Spent last week snowboarding and raging it up with 30+ college students from all over Hungary in Donovaly Ski Resort, Slovak Republic.  The resort itself was pretty weak - one mountain and one hill, inconveniently located a 20 minute walk from one another and boasting a combined trail count of just over 5, all of which were complete boiler plate by 1pm.  On the bright side, the terrain park wasn’t too bad, although poorly groomed, and on the “big” mountain there was a nice little bowl accessible by a ten minute walk from the summit.  I found that this little taste of backcountry was actually the best way to get to the other hill, not that there was much reason to go there.

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Spent a beautiful Saturday afternoon with not one, but two Eszters and a Balazs at the Soviet Era Statue Park, inconveniently located in a middle-of-nowhere suburban subdivision of Budapest.  The park is a representative collection of the hundreds of Soviet statues, plaques, busts and sculptures that dotted the capital.  Despite the sunny weather, there were only a few other “tourists” there, and we basically had the run of the place.  The entrance fee was 300 FT for Hungarians, 850 FT for foreigners, so in my spirit of capitalist chivalry I became a Magyar for the day.  Click more for the results.

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Recent snows in the city have made above-ground transportation a wet-shoed affair.  I snapped this pic of my local metro escalator on the way back from the kindergarten.  I’ve been thinking of a photo series called “missing you” that would be about all the little things that go missing in our every day existence.  For some reason, this made me think of “a ride missing passengers”.  And I just like this next one.

Got out to the countryside with E and the fam this last weekend, specifically to the village of Matrahaza in the northeast area of Hungary. Matrahaza is famed for being home to the tallest mountain in the country, which at a pretty tame 1014 meters brought me right home to the mountains in NH where I grew up skiing and riding.  The first day we took a bus to the summit and the next day hiked through the woods. They even have a ski area with one trail (definitely green dot terrain) and were in the midst of a freestyle competition.  I finally got a chance to try out the rapid-fire shooting mode of my new camera, allowing me to take 3 frames per second. The new snow and fresh air, along with copious amounts of boiled wine and mama Agi’s fine home cookin’, made it a very satisfying weekend.  Click “more” for a few pics.

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Party at the kindergarten today.  Lots of singing, dancing and eating donuts.  Every single parent in attendance had a camera.  So did I.  Here are some of the results:

The other day I watched a Chris Rock stand-up comedy show.  One of the bits was about reading - I won’t repeat it verbatim here - but it made the point that books are like kryptonite for the ignorant.  So in the pursuit of ejumacation, I have torn through the following reads, all of which come highly recommended.

Nickel and Dimed, by Barbara Ehrenreich.  A classic account of investigative journalism, in this case into the sub-classes of low-wage workers in the United States.  Why should you care?  Because without these people, who must work 2 jobs if they intend to sleep indoors and eat from a convenience store if they can afford to eat at all, are the pillars of the nation’s economy.  If they disappeared, we’d be toast.

Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck.  If you haven’t read this, stop everything you’re doing and get it.  If you have, read it again.  Although short, the tale of friendship and honor is timeless.  If life could imitate literature, this would be it.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson.  Although the craziness of this “gonzo” journalist is largely due to the simultaneous consumption of several mind-altering substances at any given time, the truth is between the white lines - there is a very dark, very different side to the American dream.

Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud.  This is NOT a book about comics.  It’s about how we perceive all visual things, especially art and literature.  By brilliantly analyzing how we interact with “a series of juxtaposed pictoral images”, McCloud makes some profound conclusions about how our minds work.

I am currently in the middle of another book, Free Culture by Lawrence Lessing, and am finding it equally intruiging.  It’s a Stanford Law Professor’s analysis (in layman’s terms, thank God) of the ways in which technological advancements (from FM radio to inexpensive photography to the internet and P2P) enable a revolution in terms of creative potential, and the corporations who try to stifle it, defying what Lessing calls “our tradition of free culture”.  Definitely worth a look if you care about media.

Not to be outdone by their higher-society brethren, I have also seen several quite interesting, bizarre and moving films of late.  Maybe I just don’t see as much crap anymore, but it seems like there are two distinct shifts occurring in the film world.  We’re seeing the rise of a large crop of intensely focused, artistically challenging and thought-provoking works on one hand, and the grasping for straws of emotional content in the absurdly expensive blockbusters.  I’d like to think that the democratization of distribution that we’ve seen as a result of the internet (see Free Culture above) is spurring a creative shift geared towards niche markets.  Anyway, dig out your Blockbuster card (irony noted, thanks) and rental yourself up some of these prime cuts.

Pi [the symbol, like 3.14 . . .] - A captivating mindbender about a mathematician descending into madness as he trys to find a pattern in the NY stock exchange.  He is further antagonized by a government agency and a religious cult [Note: aren't they one in the same? - Ed.].  It’s kind of like an auteur DaVinci Code, I think.

Brazil - Terry Gilliam’s (of Monty Python fame) epic exercise in abstraction manages to both confuse the hell out of us and still make serious comments on friendship, love, and the future of air conditioning repair.  With Robert DeNiro in a brilliant bit part.

The Motorcycle Diaries - Inspiring film about Ernesto Guevara’s, well, inspiration- a 3500km odyssey through South America, partly on a motorcycle.  If nothing else, it makes you want to take a road trip and learn Spanish.

The Corporation - A fast paced and information-heavy tour of the history of the corporate entity, from humble “servants of the public interest” to nation-rivaling power mongers.  If markets are to be trusted, the pursuit of profit comes second to nothing short of self-destruction.  We should be very afraid.

Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, and The Manchurian Candidate.  True stories or just entirely possible, these three drama/thriller vehicles raise very pointed questions as to what the hell we’re doing in the rest of the world.

King Kong (the new one) - Dizzying and hyperactive but touching remake of the classic story.  Could have done without 50% of the action sequences (especially the giant bugs attack scene - eew!) and the intensely old-fashioned “natives” scenes, the main subjects of which look suspiciously like orcs from LOTR.  Computer animation has come so far and is truly spectacular, but one gets the sense that it’s a bunch of techies sitting around smoking pot and saying “Yeah!  and after the brontosaurus stampede scene we’ll have Kong fight THREE t-rexes!  On a web of vines!  While he’s juggling the woman around in the air!”.  Chivalry has surely reached the limits of absurdity.  At least they don’t kiss.