Moscow 2009 - Red Army Choir

The most famous and well-known russian songs such as Kalinka, Katyusha, Ochi Chorneye are best performed, to my mind, by the Red Russian Army Choir. This choir has great voices , and the uniforms that go with it never fail to impress an audience.

However...they cannot go on singing year after year, decade after decade using the same dry army style. 'Kalinka' and 'Katyusha' are songs with a speedy tempo and require choreography, 'Ochi Chornye' needs a woman with black burning eyes on the stage. That's a new era , they have to adjust.

As kids we were crazy about singing the refrain of Kalinka (little snowberry ), and we derived pleasure from the fact that it generates the word... 'kaka' (shit, in many languages). It goes like this: Ka - lin-a- Kaka - lin-a - kaka - lin-a - ka-moya.

[This reminds me of something about the Israelis ( not the kids, the adults).They love the names of two places in the world: Guadalahara in Mexico, and Harare in Zimbabwe. Why so? Well, these two names include the word 'hara' which in spoken hebrew means 'shit'. So the stand-upist will say something like this to his audience: "Last year I was at the soccer games in Guadalahara. Believe me , I didn't lick any honey there." ].

Well, things become more serious when we get to Katyusha, the second song. This song is about a young girl , Katyusha (the diminutive of Katya) , longing for her beloved who's away on military service. So far so good, but the russians gave the song's name to the deadly rocket they had invented. The katyusha , mounted on truck for mobility, is the pride of its russian creators and the sweetheart of the arab terrorists, but our people in Israel get hurt by it.

Now, back to the Red Army Choir. I've been following their video clips of the last years, and there were some minor attempts to introduce slight changes, but the outcome was usually ridiculous. Their main problem seemed to be with Ochi Chornye (Black eyes ,also translated as Dark eyes). It has more than one version . but basically , the song is adressed to a woman with "black eyes, burning eyes/passionate and splendid eyes/how I love you ,how I fear you". It's kind of hard for some colonel in the best and most fearful army in the world to play the role of the unhappy lover in front of some gypsy-like woman.

Surprise, Surprise. The Red Army Choir finally did it all. in its guest appearance at the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 in Moscow . They sang all these three songs and more, with the appropriate addition of dancers and dark eyed women (nice compromise - the colonel doesn't have to sing to a particular dark-eyed woman; he's surrounded by several of them).

Notice the difference between the two soloists: the first one who sings Kalinka, is a light version, in white uniform with licked hair, more like Elvis Presley.
The soloist of Ochi Chorneye is the classical soloist of the Red Army. What a Man! What a Voice!

Enjoy!

NESSIE

Humoristic postcard featuring Nessie with a long neck

After all these years (since 1933), with so many film expeditions and sonar experiments ,the mystery hasn't been solved yet, that of the water creature from Lochness in Scotland, affectionately referred to by the diminutive Nessie. So far, a lot of theories, but nothing definitely identified.

'Ness' in the Hebrew language means 'miracle', and that makes me think of the many 'miracles' in that area of Inverness (the small capital city of the Scottish Higlands) and the Lochness lake, due to the phenomena of Nessie.

First and foremost, it brings a lot of tourists who bring a lot of money and so help develop the place . The area attracts people of high quality : scientists, journalists, photographers and others who 'put the region on the map'. Moreover, from my brief visit here in the past, I recall feeling an unusual inner peace (calm, relaxation) and an unusual silky quality of my skin and hair. To my mind, it is the presence of something undefinable (Nessie??) about this part of Scotland that makes one feel here good in a strange way.

Anyway , the lake (Lochness) is long and straight and there's a castle (ruins of a castle, more precisely) on its bank. From what I'd read and heard, the sightings of Nessie occurred mostly in the area around this Urquhart castle. Well, I have a theory of my own . It goes like this: I say there's no smoke without fire. Too many testimonies indicate the presence of some special creature. some sort of animal or fish with both aquatic and non -aquatic skills in this area of the lake. To get to it , the castle of Urquhart will have to be completely demolished; this castle is, in my humble opinion the key to the mystery . But that won't happen , the demolition, as the castle is considered an historical, preserved site - part of the scottish heritage. So, the mystery will probably remain unsolved for a long, long time - perhaps forever.

Here are some photos with the castle and the lake from various angles.