They flew one passenger 15 miles from St. Petersburg to Tampa. Tickets were $5 ($150 bucks in today's money, $1500 next week thanks to those morons in Congress). The airline operated for four months until all the snowbirds went back north in the spring. Space.com has the story.
Opening St. Petersburg - Tampa Airboat Line Tony on the right
There were any number of ways to get from one these cities to the other, but they all took much longer. A boat would probably be the quickest but it would take at least an hour, assuming you could find one that had steam up and was ready to go. Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has a page about early airlines, which is where I found this map. Current maps are covered with roads, so they don't give a good picture of the situation.
Someone has put together a website of old WW2 German aerial photographs of Russia. It's all in Russian, and Google translate doesn't help much. I was able to find St. Petersburg because the alternate name (Leningrad) is in parentheses, and parentheses are the same in both English and Russian. It's pretty cool because you can switch back and forth between these old WW2 aerial photos and current satellite images and maps, much like Google Maps, so you can compare.
Google Maps offers photos of places on the map, and if there are a bunch of photos, it will stream them to your screen, one after another, shifting and zooming so your point of view remains the same, or as much as it can. I suspect a few whiz kids got their doctorates developing this. Or maybe it's the work of just one crank working away in his basement. Not me, I didn't do it.
So I go to Google Maps and look at St. Petersburg and I see there are a couple of very long bridges across the bay (Gulf of Finland). So I go looking for the story about how they came to be. Not finding much, I go to B1M, where I don't find much except a video about BIM (Building Information Modeling) in Russia and a view of this statue appears. I think that's the weirdest statue I've ever seen. Also very cool. Naturally there are a bunch of ignorant fools who don't like it, but that's always the way it is whenever anybody does anything cool.
The narrator mentions the Dieppe Raid. Took some digging to find that one, mostly because 'what did he say?' The allies did attempt to land a force in France back in 1942, but it was a disaster. Command did learn some valuable lessons, so it wasn't a complete loss.
Siberia Official Trailer (2018) - Keanu Reeves
Saban Films
We watched this odd little film last night. Today I am musing about it and it pops into my head that it's a Greek tragedy! I couldn't tell you which one, but there are just so many elements that are, um, iconic? Is that the word I want? I dunno. I'll just tell you about it and you can decide for your own dang self.
Kean-o (that's what I call him because no matter how many times my oldest tells me, I can never remember how to pronounce his name. Besides, who cares? It's not like I going to be talking to anyone in his universe. Though now that we're on the subject, we should probably all just call him Neo. I mean that's when he first crossed my event horizon.
Anyway, as I was saying before I got distracted, Kean-o is trying to facilitate a transaction involving a dozen, giant blue diamond gemstones. I mean giant like one carat, not like 20 or something ridiculous, he just has a handful of healthy sized gems. Well, he would if his partner would show up, but he doesn't. Matter of fact he never shows. We never see him. Kean-o calls him every five minutes from a new cell-phone and leaves him a voicemail, a message that is never returned. Grrr (that's Russian for Hmmm), me thinks there's skullduggery afoot.
The meeting is in St. Petersburg and the sale is supposed to be for $50 million dollars. $50 million for a dozen gems works out to around four million each. That sounds a little steep, until you realize the dollar isn't worth what it used to be, and there are a heck of lot more people now with big piles of money (10 times as many billionaires now as they were in 2000) just itching for something to spend it on, so of course luxury items have skyrocketed. And then these stones are special, and to the right knucklehead that alone can make them worth a zillion times more than their nominal value.
The customer is not happy and Kean-o is in the hot seat, so he asks for two days to track down the diamonds. Any normal transaction, you would expect Kean-o to apologize and they would just say good bye. Somehow I suspect his thinking was influenced by the prospect of a multi-million dollar commission. How much? Gems are only worth about a quarter of their retail price. You can buy them wholesale for half of what the retailers charge, and the distributors probably get them from the miners for half of that. So depending on where they are getting them, how much skin they have in the game, and how many people there are between them and the source, it could be anywhere from one to seventy five percent. I'm going to say 25% because you are going to need that much money to support yourself in the rarefied atmosphere that your clientele inhabits. Probably split it with his partner. Might even be working for a retailer who has offered to split the profit on this very exquisite set of highly desirable blue diamonds that have been sitting in his vault for the last dozen years or so.
