Χρήστου Ζαχόπουλου … Squall 17th of January, 2008 POST·MERIDIEM 01:59

There’s a political sex scandal in the news in Greece right now; the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on it here, and you can find commentary in English via Google News. The Greek minister of culture had an affair with his secretary; she secretly filmed about 100 hours of them having sex, and then threatened to release them unless he gave her a good job and 200,000 € in hush money. He refused, she sent the videos to his boss, who forced him to resign, and a few days later he jumped from a fourth-floor window. So far, so sordid. What I found hilarious about the case, searching for images related to it to paste into IRC, was that this Turkish paper, when reporting about it, omit photos of the unlovely pair entirely, and show a photo of an attractive couple instead. Worried about their readers’ aesthetic sensibilities, bless ’em.

On the personal news front, I’m doing essentially a mock version of an important exam the Saturday after next, and good God am I underprepared for it. Fuсk. Otherwise, living a quiet life, committing to XEmacs too much, puttering along with Spanish and other bits of work here and there.

Word of the day: шквал is Russian for ‘squall’; the Polish is much the same, szkwał. I was a little surprised to see a Germanic word in that context; this dictionary entry suggests that at least the Russian word is from English, but doesn’t say when it was borrowed.