If that's her goal why didn't she just post the ad in Russian or Tatar? I admit this would have been less entertaining, though.
Man, now I just wasted ten minutes learning about Bashkortostan, it's captial, Ufa ("Be prepared at any moment to have your palm read or a brick of cheese thrust in your hand") and the city's Coat of Arms, which appears to be some kind of ferret-like animal looking to lick something. Perhaps a Tatar. The great thing about these places is that millions of people live there, and you've never heard of them.
Educational institutions include Bashkir State University, Bashkir State Teachers Training University, Ufa State Aviation Technical University, Ufa Oil University, Ufa Architectural University, Ufa Agricultural University, and others.
Truth in Educational Advertising!
Famous natives of Ufa include rebel Salavat Yulayev, painter Mikhail Nesterov, dancer Rudolf Nureyev [!], NHL ice hockey player Andrei Zyuzin, rock singers Yuri Shevchuk with his band DDT (band), and Zemfira.
She was distracted making research.
In other news, Bashkortostan is a real place. Sometimes I think Russia just invents a province once in a while to mess with the rest of the world. Just rope off a chunk of land in the Urals, give it some crazy name, and make up a bunch of notably boring factoids for the wikipedia entry.
The number of comments until somebody with an extensive body of work on Bashkortostan including scholarly papers and extensive field work work corrects me for my ignorance I estimate at three.
4 to 1.
2, 4: Bored people on Saturday night think alike.
Yeah, like the brilliant guide to Molvania, which has a line in it somewhere about the local down being a wonderful combination of gothic architecture and Balkan sleaze. And San Sombrero, whose calendar includes the holiday "National Day of Unity (North Only)".
Bashkortostan is a relatively prosperous area owing to its minerals and fossil fuels. I looked into working there once.
Famous natives of Ufa include...and Zemfira.
For a moment I thought that referred to the pan flute dude. Sadly, it does not.
The Bashkir entry is less dry.
Some Bashkirs traditionally practiced agriculture, cattle-rearing and bee-keeping. The nomadic Bashkirs wandered either the mountains or the steppes, herding cattle.
Bashkir national dishes include a kind of gruel called yûryu, and a cheese named skûrt.
Bashkirs had a reputation as a hospitable but suspicious people, apt to plunder and disinclined to hard work.
It is said that in laziness, deviousness, and filth, the Bashkir are surpassed only by the Lur.
It's cultural. In Bashkhortostan the "personal ad" does not mean "looking for fuckbuddy". They have a different page for that titled "Fuckbuddy ads". Likewise, in Bashkortistan the escorts listed in the Yellow Pages are actual escorts. Prostitutes are listed under "Whores".
4: Expect a call from me Monday morning.
Sometimes I think Russia just invents a province once in a while to mess with the rest of the world
Like Transnistria? It was one of the first things I blogged about back when I started my site. It's a weird place.
In other news, the Tatars were originally called the Ta-ta Mongols.
"National Day of Unity (North Only)" is unbelievably awesome.
And especially apt around April 9 in this country.
The Tatar wiki page is a godawful mess, apparently edited from the Brittanica by several different people who don't read each other's work.
At the time of Genghis Khan the T'a-t'a-erh (etc.) were a Mongol subtribe. They were his enemies, but after he pretty much destroyed them, somehow "Tatar" became the generic name for the Turks (no longer Mongols) who ruled Russia with the breakup of the Mongol empire. By now the terms seems to mean "Russian of Turkish descent who doesn't have any other specific identification", except that there are certain groups which have always been called Tatar. As I understand, the Chinese Ta-ta have come to China from Russia.
Russia is 20% non-Russian even after 15 or so Republics left the USSR. Wiki: As of the 2002 Russian census, 79.8% of the population is ethnically Russian, 3.8% Tatar, 2% Ukrainian, 1.2% Bashkir, 1.1% Chuvash, 0.9% Chechen, 0.8% Armenian. The remaining 10.3% includes those who did not specify their ethnicity as well as (in alphabetical order) Assyrians, Avars, Azeris, Belarusians, Bulgarians, Buryats, Chinese, Cossacks, Estonians, Evenks, Finns, Georgians, Germans, Greeks, Ingushes, Inuit, Jews, Kalmyks, Karelians, Kazakhs, Koreans, Kyrgyz, Lithuanians, Latvians, Maris, Mongolians, Mordvins, Nenetses, Ossetians, Poles, Romanians, Tajiks, Tuvans, Turkmen, Udmurts, Uzbeks, Yakuts, and others. Nearly all of these groups live compactly in their respective regions; Russians and to a lesser extent Tatars are the only people significantly represented in every region of the country.
I worked with a guy named Tatar once but that was in North Carolina so I can't help you out. Sorry.
The assonance between Tatars and Taters is purely coincidental.
(Taters live in Scandinavia.)
Hey here's an idea: a french-fry shop featuring unusual toppings from different regions, called "Tater Diaspora".
It could be next door to Sweet Cheeses.
13: The iconic one for me is Kalmuckia.
ST, it's the lotus flower on the flag, isn't it?
Next, Emerson explaining how he came up with his "no Burkhanism" rule.
