Saturday, August 02, 2003
I just saw the best movie ever!
I know this is getting a little repetitive, but I really have to tell you guys about this one. It was Krull-eque! I, my friends, am a connoisseur of bad movies, and this really takes the cake! The title: Story of Voyages.



So, it's the middle ages, and there are these two orphan kids, May and Martha, brother and sister respectively. May has the power to sense the presence of gold, which is not as useful as it might seem, as it gives him skull-splitting pain. Anyway, it's Christmas, and the kids are sitting up waiting for Santa. And then Santa comes down the chimney! And says, "Ho ho ho, kiddies! Open your mouths and close your eyes!" like he's going to give them candy. But instead he grabs May and runs off, 'cuz he's not Santa, he's a bandit. So Martha follows in hot pursuit, but it's really cold and she loses consciousness in the snow.

When she wakes up, she's in the back of a wagon, and this dude is all trying to take her clothes off. And she's like, "aagh!" and he's like, "sorry, I thought you were dead," which for obvious reasons does not reassure her. But apparently he was just going to sell them. His name is Orlando (although it's more like Arlanda, with the Russian accent and all) and he is played by...wait for it...Andrei Mironov. Unfortunately, Orlando is not particularly faaabulous, as he is a dirty homeless Dark Ages peasant, but I'm sure that given some soap and some rockin' duds he'd return to form.

So Martha tells Orlando her sob story, and he's like, "Well, I don't have anything better to do, being a dirty homeless Dark Ages peasant and all, so I'll help you find your brother." But then wolves eat the pony and they have to walk. And then they run into these guys, who tell them that a dragon lives under the ground nearby. And Orlando's like, "screw this for a bag of chips, I didn't sign on for no dragon," but Martha is so cute and precocious that she convinces him to go on.

Meanwhile, the bandits are using May as a human metal detector.

Orlando and Martha get to this town, and there's a bacchanal happening! Also, for some reason, Don Quixote is there, and he's played by Viniamin Smekhov, who is on the staff of the Russian School here, which means that a truly absurd number of our teachers are IMDB listed. So Orlando is all, "Whoo! Party!" But then it turns out that they're just partying 'cuz the dragon is about to eat them, so Orlando and Martha have to run away.

They manage to make it to the next town before Orlando does another dumbass thing, incites a giant barfight, and gets arrested and sentenced to death by being walled up inside an old building, Cask of Amontillado-style. So they're all walling him up (Andrei Mironov, noooo!) and Martha is all "I love you, Orlando!" at the last minute, and jumps in the hole and she gets walled up inside too. But then they find out that the building does have one exit, but it's at the top of a high and deadly cliff! Orlando turns out to be good for something, and builds a hang-glider out of driftwood (don't ask me how it got up on top of this cliff) and they fly to safety.

But it's not really safety, because they land in a town that has the plague, or rather, is terrorized by a human personification of the plague in the form of a homely goth chick on a ugly horse. She all goes after Martha, but Orlando fights her off with a flaming stick, and she is defeated. So he and Martha are like, PARTY! and he makes his hair stand up all Wolvie Berzerk-style and does a comedic dance (look, I don't get it either) but unfortunately, he caught the plague while he was fighting the goth chick and he falls down dying. Then some creepy guys come up and set him on fire, and he's REALLY dead. I think everyone knows how I feel about people being set on fire. This was a little stressful for me. (Sniffle. Faramir!) But now the town is cleansed of the plague, so he didn't die for nothing, at least.

So Martha wanders around for ten years (which elapse in a cheery little musical number) and finally finds this castle where her brother lives. But he's grown up to be an evil crazy despotic prince! You can tell, 'cuz he wears dramatic eye makeup and a red cloak and has hundreds of Dalmatians! And he sics the Dalmatians on Martha before realizing it's his sister, and then he's all, "Whoa, sorry, want to come up for dinner?" But the castle is a home of debauchery! Martha throws a hissyfit, since she's been looking for May for all this time and it turns out he's a bastard. And then May is pissed off that she's pissed off, and he's goes all dramatic evil overlord and explains that now, he can not only sense gold, he can make it fly around! And he makes all the gold in the castle fly around! But then the castle falls down and kills everyone inside except Martha and May! And then, he's all, "Now I can't sense gold anymore, hurrah, let's go home!" And she's like, "No, you're a bitchface now!"

