Contrary to popular belief...

...I'm not dead. I just took an overlong vacation, as I tend to every August. This year is even more important, as this time next year I'll be serving my time in the Greek army. Trust me, it's not half as fun as it sounds. So I figured I'd spend extra time in my mountain village of Neraida, near lake Plastiras, this year, to make up for next year's.

What's more, with the recent atrocities that happened in Pelloponisos and in other parts of Greece lately, I'm starting to worry that the forests I love so much won't be around for much longer. Even without fires, the scorching heatwaves that plagued Greece this year took their toll on the plant and animal life of said forests. The only ones that didn't seem affected were all those fucking flies. My god, the flies. I swear there were at least a million around at any given moment, even at the deepest part of the forest all you could hear was a constant, loud, buzzing sound.

Still, spending your time in the mountains beats Athens and my hometown of Karditsa any day, so it's why I didn't want to leave. Having a few drinking buddies around never hurt, either.

So what's been happening in the world while I was away? Elections were suddenly announced for the 16th of the current month, but let's get serious, I'm not gonna bother with that one.

I was thinking of writing an article about all the disgracing forest fires of June, July, and August, but so much has been said about them recently that I have nothing really significant to add. Except of course for a big ol'"FUCK YOU" to all those that caused this, and all those who could have done something to stop it, but didn't.

At the end of the day though, nothing will say or do will change anything. Elections are a little over a week away, and after that (a month tops) nobody will remember about the forest fires of 2007, and naturally nobody will do anything to prevent such a thing from happening again. It's like this graffiti that's reportedly been seen around Athens lately, loosely translated by yours trully it goes a bit like: "This country is being torn apart by indifference, but what do I care?"

That's Greece in a nutshell for ya.

Anyway, I don't want my first post after so long to be a total downer, so on the positive side, Eurobasket 2007 has been very interesting so far. It's not that the matches that have been played as of today are awesome or anything, but they're really close for the most part. Like last night's game between Greece and Serbia, where Gurovic tied the game with a three-pointer from like nine meters away at the buzzer. I wasn't too happy about it personally at the moment, but in retrospect it helped an otherwise bad game become exciting.

Better yet was Slovenia's win over Italy, with the Italians taking the lead with a few seconds to go for the first time in the game, and then... Well, just watch the following video. Damn, that must have sucked royally for the Italians.



And now I must be off, the basketball match between Greece and Russia is starting any moment, last game of the first round for the Greek team so far, hopefully it will mark our third win. Oh and the Serbs managed to fuck up for the fourth year in a row in a major competition by losing to Israel and coming up... last. Heh.