I am confused about why Russia is being such a hardass on the only Former Soviet Republic that wanted to stay in the Soviet Union.

Georgia and Ukraine, I see that, but Belarus?

Actually, it's not quite hard-frozen.  Mostly soggy.  I refer to the frozen tundra between Tug Hill Plateau and Lake Ontario, where I grew up, which looks a LOT like Russia.

My sister works in Manhattan for the EPA, and in the EPA world this region is in fact referred to as "the tundra."  Outside New York State you hear the area lumped into the following categories by people who don't know any better:

1) "upstate" (i.e. the entire state, which happens to be located north of 113th Street so therefore is "up").

2) the southeast Adirondacks, which is the wildest thing in New York as far as urbanites are concerned-- and by the way Lake George is NOT as wild a region and not remotely as remote as where I'm talking about.

3) Buffalo, Rochester, or Syracuse.  Again, the furthest north, wildest places people can think of.  This place where I am is far wilder, far colder, far snowier than those areas.

We are at the place of landfall for a storm system that starts in the middle of Canada, or maybe even the Yukon if you want to go back to the very beginning of where it starts to pick up steam.  There is a lot of exchange of labor force between my home area and Alaska, because the weather is similar.  The trees all lean and point branches to the east because of the literally constant wind off the lake to our west.  The land is mostly cleared for pasture land and corn or alfalfa.  There is a three month growing period.  It literally is a frozen tundra.

The train comes through and the subzero air carries the sound direct to our house's formidable west wall.  It is the loudest thing there is up here.  I mean, besides snowmobiles, the absence of which is the silver lining to the gross snow-less weather.

Even Russia isn't getting the snowfall it usually gets.  Kamchatka was bare of snow until mid-December, though it was in a deep freeze.  It's a quirky winter, that's for sure.

Finally the snow came...

This is the view of the street in front of my childhood home.

There are a few early formative influences that got me thinking about the Soviet Union. One of these was Sting's hit single "Russians," and another was the movie "Red Dawn," and the other big influence was Ursula LeGuin's novel "The Dispossessed." I had quotes from that book all over my walls.

Well, I just read another book in that same "series" (i.e. Ursula's world where the Hainish people populated the universe) "The Left Hand of Darkness." In both novels I saw shades of the cold war, US / Soviet conflicts, socialism versus capitalism.

So I poked around Wikipedia to see what it said about this world and that novel, and found a definition for Ursula's word for the "governing" body of the union of all worlds - the ekumen - a link which also explains the LeGuin universe a bit.

When I was preparing to move to Russia for a year I actually wrote Ursula LeGuin a fan letter, thanking her for getting me thinking about the Soviet Union, which served to help me decide to visit the USSR when I was 15, and then to learn Russian and eventually go there to live. She wrote back a nice letter where she said that she had a Russia connection, and had indeed been inspired by the USSR for "The Dispossessed." And much more, I'm sure.

Anyway, I just noticed at the end of the Wikipedia definition a list of "other planets" from Ursula's world, and they include the planet "Gde."

That is Russian for the question "where?"

A friendly little in-joke.

No, I don't mean Pinochet, I mean that ultra nutjob Saparmurat Niyazov - "Turkmenbashi" - dead of heart failure at 66.  He didn't name a successor- so what's next for Turkmenistan?

Another chaotic Central Asian country that most US Americans don't know exists... and what a twilight zone.  People were fined $50,000 if they ever left the country.  Even other Central Asians don't know what the hell is going on in that prison of a country.

One of the founders of Google was born in Russia, but Google is still having trouble breaking into the Russian market.

http://www.threadless.com/product/383/The_Communist_Party


Woo hoo!

Still available in "girlie tee"!

has been waylaid due to a flare-up of tendinitis related to a grad school application deadline. We will return to your regularly scheduled updates soon. Thank you - The Management

Bummer!

Skype’s free phone call plan will soon have annual fee (New York Times, 12/13/06).


"The new annual fee for unlimited calling, while still nominal compared with other Internet calling plans, is part of a broader strategy by eBay to expand Skype’s product offerings and revenue."

