Monthly Archives: September 2011
Just a few thoughts to round off the quarter
Happy 400th birthday to thee
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the end of another quarter, known in the mouth of the people as Q3 – 2011. You can call me a typical accountant if you like, but I always tend to be aware of these quarter ends and I tend to have certain aims and goals for what I like to achieve both professionally and in my hobbies each quarter and so days like today are an opportunity to take stock of where I am.
Doing so generated just a couple of thoughts which I thought I’d like to share with you.
I had a nice long time in the UK, and was supposed to be taking time off, but in the event work kept me fairly involved even though at a distance, and I made little progress on the writing projects I had in mind, especially the Goldlist book and the workbook for the Huliganov Russian course. Hence these are not really ready to show yet, apologies to those of my viewers and readers whom I may have led to hope that they would be. Work has to come first, I have to be able to look after my family.
It’s also three quarters through the 400th anniversary year of the KJV and I also didn’t get far with the readings of the KJV I wanted to do – this is all in the last quarter now if I’m going to do it at all in this year.
In Japanese I made a slight breakthrough while discovering a way to adapt goldlist principles to working through the Heising book and getting the best of both worlds – more on that when I get further on with it. In any event I registered for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 5, which is on Decmber 4th in Warsaw, which is a target to work towards,
World events seem to be leaving something to be desired, with hurricanes in the UK, people defrauding UBS out of money that makes Nick Leeson look like a small timer, and the continuing threat of the EURO going down the tubes at the hands of defaults by Greece and other weaker countries, as well as a few nights of crazy behaviour in the UK by vandals and malcontents out for some fun at the expense of working people have made the last quarter a very strange time. We are edging nearer and nearer to a precipice. Winter will draw in soon, the nights will be longer, the days colder, and we are going to be in for a long and hard winter.
Last winter I wrote an article explaining to UK people and others from places where the winters are normally mild how to go about surviving a Siberian style winter. I recommend you read this once again and think about it.
https://huliganov.tv/2010/12/16/huliganovs-winter-hinters/ is the place to go for it.
Many thanks again to my loyal viewers and readers, which here on this blog currently number 96. Thanks especially to those of you who join in on discussions, I hope for more of that. If I am sometimes slow in getting to moderate them, sorry. I have to keep the mod thing on because otherwise a lot of spam will get on, which thanks to the new technology is not the case at the moment, and sometimes I don’t have the ability to go online every evening.
Every comment is valued, even if I don’t have anything to say back to some.
Related articles
- KJV in the USA: Folger Institute’s King James Bible conference begins (manifoldgreatness.wordpress.com)
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To Elena – the woman I love
| Playout date: | 2 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – heavy use |
| Location: | Various |
| Other people featured: | My wife, Elena |
| Genre: | Gallery type (based on photographs) |
| Music used: | 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.
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- The Kremlin’s Eye turns to Piter (larussophobe.wordpress.com)
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Snow flurries
| Playout date: | 2 November 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | my wife, Elena |
| Genre: | Family, Song acapello, minimal intro |
| Music used: | 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!
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Title: RL101-6 The next 5 – 2/3 of the way
| Playout date: | 27 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – heavy use |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Lesson |
| Music used: | I can’t help falling in love, Elvis Presley, karaoke. |
| Languages used: | English and Russian |
| Animals featured: | None |
We look at another five letters, which is enough to take us two thirds of the way through the Russian alphabet. That won’t mean being able to read two thirds of the words, of course, as most words are five or more letters long, and it only takes one of the these letters to be in the third not yet learned for the whole word not be readable. However from this point on, the volume of words that we can indeed understand in full begins to increase out of proportion to the remainder of the journey.
