I was flipping through 3D Toons book, and there was a picture that immediately caught my attention. The book presents lots of cute creatures, but this cat stands out. It is a very special cat. I returned to the book to look at the pictures once again, then again, then I searched on the Internet to read all I could find about "Riba" short movie and its creators. Here is the official site, and here is the movie itself. It was created by the students of the Supinfocom Valenciennes 3D school of France. Somehow static pictures impressed me more than animation. I downloaded all the pictures I could find on the site, because I am getting addicted to them.

Some linguistic observations

Yesterday I was in the "Taste of Russia" restaurant in Woodburn, Oregon, and noticed that in their menu pelmeni are constantly spelled as plimeni. Just recently I read about similar mispronunciation in English:

Regional Note: Purty is probably the most common American example of metathesis, a linguistic process in which two adjacent sounds are reversed in order. Metathesis in English often involves the consonant r and a vowel, since the phonetic properties of r are so vowellike. For example, the word third used to be thrid, and bird, brid. By the same process, English pretty often came to be realized as purty in regional speech. Most such words stabilized because of the influence of printing and the resultant standardized spelling, but purty for pretty has survived in regional American dialects.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.

Another observation. Both pirozhki (small pie) and blini (crepes) are grammatically plural in Russian. However, in the "Taste of Russia" menu pirozhki kept their plurality no matter what, "one pirozhki" instead of "one pirozhok", while blini somehow managed to produce perfectly correct singular form: "one blin". I am not trying to insist that all Russian words borrowed into English shall behave well and keep their Russian grammatical forms, but why some do and some don't? Anyway, I like blini more than pirozhki, and in all four words ("pirozhki", "pirozhok", blini, blin) the stress is on the last syllable.

Stchi

I have complicated relationship with Russian food. It didn’t use to be this way. My relationships with food in Russia were simple. I ate it. That’s all. Both my parents worked full time when I was a kid, so the ration for the whole week was usually set on the preceding weekend, when they cooked huge pots of that traditional Russian cabbage soup which has two letters in its name in Russian, and four to seven in English, and that everybody ate the whole week. Stchi. I hated it. I hated broiled cabbage. Another delicatessen was pasta. Huge pots of pasta without any dressing that we shoved into ourselves the next week. Thus was established my attitude toward food: if you are able to swallow it, it's just fine.

For some reasons, stchi (that's plural too) weren’t in the "Taste of Russia" menu. The only entry they had in "soups" section was borsch, which basically differs from stchi only because it has beet in it. Still I like borsch better, because the more beet, the less broiled cabbage there is!

The "Taste of Russia" place is run by Russian Old-Believers -- I could tell this because females didn't wear pants, only traditional long dresses (platya) and many wore kerchiefs on their heads. Old-Believers abandoned traditional Orthodox religion in the XVII century, in a protest against patriarch Nikon's reforms. I only read about them in history books, but never met in person until I moved to the USA.

What do I want to eat?

When I moved to the US, I learnt that among other new responsibilities I am now responsible for informing everybody around me regarding what I want to eat. I remember being utterly confused when I first encounter this dilemma. What I want to eat? How am I supposed to know what I want to eat? I never had to think about it. Visiting restaurant isn't a popular activity in Russia, to put it mildly, and most of the time when you aren’t home you are served food without asking what you, Your Excellency, want to eat. When I was on a trip to St. Petersburg, for example, the whole group sat in a hotel's dining-room and everybody was served the same set of dishes. No choice was provided, and it didn't occur to anybody to ask for something else. And if somebody did, what difference would it make? Russian food is something you more survive than enjoy.

This topic shall be further explored in the "Purty plemeni. Part 2" entry.