Rigid Cell Phone Faraday Cage** (At 1:36:17 from the end on Netflix)
Naturally, Kean-o calls his partner and leaves a voicemail. Actually, the first thing he does is change phones. He's got a bunch of cell phones and a bunch of brand new pre-paid SIM cards (you can tell they are new because they are still in the credit-card sized cards they come in and Kean-o has to break them out of the card). Anyway, he breaks out a new phone and calls Pyotr and leaves a voicemail and then he puts his phone inside a container. From the way it is built and the careful way he stows the phone I surmise it's a Faraday cage. Okay, now we're being double paranoid. But he's waiting for a call from his partner, and inside that box that phone isn't going to be receiving any phone calls. Bit of a dilemma there. He calls Pyotr repeatedly throughout the movie. Pyotr never answers. Matter of fact, we never see him. Kean-o believes he exists, so we do to.
Now he gets a message that Pyotr is in Mirny which is in the middle of Siberia. Kean-o hires a private jet to take him there. Pyotr's brother works in a mine there. Kean-o waits by the gate for him to get off work. We see a scene of a large industrial complex, looks like an oil refinery. Well cool, another big industrial establishment I didn't know existed. That used to bother me, finding out about giant stuff I had never heard of, but I've gotten used to it. There's a new one popping up every day.
So I go look up Mirny on Google Maps to see if I can find any sign of this giant industrial complex in the middle of Siberia, and it's not there. There is, however, a giant frigging hole in the ground. Looks like asteroid strike except there's no damage, no upheaval, just a big whole in the ground. Looks suspiciously like some kind of evil Cold War era defense project, but it's not. It's a diamond mine. I'll be durned.
Back to our story, Andrei, Pyotr's brother, doesn't know where Pyotr is either, but assures us that he will be back in couple of days. So our rich American gets acquainted with the locals - a gang of rowdy's who take him bear hunting. They all have big fancy bolt-action rifles. They give Kean-o a single shot rifle , one like you might give a kid who is learning to shoot. After making an series of jokes about how they have the big guns they eventually give him a bullet for his gun. Bullet, cartridge, don't quibble, I'm trying to tell a story here.
He also gets acquainted, biblically, with the waitress at the local diner. Can't say as I blame her. Fancy foreigner shows up in their podunk little town, of course people are going to be interested. She's of marrying age, too, so probably more susceptible to sexual urges.
Now it transpires that there are several other players in this game and another near identical set of blue diamonds, but this other set is fake. However they aren't fake like the ones you buy at the five and dime, these are also genuine diamonds, but they are manufactured diamonds. Presumably the original set are natural diamonds. These diamonds are so good the only way they can be told apart is via a spectroscopic examination.
Pyotr sold the fake diamonds to one of these other players, some dude called Samasov and he has discovered the deception and isn't too happy about it. You know, that might explain why we haven't heard from Pyotr.
Kean-o goes back to St. Petersburg and goes through Pyotr's old hotel room, again. This time he finds a pistol hidden under the false bottom of a suitcase. And then he notices a fat blue candle on the counter. Wait a minute, that candle looks just like the one in the Gorynch Guest House* in Mirny where he was supposed to meet Pyotr. I mean, what are the odds? Apply boot heel to candle, it crumples, and looky there, a little red velvet parcel that contains one real blue diamond. Well, it there's something in this candle, might there be something in the other one? So he calls the waitress who brings him the other candle. Sure, enough, there is another velvet wrapped parcel inside, but this one doesn't contain any gemstones. If I recall correctly, it holds a map to a farm outside Mirny. So back to Mirny we go. Well, not quite yet.
