Anyway, on to a review of the album itself. It’s a solid release from the band that features a domibra player, a metal guitarist and a violin player as well as a rhythm section of drummer, keyboards and a bass-player. If you’ve heard Ulytau before, the tracks on this album are not a surprise. If you haven’t, think Vanessa Mae and other classical/rock/prog-rock/electronic pop fusion bands that are influenced by Yes, Metallica, and Bach. What Ulytau adds to this admittedly small but popular genre is the Kazakh influence. The sound of the dombira itself is quite unique. While a guitar can also double as a rhythm or a lead instrument, the way the dombira is plucked adds a percussive quality to the tune.

Beyond that, seven out of the ten tracks on Jumyr Kylysh are Kazakh folk songs. The other three are classical works, but the one of them is the Turkish inspired Turkish March by Mozart. The other two are Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in Dminor and Winter from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

In general, Ulytau is a talented ensemble and there are no flaws in their playing or their arrangements. They tend to err on the side of melodiousness in this particular album, which I appreciate because some of their other works (and works by other Kazakh musicians who use electronica in their tunes) has erred on the side of pop, with sweet keyboard melodies or hard hitting beats. It’s certainly one of their best albums. I am particularly fond of their arrangement of the well-known (in Kazakhstan, of course)Ata Tolgauy. It’s been covered by Urker, among others, and shows up as incidental music at concerts, plays, in TV shows and movies. With it’s simple melody, you’d think I’d be sick to death of this tune. But their arrangement of it starts off as a poppy ballad complete with synth pan-pipes, then moves to an acoustic-guitar driven rhythm section, making it sound like the Eagles or Dan Fogelberg. The distorted guitar comes in, without being overbearing, and brings us to a counter theme. Toward the end we get the tune in a more traditional setting, with violin and guitar playing the melody in unison, and the dombira in the background. It’s a clean, little arrangement that never gets boring, but doesn’t overshadow the tune itself.

Their cover of the Turkish March is also fun as they switch around with which instrument plays the lead melody. The disco-funk vamp intro, which reappears half-way through the song to back up a Kazakh melody, promises something a little more fun that never gets realized. Yapyr-Ai, a ballad, is nicely placed in the middle of the album as it’s a fairly straight-forward tune without a lot of production effects. It sounds like Asylbek Enseppov could have done it and it refreshes the ear from all the prog-rock.

The biggest disappointment is probably the Toccata and Fugue. It’s a tune that the whole world knows so it’s hard to do something original with it. And Vanessa Mae got big doing a rock-fusion version. Here Ulytau basically covers Vanessa Mae covering Bach. Except for the “Here We Go Now” and some of the more overtly techno parts of Mae’s version, this pretty much sounds like Mae.

Overall, this is a solid album, and an excellent introduction to the talented group. I do hope that in the future they will explore other genres of music and choose a few more obscure tunes or even move into composition, but I will definitely be making a trip to the record store (am I showing my age?) to pick this album up.

It’s being sold now in Kazakhstan in record shops and is also available on Amazon.com or off of iTunes as an MP3 download under the nameTwo Warriors. You can get the whole album or download individual tracks. Interestingly the band’s official website lists Paramount Records as the producer of the album, so perhaps it is available for purchase in Western countries.

Ulytau consists of Nurgaysha Sadvakasova (violin), Max Kichigin (solo-guitar), Erzhan Alimbetov (dombira), Novel Adonin (keys), Evgeniy Sizov (bass-guitar), Igori Dzhavad-Back (percussion) and is the brainchild of producer/musician Kydyrali Bolmanov.

So we decided to go another way. Powerpoint! The advantage is that it’s much easier to work with because you can change the questions all in one file and program without opening a million separate files. Plus it’s What You See Is What You Get. Animations and sound effects are easy to add. You can do an Audio Question or a Video Question without too much work. So here for your consideration is the PPT version, done in Open Office but everything should be compatible. The board is composed of links to the question pages and then each question page has a Back link that takes you to the board. Final Jeopardy at the bottom–the question has the theme song looped 4 times for a two minute time limit. Can easily be removed or modified.

These particular questions are designed to review Straightforward Intermediate Unit 2. Have fun, feel free to modify it, and if you have any suggestions or problems let me know in the comments.

