Dog Here – Dog There – Dog Gone…


Strays ride the metro...

I have not walked the dog the last few days because I have been feeling bad. So I was surprised when Sveta came in last night and said, something is very different and strange outside tonight. I then found out that she meant that all the stray dogs are gone…

So I went out today (Just don’t tell Sveta!) and looked at the spots that I know that strays (dogs) are always there. The dogs are gone! We had at least 12+ living around our flat complex. People always fed them but at the same time everyone gripped about them. Sveta said that she is seeing bowls of food and water laying around on the ground and nothing to eat it. Cats are always fed on window sills and such. So you can always tell who the food is for…

The people in Moscow are having a fit over the plan that is in effect, to round up the strays. It seems that they are going to take all these dogs (officials say 25,000+) and take them about 200km away from Moscow. What is going to happen is being mauled around right now, but my thoughts tell me that they will be killed…

So while sipping that cup of coffee (chicory) this morning I was doing some thinking’s about Moscow and her stray dogs. First off to say there was only 25,000 strays is a gross underestimation. I would say 100,000+ would be closer and that may be underestimated. Moscow has a huge stray dog issue (or at least they did) and people feed these dogs constantly. People are strange in Moscow. They get up in arms about getting rid of dogs but they will not take a dog into personally take care of. People in Moscow will feed dogs on the street and tolerate these dogs by even stepping over them in the doorways of the train stations and subways. They will care for a dog but never take one in their own home…

One big reason for so many stray dogs is that people toss puppies out on the street and kick their own dogs out on the street because they do not want to be bothered. No one believes in fixing their pets so that excess puppies are not reproduced. It just does not cross their minds here in Russia and or actually considered bad…

So now people are wound up like a fat tick ready to pop. Over something that they created and endorsed for years and years…

But as Sveta said something like, “It is just strange outside.” then “All the dogs are gone!” Then she asks something like, why do the people not just take a dog in to care for if they are having such issues?

That is a good question…

You see Boza was a stray and would have been killed by now. He was found by us near a very busy highway and he would not have lasted long. I look at Boza and realize that he is our buddy. He stays by me very close when I am having issues with health as I am now. He seems to know (I need to get in to see my cardiologist and have my medications adjusted)…

So I guess we will see how many of the dogs they got. We will see if any have been hidden or hid themselves real well. But like Sveta said also, “It is so quiet outside!”

She is right, The dogs are gone…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

PS: Many people do not want the responsibility of a pet in Moscow, but they will feed the dogs on the street to make themselves feel better about stray animals. We did find one puppy today. It is a she and she is a terrier mix about 6 months old. So many of our dogs are gone and Boza is missing his friends… 🙁

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7-billionth person will be born on October 31 in Kaliningrad, Russia…


The world’s 7-billionth person will be born on October 31 in Kaliningrad.

The decision was taken by the United Nations Population Fund, which is presenting its annual report in Russia’s westernmost city.

While no one knows if the child will be a boy or a girl, one thing is for sure: the mother will receive a special certificate and gifts from the local administration.

In 1999, a boy born in Sarajevo was named the 6-billionth person on the planet.

Windows to Russia!

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Russia: What Is A Sandwich?


A Dagwood sandwich

That is a sandwhich...

I was drinking my morning cup of coffee & thinking about sandwiches! In America a sandwich is food, meal, art & tradition! The term Dagwood Sandwich comes to my mind.
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Dagwood A real sandwich is awesome!

buterbrod

In Russia; the concept of a sandwich is still very foreign and new. Russia has a form of a sandwich called, бутерброд (buterbrod).  >>>>>>>

“Dagwood Sandwich – It is a multilayer sandwich with a variety of fillings. Used to denote a sandwich put together so as to attain such a tremendous size and infinite variety of contents as to stun the imagination, sight, and stomach of all but the original maker…

Dagwood sandwiches, a term so well-known it made Webster’s New World Dictionary.

caviar

1930 – A term that originated in the comic strips in the 1930s after a comic strip character named Dagwood Bumstead, a character in the “Blondie” comic strip. According to the creator of the comic strip, Murat Bernard “Chic” Young (1901-1973), the only thing that Dagwood could prepare in the kitchen was a mountainous pile of dissimilar leftovers precariously arranged between two slices of bread. Dagwood became know for his huge sandwiches he created on evening forays to the refrigerator...

What is a buterbrod: According to my Wife: who is an expert on Russia. 🙂 –
Buterbrod is one slice of bread, with or without butter, & could have one of the following; Sausage (kielbasa), cheese, salmon or caviar. Never two of those items?? (Yummy?)