First we have to deliver the gemstone to the customer. He tells his girl he will be back in couple of hours, but she can't sit still. She notices that he has written the address on a notepad, so she goes there as well. To consummate the deal, the customer wants to become like blood brothers with Kean-o, so he asks? suggests? demands? that the two girls give them blowjobs. His girl with give Kean-o a blowjob and the waitress will blow the customer. And the two guys must look into each other's eyes. Kean-o is reluctant, but the waitress has no qualms. Maybe she realizes what's at stake, or maybe just hanging out in this rarefied atmosphere has made her horny. In any case, the girls perform, heads bobbing dutifully, but the scene is not in the least erotic. I'm not quite sure why that is. Is it the hostility, the reluctance, or the small group of onlookers? And what would bring a person participate in such a scene? Well, Kean-o has two reasons: the potential enormous payoff and, hey, blowjob. But why is the customer instigating it? Probably because he has the urge and he has enough money to indulge his whims. Who knows what kind of whims you might want to indulge if you suddenly got a billion dollars.
There was another movie with Viggo Mortensen that had similar scene. Viggo was undercover cop who had wormed his way into the Russian Mafia so far that they are going to make him a 'made man', or the Russian equivalent. But before the boss will proceed, he has to know that Viggo isn't queer, so he takes him to a whorehouse where he has to fuck one of the girls while the boss is watching. So now I'm wondering if this a real thing, or they just wanted to put some sex in the movie but by populating the scene with Russians we can pretend that only foreigners are weirdos and nobody we know would actually do anything like that. Yeah, right.
There's some emotional fallout from this, but our happy couple deal with it and head back to their hotel. Where they run into the FSB (successor to the KGB). There's a couple of brutes standing in the lobby . He asks the clerk if there are any messages for room 701 and the clerk warns Kean-o that 'they' are waiting for him upstairs. It would have helped if I knew if his room was actually 701, but it doesn't matter because he walks right in. They separate them and tell Kean-o that they have the fake diamonds and they want him to sell them to his customer - or else. I'm not sure what the 'or else' was. In any case it's enough to persuade Kean-o to agree.
When he shows up to make the sale, the customer has brought a jeweler with a spectroscope. The jeweler has some trouble with some cables, Kean-o makes a remark, the operator gets flustered and customer dismisses him. Now he is trusting Kean-o that the diamonds are real, and Kean-o doesn't flinch, even though he knows he is probably signing his own death warrant. Those fake diamonds are still diamonds, but once you get into this oxygen deprived atmosphere logic and reason have no effect. They might be worth 90% of the real ones, but that 10% is still five million bucks. In this case though money probably has no bearing. They are 'blood brothers' and Kean-o lied. If Kean-o wants to save his skin, he better get on a plane back to America and do it pronto.
But we can't do that. We have to have the final shootout. He travels back to Mirny where he enlists the band of bear hunters to go with him to this farm (the farm on the map that he found in the candle that his girl brought him from Mirny). When they get there they find the brother, Andrei, dead, sitting in the outhouse. He has several injuries. I'm not sure whether he died of a drug overdose and he's just been sitting there for while and the critters have got to him, or whether he was tortured. Don't matter, he's dead. The house is old and worn, but somebody has been living there. The prop department botched the front door though. It's a simple door made out of planks, but there are gaps between the planks, gaps that you can see light through. That door isn't going to keep out the cold, and, in case you forgot, Siberia is cold in the winter. So, bad door, but otherwise the house was just what you might expect of a farmhouse that's been there for a hundred years.
So the house is lived in, but no Pyotr, so we sit down to wait. It doesn't take long for the bad guys to show up. The bear hunters have left Kean-o a rifle and a box of shells and once the bad guys show up he starts making effective use of it. He's shooting and knocking them down, one after another and you think maybe he will get out of this. I mean, the odds are low, there's only one of him and there's good half dozen bad guys. On the other hand it's a movie, and he's Kean-o, the savior of the world, he might pull it off. No such luck. The customer's head thug walks up behind him and shoots him in the back and that's it for Kean-o.
** I looked for a rigid cell phone faraday cage, but all I could find were bags. I wonder if cases ever were a thing, or whether I'm just not looking under the right rocks.
