Category: Culture

The Evolution of Mermaids in Russian Folklore: From Legged Creatures to Aquatic Tails | August 08 2026, 02:15

WOW, it turns out that mermaids in Russia actually had legs, and if you asked about the tail, they would tickle you to death or drown the curious in the nearest pond. A specific feature — tousled blonde hair, hence the phrase from Dal “walks like a mermaid.” The name itself, however, is not from the type of blonde hair, but from “rusalki” — a spring commemorative festival.

And the tail actually came from sea maidens (mermaids). Mermaids are an invention of peoples living by the sea. In general, how mermaids merged with them in our perception is unclear, but it happened relatively recently.

Although there is one assumption. In Andersen’s tale, the little mermaid — literally a sea maiden (Den Lille Havfrue). But in Russian translation, it was called “Rusalka.” Lermontov has a poem “The Mermaid” from 1831, where she swims in a river. Surely the modern reader imagines a tail. There’s also a tale by Orest Somov, where the mermaid runs away from her mother, and her unfaithful lover—the Pole, was tickled to death by mermaids.

I illustrate with an 1871 painting by Ivan Kramskoy. With legs and Makovsky’s “Mermaids” (1879) – Makovsky painted it on an estate on the border of Chernigov and Poltava provinces, near Dikanka — that very Gogolian Ukrainian night, i.e., the same literary source as Kramskoy. They would have been very surprised by a tail. Also adding Prushkovsky’s Mermaids” (water nymphs) from 1877. Also attaching a drawing by Ivan Bilibin (1934).

By the way, those who depict mermaids with tails on trees – think about how she climbed up there.

The Invisible Merchants of Spain: The Manteros of Top Manta | July 31 2026, 18:59

Here in Spain, they are called manteros (mantas sellers)—from the Spanish word manta (blanket or cover). And the process of such illegal street vending is called top manta.

Since their activity is illegal, they have developed a rigorous system of alerts. As soon as one of the vendors spots the police, they signal (often yelling the code word “Agua!”—water). After this, all the manteros on the street in a split second gather their blankets into bags and melt into the crowd. If someone had managed to give them money – apparently, they will run together with them.

The vast majority of manteros are migrants from sub-Saharan African countries (most often from Senegal, Gambia, and Mali). They are not doing this for an easy profit: most of them are status sin papeles (without documents), making legal employment in Spain impossible.

In Spain, the police fight not only the supply but also the demand. By law, if the police catch you in the act of buying a bag or sunglasses from such a blanket, you, as a buyer, can be fined up to several hundred euros.

In Barcelona, the vendors have united into the “Union of Street Vendors” (Sindicato Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes) and made a brilliant marketing move. They registered their own legal brand of clothing and footwear, calling it Top Manta. Now they produce quality sneakers and T-shirts, giving migrants the opportunity to leave the streets and work legally.

The Art of Beauty Marks in Historical European Portraiture | July 28 2026, 06:34

It is interesting that the artist did not hesitate to place a black beauty spot on the temple of the hawthorn seller in this painting. At that time, it was a very typical accessory. They were applied to cover skin defects and quickly became an essential element of makeup. The black color of the beauty spot fabric created a strong contrast, visually emphasizing the aristocratic paleness and whiteness of the face, and also drawing attention to the eyes. In Europe (including Spain, where Lorenzo Tiepolo worked), there was a complex “language of beauty spots”. Depending on where the piece of fabric was attached, it conveyed a specific message to suitors.

But they probably would not have understood piercings and tattoos 🙂

The CIA’s Secret Role in Promoting American Avant-Garde Art | July 28 2026, 05:15

Today I learned that the popularity of American avant-garde worldwide turns out to be the result of a CIA program—at least in part. During the height of the Cold War, starting in 1950, the CIA secretly funded magazines, concerts, and exhibitions throughout Europe through the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” and front organizations (the most famous being the Fairfield Foundation). The idea was simple: to demonstrate that the free West produces bold experimental art, while the USSR produced only state-controlled socialist realism. For example, when London’s Tate Gallery couldn’t afford the “New American Painting” exhibition in 1959, a “generous patron” Julius Fleischman suddenly appeared—though the funds actually came from the intelligence budget.

The most astonishing fact is that the artists themselves had no clue. Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, who came from the left-wing bohemia of the 1930s, despised the government and the era of McCarthyism, and would have considered it insulting to work for the intelligence. The CIA didn’t propose: they didn’t pay the artists or dictate anything, they simply “promoted them in the dark,” paying for the infrastructure of fame through two or three layers of intermediaries. It reached the point of absurdity. While one hand of the government secretly transported their canvases across Europe as a symbol of American freedom, the other—the FBI and conservative congressmen—kept files on the modernists and branded their art as “communist smears.”

Exploring the Missing Trojans: Homer’s Illusive Episodes | July 21 2026, 18:14

Tomorrow I will go to the Odyssey. Remember the Trojan Horse, the snakes, Laocoön, and “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”? So, it turns out that the most famous episode of the Trojan War isn’t in the “Iliad”—the main poem about this very war, and things with the Odyssey are also tricky. In the Iliad, Homer ends the story earlier: the “Iliad” covers only fifty days of the last year of the siege and ends with the funeral of Hector—there’s no horse, no death of Achilles, nor fall of the city in it. In the “Odyssey,” the horse appears a couple of times but only in passing: the bard Demodocus sings about it at a feast, Menelaus recalls how Helen walked around the horse and mocked the voices of the Greeks hidden inside. That’s it. There is no elaborate scene of assault and fire in Homer’s works at all. And that canonical story—with the spy Sinon, Laocoön strangled by the snakes, and burning Troy—is from the Roman Virgil, the second book of the “Aeneid,” written in the 20s of the 1st century BC, almost seven hundred years after Homer. It is precisely from there that the plot leaked into pop culture.

