Archive sections: ‘Living in Interesting Times’
I expected to spend most of my time this week writing about the election campaign which has now been underway for a week. I am not sure, however, what I can actually write. There are a number of posters and banners lining the streets for this party or that. The loudspeaker vans have been going [...]
There’s a fascination with statistics here. I know that in the West we also have a fascination with numbers, but it seems to be taken to extreme here. I suppose it is a consequence of the culture of “the plan” which was so prevalent in Soviet times. Everything was done to make sure that you [...]
If last week was a Three Day Week, this week has been a Four Day Week. Friday marked the end of Ramadan, and is known here as Orozo Ait, (although elsewhere in the Muslim world it has different names – for example: “Eid al Fitr”), and is a public holiday. Because it is based on [...]
Have you noticed how history seems to have a habit of repeating itself. The actual circumstances vary in detail, of course, but the situations and the way that people react often bear remarkable similarities. I have written before how struck I was by the similarities between how the situations evolved in Russia in 1917 and [...]
In many ways, this week has been a quite week but also a strange week … it has provided to be a hiatus in lots of different ways.
You might expect that, as a former Maths teacher, I do not suffer from Arithmophobia – the fear of numbers. Indeed, one of the books that I brought with me when I cam out here 15 years ago was “The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers.” Oddly enough it has no entry for 57, [...]
Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, (HHGTTG or H2G2 to aficionados), may be famous for his answer to “the great question of … Life, the Universe and Everything … “, (that is: “forty-two”), but his quirky sense of humour also resulted in a number of interesting “one liners”. One of [...]
The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, (HIPC), operated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), was established in 1966 to offer debt relief and low interest loans to countries that qualified for the programme so that they could reduce their external debt to sustainable levels. It was felt that no poor country [...]
Michael J. Fox encountered a number of dilemmas as Marty McFly in the 1985 Stephen Spielberg film, “Back to the Future”. One of those dilemmas gave the film it’s title – having been thrust 50 years into the past, how was Fox/McFly to return home? The film was a great success: it was the highest [...]
Doughs occupy an important place in Kyrgyz cuisine. The popular, ancient, ritual dish of boorsok is cut pieces of rolled dough deep fried in oil. They form a traditional table “decoration” and are produced in large quantities to be spread over the dastorkon (tablecloth) at every major celebration.
