Official Off-Topic Flooding Thread

Discussion in 'Off Topic International' started by Harpoon, Aug 15, 2004.

  1. rgreat

    rgreat FH Developer

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    There are less and less people still alive who remember WW2 first hand.
    Salvaging and restoring war relics is one of the ways to keep memory about that terrible war.

    As we all know: one who do not keep memories of his past is doomed to repeat it.
     
  2. hezzey

    hezzey Well-Known Member

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    There are some shipments From around the world made up of t34s in working condition without any bones or dusty remains.
    Maybe those tanks are being collected like Holy icons?
    I know that Vladimir Lenin was preserved and laid in state for the public to come look at.
    I am found that to be insane. Like holy fuck!
    In Victorian times in much of the western world the display of embalmed remains were put behind the glass. Displaying relics I guess is cathartic?
    Did Soviet patriots pickle Stalin and put him display?
    I would guess that is part of traditions from other parts of the world to to revere and even sort of worship remains and relics.Hi would guess that is part of traditions from other parts of the world to to revere and even sort of worship remains and relics...
    All over the place fallen stalin monuments. Some of them with a leg smashed off some shit tipped over and I bet some were left standing.
    Macabre
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2020
  3. rgreat

    rgreat FH Developer

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    "Salvaging and restoring" a relic is quite different in involvement and meaning from just "buying" something from a shelf.
     
  4. rgreat

    rgreat FH Developer

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    Stalin's monuments were taken down mostly in USSR times, long long ago. These which survived the fall of USSR usually still stands.
    In Russia, we do not take fancy in downing monuments. History is history.
    And even some new ones being erected by sympathetic crowds.

    As for Lenin mausoleum - think about that like Pyramids of Egypt.
    Communist banned religion at that time, and I guess something like that was weird form of some kind of sublimation.
    It is also considered as a history relic now.
     
  5. hezzey

    hezzey Well-Known Member

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    Oh I understand and sympathize with anyone who will not let a smashed monument lay rotting.
    In my land we are tearing down monuments and other forms of remembrance because it is no longer politically correct to recall great people The past..... oh they all have to meet some sort of bullshit standards there is a word for that in Canada.
    We don’t have a very long recorded history here and some pretty important stuff is now being carved up and destroyed because some of the great Canadians of the past had bumps and warts.
    I think the great mighty United States would have a nervous fucking breakdown if they discovered that Abraham Lincoln was a paedophile.... or George Washington wore a diaper.
    I am not a Yankee but I wouldn’t wanna hear any of that or even think about it.

    I dislike very much seeing destroyed monuments of great people.
    There are many of great people that I don’t like and that has nothing to do with anything.
    I was looking at the YouTube and I saw a video posted by a guy that was touring different places and in a video he displayed a great big huge statue of Genghis Khan.
    We don’t have much of those sorts of monuments in Western Canada.
    There are not many structures anywhere in Canada much older than 100 or so years.
    We have a boring history and no great battles and no great leaders no great struggles.
    Lenin is a towering figure and he is impressive as hell and John A McDonald is not.

    Yes the near extinction of the aboriginal people in this continent is genocide and terrible and will never be told because they were Stone Age and didn’t keep records. I know that the Americas are conquered lands.
    The lands were taken and the fields were salted and there are only some legends for us to remember no statues

    I tried to look away from the Yankee hero worshipping.
    In Canada our heroes are blind marathon runners and there was that guy who dressed up in hockey gear and had a fight with a grizzly bear.
     
    Last edited: Apr 19, 2020
  6. rgreat

    rgreat FH Developer

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    That's amusing. :)

    Did he win?
     
  7. hezzey

    hezzey Well-Known Member

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    She won.
     
  8. vasco

    vasco Well-Known Member

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    Oh, boy! That must have been awful, having your father arrested.

    We too were afraid of the political police. When the revolution here got on tv, in December '89, I was just returning with my friends and neighbors from a trip to all the toy stores in the city, because they used to bring in a veeery small supply of model airplanes from DDR, right before the New Year. And we were competing with the kids in other neighbourhoods in buying them.When we got back, around noon, there was a loud broadcast from someone's open window. Agitated talk from a speaker. It can't be TV, I thought, maybe theatre over the radio. But something was very strange - even the simple fact that someone was listening loud radio at home, during a working day - so I turned on the TV set when I got home. And there it was, the Revolution on TV.