When the Soviet Navy Lost 16 Admirals in a Single Accident: The Tu-104 Crash at Pushkin
Paper Skies
A fine example of what happens you have blockheads in charge. The more powerful they are, the more dangerous they become. The crash happened at Pushkin Airfield in Leningrad, known today as St. Petersburg.
A Decembrist refers to one of the liberal Russian noblemen and military officers who led an unsuccessful uprising against Emperor Nicholas I in December 1825. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals and Western European reforms, these revolutionaries sought to abolish serfdom and establish a constitutional government in Russia.
The term has expanded over time into a metaphor for someone willing to sacrifice personal comfort, privilege, or status for a greater political or social cause.
The 1825 Uprising Following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, there was a confusing succession crisis. Taking advantage of the chaos, a group of about 3,000 officers and soldiers gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 26, 1825. They refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, and instead called for the accession of his brother Constantine and the creation of a constitution.The rebellion was quickly suppressed by forces loyal to the Tsar. In the aftermath, the leaders were executed and hundreds of other conspirators were imprisoned or exiled to the harsh climates of Siberia.
Historical Impact Despite its failure, the revolt became a foundational myth in Russian history. The martyred Decembrists became a powerful source of inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian dissidents and revolutionaries throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Cultural References The name has since been adopted by modern entities, most notably the indie folk band The Decemberists. Frontman Colin Meloy chose the name to draw on both the historical drama of the 1825 uprising and the general melancholy associated with the month of December.
Did The Decemberists sing any songs about Russia? Yes, they did:
Yes, The Decemberists sing the song "When the War Came" (from their 2006 album The Crane Wife), which is explicitly set in Russia. The song tells the true story of the agricultural scientists and botanists at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad during World War II. To protect a massive, priceless seed bank from being eaten by the starving, besieged population, the scientists made a pact to guard the seeds and tragically starved to death in the process.
Joseph Heinrich has argued that northwest Europeans are less clannish and more individualistic because Western Christianity banned cousin marriage—to a limited degree in the 7th century and then much more in the 9th. Evidence from aDNA, however, suggests they were already avoiding cousin marriage before the ban.
WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It refers to people of northwest European descent and was coined to warn against using them in studies to understand human nature in general. They are not necessarily the same as people elsewhere.
Two decades ago, Joseph Heinrich and other social scientists concluded that WEIRD people are outliers in many aspects of mind and behavior, including sensory ability, economic preferences, personality structure, morality, and cognition. They are divergent because they have adapted to an atypical environment of weak kinship, strong individualism, and “impersonal pro-sociality”—in other words, social interactions that are less personal, less emotionally intense, and extending much further than friends and family.
For at least a thousand years, this behavioral environment has prevailed north and west of a line running from Trieste to St. Petersburg (known as the Hajnal Line). It is characterized by certain longstanding patterns of behavior:
Solitary living for at least part of adulthood, with many individuals remaining single their entire lives.
Departure from the home upon reaching adulthood, either to form a new household or to circulate among unrelated households, typically as servants.
Less loyalty to kin and greater willingness to trust strangers
What the heck is the Hajnal Line? Wikipedia knows:
It was launched in 1957 which makes it 75 years old. It weighs 3,000 tons which is like 1/6 of what a Trident missile sub weighs. It has a beam of 25 feet which means the top of the sail in this picture looks to be about 50 feet from the ground.
We just finished watching the first season of Bordertown and it's pretty great. It took us two weeks to watch all eleven episodes, each of which ran about an hour. It was interesting that it was set in Finland near St. Petersburg. Haven't heard much about that part of the world other than Nokia phones and Peter the Great. The show is dominated by old folks. They have all the big important roles. There are a few young, cute faces but compared to the world-hardened adults and they are kids and are treated as such. The adults command center stage, the youngsters are important, but do not play central roles in the story.
The series of eleven episodes covers four or five major cases. These cases involve some pretty heinous crimes. Maybe there's a reason your parents warned you not wander off into the deep dark woods, which is what Finland is covered with.
