January 13, 2022

Grinches, GPS Art, and Gordon Ramsay


Grinches, GPS Art, and Gordon Ramsay
In Odder News

In this week's Odder News: the best winter neighbor, the best Olympic hockey team, and the worst gifts.

  • According to a poll, one-fifth of Russians were dissatisfied with their New Year's gifts. The top three lumps of coal were candy, tea sets, and pajamas/sweaters with New Year's themes. The majority of the 1,600 grinches who responded to the survey noted that they would have preferred cash. While Americans might bristle at a cash gift – except maybe from parents to adult children – it may be your best bet for your Russian friends and colleagues.
  • With the best hockey league in the world, the NHL, disallowing its players from taking an Olympic break and playing for their respective national teams, sportscasters are predicting that Team Russia will win in Beijing. Russia is the primary home, after all, of the second-best hockey league in the world, the KHL. The controversial move by the NHL will likely even place Team Germany over Team Canada – the ancestral home of the sport.
  • British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay recently told The Kelly Clarkson Show that he cooked for President Putin when Ramsay was invited to meet with former prime minister Tony Blair. Ramsay said, "I almost died of fear," and that he was more worried about the quality of the food than usual. He joked that it was weird to talk about asparagus with such important people as Putin and Blair.
  • A couple from Irkutsk just celebrated an underwater wedding in Lake Baikal. The bride wore a blue sundress over her wetsuit and a white veil; the groom just wore his wetsuit. She is a champion freediver and he a professional breaststroker and freediver. They met at a master class on underwater hunting. The underwater ceremony included a group of witnesses swimming in a circle around the couple. They all retired to the banya for the reception, naturally.
  • What a neighbor! Yekaterinburg resident Leonid Valitov wakes up at 4 or 5 am in the winter to "draw" lovely pictures for his neighbors in the snow with a shovel. His work is both beautiful and humorous. Valitov also practices "GPS art," in which he moves over a frozen lake in a recognizable pattern, such as that of a dolphin or other animal, and posts his resulting artwork online. Don't miss his works of shovel art, here.

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Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
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93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
Marooned in Moscow

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