Wild Hippos In Columbia? Seriously? #morefon2018 #moreфон2018 #Columbia Day 6 I was greatly surprised when I saw a recent video from the Vox youtube channel that tells a story of a bunch of African hippos that have lived almost freely and have proliferated in Columbia since 1980s. In that time the Colombian narcobaron, Pablo Escobar, had so much cash from cocaine trade, so that he was spending $2,500 a month only to rubber bands to fasten banknotes together. He decided to pour that money into building a private zoo with elephants, giraffes and other big African animals. And also he bought four wild hippos. After the killing of Escobar, the authorities transferred all the large animals to the local zoos, except for the hippos, that were found too difficult and expensive to remove. The hippos seem to be very glad to live in what scientists call "the hippos's paradise". In their new home there are no predators or devastating draughts. The Colombian climate is warm and moist and food is in abundance all year. In these conditions the numbers of hippos began to rise quickly. Their number is soared from 4 to 40 in 2018 and continue growing. Scientists are afraid that the situation can go out of control as the hippos are aggressive and dangerous animals, and can pose a threat to people and indigenous ecosystem. As fo my opinion, I rather welcome the presence of hippos in the land of Columbia. The big mammals, or 'megafauna', lived in America not that long ago, just tens of thousands of years, before having gone extinct. So, maybe returning the survived representatives of that megafauna is not that bad.

Is Kino gradually becoming a recognizable band in the world? morefon2018 moreфон2018 Day 5 I have accidentally noticed an interesting thing over a recent couple of weeks: one of the youtube music videos of Kino, THE Russian rock band of 1980s, is gaining popularity with a respectful pace. The video is called "Kino - Spokoynaya Noch" and has over 560,000 views at the moment, with an increase of around 150,000 views over the recent two or three weeks and a daily growth of 6-9,000 views. Not a big deal, you will say: every day millions of videos grow in Youtube. And you will be certainly right, but one thing puts this one apart, at least for me: it has only Latin title and, based upon comment section, around half of the total amount of views came from non-Russian-language countries. It's interesting to ponder what causes such a splash of interest to a band which is little known outside the former Soviet Union. The answer seems to be able to be tracked down though. PewDiePie, the world's top blogger with 74 million subscribers, used a small sample of this song in one of his videos several months ago. As the melody is catchy and distinctive because of Viktor Tsoy's unique timbre, the first big wave of new listeners definitely came from PewDiePie. But it happened months ago, and what causes the recent wave is not fully clear to me. Maybe it started from him and Youtube algorithms did the rest of the job. Actually, I was planning to write a bigger essay about Kino and Viktor Tsoy and maybe I will do it later. But now I would just recommend this song to everyone who seek stunning but not a well-known piece of music.

My current approach to learning new words (Morefon#3) #morefon2018 #moreфон2018 Day 3 Yesterday I talked about H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Colour Out Of Space". To add a few words to that topic, today I want to reveal my current method of learning new words on the example of my reading of this story. It's rather simple and consist of two steps. On the first step, when you see a new word, you copy it to the Excel file with some additional information. On the second step, when your reading of a piece of literature is over, you import these Excel notes to Anki. The Excel sheet would typicly have three columns. In the first one you copy the new word, the second column is usially for copying the sentence in which this word occured, and in the third column you copy down an explanation from the dictionary. The main purpose of this process is to effortlessly create a list of new words, ready to export to Anki. It's tiresome to do this as a single and isolated task, but doing it that way is just a little prolongation of natural process of looking up a new word. Importing the whole list to Anki is much easier and time-effective than creating every single card by hand. It is important to note that certainly NOT all of new words that you run into should be imported. It's meaningless to learn the vast majority of the nouns that way, because they come naturally. But adjectives and verbs are a lot more tricky, as their right usage is dependent on collocations and context. So, I just exclude the nouns from the final export list. That method gives you a little bonus: you can see your statistics. Lovecraft's story discussed above consists of around 12,400 words, of which 179 were copied into the Excel sheet and 107 was subsequently added to Anki.

A Few Words About Lovecraft (Morefon#2) #moreфон2018 #morefon2018 [Note: Morefon2018 is a 30-day challenge of keeping public dairy in English, announced here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhrGBY27kY , Russian language] Day 2 Today I want to say some words about H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Colour Out Of Space". After watching one of the Dmitry's videos, devoted to Lovecraft's works, I decided to pick this one to read because of Dmitry's emphasis on this story and the reasons why he prefers it to the other stories of Lovecraft. The point is that most of his stories include depiction of monsters of various kind, with tentacles and other visible physical features. But in "The Colour Out Of Space" the monster is of a different kind: it's not physical in terms of our reality, but more supernatural. Dmitry pointed out, as I recall, that such approach is more subtle, and it leaves more work on a reader's imagination. This was quite close to my own beliefs and I got to reading. And the story did not disappoint me. It is brilliantly written and exceptionally good in creating the mood of dangerous mystery. Yes, I think it is more of a mystery than of horror. The whole story holds a reader in awe before a hidden, powerful, obscure and evil thing. A reader doesn't know what to expect from it, he guesses of it's origin and purpose. As the moster is hidden and not even tangible, a reader comes to know it from its doings. And the doings delivered through the details. That's where Lovecraft is doing his magic. The transformation of nature, for example, is wonderfully written. One may think that the most natural way to depict a monster's influence on the surrounding nature is through various detrimental effects and constant degradation. Well, Lovecraft do it, but not in a banal way: after the arrival of the monster the surrounding nature... begins to thrive. The crops are record-high. Is this a miracle? Is this a ray of hope that the unknown entity is not so evil and the mortal danger will pass by? But the faint hope quickly turns into gloom as all the harvest turns out to be poisonous. Lovecraft plays with a reader such a way not once and create deep and mezmerizing scene inside of not-a-very-long story. I would recommend this story to everyone who loves good literature.

Starting a challenge (Morefon#1) #moreфон2018 #morefon2018 [Note: Morefon2018 is a 30-day challenge of keeping public dairy in English, announced here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXhrGBY27kY , Russian language] Day 1 Well, I'm one of the guys, who don't do much activity in social networks. But I find the whole idea of writing down my thoughts on regular basis to be very useful and challenging. So I decided starting this 30-day diary right here, in the comment section of this video. I don't know, whether it will fullfill all the criteria of the contest or not, certainly not, but regular practice is more important than formal 'reward'. Tomorrow I will put my thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Colour Out Of Space", stay tuned :)