Georgia

I decided that if I waited until I had the time and inclination to make truly large and detailed posts, then I'd never post at all. So here's a start of smaller and hopefully more frequent posts, on politics and movie-reviews both.

This post is a political one: just a note on a sequence of three events, three *deaths* that have perhaps not been given as much attention as warranted -- hopefully unrelated with each other.

1) Prime Minister of Georgia, Zurab Zhvania, dead in a seeming accident, by carbon monoxide poisoning.

2) Georgy Khelashvili, political associate of Zhvania, dead in a seeming suicide, two days after Zurab's death.

3) Mamuka Jincharadze, politically influential ethnic Georgian tycoon, shot dead in Russia.

In the meantime as noted in Neeka's backlog here, Russian Gleb Pavlovsky made some rather nasty hints about Zhvania's death and what Tymoshenko's (the Ukrainian PM's and one of the two leaders of the Orange Revolution) fate may be.

Time to mourn for Georgia, I think. Now, not *all* of these events need be connected with each other. But unless the whole pattern of events and commentaries is widely misleading and coincidental, these are not unfortunate accidents but rather the opening salvoes in a war.

Edit: Another point worth of note, of course, is the Gori bombing a couple days previously.

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On a different note: "New Group of Georgia's Friends" founded by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

The fact that this group (unlike the old "Group of Georgia's Friends") doesn't contain Russia as a member, may make its naming a tiny bit more accurate.

Greek church

This comparison will probably only be understood by Greek people, aware of the recent church-scandal fervor, and not at all by foreigners... but so be it.

Anyone else feels that Christodoulos saying he'll personally take charge of anti-corruption cleansing efforts in the Greek church is similar to having Al Capone say that he'll personally lead the fight against the Mafia?

Mr Paraskevaidi, you don't treat cancer by placing the tumor in charge. If you were truly an honest man intent of fighting corruption in your home field, then you'd have asked for the most brutal anti-ecclesiastical independent prosecutors that could be found, not picked the one person (namely you) who has the most reason to keep church corruption under wraps.

That'll be all.

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One more thing, relevant to the topic actually: I was bizarrely reminded of Sid Meier's Civilization. For those who haven't played it, it's a strategy game where you're building new cities across the world as you are expanding your empire. Each city may occasionally, randomly be struck by some kind of "disaster" -- drought, famine, floods, fire, etc which may harm their development... Now some of these catastrophes can be prevented by "city improvements" you may built -- building a Granary prevents a Famine, building City Walls prevents a flood I think, building an Aqueduct prevents the effects of a drought -- and so forth.

There was also a "disaster" which one occasionally encountered, but which I had noticed was bizarrely undocumented in the manual and I was never fully sure of its effects -- it may have been a leftover concept that the creators of the game either accidentally left in, or perhaps a last-minute addition that they didn't have the time to update the manual for. It was the "Scandal disaster".

I was never quite sure of its effects (may possibly have made the population of the city unhappier) but seemingly it could be fought off by building the city improvement "Temple".

Silly Sid Meier. Silly, *silly* Sid Meier. Temples tend to be the centers of scandals and I've not noticed them ever being the solutions thereof.