Okoldovana, ocharovana’ by St Petersburg. Aka “Dragotsennaya ty moya zhenshchina”.
Languages used:
Russian
Animals featured:
None
This was my 100th video, and so I wanted to mark it out in a special way, and nothing is more special to me than my wife, and therefore it was a natural thing to do to dedicate this film to her, and to show my viewers a few of the photos I’ve taken of her over the years.
The music playing in the background is one of my wife’s favourite Russian songs, by the group Sankt Peterburg. The song’s title “Dragotsennaya Ty moya zhenshchina” . This means my precious woman, so I thought it was appropriate.
This is a gallery type video intended to showcase photography, but some of these shots were done by friends.
Acapello rendition of ‘Vdol’ po ulitse, aka “Snow flurries”
Languages used:
Russian, English
Animals featured:
None
This video was made as a response to Kenbank, one of my first subbers and a good YT friend. Ken had made a video singing the Russian staple “snow flurries”, or “Vdol’ po ulitse metelitsa metyot”, and since on that particular morning, despite it being only 2nd November, we did indeed have snow flurries out on our terrace, I decided to sing the song a cappella, showing an example of snow flurrying, as it were, while I did it!
Early YT legend (and one of my sources) Brookers did a muckaround video called #1 Numa fan, to which someone else called Ognog responded with #2 and this was intended as a response to that, although right now that film has faded into obscurity with only 70 thousand hits to Brookers’ 7 million for the original muckabout, and this one by is only had 700. Leading to the observation that you loose two zeroes off the end whenever you go back one “generation” in spoofing something. Only one in a hundred people actually look at responses, it would seem!
What this all is is part of that whole craze from about 5 years back about the so-called “Numa” song. It was actually “Dragostea din tei” or “Love from the linden trees” by Hajducii, or the Outlaws, a Romanian group who managed to become the Summer hit of the year with this dancey tune. The lyrics to the chorus go “Vrei sa pleci dar nu ma, nu ma iei, nu ma nu ma nu me iei” and the repetition of “nu ma” gave the song its English name. It’s a bit like the Japanese hit Sukiyaki, which received that name as nobody could say “Ue wo muite arukou”.
The chorus in Romanian actually means “You want to leave, but you are not taking me” and the nu ma is ‘Not me’, so that it sounds like the “not me” song.
Oktoberfest is, for Germans, one of the most important dates in the Christian calendar, but while drinkning copious amounts of alcohol and swaying from side to side, spare a thought for the North Koreans, and their leader King John the second, who needs to give up his weapons testing. Count Sproey von Weytzentrenner has no truck with Communists, and is sure that King John of Korea feels likewise, and sings him “Born Free” in a hamster’s voice, accompanied on the beerstein.
Watching this I can’t help feeling a lot of reminiscence as it was only 5 years ago but still my wife was able to walk freely around the home without crutches. How fine she looks in this video.
A whistled version of Colonel Bogey (Creative commons)
Languages used:
English
Animals featured:
Monty the ginger cat
I used to be able to make my old cat come by whistling Colonel Bogey like this, but Monty was a one-man cat, and could only be summoned by my father. He was at first my sister’s cat, but when she started to live with her later husband, the cat needed a new home as like most young people these days he is an allergist for cats.
Unfortunately Monty passed away a couple of years back, having lived about 17 years, which is a ripe old age. His presence lives on a bit in the house in a way. I still go gingerly into the kitchen when the light is out from having needed to do so before in order not to walk into him.
The big picture - we only saw a handful of the total available!
Occasionally these blog posts will contain more than one video – especially if the video is one item which was split up into separate items as this day chasing chateaux in the Loire Valley was split up in order to keep them on HD in YouTube.
They are all one day out, and they can best be enjoyed from beginning to end as one piece, hence putting them into a single post.
I don’t always do this, but sometimes I just feel like it.
OK, so here are the videolinks in order of their appearance:
Here we can see George and me enjoying an evening walk and meeting some horses, over in Cussay, France. George gets used to horses during his hippotherapy, and so it’s no surprise that he has no fear of them, more surprising is the way the horses came over and wanted to see George. They seemed almost to treat this little autistic boy as a guest of honour, specially showing themselves to him. Animals sometimes have an understanding which is lacking in human beings.
One of my Polish viewers who now lives in the UK didn’t believe that concerts on Grandma and Granda‘s day (near the end of January) are marked with concerts all over Poland, as she didn’t remember any from her school days.
The fact is that this piece of Polish charm was actually imported from the United States during the 1980s! It seems like the typical piece of socialism hangover, but the funny thing about Poland in the eyes of an Englishman is that a lot of things which we are tempted at first glance to write off to the Communist era actually has a completely different explanation.
