Watching the excellent experiences of Global Voices I know very well what an excellent mean a blog is to connect people at the far ends of the world. And Pocakos has managed to do just that. He posted an entry on an English language book titled “Sword of the Turul”. The author Catherine Eva Schandl writes about the memories of his father - Karoly William Schandl, who was a lawyer in Hungary -, about the 11 years he spent in Soviet prisons after World War II.

Pocakos started a little investigation of his own about the family as Schandl not really a well know family, but according to the book Karoly Schandl was a son of a famous politician. And Pocakos actually found lots of interesting fact about the family, but he also raised some doubts about one of the dates mentioned in the intro for the book. But that is not the truly remarkable point of the story as even from my previous notes you might know that Pocakos is indeed very good in background research.
BUT the amazing thing happened when the author herself checked in with an English language comment for the original post. [Henrik’s note: as Pocakos later told me he is not even sure how she got the info about his entry on the book. Probably some link logging is involved.] And you can read the rest of the conversation yourself there, the comments are in English.

I think these cross cultural and cross language (!) connections are so rare that each of them are great and important. [Henrik’s note: and my own blog is aimed partially at fulfilling this role in its humble little way, so I can totally relate to the excitement of Pocakos about this story.]
(The referenced entry is in Hungarian, but the comments are in English)

Tags:
Cross-culture
Book

The Index story I already wrote about introduced a new theme in the Hungarian online political activity. The case of Sztipkviz is another unorthodox campaign method. It is a simple quiz about economical facts and if you answer correctly a nice woman strips for you in a flash animation. According to the opening screen:
“ Hi! I’m Sylvia. I believe that most of the Hungarian men happily willing to learn the most important figures of our economy. What do you think, Am I right?”

When you do the quiz it is hard not to notice that all of the four questions are well chosen to talk only about statistical figures showing the advancement and good shape of the Hungarian economy, which is highly debated nowadays and I think is going to be one of the main themes of next year’s election campaigns (if not it is already).

Comments on blogs about this really special campaign:

Déli Riporter writes commenting a news article: “It is hard to believe the news that the government has nothing to do with sztripkviz.”

Egy Székely Budapesten writes:
“ Sztripkviz – the whole country is getting naked.
Yes indeed. Just to make sure it gets into everyone’s ears like liquefied hot vax: the economy of this country is so successful that we almost get naked because of it. Despite all of this, Sztripkviz is a good, well, more precisely a novel political advertisement.”

And Miles has I think a rather clever response too: he made his own flash animation quiz version, where he points to statistics which shows just the opposite of the great economical success and using a homeless as the model. It starts with the following screen:
“Hi! I’m Frankie. Sylvie is out of clothes so she is unable to ask the following further questions…”
[Henrik’s note don’t worry the homeless does not get naked, just takes the coat off.]

(The referenced blogs are in Hungarian)

Tags:
Campaign
Politics