The Kalmucks are the furthest West of the Buddhist peoples. There is a Kalmuck refugee community in New Jersey, and I believe that there were Kalmucks among the Russian refugees in San Francisco.
24: That's nifty, but what I really love is the insane, chess obsessed dictatorial ruler
The most famous Kalmuck, of course, being Ivan Skavinsky Skavar.
I had a friend who was obsessed with Udmurts for a while, partly trying to impress a Russian girl whose mother was Udmurt. If you liked the Ufa weasel, you'll love the Perm bible bear. Also, ATM.
I can't believe no one has said this yet -- "I'd like to meet someone who's interested in Tatar tots."
You guys shouldn't ever go to Language Hat. Over there obscure nationalities are the main topic, and the Tatar and Kalmyk are not obscure. The Persian-speaking Mountain Jews of the Caucasus (Tat) are obscure, or the non-Sephardic non-Ashkenazi Greek Jews.
We need a pwnage-arbtitration here. While I see the point being made, I don't think this is a clean pwn.
29: Dude. I send Steve at Language Hat stuff. Reminds me, there's a 16th-century praise poem about the meat porridge of the Armenians of Lvov that he really needs:
All the Mohammedans
Drop their pilaf and zardan
Their boureks and their baklava,
And come and eat herisa.
(Note: the author is obviously nuts.)
Yeah, HWD, I only meant the ones who think the Bashkirs and Tatars and Kalmyks are exotic.
Cracked wheat simmered soft overnight, shredded meat (generic meat, JM), broth. Cook again till mushy. Beat till blended. Serve with paprika, cumin, sumaq if you can get it, and butter.
I'm sure it's tasty, like the bottom of a beef barley stew. But...
31: To follow off, if I was pwned by 18, then 18 was also pwned by the title of the post itself. (I will gladly accept a meta-pwn.)
Follow up -- I was just reading some German, so I confused "up" with "auf."
29: Though not entirely obscure to the folks who have read Yo'av Karny's book Highlanders. He'd have probably written about the Lur, too, were their range more northerly. Lotta strange Judaica in that book, too.
37: Don't feel bad, Adam, it could be much worse. Like the time I confused "nach" with "back" and requested a telephone eulogy from a business contact.
I know a guy who has funny stories about working on a stage crew, where he had to be the translator between monolingual Germans and English-speaking people. Apparently the fact that when people yell the German word for "down", it sounds like "up", caused a lot of problems.
And of course, when you yell "up", it sounds like the German word for "down".
According to this it doesn't literally mean "down", but there are a lot of situations where it meant the opposite of yelling "up" would mean.
Anyway, I'm just trying to destroy this website with as much unfunniness and joke-explaining as possible so I can get back to real work.
"Auf" also can mean the opposite of "off".
29: I didn't mean to imply that Tatars or Bashkir are obscure. Only that their home province is obscure to me, because I'm ignorant. To make this more clear in the future, I will preface all my comments with "DUh HURR HURR."
I attended a talk once, following which an answer to a question from the audience was: "Yes, in an unheated building in Bashkiria."
As long as you're not dumber than a Lur, you're cool, Sife.
See, now, I thought "tatars" = "tartar," as in sauce, rather than "tater," as in tots.
Tater tots with tartar sauce = teh YUM.
I had a dream last night in which I used the phrase, "teh awesome" in front of a classroom, repeatedly, and then segued into an explanation of grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive and language changes and "teh" is an example of this, blah blah blah. Sometimes I really love my psychotropic drugs, I'm telling you.
Oh, and I also love that this thread includes actual information about Tatars.
then segued into an explanation of grammar being descriptive rather than prescriptive and language changes
This warms my heart, it does.
I wouldn't recommend the tater tots tartare, though. Too crunchy.
How can Tater Tots (tm) in any instantiation = teh YUM? They are totally bland. If the sauce was good I could see that being tasty, as tasty as the good sauce on any other bland sauce-vector; but teh YUM implies to me the sort of transcendent tasty experience not available from packaged frozen reprocessed materiel.
(And might I just remark that Robyn Hitchcock's "Ride" from "Perspex Island" gives me the sort of sensual experience which I seek?)
Noo! They're fabulous. All soft on the inside, all crunchy 'n shit on the outside. Love 'em.
Damn, now I want to go to fucking Sonic for dinner.
54: This statement suddenly makes much more sense to me now.
In Bashkortostan, Tatar tots serve you. I love wiki-prose like "They say, the group of workers totally refused to weld the monument as it was made of copper" and "At one point they were castrated by force, and children were removed from their families, so that 'the plague wouldn't expand.' They are well known for their music, as well as their beautiful and very well-made handcraft."
Similarly, from this Kucinich website: "... under-rated Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich catapulted to a stunningly strong third-place finish in a nationwide poll among likely Democratic voters."
32: My herisa brings all the boys to the yard?
How can Tater Tots (tm) in any instantiation = teh YUM?
Because they are deep-fried in oil, which makes everything teh YUM.
58 -- that's setting a kind of low bar for teh YUM...
Weird -- I used "kind of" in two consecutive comments -- guess I'm feeling unusually qualified today.
58: That attitude can get you into a lot of trouble, as the guy on "Spin City" said when the other guy said "I love things dipped in yogurt. You dip anything in yogurt, and I'll be all over it."
