Another new buckle

I noticed last night when taking in the washing that the new buckle on my secondary clothes line had cracked through in the same way that the original Bakelite buckle did, and after about the same amount of time; however this time I knew where to go to purchase a replacement! The current new buckle is green, but I don't think it's as thick in cross-section as the last one, so I don't know how long it will last. What I really need is a metal buckle, of course (though doubtless the weld holding the bar on would eventually fail; they are simply not designed for heavy loads). Possibly I should *get* a metal buckle and then make a strap to fit it, as opposed to trying to find buckles to fit the existing stout woven strap -- which has lasted remarkably well.

Current cycle mileage: 878 -- 271 miles since January (plus a few more that didn't get recorded due to bike issues). Spot on the usual average of 18-19 miles a week :-)

*reads rest of past blog post*
I currently seem to have two videos on Venjamin Smekhov queued plus two on Igor Starygin, having watched four on Valentin Smirnitsky... well, I currently have 42 videos queued ;-p
( Read more... )

The Eldest Son (1976)

Having just counted up the number of 'pending' Russian videos that I had acquired, I ended up jumping straight into a forty-third when YouTube suddenly presented me with "Старший Сын", the film that gets cited in the documentaries as Boyarsky's 'breakout' picture. It was only an hour long (it turns out that this was in fact an opening episode!), and I thought I'd take a look at the start at least without bothering with subtitles or anything, as I was no more than mildly curious about it. The start (a) has nice music and (b) is practically wordless and was thus undemanding to follow, so I was ten minutes in or so before things started getting complicated, and by that time it had grabbed me emotionally...
( Read more... )

Of course, as it happens, this sort of thing -- a conflict of loyalties, assumed identity, and emotional betrayal -- is very much more up my street than the standard romantic drama of will-they-won't-they with lashings of sexual action... But it's *not* Boyarsky, because he's really barely in it -- frankly, I'm not sure how this was a break-out role of any sort -- it's simply the film itself. ( Read more... )