Observations · Society · Humour
Russia is a huge cart, dragged along a wretched road by scrawny nags: the officialdom. On the cart sit the common folk and public figures, cursing the authorities for all they are worth and blaming them for the bad road. It is these gentlemen who ought to be taken off
Cinema · Books · Observations · Society · Humour
The Government of the Russian Federation, jointly with the Ministry of Justice of Russia, is to consider the question of drafting regulatory legal acts aimed at granting cultural organisations the right to use works created by outstanding Russian authors in cases of unjustified refusal by rights holders to grant such
Art · Society · Pop Culture · Humour
The canvas heaps together George Washington, the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, an astronaut on the Moon, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore and Trump himself, along with a woman sewing a flag by candlelight, a boy with an elderly man in period dress, and a humanoid robot
Archive · Moscow · Society · Humour
Absolutely nobody: Peter I's decree "On Maintaining Cleanliness in Moscow": still in force
In the Press · Art · Observations · Society · Humour
I read a column by Marc Spiegler, who ran Art Basel from 2007 to 2022. A comical piece. He laments that galleries are struggling, that the market shrank by some ten per cent in 2024, and that young investors are buying bitcoin instead of paintings. Duremar, having caught a pond
Observations · People · Humour
So here is a man with a telling surname
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or
Observations · Science · People · Humour
Vasily Belokurov, one of the 2026 Kavli Prize laureates in astrophysics, is a galactic archaeologist. I have read his article about intruders and learnt that the constancy of the starry sky, to which people have prayed from the Palaeolithic to our own day, is an optical illusion the length of
Archaeology · The East · Observations · Science · Society · Humour
By right of the first. When political regimes justify their claims to some territory by length of tenure, one can always object that somebody other than them was there first. And somebody other than those first ones. And than them, too. If one is so inclined, one may go all
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
The first: the European fallow deer bears the Latin binomial name Dama dama. And this Dama has nothing whatever to do with the word dame, "woman". Dama was used in ancient Rome for small hoofed animals that grew easily accustomed to people, and is thought to go back
NB! · Cinema · Saint Petersburg · Society Pages · Humour
Emir Kusturica has been spotted at SPIEF. As the saying goes, if nobody catches cold, then everything will most certainly come to pass.
Archaeology · Science · Humour
While some look for traces of extraterrestrials in ancient monuments, others are establishing what ordinary mortals were capable of. A new study deals with the Altar Stone of Stonehenge, a six-tonne sandstone slab at the centre of the circle. The stone hails from the north-east of Scotland, from