In one my earliest posts, First Few Days, I mentioned a landscape artist named Грубник, Владимир, or Hrubnyk, Vladimir, whose work I really liked.
Well, I’ve since discovered artboyko.com and his page where you can view a lot of his work. Check him out.
A couple of my favorites:
All I have to do now is write and sell a book or two so that I can afford his paintings.
This raises more questions than answers, but I was just told that on October 11th, Kyiv residents will be able to begin heating their homes with gas. Hospitals will begin a little earlier.
Edit: People pay their gas bill to a municipal body called Jek, (ЖЭК).
I get the weather report from three cities on my Google home page.
55° F in New York City
45° F in Kyiv
35° F in Iowa City
OR
12.7 ° C in New York City
7.2 ° C in Kyiv
1.7 ° C in Iowa City
Did you know -40° F = -40° C?
Okay, back to work…
Filmed during Rob’s visit:
Bandurist at Kyiv’s Saint Sofia’s Cathedral from Roman in Ukraine on Vimeo.
First of all, check out http://mises.org.ua for Ukrainian and Russian language works, analysis and current events commentary.
Here are some classics in Russian:
Mises
Human Action
http://financepro.ru/economy/7567-ljudvig-fon-mizes.-chelovecheskaja-dejatelnost.html
http://libertynews.ru/node/410
Socialism
http://www.libertarium.ru/l_lib_socialism0
Bureaucracy
http://libertarium.ru/l_lib_buero
Rothbard
Ethics Of Liberty
http://libertynews.ru/node/142
For A New Liberty
http://libertynews.ru/node/1338
Power And Market
http://libertynews.ru/node/830
What Has Government Done to Our Money
http://libertynews.ru/node/768
Huearta De Soto
Деньги, банковский кредит и экономические циклы
http://www.jesushuertadesoto.com/madre2.htm (click “articles and books in Russian” on the left panel, and after that “money”) there are also other books by Huerta De Soto
Publishing house translating Austrian Economic books
http://www.sotsium.ru/?link=CATALOG&edition_id=8
http://www.sotsium.ru/?link=CATALOG&edition_id=13
Funny that the same day I post “Getting Better at Life,” I notice a funny smell from my fridge. Then I notice water. Seems my fridge died quietly some days ago.
No worries. It’ll get replaced soon. :)
This is a rumor.
A friend of a friend was pregnant. She got repeatedly turned away from produce stand. They tell her quietly and politely to keep moving. Apparently, they have enough scruples to not sell radioactive tomatoes to pregnant women, but not so much that they wouldn’t sell them to people like me.
According to rumor, (Please, remember this is all hearsay.) she has since delivered a healthy boy, and now asks produce vendors whether their products are fresh. “Yes,” they say. Then she tells them she has a two year old child at home. “Are they really fresh?” And, often, they tell her to go somewhere else.
I’m hoping to glow in the dark when I return to the U.S.
My friend Rob who is visiting me from the U.S.: There are lots of beautiful women here.
Me: It’s nice to finally be in a place where everyone is as beautiful as I am.
Rob: Shut up, Roman.
Photo and hand-modeling by Aleks.
Lucky timing with my visit. I joined the first known gathering of Libertarians in Ukraine this weekend. Found out about it here: (Українське лібертаріанство)
There were about six of us. We drank, talked Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Thomas Jefferson, private security, private arbitration, caring for the poor, natural law, welfare, black markets, and about the near universal disinterest when the ideas are presented to people. We’d all been frustrated, and felt great relief, I think, at finding allies. We argued (amicably) about intellectual property and punishment. Mises.org.ua may be appearing soon, which would be extremely cool.
We speculated about the mentalities of Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and the U.S. I have the distinct impression that European libertarians are looking westward over the Atlantic for leadership and encouragement.
