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Talking about driving your point home! Pictured above is a billboard created by the government of Nizhniy Novgorod, Russia, to discourage drunk driving. The text on the back side, according to English Russia, reads “Your body could have been here.”
Link via Jalopnik | Photo: English Russia
What good are spam, you say? How about saving the lives of hundreds of would-be victim of a terrorist bomber?
The woman, dubbed "The Black Widow," who Russian authorities suspect was part of the same militant group that killed 35 people at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport on Monday, was at a house preparing for the attack, which would have occurred on New Year’s Eve at Red Square. Instead, the woman’s mobile phone, which served as the device’s detonator, was activated hours early by a spam message wishing her a happy new year. She was killed, while a man and woman suspected of being accomplices escaped from the house.
Russian security forces told The Telegraph that phones are usually kept off until the last minute for detonation, but in this case, "the terrorists were careless."
The oldest fully wooden churches in the world are also architectural wonders. These are “multi-story, multi-cupola, single-block masterpieces.” Built 300 years ago on the Russian Kizhi island, they are called the Church of the Transfiguration and the Church of the Intercession. Read about them and see lots more pictures at Kuriositas. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Jordi Joan Fabrega)
This little feller, a European Hamster (yes, they also exist in Russia), turns out to be quite a feisty little rodent, as these two hapless Russians found out the hard way (they need the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!). In Soviet Russia, hamsters eat you!
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via metafilter
At first it looks as if the Tetris L block has messed up your game in this Czech building. However, upon further investigation, the block was planned to fall this way in order to keep the bottom floors of the building from being wiped out. See more views with Google Street View. Link -via reddit
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English Russia has pictures of the offices at the Russian LEGO headquarters. Look who greets you upon entering! They have whimsical LEGO creations in almost every room. I think my favorite may be the monkey. Link -Thanks, fraulein m!
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I can’t speak Russian, which is real shame right now, because I’m really curious about these Russian novels about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The illustrations are truly bizarre, such as the above scene. There are many, many more at the link.
Link via Geekosystem
According to Vladimir Moksunov, the leader of Russia’s toilet manufacturing association, his nation had the best public restrooms in the world until the Communist Revolution of 1917. Now it’s time for Russia to return to the top:
He recalled that on April 9, 1699, Peter the Great published a trailblazing decree which made it a punishable offence to throw sewage into the street.
“But now we do not even have official regulations for the quality of public lavatories except a document from 1972 that talks about cesspits,” he said, adding that Moscow had a “crying need for modern lavatories”.
The state of public lavatories is generally seen as a disgrace in Moscow, with citizens having to endure stinking and ageing facilities even though they usually have to pay for the privilege of using them.
Link | Photo from the Trans-Siberian Railway by Flickr user Jim Linwood used under Creative Commons license
In 1815, Cossacks returning from the Napoleonic Wars established a village in what is now the Chelyabinsk oblast of Russia. They named it Paris, and their descendants later erected a miniature Eiffel Tower. At the link, you can view several pictures of the site.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: Victor Borisov
Photo via Elena Chinarina
Forget haunted houses – in Russia, there are entire cities and towns that look haunted. Dark Roasted Blend explains:
We’d like to call them "ghost towns", but they are clearly not abandoned. Amazingly, people still live in them, go to work in harshest possible conditions (paradoxically making it the richest and mightiest industrial area in Russia) and then come "home" to relax in this inhuman weather, non-existing infrastructure, in dangerously dilapidated buildings…
Take, for example, Cherepovetz City ("City of Skulls") shown above. No need for skeletons, monsters, or for that matter, any special effects to make this town terrifying: Link
Russia has devised a way to enlarge its army while saving money. It’s begun making large numbers of inflatable — and fake — tanks, radar stations, and trucks:
What they lack in firepower, they make up for in flexibility: they are light and can be deployed quickly to deceive the enemy.
They are also very realistic. They are made of a special material that tricks enemy radar and thermal imaging into thinking they are real weapons.
The inflatables are stitched together at a former hot-air balloon factory.
Link via Slashdot | Photo: BBC News
When is a zebra not a zebra? When it’s a zebra crossing, but that’s only part of the story. A public safety advertising campaign in Russia hopes to draw motorists’ attention to pedestrians crossing the road by using zebras.
Only, police in the Russian capital could not get any zebras – so they painted black stripes on white horses instead.
They paraded the horses over crossings, forcing motorists to slow down and read road safety messages.
Thousands of pedestrians die in road accidents in Russia every year.
