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Ruslan Gritsaylo, 40, speaks to the BBC about how he set up a business taking people on paratrike tours in the skies above Kiev

What makes an entrepreneur? The BBC's Roman Lebed and Tom Santorelli speak to Ruslan Gritsaylo about how he set up a business taking people on paratrike tours in the skies above Kiev.

"my business is to fly," says 40-year-old Kiev resident Ruslan Gritsaylo, who really does look like a man who loves his job.

Every week he takes customers up in the air on his tiny aircraft known as a paratrike.

A cousin of the microlight, paratrikes look like a tricycle tractor with a huge propeller mounted behind, as well as a big parachute which rises into the sky on take-off.

At first sight it may be difficult to believe that this vehicle can make it into the air, but these doubts quickly eat the dust when the vehicle breaks away from the earth.

Piloting in the blood

Mr Gritsaylo is a third generation pilot. his grandfather flew during World War II, and his father was a pilot in the 1970s. he himself flew sports aircraft and was trained as civil aviation pilot.

When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, he realised he could make good money by piloting flights on his own.

"my dear wife Aliona is joking with me: your hobby became a business, and then your business became a hobby. It's all about love," says Mr Gritsaylo.

When he started his business in the 1990s, there was not much competition. There was not enough information about paratrikes – how to construct them or how to fly them safely – so it was a rather dangerous business.

This changed over time as the technology improved, making flights on the micro-vehicles completely safe and civilised, according to Mr Gritsaylo.

"It still can be considered as an extreme sport, but it is more about endorphin then adrenalin," he says.

"It's more about enjoying it rather than being scared of it. The definition of paratrike is one of the safest flying machines ever created by man."

Between the lines of the law

In a country well-known for its love of red tape, securing permits to fly paratrikes proved complicated.

Mr Gritsaylo found that many laws in the aviation sphere contradicted each other, and it was very difficult to properly legalise the business for a small private company.

"There are lots of things, which make no sense.

"For example, people come and ask, show me your papers. I say, what kind of papers? and they say, well your pilot licence.

"I have six pilot licences all over the world, but I don't have Ukrainian, because there is no company legally providing official pilot licences for this kind of ultra-light flying machine," he says.

Mr Gritsaylo's father and grandfather were both pilots

So his biggest problem became his biggest opportunity: because of imperfect legislation his aircraft does not require registration.

Otherwise, he would have had to get 11 different permits, which would have been almost impossible.

"It's a balance between 'yes' and 'no' – it's 'maybe'. and between the borders of this 'maybe', you can do everything. We are between the lines of the law."

Mr Gritsaylo carries several thousand customers every year. They stand in line to fly during weekends.

Ten minutes in the sky costs about $60 (£37) – for Ukraine, that is quite a lot of money, but he spreads his net wide to catch customers by using social media and maintaining his own website.

"I follow the rule of big figures – you make lots of calls, lots of e-mails, lots of people. Lots of money," says Mr Gritsaylo, whose phone rings almost every five minutes.

AirForia euphoria

His clients are made up of a wide range of people – bankers, office managers, artists, actors – and often people buy certificates to fly as gifts for each other.

People get their biggest kick from night-flights, otherwise known as open-space flights.

Ruslan diversifies his revenue by producing videos of the flights and performing at airshows

Mr Gritsaylo likes to call himself The Man who Brings Happiness. he even named his aero club AirForia, a play on euphoria.

He says that after he started taking people up into the sky he needed to diversify his business model, and now he advertises insurance companies and other companies on his parachutes, flying their banners through the skies and performing paratrike tricks during airshows.

"Take a bottle of milk. how can you earn money with a bottle of milk? Advertise it with an airplane! where, when, with whom – these are the questions. But every question has an answer. you have to find the connection between the airplane and something you see around".

Mr Gritsaylo also purchased equipment so he could produce high-quality videos of the flights.

He sets the camera right on the nose of his aircraft and claims that he can take better pictures than helicopters can.

"every year you must make some step forward, because there are lots of people walking behind you. and they are trying to step on your toes. if you don't go forward – they will walk on top of you," says Mr Gritsaylo, with a huge smile on his face.

Jim Parsons Pulls a Rabbit Out of his Hat for Broadway’s Harvey

by Mervyn Rothstein14 May 2012

Beloved for playing a quirky social outsider on TV’s "the big Bang Theory," Jim Parsons talks about his passion for the stage as he begins crafting the equally odd misfit Elwood P. Dowd in Broadway’s Harvey.

Jim Parsons has two TV Emmys, but deep inside he’s a man of the theatre.

"Theatre was my first love," Parsons says. "I can’t take the theatre out of me. and I wouldn’t want to. To me it’s home. For an actor — maybe not all actors, but for the type I feel I am and the type I want to be — there’s not a better place to hone what it is you do."

