Cat said that the second half of “The Wall” is better than the first one. I was surprised, since for me the album is a holistic composition, like a sculpture, and it would be strange to consider the right half of the David is more perfect than the left one.

When I was a boy I used to not make the inversion in questions with ли particle. In English it could be expressed this way:

— You have pray’d to-night, Desdemona?
William Shakespeare, “Othello”

— But a boy was there? Maybe there was no boy at all?
Maxim Gorky, “Life of Klim Samgin”

— I am a trembling creature or I have the right?
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”

— Gasoline has risen in price again!

— Great! The gas-tank now holds $1 more!

1987.09 ÷ 1988.05. Primary school №13 (has been dissolved)
1988.09 ÷ 1994.06. Comprehensive school №10 (has been dissolved)
1994.09 ÷ 1997.06. Technical Lyceum №8
1997.09 ÷ 2001.06. DAME, MIPT
2002.09 ÷ 2005.06. Institute for Linguistics, RSUH
2005.11 ÷ 2007.10. Institute of Linguistics, RAS
2009.09 ÷ 2011.05. Yandex School of Data Analysis
2014.10 ÷ 2015.05. Andrey Velikanov’s “Philosophy of Art”
2019.02 ÷ 2019.03. Ilya Sinelnikov’s “Negotiations and Client Relationships”

Characters of the animation “Mercano the martian” want to stop the countdown of the heavy-duty bomb. They cut the green wire — and explode with the entire planet. The caption “It should be blue one” opens end credits.

The phrase expresses both an universal regret and an excuse: “I’ve done everything I could, but I’m extremely out of luck.”

— Just promise me.

— I cannot promise you that.

— Why?

— I never deceived you and do not want to begin.

— That’s the reason I advise you to promise.

— Well. I won’t work on Sunday evening.

When I worked at Art. Lebedev Studio and at the same time studied at the Yandex School of Data Analysis, I worked out three-naps-a-day cycle. Here’s a typical day:
09°00′ ÷ 09°45′ — Get up, have breakfast and so on
09°45′ ÷ 10°30′ — Go to the studio, by foot or by metro
10°30′ ÷ 13°30′ — Work
13°30′ ÷ 14°00′ — Power nap, right on the studio sofa
14°00′ ÷ 17°20′ — Work more
17°20′ ÷ 18°00′ — Walk to school
18°00′ ÷ 21°15′ — Classes
21°15′ ÷ 21°45′ — Go home by metro
21°45′ ÷ 22°30′ — Have dinner
22°30′ ÷ 01°30′ — Nap
01°30′ ÷ 06°00′ — Do homework, housework, sometimes just work
06°00′ ÷ 09°00′ — Nap

When down and out or anxious, some people cannot eat at all. Others, on the contrary, eat a ton. I’m of the former group. Q’s of the latter.

I only need a TV-set for the live broadcast of the New Year’s concert of the Vienna Philharmonic in the morning of the 1st of January. Upbeat music written by classical Austrian composers, splendid flowers in the concert hall, promenade in Vienna — it’s difficult to imagine a much more encouraging beginning of the year.

I hope one day I’ll see this concert live.

Anton named his cat Cat Cat Cat Cat, after major Major Major Major Major from «Catch-22».

— I’m Olga, and you?

— I’m Bogdan, or just G-d for short.

When a woman falls into your arms — don’t ask questions, just dance!

If you want to be on time, don’t be afraid to come early.

Devices require names and as a rule I use Italian words. I do not speak Italian, so its main advantage is Latin alphabet without diacritic marks. In case of several devices of the same type Roman numerals are added.

Fusto	shaft, trunk	stand-alone hard drive
Scrigno	chest	portable hard drive
Gemma	bud, gem	flash drive
Petalo	petal	iPod
Foglia	leaf	Pocket PC
Specchio	mirror	iPad
Radice	root	mobile
Frutto	fruit	iPhone
Bosco	forest	WiFi router

And my laptops are named Meurglys I, Meurglys II, Meurglys III after the guitars of Peter Hammill, by-turn borrowing the name of Ganelon’s sword from «The Song of Roland».

