Murmurating, Toothless Sherlock Holmes, and "Own Goal"

In this week's Odder News, Dostoyevsky "failed at almost everything he did," Sherlock Holmes gets a not-so-flattering new look, and Team Russia is not great at soccer.

• A beautiful but alarming flock of birds was caught on video pulsating across the sky in the village of Anastasiyevskaya near Krasnodar. The "dancing" starlings are "murmurating" – the official scientific term – though scientists do not know exactly what they are doing.
• The most famous Russian hockey player in the world, Alexander Ovechkin, plays a very unusual Sherlock Holmes with a toothless grin in a PSB bank commercial that is all over Russian television right now. Between Russia and the United States – where he is the captain of the Washington Capitals and may even break Wayne Gretzky's scoring record before he retires – Ovechkin makes about $5 million per year from advertising. On the Washington Capitals website, a promotional set of matryoshka dolls pops up with every doll being a toothless "Ovie."
• Esquire Russia wants Russians to know some of the coolest new English words – words you may not have even heard of. "Like shock" is when you get so many more likes on social media than you were expecting. "Computer-face" is when you stare at the computer to make it look like you are actually working. We'll leave it to you to find out what "seagull management" is.
• Russia literally gifted Croatia a ticket to the soccer World Cup in Qatar in 2022 by scoring on its own goal in a 1:0 game. After 80 minutes of nichya ("no one's," or "a tie"), Fyodor Kudryashov kicked the ball into his own net when it landed awkwardly in front of him. Brutal.
• By now, everyone should know that Fyodor Dostoyevsky's birthday was last week. There's a whole list of fun facts you may not have known about him here. Dostoyevsky proposed to his second wife, Anna, by writing a novel that was about two people very much like themselves and asking her how she would end the story. He scribbled gothic cathedrals, female legs, and male faces on the pages of the first versions of his novels, scribbling words in different handwriting as if different people were weighing in on his manuscript. In San Francisco, there is a church fresco depicting Dostoyevsky dancing with Darwin, Gandhi, Shakespeare, and John Coltrane. Check out more weird Dostoyevsky stories here.