Our operations depend a lot on Yahoo IM and Skype-- I hope it doesn't get priced out of our Russian partners' range!

I was aware of the Kamchatka indigenous Itelmen people's fall festival of Alkhalalalai, a sort of thanksgiving festival, and I had been encourged to attend it, but I only just now found out what the name means. 

"We want women with big breasts."

Apparently, the traditional response by the women, after the men shout "Alkhalalalai":

"We want men with nice moustaches."

(Nietzsche would have been very popular among the women on Kamchatka.)

(Now THERE'S an Itelmen moustache to tell your girlfriends about!  Image from a Kamchatka travel company.)

Learn more about the Itelmen people, including photos of Alkhalalalai.

Learn more from the indigenous Russian organization RAIPON about the indigenous peoples of the Russian North.

I am very entertained by what word Abby Lingvo 11 came up with when I went to it for help with a word I was trying to pull out of some messy handwriting by one of our otherwise impressive partners in Koryakia.

The word looked like poligia, but all I could come up with was polygyria.

Полигирия which translated in Abby Lingvo as polygyria.

The actual word I needed - which my native-Russian-speaking coworker helped me deduce- was just наличия - the genitive form of the familiar word наличие -  "acquisition." 

So, what the hell does it mean if you have an "excessive" number of convolutions in the brain?

 

I was reading the Economist from a week ago and there was an article about Bolton (who has now resigned at the UN as US Ambassador) -- the article mentioned that one impact he had was uniting the G77 against the "developed" world.  I had never heard of the G77, but apparently it formed in the 1960's, and it has its own website. 

My first question is, since Russia is sometimes and sometimes not considered developed, and so floats in and out of the G7 or G8, would it include itself also in the G77?  Well, according to the country member list, it is not.

When is Russia not in the G8? 

Wikipedia says:
--------------------------

In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, the USSR (now Russia) began meeting with the G7 after the main summit. This group became known as the P8 (Political 8), or colloquially the "G7 plus 1", starting with the 1994 Naples summit. Russia was allowed to participate more fully beginning in the 1997 political summit, marking the creation of the Group of Eight or G8.

Russia was not included in the meeting of financial officials as it is not a significant economic power; "G7" now refers specifically to the meeting of the respective Finance Ministers and Governors of the Central Banks.
--------------------------

So, the G7 -- France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada -- are the only ones considered "significant" economic powers.

I wonder who on earth would say Russia is an insignificant economic power.  They must mean that Russia is not floating the developing world the way the G7 nations are.  Well, what can you say, Russia didn't create significant colonies overseas, so it doesn't have to apologize and back away slowly throwing wads of loan-money at its former colonies. 

So who IS in the G77 who doesn't really belong there anymore?

China!  Who is the new number one world superpower in about 15 years.

And, Romania!  Who is entering the EU in January.

It's been a hard couple of days for a number of reasons, primarily because of stress from the upcoming deadline for my grad school application, which has me pretty overwhelmed, and I was so happy to find out:

1 - my friend and sometime fling Vlasta from Zagreb is coming to visit in March!  And, maybe, during a week when I'll be performing at a big bellydancing festival.

2 - I have enough frequent flier miles not only for a trip to Europe (read: Croatia and Slovenia), but enough for a FIRST CLASS ticket!  Whoo hoo!

This is where I want to be RIGHT NOW:

The Terme Palace

Waaaay in the back is where the little hot tubs are.  Vlasta and I had a little fun in the little hot tubs some three years ago.  She took a bus up from Zagreb just for the night, and then we took the bus back to her place in the morning.

Unfortunately she gave me a humongous headcold during that little fun in that little hot tub.  The rest of my trip was fairly miserable because of it.  Yet, the memory of the times I have had at Terme Palace transcend that consequence.  It is a MARVELOUS place to unwind.  Right beside the Adriatic, using Adriatic slightly-desalinated water, heated to different temperatures, and flowing in a current around the pools and waterfalls (which you can stand under) on a 10 minute timer, so the "tide" changes regularly, keeping people from bogarting the best spots.

Sigh...