Parsons won the 2010 and 2011 Emmys for Best Actor in a Comedy Series by portraying theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper on "the big Bang Theory." Now, on summer break from CBS, he is again romancing his first love, starring on Broadway in the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Harvey. He’s playing Elwood P. Dowd, an otherwise ordinary man who says he has an invisible friend named Harvey — a pooka, or mythological creature, who resembles a 6-foot-3-½-inch-tall rabbit.

Mary Chase‘s classic 1944 comedy won the Pulitzer Prize and lasted 1,775 performances, making it the sixth-longest-running play in Broadway history. Antoinette Perry, for whom the Tonys are named, directed; Frank Fay was the first Dowd. Jimmy Stewart portrayed Dowd in the 1950 movie. Parsons’ co-stars are Jessica Hecht and Charles Kimbrough; Scott Ellis directs.

Parsons, 39, grew up in Houston and made his stage debut in school at age six as the Kola-Kola bird in The Elephant’s Child. He was hooked on theatre.

Jim Parsons

"even five years into doing ‘Big Bang Theory,’ the scales are still tipped for me so heavily in theatrical experience," Parsons says. "whether it was children’s theatre, or Shakespeare in the Park in Houston, or free theatre in a converted warehouse in downtown Houston" — or college at the University of Houston, or the old Globe/University of San Diego graduate program in classical theatre — the stage was where he learned his craft.

Parsons has the Texas accent that’s part of the Sheldon Cooper essence, but there’s nary a hint of the character’s hubris. his non-TV voice is friendly and unassuming, with the sincerity of an actor who loves his craft.

Last year he appeared on Broadway in the Tony-winning revival of Larry Kramer‘s The Normal Heart. (Ben Brantley of the New York Times called him "terrific.") one reason he has returned again, he says, is that he misses "the immediacy" of stage acting. "We have an immediacy to our TV show because we have a live studio audience. but there are major differences. Being in TV, we get to do it again and again until it’s ‘right.’ There’s a part of me that likes the other way, that aspect of theatre where there’s no chance to go back."

but most important "is that I’ve not worked in any other medium that offers as much time to get to know a story, and a character, as theatre does. the TV schedule is essentially four or five days to get in touch with the story you’re doing that week. you play the same character every time, so there are certain things that do carry over, but as far as the story, as far as the words — and the words are ever changing through those four or five days — you don’t get a chance to sink down into the script."

 Continued…

On "Don't Be Tardy For the Wedding" (Thu., 9 p.m. ET on Bravo) Kim Zolciak met with her wig stylist to discuss what style she — and her dog — should sport on the big day.
The Full Feed from HuffingtonPost.com

Poor misguided "dating spreadsheet guy" of last week has another moment in the New York Post Monday. This time it comes from Andrea Peyser, our new favorite dating columnist, who's not only full of advice but also so effervescently positive. how does she do it? Peyser uses David Merkur—remember, he's the investment banker who ranked his Match.com dates and kept track of them via Excel—to bemoan the entire state of online dating, that thing these crazy kids are all doing nowadays! the nostalgia wafts over the cubicle walls, here. Peyser writes: 

It seems so very 2011. but remember the old days when men and women used to communicate via text message?

Or the previous century, when guys and gals hooked up in bars?

Remember? Remember those days? Peyser seems not perturbed by the fact that right in front of our eyes, guys and gals are still texting and hooking up in bars. No matter. the point is, we're all creeps now. Creeps with computers! Peyster continues:

It’s happened. the war of the sexes has gone creepy, officially turning from a pastime to a game. now it’s blown up into hand-to-hand combat on the Macs of Manhattan, where even a guy who looks like Miss Piggy can be the master of his virtual harem.

As for what the world is coming to and why, Peyser believes the fault lies with 1) the Internet; 2) Men, who think they are invincible because of the Internet (whatever happened to picking up "chicks in person," the way real men used to, back when people were honest and there was no such thing as a dial-up?); and 3) Women, who are desperate, a "red meat in a guy’s dreams of zipless conquests," eating up online dating manipulations from terrible men "like a bulimic before a purge."

but mostly it's the Internet. This all happens because men can't get girls in real life and so go online instead where they can better mess with women. because that's exactly how it works, assuming people are only online dating because they are psychotic.

there are other possibilities here, of course. There's a small chance that online dating is just another way for people to meet and to go through the general "games" and orchestrations (which every so often result in actually getting to like someone else, and maybe even having a relationship) as any other form of communication and interaction, including hooking up in bars after meeting in person after discovering a mutual admiration for cave drawings or whatnot. Online dating might, maybe, be a conduit to dating, not simply a distasteful activity akin to an eating disorder. but we're not the dating columnist. Andrea Peyser is! Her solution in this desperate time: Get off the computer and meet your husband in a synagogue, like her friend Arlene. Arlene clearly has an AOL account.

