Tie Me to the Mast

"Then I stopped the ears of all my men, and they bound me hands and feet to the mast as I stood upright on the crosspiece; but they went on rowing themselves. When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate, the Sirens saw that we were getting in shore and began with their singing." -The Odyssey (trans. S. Butler)

Anecdote

A Russian colleague told me this anecdote today:

An American:
- We have Barack Obama, Stevie Wonder, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash.

A Russian:
- We have Vladimir Putin, no wonder, no hope and no cash.

Major discoveries

That song they play at Leningradsky Vokzal when you arrive in Moscow: "Moskva" by Oleg Gazmanov.

And,

"Since 1965, the song "The Hymn to the Great City" (composed by Reinhold Glière and has been adopted as the hymn of Saint Petersburg) has been playing, when the Red Arrow leaves Saint Petersburg at 23:55." (Wiki)

Knowing what things are called is cool.

Recent Discoveries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepak_takraw
http://sorry.coryarcangel.com/

And the Men by Tony Hoagland

And The Men

want back in:
all the Dougs and the Michaels, the Darnells, the Erics and Josés,
they're standing by the off-ramp of the interstate
holding up cardboard signs that say WILL WORK FOR RELATIONSHIP.

Their love-mobiles are rusty.
Their Shaggin' Wagons are up on cinderblocks.
They're reading self-help books and practicing abstinence,
taking out Personals ads that say
"Good listener would like to meet lesbian ladies,
for purposes of friendship only."

In short, they've changed their minds, the men:
they want another shot at the collaborative enterprise.
Want to do fifty-fifty housework and childcare;
They want commitment renewal weekends and couples therapy.

Because being a man was finally too sad—
In spite of the perks, the lifetime membership benefits.
And it got old,
telling the joke about the hooker and the priest

at the company barbeque, praising the vintage of the beer and
punching the shoulders of a bud
in a little overflow of homosocial bonhomie—
Always holding the fear inside
like a tipsy glass of water—

Now they're ready to talk, really talk about their feelings,
in fact they're ready to make you sick with revelations of
their vulnerability—
A pool of testosterone is spreading from around their feet,
it's draining out of them like radiator fluid,
like history, like an experiment that failed.

So here they come on their hands and knees, the men:
Here they come. They're really beaten. No tricks this time.
No fine print.
Please, they're begging you. Look out.

Communism as a Cargo Cult

"Frank Dikötter's Mao's Great Famine firmly supports a simple but shocking theory of Communism: It was the largest cargo cult the world has ever seen. Communist revolutionaries were great at seizing power, but if power were their sole aim, the horror would have ended once they were firmly in charge. Alas, the Communists saw absolute power as a mere stepping stone to their true goal: Mimicking a few random characteristics of advanced economies, no matter how many lives it cost."

Read the rest at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/02/commie_cargo_cu.html

The Cry of the Menstruating Female Poplars

Due to a poorly planned city beautification project in the 1930s, there are too many female poplars and too few males in Moscow. Every May-June, the unwilling spinsters issue a collective cry for help, a summer blizzard of unfertilized seeds. "Give us men or cut us down." Actually, it's even worse than that, because the window during which male companionship would be useful has already passed. It's not a cry for help, then, but a lament that for the 60th year running it didn't arrive in time. Check this out for more on the poplars.



The heat, the smoke, the cold, the power, the iron water — this city goes from calamity to natural calamity. It's like we're at plague 5 of 10, and the Almighty still can't get anyone's attention, and the Jews have mistaken their chains for fashionable bracelets.