"Эй, моряк" -- why, hallo sailor :-D


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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
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I am currently on Lesson 18 of the second 'tele-course', which provides the comforting experience of understanding practically every word on the screen; this lesson was about winter sports( Read more... )

In my parallel progress through the two different course-books, I am currently in Lesson 9 (of 28) of "Colloquial Russian" from 1990 and Lesson 13 (of 30) of "The Penguin Russian АБВ" of 1965 ( Read more... )

I have finished listening to all the nine episodes of the Ali-Baba podcast( Read more... )

I am 50 minutes into the filmed stage version of "Elsa's Land" -- which of course doesn't come with convenient English film-festival subtitles! -- and 7 hours 53 minutes (Chapter 26 -- "The Dissertation of Aramis") into Smekhov's reading of "The Three Musketeers", which if nothing else is helping to teach me my ordinal numerals thanks to repeatedly paging through the chapter numbers ;-)

I stumbled across a second upload of "Smok & Malish" and re-watched it straight through up to the point that I had previously 'been over' with the dictionary( Read more... )

So we've finally met 'Malish' -- who gives his real name, but I didn't get it as it flew past...

I started off on this 'episode' of "Smok and Malish" (half an hour or so of watching; we are still in the first episode of the series) with the studious intention of doing all the 'work' over short segments; watching the scene straight as intended, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles, then rewatching with Cyrillic subtitles and pausing with a dictionary, then finally rewatching with the auto-translated English subtitles to see if that picked up any colloquialisms or other material that I'd missed. And for the first couple of scenes I did do just that( but got carried away ) while YouTube persisted in inserting advertisements in the worst --or most effective-- places imaginable.

It absolutely cannot have been random. Every time something lethally dangerous happened, there was another cliff-hanger ad break at that exact moment, with multiple ads clustered close together in the most action-filled section :-P

I mean, objectively I knew that both characters had absolute plot armour at this point in the story, because neither the titular Smok nor Malish (even if we don't yet know how Kit becomes 'Smoke') couldn't possibly die in their first scene together. I even consciously *told* myself that during one of the enforced pauses for advertisements. But by that point the film had grabbed me to such an extent that I had my nails dug into my palms and my jaw clenched tight, and couldn't look away( cliffhanging action )... and I breathed a long sigh of relief and was finally able to stop watching ;-)

So by this point I'm clearly *very* much emotionally engaged in Kit's story, whether because it's an excellent lead performance or a compelling production overall (based on promising source material)!
Created a new tag, because we're obviously going to need it :-D

I fell asleep while listening to Smekhov read Chapter 1 of "The Three Musketeers" in Russian (the audiobook is on YouTube), and dreamt first that he was reading an anomalous version of Chapter 27 (La femme d'Athos), thanks to having listened to a heavy metal version of the Soviet film's 'Ballad of Athos' immediately beforehand, and then that he was reading Jack London -- this is what you get for mixing your canons :-D

The Russian audiobook is surprisingly comprehensible, given that I only understand about a quarter of the vocabulary -- it of course helps enormously that I already know the story, and can sometimes recognise bits of it word for word! I have a certain suspicion that the unexpectedly raucous voice Smekhov gives to his young d'Artagnan may be a take-off of his friend Boyarsky, although it's not inappropriate to the young man's exasperated and combative disposition ;-)

(I tried listening to an 'intermediate level' modern educational clip featuring two girls discussing the subject of 'why it is important to keep a diary' very slowly and with illustrative graphics and gestures, and although I could indeed understand every word, it was rather less enjoyable than Dumas grasped at in passing, and -- unsurprisingly -- very much less creative than the 1970s educational programmes, where there was clearly some serious talent enlisted...)

