An amazing story about a 64-year-old American woman whose donation helped the Chernobyl Children's Project International to buy medical equipment that "will save as many as 175 young lives a year" in Belarus:

[...] One of Judy's dreams was to swim Hood Canal. Not a natural athlete, she trained hard and found it difficult and monotonous. To spark her motivation, she went back to her dream book, and saw that one of her dreams was to help children with birth defects. She realized that she could accomplish two dreams with one swim.

Judy's friend Steve Cagan, of Restoring Hope Foundation of Southern California, had raised $20,000 in a Chocolate Festival last year, and donated those funds to Chernobyl Children's Project International for a life saving children's cardiac surgery program in Belarus. Hearing about this program, Judy found her inspiration. [...]

The initial reaction - "And here people are so different, lack altruism, etc., and that's why it sucks the way it does here" - gets interrupted with: "But this story is so much more about HERE than it is about OVER THERE!.." And then, somehow, it hurts even more...

(via MoldovAnn)

Peter Nalitch: the guy totally rocks.



:)))

(We're in Moscow already, btw.)

Just ran into this video of Eduard Limonov chatting with Radovan Karadzic, then shooting at Sarajevo. Have no idea if it's the real thing.

But, even if it's not, I still don't understand how Garry Kasparov could possibly agree to team up with Limonov.

I've had a haircut today/yesterday - and now I've changed this blog's template. So revolutionary of me. Mama says it's full moon now, and I guess that could be the reason.

It'll stay messy here for I don't know how long - please forgive me. If something suddenly turns upside down, and if it stays this way for over a week, please do let me know.

:)

P.S. Ouch. It looks okay on Firefox, more or less okay on Safari - and truly horrible on Explorer. The text is green, for example. Is it the same for those of you who are on IE?

To a recent visitor from Saudi Arabia, who came here looking for "sacking facking free wonen photos" - go "sack" and "fack" yourself.

Thanks to one good-looking but very dumb cop, I'm a pravoporushnyk now - a criminal, almost.

Anyone who loses his or her passport in this country becomes one and is subjected to a 17-hryvnya fine (nearly $3.5).

And it doesn't matter that my passport had been stolen - as long as there are idiots who can't or aren't willing to do the paperwork properly, I'm the one who broke the law, a pravoporushnyk.

Fighting them is a bit too time-consuming and a real pain in the ass.

So I hope they'll choke on my 17 hryvnias - and the asshole cop will never get promoted out of his shitty office somewhere at Rusanivka.

Maybe I'll write more about it later. Maybe not.

I'm really pissed right now.

Thank you all for your warm wishes.

Here's a quick question - and then I'm back to my blogging vacation:

Serving Corona beer with a straw stuck into the bottle next to the lemon - it's one of those devushka things, right?

***

Two competing worldviews:

"I can't imagine drinking beer through a drinking straw."

vs.

"I can't imagine drinking anything straight from the bottle."

I'm taking a short break from blogging here. For a week, at least, and then we'll see. Maybe I'll post a thing or two, maybe not. I'm exhausted, and depressed, and worried sick about certain family issues, and about to move back to Moscow, which is both good and bad, for a number of obvious reasons. Writing in my Dear Diary would be the right thing for me to do now.

Dnipropetrovsk gas blast GV translation.

Wow. It appears that Yerevan is way crazier than Kyiv, traffic-wise...



(Two bloggers' reactions: Onnik Krikorian and Notes from Hairenik.)

Two posts from my today's GV reading:

- MoldovAnn on Chernobyl aid programs -

[...] I do believe aid organizations want to help people have better lives. But when I hear them talking about “we’re going to support this community because it’s not too far from Kyiv and we can easily visit it in a day during our short visit to Ukraine”, it’s hard for me to take them seriously. If they really want to help the most needy, the most affected, the most at-risk people, then they should go to the far away, isolated, hard-to-get-to places - precisely because no one goes there. [...]

- Window On Eurasia on the centenary of the birth of General Pyotr Grigorenko -

[...] The National Bank of Ukraine has issued a special commemorative coin in an edition of 35,000 copies. And the Tatars in Crimea itself, to whose return to their homeland Grigorenko made such an important contribution, reportedly are planning a small commemoration.

But elsewhere in Ukraine, few if any events are planned. [...]

