The other day someone here on the blog asked why all I’m doing lately is posting yukyuk pictures (9GAG style) and nothing more substantial. The simple and short answer is I’m depressed.

It started with Cristian Gog who won this year’s “Romania’s Got Talent” contest using what he calls “mentalism” and what I call “high school talent show magic tricks”. Although I’ve never met the guy, he seems all right from what I’ve read (plus he has a blog) and I can’t blame him for entering a contest with a large cash prize. Turns out he was deeply in debt to some shithead bankers who flagrantly broke the law (including with his account specifically) and never suffered any consequences, so yeah, the cash will do him some good.

What depressed me, beyond ProTV’s incredibly shoddy production values (even if you don’t speak Romanian, you can see his final round trick here) with horrific camera management and editing, and beyond the superstitious crossing herself to “ward off the evil eye” that the female judge did, was just how apeshit with pleasure a lot of people went, including seemingly en masse the vapid Romanian “blogosphere”. Even a guy I know and thought was at least fairly level headed creamed his jeans at seeing what was, quite honestly, a rather low rent trick.

Again, kudos to Gog since he apparently knew this kind of shit would wow and amaze Romanians, whom I might note once again believe in witches and magical spells even at the highest levels of government, but I do have to ask – haven’t you ever seen Penn and Teller? Or David Copperfield? Or Chris Angel (sp?) or the dozens of others of internationally famous magicians? Tricking an EKG machine and supposedly “reading people’s minds” twice (once in the finale, once in the semi-finals) is pretty weak tea.

But ok, it’s a TV show for laughs and giggles, so what? No big deal. What is far more disturbing in the continuing saga of Searching for an Education Minister. I mean how long has Skeletor been in office? Three weeks? And we’re now on Education Minister #3. The first one, Corina Dumitrescu, clearly had major problems with conflicts of interest. But that’s not what sunk her. Where she screwed up was lying on her CV (USA: resume) and saying she was a student at “Standford”. Not only did she misspell the name of one of the most famous and prestigious universities in America but turns out she never was a student there at all. Oh well!

Then Skeletor moved onto Ioan Mang, who had previously published a paper copied nearly word for word from two Israeli cryptographers and dealing with some fairly advanced mathematics. First Mang denied that his paper was plagiarized. Then he said okay it was plagiarism but he hadn’t submitted the paper (who supposedly did was never determined). Then he tried to resign but Ponta wouldn’t answer the phone. Then Mang resigned and everyone from Skeletor on down said it wasn’t because of the plagiarism but just to avoid all the uproar and Mang is an honest and wonderful guy and blah, blah, blah, more bullshit.

So now we’re onto Liviu Pop, currently the “interim” Minister of Education until yet another moron can be found. And 24 hours into his temporary posting, it turns out on his own CV (posted on his personal blog, christ!) he can’t even spell the name of the school where he’s been teaching for years. Nice. And God only knows what other shenanigans we’re in for as the Skeletor cabinet rolls on through the summer.

Someone asked me (after Pop’s appointment), “Don’t they vet these people first?” meaning “Don’t they do some research beforehand and make sure these are good choices?” And I’ll tell you the answer. No, they don’t. Nobody is doing anything in terms of research or preparation or strategizing or anything else. They’re picking their friends because that’s what you do and nobody’s doing the slightest bit of vetting or anything else because long-term thinking and investigating is apparently something biologically impossible for Romanians to do.

I mean does any of this matter? Just a few months ago the government announced it was cutting 17,000 (17 thousand!) university spots that previously had been free for students assuming they had the necessary grades, etc. And now we’ve had 1 liar, 1 plagiarist and 1 guy who was illiterate appointed to head up the Ministry of Education. Is that really the direction Romania needs to be going? With 17,000 fewer tuition free places in the universities, do you think corruption and “influence peddling” and little brown envelopes stuffed with cash are going to increase or decrease? And when the man or woman at the top is leading by example (and God only knows what kind of corrupt crap they’ve been involved with to even get the nomination in the first place) what’s the long term results for Romanian education going to be?

I mean does anybody care? I don’t think that they do, besides me, and I don’t count. I mean just today I see a little “ho hum” article in Adevarul that Mrs. Elizabeth Brown “polish my fucking spoons” Gitenstein, the wife of Daddy Mark, the American Ambassador to Romania, is making a visit to a local 4H club in Ramnicu-Valcea. No big deal, right? Except she’s going to be joined by none other than Kiki Harris. Jesus! And absolutely no mention of who she is whatsoever, just that she’s a former “cultural attache”.

Bullshit. Adevarul knows better, or should know better, since there’s no mystery who this evil bitch is, friends with one of the creepiest group of American pedophiles to ever live in Romania and most of them covert operatives of one sort or another of the U.S. government. Yeah there’s “nothing to report” when Kiki Harris goes to visit a children’s club in Romania, nope, nothing to see here at all.

As I’ve said before, the wolves are circling the helpless sheep of Romania and the only thing anybody gives a damn about are two-bit magic tricks. So yeah, that’s my mood at the moment and why I’ll stick to making yukyuk pictures for the time being.