I found myself yet again consulting Mrs Molokhovets in an attempt to work out how to make dough for pirozhki when you don't have any butter (due to having used almost all of it up on Peach & White Chocolate Failure -- I'm still eating the crunchy little greasy twice-cooked portions, although two of the remaining last three appear to have welded themselves together in the freezer and may have to be eaten as a single large lump). What had not dawned on me, of course, is that the butter-free Lenten recipes are also egg-free, so not really what I was hoping for in terms of proportions of oil to flour and egg!( Read more... )

Anyway, I gave up on Mrs Molokhovets, which I couldn't really read and which didn't seem likely to have anything along the lines that I was looking for, and resorted to the Internet instead and a query for "Russian+dough+yeast+oil+egg". Which gave me a recipe for Russian Stuffed Rolls with a dough that seemed to have the right sort of proportions ( Read more... )

Apparently I missed doing this altogether in 2024, so I'm afraid "The Remorse of Others" will never get a mention...

Stats

List of Completed Fics

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I am currently wearing a ridiculous number of layers (thermal vest, heavy brushed-cotton shirt, thin jumper, sleeveless hand-knitted tank top, heavy roll-neck Aran pure wool jumper given to me after it had shrunk in the wash from XL to S, silk scarf under the roll-neck to keep the neck of the jumper clean, fluffy novelty scarf wound many times over it -- and a similar arrangement on my lower half, ( Read more... )

Since the temperature outside my bed was 49F I didn't feel like getting up until finally forced to do so by the demands of my bodily functions, so spent a further three happy if somewhat mindless hours watching uploads on YouTube from Russian channels celebrating the New Year with archive footage, Project Zomboid playthoughs (a game I have never played and shall never be able to play, but for some reason find entertaining to watch), and, by an inevitable process of intersection, Project Zomboid videos *in Russian*... the game being popular enough to have generated its own circle of players there, and even its own Project Russia setting, which remaps everything in the game to a 1990s Russia instead of 1990s USA (the game developers are not, in any case, American, so the original setting reflects zombie movie culture rather than anything else ;-)

After which YouTube proceeded to suggest to me an hour-long interview with Mikhail Boyarsky from 2007, which turned out to be, as so often with the lively Boyarsky, highly entertaining... and also turned out to be completely without subtitles of any kind, either English, Russian, or auto-translated, as I discovered about 15 minutes in when I actually wanted to check what had just been said ;-) ( Read more... )The great thing about Boyarsky as a performer is that he has absolutely no embarrassment and no inhibitions :-D)

† "Mama"....



At any rate I am feeling unusually pleased with myself for once -- and almost ready to gird my loins and tackle the broken-spined paperback 1960s/70s Penguin "АБВ of Russian" (ABV -- the first three letters of the Cyrillic alphabet) that I have just acquired, with an eye to formal grammatical study!
(Never mind grammar, there are words that I don't know in the very first lesson: 'school-desk', 'blackboard'. This is what happens when your vocabulary acquisition consists of words like "honour", "sword" and "hand-to-hand combat"... :-P)

Edit: heating is on. Temperature in here now 54F -- am sweating a little!

While testing some tips on the Dreamwidth search function, I discovered that there are two Smekhov-mentions on Dreamwidth that are *not* from my own journal :-p

(Plus the entertaining one that goes simply AAA! CMEXOB! :-D
In which somebody stumbles across his (hosted on a Ukrainian URL at https://smekhov.net.ua/ and hence no longer extant) website, and is ecstatic about it :-D Admittedly this was pretty much my own reaction to discovering the existence of the currently just-about-still-functioning version https://www.smekhov.narod.ru/ -- which does not, however, appear to contain a mirror of the specific pages mentioned in any of the Dreamwidth articles that link to the other site...)

The other entries were Idols of My Youth from kavery (with comments along the lines of YouTube fandom :-), and 12 Months of Tango from ahka, a review of the joint show he did with his actress/singer daughter Allika, and which I've heard the two of them talk about in an interview -- in which, yes, the mutual pride and affection was very evident (and the tendency to be embarrassed by the other's praise; that is one family who will clearly never be at a loss for an appropriate quotation!) But I'm delighted to hear that this evidently showed up in the performance itself.

I tried watching the BBC's new "The War Between the Land and the Sea", which was being put into the Saturday-evening slot. Unfortunately I really struggled to understand what was going on.

( If I am going to struggle, I should prefer it to be with Russian )
Sorry, Russell T. Davies, but you had one chance to fix my interest, and you didn't make it. (Which, by an ironic coincidence, was more or less what Boyarsky was saying about his own experience of recent film releases in that school-interview :-p)