30th
I’ve hesitated to confess this to my Tumblr followers, who like having me close by, but I’m now in Moscow, and will be for a while.
That said, Moscow is a pretty good place to keep up on events. For one thing, every time the NYSE goes down, up goes the ruble against the dollar. But since the Russian markets open eight hours earlier than the American markets, they have time to guess which way the market’s going to go; yesterday morning, for example, they guessed the bailout would go through, and the dollar strengthened. I should have traded all my dollars right then.
Anyway, after a couple of weeks of acclimatization, I’ve finally settled down to watch some tv. It turns out we have CNN. And there was Sarah Palin on her infamous Katie Couric appearance—it turned out I’d never heard her talk. And immediately I thought: Well the great American people might elect a black man; they could elect a Jew; it is even possible that we will someday elect a woman. But, by gum, the great American people will never elect a Canadian!
Then I checked online and it turned out the linguists have been through this already, here in particular. It includes the following image of Palin’s speech pattern:
And this from a commenter:
In case anyone is interested, I found the website of the Bethel, AK public radio station. Bethel is the largest city in the region populated by the Yupik people. Of course, we don’t know where the announcers are from, but some of the characteristics of the female announcer’s speech do (in my admittedly quickly and unscientifically formed opinion) sound quite similar to Sarah Palin’s:
http://www.kyuk.org/news.htm
Amazing. The internet will never die.
Another treat on the television has been the Russian hockey league. Do you remember when Channel 6, the last redoubt of independent news broadcasting in Russia, got shut down a few years ago for its oppositional broadcasts? And they replaced it with a sports channel, to drug the people? Well, that was terrible and all, but on the other hand they now have a round-the-clock sports channel. They also have a new hockey league, the KHL, and so they pretty much have no choice—they haven’t discovered poker yet, I think—but to broadcast the KHL all day. It’s pretty great. The camera work is shoddy, and the level of play is not as high as the NHL, but on the other hand, for example, Jaromir Jagr, the Czech magician, as they call him here, who left the Rangers this summer to sign with the Omsk Avangard, is able to do things here that he was no longer able to do in the NHL. But more than anything it’s just nice to have hockey on. It’s like living in Canada, like Sarah Palin. Also it’s easier to keep an eye on the Somali pirates from here.
Finally, a little Harper’s Index for you:
Number of recent (post-Soviet) Russian films I watched over the weekend: 2
Number of them in which a pretty blond woman was viciously raped by a Chechen: 2.
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