But he protests that he had a dream where she would come and they could fly away home. And she's like, "What do you mean, fly?" and then he scratches a picture of Orlando's hang-gliding machine on the torched wall and destroyed wall of the castle. And then the music gets all joyfully dramatic, and they smile and sniffle, and I think it was supposed to be a happy ending. The end!

Today's Why Pushkin is Awesome:
One time, Pushkin was trying to go to a wedding, but he ended up in an area where they had cholera and got quarantined for three months. Instead of moping around and succumbing to the plague, he wrote a collection of short stories, a lyric novella, a series of "little tragdies," more than 30 poems and finished Eugene Onegin. Go Pushkin!

- declared by Liusia @ 9:01 PM

John vs. Falwellette
Okay, the only interesting thing I did today was botch up a listening comprehension exam, so instead of blathering about me, I will post a story that comes to us courtesy of John. Hi, John! Thanks for permission to post this!

The USS Sanity vs. the USS Fundie
I've been working at Best Buy around 20 to 30 hours a week, and so far it hasn't sucked out my soul. I'm licensed to drive the forklift, use the security cameras and yell at people doing anything unsafe or that could possibly lose products to thieves. There is a large part of me that enjoys that I don't have to sell anything, but I do hate the customer service aspect of my job at times. I'm the guy who stands in the front of the store in a blaze yellow shirt and thus, people ask me some of the dumbest questions: "Do you sell jewelry?" "Hey, how come you wear a yellow shirt? Were all of the blue ones dirty?" and my personal favorite, "Where do you have cameras? Oh, underneath the gigantic Cameras and Camcorders sign two feet in front of me?" But this all pales in comparison to the restraint I had to show last Wednesday...

I'm doing my usual deal of checking receipts, de-magnitizing stuff, and saying hello to everyone when I notice this woman sitting on an empty register to my left. I ask her if she needs anything and she replies that she is just waiting for her son to finish applying for a Best Buy credit card (this takes about 45 minutes for the %#@%$@ bank to get back to us with approval). Sure enough, there is a 30-some-odd-year-old writing in illegible scrawl on a credit card app at the finance table, so I think nothing of it.

Now, looking back, acknowledging the woman was my first mistake. Trust me, next time you come across a sadistic hell demon, just ignore it and its bloody entrails, and it will go away. The woman took my exchanging pleasantries with her as a sign that I might care to hear about her life story.

It started out okay. She and her son were in town for a wedding, for which the son was going to be the photographer. Okay, nice safe topic, right? Wrong. As it turns out, this woman was a fundie and her son was going to tape the wedding of two 18-year-olds that were "going to be fruitful and multiply." I was dying to ask whether that meant he was going to be taping the multiplying aspect, but my restraint held true. I decided that I'd ignore this woman for a little bit and see if she would go away. Lo and behold, not a single customer came in to whom I could divert my attention. Damn, damn, damn (which what I was in her eyes). I decided a better course of action was to engage the S.S. Fundie at point-blank range and hope that my armor was thick enough to withstand the shelling. I asked about her son and what he did for a job. Nice topic, as he's too grubby to be a man of the cloth, so religion couldn't come up too easily. He was a network systems administrator. Something struck a cord in me. I'd heard that name before. We talked about the job market and how hard it was for him to find a job. Then, I took the wrong turn of asking where he got his degree. If I ever have a DeLorean that goes back in time I'll stop myself from asking that question, as the answer took at least a good decade off of my life.

