Afternoon music
Interesting vlog featuring Siberia
Another “Matt and Julia” vlog post. This time they fly from Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) to Novosibirsk, and then to Kemerovo, where Julia was born.
I was interested to see how nice, relatively uncrowded, and how up-to-date, were the airports. Novosibirsk Airport was especially impressive.
As to Kemerovo in snow, slush, and minus-degree temperatures, it looked pretty bleak to me. One thing that surprised me, and that I had noticed on some of their other vlog posts, is how far the couple are prepared to walk, when many (including me) would have preferred to go by car. They set off (not even wearing gloves) from the home of Julia’s relatives to central Kemerovo, striding purposefully through the snow in what looks like a vast snowbound urban, landscape. They seem to be walking for miles.
Worth seeing, despite the relatively superficial commentary.
Tweets seen
I think that is Kreshchatik, the main street of Kiev, but filmed long ago, in late Soviet times.
I do not usually watch ice-skating or ice-dancing, but it is amazingly graceful and skilled.
I myself have skated a little in the past, when I was in my twenties, though never either skilfully or gracefully. I occasionally hit the Queens Ice Rink in Queensway, Bayswater (London) in the early 1980s, and also skated once, in 1996, at the Olympic ice rink at Medeo, near Almaty, Kazakhstan, built for the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Happy times (in part).
Rewilding
“Aerial footage of an estate in Somerset has revealed the benefits of rewilding land in the face of extreme weather brought about by the climate crisis.
The area of the National Trust’s Holnicote estate where rivers have been returned to their natural courses and wetlands have been restored have remained green and lush during the five heatwaves across the summer. In contrast, the surrounding countryside has become parched and brown.“
[Guardian]
Ships’ cats
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2001/aug/04/weekend7.weekend9.
Our animal friends.
[“On 19 August, Zelensky fired his deputy chief of staff Irina Mudraya, who, among other findings, had 600 million rubles in bank accounts in Ukraine and Israel. (She bought her daughter a Lexus for her 18th birthday.) Kyrylo Budanov, Zelensky’s chief of staff, organized her bail. Anti-fraud investigators in #Ukraine released recordings of Irina Mudraya repeatedly referring to instructions from “the leadership” – which the investigators said likely means either Budanov or Zelensky. The case is the latest of several fraud investigations among Zelensky’s inner circle.
His former chief of staff Andrey Yermak, accused of laundering $10 million through a luxury property scheme, fled to Israel where Zelensky’s parents are living.“]
System party idiots, as that lady was until her ex-husband was voted out as MP, she then losing her job (paid for via Parliamentary expenses) have been pushing for conflict and even war with Russia for several years. I hope that now they are not going to get what they have been wanting, the stupid nuts.
Britain should be cultivating better relations with Russia. Leave NATO, and dump the Jew Zelensky and his corrupt shambolic thug regime.
Ian Robert Millard 