The mansion at 14 Sofiiskaya naberezhnaya across the Moscow River from the Kremlin was built in 1893 for the “sugar king” Pavel Kharitonenko and his family.
After the 1917 Revolution, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs claimed the mansion — and saved the interiors. At first it housed the families of important Soviet diplomats and visitors such as H.G. Wells and Isadora Duncan.
In 1929 the mansion was transferred to the embassy of Great Britain, the first major country to establish diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R.
They also has some fine photos of the interior of this place.
KILLING EVE Official Trailer (HD) Sandra Oh, Jodie Comer Thriller BBC Series
JoBlo Streaming & TV
I dunno about this show. We've got two very smart women, one works for the British government in some kind of Ministry of Information and the other is an assassin operating at the behest of some shadowy group. Our girl, Eve (Sandra Oh), works for the government, is good at data analysis, but not too sharp when dealing with the real world. The bad girl, Viallanelle (Jodie Comer), has no patience with any kind of bureaucracy but is talented with all the tools of an assassin, knows how to fight and has plenty of street smarts.
Eve is fine in the office, but out in the field she is a bumbling nitwit. I find myself yelling at the screen in every episode because she is doing something boneheaded. Now that I think about it, I realize she is much like Sam Lowry, the hero/victim in Brazil.
Villanelle takes an interest in Eve because she is the first person to get an inkling of just who she is, which makes her a worthy adversary. Eve wants to find out who Villanelle is working for. Her victims are all over the map, politically and geographically, so it is not apparent who is benefitting from all these killings. Villanelle and Eve sit down for dinner one night (not Eve's idea of a good time) and Eve asks her. Villanelle responds that if you go high enough, they are probably working for the same people. Aha! Conspiracy! I newd it!
Carolyn Martens (Fiona Shaw) is the head of the Russia Section at MI6. She is kean, as into neato-keano, as she is very quiet, keeps in the background, but wields a heck of a lot of power. I've seen Fiona around before, but the only shows I remember seeing were Enola Holmes and the Harry Potter films where she played Petunia Dursley.
Kind of a cool looking building. They have shuttered the two international terminals. Imagine that. Meanwhile Putin has nationalized all of aircraft that were being leased from companies in the west. Who'd a thunk it? You shut off travel and any kind of financial transactions, what do you expect Russia to do? They can't return the aircraft nor can they pay for them, so nationalization is just paperwork that allows the airlines to keep operating them domestically. The owners of the planes are going to be put out, but Biden is tough, he can handle their complaints.
Stumbled across this today and I thought I better steal them while I have the chance. Who knows if I could find them again if I need to. But now I have a copy here, so I should be able to find them.
The strength of Putin’s rule is not so much in his iron grip on everyone’s life, or the sophistication of his spies. It’s the deep-ingrained belief of many Russians, both among the elite and commoners, that the government is the only thing that can protect each of us from the rest of us. - Dima Vorobiev on Quora
I am glad to see that Russia is making some economic progress. Putin might be a killer, but is there anyone who would prefer that Stalin was still in charge? Did Putin order the execution of the Russians who were killed in Britain recently? Seems pretty thin to me. I mean our government is not always the most competent when ferreting out the details. I suspect someone had a personal grudge. Maybe it was Putin, maybe it was someone else. Whatever. In any case I am looking for a picture to post and I come across Anna Chapman, who was some sort of real-life Bond girl.
It's no secret that we live in an era of overabundance of information. Today a day a person learns more than a hundred years ago could learn for a lifetime. In this uncontrolled flow of knowledge it is difficult to understand: where we are honest and where we are deceived. And as a result, many take on faith all incoming information. Or, on the contrary, they throw themselves away, not even allowing the thought that it can be reliable. When this winter the swine flu epidemic hit most of Russia, there were many versions of its origin. Up to the point that it came to us from the territory of Ukraine - allegedly in the laboratory near Kharkov, the Americans are developing biological weapons. A crazy theory that, nevertheless, has a right to exist. - Anna Chapman via Google Translate
Seems like wacko conspiracy theories exist on both sides of the ideological divide. Oh wait, maybe the CIA actually did infect Russia with the swine flu. I wouldn't put it past them. They certainly have a long history of dirty tricks. I don't actually think they did. Mother Nature doesn't really care what we do or say. Sometimes her vicious nature just asserts itself and a zillion people die.
P.S. While looking at pictures of Anna, I came across several that had her posing with a gun. Well, if you're going to be one of the elite, and I'm pretty sure being a real-life Bond girl qualifies, you need to be able to handle a firearm. But this pic won out because we have a Russian church in the background. I don't think it's St. Basil's, but I am pretty sure it's in Moscow.
Another serial killer detective series, this time from Moscow, Russia. Pretty girls, inscrutable language, deranged psychos, what more could you want? Europe seems docile in comparison. I think it's the language that throws us off.
Russia is kind of funny. They are the only country that has given us a run for the money. They might have beaten us too if they had gotten a decent leader instead of that blood-thirsty psychopath Stalin.
The translated subtitles are sometimes a little screwy. Makes me wonder just what the original Russian really means. The subtitles in trailer above are pretty horrible. The ones on Netflix are much better. I tried to turn on subtitles, but it doesn't seem to be working. I have to click on cc and then the flower (gear?) to select Auto-translate, and the scroll down to select English. Kind of a pain, and they don't tell you much.
