Movie posters

We have a lot of cinemas in my town, and in Russia in general. Сinematography used to be extremely popular art here since USSR.

I’ve heard that all the old movies were really profitable because hundred million people went to cinemas to watch them.

Now with DVD, tv, the internet, and other ways of watching movies, local cinemas almost extinct. We don’t have “simple” cinema anymore.

Those that we have are super-duper fancy: they offer you powerful sound with many sources, huge screens, air conditioning, some snacks etc.
On contrary small local cinemas from my youth offered you exactly one thing — a movie.
Today I am going to show you a fun thing from the old good days, those movie posters.

Printing was an expensive technology and thus many cinemas couldn’t use it. They used to use painted poster.

Some artist painted the poster after watching the movie for them.
It became to be a special art, as I see that.
Many people found it very special and fun.

I heard that some cinemas still use that to attract people.
Enough words! I was told that a picture worth a thousand words, so here they are.

For the movie “Terminator”

 For the movie “Men in black 2”

For the cartoon “Shreck 2”

A poster for the movie “Total recall”

Birch sap

Russia has a lot of forests, and the most common type of tree here is birch.

Birches are very common all over the world but nevertheless, we call it “our” tree.

We even have a joke about it, usually, we say to anyone who is going abroad “how would you subsist without birches”.

Birches lose their leaves during the winters, and they draw the water from the trunk for a winter period, because frozen water can damage the structure.

When winter ends they need to grow back their leaves and they suck in a lot of water from the earth, fortunately, there is a lot of water made from melting snow.

Some people joke that if in the spring you can “hear” the birch by leaning your ear to the trunk and hearing those pumps working.

We use that water movement to make birch sap.

The procedure is quite simple. One has to have a small drill, a few conduits, and a jar or a bottle to store it.
Make a small hole in the bark of the tree, connect all the pipes with duct tape and leave it for a few hours.
The time needed to fill the bottles varies; it depends on the tree, place, and the time of the spring.

Generally speaking, there is only a week in the beginning of May when the speed of the water is high. You can collect 7-10 liters of sap in a day from a reasonably big tree.

It is still possible to collect the sap after the season, but it will take too long.

The sap is sweet but not too much. It contains about 1-3% of sugar. It has a very special flavor, but for me personally, it reminds me of a dash of honey dissolved in water.

Many people believe that it’s very healthy.
And I can remember that when I was young I used to be able to get some  in our school cafeteria.

You can see on the picture how they collect that sap if they need a lot of it:

The modern generation of children prefers Cola for sure.

I collected a medium-sized jar of the birch sap recently. My boys only tasted it briefly but weren’t impressed.

Managing ice bridges

Roads in Russia is the typical subject for jokes. Since the country is big and the population is spread unequally there are many white spaces between cities and villages, hundreds and thousands kilometers of roads without anyone living around.  Add to that our climate and puzzle will be solved.

That’s why we got used to using some unique ways to improve the connectivity.  One of them is winter roads and bridges.
Bridges is a hard thing to manage in our climate. We have a few factors those make this task harder.

Those are:
– Ice movement in spring, when a huge ice plates can destroy anything on their way
– Water overflows, when snow is melting the river stream can have hundred times more water than usual.
Mostly those troubles happen in spring, and we found a way to avoid them:  seasonal bridges. The bridges that exist only in winter.
When the temperature is bellow zero, the water turns into ice easily. And ice is a good material for construction if you know what are you doing.

A specialized car is able to build a bridge from nothing just in a few days.
It takes water from the river and spread it in the tiny drips into the air under a future bridge. Because of physics the tiny amount of water turns into ice almost immediately, and when they fall on the surface them meld together.
Depending on the needs this car can freeze as much ice as it needed for bridge capacity.

It’s cheap: you don’t need to transfer any materials, the main component (water) is already in the place.

It’s efficient: 70 cm of ice can carry a 60 tons car, and when it’s -15 outside you need only 50 minutes for each centimeter of new ice.
Thus you need about 60 hours to make a bridge which can serve for 6-8 months.
It’s a good technology but it has some cons.

It forces people to do some planning. If some regions accessible for trucks only in the winter period, we have to manage that properly and accumulate all that we need in the stores before summer will come. We call it “winter delivery” and got used to that.

Another cons is that in Spring, the massive amount of ice is dangerous for objects which are located downstream.
That’s why we need to destroy all those bridges on our own before ice will go.

If the bridge is small the road workers can do the markup with chainsaws and then ice will be broken on small parts with those line, but if the bridge is big it’s much easier to blast it.