Perhaps they got the idea from a zoo in Gaza. Link to story. Link to video. -via Arbroath
Previously: The Only Zebra in Gaza
Flickr user Beniah Brawn has many sets of fascinating vintage photographs. Russian Types is a collection of early portraits of Moscow and St. Petersburg residents.
During the 1860s, several photographers based in Moscow and St. Petersburg produced series of cartes-de-visite showing Russian ‘types.’ These remarkable portraits provide a fascinating record of working-class townspeople, artisans, street vendors and peasants, some staged performing an activity, such as drinking tea or gaming, and some photographed in the performance of their occupation.
Read more and see 72 such photographs at Flickr. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
What are these people in Moscow lined up for? Jobs? Cash? No, about 30,000 people lined up for the opportunity to eat at the first McDonalds to open in the city, in 1990. -via Buzzfeed
This music video relates the history of the Soviet Union with a clever song set to the Tetris theme (Korobeiniki), both the music and the game itself. Music by Pig With The Face Of A Boy. Honestly, it’s awesome. Link
Watch Russian military tanks maneuvering as if they were dancing, as they perform in a precision drill called The Invincible and the Legendary.
Andrei Melanyin, seated with his legs crossed, watches the tanks practice from inside a beige tent in the bleachers. As the director of The Invincible and the Legendary, he’s looking for mistakes with a practiced eye. Melanyin is the head of the State Academic Bolshoi Theater of Russia, which includes the world-famous Bolshoi Theater, and a professor at the Institute of Modern Art. “They asked me to come in and do something theatrical,” he says of the government organizers of the event. “They wanted something more than just a technical demonstration.” The show he produced skips like a fake gemstone across Russian history, from the violent founding of the nation out of the Kiev city-state in the 12th century to demonstrations of hand-to-hand combat, set to the music of Ravel’s Bolero, by modern paratroopers. The program also includes a reenactment of a raid on a terrorist camp by attack helicopters, a display by combat dogs and a parade of heavy vehicles running obstacles. And the tanks—not just jumping ramps, but choreographed in a synchronized dance routine.
It’s part of the Russian Arms Expo going on this week. Read more about the tank ballet at Popular Mechanics. Link -via Boing Boing
Comments Off A leisure firm in Golubitskaya on the Azov Sea launched a donkey into the air on a parasail as a promotional stunt. After the video was released, Russian police began investigating the matter and may file charges of animal cruelty. If convicted, those responsible could be sentenced to up to two years. Link
Heavy rains in St. Petersburg flooded the streets. What’s a woman to do? This act of chivalry not only kept them dry, but also made the women recording the video squeal with delight. There’s also a bonus surprise that passes by. -via Arbroath
In 1970, during the Luna 17 mission, the Soviet space program landed the first ever remote-controlled vehicle on the moon. Lunokhod 1 spent eleven months taking pictures of the moon’s surface, and sent back about 20,000 images. It stopped communicating with the earth in 1971. Fast-forward 40 years, and read about how a new use has been found for Lunokhod 1 at the blog Starts With A Bang! Link
When Leonid Murlyanchik retired, he spat on the shuffleboard court and turned his back on early bird specials. This one man wrecking crew has spent every year since 1984 single-handedly designing and digging his own Russian metro; and you thought it was cool when your grandfather built you a clubhouse out of plywood…
Russian hero Leonid Murlyanchik has been building his metro alone since 1984. All materials are bought for his retired fee. Construction is not over yet.
View the source to see photos of this amazing undertaking.
Link – via BoingBoing
Comments Off Russian authorities shut down a seven-kilometer-long bridge over the Volga River in Volgograd last week after it started to wobble. Floodwaters loosened one support, which affected the stability of the entire bridge, which is the longest in Europe Russia. The video is reminiscent of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge just before it collapsed. The Volgograd bridge was completed less than a year ago. Link -via Arbroath
There have been many instances of online communities banding together to help someone in the real world. The latest incident involves Metafilter members who kept two Russian girls from becoming sex slaves when they arrived in the US yesterday. They were promised jobs from a questionable source who directed them to a strip club for an interview. Mefi members went into overdrive to investigate, stop the meeting, and get the girls official assistance despite the insinuation of threats from their contacts. The thread at Ask Metafilter unfolds like a movie script.
