Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages.  It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.   While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).

Today, however, was different.  It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.

Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat.  The name comes from LOL - an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat - an animal on the picture.

As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like  i can haz cheezburger).  And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.

My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post.  My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”

Olga keeps bringing up interesting points over and over again and she’s not blogging herself, I’ll use her topics to fill up my blog.

This time we were talking about how progress changes society in so many ways that we don’t even notice so many of them. One of the examples that we do a lot of thinking now is village life vs. city life. Don’t worry just yet - we aren’t planning to move out into some distant countryside.

Maxim is growing up. We have to teach him a lot of new stuff. Some of this stuff comes from books for babies. One category of these books is about pets and animals.

You see, for our generation there was always a distinction between domestic and wild animals. We all had grandmothers, grandfathers or uncles and aunts who lived in villages and had cows, horses, goats, sheeps, pigs, chicken (hens?), ducks or gueese. It was very easy to separate domestic animals from wild ones, because everyone has seen all domestic animals in the village yard at least once. Wild animals can be seen only in the zoo or circus. Chances of actually meeting one in the wild are so slim that can be ignored.

But that was our generation. Now things are much different. More and more people have moved into cities. Economies has grown. And even villages are not the same anymore. In fact, many of the village people these days don’t even have any animals except for chicken or gueese. Livestock is now concentrated in bigger farms with bigger production numbers. Finding a domestic animal is becoming as hard as locating a wild one outside of the city borders.

Obviously, explaining the difference between domestic and wild animals to a kid becomes tougher. The only angle that I seem to come up with is that domestic animals are used for food and wool and stuff like that, while wild animals are left so few that no one can find them, not to mention use them for something.

How do I feel about it? Well, I feel glad. I never enjoyed all the animal stuff anyway. I prefer the “civilized” approach to animals. I want to see wild animals on the Discovery Channel and domestic animals on my plate. Anything else doesn’t interest me much. On the other hand - I had my time. I had the chance to experience the animal proximity, and although I didn’t enjoy it that much some of my peers did. Maxim is getting less of a chance at it. And the generation of his children will have even a smaller chance. But the world is moving forward and these things get compensated. Instead of these opportunities they’ll get some other.

Life goes on…

Maxim, while being rather cautious about uknown subjects, is surprisingly joyful about cats. He has demonstrated it on multiple occasions. If the cat is in the 10 meter radius, he starts to watch its movements with a smile. If he by any chance can touch the animal, the laughs out loud like the cat is the Eights Wonder of the world.

I guess he inherits this appreciation of cats from his mother, because I don’t have anything to do with it.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-12-03_POTD/

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-12-03_POTD/

Almost a year ago I mentioned that Pafos Bird Park was open and accepting visitors. Finally, I managed to go there and see for my own what and how good it is. Vladimir, Olga, and Maxim came along.

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