Here are also two old New York Times pieces - one on Grigorenko's memoirs, the other on "the world of Soviet psychiatry" - both from 1983.

First, someone landed on this blog via a Google search for "uzhgorod hostess and escorts." A few hours later, another person from another country stopped by in search of "uzhhorod prostitute."

And I was horrified.

Because, somehow, I've no problem with the fact that Kyiv is full of prostitutes and their clients. It's a big city, what can you do. I don't really care when someone comes here looking for prostitutes in Kryvyi Rih - mainly, because I don't care about Kryvyi Rih in the first place.

But Uzhgorod is sacred. It's my favorite Ukrainian town. I love to idealize it. It's like a tiny New York City. It's got a lot more than you expect to see and hear in such a small place.

And it's got prostitutes, of course. And they are cheaper than in the EU, obviously. And booze is cheaper there as well.

And I like to pretend that this parallel universe doesn't exist. Not in Uzhgorod.

And then some guys run through my blog and ruin it for me...

Three months since my father disappeared. I still haven't really found a way of dealing with his death. Nor has my mother, I'm afraid. There are plenty of distractions, Marta is the best of them, but very often nothing really works.

It'll always be the 16th for me. Not the 19th, the date that they put on his death certificate. It could've been the 18th or the 20th. With the 16th, there's no uncertainty. It's the turning point, and what was before and after it seems very blurry now. Which is sort of good, I guess, because when I attempt to focus, it gets unbearably painful.

***

And Ukraine, too, is mourning today - mourning the 15 victims of the gas blast in Dnipropetrovsk.

At last, the official results of the Sept. 30 vote are in, and it does look like the coalition between Yulia and Yushchenko/Lutsenko is actually going to happen, after all. Nice, very nice.

***

And, there's also this nice piece (UKR) in Ukrainska Pravda, by Kostyantyn Levin:

[...] We can, perhaps, assert that the anniversaries of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's creation will be marked according to the same scenario every year - mass PR events by Vitrenko, Symonenko and Tyahnybok on the streets and squares of Kyiv, burning of the UPA flags in Crimea, some more local news from Lviv, Kharkiv, Frankivsk and Poltava, which, however, no one cares about.

[...]

But, in fact, we aren't talking about the official recognition of the Insurgent Army, nor is it about those who earn their political capital off the Cossack Glory holiday. It's not even about UPA. It's about ourselves. Because, if someone's forgotten, we are the Ukrainian people.

All our history is the history of fighting against inner opposition, and our every war [...] ends up turning into civil war.

Actually, all our history - if you look at it from a certain angle - is the history of UPA. Some are in favor, others - against, and the majority works [day and night] and drinks.

[...]

Why aren't we using all the heritage of our ancestors? The Crimean Tatars, by the way, also have something to tell about their past.

Ukrainian history is the history of suffering, interfighting and great blood. The history of rupture and scars that haven't healed since the times of Khmelnytskyi and Mazepa, that continue to rot, making it impossible to finish the process of consolidation of that one whole that we'll eventually call "Ukraine" - and won't be wrong.

And there are only two paths to follow: the path of mutual exclusion, of cutting off what doesn't fit the framework, what's not on the map and dressed in the wrong uniform - and the path of collecting.

Collecting the differences in one place, the path of recognizing our century-long fratricide as an inseparable part and even (why not?) the most typical feature.

So that next time we could avoid robbing our culture in the process of "cutting off" - and perhaps, as we take aim [...], we could even feel ashamed. And stand next to each other instead.

[...]

Trying to entertain Marta this morning, I kept straying off to YouTube, to watch some of my favorite Soviet cartoons. I realized they were a bit too boring for Marta when we were watching the first one, Winnie-the-Pooh, and I wasn't surprised at all, but since it didn't really matter after that, I got to watch Padal proshlogodniy sneg (1983) in between other, more kid-friendly, things.

(All videos and links are in Russian.)

Part One:



Part Two:



Here's another one, made by the same guy, Aleksandr Tatarskiy, in 1981:



I don't think I've ever seen it from the very beginning. In general, it feels very different to watch this stuff on YouTube, not on TV. A totally different context.

Tatarsky was born in Kyiv in 1950, and died this past summer, at the time when we were searching for my papa. So very sad.

Here's a video interview with him, conducted by The New Times just ten days before his death.