That’s why you still see May holidays, Red plaques by buildings, military parades all over the place, grandparents’ day concerts and the habit of putting the water in the cup in restaurants without the bag – which I always assumed to be an East Europeanism until I got precisely the same in the States. Some of these things which the British would wave off as Sovietisms actually come from a totally different direction.
If Freddy Chopper had really liked Warsaw, nobody was stopping him staying! As it was he left even despite the fact that Konstancja was there. That's how desparate he was to go...
ANYWAY, this was Sophie’s first ever piano recital in front of a hall full of people. We thought she was going to be given a proper piano and not this joke of an instrument. Notice also how the music teacher doesn’t give any credit for the talents of the piano playing kids to their teachers (Sophie’s teacher is sitting with Irina and me in the audience cringing with the amateurishness of it all) as naturally there is nothing of the sort available in the State curriculum. The appalling song at the end about Warsaw being Chopin‘s city (which he dreamed of nothing but escaping, despite his liking for one girl there) which has been shoved out at kids in all the Warsaw schools just as a recorded karoke piece – although the sheet music is available on the internet just in case any Warsaw school music teacher can actually read musical notation. Some pieces were played by the music teacher not on the tape recorder, that fine baroque instrument, but on a guitar of which 1 of the 6 strings was absent and I think she knew a good 4 or 5 different chords.
I didn’t write all of this in the YT description and discussion, I’ve saved it for here as I like to give you a separate perspective on here, or why would you come? The videos are all on YT and some of you have already watched them once.
Please add your thoughts on musical education in schools, including answering the poll on what the government policy should be.
Live coverage of developments in Syria, as 47 people are killed in Homs since midnight - just hours after Russia said Assad claims he is "fully committed" to peace.
Sir Richard Branson has weighed in on a race row which erupted after a white member of a Virgin Active gym launched a racist diatribe at a black woman during a spinning class.
Sir Richard Branson has weighed in on a race row which erupted after a white member of a Virgin Active gym launched a racist diatribe at a black woman during a spinning class.
To evaluate this claim, the author reviewed both the textbooks used for life science classes at the college where he teaches and those that he used in his past university course work.
The word evolution is such a loaded term today that it is turning off a large segment of the population. Shrewd evolutionists have been sneaking in their worldview through the back door.
Really most sincerely dead, origins smorgasbord, dinosaur freeway, Darwin’s “beautiful contrivances,” mutational secrets of a virus, and more in this week’s News to Note.
If they are to be consistent, old-earth creationists are forced to believe in a local flood. Can they provide adequate responses to the prosecution’s case?
Окружной суд польского города Новы-Сонч постановил выдать России одного из фигурантов игорного дела - бывшего первого заместителя прокурора Московской области Александра Игнатенко.
Телеведущий заявил, что может закрыть свою программу на российском Первом канале, если ситуация с цензурой не изменится. Гнев ведущего вызвал вырезанный из эфира на Москву эпизод о Навальном.
Российский премьер-министр и кандидат в президенты призвал представителей религиозных конфессий не допустить в России развития событий, подобных тем, которые происходят в странах Ближнего Востока. […]
Верховный суд России оставил без удовлетворения заявление одного из основателей "Яблока" Григория Явлинского, оспаривающего отказ Центризбиркома регистрировать его кандидатом в президенты России. […]
Жители сирийского города Хомс говорят, что обстрел утром 8 февраля был одним из самых тяжелых из тех, которым они подвергались. После огневых залпов, в город двинулась бронетехника.
Сергей Насонов, эксперт Независимого экспертно-правового совета, объясняет, с какого момента российское законодательство позволяет судить уже умерших людей.
More than twelve months have passed since the Management Buy-Out (MBO) of Atlas Converting Equipment Ltd. from Bobst Group in late October 2010 - and 2011 proved to be a very busy year of achievement for the world-leading manufacturer of Atlas & Titan slitter rewinders, with sales and order bookings exceeding the company’s expectations.
At Fespa Digital Barcelona, Zünd is proudly presenting the brand-new S3 line of cutters. Following the introduction of G3 in 2008, Zünd Cut Center Software in 2010, and the fully automatic Board Handling System in 2011, Zünd continues its string of exciting new releases at this show, proving yet again why it is truly “Your first choice in digital cutting”. E […]
The Russian dairy producer Galactika Group has recently invested in new packaging technology and packaging in order to make its products more appealing.
According to the latest figures from the AMI (agricultural market information service) in Bonn, 850 million tonnes of vegetables and 725 million tonnes of fruit were produced worldwide in 2011.
