Month: June 2005

XXVII Moscow International Film Festival: Day 1

Today marks the start of XXVII Moscow International Film Festival. It is a major cultural event that will continue for 5 days and will provide general public with a chance to see a whole lot of excellent films.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, but, never-the-less, I think it is a good opportunity for me to learn a lot about good movies. I will go through all the films that made it to the program, collect more information about them, and post it here.

It is impossible to watch all of the films during the festival as there a lot of them and they are shown on different screens all over Moscow. Thus, this guide might be helpful for future rental purposes.

As I already mentioned, the Festival will continue for five days. I will create a separate post covering films for each day. The complete program of the Festival with film information and screening time is available in Russian at http://www.afisha.ru/mmkf/.

Continue reading XXVII Moscow International Film Festival: Day 1

Passing the vision test

Few years ago, when I was in high school, I had a classmate who was wearing this really thick glasses. His vision was terrible. But every time he was passing the vision test, he scored the most points. I was wondering how he was doing it, since he could see practically nothing.

The trick was simple.

Back than vision tests were done using Sivcev’s tables. The most common Sivcev table is a poster with rows of random latters. The top row has two letters in biggest font. Next row has three letters in smaller font, and so on. Reading letters from a certain distance can suggest how good a person can see.

The guy just had the whole table memorized. Yes, that’s true. He knew all the letters in all the rows and could spell of them back and forward and as you wish. I thought it was close to impossible at the time.

New category: Memories

Recently, I have read an interesting post in someone’s blog (don’t remember who now) about the routine. The author was saying that there is plenty of interesting stuff going on in an average person’s life. Everyone has ineresting stories to tell. Everyone can remember at least a couple of funny episode’s from own life.

The strange thing though, that author continued, is that most people pay attention only to routine stuff. And they blog about routine. Wake up, brush teeth, breakfast, go to work, get bored, go for lunch, return and get bored again, go home, watch TV, go to bed – that sort of thing. If I remember correctly, he was speaking particularly about Live Journals, but what he said holds equally true to any other blogging community out there.

When I read that post at first I just nodded my head in agreement and forgot about the whole deal. Few days later I started thinking about it. Yes, it is true that most people blog about routine. Am I one of them? Probably. What can I do to improve the situation? Well, it is difficult to spot interesting stuff as it happens (although I try and thus blog a lot). But it is pretty easy to tell something that happened before. Interesting episodes from the past are crystal clear. Why not tell them? Heh, no good reason.

Therefor I am adding yet another category called ‘Memories’ (in ‘Personal’) where I will post stories from the days that are long gone. I’ve had surely lots of fun in my life. I will try to tell the stories. At least, this way they won’t drown in my memory one day…