    And then the phone rang. I was 12. I turned off the TV set's volume and went to the phone.
    Allo, i answered.
    Allo, Vasco, did you turn on the TV?
    No, I lied.
    It's me, Toni. Ceausescu ran off.

    Of course at first I thought it was the political police I was thought to avoid. It was in fact one of the older kids I had just been out with.
    I knew I wasn't supposed to talk bad about the commies. My father was a sociologist, a potential enemy of the regime (sociology wasn't taught anymore in universities since the 70's). My parents were listening to the banned radios, were against the regime and were monitored by the political police who came regularly and openly asked our neighbors for information on my parents. Growing up knowing the enemy is in power, that's not nice, but it's necessary.
     
  9. vasco

    vasco Well-Known Member

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    Indeed, and there's the story the object tells after you salvage it or the evidence which it adds up.

    We found a piece of a small capital from an antique column, right near our building. It was left there after some infrastructure works in the area. It wasn't that impressive to us, not the kind of things you would see in the museum, but we took it there nevertheless. The historian there was very happy, because it was more evidence for a possible greek temple in the area. The capital was from a type of small altar column.
     
  10. -frog-

    -frog- Well-Known Member

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    But why?
    First time they arrested him, when he was taking care of me, was in my preschool (in 1983 or so). They simply took my father, and we drove together (in that strange sounding Fiat 125p) to my grandparent's place, where they left me.
    (I later learned that the secret police utilized 2.0 litre DOHC versions of Fiat 125p, instead of the "normal" 1.3 and 1.5 OHVs, that's why a car that was pretty familiar to us sounded strange)

    Our regime was not as gruesome as yours.
    There were no people vanishing from the streets.

    My father ran an underground printing press, and legal services for those detained (he was a lawyer).
    The regime was trying to be scary, but after the Solidarity "carnival" of 1980-81 no one really feared it anymore. People knew they were millions against thousands. And the regime was aware of that the people knew.

    One one hand we were struck by economic crisis, on the other we also were the "funniest barrack of the bloc".
    But it was always like that, at least since 1956, when our version of Stalin (comrade Bierut) kicked the bucket in Moscow (he suffered a heart attack following Khruschev's famous speech at the 20th Party Congress, where he was invited as a guest).
    We were allowed much more freedom (save for a short period of reform in Czechoslovakia) than any other nation "behind the curtain", and when the authorities realized, they're loosing the ground in was all too late to make anything about it.
    The economic reforms initiated in mid 1980s meant that there was no return to real socialism anymore.
    Much like with Hungary private enterprises were allowed some more freedom (what is of interest - we never abolished private property of small stores, small companies, and services - and what is more, there was always private land ownership, and the majority of crops were yielded by individual farmers, and not collective farms) and there was no turning back.
     
  11. vasco

    vasco Well-Known Member

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    Looks like they was a bunch of pranksters, your secret police.
    :)

    Really, during the 80's there were many Polish tourists in the summer, here. Some were hosted by the local families.
    Their Polonez cars were the most modern thing to me, at the time.
     
  12. -frog-

    -frog- Well-Known Member

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    Nah - the secret police were just realists.
    Everyone knew the system is no longer supported by anyone, let alone its leaders.
    The system had to collapse, because all the idealists switched sides, and it could not support itself with the conformists alone :)

    As far as Polonez cars are considered.
    It's a Fiat 125p dressed in heavier, more luxurious body.
    And the Fiat 125p wasn't even a real Fiat 125... it was the body of a Fiat 125 installed on the undercarriage of Fiat 1500.
    Yes - it had 4 disc brakes, and some other nice features, but it was early 1960s tech, manufactured in 1980s (the OHV engines, with their 3 main bearings were their biggest issue - not only were they underpowered for the 1 tonne plus body of Polonez [it was the first European car to meet the NCAP specifications without ridiculous bumpers], but also less than reliable).
    Another issue was its driving characteristics.
    Fuck these were poor.
    I had some RWD cars, but only after trying to make some faster corners in a Polonez was I short of shitting my pants.
    And I am not alone here:
     
  13. vasco

    vasco Well-Known Member

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    How dares this Clarkson bastard to demythicise the out of this world Polonez.
     
  14. alburl2014

    alburl2014 Well-Known Member

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  15. -frog-

    -frog- Well-Known Member

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    I wonder what scenes were cut out (the international version is 12 minutes shorter than the Polish one)?
     