During a short work stints before my freshmen year at MIPT I was settled to my future course mate. I came into the room and asked:

— What is your name?

— Bogdan, — the fellow replied.

— Then I guess I’m Bogdan too, — I said right away, concealing my surprise.

After that I had to show my name on student ID.

In August, 2008 at Alib.ru (russian website for second-hand books) I saw a book, that I wanted to read and could not found anywhere else. The seller, Maxim, lives in Kazan, so I asked him to send the book to Elektrostal. The package had been sent, the receipt had been scanned, but I had received no notification from post service for weeks.

In the middle of October the package returned to Maxim with «Storage time expired» message printed by my post office. The book was still wanted, and we were looking for another way to deliver it from Kazan. I asked all my friends, if any of them were going to Kazan, and some were really going. I wrote to Maxim and asked for his phone number, but his answer had been moved to Spam folder and they had not met. At this stage I transferred book price and post fee to Maxim to encourage him.

In the beginning of November Anton was going to play «What? Where? When?» to Samara, where would be some Kazan experts. I asked him to contact Maxim about the book. But now Anton’s email went to Spam, and Maxim called Tatiana just when she arrived to Samara.

Several hours later it revealed, that a friend of Tatiana would go from Kazan to Samara by night train. Maxim managed to meet him, the book reached Anton in Samara. He went to the next festival, and eventually in the middle of February, 2009 J. M. Coetzee’s «Slow man» was in my hands.

Every time Omant wants to mention Elektrostal (literally Electrosteel), he uses a new name: Electrostool, Electrowool, Electrotrain, Electrobrain, Electrotyphoon, Electrobassoon...

During the summer of 1995, Oleg and I went to a vacation house on the Black Sea shore. Our stay was paid for, but we had to do some odd jobs from time to time.

So during the first workday in my life I collected leftovers in the dining-hall for the pigs. We did not think this work was beneath us and we even were joking around, but our hands were covered with small cuts made by disposable foil dishes and it was painful to swim in the salty sea. And I’m still hardly what you call squeamish after having that experience.

The first entry in my employment record book was made a year later: cloakroom attendant.

In the sixth semester we were taught mathematical statistics by Sergey Anatolievich Guz. On the exam he seated you on the first row, gave you one random question of thirty and a clean sheet, and on the expiry of seven minutes took them back. And stood sternly pending above you. So either you were perfect or had to come again and again. In the evening before the exam it was clear, that even ten ideal answers were beyond my time resources.

My classmates were taught probability theory by Guz earlier, so I asked Alexey Malistov for advice. He heard me out and told:

— Learn maximum likelihood estimation.

In the morning I was given MLE and the excellent mark.

In 1990 I was the chairman of the group council in the summer pioneer camp. Next year the young pioneer movement was dissolved, but several times after that on the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization Foundation Day, 19 of May, we defiantly went out in pioneer uniform: necktie, badge, white shirt with aluminium buttons. In 2005 I came in this uniform to lexicography exam and astonished professor incremented my grade.

— What side of bed do you prefer to sleep on?

— On top.

Oleg and Masha arranged to pay each other a penalty every time when uttering the word ‘anch’.

Once I exited Yandex office, ran into glass cylinder containing revolving doors and cut my forehead to bleed. Next morning all dangerous places were marked with orange circles, and after a while it was replaced by proprietary Yandex arrows.

I have normal angle of view, but I see any object with only one eye. Usually I control which eye is leading, but when I’m tired or in stress, initiative may jump randomly. At these moments the forward direction shifts a little. That’s why I’m not allowed to drive, to dive and to skydive. I do not perceive stereo-images and 3D-movies. The world around me is flat.

I wear glasses watching movies, in the museum, at a lesson, in front of the computer and when I am abroad.

It took me a long time to break my own six-minutes record from the moment of waking up at home till the departure of the local train I’ve caught.

My friends went to the cinema to see “The Matrix”, but I was tired and felt asleep. At half past one they came back, I woke up and for two and a half hours Gonz has been retelling the film, skipping all around the room, imitating voices and answering my questions. After such a show I had no desire to see the original.

