New Year in New Zealand

As always New Zealand starts the celebrations before us in Europe and elsewhere.
A private video:

Козият Рог / Koziat Rog and other Bulgarian films

I chatted with a Bulgarian translator on Facebook and we came to talk about film, as he works as a translator of films for SDI Media.

As I'm no expert on Bulgarian film, I asked him to recommend some and he - among others - mentioned this one, 'Koziat Rog' (1972), directed by Metodi Andonov:

Another important Bulgarian film from the 60's is Otklonenie (1967), directed by Gisha Ostrovski and Todor Stoyanov:


...and 'The Clown and the Kids' (1967), an American Bulgarian film by Mende Brown:

Of course there are others, maybe more important films than these but maybe I will get some feedback from some of you reading this.

Some reflections on why you should leave Facebook

Swedish Mafia

I've started reading this book now, it's a book about organized crime in Sweden and not least the different motorcycle organzations or other criminal gangs who nowadays more over overtly display their belonging to a criminal organzation or group.

We've had criminal gangs in Sweden before but they were more 'discrete' concerning being seen in public and this is one of the changes since the late 1990's and beginning of 2000's, now the members are proud of being part of these gangs and they show it to as many as possible.

The authors - Lasse Wierup and Matti Larsson - try to pin point the factors leading up to this and they do so by not least interviewing the gang members themselves.

As I've just started reading this book, I can't give you my opinion about it but I will get back to that later on.

Earlier I've read the Swedish author Tomas Lappalainens books about the Mafia as a whole and another one about the Camorra in particular.

Questions about Queen-Master Mind

I found this through Facebook and being a fan of Queen, I must say this man knows a lot about them. Not all questions were excessively hard to answer but the difficult thing is to find the right answer right there in the very moment within seconds.