Because I am America, I happen to disagree with this Russian form of sandwich. So I have tried to converted my wife to American sandwiches! 🙂

I make her every kind of sandwich that I can think of. She has eaten & liked grilled cheeses, hamburgers, grilled ham & cheese, Monte Christos, cold cuts & many more styles! (but she still tells me that Russian do not eat sandwiches like this) So I have met her half way and make sandwiches with only one slice of bread…

She is right: All you have to do is go to McDonald’s in Russia and you will see what I mean! The art of eating sandwiches in Russia is a new concept. Russians are prone to removing the top of the bun and eating the burger. They like to balance the burger on their finger tips and munch around the outside edge…

You learned something new about Russia today. That is why I love Russia!

Kyle
Windows to Russia!

PS: Sveta likes a grilled cheese on one slice of bread. That is her favorite and of course it has to be black bread…

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Do You See What I See / Do You Hear What I Hear? Boom Boom…


Those War Drums are beating so loud that they keep people up at night even all the way over here in Russia…

“Now that military operations in Libya are ending, there will be renewed focus on what practical military operations might be considered to protect civilian lives in Syria,” McCain told a World Economic Forum meeting in Jordan.

Now that is a really loud beating of a War Drum if I ever heard one…

I have got to say: It looks like America has a really big desire to just hop from one small country to the next in the Middle East and bully everyone until they are dead or cry Uncle…

With things destroyed in Libya and messed up worse than a kids toy box in his room. We now want to go and kill another 100,000 people in Syria…

How do you sleep at night? I sleep only because I myself refuse to be quiet about it! If I can get one person out of my readers to stop and say to himself that we are killing people all over the world in the name of democracy and that is a bad thing. Then I have made a difference…

So Boom Boom Boom beat those drums, lets go blow the hell out of Syria. You know they deserve it our government says it is so… 🙁

By the way: We are killing people all over the world in the name of democracy…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

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Russian Dove: Pigeon!


In The former CCCP (Soviet Union), They had Dove houses. These Dove houses have survived mostly intact. These houses are all over Russia, from the center of Moscow to the Villages. They are still being used for mostly white Doves. Though interracial seems to be the future. 🙂

I find it interesting that the Humans lived in flats, and they built free standing houses for the Doves. I am finding out that the Russians Love their Doves, very much!

I being American, made the mistake of saying, “The city is full of Grey Pigeons! (please, do not call them pigeons)” The Russians call them Doves, So be them white, gray or brown, they are Doves! (That is final!)

This is just another aspect of the Russians, that you did not know about.

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

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Moscow’s Population Will Grow…


Many residents of the Moscow region will receive an unexpected boost in their social status on January 1, when City Hall legally incorporates huge chunks of land as part of the Greater Moscow expansion project. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Moscow Region Governor Boris Gromov will formally sign legal documents on January 1 that will automatically transform some 250,000 residents of the Moscow Region into Muscovites – a highly coveted status…

I also wondered what that did to the population rankings for worlds largest Cities proper by population!

1 Shanghai 17,836,133 Core districts 2,605.8 6,845 km2  China
2 Karachi 14,500,000 City District 3,527 3,683 km2  Pakistan
3 Istanbul 13,120,596 Metropolitan Municipality 1,831 7,166 km2  Turkey
4 Mumbai 12,478,447 Municipal Corporation 603 20,694 km2  India
5 Beijing 11,716,000 Core districts 1,368.32 7,400 km2  China
6 Moscow 11,551,930 Federal City 1,091 10,588 km2  Russia
7 São Paulo 11,316,149 Municipality 1,523 7,383 km2  Brazil
8 Tianjin 11,090,314 All districts 7,422 1,494 km2  China
9 Guangzhou 11,070,654 All districts 3,843 2,881 km2  China
10  Delhi 11,007,835 Municipal Corporation 431 25,540 km2  India

 

Looks like Moscow moves up a notch in the City Proper listings. Moscow looks to become number 5 on the list. That is interesting…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

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Search Engine War: Yandex and Baidu Taking on Google…


This morning over coffee I just had to express what I use for search engines in the last few months. I decided that Google was just to big and controlling. That Google has too much information on everyone in the world and it is monopolized. It just does not seem right…

I have silently switched what I use as a search engine. I now use Russia’s Yandex and China’s Baidu in 75 percent of my searches. I have been watching them become better and better at search engine results as I use them more and more…

China’s top search engine Baidu said that it had signed a partnership deal with Microsoft’s Bing search engine to offer English-language search to Baidu users. Baidu dominates China’s search engine market after Google Inc pulled out following a high-profile fallout with Beijing over censorship last year…

Yandex, Google’s Russian competitor in online searches and Internet advertising, is looking to carve itself out a bigger share in cyberspace as Google faces serious antitrust charges. They are doing it on their own..

http://www.yandex.com is the English version of Yandex…
http://baidu.com is the Chinese search engine…

