Well, why not, why not go a little off subject on a Tuesday? Career tests are important, of course, but the EQSQ tests will still be up above tomorrow. Tuesday’s one of those days when we all need a little lighter material to get us over the fact that it’s an entire four days until the weekend again (and yes, we did have to work yesterday, darn it). Or so they tell me anyway.

So, rather than Simon Baron Cohen and his career tests, let’s look at the cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen. You’ll know him as Ali G but you may also know of his character, Borat. As Film Ick points out this character is now about to feature in a full length movie, a project that appears to be having more than the usual run of troubles. Still, they’ve got a good director now.

Borat is supposed to be Kazakh and I have to admit from my own knowledge of the country he’s actually noting like any Kazakh I’ve ever met. So while he’s extraordinarily funny, the satire is a little odd: it’s not actually of Kazakhs, rather of some straw man existing only in the imagination. As part of the creation of the character though the website was actually set up in Kazakhstan, with the .kz suffix. This caused something of a problem for Baron-Cohen when one of his skits seriously annoyed several politicians. As parenthetical remarks points out, that website was closed down and there were threats to sue him for “insulting the national honour” and the like. Fortunately the politicians started thinking (not always a given in that part of the world) and these threats have now been withdrawn. It was actually the President’s daughter who made the decsion to back off.

As Registan says though, anyone with knowledge of that part of the world wouldn’t take such a retreat at face value. The Eurasian Media Forum is taking place in Almaty: people tend to take free speech seriously at such things.

[tags]personality tests, emotional quotient, systemizing quotient, EQSQ, Borat, Kazakhstan, Ali G, Baron Cohen, Movies, film [/tags]