Personal

Yes, no, is, is not

With Maxim’s recently discovered interest in kang fo, I thought we should watch Kung Fu Panda 2 together. But these days it’s tough – you can’t trust anyone. Movie makers can’t be trusted with making a 2D movie. Local movie distributors can’t be trusted to avoid dubbing into Greek or Russian or something else. Local movie theaters can’t be trusted with the sound setup. Local DVD shops can’t be trusted with selling legal copies and keeping sane prices. So, as always, I distrusted everyone and turned to piracy. Pirates can’t be trusted with torrent downloads, but downloads are the easiest to fix.

So I downloaded Kung Fu Panda 2. Before I even started it, Maxim told me that he didn’t see the first one. And Olga confirmed. So I said OK and started the download of the first part. When it was 90% complete, I realized that I already have it on another disk.

Three minutes into the first part of Kung Fu Panda Maxim announces that now he remembers that he saw it. All of it. At which time I gave up. “It’s a quality animation and it’s been a while since you saw it”, – I say. So we watched the first one anyway. Kung Fu Panda 2 awaits tomorrow.

Kang fo

Here is one of my proud parenting moments – Maxim’s exercise diary. While at school they do boring running, at home he lets his inner self to take control, and practice kang fo. Now, for those of you not versed in martial arts, kang fo is like kung fu, but more powerful, and with a tiny mix of robots’ and transformers’ fighting techniques.

Brothers

Last Saturday I was up in the hills for a barbeque with a few of my friends. There were several groups of people at the picnic place, and all of them turned out to be Russian. More so, there were common friends between all of these groups. Eventually, people started moving from group to group and from table to table. That was a lot of fun.

As with any modern group of people, there were several digital cameras around. Slowly slowly, the pictures are making their way online. The image above was shot and post-processed by Olga Timofeeva. I think this is one of the best pictures ever taken of my brother and me together. There are more awesome pictures in her Facebook album, which is unfortunately not a public resource yet.

Other people shared pictures more publicly. Here is my brother’s album and here is an album by Dmitry Blokhin.

Which day is your candidate for the Groundhog Day?

This blog post (in Russian) tells a story of a young woman that really loves the first day of winter, when the first snow falls. The author suggests that if there was a chance, this woman would have chosen the first day of winter to live through again and again, like the character of Phil, played by Bill Murray in the excellent movie “Groundhog Day“.

The author of that story also asks an interesting question. If you had a choice, which would be the day you’d choose to live through and through, like in that movie. If you could pick any day at all, which one would that be?

For me personally it is a hard choice indeed. I love and cherish every day of my life. Except for, maybe, Mondays. I’ve had plenty of excellent days over the years and I can’t really pick one of them. But if I had to, I guess I’d have to go with the 1st of January, the New Year Day. Why? Well …

I am Russian and Russian celebrate the New Year like nobody else. It’s one of the biggest holidays in our culture. We eat, we drink, we have fun, and everybody stays up until very late. Until early morning even. 1st of January is a public holiday. No matter which day of the week it is, you don’t need to go to school or work. Since everyone stayed up late, most people sleep through the morning, waking up in the afternoon. This is probably the only day when I am not standing out in this regard, when I’m not the only one who loves waking up past midday.

Oh, and then there is food and television. 31st of December is the evening of celebrations. We prepare lots of food. We call plenty of guests. We dress nicely. We behave. It’s all nice, but it’s a tiny bit too official and tiring. On the 1st of January though, it’s totally different. It’s the relax time. There is still plenty of food and drinks from yesterday. Whoever survived the drunk night is not in the mood for any official behavior. People under-dress, grab food, and spend a lot of time in front of the television watching entertainment shows or movies, taking short naps in between.

By the evening, people, and people I of course mean myself, are often recovered enough to take a short walk. Time to see friends or relative or visit the nearest pub. Slight tough upon the yesterday celebration with an attempt to reconstruct the chain of events from a collective memory. And then early bed time.

I think that year on year, 1st of January is the closest day to a perfect one. So if I had a choice to live through one day time after time after time, I’d choose that day. Gladly, of course, I actually do have a chance to do so. It’s just that I have to wait a year in between.

What day is your candidate for the Groundhog Day?

Doctor ibn Engineer

I had an interesting idea today, which somehow transformed into a rather lengthy thought train, which, in turn, pushed me to browse quite a bit of Wikipedia, and, finally, to write this blog post. It’s just one of those things that I spent some time thinking about which has no practical purpose rather then annoy and entertain readers of this blog and confusing Google into bringing in more people, searching for rather random things.

I started off with names and naming conventions. People names, to be more precise, and how different cultures approached the naming. Remember, those Arabic names that trace the ancestry of a person using the “ibn” word, which means the “son of”. Abdul ibn Hasan ibn Abdurahman ibn Foo ibn Blah ibn .. it can go for ever. No, remember those surnames based on the profession of a person, used by many cultures. Baker, Fisher, Hunter, Miller, Parker, and so on.

Wouldn’t it be fun to see these two paradigms mixed up. We’d still use “ibn” to indicate the “son of” part. But instead of meaningless father’s name we’d use father’s profession. In conjunction with the regular first name and last name that could give some really awesome names. For example, my son could have been Maxim ibn Programmer ibn Engineer ibn Projectionist Mamchenkov. How cool is that? For a change, most people’s full names would be interesting. The downside? Those families with the same profession running through generation would be really boring. But they would still have something to feel proud about. John ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor ibn Doctor Healer. I’d be more than willing to trust my health into his capable hands!

What would your name be like?