--- "Devine, James" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: awhile back, a pen-pal from Bolvia forwarded a message from Chile. There, the home of the first neo-liberal revolution (in 1973) -- the cult of the cell phone had gone so far that some drivers had whittled fake ones out of wood so that they could look as if they were talking on the phone while driving. (They needed the cars, but couldn't afford the phones.)
In the US, cell phones are taking over. But text-messaging came after a delay of a few years, compared to Europe. --- I just got out of the (spectacularly non-collapsed) Moscow metro, and the walls of the wagons are virtually coated with ads for cell phone service providers, dating services you access via your mobile phone, numbers you call to set the melody that goes off when it rings (including the Soviet Anthem and the Song of the Young Pioneers). It seems like maybe half of the Russian pop songs out there either allude to cell phones or the Internet, sometimes mixing it up with Soviet imagery (as when, e.g., punk-ska band Leningrad updates the classic Soviet pop song "My Address Is the Soviet Union" with "My address is www.leningradspb.ru"). Speaking of which, something which I find very interesting as a foreigner is the mixture of the old and the new in pop culture. For instance, MTV Russia plays a mix of about 30% foreign and 70% Russian-language music videos, but they have a special program whoch is 100% Russian. The logo is the MTV trademark placed inside the leaves of grain that contained the hammer and sickle in the Soviet seal, over a moving background of cosmonauts and Red Stars. MTV Russia also shows old Soviet cartoons. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
