One hundred kilometers from Moscow, Boris was sitting, waiting with 48 years of secret service knowledge at his fingertips, waiting for somebody willing to pay his price.

Eldar's advert promised big things, a pair of magic glasses that could record your dreams while you sleep.

Cran the Intern looked at me askance. "What did you say?" she asked.

Ireland, one of the countries worst hit by the financial crisis, is looking to boost its economy by attracting Russian tourists to its shore, and Wednesday the Irish Embassy presented a sales pitch for its country to local tourist firms.

What 2011 will represent for Russia — the start of something, the end of somebody — nobody knows. But it was a year when the curtain was slid aside and those behind the controls revealed. Or when people, who always knew of the men behind the curtain, decided to take notice.

The Saturday protest offered a cornucopia of political slogans, signs and posters. The Moscow Times spoke to people carrying some of the better ones about what they wanted to say and why.

You may have heard that tens of thousands of people would protest against election falsifications on Saturday. You probably didn't hear it from state-controlled Russian television. But perhaps you have been following it in real time on Twitter.

Someone near metro Universitet is currently cutting up 16.2 kilometers of white ribbon and needs some help. It takes a long time, there are three shifts tomorrow, but it has to be done by Saturday.  

Somebody has been sending chocolates to Alexei Navalny, the temporarily jailed anti-corruption blogger, who once inspired a box of chocolates himself.

Tens of thousands people descended on the center of Moscow on Saturday for a protest against election fraud and to demand new elections in what was one of Russia's biggest demonstrations since the early 1990s.

Tom Cruise was looking down on the protest at Mayakovskaya this week. He was in an ad on a roof advertising "Mission Impossible 4," a film that premieres next week with an opening shot of a bomb blowing up the Kremlin. Down below, a different threat to the Kremlin was being herded off to police stations.

There was a long line on Pushkin Square earlier this month, 50 people standing patiently. On the other side of the square the screechy histrionics of an LDPR meeting could be heard, and it was clear who the people were. Walking past, a young man with a clipboard came up and offered 200 rubles to be a fake supporter in the fake demo for the fake party. I said no and he looked me up and down and immediately raised the figure to 250, which felt kind of good at the time.

Bloodsuckers! Bloodsuckers! They attach themselves to the body politic and then suck out all the good before falling off sated and not much use for anything.

The square steel construction leers up out of the top of the underpass that leads to Kursky Station. It looks as if it were shipped in from a military Soviet factory whose move to consumer goods had not been as successful as hoped.

With the Bolshoi Theater's historic stage opening after restoration Friday, there is huge interest in tickets. But anyone walking past the box office this week would have witnessed an unexpected scene, as one by one a series of men who looked as if they were more used to sleeping rough than watching ballet, came out holding tickets to Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker."

The end-of-season final was typically tense, with a goal disallowed and emotional fans on the sideline. As it ended in a draw, both teams had to face a penalty shootout, and the referee made an unusual decision after players began missing penalties.

In a month or so, people will come into Moscow offices, their faces shiny and stuck in one pose. If you see someone like that before the freeze, it's probably Botox rather than the cold.

Look down next time you are near Belorussky Station, and you will see Boris' simple ad for salt. His number is written on the ground in huge letters with the word "salt" above and "spices" below, as if he were a merchant of olden days, when salt was a valuable commodity.

Fans in Makhachkala gave a frenzied welcome to Samuel Eto'o, the former Barca and Inter forward whose move to a club that few outside Russia had heard of a few months ago has stunned world football.

My neighbor's daughter doesn't come round much, but here she was — blonde, sparkly rocks on her hand, tight leopard skin-colored trousers and an ability to speak to the creator.

If you are coming downstairs now with a bump, bump, bump on the back of your head, then that may be the only way you know of coming downstairs, but that frankly is still not going to help you when your eye pops out, your seams come undone and your face turns black from the stairs in your apartment building.

The job ad looks tempting at first glance. They promise lots of travel, enquire if you have a passport, a Schengen visa, a driver's license before asking for a photo but making the odd point that it doesn't have to show your face.

A Russian film director was recently interviewed and asked why he had cast two foreign women in his film. He explained that it was hard to find good Russian actresses in their 30s as most young women in the early 1990s didn't want to go into the poorly paid profession. They, he added bitterly, just wanted to be a soderzhanka.

The other day, there were three journalists — two British — in the car heading back from Vorobyovy Gory, but surprisingly the only one secretly recording anything was the young driver of the Ford.

The photos of Hollywood stars have been plastered all over the city for weeks, Dustin Hoffman looking down on Nikitsky Bulvar, Woody Allen and Steven Seagal, paired together on a billboard for probably the first time ever, on the Garden Ring. This Saturday and Sunday the stars actually came together at an event organized by the controversial charity Federation Fund.

Many have tried to get rid of them before, but somehow over the years the kiosks survived the promises of cleanups, police raids and the wanderings of the hapless down-and-outs and taxi drivers, the type that were brought up by wolves until expelled after the wolves realized they were too uncouth for pack life.

The Moscow International Film Festival opened Thursday with the world premiere of "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," the blockbuster whose predecessor was described by one critic as "like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan," but the probable awfulness of the Michael Bay movie should not put off anyone from going to a festival that has a strong selection of festival favorites and intriguing new movies.

There is a new women's magazine on sale at the Kurskaya metro station, and like all the others it has somebody pretty on the cover. This cover features a handsome young man with steely blue eyes and a perfectly trimmed two-day old beard lying on the ground with one arm behind his back and a come-hither look.

The Listener wasn't answering his phone the last two times I rang. The first time I rang, the line answered and there was a silence for 10 seconds that may have been the sound of somebody listening — although not with much enthusiasm.

The end of the world has been announced on an empty road in the north of Moscow. That is where the advert for FamilyRadio.com looks out from high up on a metal pole.