He got his degree through the mail. Remember all of those mid-day commercials about getting your degree from where-ever U? That is where I had heard the job title. Good for him, I thought. Everyone needs a little education to improve their life. Bu this was the catalyst for my divulging to the woman that I was going to be a chemistry and physics teacher. Oh hell. She started a huge rant on how teachers unions are evil (fist clench), how teachers are paid too much since they are too unskilled to deserve anything more than minimum wage (jaw clench), and how revisionist history is being advanced by those atheist Democrats: "You know slavery wasn't really that horrible. It gave them a place to stay." (my brain almost burst). She rattled on and on about how textbooks were godless and how we should go back to McMillan Readers ("E is for Eve whose taking the apple damned us all"), quite possibly the most misogynistic, racist, and all-around awful books unless you are a white Protestant male living in the 1700s.

I took this all in stride. The U.S.S. Sanity was still above the waterline. Then came the straw that broke the camel's back: her son is homeschooled in a
way called "non-schooling". In non-schooling you alow the kid to do what ever they want so that their natural curiousity leads them to learn. You don't impose any ideological system upon the learner; instead, you wait for them to ask questions. Excellent theory when we can super-specialize. Absolute crap when an ideology is already ingrained (fundie). So the son was a complete dimwit, and this woman is yelling at me about how the laws of physics are all written down in some passage of the Bible. We don't really have to do any experimenting or learning. Just look in the good book, and somewhere there is Plank's Gravitational Constant just waiting for us. [ed's note: you know, I've read the whole Bible, and I'm sure I never came across any debate of whether light is a wave or a particle, or anything of that sort. Hell, the apple didn't even fall on Eve's head.] The woman eventually left with her less-than-Neaderthal son, but only after she had given me these words of advice: Teachers should try to ban abortion since doing so would increase the number of children in their classrooms. Schools would get more money if we had vouchers since the evil public schools are so inefficient with all of the bureaucracy. Bush is bringing Christ to those godless Iraqis. Oh, hell. My brain just shut down. My rant about that woman is done.
- declared by Liusia @ 4:07 PM

Friday, August 01, 2003
I am scared of Christopher Walken
But this is still funny.
Christopher Walken: All You Have to Do Is Ask
- declared by Liusia @ 10:34 PM

Today was awesome!
Do you know what is an awesome movie? Beware the Car. We've been watching it in class, and we finished it this morning. I'm going to give away a bunch of plot points, since none of you are ever going to watch it anyway, since it's a 1960s Soviet comedy that's not, as far as I know, available in English. So, anyway, this guy Detuchkin is an insurance salesman by day, a car thief by night. The movie starts with him stealing a car from a hip young contrabandist, played by none other than Andrei Mironov, who was the faaaabulous Giesha in The Diamond Arm. Methinks poor Mironov got a little typecast at some point. Anyway, he steals this car, and then Detective Some-Damn-Thing starts investigating. But lo! Detuchkin and Detective Thingy are a part of the same community theatre! Detective Thingy is playing Laertes, and Detuchkin is Hamlet. Anyway, Thingy and Detuchkin become friends, and in light of their friendship, Thingy totally ignores approximately 1 million really obvious clues that Detuchkin is behind the new wave of auto theft. Finally, a giant clue in the form of, like, SEEING DETUCHKIN WITH A STOLEN CAR bludgeons Thingy into figuring out that it's him. And they have this big dramatic Hamlet rehersal thing where their lines from the play gradually turn into an interrogation about car theft. But then Detective Thingy, being the keen investigative mind that he is, finds out that Detuchkin was actually stealing the cars from baddies and giving the money to orphans. So Thingy is all, okay, you can go free, but don't steal any more damned cars, okay? But then Detuchkin steals another car. So they put on the play, and sadly, Thingy has to arrest cute little Detuchkin and send him to 5 years in the gulag. The end!

Also, it was really funny.

