Last night’s episode of The Big Bang Theory was forgettable. Something about Raj going to live with Leonard and Penny but then going to live with Howard and Bernadette and then going back to Leonard and Penny.
The “vanity card” at the end caught my eye (instead of having the same Chuck Lorre Productions title card at the end of each episode, Chuck Lorre prefers to write a new one for each episode, often with some random musings unrelated to the episode that just ended).
I saw a bunch of Cyrillic on tonight’s vanity card. I went to Chuck Lorre's website and found the card, but it was an image, not text. Not even the line in English at the beginning, “Sing it with me!”
So it has to be the lyrics to some kind of song. I couldn’t put the image into Google Translate (or at least I assumed I couldn’t). So I pulled up my computer’s Cyrillic keyboard layout, being well aware that the designer of the Russian keyboard had no obligation to base it on our ridiculous and haphazard QWERTY layout (though do check out the keyboard at TypeIt.org).
In fact, the only mnemonically helpful coincidence seems to be that the C key is С in the Russian keyboard; that Russian letter is somewhat less variegated in sound than our letter, and as far as I know it is always transliterated as S.
I didn’t have to type the whole song, just the title and the first line was enough to pull up the Russmus.net lyrics page for “Moscow Nights”:
Не слышны в саду даже шорохи,
Всё здесь замерло до утра.
Если б знали вы, как мне дороги
Подмосковные вечера. ...
Ne slyshny v sadu dazhe shorokhi,
Vsyo zdes' zamerlo do utra.
Esli b znali vy, kak mne dorogi
Podmoskovnye vechera. ...
Even whispers aren't heard in the garden,
Everything has died down till morning.
If you only knew how dear to me
Are these Moscow nights. ...
Here’s the song sung by the Red Army Chorus:
It's a nice song by Vasily Solov’yov-Sedoy, lyrics by Mikhail Matusovsky. The composer, who was born when his city was called St. Petersburg and died when it was called Leningrad, became very popular during World War II with his songs empathizing with the Soviet soldiers.
After the war, Solov’yov-Sedoy continued to write songs about soldiers, but he also wrote songs about workers and students. “Moscow Nights” was written in 1955. How Chuck Lorre came to be aware of this song, I can only speculate.
If you don’t think this card has any political significance, the one for the previous episode (aired February 23, there was a rerun last week) is much more overt:
If the free press is the enemy of the people, and I'm part of the people, it would follow that Rachel Maddow is out to get me. Now I don't mean to diminish her intellect, which is considerable, but as enemies go, with that Ricky Nelson pompadour and big, goofy grin, she doesn't exactly strike terror in my heart. On the other hand, Little Stevie Van Breitbart, who I assume is a friend of the people and looks like he just woke up from a three-day bender, scares the$#!+ out of me.
“Stevie Van Breitbart” is obviously Steve Bannon. Liam Matthews at TV Guide dissects that one in more detail (he also wrote about the card for the February 16 episode, which warns of opportune tragedy and suggests having a Canadian passport is a good idea).
Probably by now Matthews has already posted an explanation of last night's “Moscow Nights” card, perhaps with some details that I overlooked or did not seek out.
I scheduled this to publish at a time when the sun has already set on Moscow, even though the day is just barely beginning over here. At what time does Putin most like to send orders to Trump?
And by the way, there's going to be a Big Bang Theory prequel, with the working title “Little Sheldon.” If the original show is any indication, the vanity cards for the new show could be way more interesting than the episodes they conclude.