The Internet: Making the World a Scarier Smaller Place

So less than twelve hours after putting this picture of the President of Tatarstan (autonomous republic in Russia) up as my facebook profile picture I got a facebook message from a random angry Tatar telling me to take it down. What the hell? He isn't in my network and we don't have any friends in common. Was he combing facebook to see if there are any pictures of random Tatar politicians being misused? Had run a random search seen the picture of the President of Tatarstan, gotten all excited thinking he could be his friend making up for his complete lack of friends in real life and then was crushed when he realized the real President of Tatarstan is not on facebook? Is he maybe just a jerk? Perhaps it was just his love and worship before the copyright alter, we all know how Russia is revered for its strict following of copyright law and how that is not at all the issue keeping them from joining the WTO. Clearly that must have been it. I mean, instead of a picture of himself the guy had a Jackie Chan movie poster for "the Tuxedo" as his profile picture, so clearly he was someone who felt everyone should use actual pictures of themselves, and someone with great taste in films. Jerk. Nobody cared when I did it with Ataturk, you know the founder of modern Turkey on account of whom youtube was shut down in Turkey because some Greeks had put up some videos calling Ataturk a homosexual.

The things is I like the President of Tatarstan. I like Tatarstan. I want to learn Tatar. I wasn't even making fun of the guy. I wanted to wish one of my tatar friends a happy birthday in tatar and though he would appreciate the visage of his president. Okay, so my status for a while was "I don't feel so hot," but I wasn't using it in a sexual sense, the President of Tatarstan is a fine looking man by any measure, but in the sense that I was sick. Come on, the man has a sash, he's awesome! So annoyed.

Maybe if Kazakhstan chills out and Sasha Baron Cohen is bored he should do a film about Tatarstan. They seem to want something to get upset about.