No, for real. It was done all film noir style, with this over-dramatic voiceover guy, who kept saying things like, "Being a detective without car chases is like living a life without love." Also, there was a truly great car chase that took place at a speed of 15 mph because it was in a school zone. And the director of the community theater was a sports coach in his spare time, which meant that he referred to intermission as "halftime" and kept telling them to "get their heads in the game" and so forth, which is a lot funnier to watch than to listen to me explain. Also, apparently the guy that played goofy Detuchkin is actually some big classical actor, and had just gotten off a critically acclaimed performance of Hamlet when this movie was released, which was half the joke.

Beware the Car!

Ekipazh!

Do you ever wake up in the morning and ask yourself...
what would Saddam Hussein look like if he was trying to disguise himself as Albert Einstein?

Thank you, US Military. Durrr.

- declared by Liusia @ 5:23 PM

Thursday, July 31, 2003
I've always been one of the proletariat
But now I'm part of The Proletariat.
The Proletariat
This promises to be interesting.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:49 PM

Today was Surrealism Day
It's been an irrationally busy day. I had class, then play rehearsal, then we took yearbook pictures, then I went to the Dead Russian Poets Society meeting, then I watched a cute, bizarre movie called How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor.

Today's DRPS topic was Futurism. I believe I mentioned before that I generally prefer poetry with a plot? Yeah. While it's interesting to discuss how the Futurists invented their own words and tried to make pictures with sounds, I don't think it's really my thing. Call me hopelessly narrowminded, but there comes a point when it just becomes noise to me. Of course, I don't "get" abstract art, either, so I'm probably not the right person to ask about this. I'm sure it's some deficit in my character and not in the art or poetry.

Whatever, Jackson Pollock.

Here is an example of Russian Futurist poetry, by Aleksei Kruchenykh:
Dyr bul shchul
ubeshchur
skum
vy so bu
r l ez

In case you were wondering why I didn't provide a translation, it's because those aren't really words. It's supposed to be a representation of language, I think, but...yeah. Moving on.

How Czar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor is adorable. It's about the romantic misadventures of Pushkin's great-grandfather. To summarize: Peter the Great is working on his giant navy project, running around acting over-the-top and overbearing, as usual. He takes on General Ibrahim Something-or-other Hannibal, an Ethiopian raised in Russia, as his assistant. Peter decides that Ibrahim (Grandpa Pushkin) needs to be married, and tries to set him up with the sweet Natasha, but Grandpa Pushkin, being an all-around good guy (albeit somewhat broody) won't marry her unless she wants to marry him. Peter gets all huffy and fires Grandpa Pushkin, who goes off and lives in a hut with his weirdo friend and teaches kids about boats or some damn thing (there were no subtitles, and I got a little lost at this point.) But then, Grandpa Pushkin finds out that Natasha really does love him and not the foppish bastard guy Grandpa Pushkin thought she was in love with, so they get married and then Peter finds out and he's like, "yo, Grandpa Pushkin, I guess everything is cool again, give us a kiss." And then everyone lives happily ever after, and presumably begets lots of little Pushkins, but that part wasn't in the movie.

The movie started off very surreal and gradually became more realistic. At first, a lot of the film was animated, and some of scenes were live actors movie-magicked into painted scenery (a pretty cool effect for 1976). As the movie went on, the acting and plot became less comedically over-the-top, and the amount of animation gradually decreased until everything was live-action. I have no idea what this symbolized. I could BS something, but instead, I'll just say that it was cool.

Man, final exams start tomorrow and run through the whole weekend. I hate finals. Blog forecast for the weekend: chilly temperatures with a 80% chance of bitching.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:02 PM

Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Field Trip!
Field trips were pretty much the only good thing about elementary school. Instead of sitting through another attempt to turn me and my fellow students into tiny precocious calculus-doing geniuses (thank you, experimental public charter school for gifted children, for helping me develop countless adult neuroses!), we got to run around like the little hooligans we actually were in some public place. My favorite place to go was the Milwaukee Public Museum, because the rainforest exhibit was beyond awesome. For those of you who haven't been there, it's set up like a "real" rainforest, with plants and indoor waterfalls and sculpted gigantic trees and evil loggers and stuffed jaguars. It's great. You can climb a ladder up to the "forest canopy" and run around pretending to be a howler monkey.

