AtDtDA(28): A Sky-Rendezvous

[Dave Monroe]

"They arranged a sky-rendezvous with the Bol'shaia Igra ..." (AtD, Pt.
IV, p. 794)


"a sky-rendezvous"

http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/1/1b/Enterprise_and_Klothos.jpg


Semipalatinsk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semey


"the great February market in Irbit"

The Irbit fair or Yamarka was the second largest fair in Tsarist
Russia after the Makariev Fair. It was held annually in winter,
trading with tea and fur from Asia....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irbit_fair
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irbit


"'some American trick'"

Cf. ...

"capitalistic propaganda" (ibid.)


"Tunguskan obstanovka"

obstanovka
Russian: situation.

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_794


"'Zdorovo!'"

Zdorovo!
Russian: If the stress falls on the first syllable it means great!
If the stress falls on the second syllable it means hello!

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_795


Neutral Moresnet

Moresnet or Neutral Moresnet or Altenberg was a tiny European
territory of about 3.5 km² (1.4 mi²) that existed from 1816 to 1919.
Its two large neighbors (Netherlands and Prussia) could not agree on
who should own it, deciding therefore to make it a neutral territory
where both would share control equally....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutral_Moresnet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Official_use

Cf. ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedge_%28border%29

Wedge, The
323; aka the "Delaware Triangle"; 469-70

The "notorious Wedge" that the tangent line created did exist, and
provided a kind of no man's land where criminals and other unsavory
types hung out because they were...neither [in] Pennsylvania or
Maryland.

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/mason-dixon/alpha/w.html
http://masondixon.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=W

...  as Pynchon's book shows, the "perfect" abstractions of Euclid and
Enlightenment science, not to mention the designs of imperial empires,
fail to coincide with a complicated world, and poor Mason and Dixon
have to compute the difference. Here, that difference is marked on the
map by the Delaware "wedge," the space (which includes Whiteclay
Creek) to the left of the Arc Corner which makes up the northwest
section of Delaware.

http://www.swarthmore.edu/Humanities/pschmid1/essays/pynchon/arc.corner.html


"Rand shares"

Cf. p. 790 ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0803&msg=125257


"'Chinese Turkestan railway bonds'"

Turkestan (Persian: ترکستان; also spelled Turkistan or Türkistan in
Turkish, which literally means "Land of the Turks" in Persian) is a
region in Central Asia, which today is largely inhabited by Turkic
peoples....

It is subdivided into Russian Turkestan and Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous
Region (also known as Chinese Turkestan, East Turkestan or
Uyghuristan) in PR China....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan

Xinjiang (Uyghur: شىنجاڭ, Shinjang; Chinese: 新疆; pinyin: Xīnjiāng;
Wade-Giles: Hsin1-chiang1; Postal map spelling: Sinkiang) is an
autonomous region (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region) of the People's
Republic of China....

The region is often referred to in older English references (in
particular past reference works) as Chinese Turkestan or sometimes
East Turkestan....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang

The Lanxin railway, or Lanzhou–Xinjiang railway (Traditional Chinese:
蘭新鐵路; Simplified Chinese: 兰新铁路; pinyin: Lánxīn Tiělù) is a railway in
the People's Republic of China.

The railway is the only railway linking Xinjiang to the rest of China....

It forms part of the Second Eurasian Continental Bridge which extends
from eastern China to Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

For part of its path, it travels along a similar route to that of the Silk Road.

It was built by the China Railway Engineering Corporation.
Construction of the initial stage (to Urumqi) started in 1952 and was
completed in 1962....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanzhou-Xinjiang_Railway

Help!  Oh, Doug ...


"'Some tchudak in bar in Kiakhta'"

tchudak
Now transliterated chudak. Russian: crank.

Kiakhta
Or Kyakhta, only two syllables. Town on Russian (Buriat)-Mongolian
border south of Lake Baikal, a center of Russian trade with China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyakhta
http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=ATD_792-820#Page_795