Isolde u down teh rivers.

This is the most brilliant thing I have ever seen.
Ever.

Dude

I'm not sure exactly how long I've been waiting for a movie that has Sam Elliott, Eva Green and bad-ass warrior bears all wrapped in to one awesome package, but I'm pretty sure it's been a long time.
Anyway, the time has arrived:



'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe' got close with the polar bears that pulled the White Witch's chariot, but it didn't take the obvious next step - which was to have the yoke's bolts come loose somehow, and the terrible duo go on and wreak their ursine havoc on the advancing Narnians.

Creativity is hard like that. Things that seem so obvious to us now - Newtonian mechanics, sterilization, warrior bears - are in truth nontrivial summits to mount, requiring a few exceptionally inspired souls to look up from the confused morass that defines their world and step beyond.

Bold Move Pays Off

Bold Move Pays Off
Originally uploaded by 4durt

Hmm...

Maybe Fred isn't so strange after all...


Natural Born Killer?

Cats kill "not only for sustenance, but also seemingly for the sheer pleasure of it. 'Even when fed regularly by people,' Temple and Coleman wrote, 'a cat continues hunting.' ... Various studies credit alley cats with up to 28 kills [of birds] per year. Farm cats, Temple and Coleman observed, get many more than that. Comparing their findings with all the available data, they estimated that in rural Wisconsin, around 2 million free-ranging cats kill at minimum 7.8 million, but possibly upwards of 219 million, birds per year.
That's in rural Wisconsin alone."

-Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

Campaigning

Sick of the presidential campaign already? Not sure if you can take another 14 months of inane sloganeering and ridiculous posturing?
Then rejoice that you don't live in Russia, compared to which American elections look downright subtle and thoughtful.


"Putin's plan is the victory of Russia!"
-The United Russia Party

Milan Was Funny

Or maybe I was in a mood.

The Duomo
Brought to you by Marie Claire.


Milanese Fashion
Dude's reading a McDonalds health summary chart.


Not to put too fine a point on it...



...It's Super-Photographer

Get Your War On

One of the unexpected results of living in Moscow has been a slight - how to say - realignment of certain ideas. Don't worry - I'm not talking about a creeping cosmopolitanism, no jejune cultural epiphany that has liberated me from my mental encumbrances and opened me to the wisdom of other cultures. In fact, if anything, it's just the opposite. Let me explain.

Russia has a holiday regimen similar to ours, if a bit strange. Our Christmas is divided into their New Year and Christmas. Their New Year's is when all the festivities happen, all the secular folderol that we celebrate on Dec 25, while their Christmas retains a strictly religious import. Then there is International Woman's Day - Soviet in origin, it is still a relatively important day in which all the men give gifts to the women in their lives. Its parallel is Defenders of the Fatherland Day, which has become equivalent to a 'Men's Day.' (I suppose given Russia's universal male service requirement, this is a reasonable extrapolation, however, the day was originally intended as a type of veterans day). Russia has an Independence Day (June 12) that, while a federal holiday requiring the day off, passes unremarkably. The big day, the biggest day of the year, the holiday to end all holidays comes on May 9. Victory Day.

It is impossible to overemphasize the shear scope of the 'Great Patriotic War' in the Russian imagination. If you sometimes balk at invocations of 'The Greatest Generation,' and sundry other forms of WWII mythologizing in the US... you ain't seen nothing.

'Is it true that Americans think that they won the war?' I've had this conversation a couple of times, and don't even bother asking which war.
'Well, yes, it's true that most Americans overestimate our role in the conflict, forgetting that we didn't even deal with the lion's share of the axis forces, nor were we the ones to sack Berlin. At the same time, it's not at all clear that the Soviet Union could have won the war by itself.'
'But we lost 11,000,000 soldiers, the U.S. only lost 11,000. [Yes, they really have casualty statistics memorized] You see, we beat the Fascists!'
Of course, were I a less diplomatic person, I would take issue with the invocation of military deaths as a measure of military strength, but at this point I usually defer, and leave my interlocutor confident in the superiority of their educational system.

Nor has the myth-making changed in the new Russia. When Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," it was hard for us to understand how this could be anything other than naked Soviet revanchism. That's true to an extent, but only in the sense that the Soviet era is to many just one manifestation of a more foundational, epochal, Russian empire.

For these reasons and others, I've grown to a sort of loathing of national triumphalism. And it is in this context that I read one of the more odious statements of the U.S. presidential campaign so far.
Right says Fred:

Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.

Now, the falseness of this statement should be apparent to someone with even the most casual acquaintance with history. On this account, Larison supplies the necessary figures. But almost worse, in my estimation, is the sentiment.
What if it were true? Would it, then, give us the right to be proud? Could we swagger into the bar of nations, aura of martyrdom shining around us, and expect all our nation friends to quail in the shadow of our magnanimity?

Again, its difficult to say what's worse about national myth-making: its fraudulence, or the supercilious Christ-complex it promotes.
"If it weren't for us, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys the French would all be speaking German," is a refrain I've heard more than once.
Nevermind the fact that France and the Low Countries shared a long, unobstructed border with the greatest martial power ever to exist at that point; nor pay heed to the fact that Naziism was never linguistically imperialistic, preferring the German tongue only be used by pure-blooded Germans. Nor, finally, that we fought to save half of Europe from a maniac who slaughtered people for their race, only to give the other half to a maniac who slaughtered indiscriminately.
We're practically Christ: We died to save the world from harsh gutturals.

Dyin' Ain't Much of a Livin', Boy

These words from "The Outlaw Josie Wales" have been the only non-essential bit of information on my Facebook profile for at least a year now, and now I see that it has been brazenly robbed by Andrew Sullivan for his series: "Best. Movie. Line. Ever."
To the victor and all that...
But the link to the YouTube clip may have been worth it.

Interesting

So I saw Harry Potter today.
Before I get to the film, some background. All movies in Russia are dubbed. Actually, from what I hear, all foreign movies in most countries are dubbed, and America and a handful of Western European countries seem to be alone in preferring subtitles, the clearly superior way of consuming this medium. If that doesn't spur your nationalistic pride I'm not sure what will.
Anyway, it has only been since films began to be distributed digitally that the dubbing has even been worth a damn. Before, the local studios basically received a product with the audio tracks already integrated, so in order to keep the sound effects, you had to retain the voice tracks as well. Watch any movie on TV more than a few years old and you get this ridiculous mish-mash. For 1.9 seconds you hear the actor's original voice until the dubbing kicks in and almost drowns it out. Now, for someone who has to concentrate to understand the dubbed language and who fully understands the native language, this makes the movie watching experience something akin to watching those war sequences in Saving Private Ryan. (You can talk as much as you like about it conveying to the viewer the confusion, brutality and senselessness of war; I call it shaking the camera around really fast: A technique my dog Max could surpass with a camera tied to his back, thanks to the mollifying quality of his canine corpulence). Anyway, Harry Potter was rather well dubbed, so three cheers for the digital revolution.

Secondly, I noticed that Voldemort's name in Russian is Volandamort. The first two or three times that He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was... well... named, I thought I misheard. But then, I got it. Voldemort, to our Anglophone ears, is a very sinister sounding name: partly from the deep, round, o sounds; partly from the Latinate influence (from mors, mortis meaning 'death'). But Russians don't have the same associations that we do (whether conscious or not). So, the question is, how does a Russian translator make the name sound sinister to the popular Russian imagination?

Volandamort.

Thirty-two brownie points to the person who guesses why.