Of course, you can run around pretending to be a howler monkey anywhere, but doing so in the Milwaukee museum rainforest exhibit adds an air of authenticity.

So I was pretty happy when they announced that we had a field trip scheduled for today. The 5th level and 7th level students piled into cars and headed for Texas Falls. I have no idea why this park is called Texas Falls; it's comprised of babbling brooks, millions of trees, heavy undergrowth, a waterfall and mountains. I do not think any of these things exist in abundance in Texas.

The park was beautiful. It actually reminded me a lot of home, of the trails around Marilyn's farm where we used to horseback ride. The forest is the same kind of rocky verdant tangle.

Anyway, being hugely daring, a few of my fellow students and I decided that the really good place for a picnic would be on the big rocks in the middle of the crick. Now, I perfected river rock jumping in Jordan Park as a child, but it's been a long time, and hopping from slippery damp rock to slippery damp rock is considerably harder when your arms are full of picnic stuff. But I made it without falling in, paragon of athleticism that I am. In fact, I don't think anyone fell in, although a few people voluntarily went swimming in the freezing, jagged rock-filled water. The fact that people behaved in a zany manner is really not a surprise, as basically, craziness is a prerequisite for voluntarily spending a summer speaking a weird foreign language and doing five hours of homework a day.

After we'd eaten and risked life and limb climbing around, Svetlana Igorevna decided that we needed to be educated about mushrooms. We wandered around the forest for a while, and she explained the finer points of mushroom hunting. "This is an okay mushroom. You can eat it raw." "Don't touch that one, it's poison." "This is the best kind of mushroom! It's full of protein." "That's some strange American mushroom, I don't know what it is." So I now know what kind of wild mushrooms you can make into soup. Since I neither like soup nor mushrooms, this is not especially viable information. However, if I ever get lost in the mountains and need to subsist on the fruits of nature, I will be in good shape. Apparently mad mushroom love is a Russian thing, and people there go mushroom hunting for fun all the time. But I'm still hung up on the spore thing. Fairy circles indeed.

Then we returned to campus, and I spent three hours in play rehersal. The performance is next week. It is going to be spiffy. Spiffier if I manage to memorize my lines.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:58 PM

"I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How've you been?"
I hate it when blogs are full of these things. On the other hand...John Cusack.


Which John Cusack Are You?

- declared by Liusia @ 9:10 PM

Tuesday, July 29, 2003
And in shady oil contracts bind them

Hee hee hee.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:54 PM

Things you should look at:
The Box Office Oracle
Enter your movie's specs, and find out how well it will do in the box office and its chances of winning an oscar. Hee. It's the little things in life that make me happy, like casting Damon Wayans in a G-rated historical costume drama.

Strong Bad Emails
I know that everyone and their grandmas are already Strong Bad fans, but if by some freakish chance you have not yet experienced HomeStarRunner.com, get yourself over there. I recommend Lures and Jigs, Japanese Cartoon and Techno as good emails to start with.

Stereotypically Suburban: Affectionately...Anna
I've been reading this blog since the writer posted effusive praise of my writing in one of my comments boxes. Flattery will get you everwhere! But, for real, this site is great. And not to put on my curmudgeonly old man hat, but in this vast internet wasteland filled with "OMG lIkE i ToTallY fArTEd iN ClaSs tOdAy .. ... LOL !!!1!" it's refreshing to see a teen blog that contains posts like "Back to my hometown-loathing: the paper is so biased. I've never been to the Spokesman Review headquarters but I'm pretty sure I know what it is. I can just see it... the office would be nothing but 40-something white men in three piece suits. They would each have a picture of them dressed in camouflage standing over the carcass of a dead animal framed on their desk. Everyone's screen saver would say "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!" and swastikas would decorate the hallways. They would each have a youngish female assistant who they would sexually harass thirty times a day. And they all would take their lunch breaks at Longhorn Barbeque." I'm definitely adding this to my permanent links.