I realized when Google played the hypocrisy game and called China down for censoring. I had to laugh at that time because Google is the king of censoring. That issue alone with Google to call the kettle black, was enough that I knew it was time to tell Google, “You are a hypocrite!” What better way is to stop using the product that they produce. Up until now that has been hard to do. But now Yandex and Baidu have opened the doors…

The picture to the right is the ground campaign for the East. The one area that Google has been unable to control is the Eastern world. Yandex is King in Russia and Baidu is King in China. The King of the West (Google) is now watching with surprised eyes as the Easter world that he has tried to conquer, is expanding into his world…

Not all success stories in the West can penetrate the Eastern market. McDonald’s, Pepsi, Coke and a few others are the exception not the norm. Most Western countries leave with their tail between their legs after trying to enter China and Russia. You have to come with an open mind and leave the holier than thou attitude behind…

The story in the West of the partnership between Baidu and Bing is  interesting. Microsoft gets belittled for working with the censorship in China and Google is praised for its stand against China on censorship. Now that is hypocrisy at its capitalist best…

A year ago China’s Baidu said that they were getting 10,000,000 plus English hits a day from people trying to get search results from them in English. This prompted the partnership with Bing and Bing has smiled ever since… 🙂

Yandex is another story. This is the story that I consider the real success! Yandex is standing on its own two feet and ignoring all the Western world about how it should do what the West does. Yandex has decided to bite off one country at a time and grow at a pace that will not stress the corporate structure. The only move I saw associated with the Western world is the investment into Blekko. That allowed a foothold into the USA market…

http://download.yandex.ru/company/Fact_Sheet_Q2_2011.pdf – How about a company fact sheet?

Yandex has just moved into Turkey and Yandex has a smile that says we are going to grow, just watch and see…

So Yandex has also entered into the USA market. It has a branch in Palo Alto, California. As of June 30, 2011, they had over 3,000 full-time employees. Now that makes California smile. It is a growing company amongst the dead. Yandex has its teeth into the US and that will lead to market saturation in America, but its main goal is the East. The Western future saturation is the icing on the cake…

I looked at the internet market that is growing in the Eastern world. I have to say that it is impressive. It is largely an untouched market and has potential to easily exceed that of the Western world in just a few years. It is simply mathematics. Everyone (literally) lives on this side of the world and as infrastructures develops, so will the internet and business…

This is all fine for me as I live in Russia and watch from the outside as Google stifles the competition and tries to alter the search results to her favor. That makes sense from a competition point of view and many will say good job Google! I say bad Google! I do not like my search results messed with. When I punch in Gaddafi I want everything on Gaddafi. Not what only makes Google money…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

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Russia Denounces The Execution of Gaddafi: Against the Geneva Convention…


Executed...

“We have to rely on the facts and international law,” Lavrov said. “It is said (Geneva Convention) that a participant captured in an armed conflict must be treated in a certain way, and in any case, a prisoner of war must not be killed…”

Russia has criticized NATO military action in Libya, saying it has gone far beyond the stated mission to save civilian life…

And the Russian political eccentric Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who is also head of the International Chess Federation, said the death of Colonel Gaddafi was a “tragedy” but he died as a martyr and reincarnates…

Mr. Ilyumzhinov was on a surreal mission to Tripoli in June, where he met with Colonel Gaddafi as an official mediator and played a game of chess with him. Yesterday he said in an interview with a Russian newspaper that he had spoken with the Libyan leader on the phone numerous times since. He said that Colonel Gaddafi had no fear of death: “It is a little belief in reincarnation…”

Windows to Russia!

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Lets Talk Gasoline (Benzine) Price in Turkey…


Sveta and I were just in Turkey. In Turkey Gasoline is sky high in price and I really think that if Russians and Americans had to pay these prices as in Turkey then people would really riot…

Turkey uses lira as money. Gasoline is priced in lira. Price per liter (not gallon) in Turkey runs approximately 4.5 lira per liter for the cheap stuff. 1 Turkish lira = 0.539403 U.S. dollars so that means as of right now a liter of gasoline cost about $2.43 per liter. There is 3.78541178 liters per US gallon. That means a gallon of gasoline in Turkey costs = $9.21 per US gallon…

Now I see a lot of $3.30 per US gallon in America when checking the gas price charts. This changes but it looks like a good place to start. In Russia I will figure what I saw as price when I rode the taxi home from the airport. That means the price is higher than when we travel because Moscow has a higher price for fuel. I saw 21 rubles per liter in Moscow as the cheapest price.(I also saw 36 rubles for super 98 plus but we will use the lowest grade that I see available within reason. That means about 90 octane!) 21 rubles equates to $2.57 a US gallon. That is using 31 rubles per dollar for your information…

Tidbit of information: BP (British Petroleum) is always the most expensive gasoline no matter where we go. I mean it is always the most expensive. So BP is not used in figuring any gas price because it is so elevated in price over everyone else… (Russia and Turkey specifically)

