“These eerie formations in the sky may look like alien ships. But as the Daily Mail points out, they’re actually a natural occurrence called lenticular clouds”. – Claudine Zap. Photo: Lenticular clouds hover of the mountains of the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia. (Photos by Denis Budkov/Caters News)

Russian Police detain opposition supporters during a “March of Millions” protest rally against Vladimir Putin's return in Moscow, Russia on May 6, 2012. Over 650 people were arrested including opposition leaders. (Photo by Dmitry Schedrin, Rustem Adagamov, Andrey Stenin)

Russian artist Salavat Fidai is obsessed with things in miniature, and he has previously painted miniatures on pumpkin seeds and carved sculptures into the graphite tips of pencils. For this project, he's gone for something a little bit bigger, but not by much. One of Fidai's favorite painters is the legendary Vincent Van Gogh, so he decided to do a series where he recreated some of Van Gogh's famous works on matchboxes.

Participants in the Grelka Fest at the Sheregesh resort in Tashtagolsky District of Kemerovo Oblast, Russia on April 22, 2017. Russian girls marked the end of the ski season with a record-breaking bikini ski festival at Siberia’s top winter resort, Sheregesh. Some 1,498 skiers and snowboarders undressed to impress in the annual event as they took to the pistes under blues skies and sunshine in a bracing temperature of just 5°C. (Photo by Grelka Fest/The Siberian Times)

“The Crimean War (October 1853 – February 1856) was a conflict fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the French Empire, the British Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The war was part of a long-running contest between the major European powers for influence over territories of the declining Ottoman Empire. Most of the conflict took place on the Crimean Peninsula, but there were smaller campaigns in western Anatolia, Caucasus, the Baltic Sea, the Pacific Ocean and the White Sea”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A vivandiere, a female soldier selling provisions and spirits, with the Allied forces during the Crimean War. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Ed Freeman was born and raised in Boston and majored in French and Russian at Oberlin College in Ohio. After college, he worked as a performing musician, arranger and record producer, creating dozens of pop and jazz vinyls, including Carly Simon’s debut album and Don McLean’s American Pie. Ed Freeman in 1990 and have watched him grow as an artist and a teacher. For the past eight years, Ed has been teaching a Photoshop class at Santa Monica City College and currently has large pieces of his work, Desert Realty, featured in a traveling museum.

“Russian singer Eduard Khil has died at the age of 77, following a stroke. Khil is apparently well known in Russia, though attained belated fame outside of Russia when a musical number he performed on Soviet television in the 1970s, in which he sung nonsense lyrics in a rich baritone over luxuriantly loungy background music, but above all with an infectious sense of good cheer, ended up on YouTube and became a meme”. ... (Listen to songs of Eduard Khil)