  16. alburl2014

    alburl2014 Well-Known Member

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    I didn't watch the Polish one.
    It's easy to understand what was in the version for the USSR.
    There are the episodes where the heroes speak Russian. :)
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2020
  17. -frog-

    -frog- Well-Known Member

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    There's no "special USSR" version for this one.
    There's the Polish, and the international version. The former is 12 minutes longer than the latter one, and I'm so fed up with that movie (I've seen it over a dozen times throughout my life), that I won't risk my nerves to watch the international version (not only Russian, but also French and British versions are shorter, so I guess whatever has been cut out, was due to the "locality" of some of the jokes, and not to censorship of any kind) just to check, what's missing.
     
  18. hezzey

    hezzey Well-Known Member

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    Look at Google earth or Google maps and noticed the geography around the Vancouver metropolis.
    Can you see that big V-shaped river delta that leads into the Pacific Ocean?
    Yeah I live on that.
    It is Sandy but could be muddy if the pumping stations have the Dykes stopped working.
    It has just rained for a week straight I think we’ve had about 300 mm of rain.
    This valley is full to the brim and all the dykes and dumping stations are about to give it up and just let the water in.
    This valley’s Low lands are now floodlands.
    There are hundreds of thousands and probably millions of farm animals that have been living outdoors for a week and submerged by the flood waters I suppose most or many of those animals will have died and soon will begin to stink.
    Much of the land and communities above a certain point R a metre or more below sea level.
    In my town it is 3 m below sea level.
    In my mom‘s town it is four or 5 m below sea level.
    River from my mom‘s town there is a great big fucking canyon called the Fraser Canyon.
    And there is a river that pours out of there I believe it is the fourth biggest river in the world I’m not sure I may be wrong.
    And every human on this planet knows that you can’t hold floodwaters back.
    I mean in the end set a torrent of flood water will win the barn.
    In this valley and it’s low lands there are about 3/4 of 1 million people and they are all on or below sea level.
    There are a couple million farm animals that will surely now have died.
    All but one railroads have been destroyed by mudslides and rock slides there is only one rail Netwerk that connects to the rest of North America.
    Never mind the Burlington northern that ships container goods in bulk it doesn’t ship supplies like food and water.
    All of the highways that lead out of this rocky valley are right now out of service Vancouver and its surrounding area are cut off.
    The one rail link out of here leads into the USA down to Washington state but it is an industrial railway and has not shipped food and supplies up here for a long time I am sure that the railroad barons in the USA wood switch over and begin shipping us freight like supplies and stuff .
    As of now there is no railroad connection in or out of the metro Vancouver area.
    The premier of British Columbia has not declared any parts of BC to be disaster areas yet but I’m sure he will tomorrow or the next day.
    And as soon as the premier does that the army will come here and nobody likes the army to run the towns and supply networks and the engineering.
    It is going to get worse because it will take months to repair the railroads and the highway Netwerk into and out of the Vancouver area.
    Look at Google maps and you can see the situation here you see all those fucking mountains that are everywhere yeah you can’t just send a railroad through that it is very complicated and complex.
    This valley is the bread basket of western Canada and most or all of the farms and farm animals in this valley are now dead or underwater and out of service.
    We are lucky because we are modern and so is our engineering and we also have a gigantic neighbour right next to us which is the USA/Washington state.
    The north western Washington state has problems of its own and some of them quite terrible and we have only one railroad leading from there up to here and at this time that railroad only ships container goods here i.e. not food and supplies.
    The millions of animals that now have nowhere to go and have nothing to eat either are either dead now or will be really soon and then they’ll start to stink.
    We are in big trouble in the Fraser Valley in British Columbia Canada and the Yankees just to the south of us have some terrible problems but they have about four times the population and most of their cities and towns are not 2 m below sea level like we are.
    I am sure that the Yankees are right now retooling their railroads and will really soon be shipping food and supplies.
    I got to give them credit the Yankees really like Canada they might even love us so when we are in need they will help and they likely are right now it is still too early to have heard anything about that.
    But it will take months to repair the road net work and the railroad network.
    WTF What are we gonna do?
    Winter has just began so what is coming?
     
  19. hezzey

    hezzey Well-Known Member

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  20. Flk

    Flk Well-Known Member

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    hezzey and -Shai- like this.