So as Jenifer said, we're flipping through Russian television as midnight approaches, because we heard there was a "cartoon karaoke" where you can sing along with Russian multfilmi. We don't find it, but watch a bit of the Russian New Year's classic, "The Irony of Fate." Good movie ( Read more... )

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha... How did I miss this last month? Brilliant.
http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/comedy/2006/11/29/singin/

Remember how I couldn't see inside the new ice-skating rink on Red Square to take any pictures? Well, it just made the BBC's news home page, with pics including the recent benefit hockey game between old hockey stars from Russia and North America ( Read more... )

Courtesy of the vocabulary in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

"Tушканчик протиснулся через лучезарную миску булькаюшеи гноя."

"The jumping-hare forced its way through the resplendent tureen of gurgling pus."

Remember how voting machines in Florida erased 18,000 votes, so that it's impossible to tell who just won the US Congress seat in Sarasota? Congress is now mulling asking for the election to be held again -- which is Congress' constitutional right, last exercised in 1975 actually ( Read more... )

Had a nice goodbye dinner with Marko on Thursday, went to an "eastern" restaurant called Rahat Lukum and had tasty shishkebab, stuffed pastries, bread with sesame seeds, etc. Also had fun Friday with a smallish subsection of the history crowd at Cafe Bilingua ( Read more... )

Silly Moscow-record-breaking-heat-wave fact of the day, from the Moscow Times:

"Masha the bear has already woken from hibernation in a Yaroslavl zoo after just one week."

Boy, is he gonna be pissed.

Here are the high and low temperatures for three cities today. See if you can guess which one is Moscow. The other two are Chapel Hill and Americus ( Read more... )

I saw the sun today from my apartment! It was surprisingly low, at noon it was maybe 1/4 of the way up the sky from the horizon. But it inspired me to go for another long walk ( Read more... )

So in addition to some useful things, reading Harry Potter in Russian is also teaching me a lot of really weird words that I'm not exactly likely to need anytime soon.

Like the words that make up the subject line of this post -- thanks to HP, I can now say "thrice-cursed gooseberries fling themselves higgledy-piggledy." ;)