Image via Shutterstock by Andy Dean Photography.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at jdoll at theatlantic dot com. you can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. Jen Doll

Answer: what your family is noticing is the "cooked" flavor of milk that has been heated to 280 degrees. Regular pasteurized milk is heated to only 160 degrees. that extra heat is why the milk in shelf-stable cartons lasts so long.
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A little more than 24 hours after blowing his third save of the season, new Marlins closer Heath Bell said Friday he was eager to go out and redeem himself. 

Bell is going to have to wait until Saturday, though, to do that.

"[If he's going to pitch] tonight he'll have to pitch lefty," Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen said before Friday's game against the Diamondbacks. "He threw more pitches than [Ricky] Nolasco. Hopefully, we can pitch him [Saturday]. 50 pitches for [Carlos] Zambrano, Nolasco, [Mark] Buehrle that's nothing. For a closer, that's three games. Maybe more. Every closer is supposed to throw 15 pitches. That's three or four games. We have to be careful with him."

Bell, signed to a three-year, $27-million deal in the winter, isn't in any danger of losing his job. Guillen reiterated Friday he's fully behind the 34-year old All-Star. "if we want to win this thing he has to come with us. He has to be there in the ninth inning," Guillen said.

Bell said Friday he's figured out what's led to his struggles with the help of pitching coach Randy Saint Claire. But when asked what they were, Bell didn't care to elaborate saying "you have to ask [St. Claire]."

"I'm confident I can pitch like I know I can," Bell said. "For whatever reason I was creating bad habits this year. Some things [are] even from last year that we found out. Saint said I need to start pounding the strike zone. I'm not doing that right now. I will pound the strike zone from here on out.

"Mechanically, I'm fine," Bell went onto say. "There's just a few other things if Saint wants to talk about, we'll talk about it. But I'm not talking about it.

"sometimes you go through ups and downs. We definitely should be better team wise. We should be playing defense and hitting better. But this is a team sport and why we have a marathon season that's six months. I'm not big into cliches and I'm not going to say it's early. But we grind everyday. if you have a bad month, so be it. It's not how you start, it's how you finish."

Bell sounded angry Thursday when he volunteered that a member of the team’s training staff questioned his work habits, saying he was doing too much, not too little.

Asked about those comments Friday, Guillen said: "if Heath said he had a disagreement with the pitching coach, I might buy that. But I don't think the trainer told him to throw 10 balls in a row. I'm just being honest.

"I don't like talking about my players, but maybe he said it because there is some reason to it. I don't know. From the minute they leave the training room to the time they get on the field, it's like four hours. if he had a reason to say it maybe you guys can ask… [But] is that going to be his excuse? I hope not. what does a trainer have to do with how you perform? Maybe he can disagree if Randy St. Claire said something about pitching. But a trainer? I don't know if that's a good excuse or that's the truth. if that's the truth, we have to find out."

> about an hour before the Marlins took the field at Marlins Park for batting practice, Guillen came out and threw an extra round to shortstop Jose Reyes, who is sitting out for the first time this season after getting off to a cold start.

How cold of a start has it been for the Mets' former All-Star shortstop? His .205 batting average over his first 18 games is the worst of his career since becoming an everyday player in 2005. His previous low? .231 in 2006. Guillen said the Marlins struggles as a team at the plate aren't the result of a lack of work. He said the team to extra BP three times on its six-game road trip. 

"I think Jose needs more a break mentally than physically. I think you watch his at-bats, not just in new York, the [entire] road trip he was rushing to the plate, trying to do too much," Guillen said. "But it's not just Jose. there are a lot of guys struggling on our club right now. We're trying to come out of it as quickly as we can. We're working on it. I think the most important thing is we have to relax. You cannot get five hits in one at-bat. You can't hit a three-run home run with one guy on base. just relax and do what you're supposed to do."

SAMSON'S 52-MILE TREK: Marlins President David Samson spent the morning, afternoon and evening Friday on a 52-mile trek from Pompano Beach to Marlins Park — all to raise money for charity.

Asked the longest distance he'd run in his life, Guillen joked: "A triple. That's it. and I was dying to get to third base."

"I'm not a running guy, but I think the cause of the running is very great," Guillen added. "I tip my hat… I hope he makes it alive. That's not easy bro."

Samson ran the double-marathon on Friday to honor the workers who built Marlins Park as well as raise money for various charities.

Turns out by the way Samson isn't the only long-distance runner on the team. Bell said he ran a marathon in California back in 1996 and has competed in about 15 triathlons — none in the last five years, though.

On this week's all new "my Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding" (Sun., may 6, 10 pm ET), TLC's look at the American gypsy subculture continues in an episode titled "14 and Looking For Mr. Right." The episode follows Pricilla, a 14-year-old girl who is a …
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San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 03, 2012 On Wednesday, April 18th 2012, culinary events company Parties That Cook® hosted its most successful fundraiser to-date. more than one hundred guests attended the third annual "Cooking up Success" for Women's …
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This agreement will showcase an exceptional Skin Care line that has never been available in North America. "After extensive negotiations and research, we decided to enter in to this long term partnership with Cellaboratories Research and Investment …
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