8 comments on “the enemy within”

  1. OK, I give up. What’s the point of this picture? I’m sure you’re going to post it, but you’re making us ask and anticipate your answer!
    Love,
    Mom

  2. the russian chick wrote that on your arm? (or her arm?) Raz-ee-nya. Not sure what that means.

  3. no, it’s my arm. and i wrote it all by myself. i got it off a collection of russian propaganda posters against alcohol that i found online. and actually, if you look at the banner at the top of this very weblog, you might find something similar…

  4. So is that Russian for failure? That was my guess. Are/were the Russians trying to equate alcoholism with failure?

  5. no, it’s not russian for “failure”. although that is a good guess. (i should look that one up, in fact.) it is actually russian for “enemy”. the poster i got it from was saying that alcohol is an enemy of the mind. …and now you know the rest of the story. well, a bit of it at least.

  6. I tried Googling “pa3yma” and got a lot of Russian web sites, but no clues that were helpful. I think that there are some special Syrillic characters that were only approximated by Roman ones, because Babel Fish couldn’t translate it.

  7. yeah, it’s a different character set on most websites. roman characters won’t really work in most cases for matching.
    the original from the poster was “враг разума”, which means something like “foe of the mind”, where “враг” is “foe” (or “enemy”) and “разума” is “mind” (or “reason” or something).
    so i wasn’t exactly correct with my definition above, because i accidentally flipped the meanings of the words in my mind between the time i found it and used it on my site and when i wrote it on my arm. 🙂 so it turns out “the enemy within” is the mind/reason. not surprising, really, i suppose. and probably more apropos, in a way.
    here’s the original poster:
    http://www.tululuka.net/alco/alko05.pxml
    check out some of the others while you’re there.
    one of my other favorites is the “no mercy for hooligans!” one:
    http://www.tululuka.net/alco/a5.pxml
    the word “хулиганье” (“hooligan”) is the word written in black on top of “разума” (“mind”) in the second picture (the blog entry next to this one).

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