If you type “fifth president of Russia”, “sixth…”, “seventh…” in Yandex, Putin comes up until the hundred first. The hundredth, too, brings up only Putin. But the hundred first – it switches to Yeltsin. And the hundred second and beyond – back to Putin again.
DID YOU KNOW that in Russia there’s a Russian Skittles Sport Federation with a president, a first vice-president, and a regular vice-president. All in blazers. There’s a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There’s an entire apparatus for the president of skittles sport with three advisors and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. They have a skittles march, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky. There are 18 regional departments and 28 regional federations with their own hierarchy.
The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Interesting, doping in skittles sport… There’s a subsection called “methodological recommendations”. Also, their charter talks about online skittles competitions. Imagine that, online!
In 2024 there was a World Championship in Skittles Sport. Apparently, they are supposed to hold it every three years. And it had a Grand Closing. Apart from Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, in addition to Sergey, Vitaliy, and Konstantin, there was Eugen Schlein, or simply, Zhenya. From the development program for 2026-2029, it turns out that players from Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Ecuador are actively training now. In the selection criteria for the national team, there is a requirement for “game thinking”. To be admitted, you need to come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of passing the anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.
At the world championship, the disciplines are “classical skittles” and “European skittles” (and separately Finnish ones). The goal in both is to knock the skittles out of the town. European ones appeared in Germany because the emigrants from the USSR were told that it’s not customary here to throw three-kilogram stones and were given lighter ones.
In short, it’s all serious.
Talk about tons of weird and intriguing stuff about Ilya Mechnikov (biologist). His older brother (Ivan) – a prototype for Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Another brother (Lev) – an anarchist, sociologist, fought in Italy alongside Garibaldi. Mechnikov himself made two attempts to depart this life: the 1st time — after the death of his 1st wife (who, suffering from tuberculosis, was carried into the church on a chair). Mechnikov swallowed morphine but survived. The 2nd time — when his 2nd wife contracted typhoid. He deliberately infected himself with relapsing fever. Both survived. By the way, this 2nd was his 15-year-old teacher (when he was 30).
Odessa. The country’s first bacteriological station on Leo Tolstoy street 🙂 An employee there botched a vaccine for anthrax and a whole flock of sheep died. Scandal => M emigrated to Paris.
Paris. Came under the wing of Louis Pasteur (the father of pasteurized milk). P supported M’s theory, gave him a lab in his institute for 28 years. M worked there for free.
M advanced the theory that not everyone who gets infected becomes sick and dies. Basically, it’s all about (of course) the gut microflora. To prove it, he deliberately drank cholera vibrios. Nothing, he got lucky (“lucky as you were”, M thought)
Not satisfied. To prove that it was about the microflora, he made his lab assistant Latapie drink cholera. Hmm, then M gave the culture to a second person, the biologist-watchman J.-B. Joupié. Joupié nearly died. Mechnikov: yay, it works: different microfloras, the microbe works differently (hmm).
Result – Nobel Prize for phagocytosis (cell immunity). And he is also the “father of gerontology”: M proposed that for longevity, one needs to quell “bad bacteria” using probiotics (hmm).
In the end, he still died after the third heart attack. In Paris, his ashes are kept in the library of the Pasteur Institute. Also, in English Wikipedia, he is Élie Metchnikoff. Hard to guess.
In the photo, Mechnikov is persuading Leo Tolstoy that he is not a charlatan.
I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.
Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.
When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”
When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”
Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”
Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”
The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.
Popov has risen!
An interesting interview with Ilya Remeslo by Sobchak. But if I were Ilya’s political technologist, I would have suggested a much more coherent story: as if, one morning, he woke up, looked back at the past, and decided to fix his karma, rather than drown. Everything I did before that morning – my past life. We can talk about it, but for me, it is a closed page, I am ashamed of it, and if someday they decide to punish me for it – it would be fair, I am ready. If they punish for today’s stance – it would be unjust, but I am ready nonetheless. Either option is better than drowning, hence the boldness. Such a story would have been much more coherent, and it doesn’t matter if it has anything to do with reality.
From realistic explanations, I keep to myself that the guy was genuinely threatened with death, someone close to the powers that be, unclear why, the reasons could be numerous, and from all the options on what to do, this one had the best chances of staying alive because if the threat is realized now, the ratings will drop even more. Well, if he is jailed, it’s almost state protection from threats.
There’s one more thing. Possibly, this individual made it known to the right people that if he is locked up, some very serious dirt will immediately go to the media, but if nothing happens to him, there will be silence.
A female blogger is not a luxury, but a means of transportation
The spokesperson for the Phystech press service explains how to determine cardinal directions in Moscow when navigation systems are down. Find the North Star or use the sun: it rises in the east and sets in the west. Also reminds us how to determine directions using trees. Ziya, do you know how to find cardinal directions using trees? — What’s there to know? Fir tree points north, palm tree points south!
Overall, it seems the Phystech press service is not aware that in Moscow, the annual amplitude of sunrise point movement is almost 90 degrees. That means, it only sometimes (like now, in March) actually coincides with the east. But they do know the word “asterism”. I think most readers will place it somewhere near the word “flatulence”
Yesterday it was plus 27 °C
It’s funny, at the CIS headquarters in Minsk 1) they still think that the CIS is alive (joke) 2) they still think that Ukraine is still there (never was part of the CIS, but officially left the CIS governing bodies in 2018). By the way, Moldova started the withdrawal process this year.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 