The Brown Bear in the Bar in Brock

My late Uncle Vince was a master story teller and the Shaggy Dog story was his forte.  For the uninitiated, a Shaggy Dog story, as I know it, is a long, usually boring windup with a very bad pun as a fast breaking punch line.  They usually need to be told, not read.  Uncle Vince's  stories were so long you wanted to shoot him to finish them and the punch lines so bad, you wished you had shot him.  This particular story, much abridged, was one of his.

A brown bear walked into the bar in Brock and ordered a beer. The bartender said "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

The next several minutes of story can be inserted as you wish, but no matter how hard the brown bear pleads his case, the answer is always the same. "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

Finally the brown bears snaps.  He has had it. "You see that woman sitting at the end of the bar? If you don't give me a beer, I will devour her!"  The bartender says, "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock".

The brown bear roars at the woman, kills her with a blow from his paw and proceeds to munch her down.  He comes back to the bartender and says "NOW, GIVE ME A BEER".   The bartender says, "No, sorry.  We don't serve beer to brown bears here in the bar in Brock and we definitely don't serve drug addicts".


"Drug addict?  What are you talking about?", says the brown bear.
"That was the barbituate".

Stars of the 21st Century

This weekend, an adjudicated multi-city dance festival was held in Zhovti Vody at the Theatre.  There were dance teams ages from 5 to about 17 years from nine cities.  Tanya and I went Sunday from 10:00 to 1:00. We saw at least 30 dance routines in that time and these kids were amazing.  The work that had gone into training, choreography and costumes left us in awe of the teachers and students.

One of the good things to carry over from the Soviet Union is the availability in small cities of professional quality dance and voice instructors.  In Soviet times attention was paid to culture.  There were culture halls in every town and village where kids went to learn performance arts and good instructors for each.

Of the dances we saw, there were traditional dances with traditional costumes; modern dances with modern costumes and fun dances with fun costumes.  Our favourite was about 20 five-year-olds in zebra costumes with a teen age clown and a teen age ring master.

Some performances had four different age groups in four different costume sets doing four different routines all intertwined at high speed.  Fifty kids dancing their hearts out and no collisions. First time I had ever been to such an event and it was interesting for me to see how the difficulty of the movements and of the choreography were adjusted to the ages and abilities of the kids.

Masha had a solo dance - a Turkish belly dance - and was judged best in her age group (she is 9).  Tanya and I had seen a professional at one of the Turkish nights at our hotel when we were on holidays.  Masha had the basic moves down cold.  She had one year of physiotherapy between ages 1 and 2 before she could even walk, so watching her dance is pretty special.  She still doesn't have all the flexibility in her one leg that other kids may have but it doesn't slow her down.  And her dance routine certainly showed the rest of her was flexible. She even made the local paper.

Tanya took her camera which ran out of battery about 45 minutes in so we didn't get many pictures.  Shooting in a large hall with a small camera is a problem any time. The picture of Masha is professionally done and her mother paid for it.

Zhovti Vody - some pictures

Someone posted some great pictures of Zhovti Vody on Odnoklassniki, the Russian version of Facebook which is much more user friendly and superb for pictures.  http://www.odnoklassniki.ru .  If you can translate the web pages (I use Google Chrome so it is easy), you can likely sign up and surf pictures of people and places to your hearts content.  Tanya has used it to find many of the people she went to school with or to spend all day looking at other people's flower gardens.

Anyhow, here are a few pictures of our town.

This is looking east-northeast (NOTHING is square with the world) down Petrovskovo Blvd.  The new electronics and appliance store (Comfy) and grocery supermarket (Velika Kshenia  - Big Spoon in Ukrainian) are to the right.  To the right of them are apartment blocks and in the distance are three 16 story apartment blocks.

This is looking in the exact opposite direction from high over the town square.  the building is the Theatre.  This weekend there was a two day children's dance festival with hundreds of students from several cities.  We went today for three hours and I will blog about that when I get the pictures looked at. The yellow buildings are older apartments.

Theatre at Night

This is the opposite side of the square from the Theatre.  the building with the arches was a movie theatre in Soviet days but has fallen on hard times.  The yellow buildings are apartments.

