I did this cartoon for the Messenger as an alternative to the one in the previous post (the map one). But it got refused. Refused is probably too harsh of a word. It was not found to be as humorous as expected. However, intention was not humorous, it was bitter sarcasm. It was a pun on lapse of judgment on the city government's part. One does probably need to have some prior knowledge of the situation to get the cartoon.
City hall is in the middle of the city, with side streets always crowded and building being quite small. Somewhat logical decision was made to move most of the city services to an office building in a different part of town that would be able to better accommodate those who work there. Unfortunately, there was a big (and I mean big) lapse in judgment - a huge office building, and no parking lot, a 14+ floors of offices, and people have to use street parking? Building is right by a round-about which in the middle of the day is more or less a makeshift parking lot. It is ironic that the office that is supposed to work on traffic congestion issues creates traffic jams, instead of trying to get rid of them.
There is a long list of lapses, it's not really suitable for just one post. I have an idea that I have to put down on paper. Another one is the airport roofing issue when Turks claimed that they were not aware of existence of strong winds in Tbilisi. It was already discussed in this post.
misunderstood
will it ever be stable?
I am wondering if stability is ever possible between Georgia and Russia. A friend suggested that Georgia would need to do some bending, and even that is quite debatable. It is not likely that Russia will get off Georgia's case even Georgia went along with Russia's absurd demands. Even if Georgia quit its quest for NATO membership and declared neutrality, it will change little if anything.
Meanwhile, Russians are slowly swallowing Abkhazia and results may not be pretty. It will turn ugly for both Abkhazia and Georgia.
post-"NATO summit" impressions
There is a saying that after battle people swing fists. In our case, I expected more of pointing fingers, rather then fists. Unfortunately it did not turn out as bad. At least the government managed to sell the result of the summit to Georgian public as a success. Blame whoever you want...
Russia does not veto NATO. Yeah, right... And Germany is willing to stop getting gas from Russia if Russia says that Georgia's NATO membership is a problem, right? Who are we kidding, they have more than a veto power, they have fuel.
That brings us to a logical conclusion - what happens to NATO when members cannot decide what the priorities are?
Wasn't it fun? Months and months, we were all preparing for the day when in Bucharest, at the NATO summit, Georgia would be presented the Membership Action Plan. All we got was a communique with a promise. What now?
irony
There might be nothing ironic in what I will write here. Just a collection of thoughts more or less related to this blog. I started this blog to share my doodles with those who could not get their hand on printed versions. I don't even know if it is possible to get a printed version of the Georgia Today in the US. Back in December neither the Messenger, not GT posted cartoons on the web version of their paper, so it went live. I never intended this blog to be exclusively "political/editorial cartoon" blog, but rather a place to dump all those ink drawings I do.
I am going to try and put a very non-political one here, see if it blows up in my face :)
Irony however, is how some people end up on my blog. Comments section seems to be exclusively empty, so I resorted to Google analytics. There is an interesting part of those analytics that tells you about people who find your site through Google search. It gives you the term they used. Last couple months I have seen odd combinations, sometimes so odd that I am shocked that this blog come up in the list of results. Not this week. It seems a bit "normal" this week. However, here's the list of searches for last few days:
- cartoon georgia maps
- georgia khachapuri
- georgia tuday
- georgian diasporas
- multiplex solutions + swiss
- roofing cartoons
I am curious if any of those people meant to see my cartoons. But they did click the link as it came up. For most of those terms blog.shioshvili.com is actually on the first page. Roofing cartoons? Strange...
deadlock
Bucharest summit is over and Georgia did not get the MAP. Maybe Georgia got a better deal, only time will show. My opinion is that Georgia wants NATO membership to resolve conflicts, while NATO would prefer Georgia resolve its conflicts before letting it join.
no hope
Story is at least couple weeks old, but still unresolved. It is not yet clear who the owner of Imedi is, and there is a likelihood that this battle will very adversely affect Imedi itself. Recently I noticed a poster with Public Broadcaster's crowd, one of them being former Imedi anchor. People do not wait around for months on, it's already been at least five months, will the public be interested to see it come back?
