September 06, 2018

A Walk on the Wild Side (of Russia)


A Walk on the Wild Side (of Russia)
Of bugs, lip synching police and a very cute kitten

1. As it turns out, Siberian transport police have got some fire moves to encourage you to get moving, too. They released a hot new track called “Three Lines of Fate” (how could it not be good?), a song that lauds the work of these policemen and encourages people to travel. In it, transport police of all types lip sync and dance to the music, albeit in a rather limited way. Still, even if Billboard doesn’t place this jam on its Top 100 list, “Three Lines of Fate” has won a place in our hearts.

 

2. When you’ve had one of those days (you know which ones we’re talking about), only a poop emoji will do. Well, maybe that’s only true if you’re a millennial. Anyway, Yandex Maps is conspiring to take this privilege away from users! Yandex Maps has a new feature in which users can label map locations using three emojis (and you can take this quiz to guess cities based on their emojis!). Given this power, internet trolls have quickly covered the map with poop emojis and other coded emojis that Yandex Maps finds offensive. What Yandex Maps giveth, Yandex Maps taketh away, and so the company is limiting which emojis one can use on its maps.

3. In a certain Russian city, people are slipping, cars are skidding out, and it’s getting hard to breathe. No, this isn’t due to a very early snow storm, or to a late one, or to toxic waste in the streets. In fact, the plague that’s been bugging Taganrog is exactly that: a plague of bugs. To be more specific, Chironomidae, a mosquito-like bug that, very thankfully, does not bite. These creatures are absolutely covering the city’s every available surface. The streets are slick with them, the air is heavy with them, and the people are covered in them. This mysterious swarm may be due to the unusually warm and sticky summer the area was subject to. Regardless, we think we’ll let Taganrog sort out this fly in their ointment before we schedule our next visit.

In Odder News:

Dasha the Cat

Photo: Vadim Kirilyuk

  • Cute as a wild kitten: scientists rescued a wild kitten and prepare her for life outside
  • A true fail: everyone has a life when a school’s ceremonial balloon, shaped like a 5, turns over into a two (in American parlance, hopes for an A get turned into an F)

  • Leaf through the amazing photos from a reenactment of the Battle of Borodino, the biggest military reenactment in Europe

Quote of the Week:

“In the middle of June she went outside for the first time, and immediately ran back inside, to her humans, because she got too scared.”

— Vadim Kirilyuk, one of the Dasha’s caretakers, offering up a very sweet and sad moment of the wild kitten’s life.

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Bears in the Caviar is a hilarious and insightful memoir by a diplomat who was “present at the creation” of US-Soviet relations. Charles Thayer headed off to Russia in 1933, calculating that if he could just learn Russian and be on the spot when the US and USSR established relations, he could make himself indispensable and start a career in the foreign service. Remarkably, he pulled it of.
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Murder and the Muse

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Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

Steppe / Степь (bilingual)

This is the work that made Chekhov, launching his career as a writer and playwright of national and international renown. Retranslated and updated, this new bilingual edition is a super way to improve your Russian.
Marooned in Moscow

Marooned in Moscow

This gripping autobiography plays out against the backdrop of Russia's bloody Civil War, and was one of the first Western eyewitness accounts of life in post-revolutionary Russia. Marooned in Moscow provides a fascinating account of one woman's entry into war-torn Russia in early 1920, first-person impressions of many in the top Soviet leadership, and accounts of the author's increasingly dangerous work as a journalist and spy, to say nothing of her work on behalf of prisoners, her two arrests, and her eventual ten-month-long imprisonment, including in the infamous Lubyanka prison. It is a veritable encyclopedia of life in Russia in the early 1920s.
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At the Circus (bilingual)

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Fish: A History of One Migration

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Turgenev Bilingual

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Stargorod: A Novel in Many Voices

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