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A New Elena Story
SwiftBoy writes "Elena, of motorcycling through Chernobyl fame has gone riding again, this time to dig up the history of Kiev's fortifications. Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there."
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about whom there was much doubt as to the veracity of her story?
Here is one of a good number of debunkings. Naughty, Naughty!
let's all just admit it. this article is only here because 90% of readers love pretty european women.
war schmore.
System.out.println(syynnapse.getSig());
Previousely discussed back in March/2004
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
There's a 4MB panoramic image on the debunking site mentioned in the parent post: http://www.web-axis.net/~pulse/chernobyl/prypyat-p anoramic.jpg
That's one hell of a case of deja vu for those of us who just spent all day immersed in Half-Life 2.
Shame that can't be done automatically for all postings...
Now watch - someone else will probably have posted this link at the same time...
Coral Link
We just did to the server what the Chyrnobol reactor did to that Russian town.
Table-ized A.I.
was the first to say "she was not allowed to be there, so she wasn't there...".
Elena goes to visit Junis in Afghanistan to photograph the Commodore-64s running Linux.
Actually there really is stuff just lying around all over the place in Europe (probably depending on exactly where you are). I know my old landlord in Germany had a museum quality collection (I say this because he loaned it to a museum in Speyer on a couple occasions) of pre-historic artifacts and fossils sitting in the garage. This was all stuff he collected while cutting wood up in the forest. The house I lived in was over 200 years old. He also had a collection of late 19th century farming equipment and a bunch of world war one artifacts which were actually passed down through his family.
You can still find bullets, shell fragments, peices of old weapons, helmets, and various other things on the ground up around the Maginot Line and also in the countryside around Bastogne (where the Battle of the Bulge took place). Other areas, like Normandy, are more "cleaned up" but still show rather evident signs of historical events of note. Hard to take two steps without bumping your head on something historically relevant.
Of course that's without even mentioning all of the other "important" historical periods that took place around Europe. With so much history to so little square footage, it's no surprise you can hop on a motorcycle and find cool stuff all over the place.
I imagine the same amount of history is lying about the americas as well. It's just that there's far more surface area to human history that took place here. So the stuff is all piled up on itself.
BTW, my eagle project was a food and clothing drive for people living in Belarus (current country where Cherbnobyl is located). They still can't drink milk or eat meat from cows in the area or eat certain foods grown in the soil close to the accident. But people do still live there. I remember having passive radiation detectors in our classrooms in the late 80s... Although that might have been more a product of the cold war, since the military base I lived near was actually a short range nuclear(that's an assumption) missle site(this isn't).
Who cares if she faked it? Who ever really cares if a hot woman fakes it?
There really are tours of the area, and she evidently went on a tour, so the pictures are real. What's fake are her claims that she rides her motorcycle alone in the radioactive zone.
HOWEVER, once I found out it was faked, I was extremely upset. The original impact of the story was immediately gone, and I felt like I was cheated out of those emotions of awe and wonder. There's no way I'm going to go out on a limb again and trust anything that woman says.
There was a story here previously about the journalistic quality of blogs on the Internet and how they couldn't touch real journalism. I now understand what that's all about. IMHO, /. shouldn't be giving any credence to Elena after her previous scam was unearthed.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
About Makhno army:
"The anarchists on the photo, they kept in terror all this region" (Makhno in the center) It was other way around. Makhno anarhist army was composed of local peasants and small core of anarchists. Makhno was hugely pouplar among the locals, mostly because he defended them again devastating communists "food tax". Later soviet propaganda tried to make a common bandit out of Mahno, but havn't succeded much.
Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there
It's that way in Germany, too. I know that in Hamburg, some of the major bomb shelters were so incredibly massive that they simply never tore them down. They put nightclubs in there now. You can see them pretty easily, they're these huge masses of concrete... one of the most touching things, besides the bombed-out cathedrals left unrestored, and the occasional Kennedyplatze or Eisenhowerstrasse you run into...
We don't really have a parallel here. This is one of the reasons that I believe that when Americans and Europeans think about war, they actually conceptualize very different things.
riding through Chernobyl on a motorcycle would be inherently risky, dangerous, unlawful and maybe even lethal.
Are you refering to dangers from radiological contamination? The danger is real, but it's not as bad as you may think. The other reactors at the site were kept operating after the accident. It was not until December 2000 that the last was shut down.
This means that over six thousand people worked right next to the containment building, and traveled to and from the site almost every day for several years after the accident.
A few rides through town on a motorcycle would expose you to a accumulated dose many thousands of times less than what a lot of other people have voluntarily chosen to live with.
I'd guess that it would be riskier to ride a motorcycle through downtown LA than through the town section of Chernobyl. (If it were allowed to ride through Chernobyl.)
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed,
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792-1822
There seems to be a lot of anti-Elena sentiment here, mostly due to the fact that she didn't really take those pictures on a motorcycle.
Who cares? I sure don't.
Her stories, fact or fiction, are a great read, and provide a wonderful thread connecting the photographs. The photographs themselves (which certainly are real) are a great record of the past that tell a story on their own.
If someone posted a "space log" with lots of beautiful pictures of the planets, and linked the pictures together using a story about flying in a spaceship from one to the next, no-one would think the story was real, but many would still enjoy it. Elena's made-up story just happend to be a lot more down-to-earth and believable.
She mentioned at one time that she was planning on turning the Chernobyl story into a chapter of a book she was working on (I can only presume that the Serpent Wall story will be another chapter). If such a thing comes about, you can bet I'm buying it! Why pass up such a great collection of photographs and enjoyable stories?
Elana,
Thank you for another good story from your homeland. These are things that Americans (like me) never really get to see. When we read one of your stories, it humanizes you and your people far more than any history book could.
I've read your stories, and am impressed - I hope you keep up your work and that the skeptics don't stop you. In your own way, you have done more to help relations between your people and the rest of the world than your government has. After reading your stories, I feel like I know a bit more about you and your people than I ever have before. It is now easier to understand some of the things about you and your people than before - because I can see some of your roots.
As a student I studied these wars, but they were abstract. Now they are real. The numbers still astound me, probably even more now.
Thank you,