Your friend has become a victim of human trafficking. Her ‘hosts’ know that her fear of immigration authorities may prevent her from seeking help. That fear makes it possible for them to continue selling women into sexual slavery. (And yes, that’s exactly what it is. Your friend’s passport will be taken, she will be raped, she won’t be paid and she may never have the opportunity to contact the outside world again). But i promise you, if you contact the police, they will be far less concerned about the immigration status of two Russian women than they will be about potentially bringing down a human trafficking ring. Some jurisdictions even have specific amnesties which protect the victims of human trafficking in return for information about their traffickers. If your friend won’t contact the police, you should call them yourself.
posted by embrangled at 6:02 PM on May 19
Link -via Boing Boing
Update: Newsweek’s blog has an interview with one of the principals in the story. -Thanks, dontyoukeep!
The Dancing Forest is an unusual natural wonder in the Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia. Its trees have grown into twisted shapes, as though they were dancing. More images at English Russia.
Link | Photo: Vaplakal.com
A Russian short film from 1946, way before computer generated effects! -via Dark Roasted Blend
English Russia is a marvelous blog filled with pictures of strange and inventive things from Russia. One offering in its archives is a post about “local globes” — the practice of taking local maps and fitting them around globes so that one locality is imagined as a whole world:
In Russia and other post Soviet countries there were a real craze on independence after they finally got it with USSR collapse. Sometimes this took some weird forms like, for example, making the globes of their own country. Yes, those were just like regular globes we used to see on geography classes but instead the whole world only their own country was mapped on it.
These things were officially on sale and still you can buy something like “the globe of Ukraine” in shops of Kiev.
So then people went further and decided to make the globes of their local cities or even villages.
At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.
Link via Make | Image: Collage by Sean Michael Ragan of Make
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It’s bad enough, it would seem from reality television, to spend a few weeks in the same house as only a few others, but imagine spending your time, with five others, for 520 days, in a shipping container with barely enough space to stretch your legs. This is the setup the European Space Agency has created to test the psychological and physiological effects of such isolation which would be required in a journey to Mars. Two crew members have already been chosen, and once four more are found, the ‘journey’ will begin.
There will be communication with the outside world via radio and email, but radio communications will be delayed a full 20 minutes as they would be on a real interplanetary mission and emails will take twice that time to get through. Both will be disrupted periodically, because what’s the point of locking six men in a container if you don’t mess with their heads a bit?
Link – via mentalfloss
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by nmiller.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov is the President of Kalmykia, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation. He claims to have been visited by aliens. Now a member of parliament is asking the Russian government to investigate the incident and discover if Ilyumzhinov revealed any state secrets to the aliens:
he head of the republic said that the humanoid figures wore yellow spacesuits and gave him a tour of their craft, which he described as a “semi-transparent half-tube”. They had brought him home in the morning, just as his worried driver and two advisers were about to call a citywide search after finding his apartment empty.
“I am often asked which language I used to talk to them. Perhaps it was on a level of the exchange of ideas,” Mr Ilyumzhinov, who is also president of the international chess federation FIDE, told the Vladimir Pozner programme on Russia’s main First Channel.
This is not the first time that he has spoken of the alien encounter but yesterday his claims prompted Andrei Lebedev, an MP from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, to ask Mr Medvedev to order an official inquiry into the alleged alien agents to establish whether Mr Ilyumzhinov disclosed secret information.
Link via Gizmodo | Photo: Reuters
English Russia has a gallery of snowmobiles made from scrap and repurposed materials. The one above is arguably the most awesome:
This bulky machine constructed by one enthusiast retiree from the Russian city of Kirov is powered by the old Yamaha motorcycle engine and is entirely made of scrap. Fiberglass seat was formerly a part of a small carousel, gear shift lever was a part of an unidentified old Coca-Cola souvenir. The front skies are covered with fluoroplastic, a material with extremely low friction factor. The main distinctive feature of this snowmobile is a big wheel instead of a regular for such kind of transport rubber heavy caterpillar made of metal and rubber. For this reason this monster is very light which allows it to drive on fresh crumbly snow.
They also note that heat from the engine will warm both the passenger and the fuel tank. There are a number of other interesting contraptions in the gallery, several of which incorporate propellors in the style of a swamp airboat (the last one at the link uses a rotary lawnmower blade mounted on an inflated innertube!)
Link.
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Photographer Victor Borisov presents the abandoned churches of the Tula region of Russia. In the sad remains, you can see how magnificent these buildings were at one time.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by rappin.
Comments Off Forty-four years after he recorded the song we’ve come to know as Trolololo (previously at Neatorama), Eduard Khil is offering to sing the song again, this time with lyrics! -via Buzzfeed
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