But Virgil did not invent the horse out of nowhere. Between him and Homer, there was an entire “epic cycle”—a series of poems that covered the entire war from beginning to end: “Cypria” (prehistory: the judgment of Paris, the abduction of Helen), then “Iliad”, then “Aethiopis” (the death of Achilles), then “Little Iliad”—here’s where they finally build the horse,—then “The Sack of Ilium”, where they roll it into the city and the massacre begins, and then “The Returns”, “Odyssey”, and a somewhat odd “Telegony” for dessert. Out of the eight poems of the cycle, only two Homeric ones fully survived. The other six—including both with all the salt about the horse—have disappeared and are known only from a later synopsis-summary and scattered quotations, totaling about a hundred lines. That means we have the middle and epilogue of the story at hand, while the beginning and the climax in the original are lost.

Turns out, we’ve been retelling a scene for centuries, the authentic text of which we don’t have.

P.S. A separate story about whether Homer was blind. And whether there was a Homer. It’s all very complicated 🙂 But that’s a story for another time.

Roman Naming Traditions: From Numerical Sons to Maiden Names | June 17 2026, 13:04

In Rome, there was a tradition to give personal names only to the first four sons, and to the rest — numbers: Quintus — “fifth”, Sextus — “sixth”, Septimus — “seventh”, Octavus — “eighth”, Nonus — “ninth”, and Decimus — “tenth”. However, they quickly grew lazy and stopped counting the children literally. For instance, a sole son might be called Quintus simply because it was his grandfather’s name. There’s a more elegant version too. The numerical names might indicate not the order but the month of birth. For example, Sextus might refer to the month of Sextilis (August, the sixth month).

For men (patricians), the structure was strict: Praenomen (personal name), Nomen (clan/family name), and Cognomen (family branch/nickname). For example: Gaius Julius Caesar. In this entire immense civilization, there were about 18 praenomens. The most popular ones were: Gaius, Lucius, Marcus, Publius, Quintus.

If you are a woman in Ancient Rome, you have no name. Period. Women were referred only by the feminine version of their father’s clan name (family name). If the father is named Julius, his daughter is named Julia. If he has a second daughter, she is named Julia Secunda (the Second). The third — Julia Tertia (the Third). The youngest — Julia Minor (the Younger).

P.S. By the way, about the months. Why is September the 7th month, October the 8th, etc.? It turns out the year started on March 1st. January and February were added later. In the very first Roman calendar, which, according to legend, was introduced by the founder of Rome, Romulus, in the 8th century BC, there were only 10 months and 304 days in a year.

Rediscovering Pyotr Boborykin: The Prolific 19th Century Wordsmith | June 13 2026, 16:47

I find it astonishing that an unknown to me Pyotr Boborykin wrote heaps in the 19th century, introduced words like “intelligentsia” and “nonsense-maker” into the language. Considered the most prolific writer of the 19th century. Almost no one knows him besides a few philologists. And yet, the guy was a star in his time.

Boborykin was deeply concerned that he would remain in the history of literature as a “secondary” author, so he wrote furiously. He authored about 20 large novels and countless smaller works. 12 volumes, 350 pages each. Essentially, he was the Darya Dontsova of his era. He has a novel “Vasiliy Terkin” which you might have heard of, but not his; you’re likely thinking of the poem by Tvardovsky by the same name, who knew nothing about the novel at all, these were different Terkins.

For instance, finding the novel “Doctor Tsybulka” online is very challenging; there’s only one PDF in the form of a reprint with pre-revolutionary orthography.

Freeports: Tax Havens for the Wealthy’s Art and Wine | May 30 2026, 14:15

Freeports are tax-free storage facilities that wealthy people use to store their investments in art, wine, and artifacts. The Geneva Freeport stores more artworks (both in quantity and value) than the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 2013, the freeport contained about 1.2 million artworks. In addition to paintings and gold bars, it stores about three million bottles of wine. Freeports are closed to the general public and have been repeatedly used to store stolen paintings and cultural valuables.

They are not exactly free, or rather, not free at all. The only “free” thing you get is the right to store, buy, and sell anything within a certain territory without paying taxes… the goods, while within its territory, are considered “in transit,” that’s all. But this only lasts until you export the goods from there. At that point, you will have to pay taxes to the treasury of the country into which you are importing the item or money.

I learned about such a model from a recent video by Varlamov-Chichvarkin about wines, googled it, and it turns out that while wine is a minor thing, it’s much more significant with art.

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.

Taste and Protest: Unveiling the Symbols at an Iranian Restaurant | May 03 2026, 19:40

A very tasty Iranian restaurant. Perhaps you didn’t know, but there are two flags of Iran. This one – the historical flag, used before the Islamic revolution of 1979, and today its use inside Iran itself is a political crime. The main difference from the official one is the emblem of the lion and the sun. Therefore, when Iranian protesters in Washington hold demonstrations, it’s interesting to see which flags they carry. If there’s four crescents and a sword in the middle, those are protesters from another camp 😉