Here is the first video I’ve ever attempted with my new Canon PowerShot SD 1300is. I ought to read the instructions. The original file was 45MB — there are probably lower quality video modes which I’m not yet aware of. I spent a couple days messing around with video converters, and various schemes for embedding videos, all of which ALMOST worked. I eventually decided to simply upload to Vimeo and post their embed code.
Anyway, this was last Sunday. I consider the shadow to be my Alfred Hitchcock-like cameo appearance.
The nice people at GoDaddy assure me that they are aware of the pathetically slow load times of my websites, and are working to fix it.
My apologies.
I’m still not sure if the English language Kyiv Post is a weekly or a daily. I’m hoping, weekly, so that I don’t feel guilty about not reading all of them.
I get the newpaper for free by walking into any fancy hotel, and either picking it up from a stack, or asking the desk.
From the corner of the front page:
“Only two years after the global economic crisis knocked nearly 40 percent off the value of the Ukrainian hryvnia, the national currency is again weakening slightly against the dollar . . .”
From the same story, continued on page 8:
“On Sept. 1, central bank First Deputy Chairman Anatoly Shapovalov, who was closely involved in the exchange rate policy, resigned and was replaced by young banker Serhiy Arbuzov, seen as a close ally of Yanukovych.
The move led to some investor concern that the government, backed by steel exporters who bank-rolled Yanukovych’s campaign, would tilt the exchange rate policy in their favour by devaluing the hryvnia — or at least stopping it from strengthening.
. . . .
The central bank, which has been buying dollars for the last few months to stop the hryvnia from appreciating too quickly, said on Tuesday it would intervene to maintain hryvnia stability.
It has, however, pledged to allow more exchange rate flexibility under a $15 billion deal with the IMF in July.”
The next story on page 8 is titled “The government’s ‘final version’ of tax code remains secret for taxpayers.
The front page headline is “Billion-dollar Conflicts — Ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko may be fading in popularity, but she remains one of the few politicians to openly denounce conflicts of interest between top officials . . . “
Things I managed to buy after some searching:
Power adapter x2 ~ $1.50 ea. (The cheaper ones are crap.)
Multi Vitamins (Mega Man) ~ $25
light bulb ~ $1
500GB USB Drive ~ $100
Dental Floss ~ don’t remember
haircut ~ $10
Things I would still like to buy, but don’t know where:
a mini swiss army knife
black construction paper
On Saturday, I caught the last evening of Gogolfest. I gave myself a whirlwind tour of the complex which reminded me very much of an abandon barracks complex we briefly occupied in Afghanistan in 2002. Part industrial, part park. Mysterious shadows from the past around every corner.
I looked at some installation art, watched part of a movie about Russian-speaking, Asiatic-looking people and their reindeer, listened to rock and roll and to strange trance music. I grew a little impatient with the people who seemed to be performing to the trance music. They were in a field below the surrounding sidewalks, and people crowded the railings looking down at them — women in flowing white robes, a man painted bronze. I grew impatient, because mostly, they just stood there.
Anyway, I loved the feel the place. Very experimental, which is completely appropriate for a festival named for the author of The Nose.
On Friday, I thought I was going to listen to music at a bar with an ex-pat friend I met through an acquaintance from a literary death match in NYC.
The bar turned out to be an intimate gathering in a small theater room in an Institute for Music. There were as many musicians as there were guests, and I was afraid of getting asked to perform something. I think the show was sort of an after-event for the ongoing Gogolfest.
A young Kazak man sat cross-legged on the floor and rocked out on a mouth harp. A Bandura, an accordion, and a Dombura played the bluegrass hit “Old Joe Clark.”
A group of three women and two men in traditional Ukrainian garb sang about a young woman saying goodbye to her Kozak lover, and a ballad which, if I understood correctly, was both about children saying goodbye to their mothers, and the homeland no longer being free.
The Debutante Hour sang about rejecting a lover, parking in NYC, and wanting to meet the devil.
All the music was fantastic. I felt moved and happy.
We went out after the show. Here’s a picture my friend took with me and 1/2 of 1/3rd of The Debutant Hour:
