Coincidence?

How ironic that NTV started airing the movie "Executive Decision" a few minutes ago just after a special news bulletin about the meeting of Yushchenko and Yanukovych with Kuchma, where apparently no final decision on who will be the executive was reached. Not because of the theme (you'll remember that this is the acting tour de force where Kurt Russell and Halle Berry battle terrorists who have hijacked an airplane), just because of the title.

Bad Eglish

This recruiting ad for the Orlyonok Hotel (careful, the intro has sound) has run in Bolshoi Gorod two weeks in a row. I guess it's not really that funny, given the much funnier butchering of English which is prevalent in many Moscow restaurant menus. It is interesting, though, that their Ispectors are not expected to speak English or Eglish.

Advertising in the big city

This ubiquitous (on hot-dog stands, anyway, of which Moscow boasts quite a few) ad for the “Volcanobull” hot dog (sold by «Стардог!s» - “Stardogs” - formerly known as «Стоп Топ»), is captioned, “The temptation of the big city.” Uh-huh.

A word to the wise

Some of my loyal readers have complained that there was a drought of updates in the last week or so. True. However, sometimes there may be updates which are not immediately apparent because I’ve back-dated them (due to my obsessiveness about things being in proper chronological order), such as this one.

Also, note that today I have added a list of links, which is rather modest for the time being, off to the right.

Moscowist?

The Gothamist empire has spread within the States (I learned about this by finding DCist) and now to London.

Moscowist doesn't have quite the same ring to it, but www.moscowist.com does appear to still be available.

The Revolution will be blogged*

Fearless Ukrainians bring you the story direct from Maidan Nezavisimosti!

In case their blogging in Russian makes you wonder about their political preferences, the following leaves no doubt they're pro-Yushchenko:

Президентом у нас хотят сделать бывшего зека - насильника и казнокрада. Это все ребята. Во-первых это большой позор для страны. Во-вторых, в-третьих и так далее скоро наступят. Хочу Вам сообщить, что я голосовал не за него. Еще интересная инфа: я спрашивал у всех своих знакомых - НЕ ОДИН (!) не один из них не голосовал за этого подонка. Не один мой сотрудник, родственник, сосед, друг не голосовал за него. Не один однокласник, одногрупник из тех с кем я общался не голосовал за него! Я горжусь этим. Еще я горжусь тем, что в моем городе Киеве за Ющенка проголосовало больше 75% населения, в области почти 77%!

*I was already aware of the unoriginality of this phrase, and if I hadn't been, a quick googling of it would have set me straight.

Sunday morning snow

From the podzemelka (underground pedestrian crossing) going across Tverskaya to catch a gypsy cab to the banya. If I had taken this photo 20 seconds later, it would contain 3 young women, one of them in the midst of a dramatic slip-and-fall down the steps. Timing is everything.


Rambler News's take on the snowfall - including a nice photo.

Potty humor

You know how sometimes you see website URL's in the most incongruous places? Well, here's one which I finally visited after seeing it so many times in...important places: www.toitoi.ru

Trust me, you will find a visit to this site to be entertaining, especially if you scroll down and click on the little devil-looking fella with a "T" on his chest. This will link you to a fun although rather pointless (maybe I just couldn't figure it out because the instructions were in German) game.

A major competitor's website and mascot are quite lame in comparison.

First real snowfall of the year

Walked out of the office to find Gasheka street looking unexpectedly like this:


Triumfal'naya Square was similarly snowy:


And, using one of the mirrored windows of the Impex-Bank branch in our building, I was able to take a self-portrait showing how much snow can get stuck to one on a 10-minute walk when it's coming down nearly horizontally:

I love the box

Sometimes people ask me why we don't have cable or satellite TV here. Well, we had the basic cable package from Kosmos-TV for awhile when we first moved here and we practically never watched it. The reason is that Russian broadcast TV can be (although it is not always) so damn good for entertainment purposes. Of course, if there's a world crisis of some kind, it would be nice to have CNN (even the inferior CNN International, which is what you get here, with "Diplomatic License" instead of "Crossfire"), but that alone is not worth the monthly fee.

OK, so tonight we went to the theater ("Стакан Воды" - I'm not sure of the original name - by the French playwright Eugene Scribe at the Stanislavsky dramatic theater, which is just 1/2 block from our front door), therefore I can try to be ironic about my penchant for watching Hollywood movies here and just maybe sound credible. Before we left the apartment, '80's classic "Back to the Future" was on STS, and when we got back the viewer's tough choice was between "Minority Report" on Channel 1, "The Nutty Professor" on Rossiya, and "The Living Daylights" on NTV.

With all of those entertaining options, I don't know how I find time to maintain this blog...