Postcard from Bishkek

According to the Doomsday Clock, mankind is just three minutes away from annihilation … fortunately it is not a “real” clock and doesn’t measure “real time”. Actually, there is a clock – or, at least, a clock face – in the University of Chicago, in the offices of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The […]

It’s Freethinker’s Day today, which is also known as Thomas Paine Day! The day has been commemorated  since the 1990s when the Thomas Paine Foundation began celebrating his birthday and, at about the same time, the ‘Truthseeker’ magazine began celebrating Freethinkers Day on the same day.  Its purpose is to educate people about Paine’s work and the importance […]

The other day I was doing some research for one of our other sites: tastes.kg. Normally we are looking for ethnic dishes – Kyrgyz traditional cuisine, Uzbek, Uighur … that sort of thing – but Kyrgyzstan, (and Bishkek in particular), offers a wide variety of dishes. As it happens, I was looking for vegetarian dishes, […]

They say that there is an element of truth behind every myth or legend. Take, for example, the case of Terra Australis, the large unknown landmass that was proposed in antiquity by people like Aristotle and Ptolemy.  They had no evidence of its existence and it seems that their justification was basically a question of […]

About a year ago I was invited by Victor Kadyrov, the General Director of the Rarity Book Shop in Dom Druzhba – Friendship House – at the side of the main Ala Too Square to visit the shop. I think it’s the largest bookshop on Bishkek, (I don’t know the actual figures), but it could […]

Last week I mentioned that it was Kid Inventors’ Day … and gave examples of just some of the things inventions that have been dreamt up by kids … one of them being the Popsicle … an iced cream on a stick. Well, today is International Popsicle Day.   The invention of the Popsicle is […]

Serendipity – finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it. This week saw a BBC documentary about a serendipitous moment that led to a surprising discovery … about an American breed of horses found in a remote mountain valley here in Kyrgyzstan. It’s a fascinating story that is well worth telling … […]

Over the years I have been a number of interesting questions … and last week another one arrived in the email: On the steppes, the nomads presumably have a healer of some sort in each tribe. Does that person have an honorific title or descriptor of some sort? There was some additional information … about […]

There’s something special about the the number forty – although, as a Brit, I should say fourty. It’s a composite number – which basically means that it is not a Prime number, (that it has more than two factors – 1 and itself). It’s a semiperfect number, which means that it is possible to get […]

A short while ago, I wrote a postcard about the difficulties that Russian speakers, who are learning English, experience in telling the time when learning to tell the time. Well, it’s been pointed out to me that it’s just as complicated and difficult in Russian … and also in Kyrgyz.