The amount of my portable drives reached ten, and they all need names. I’ve chosen four-letter names of gods from different mythologies. Eleven different initials are homoglyphs of cyrillic letters.

Anat	Northwest Semitic war goddess
Badb	Irish war goddess
Chac	Maya rain deity
Enki	Sumerian god of crafts, intelligence and water
Hera	Greek goddess of women and marriage
Kali	Hindu goddess of destruction and time
Mars	Roman god of war
Odin	God of war, wisdom and poetry in Norse mythology
Ptah	Egyptian god of craftsmen and architects
Toci	Mother goddess in Aztec mythology
Xihe	Chinese sun goddess

Oleg Peyl (Vladivostok)
Alexander Biderman (Khabarovsk)
Kirill Korotaev (Khabarovsk)
Anatoly Khamukhin (Ozersk)
Eugene Shuranov (Ufa)
Alexander Mavrin (Tolyatti)
Peter Starostin (Kirov)
Nadezhda Rossokhina (Penza)
Denis Koblyakov (Yaroslavl)
Sergey Muravyov (Ivanovo)
Alexander Gavrin (Kovrov)
Alexey Malistov (Ryazan)
Bogdan Kravtsov (Elektrostal)
Alexey Drobyshevsky (Reutov)
Eugene Sokolov (Moscow)
Alexey Polovinkin (Dolgoprudny)

First minutes of the Easter Sunday, 19th of April, 1998. I was visiting Anton and he said:

— A friend borrowed the Burnin’ Red Ivanhoe cassette, but returned something else in that box. Something unknown, but I like it. Can you identify the music?

The music began to play, and I certainly recognized it:

— Anton, this is Jesus Christ Superstar.

After the second year of studying, in the September of 2004 I was expelled from the Institute of Linguistics of RSUH because of an academic problem. I went to Tibet, came back in December, reinstated in the institute, during one term passed all the exams and in the June of 2005 defended the diploma.

In my work on the subject of “Morphonology of the extraparadigmatic wordforms in Modern Russian” the article by Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak “About the possible relation between operational conceptions of synchronic decription and the diachrony” was cited in full. My speech lasted less than a minute. Here’s the transcript:

My name is Bogdan Kravtsov. I have compiled the dictionary of all extraparadigmatic forms of Modern Russian language. Those are prepositions, interjections and so on.

The dictionary contains more than 2000 entries. Every word is represented as a sequence of formatives. On the basis of this morphonological segmentation words were classified, and most of them turned out to correspond with the specific wordform of the specific paradigm of the specific declinable lexeme.

Those are described specially all the cases of the discrepancy of these morphological portraits and, at first, with the paradigmatic system and, at second, with their own etymology.

I’ve received the degree with distinction and an assignment to the Ph. D. program.

There are six Schengen visas in my fourth international passport. For one trip each, all to different countries: Netherlands, Belgium, Latvia, Germany, Sweden, Austria.

When the ships of the American Seventh Fleet docked at the Petushki station, there were no Communist Party girls present, but if Komsomol girls are considered Party members, then every third of them was a blonde, and every seventh blonde was in Komsomol. When the ships of the American Seventh Fleet set sail, the following was discovered: every third Komsomol girl turned out to have been raped, every fourth rape victim turned out to be a Komsomol girl, every fifth one of the Komsomol girls who have been raped turned out to be a blonde; every ninth blonde rape victim turned out to be a Komsomol member. If there are 428 girls in all in Petushki, determine how many nonpartisan brunettes among them remained untouched, if every fifth of them was named Katerina?

— Christ is risen!
— He’s a lucky guy!

~8-) → ))

7 = happy
6 = excellent
5 = good
4 = calm
3 = sad
2 = anxious
1 = hopeless
0 = self-destructive

I have two mugs: the black one for milk and the white one for kvass.

The stones were collected on the fjord shore, the rigid wire base and plastic fittings were picked up on the streets of Oslo. The stones are fragile, they will break and crumble, leaving gaps. That’s by design.