Today’s letters are still letters deriving from Greek and not looking the same as in Latin, however these letters are also not written the same as they were in the original Greek. That’s basically the idea of the course – back at the beginning we took a look at the six letters which are the same in Cyrillics as in the Latin alphabet we are probably familiar with ( hint – you’re reading it now) after which we looked at letters whose form in Cyrillics look like Latin letters but which sound different, and in each case they were also in Greek, and the Greek sound is basically the same as the Russian one. We then went on to look at letters which are pretty much the same in the Cyrillic alphabet as they are in Greek, but which don’t resemble Latin letters and are therefore less likely to cause confusion. The natural progression here is to look at the letters which really derive from Greek, but which also look slightly different to the way they looked in Greek. This will be followed by letters which derived from Hebrew instead, and then the mop up of the few letters left over at the end. That’s basically the approach we’ve taken in this course to the Russian alphabet.
Related articles
- RL101 – 5 Revision of the first 17 letters (huliganov.tv)
- Podlinniki: the Manuals of Icon Painting and How to Read Them (russianicons.wordpress.com)
- Canonical Design Team: History of the Alphabet (Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Latin, Arabic) (design.canonical.com)
- Shape-based transliteration between alphabets? (ask.metafilter.com)
LPR Super Party
| Playout date: | 24 October 2006 |
| Camera: | WM Capture/Recorder/Converter |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Nowy Swiat, Warsaw |
| Other people featured: | Not known |
| Genre: | Nicked for subtitling |
| Music used: | None |
| Languages used: | Polish |
| Animals featured: | None |
This is probably the first example I can think of of when I have simply taken a film from another source and added subtitles in translation. As a rule I don’t do much third-party stuff on my channel, but there are three cases where I do. The one case was the radio stuff which Stuart Heron captured the video for and I added to my channel with the agreement of play radio. Another case is Soviet films which actually belong to everybody and which have not always been shown in full on YouTube. In these cases I have put them on if I had them. The third case is where I have taken something which is vailable and popular but not yet in English and I’ve taken it in order to produce the English version with a translation given as subtitles. This is an example of this case.
It has become one of my most popular videos, and to a degree I think I foresaw that it would be. I uploaded this from the office while working with another colleague, and that colleague and I were checking back every so often looking at the views which hit a hundred on the first day. I wasn’t used to that back then and I’m still not really used to it although it happened one or two times since. One thing is sure Polish people are heavy users of the Internet especially you Tube and they do like their politics.
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#3 Numa Fan muckaround
| Playout date: | 22 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | None |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | Sophie |
| Genre: | Family, musical muckaround |
| Music used: | |
| Languages used: | Romanian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
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.
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Come thou fount of every blessing
| Playout date: | 22 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Logitech Webcam |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Home |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Hymn |
| Music used: | Cyberhymnal.net’s arrangement of hymn tune “Hyfrydol“ |
| Languages used: | English |
| Animals featured: | None |
The beautiful hymn by Robert Robinson, this time sung to the tune Hyfrydol.
I did both voices, the melody and the bass part. Can you work out which is the one I’m singing on the video?
An interesting story about this hymn, courtesy of cyberhymnal.org where I also got the midi (this is allowed by them, by the way, as long as you credit, which I am doing)
Robert Robinson had a difficult time with his faith in the latter part of his life, having been converted at 17 and having written this and other hymns as a young man. The story is told of how one day, he encountered a woman who was studying a hymnal, and she asked how he liked the hymn she was humming. In tears, he replied, “Madam, I am the poor unhappy man who wrote that hymn many years ago, and I would give a thousand worlds, if I had them, to enjoy the feelings I had then.”
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- Sabbath Evening Post #19: A Hymn That I Love (bluemustang5.wordpress.com)
- A Commentary on Hymns (sjbrown58.wordpress.com)
- Behind The Hymns: Tis Sweet To Sing The Matchless Love (harmonyavenue.wordpress.com)
- Your Sunday Hymn: I Heard The Voice Of Jesus Say (nicedeb.wordpress.com)
- Hymn of Praise: #1 Praise to the Lord (thedisconsolategarden.wordpress.com)