Bogdan Khmelnitsky is the local hero.  In 1648 he and his Cossacks freed Ukraine from Polish rule at the Battle of Yellow River about 35 km from here.  Of course in 1653 he had to sign over to the Russians to keep the Poles from making a comeback.

Bogdan's statue has been different colours over the years so some wag made a composite

Bogdan's statue in the park on a foggy evening

Economics University

Commemorating the beginning of Uranium mining in the city

One of many bus stops

Russian Orthodox Church 

There are literally thousands of trees in the city.
Tree planting was a priority in industrial towns and cities

Our newest restaurant.  Not bad food.  Pricey, though.

One of many parks

Railway bridge over the Yellow River (I think)

Soccer pitch is well used.

The realities of life in the Soviet style apartment buildings.

Sandbox Training the Cat.

Andrei was here Thursday afternoon and using our electric chainsaw, helped Tanya cut down a dead apple tree and trim up a number of others.  I worked on my report so I could ship a chunk of it out Friday.  I have used chainsaws but they terrify me.  Along with pressure cookers and deep fat fryers.  When you make Clumsy Carp seem like Rudolph Nureyev, you should avoid things that have potential to wreak grievous harm to yourself and others.

Friday morning I helped Tanya clean up all the branches and haul them to a burning pile over on the abandoned lot because it was threatening rain and could have turned to winter before it dried out enough.  The burning pile will still wait for spring as most of it is too damp.  There was a barrel of garbage in the dogs' yard that hadn't been burned in two years.  Mostly dog hair and food bags but likely other stuff too.  I didn't tell Tanya but dumped some BBQ starter on it and lit it just before I went in the house.

It caught and burned as I could see smoke drifting by our north window.  In a couple hours the sky cleared up and the day brightened.  We were both upstairs on our computers when we heard this awful "BOOM".  I said it must be thunder.  Guess there was something in the barrel I didn't know about.  Good thing the dogs were gone.

I had let them out in the morning for a run and they disappeared until this morning.  They were happy to come home and were so tired they could hardly wag their tails.  They are still young enough to stay out all night.  

And such a nice night it was.  The temperature had gone up to +15C (60F) Thursday night and the wind howled all night.  Friday and Friday night it stayed +15C which broke a more than 100 year record in Ukraine.  There are actually lilacs blooming in southeastern Ukraine near the Azov Sea. Crazy weather.

So the flower garden is all ready for winter, if it ever comes.  Earlier in the week we banked loose soil around the bases of the rose bushes and raked most of the leaves and dead flowers off.  I was allowed to help though I almost wrecked it and cut off one of the small stems of a clematis.  Normal for me.

Kuchma is getting old so we will try to keep him in the house most of the winter instead of booting him out at night.  Which means we have to train a 12 year old cat to use a litter box.  I locked him in the passageway between the house and outbuilding with the litter box.  It worked.  He used it.  And didn't use one of Tanya's boxes of dirt covered bulbs and roots.

So I tried it again some time later. He used it again; but only half in the box and half over the edge on the floor.  This presented him with a problem as to covering it so he dragged a floor rag to cover his deposit in box and on floor.  Not very accurate but can't fault him for neatness.

The Battle of Berezina

Two hundred years ago, from November 25th through to 29th, the final battle of Napoleon's 1812 Russian Campaign occurred at the crossing of the Berezina River.

The French army was in full retreat from Moscow, forced to retrace the same route as they had traveled in the summer. With no foraging possible for man or beast, horses and humans were dying as they marched. The cavalry was virtually afoot and hundreds of supply wagons were abandoned.  (It was not the bitter Russian winter that did them in, it was starvation.  Severe winter never came to Russia until after the French were in Poland).

The Berezina River was the last major crossing before the safety of the  Polish border.  Roughly 40,000 French soldiers and 40,000 civilian followers or non-combatants arrived at the river November 25th.  They planned on crossing on the ice and Napoleon had ordered all bridge construction materials destroyed a few days previously.  However, unseasonable warmth meant the river was thawed and impassable. The only bridge at Borisov had been blown by the Russians.