Jeopardy Powerpoint (7 Nov 09)
and for those who prefer html: Jeopardy HTML (22 Sep 09)

To the casual observer, this does seem like a really serious problem. You see cars with AV and AST license plates at the bazaar and at restaurants. A friend of mine says the classmate of his son is picked up from school every day by an AST car. The kid is six years old.

Why is this personal use of cars a problem, I hear you say? Well, first taxpayer money pays for that gas, those drivers’ salaries and repairs and maintenance on the cars. Government workers don’t have the right to take a taxi and then make me pay the bill, which is essentially what they do when they use government cars for unofficial use. And of course the more a car is used, the more maintenance it needs, and the better chances it will get into an accident. More things I have to pay for so Azamat the Lead Manager can show his girlfriend a good time.

Second, I believe it’s a gateway drug to corruption and abuse of power. If you let a civil servant use one piece of government property anyway he or she pleases, why are they going to draw the line at cars? Why not treat their office, their subordiantes, the computers, and other information and property they have access to as if it was their own? All at our expense. At the very least, it would be very hard to take someone seriously who fights against corruption and then uses their AV to drive their mother shopping at Astrikzhan.

Third,while KZ and AV cars are assigned to individuals, the AST (formerly ADM) cars are in a pool. Civil servants who have the right to use them must phone up the dispatcher and wait for an available car to come pick them up. If all the cars are busy, they have to wait longer. One can imagine situations where people who need a car for legitimate reasons wait while all the cars are busy taking people to night clubs and cafes!

So what is the solution? Lower the mileage limits on use of cars for civil servants? Strictly enforce those limits with surprise inspections? Limit the number of government cars available? Reduce the hours of availability? Not so much. Instead the government appears to have authorized members of Zhas Otan to ride with traffic police at night and stop government cars. Zhas Otan is the youth branch of Nur Otan, the party headed by the President. A number of my friends have reported that their cars were pulled over at night and the driver interrogated by a 20-year old kid as to where he was going and why. Even when the driver had a legitimate reason–going home after dropping a government worker off or picking someone up from a late-night meeting–a complaint was still filed. That complaint apparently requires that the government worker assigned that car write an explanation to the Office of the President because they are the ones who manage the car pool.

I have a few issues with this solution. The main one is that I don’t see why 18 to 30 year old kids need to be deputized. Are the traffic police unable to handle the situation on their own? Or what about the dispatcher, who should know where cars are going and when? Perhaps it would be sufficient for the traffic police to note when they see government cars and check with the dispatcher to see if there was a legitimate reason? While these kids may be nice enough and trying to just help their country, power corrupts and I can’t imagine it’s good for a young person’s upbringing to authorize them to pull over cars assigned to Ministers and Vice Ministers! How will their bosses (or rectors of their universities) deal with them knowing that that night those kids can hunt down their cars and file a complaint to the Office of the President? And it’s a bit strange from my point of view that a political party, rather than a government body, is dealing with this problem. Political parties are not the government. Just because Nur Otan has a majority in Parliament now does not mean that the party itself has power over the government. If anyone should be dealing with this problem, it should be the police or the Office of the President itself (as they own the car pool).

I should say that I don’t know what measures have been taken in tandem with this program. Hopefully there are other measures. I should also note that as far as I understand, the Zhas Otan corps is mainly targeting cars they see stopped outside of cafes, billiards clubs and restaurants late at night–which is fair enough, probable cause and all. However, some cars have been pulled over at 10 o’clock at night, driving. Which leads me to believe that it might be illegal for government workers to use their cars at 10pm. Meaning it’s illegal to make people work at 10pm. Meaning that soon the government will no doubt pass a law forcing all government workers to go home at 7pm, as per their contracts. I see that as happening really soon.

So down at the bottom of my site you will notice a new badge that looks like this:

If you want to register, you can go here. They have a variety of badges to choose from and they all look pretty slick. I also noticed that the badges by default point to the homepage of Whois1in.kz so I advise modifying it to point to your own site’s statistics by replacing the link in the code. Also the link opens in the same page, so I would change the target to “_blank” or “new”.