Samorost
If you figure out how to beat this stupid game, please tell me.

Eric Conveys an Emotion
This site is entirely pointless, and yet draws me, like a pyromaniac to a blowtorch.

Helvetica vs. Arial
Any flash animation game where you make fonts fight automatically deserves a shout-out.

Tolkien Sarcasm Page
Yes, I'm a nerd. Shut up.

This picture:

- declared by Liusia @ 6:11 PM

Area Youth's secret shame
Stupid Middlebury.

I used to think Wisconsin was unforgivably, incomparably rural. This seemed like a logical assumption; you can't get TV reception at my parents' place, it's so far from civilization. The nearest gas station is about a half-hour away. Four-wheeling is considered a sport. But, good Lord, at least you can get a freakin' pizza.

At this point, you may be saying to yourself, I thought Middlebury had a college? Don't colleges and pizza parlors have a symbiotic relationship? Aren't they unable to survive separately? A sort of metaphorical Chang and Eng?


Around 11 pm last night, Katia and I decided that we wanted pizza. It's been several months since I enjoyed a good pseudo-Italian fat festival, and I had a serious craving. Simple enough, we figured, and hopped on the internet to do a search of local restaurants. Marvel at this: we discovered that we are in a Dominoes-Rocky's-Papa John's-Pizza Hut-Little Caesar's-Gumby's-Sbarro-free zone! Not only can you not get delicious greasy chain wonderfulness in a colorful box delivered, you cannot get delicious greasy chain wonderfulness in a box at all. The nearest chain pizza place is more than 45 minutes away.

Okay, we reasoned. A local restauranteer must have stepped up to fill the gap. College town, and all. And lo and behold, internet research turned up a likely pizza-provider. And - thrill - "free late night delivery!" Ura! So, Katia tried calling. About seven times. The phone wouldn't connect. Not terribly unusual in Vermont, alas. Finally, it did connect, and she got an answering machine.

Do you know what "late night delivery" means in Vermont? Until 9 pm.

Eh. We ended up going to the Grille, the school's "restaurant." Madisonians, think Der Rathskeller, except cleaner, less German, and less interesting. Pizza was available there. But it's just not the same, you know?

Do you know what I really had a taste for? This is shameful.
Pokey Stix.
And I hadn't even been drinking.
- declared by Liusia @ 12:35 PM

Monday, July 28, 2003
Woland is such a creative guy
Jess, I think I've discovered a possible source of your computer problems. Does your BIOS screen look like this?
- declared by Liusia @ 8:30 PM

Grrrr, aargh
You know, today has been kind of rough. The demon insomnia attacked in full force last night. I finally started feeling sleepy around about 5:30 am, but at that point, I decided I'd just be more tired if I slept for an hour and a half, so I just stayed up. I did not use this time constructively.

So, I fell asleep about four times in class today. But weirdly enough, I was not the only one. There seemed to be some kind of insomnia epidemic - about half my class said they hadn't slept, there was a high degree of zombification, and one guy entirely zonked out, flopped on the table. The teachers didn't say anything. I hope I didn't snore at all.

After lunch I went back to my room and slept for about four hours, after which I felt a little better. Why, why, why has my circadian rhythm suddenly gone uber-vampiric?

Anyway, I just got back from watching a movie, My Friend Kolka. The director, Aleksandr Mitta, is our new artist in residence. The film is pretty old - 1960s, I think - and very cute. It's about a group of schoolchildren who have a secret society. Adding to the adorableness is the fact that our play's co-director, Anya, was the female child lead. Out of curiosity, I hit up the IMDB, and discovered that both she and Sergei Borisovnitch have IMDB entries. So cool.