The Russian army had 34,000 men under Chichagov on the west bank of the Berezina while Wittgenstein was approaching from the north with 30,000.  Kutuzov was following about 40 km behind with another 54,000 soldiers.  The plan was to trap and destroy the French army and capture Napoleon.

From Wikipedia 

Napoleon sent Odinot south on the 25th with enough soldiers to draw Chichagov's force , believing the French intended to escape to the south.  It worked.  In the meantime, as not all bridge materials had been destroyed, the engineers set to work building two 100 meter bridges across the icy water at a ford near Studenka, further north.  By the 26th, the bridges were complete and enough French forces and cannon across to hold the bridgehead when Chichagov realized he had been had.

Victor was left behind to fight rear guard against Wittgenstein's army and on the night of the 29th, the last survivors made their way across the bridges.  Those non-combatants who had not managed to cross were left behind to the tender mercies of the Cossacks. Estimates of French and Russian losses vary widely but French losses ranged from 15,000 to 25,000 combatants and 10,000 to 20,000 civilian non-combatants.

From Wikipedia

Napoleon had been campaigning on two fronts in 1812 and loosing both (Wellington's army and Spanish guerrillas were chasing the Grande Armee all over Spain).  Plots were hatching to dump Napoleon who had to leave the remnants of his army at Berezina and hurry home to save his throne.

The Battle of Berezina was a strategic success for Napoleon as he escaped and his troops were not completely annihilated, leaving sufficient to rebuild his army the following year. The Russians failed to stop him because they really were not that committed to doing so, while the French were fighting for their lives.

Kutuzov, who did not arrive in time, never had any intent whatsoever to do so.  If he had had his way, not a single Russian soldier would have lost his life fighting Napoleon. Kutuzov realized that Napoleon was beaten as soon as he crossed into Russia, that distance and weather would do the army's work for them.  His objective was simply to clear the last French soldier out of Russia and they were going.

Russia's failure to stop Napoleon at Berezina resulted in two more years of war plus the "100 days" in 1815 before Napoleon was finally finished. 

Upper Crust; Lower Crust

Tanya was bored because it is too miserable to work outside and finish off her garden for the winter by putting dirt around the roots of her rose bushes.  She is already perusing the gardening websites on the internet.  So she phoned Lina to meet her and I drove her into Zhovti Vody to go shopping.

The two of them wandered from store to store for a couple or three hours.  Lina needed new winter boots so it gave them something definite to look for.

I went home and continued turning numbers into pictures.  I have about 30 pages of charts and tables and other information for my report but can't get a story line clear in my head to write it up which is frustrating.

On my way home from town, I stopped to buy bread.  It was still warm from the bakery oven and is home-made just like "mother used to make".  Not really.  My mother made wonderful brown bread from home ground whole wheat flour.  I wouldn't say the loaves were heavy but you could fire one through the side of a wooden ship with a small cannon.

Tanya loves the bread crust.  If I buy two loaves of bread it is not unusual for find the ends missing from both loaves if she has made herself some lunch.  And sometimes not only the ends are missing but the top, sides and bottom too.  I get to eat the middle of the loaf.  Tanya says she does this out of thoughtfulness for me because I am old and have not good teeth.

Maps (pant, pant, pant) Maps

As a follow up to yesterday's post about Red, Blue and fatal car accidents, I bring you this lovely set of maps.  Maps are wonderful.  Making pictures from numbers to turn data into information is wonderful.  Using maps to show pictures made from numbers to turn data into information is almost orgasmic.

Nan, from All the Good Names Were Taken, linked to this map in a post she did after the election.  You can find it HERE much larger than this.

The top middle map is the Red and Blue States from the 2012 Election.  The other two maps are by counties (I think.  Help me, please, Nan).  The big map at the bottom breaks the voting down by counties but is shaded according to population density (people per square mile, not level of stupidity).

However the BEST location to find pictures that tell stories is at Russian Sphinx. This lady makes the most awesome charts, maps, graphs and tables.  Browse around her website and see if you don't agree. The post I have linked to is a comparison of handbag prices in USA and Moscow.  Moscow where conspicuous consumption is a way of life when you have that much money.