The Supreme Tradition of Spelling Bees

We posted simultaneously (#33 and #34). I take it no one was injured, good thing.

Hi shilgia, please find the answer to 734 in 733.

And about Máxima... if you are going to be the Queen of a country where you were not born in, you have to be extremely careful about what you say, specially if you are going to talk about the esence of the people of that country.

What amazes me is that she must have several advisors to assist her with her speechs, they should have imagine that something like that could bring up some criticism.

Yes, but it's hard to predict what will ignite criticism. As I said in #734, her speech was rather fluffy: Everyone should feel at home here, because everyone is different, and because everyone is different, everyone should be welcome, and people should not be excluded based on their skin color, yada yada yada -- not much news. (I thought.)

I knew a dog once who was struck by lightning. His owner had taken him out for a nocturnal ramble and the dog had cocked his leg under a tree when the tree was hit by lightning. The only immediate signs of damage were a blue tracing, like veins or tree branches, on his abdomen, and that he acted listless and stupid for a week or two. He had trouble remembering things like where his dish was, and at first all he wanted to do was sit quietly beside people, when he had been a very lively little guy.

Over time, though, he returned to normal. Except for one very peculiar effect. He had been a champion ball-playing dog, loved nothing better than to play with a ball or anything that even LOOKED like a ball (he lived in an apple orchard so he had lots of fun once apples started falling off the trees). He was so obsessed with playing ball it was annoying. And he had been very clever about knowing if you were trying to fake him out by pretending to throw the ball one way and actually tossing it in the opposite direction. He could always anticipate this and it was simply not possible to trick him this way.

But after the lightning strike, at first he didn't even play ball. He eventually got back to his old habit of wanting to play catch for hours. But he never regained the ability to know you were faking him out. Apparently whatever tiny circuit was responsible for that one behaviour never came back, even though he lived for several more years after that.

Lightning can do strange and amazing things. Interesting about that fried cord, Loscar. And fortunate no bigger damage was done!

Turnipseed, that's fascinating. I wonder what caused the blue tracing. I remember seeing a documentary years ago about people who'd survived serious injuries (from crowbars through the skull to lightning strikes) and had undergone various behavioral changes. I suppose if I had been struck by lightning I would count myself lucky if the only upshot were an inability to identify a fake-out.

Loscar, I'm glad to hear no serious damage was done. I have been off for some time because of a move in progress: getting K and me to Tajikistan from Helsinki. I was recovering from some debilitating virus, and she got an entirely unrelated one--that's my story and I'm sticking to it--just when the packing frenzy was at its height last week (she's still sick). We made it here OK in any case.

The good news is that there's a wireless internet connection in our temporary digs, but the bad news is that it's about one-tenth the speed of a typical connection in Helsinki, so TT loads slowly as does everything else. Also, one doesn't need to wait for lightning to strike to have one's laptop fried--power surges and outages abound here.

I came via St. Petersburg, arriving in the international terminal and departing from the domestic and "Near Abroad" terminal. The contrast was interesting. In the international terminal, smartly dressed people with designer luggage passed billboards for brokerage services, wireless internet and the like. I had a chicken quesadilla and Oreo milkshake at the TGI Friday's (a US chain), under a sign that promised "cocktails, life, freedom," rather than "bread, peace and land." I was then escorted (no Russia visa, so I was a bit of a bureaucratic curiosity) to the other terminal, which was vast and dark and had seen no decorator's hand since SALT I. The sign on that terminal's facade still reads "Hero-City Leningrad."

CK

Your descriptions of the terminal differences are great, Chris. Were you allowed to take pictures? I imagine all of Russia is a huge Potemkin village. They figure no foreigners will be going to the domestic terminal or away from the most common tourist sites in St Petersburg or Moscow, so haven't bothered modernizing and cleaning it up. I just read that the last Lenin statue was taken down in, I believe, Tajikistan, but it might have been another of the stans.

Glad to hear all is okay, Loscar. A tree in front of my sister's house in Canada was struck by lightning and killed instantly. The city department guys who came to cut it down told her she was lucky it had been alive. If it had been dead, it would have caught fire like a huge torch.

(no Russia visa, so I was a bit of a bureaucratic curiosity)

that's interesting to me. you didn't fly from piter to helsinki did you? how long would that take, 15 minutes?

I didn't have a charged battery for my camera, and probably wouldn't have taken the chance with photos anyway because of security sensitivities. The last time I was tempted to take a picture in an airport was in Bahrain a couple of years ago, as groups of men in white robes and headdresses trouped past a singing, dancing, robotic storefront Santa with gyrating hips. I tried then, but none of the photos came out very well because of the lighting.

There were many Lenin statues left in Kyrgyzstan when I went seven or eight years ago, but that may well have changed. I know (thanks to LP) that the main one here in Dushanbe was moved to a park and replaced with a statue of a local hero. The Stalin statue is still up in Gori, Georgia as far as I know.

CK

Yes, mathilda, I flew from Helsinki to St. Petersburg (40 minutes), then waited there all day eating comfort food, then flew to Dushanbe. I looked into the relative costs for the flight versus the train (five hours or so from Helsinki, and a pleasant trip), but it would have meant getting an expensive Russian visa. Also, in one of those interesting quirks of air travel, the flight starting in Helsinki was cheaper by hundreds of euros than the nonstop from St. Petersburg.

CK

Glad to hear there was no other damage, Loscar.

Chris: There is a really bad flu going around; I thought last week I might be coming down with it but it's just a cold.

Too bad about the Bahraini picture. You're a hero, by the way, enduring Oreo milkshakes from TGIF. You couldn't pay me.

One time at Ben-Gurion Airport I was told by security to take a picture (to demonstrate that my camera wasn't a bomb) and instinctively and stupidly started to frame and focus a shot and then realized that I really didn't want a picture of Ben-Gurion airport, especially since it might have meant difficulties if I had had the reel of film developed in Saudi Arabia, where I was living at the time, and any Hebrew was visible in the shot. So I took a picture of the floor. But the guard had not objected when I started to look through the viewfinder.