Time for homework. Meanwhile, here's the Russian Weirdness of the Day (fairly low-key this time):
UFO drives Russian fisherman to drink
- declared by Liusia @ 8:23 PM

roX0r 2: roX0r roX0r
I really like the word "discombobulated." My dad uses it all the time. That and "copacetic." He's like a Reader's Digest Test Your Word Power! quiz.

Oh, my God, do I need to finish this essay so I can sleep.
- declared by Liusia @ 12:04 AM

Sunday, July 27, 2003
Um, roX0r.
I did not do anything interesting today. So, instead of writing an entry that consists of "blah blah blah I ate lunch w00t" I will simply provide this .jpg for your viewing enjoyment. I think it's funny. Then again, I am a big dork.

- declared by Liusia @ 10:36 PM

Quality advertising
I got the weirdest spam subject line today:
"b0ys fuck1ng do it 2"
What do you suppose it means? There are so many grammatical permutations there. Is the 2 to or too? If it's "to," why don't they say to whom the boys are doing "it"? Perhaps it is a teaser. Click here and find out what the indirect object is! But if it's "too," I can't even think what the "it" could be. And I suspect the "fuck1ng" is literal, but sentence placement suggests that it is meant as an empathetic interjection.

Alas, we will never know what this fine advertiser is peddling, as I deleted the e-mail unopened.
- declared by Liusia @ 2:52 PM

Chaaaaaapstick!
I intended to accomplish so much yesterday. I was going to finish my essay and my textbook exercises, wash clothes, go shopping and get a good chunk of Master and Margarita read. Well, I managed to wash clothes.

Last night was the school talent show. What talents I have do not translate well to the stage - I mean, I guess I could copy-edit something in front of everyone, but it wouldn't make for a very good spectacle - so I did not participate. I suppose my half-assed French horn playing counts as a, um, skill (I certainly wouldn't call it a talent) but my horn is currently languishing in my mom's basement. It did not get to go to Vermont because French horns do not like airplanes.

The show had all the talent show prereqs - highly skilled piano playing, dramatic recitation, someone trying to sing opera (the crazy part was that she succeeded) and, of course, interpretive dance. When it comes to dance, I am something of a philistine. I will admit this. I go to dance performances and listen to the accompanists. I can see the skill and grace required for ballet. I can appreciate the amount of effort and practice people put into perfecting jazz and tap. But interpretive dance...that's pretty much just swooping around, right?

It was the bizarro acts that really won my heart. A kid who goes only by the name of Sputnik sang Pushkin to the tune of a Bob Marley song. Another guy did some kind of an Adam Sandler/Stephen Lynch/Weird Al musical parody thing, creating an insulting/affectionate medley about Middlebury. He also sang a song that consisted entirely of strumming his guitar, singing "cigarette cigarette cigarette cigarette in a glass. I'm drunk with you!" in various thirds while a girl played little riffs on the harmonica.

After the talent show, Marusya and I cleared, forgoing the weekly Discoteka in favor of mixed drinks at the Two Brothers bar. You know, I would write some kind of Middlebury travel guide, except that the only things I could write about would be the post office and the Two Brothers. Both are slow. The latter serves drinks. That is all.

She and I spent a good long time discussing embarassing celebrity crushes. I won't give hers away, but I will admit to you that I think Richard Gere is pretty hot. Look, I know. I'm sorry. Chaaaapstick!

(How dumb is it that The Mothman Prophecies was rated R for terror?)

I'm so sad. The Sony Pictures website took down the "Chaaaaaaapstick!" Mothman Prophecies trailer. That was easily the best movie trailer in the world.

I just got an email from John. Hi, John! Why John is my hero:
I just read your blog for the first time in a couple of days and I have just one question: when are you and Katia going to save Dustin from the mountain troll? You know it will be when you need to say "dog" perfectly in Spanish to knock said troll out (Mountain variety, not Dustin). Congratulations on becoming a Weasley.

Hee, hee, hee.

Russian Weirdness of the Day (shamelessly stolen from Katia's blog):
A Polar Explorer
- declared by Liusia @ 1:32 PM

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