Time for confession!

Tom's post was so tender, it almost made my cry:

100 pounds was about what my daughter weighed when I stopped carrying her upstairs to bed when she fell asleep in the living room.

Since I moved to this country, I dreamed to live in a two-store house -- a very unusual thing if you are a Russian.

My father never carried my upstairs, since there were no upstairs. We had two rooms, one for me, and another for my parents. Only now I can understand what it costed for my parents to get me a separate room.

Lorka, my girlfriend, lived in a room with 5 other people. She used to sleep with her grandmother until she died. Grandmother died, not Lorka. She graduated from the University that year.

I saw her room, even if you would get an idea of giving her a separate bed, where would you put it?

Back to 100 pounds thing.

One day I woke up and found myself in my parents' bed. I was adult enough to participate in family's drinking. On Saturdays we used to have big meals and yes... drinking, so we could say all what was on our minds.

So that day I woke up, in my parents' room, and I spent next hour wondering what I am doing here and where my parents are.

They were sleeping in my room.

My bed was designed for precisely one person. How on the Earth two adults could sleep in it?

When they woke up I asked why they didn't kick me out of their bed, all the way to my room???

They did not say anything intelligible.

That was the moment I realized what the word "parents" means. It's as nice a word as a razor.

I feel in debt that I can never pay -- since then. :)

I read Tom's review of "How to lie with Maps" book (why did he choose this book? :shocked:) and remembered my surprise when I first saw world maps here, in the US. For some reasons the USSR, or what used to be the USSR, occupied a bigger part of the Eurasia than I used to see. I read before that there is no way to represent the Globe surface on a plane without distortions, and I always planned to do more research some day. Today is this day, and I am going to track my findings here.

All maps distort distance, shape, area, or direction to present a map that meets the users' needs.
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The most popular on the West the Mercator projection has chosen to distort areas.

With the traditional Mercator map (circa 1569, and still in use in many schoolrooms and boardrooms today), Greenland and Africa look the same size. But in reality Africa is 14 times larger!
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To restore the truth, in 1960-s Dr. Arno Peters created (let's skip controversy regarding his authorship)

a new world map that dramatically improves the accuracy of how we see the Earth.
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Which is to say that his maps preserve the areas, and distorts shapes.

According to prominent cartographer Arthur Robinson, the Peters map is "somewhat reminiscent of wet, ragged long winter underwear hung out to dry on the Arctic Circle."
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The Peters map were proclaimed "first non-racist maps", since they, unlike the Mercator maps, didn't give advantage in occupied area to the North America and Europe situated in the North.

In comments, I speculated that the USSR's relative size was distorted for political reasons, but I don't think so any more. Even though this theory is supported by Jeremy Black, a professor of history at the University of Exeter.

Professor Black and others have criticized the NGS in the past for using map projections that exaggerate the size of the temperate latitudes, especially Greenland, Alaska, Canada, and the former Soviet Union. The Van der Grinten projection, which was used by the NGS from 1922 to 1998, became the standard in schools, the news media, and government.

"In that projection, a large USSR appeared menacing, a threat to the whole of Eurasia, and a dominant presence in the world that required containment. It was a cartographic image appropriate for the cold war," writes Black.
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Unless the decisions were made to prefer one projection over another for political reasons, and these decisions are documented, it seems more reasonable to believe that these distortions are simply a side effect -- if another choice was made, somebody else would complain.

I have to admit, though, that the cancer-size USSR does look scary. There is something ugly in proportions. Still not sure how the Soviet cartographers achieved it, but the proportion I got used to was more aesthetically pleasant... and of course, they put the USSR where it belonged to -- at the center of the world.

From Oregon DMV site:

Acceptable Proofs of Age, Identity and Address

An applicant who is homeless may use a descriptive address of the location where he/she actually resides, e.g., "under the west end of the Burnside Bridge". The applicant must also provide a mailing address.

I suppose the same, "please, deliver all mail under the west end of the Burnside Bridge".

