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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.
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.
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.