So we have Russia who complains all the time about high price fuel and America who says the country will collapse at any minute because of high price fuel at $2.57 and $3.30 per gallon respectively…

Okay go ahead and say I fudge the numbers. Even if I did and you want to add 20% you will not equate to anything near Turkey pricing. But the fact is that I did not and am using prices that I see in two countries personally and take from http://gasbuddy.com/ for America…

I realize that many parts of the world pay just as much as Turkey and maybe more. I know that in England gasoline is very high. I have seen it as high as $10.00 per gallon…

The one thing that I saw in Turkey was a whole bunch of cars are using propane. Propane is 2.25 lira per liter and even without figuring it you can see why when compared to 4.5 lira per liter that propane would be a viable choice. In fact because we run propane in Russia in our Volga wagon. I kept telling Sveta smell that? She would say, No! Then we would walk some more and I would say smell that? She would say, No! Then I would say that is right because they are all burning propane in their cars. Sveta would then smile as she was thinking of our Sammy the Volga just as I was at that moment…

Driving on Propane Part 1 Driving on Propane Part 2 Driving on Propane Part 3

I saw that in Turkey cars were not dual fuel but propane only. In fact where the gasoline fill normally is. Open the flap and you will find a propane fill valve. I also did not see any reason to say that high gasoline price is the death of an economy. Turkey has an active economy to say the least but in America the whole world falls apart with high fuel prices. Turkey has adapted: They walk more, they use mass transit, they use solar panels to heat water, they conserve, conserve and conserve some more. That word conserve is the big one… 🙂

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

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Unbelievably Wonderful: Gaddafi E-mails to Windows to Russia…


Last night I received a slew of comments on the e-mail system. I expected to be slandered all over the place as I usually am. I had in mind just to delete them all and say Oops…

I was wrong and totally amazed at the compassion and sadness at the way Gaddafi was treated in his final minutes…

Many cried…

Many worried…

Many were angry along with that sadness…

Here is one I received:

The silence is Deafening.
I wonder if anyone will ever end that silence?
Fairness, Justice and Freedom have become Dirty Words.

Every human being knows in their hearts and in their minds that something is terribly wrong in the world. You don’t even have the Freedom to Speak Out, or even Question what you see anymore.
For without doing those, you all give them your Consent.
Events have evolved outside the Control of the Individual, whom is now powerless to do anything but Watch.

So remember those Dirty Words.
They Died Forever Today.

Mike

The one thing that was common with them all was the fact that we (West) were suppose to be happy about this occasion and many seemed taken back by it all. It was if a realization slammed home to millions and millions of people all at the same time, Law and Order is gone from the world agenda. Democracy and the Rule of Law no longer go hand in hand…

Not a single derogatory comment was sent to me. Not a single, “I hate you or you should die.” comment was spat my way…

No one will ever contend that Gaddafi was a saint but when he was killed it was with a gasp from the people in the world. We have been told from day one that Gaddafi was to be held accounted for his crimes. We believed that and even though we all knew it would be his death. We all expected him to be brought to trial and then everything that Gaddafi had knowledge of would be put on the table. Good or bad for the Western world we did not care, We only knew that Gaddafi had information that can put light on much corruption in the world…

We wanted an ending to why the West stuck its nose into Libya. We want why months before all this started he was met with open arms and hugged by all of our great pathetic leaders. We wanted real answers and those answers would come by a court system that was prided on being the Rule of Law…

We were told that this was not about killing Gaddafi…

I have to put a statement by Lew Rockwell in at this time:

It wasn’t only Hillary, Obama, Bush, and the rest of the power elite that cheered the murder of Gaddafi today. CNN showed the tape of his being beaten bloody before he was shot in the head, again and again and again, for our delectation. It was a tribal killing, ordered by the US, and savored by the establishment as well as the perps. He was a dictator, but more so than Obama? More so than the fundamentalists the US has brought to power, so as to cause chaos? As in Iraq, ethnic and religious minorities may look back on the dictator’s rule as a golden age. This isn’t a bunch of classical liberals who’ve come to power. Certainly anything that has Hillary–who looks more and more like one of the Three Witches every day–chortling over blood and scheming for more, can’t be good news.  Lew Rockwell

As I have said before. The West has no respect for the rest of the world. Just look at Libya now. Look at what we considered a proper choice to run Libya. May God help us for stepping where we should never have gone…

I want to thank all for the e-mails I got. They were heart warming and gave me hope that people are really good inside after all. It looks like we have created another Martyr out of Gaddafi just like we did out of Ben laden. We truly are ignominious…

Kyle Keeton
Windows to Russia!

PS: President Barack Obama hailed the lifting of the “dark tyranny” over Libya after the new government confirmed Muammar Gaddafi had been killed, issuing a warning to other dictators in the Middle East – and particularly Syria – that they could be next…

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