By Bryan | Published:
October 12, 2008
Let me preface this entry by saying that I am addicted to Diet Coke. A few years ago I weighed about 35 pounds more than I do now. Then, as now, I drank an amazing amount of cola on a daily basis. But one day I decided to switch to diet cola, and over the course of about three years I lost a lot of weight without changing much else about my diet. Today I am very near my high school weight. And out of the available diet colas, I eventually settled up on Diet Coke as my favorite.
A good friend of mine who works in the pharmaceutical industry, concerned about my huge intake of Diet Coke, mentioned that it has been found that aspartame crosses the blood-brain barrier, but that we do not know exactly what it does. “It makes you addicted to Diet Coke, is what it does,” I quipped.
Diet Coke (or Coca Cola Light, as it is known in this region) is not widely available in Tajikistan. As I mentioned in a previous entry, the vast majority of food products in this country are imported, and Coke is no different. There is no Coca Cola bottling plant in this country, so all of the Coca Cola here is imported from other countries, usually Kazakhstan or Afghanistan.
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Posted in Life, Tajikistan |
By Bryan | Published:
October 6, 2008
People have contacted me regarding the earthquake in Kyrgyzstan, wondering if I am OK, so I just wanted to say to everyone that I am fine. Many of the news reports are saying that it occurred on the border with Tajikistan and being unfamiliar with the geography, some people became worried about me. So for those people, rest assured, Dushanbe is hundreds of miles away from Kyrgyzstan, so we did not even feel it at all, though I must say that this region is in general, earthquake prone.
-Bryan
New York Times: Quake Kills at least 72 in Kyrgyzstan
By Bryan | Published:
September 30, 2008
(Updated October 3, 2008)
So I’m back in Dushanbe, Tajikistan right now and I’ll be here until late October. In the past I haven’t really written a whole lot about what I do out here. Maybe it’s because I didn’t think other people would be all that interested. Or maybe, this being my fourth trip out there, I suppose I have gotten accustomed to the sights, sounds, culture, all the stuff that goes on in the course of these trips, and actually, yeah maybe it would be interesting for other people to hear.
So I guess I’ll start by just giving you some background information, and maybe in further entries I will give more specifics about different topics.
Tajikistan is a highly mountainous country in Central Asia, located just north of Afghanistan and just to the west of China. With very few natural resources and very little workable land, it is the poorest of all of the former Soviet republics. The Tajik people share some common history with the Persians of Iran and speak a mutually-intelligible dialect of the same language (Farsi, as spoken in Iran has a lot more loanwords from Arabic, while Tajik understandably has a lot more loanwords from Russian).
If you believe the 1980’s action movie portrayals of the USSR you’d think it was only Russians around but actually there are also many different ethnic groups speaking many other languages here in Dushanbe, with Russian serving as a lingua franca, particularly in the arenas of business and politics.
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Posted in Life, Tajikistan |
By Bryan | Published:
September 13, 2008
It struck me recently that I think our country could be heading into a new era of moral conservatism, and if McCain wins the next election, it’ll pretty much seal it. In this future I think the era from the beginning of Clinton’s presidency until now would be remembered as a free and easy time, kind of like the 1960’s. There was earth loving and what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and Vicodin and medical marijuana and gay people gained rights!
It seems like these things come in cycles. Did the Roarin’ 20’s bring on prohibition? Did the 60’s bring on the “war” on drugs and the Moral Majority?
I’ve been convinced for a while that somehow in the end, McCain was gonna pull it out, and for the first time it actually seems like it could happen. I’m actually pretty scared. I’m afraid of how many more rights we might give up in the name of national security.
But for some reason I just have very little faith in the Democratic party to be able to win an election. I mean, George W. Bush got re-elected. If that doesn’t prove they are inept, I don’t know what could. And now the Republicans have a vice presidential nominee who I personally think is the worst VP nominee in history, and somehow she’s actually helping McCain. It’s amazing.
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By Bryan | Published:
August 30, 2008
- What We Do Is Secret
What you’re looking at over there is for me a very historic ticket stub! Today was the first time I saw my name in the credits of a movie that I had worked on, playing on a regular day, in a regular theater, to a regular audience. Not a one-time festival date full of people who worked on the film. Not some made-for-publicity theatrical premiere for a direct-to-DVD release, but just a plain old regular movie in its second week of play! And I have to say that it feels pretty good. I finally feel like I have worked on a “real” movie.
I wasn’t even sure that I would be credited at all as I had only worked on it for a few days on what I was told were re-shoots, but when I got to the credits roll at the end, I found myself credited as grip under the “Additional Photography” section.
The movie itself, I am actually proud to say, was pretty mediocre. And actually it was a lot better than I was expecting. At any rate, having been paid to work on even a mediocre movie playing in theaters in multiple cities is an achievement that 10 years ago would have seemed like an impossible fantasy to my college-aged self.
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