In fact, I was impressed that homeless people are taken care of. :)

There is a popular joke among linguists: "to ask a linguist how many languages he knows is like to ask a doctor how many diseases she has".

In May I visited my girlfriend's mother in California. She doesn't speak any English. I already went to bed, while she was finishing her conversation with other inhabitants of the house. She came to our room later, groping her way in darkness. I said:

"You can turn on the light, I am not sleeping."

She said "Chto?" (What?)

I thought that I said it too quietly, so she couldn't hear me, and repeated:

"You can turn on the light, I am not sleeping."

She said "Chto?" again, bended over me and gave me a strange look. Suddenly I realized that I was talking in English and started to laugh. I know her for almost 20 years, most of them in Russia. She would be the last person I would think to talk to in English, well, if I would think.

There was something strangely familiar in her look. Later I remembered that my mother used to look at me with the same concern when I was a child, and she suspected that I was sick.

That's the worst part of an émigré's life. During the day you are fine and normal -- these are nights when the past comes to get you. There was a period when I saw my parent every every every night. I woke up crying. I tried different ways to suppress tears, nothing worked, so finally I gave up and stopped to pay attention. What difference does it make if you cry or not.

One dream was particularly vivid. They came home after shopping, probably, I hug my mother and I felt her cheek -- it was cold. It was so real and detailed sensation, I am sure the real thing was hidden somewhere in my memory, and my memory served it just fine. Thanks.

And here is the difference between an émigré and an exile. As an émigré you are free to visit your country and to make sure your dreams are a mirage. The home you dreamed of doesn't exist. Your memory played a joke on you. It's not my personal aberration, lots of my fellow emigrants had the same experience. You go "home" only to find that there is no such thing any more. Then you count days when you can go back. Exiles are denied such experience, and they create legends. How the native land is much much much better than the current shelter. I am nor sure what is better: an illusion or an absence of it.

When I left my city I cried. My mother did not. An iron woman, she always was. I am reluctant to visit home since then, I just don't want to go through all this again. I am not a stone yet.

Ihath wrote:

“I want my life to be boring; I want my life to get into a rut.” I told my dad when I moved from Israel to Vancouver. All this traveling around the world, learning new languages and discovering new cultures seems all interesting and glamorous; few people realize the toll it takes on your emotions and psyche. I swore off adventures. I swore off interesting. I wanted dull, I wanted gray, I wanted ordinary. I wanted average. I am going to become the most boring person on earth. I am gonna buy a boring house with a boring backyard. I am gonna buy the most boring family sedan for a car and I am gonna get a boring job. Preferably in an office where I just push paper around aimlessly. Even my food will be boring, I will eat boring meat and potato dishes. No interesting people allowed into my life. If you are the least bit interesting then please don’t talk to me. If there is a small smudge of excitement happening somewhere then please be sure to exclude me from it. That was my objective on September of 2000.

Sister. :( One night I had a dream. It was several years ago. I was like in Peru, or in some other Latin country. It was a big room I was living in, not a living room, it was either an abandoned church or something else. The walls were white, whitewashed. Not much furniture, if any. I felt so out of place and lonely, I knew I left all people I love in Russia, and I felt exhausted. "When will I find home at last" was the only feeling I had in that dream, and it was so sharp. I never had this feeling so intense when I was awake.

Doctor Zhivago—I heard that the movie was popular when it was released. Before watching, I was worried a bit, because the novel is difficult to transfer to the screen, in my opinion anyway. There was no reason to worry—it was worse than anything I could imagine. To fail to adequately re-tell the story is one thing, to consciously dumb it down is another. The Pasternak's novel is complex, subtle, nuanced, and the crew apparently set up to demystify it. The main personages are simplified beyond recognition. Lara's seducer Komarovsky got it worst: he was appointed as a positively bad guy, as a proof of which the screenwriter made him to rape poor Lara—and after Lara's shot at him, denied him any feeling of regret and remorse. Sigh. The rest of the gang has to demonstrate exactly one emotion at time, and to do it to the maximum possible extent, to make things plain clear, I suppose. They did made things clear, at the price of looking false, pretentious, unnatural and... well, dumb.

