Editor's Note: Imagine if you will you are in downtown Lausanne and all the chi-chi and not-so-chi-chi shopfronts are barricaded, not with ugly plywood, but with amazing thick, yellow laminated planks, seamless and somehow festive in the silent streets. Eerily, not a single gold watch in sight, not a fancy shoe, not a polo shirt. In this pause, all the shopkeepers who tried to sell off their inventory "just in case" have stayed home. Capital sleeps an uneasy midday sleep, it's quiet, and the poets of the FLPP have come out to play with their Sharpies (or the French-Swiss equivalent of Sharpies...)

Meanwhile the shore of Lake Geneva just down from here presents a less-pretty picture of pre-emptive G8 crackdown: there are no ferries or pleasure craft on the waters; entire streets bordering delegates' hotels are completely blocked by a double-high wall of air-sea-land containers topped with coils of razor wire; the waterfront is similarly armored.

In a way, this is last summer's story: the 2003 G8 meeting took place in Evian across the lake, with riots in Geneva and fancy barricades in Lausanne. Today, however, as Georgia prepares for its own G8, I feel it's important to run these images of creative resistance in Switzerland. Ratsalad seems to have struck out in our attempts to get 2004 G8 protestors to write about their plans & perspectives, though we HAVE heard rumors about "fix shit up" homebuilding anarchists that make us smile.

In any case, add civil disobedience to the list of things we at Ratsalad like laced with a sense of humor.