My wife and I are in a shopping mall after some auto parts. It's not your typical big mall with acres of parking, glitzy department stores and dozens of boutiques. It's more of an outlaw mall that has grown up on the side of this hill. It's been there for years and growing for all that time. It's full of the kinds of stores you find in strip malls and other not prime real estate. Last time I was here it wasn't quite so big, so we charge in expecting that we will get to the auto parts section fairly soon, but after a long time spent following the main corridor that keeps zigging and zagging back and forth we are getting a little discouraged, so we stop and ask someone. They are glad to tell us that the auto parts section is another eight miles down this corridor. Well, nuts to that, we're not going to hike 8 miles, we'll go back to the entrance and . . . catch a tram, maybe, that will take us there via the lower level.
This mall is built on the side of a hill, but it is pretty much restricted to just a couple of levels, but it goes all the way around the hill, or it would if it were long enough. It's kind of a big hill.
We start with this ad full of red cloaked demons and a couple of insidiously cute girls:
Pit Stop - Breitling TV commercial
which leads to this video of a guy taking apart a very fancy watch and repairing it
Service and repair of a rusty valjoux 7750 based Breitling watch
Which gets me to wondering about the market for used and / or broken Breitling watches, which takes me to Ebay where I find there are thousands of Breitlings are available (5,954 at the moment). Looking for broken ones turns up 27 listings, and most of those are just for spare parts. Well, how about watches in general? How about a million and a half? The first one on that list:
How can you sell a watch for $2.86? I suppose if they fell off the back of a truck you could do that. I just don't understand. This gets me wondering about watch factories, which leads to Wikipedia's list of Watch movement manufacturers which contains only 15 names. But look! One of them is Russian (two actually). How bizarre.
Never heard of a Russian watch. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. They cut themselves off from the rest of world, and they had this attitude that anything the capitalist running dogs can do, we can do better, so of course they are going to make their own watches. Ebay has 13,000 odd listings. Many are mechanical (i.e. not quartz), many are old, some are Russian in name only.
What?!? The KGB's Moscow prison is now a toy store? Tell me it ain't so, Boris. Actually it's in a department store on Lubyanka square in Moscow, which just so happens to be where the infamous Lubyanka is located.
Mathias Rust, his borrowed Cessna 172 and assorted KGB goons in Red Square
Younger son had a flying lesson in a Cessna 172 yesterday. When I Googled it this is the first thing that came up.
Mathias Rust (born 1 June 1968) is a German aviator known for his illegal landing near Red Square in Moscow on 28 May 1987. An amateur pilot, he flew from Finland
to Moscow, being tracked several times by Soviet air defence and
interceptors. The Soviet fighters never received permission to shoot him
down, and several times he was mistaken for a friendly aircraft. He
landed on Vasilevsky Descent next to Red Square near the Kremlin in the capital of the Soviet Union.
Rust said he wanted to create an "imaginary bridge" to the East, and he has claimed that his flight was intended to reduce tension and suspicion between the two Cold War sides.
Rust's flight through a supposedly impregnable air defense system had
great effect on the Soviet military and led to the dismissal of many
senior officers, including Minister of DefenceMarshal of the Soviet UnionSergei Sokolov and the Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Air Defence Forces, former World War II fighter ace pilot Chief MarshalAlexander Koldunov. The incident aided Mikhail Gorbachev in the implementation of his reforms,
by allowing him to dismiss numerous military officials opposed to him
whilst reducing the prestige of the Soviet military among the populace,
thus helping bring an end to the Cold War. - Wikipedia
Russia has two big military holidays every year. One in November to celebrate the 1917 Revolution and one on May 9th to celebrate their victory over Nazi Germany in WW2. When the Soviet Union was still in business, they used to celebrate these two holidays with massive parades of military armaments through Red Square in Moscow. I vaguely remember hearing about these when I was a kid and people making a fuss about some new missile being revealed for the first time, along with the usual endless speculation about "what it all meant".
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the parades stopped. Russia has been recovering and in 2008 they were feeling flush enough to restart these parades.
I have been looking through some photos of the Russian military from a few years ago and came across some from their violent disagreement with Georgia wherein I found this excerpt:
THE psychodrama playing out in the Caucasus is not the first act of
World War III, as some hyperventilating politicians and commentators
would like to portray it. Rather, it is the delayed final act of the
cold war. And while the Soviet Union lost that epic conflict, Russia won
this curtain call in a way that ensures Washington will have to take it
far more seriously in the future. This is not just because, as some
foreign-policy “realists” have argued, Moscow has enough troops and oil
to force us to take into consideration its supposedly irrational fears.
Rather, the conflict in Georgia showed how rational Russia’s concerns
over American meddling in its traditional sphere of influence are, and
that Washington had better start treating it like the great power it
still is.- Ronald Steel in The New York Times, August 24, 2008.
I don't like the "news", mostly because everything is presented as equally important. It's not. 99.9% of it is drivel. There are some sources that give you a better concentration, but then they usually have an agenda as well. My random walk technique suits me well enough, though sometimes I am a few years late to the party.