The best part of the series, for me, came in the last episode. I have been watching these people (the detectives) for ten hours now and I've sort of gotten to know them, but they are characters on a TV screen, how well can you really know a person if all you see is a projected image? But you watch them long enough, and some of that personality starts to come through, and for me, I really got a feeling of knowing a couple of the lead characters in this, the final episode, and that was pretty cool.
Garage 54 is in Novosibirsk in southwestern Siberia. It is the third-most populous city in Russia (after Moscow and St. Petersburg). It was founded in 1893 on the Ob River crossing point of the future Trans-Siberian Railway.
War reporter Vladlen Tatarsky may have been killed by an improvised explosive device disguised as a statuette, Kirill Makarov, the youth policy minister of the Donetsk People’s Republic, told Russian media on Sunday. Tatarksy died on Sunday in an explosion while hosting a live event for his supporters at a St. Petersburg café.
According to several Russian media outlets, a young woman presented a figurine to the war correspondent and blogger during the event. Her identity is unknown so far. The police have not commented on this version of events but have confirmed that Tatarsky was killed in the blast, which also left 30 people injured.
Earlier, a source within the emergency services told TASS that an improvised explosive device was detonated near the stage in the café.
Russia’s REN TV reported, citing a witness, that the statuette blew up as Tatarsky was holding it.
War seems to be becoming a battle of machine versus machine. Russia is turning the venerable An2 into an attack drone. The An2 has shown up here a few times.
The Seshcha airbase (at the 2 minute mark) was a little hard to track down. Google Maps can't find it. Supposedly it is near Dubrovka, but Dubrovka is near St. Petersburg which is a long way from Ukraine. Wikipedia has the coordinates of the airbase. There is another, smaller Dubrovka near the airbase. The airbase has an unusual layout.
Looking at the original picture I was torn between thinking whether this looked like a cozy rural setting or a remote desolate outpost. So much depends on the context. In movies, it depends on the music. Spooky music and this place could look very grim. Cheerful music and it could be very comfortable.
In truth the place is about 150 miles southwest of St. Petersburg (Leningrad for all you die hard commies out there) and ten miles east of Estonia.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we started watching the second Season of Bordertown, which is set in modern day Lappeenranta, which is just across the border from St. Petersburg, Russia.
Akso started watching a Lindybeige video about the Battle of Bomarsund, which took place on a Finnish island in the Baltic Sea back in the mid-19th Century.
BRICSis an intergovernmental organization originally comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
The Valdai Discussion Clubtakes its name from a lake of the same name that is located approximately halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).
It's pretty much a fairy tale woven together from elements of several stories, including fast and fancy ice skating (Hans Brinker), a gang of pickpockets (Oliver Twist) who are living on an abandoned sailing ship (Peter Pan). A poor boy and a rich girl happen to meet and in a tale as old as Hollywood, proceed to disregard all the sage advice of their elders, believe love will triumph all, and the script writers make it happen. There was a moment when we thought this might be an actual Russian story when the boy dies, but then he wakes up, 'returns from the dead' the doctor says, so we can have our Hollywood ending.
It's set in 1900 in St. Petersburg, Russia. The scenes are great. We have scenes on the ice in the canals through town, which serve as roadways during the winter, and scenes of the city and the palaces.
Dmitri Mendeleev (1834-1907), father of the modern Periodic Table, makes a couple of appearances. Seems our girl is a budding chemist and wants to study at the university instead of marrying the handsome, brave, strong nobleman her parents have picked out for her.
Our hero has some very fancy ice skates that his father picked up in Amsterdam. I looked for a picture but I didn't have any luck. If I watched the entire film over again, I might be able to find a shot or two, but it's two hours long, and I'm busy. Busy, very busy.
I seem to be on a bit of a Russian kick the last couple of days. I thought this video is a nice counterpoint to the Rolls-Royce story I posted a couple of weeks ago. You don't need any Russian to understand the video, the soundtrack is entirely music, no speaking. Kilmov is in St. Petersburg.
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