Month: December 2009

The rules, they are a-changin’

(A poem for the new decade by Viktor D. Huliganov with apologies to Dylan Thomas)

You can take all the notions you thought that you knew,
You can take all the truths you believed to be true,
And the old guarantees and your securities
And you can burn them as fuel for your engine.
You can restart your mind and your philosophies
For the rules, they are a-changin’!

The government thug in his suit and his hat
Will be taxing your earnings until they get fat
They’ll be taxing your children and taxing your cat
And your business they’ll be disarranging.
They’ll tell you what’s what and then that’ll be that
For the rules, they are a-changin’!

This new unelected fisc-alien horde
Will be taxing the pen and then taxing the sword
They’ll be taxing you far more than you can afford
As we slip into this demo-slavery
They’ll be taxing the devil and taxing the Lord
For the rules, they are a-changin’!

Don’t stick to ideas which turned out to be wrong
By foreseeing the change you can make yourself strong
You must weather this crisis, no matter how long
But your model, it needs rearranging
So remodel your moral and rewrite your song
For the rules, they are a-changing

VDH 31st December 2009.

Jane Burgermeister

Project Camelot interviews Jane Burgermeister


Just watch it through. Then make up your own mind what to think of it. This isn’t from my channel, but I have a section here for video from other channels – things which are worth putting out there, wherever “there” is…

Introducing Viktor Dmitrievitch Huliganov


This was made on May 27th 2006, when I had been on YouTube already over three months. The day before had been my birthday, and my parents had been here in Warsaw. For my birthday gift they gave me my first ever webcam, and the next day I got on it and started to do characters. Viktor Huliganov was born. This is the first ever Viktor video – he was going to be an amusing shady Russian businessman at first, but developed into more of a crazy professor, once the Russian lessons started. Although, of course, the one does not necessarily exclude the other. This marks the end of my “early attempts” section, and is therefore the last film in this section. With this film I transferred into the next phase of what I’ve been doing on the internet ever since.

Viktor has come to life in more ways than one. He blogs, he makes Russian lessons, he writes books, he talks on the radio. People write to me as Viktor, talk to me as Viktor, some people still think after watching many Viktor films that there really is this Russian dude – more sophisticated viewers are aware that it is a persona but want the persona to live anyway, and so they continue to address and to follow Viktor Huliganov. I had no idea of the success that this would have when I started doing it.

Some people have accused me of doing a Borat, but there are big differences in style on the one hand, but on the other hand, I have been impersonating the Russian accent ever since Sacha Baron Cohen was running around in short trousers. There are many sources for the Huliganov persona, not all of them Russians, actually. If Borat is on that list anywhere it is not high on the list and not with any intention or awareness on my part.

Button Man


This film shows that I was trying to experiment but I still only had the Fuji which was trained on the monitor. This is the last film I took and uploaded that had to rely solely on that one technology, but already you can see the desire to experiment a bit more with the films. The next film I did after this one was a radical departure…

Polish Carol #2


Another carol from the same carol concert as earlier. This is Richard Berkeley’s choir here in Warsaw singing “Przybiezeli do Betlejem”, a famous Polish “kolęda” or carol. Again just a single verse here owing to the tiny memory card I had when starting off. Since that time everyone’s memory card is now much bigger, and I sometimes wonder which is driving which – is YouTube driving the technology available on the highstreet, is it the highstreet which is driving YT, or is it both ways?