When it comes to any thing communist, it gets ridiculous. I had to stop the movie and check the text several times, because I couldn't believe Pasternak could write anything so silly, and of course, he did not. Bad, bad, bad propaganda. Didn't they read the classics of the genre? To be effective, propaganda must be based on real facts—and there are plenty in the novel. Why to invent something stupid instead? Partisans picked up the doctor, who cried that he left a wife with a child and the comrade Big Boss answers: "It doesn't matter"—with the face the Terminator would be envious of. In the original text, they simply said "Our feldsher (medical assistant) is killed. Come with us, and if you don't, don't be mad at us, we'll shoot you". No lachrymatory scenes about an abandoned wife and child. The followed scene pictures two terminators, one of whom is a Party guy, I suppose, who finally took over, and proclaimed in a schisohprenic voice that the doctor will stay as long as the Party wishes. The text said that the doctor tried to escape several times with no good results, but he got away with it—the Big Boss liked him.

And the balalaika—yes. I mean, no. There is no such thing in Pasternak's original text. The main hero's mother neither played balalaika, nor handed it down as her only (???) property. Balalaika is a very folksy instrument—an aristocratic woman would play piano, not balalaika. Not that it was totally impossible, but like the British Queen thrashing a drum in a progressive rock band, this artistry would require some explanations. None were provider by the provider of the balalaikas, Mr. David Lean. Perhaps playing balalaika was considered as self-evident for Russians as the pursuit of happiness for Americans.

In the novel, Yuri's brother (Comrade General) found Yuri's lost daughter during the WWII, on the front line. She tells a horrible story about her mother giving her to some random family the mother run across, to hide her for a couple of days, because the Red troops were to invade the place. Apparently she's never seen her mother since then. I don't even want to re-tell the rest of the story, it's not pretty. In the movie we see the girl peacefully working at something resembling a hydroelectric power station, and she is provided with a boyfriend (!?) and... that's right, balalaika. The couple cheerfully march right to the bright future, with the Comrade General watching them with a smile. By this time I started to wonder whose propaganda I am watching. Why this "happy end" out of the sudden?

I am far for suggesting that all movies should closely follow the books they are based on—not at all. But this one just goes silly as soon as it steps out of the original. One might wonder why the novel was given a Nobel Prize, after watching this movie. Frankly, I doubt it deserved a Nobel Prize, it's an original work indeed, and very worth reading, but it struck me as written by somebody as lost in this world as me, rather than a genius.

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and comments about the experiment appear at that location.

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Bought the book today, because I enjoyed so much reading what I could find online.

The author plopped Russian words all around; my guess is he heard something about ostranenie (google it, that's Ok).

Only one sentence:

And so it would itty on to like the end of the world, round and round and round, like some bolshy gigantic like chelloveck, like old Bog Himself (by courtesy of Korova Milkbar) turning and turning and turning a vonny grahzny orange in his gigantic rookers.

itty - to go, but how funny it looks followed by "on"!
bolshy - big. The Russian word is "bolshoy", so he took only the root "bolsh" and added an English suffix to it.
chelloveck - person
Bog - God
Korova - cow
vonny - hmmm... looks like smelly. See comments to "bolshy".
grahzny - dirty
rookers - "rook" is a root for "arm", and "er" suffix, once again, is purely English...

Why I enjoy all this okroshka (google it, that's Ok) so much, because it is a precise log of my own inner speech. Once I caught myself saying (typing, actually) "many lets". My interlocutor said "Mmm?" and I couldn't understand what was unclear for some time. Then I realized that I used a Russian word for "year", put it properly in plural, which made "let", and then finally rendered it as "lets", thoughtfully adding "s" to indicate plural, this time in English.

I suppose, for any normal reader (=target audience) all these exercises are nothing but irritation.

Amen. And all that cal as Alex said.

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cal -- feces.