A golden oldie ...

From my livejournal, June 3rd 2002:

Translation, "Tous les garçons et les filles"

All of the boys and the girls my age
Walk down the street two by two
All of the boys and the girls my age
Know what happy is quite well, too

Refrain:
And the eyes looking at eyes
And one hand is in the other
They go off in love
Without fear for the future
Ah, but me, I go alone
Down the streets my heart pained
Because no one loves me
My nights like my days
Are all the same
Without joy and with boredom
No one whispers "I love you" in my ear

All of the boys and the girls my age
Talk together of their future
All of the boys and the girls my age
Know what love is quite well, too

Refrain:
And the eyes looking at eyes
And one hand is in the other
They go off in love
Without fear for the future
Ah, but me, I go alone
Down the streets my heart pained
Because no one loves me
My nights like my days
Are all the same
Without joy and with boredom
Oh! when will the sun shine for me?

Like the boys and the girls my age
Will I soon know what love is?
Like the boys and the girls my age
I wonder when that day will come.

Refrain:
Where the eyes look at eyes
And one hand is in the other
I'd be overjoyed
And my fears would be gone
The day that I wouldn't have
Any more of this pain
The day when I too
Would have someone who loves me

Dalhousie Letters: Take Two

Here they are, suggestions taken into account.

( Read more... )

At the Davos Summit, of all places ...

Daggers out as Davos turns on U.S.
Washington flayed at Swiss summit for its Iraq policies and role in world

By ALAN FREEMAN

Saturday, January 25, 2003 – Page A19

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND -- Harsh criticism of U.S. policy over Iraq and heated discussion about the United States' role as the world's only superpower dominated the normally polite seminars of the World Economic Forum yesterday.

( Again and again, world leaders and other participants in the prestigious five-day talk shop criticized U.S. plans to topple the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and they charged the United States with hypocrisy for its policies on human rights and refusing to sign international treaties. )

Canada's changing ethnic demography

Wave of immigration changes face of Canada

By GLORIA GALLOWAY

Saturday, January 25, 2003 – Page A1

Poor and hungry, Nick Iwanoczkow took a boat from his native Ukraine in 1925 and stepped into a land that was still little more than a British colony, a place where newcomers were foreigners, not new Canadians, and it took a long time for an immigrant to feel at home.
There were no classes that taught immigrant workers English as a second language; no social workers or immigration specialists to help those from foreign shores adapt.

"I had a hard time in that I did not understand one word of English, that's for sure," Mr. Iwanoczkow, 101, recalled this week from the Winnipeg nursing home where he lives.

"I suffered for a long time before I picked up some language."

Mr. Iwanoczkow was part of a wave of immigration last century, one that rivals the surge of the past decade in Canada. Census figures released this week found more people born outside the country than at any time since 1931, the last time immigration changed the face of Canada as much as it has in the past decade.

( But the reception for newcomers was dramatically different then. In the early decades of the past century, it was not just the climate that was inhospitable. )

"Á Belarus"

The below is a story that I wrote last year on the AHTG mailing list, set on my world of Tripartite Alliance Earth. Mikael Bergstrom, a Danish filmmaker, who was venturing to Belarus to do some documentation film work. In Tripartite Alliance Earth's setting, Belarus is a country devastated by the Third World War, declaring independence following the breakdown of the post-War Russian confederacy, left with a yawning void at the core of its national identity despite some degree of hope for the future.

(The original posts are available here, here, here, and here.)

Anyway, here it is, collected for the first time.

( I'd plotted out my travel already. I'd take the rail, from Copenhagen and down the eastern coast of Jutland into first the Bundesrepublik, then Brandenburg. I'd stay well north of Berlin in the wastes of Mecklenburg, overnight at Stettin, and then pass along the Baltic shore of Poland via the TGV line all the way to Grodno. From there, I'd take my rental car and drive to Lida, capital of Lida province and hearth of what was left of the Belarusian nation, and to Navahrudak (capital of the dead Grand Duchy of Lithuania) and from there eventually to Minsk. )

So, comments?