May 30 2015, 12:49

Speaking of healthy eating: from 1994 to 1999, my daily diet in the dorm consisted mainly of the following products: bread, fried potatoes with pork scratchings, pasta fried with pork scratchings, pork fat, alcohol (beer, wine, etc.), tea and coffee. And no problems at all with excess weight or health) remember, Andrey Koryavchenko, Svyatoslav Kulikov?

May 29 2015, 14:26

Passed by a minor accident involving a coach and a car in a village near Solnechnogorsk. And it got me thinking.

So, if a driver with CASCO insurance gets slightly scratched by a coach full of weary miners, am I right to think that the drivers of both vehicles start collectively waiting for the traffic police to provide a report for insurance purposes, while the passengers get off the fully functional bus and either walk through the woods to the next mode of transport or wait inside? It seems to me that a driver with a scratch won’t get off easily.

May 28 2015, 03:29

“An affront to the sacred.” An “Immortal Regiment” advertisement posted at my daughter’s school. I simply cannot understand how people who died over 70 years ago in a war saved my life or anyone else’s, and even more so – our children’s lives. The key word here is “saved”. It seems to me that they saved the lives of many of their contemporaries, but certainly not those of 21st-century schoolchildren.

May 25 2015, 18:08

Liza has a Russian exam tomorrow. Sharing knowledge.

It turns out, according to the rules of grammar, a dead man, a drowned man, a zombie, and a deceased are animate, but a corpse and a mummy are inanimate.

It is determined by the accusative case in the plural (see whom? what?), if it coincides with the genitive (no whom? what? dead men, deceased) – then it is animate. If it does not coincide with the genitive but does with the nominative plural (what? corpses, mummies) – then it is inanimate.

And the same goes for snowmen, dolls, matryoshkas, and marionettes. They are all animate (see whom? what? = no whom? what? dolls, matryoshkas, marionettes). Likewise, the king, the ace, the jack, and the trump are animate.

Live and learn.

May 24 2015, 17:29

Nine years after the movie’s release, I finally got around to watching it. Whew, the plot twists and dialogues!

“— My father used to say: ‘The first time you hear someone call you a ‘horse’, punch the offender in the nose. Hear it a second time — call the insolent one a freak. The third time you’re called a horse — go to the store and buy a saddle’.”

May 23 2015, 07:04

It seems I’ve found a way to get an interest-free loan in foreign currency

1. You open a debit card. In my case – at PSB.

2. You deposit 1 ruble (in my case, the balance turned out to be 1.85 rubles)

3. While traveling abroad, you withdraw money in euros from an ATM (in my case – paying for car rental 415 euros)

4. PSB just told me that for transactions in euros, the real-time check of the account is for sufficiency, not for positivity. Hence, my account went into the negative (overdraft) by 25,000 rubles.

5. As PSB just informed me, there are no interest rates on the overdraft, so the account was negative from May 5 to May 23. Technically, this is a loan.

Perhaps with an ATM, it wouldn’t have happened, but buying an iPhone on such credit would have been more profitable)