Even though jokes aren’t funny when you have to explain them, I will say that the word in the pic means ass, and has the same connotation in Russian of badly done, crappy (pun gleefully intended), disorganized, and so on.

So it was a shame that this promising fighter lost a bout to WBA light heavyweight champion Gabriel Campillo on August 15th of this year. It was a shame that the match took place in Kazakhstan, at the Astana Boxing Complex. It was too bad that he had family from Shimkent in the audience. And it was a shame that he lost on points, with the match a draw until the final round. Campillo won on the basis of one well-timed blow in the 12th round. Even more interestingly, most spectators believed that Shumenov was the clear winner, dominating the entire match. But the match apparently ended amicably with Campillo saying, “Shumenov is a great boxer…He will be world champion.”

However, that wasn’t the end of the matter. In September, Shumenov’s company filed a lawsuit against Camillo and refusing to pay him claiming that he violated Kazakhstan Federation and World Boxing Association drug testing rules. According to eleven witnesses immediately after the fight instead of going directly to the drug testing room, Campillo locked himself in the men’s shower room with his trainer for eleven minutes. Campillo claims that a WBA judge and a WBA supervisor were with him at all times. Both the WBA officials also corroborate this story, saying they were in the locker room with Campillo after the fight and that he was only out of their sight for ten seconds when he went into the shower room. However witnesses claim that neither official was in the locker room and that Campillo and his trainer spent at least five minutes in the shower room alone. A bit suspicious.

Now we have a resolution of sorts. The WBA has sanctioned a rematch to take place sometime before 28 February 2010. Shumenov, as both fighter and President of KZ-Events, has accepted the decision and withdrawn his lawsuit and any claim that Campillo violated the rules. Campillo for his part says that all questions of payment for the first match have been resolved and that there are no bad feelings between the two fighters.

Hopefully this time some of Shumenov’s relatives, whom I know indirectly, will think to invite the American along to watch a future world champion take Campillo down.

EDIT: Thanks for the huge reaction and quick reaction. That has to be a record for number of comments on a post in one day. I was thinking of any well-known and loved songs.

This is what I have so far from this post and from quizzing friends.

1. “Novii Povorot”, Mashina Vremeni
2. “Lady of the Night”, Modern Talking
3. “You’re My Heart, You’re My Soul”, Modern Talking
4. “Stumbling In”, Smokie
5. “Winds of Change”, Scorpions
6. “Rasputin”, Boney M
7. “Ma-ma-ma-ma Maria”, Gaylords (Ricchi i Poveri, original Italian)
8. Alumnivii Ogurtsi”, Kino
9. “Happy New Year”, ABBA
10. “Moi Adres Sovetskii Soyuz”, No idea who did it.

Also, those last two links in Jen’s comments are hysterical. Not sure they are incredibly popular around here but so awesome. In terms of where to get these in the US, besides trying compilations of 70s-80s pop music, there are ways to download videos or even audio from YouTube and apparently various ways to download MP3s. But as those may not be legal, I really wouldn’t want to post about them here.

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that he took off from Baikanour, located in a desert area of Central Asia, a region that has serious problems with water supply. He plans to use his time on the space station to to draw attention to problems of clean water. At 24:00 GMT on October 9 [06:00 Oct 10 Astana/Almaty time], he will launch a webcast performance that will link with performances in Montreal, Moscow, Santa Monica, New York City, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Sydney, Tokyo, Tampa, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Paris and London.

According to the press release,

In each of the cities, an “artistic moment” will unfold in the presence of artists and world-renowned personalities. Each city will have its own theme related to water. The following have already confirmed their participation: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, A. R. Rahman, Cirque du Soleil, Claude Challe, Dr. David Suzuki, Fnaire, Frank De Winne, Garou, Gilberto Gil, Gregory Colbert, Jean Lemire, Julie Payette, Maud Fontenoy, Patrick Bruel, Peter Gabriel, Peter Lik, Shakira, Simon Carpentier, Tatuya Ishii, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi, Tiffany Speight, U2, Vandana Shiva and Yann Arthus-Bertrand. They will take part in the event either by reading parts of the poem, performing or sharing an artistic work.

Although the site is down right now, it will be broadcast on the One Drop Foundation site.