Expenditure analysis

Finished (rather belatedly) running my accounts for this financial year. Assuming an entirely spurious degree of accuracy, I can observe that my largest single expenditure (almost £3,000) was on utility bills, of which the largest was council tax (£1,162) and the next largest the electricity bill (a consequence of going with an expensive 'green' provider), although my water bill is going up by fifty percent as of next month...

I spent almost £700 on paying the greengrocer's bill versus £160 at the supermarket and £280 at various street markets.

Total annual expenditure on food: £1,150, of which £760 on fruit & veg, £110 on meat, £40 on dairy products and £230 on assorted groceries.

( Read more... )

Total annual expenditure: £10,165.50, which is a lot less than last year because last year I had to have the windows replaced, and will be a lot less than next year because this month I have had the roof done again :-(
(And not all that very much different from what I paid in 2021...)

Song texts

I'm still struggling with "Twenty Years After": the film managed to cover a vast chunk of the book in a few scenes, although the adaptation must have been made slightly more tricky by the fact that they had decided to omit both Planchet and Grimaud from the first film and therefore could not use them here, at a point where in the book their roles are actually rather significant! Sadly this means we also miss out on Rochefort escaping and being rescued by Planchet after being wrongfully imprisoned by the Queen -- quite a turn-around for the characters, and a point at which we get to appreciate the reality of the throwaway comment at the end of "The Three Musketeers" about Rochefort and d'Artagnan eventually becoming genuine friends. ( Read more... )

What I did, however, manage to find was the lyrics to the two songs which occur in these first couple of episodes, which enables me finally to understand the context to the intriguing lines of the chorus that I did succeed in catching by ear alone :-)
https://textys.ru/lyrics/12/Mushketery/tekst-pesni-Nasha-chest
(Always tricky, because my keyboard won't let me *type* Cyrillic -- hence the need for a 'real' dictionary! -- but only cut and paste it, which makes searching online very awkward indeed.)

The song about honour (Наша честь) was so catchy that I thought it must be a repeat from the first film, and spent some time going through the various war and friendship songs there trying to identify it in the hopes of locating the lyrics in the subtitled copy! But it isn't; it seems to be a genuine original for this film, and I managed to track it down online.
The translation here is pretty awful so far as I can tell, but it's enough to prompt me through the important bits of vocabulary so that I can more or less parse it on sight myself without the use of the dictionary.( Read more... )

And the other chorus that struck me was the oddly optimistic one that plays as d'Artagnan is saddling up and preparing to ride out in search of his long-lost friends: "И кончится все хорошо". It turns out to be about a guardian angel, and very poetical -- it's not surprising I couldn't make out the context.
"И кони ржут, и кровь рекою льется" -- the horses, of course, are not laughing but neighing, and the blood flows in rivers... but in the end all will be well. The angel does not sleep, and all this will pass -- and in the end all will be well.

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( Your top genres were: 24% 'Russian pop', 23% 'Russian chanson', 5% 'classical music', 5% 'New Age music' and 5% 'Russian rock' )

New material acquired

I acquired a new 'large water-carrier' to replace the broken one, from the usual source (other people's recycling put out for collection). ( Read more... )

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Finished watching (for the first time, without subtitles) the rest of the second episode of "Twenty Years Later", after watching the beginning of this episode for the second time.

Mordaunt *bombs* Athos's *house*? (with a barrel of gunpowder delivered as wine) :-O
I do not remember that...

I strongly suspect that the scene between Porthos, d'Artagnan and Jussac (see, I guessed they were going to bring him back :-p) is not going to be found anywhere in the book, which is unfortunate, since the repartee there was one of the bits I found very hard to follow. Part of the problem is that Boyarsky's voice has become hoarse over the course of twenty years -- twenty years' heavy smoking and drinking, by the sounds of it! -- and the character tends to get worked up and speak quickly and violently, all of which make comprehension a lot harder, just as I always struggled with the gruff 'character' voices in "Sous le signe des Mousquetaires" (Rochefort, Treville). ( Read more... )

Sexual equality in birds

This afternoon on the radio I heard one of the more breathtaking stupid pieces of scientific claptrap that I've come across, from a museum curator none the less, who was (by his voice) a young man bemoaning the arrant sexism of the scientists who defined the 'type specimen' for the majority of birds as being represented by the male of the species. Apparently it had not occurred to him -- as it immediately occurred to the (female non-scientist) presenter -- that if you tried to represent the appearance of bird species using female rather than male specimens then you would simply end up with a vast number of bespeckled 'little brown jobs'; not at all helpful in terms of distinguishing features!

Sometimes ideology can really get in the way...