Catching up (again).
Well, I took Saterday and a good part of Sunday off as mental health days, so this post will be kind of an eclectic batch of stuff.
First off, today is an aniversary of sorts here, not that anyone really realizes it though. On this day in 1895 a group of university students burned the Hungarian flag in Jelačić square. That probably doesn't sound like that big a deal to most people, but it was pretty important at the time. In fact, it is the first time that anyone used the square for a political demonstration against the ruling authorities. Hense, it is an important date for my project, because it signifies the birth of "democratic" politics here. I use "democratic" not in the sense of holding elections, since they had been doing that here for quite a while before 1895, but in the sense that it was the first time people tried to use the place of regiem power to voice disaffection with the regime. There is a lot to this whole incident, and it will be explained much more completely in the future, so I will move on to other things.
Some more fallout from the "Big Game" last week. The English Soccer Federations has logded a formal complaint (or at least they are talking about lodging a formal complaint, it's not really clear here if they have or not) against Croatia for their treatment of fans. This actually has nothing to do with the game, but with the actions of the Croatian police, who were apparently described by the English Soccer Federation as something translated to "brutal" here in the papers. My response is "Well, duh." The attitude of the police here is basically 'if a little force is nessessary, then more force is better.' The police here seem to have been pretty even handed too, based on the numbers I've seen (they arrested about 4 times as many Croats as the did Brits, but there is now some dispute about that, with Jutarnji list saying that there were quite a few more Brits detained at the stadium without being arrested).
Top headline today in Večernji list was that the former head of Serbia's nuclear bomb program (who knew they had a nuclear bomb program?) is claiming that Milošević wanted the bomb so he could nuke Kosovo. I find that one a little hard to accept, but Miloševič is dead now, so I doubt he will be able to deny it.
Also, this weekend they showed another football game (American) on TV here. This is kind of a wierd thing for a few reasons. First, the station it is aired on is Z1, which is about one step up from local access. It's a local (Zagreb) station, but it really doesn't have a lot of content, so I doubt they have the money to buy NFL games (in fact, it's such a minor station that Jutarnji doesn't even print their schedual, but that may be because Jutarnji is trying to be a more "national" paper then Večernji). This leads me to believe that this is part of an NFL market building program, where US networks are required to provide one game a week to Z1 for free. Second odd thing is that this whole project started 4 weeks into the regular season. The first "pregled" show was really an introduction to what American football is, and I mean the very basics, as in how many teams are there type thing. Last sunday the showed the Cowboys-Eagles game. This friday, they did another "pregled", but it was a recap of last weeks games (a very nice NFL product) with a Croatian voice over. Sunday was the Stealers-Chiefs game. Play by play was much better this time, and it is interesting to see it develop. The first game they were really struggling for vocabulary and they used a lot of English terms. This week they used a lot more Croatian terms, so they have obviously been thinking about how to describe the game a lot (which also leads me to think that the whole thing was very short notice when it started, or else they would have all this figured out by now).
It is interesting watching football from a Croatian perspective. The first game one of the comentators (a guy who has never played) was saying the game is very violent. The other comentator (a younger guy who did play some in the US, I think at high school level) tried to explain that the game is not so much violent, but physical (the distinction being that, while the players are trying to physically dominate the opposing players, they are not actually trying to physically injur the other players, well, at least most arn't). The younger guy eventially gave up trying to explain it. A lot of the time is spent just explaining the rules and why players are doing what they are doing on the field.
More observations later. Once again, I sorry for any typos or misspellings, as I am just going to publish this as is and (hopefully) come back and edit later.
First off, today is an aniversary of sorts here, not that anyone really realizes it though. On this day in 1895 a group of university students burned the Hungarian flag in Jelačić square. That probably doesn't sound like that big a deal to most people, but it was pretty important at the time. In fact, it is the first time that anyone used the square for a political demonstration against the ruling authorities. Hense, it is an important date for my project, because it signifies the birth of "democratic" politics here. I use "democratic" not in the sense of holding elections, since they had been doing that here for quite a while before 1895, but in the sense that it was the first time people tried to use the place of regiem power to voice disaffection with the regime. There is a lot to this whole incident, and it will be explained much more completely in the future, so I will move on to other things.
Some more fallout from the "Big Game" last week. The English Soccer Federations has logded a formal complaint (or at least they are talking about lodging a formal complaint, it's not really clear here if they have or not) against Croatia for their treatment of fans. This actually has nothing to do with the game, but with the actions of the Croatian police, who were apparently described by the English Soccer Federation as something translated to "brutal" here in the papers. My response is "Well, duh." The attitude of the police here is basically 'if a little force is nessessary, then more force is better.' The police here seem to have been pretty even handed too, based on the numbers I've seen (they arrested about 4 times as many Croats as the did Brits, but there is now some dispute about that, with Jutarnji list saying that there were quite a few more Brits detained at the stadium without being arrested).
Top headline today in Večernji list was that the former head of Serbia's nuclear bomb program (who knew they had a nuclear bomb program?) is claiming that Milošević wanted the bomb so he could nuke Kosovo. I find that one a little hard to accept, but Miloševič is dead now, so I doubt he will be able to deny it.
Also, this weekend they showed another football game (American) on TV here. This is kind of a wierd thing for a few reasons. First, the station it is aired on is Z1, which is about one step up from local access. It's a local (Zagreb) station, but it really doesn't have a lot of content, so I doubt they have the money to buy NFL games (in fact, it's such a minor station that Jutarnji doesn't even print their schedual, but that may be because Jutarnji is trying to be a more "national" paper then Večernji). This leads me to believe that this is part of an NFL market building program, where US networks are required to provide one game a week to Z1 for free. Second odd thing is that this whole project started 4 weeks into the regular season. The first "pregled" show was really an introduction to what American football is, and I mean the very basics, as in how many teams are there type thing. Last sunday the showed the Cowboys-Eagles game. This friday, they did another "pregled", but it was a recap of last weeks games (a very nice NFL product) with a Croatian voice over. Sunday was the Stealers-Chiefs game. Play by play was much better this time, and it is interesting to see it develop. The first game they were really struggling for vocabulary and they used a lot of English terms. This week they used a lot more Croatian terms, so they have obviously been thinking about how to describe the game a lot (which also leads me to think that the whole thing was very short notice when it started, or else they would have all this figured out by now).
It is interesting watching football from a Croatian perspective. The first game one of the comentators (a guy who has never played) was saying the game is very violent. The other comentator (a younger guy who did play some in the US, I think at high school level) tried to explain that the game is not so much violent, but physical (the distinction being that, while the players are trying to physically dominate the opposing players, they are not actually trying to physically injur the other players, well, at least most arn't). The younger guy eventially gave up trying to explain it. A lot of the time is spent just explaining the rules and why players are doing what they are doing on the field.
More observations later. Once again, I sorry for any typos or misspellings, as I am just going to publish this as is and (hopefully) come back and edit later.
posted by The Solitary Traveller at 11:00 PM
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