December 22, 2005

I have new software for managing this here website. On the right, you can see a list of Categories. Click on one, and it'll take you to a page with all of the entries I've written on that subject. The archives have grown too unwieldly, and since I only have four or five different things that I write about, I wanted people to be able to find, say, all of the panda porn entries with ease. If you have recommendations about categories that I should add (e.g. stuff I'm always yammering on about), please let me know. So far, I've assigned categories for everything from Japan onwards and the entire college era. I'll get the rabbi era done eventually, but I don't know if I'll ever do the Beelzetron entries, because there are so many of them, and I need to do new things to write about.

A lot of people are up in arms over the recent article claiming that Stalin had a secret plan to breed half-man, half-ape super warriors, but I don't really buy it. Look, everyone wants to make a connection between communism and monkeys. If we could place a chimpanzee at Trotsky's side during his "dustbin of history" speech flinging poo at the Mensheviks as they left the hall, we could pretty much draw the curtain on the human drama, take a bow and exit stage left. But we can't. The basic idea of this story is that, in 1926, Stalin found a scientist who had built his reputation on the artificial insemination of race-horses for the tsar and gave him a bunch of money to create obedient, powerful monkey-men who were "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." The scientist failed, as the story goes, and was duly punished.

Predictably enough, there are no corroborating sources on the web other than one brief reference to the scientist in question and bloggers linking to the article and going "woo woo monkeys". (Has anyone ever noticed how much the proliferation of blogs has diluted the usefulness of search results? It'd be fine if any of them had something to add to the topic. Instead, you just get a two hundred winners linking to the article and going "woo woo monkeys".) As I said, I don't believe the story. I could be wrong, but let me drop some history and see what you think.

By 1926, Stalin had the upper hand in the leadership struggle, but he was not the absolute ruler yet. He was still cutting deals under the table with other members of the Politburo and pitting various factions against each other. Trotsky was still on the scene; Zinoviev wasn't far removed from his power base in Leningrad, and Bukharin was at full strength. The Five Year Plan was still up for debate. Stalin and Bukharin hadn't even allied yet, let alone agreed about the shape of collectivization. There's no way Stalin could blow the 1926 equivalent of $200,000 on a whim. Also, armies of super-soldiers were not really his area of concern. Back then, Stalin's thing was Socialism in One Country. It was Trotsky who wanted to get other countries involved in the revolution early and often, and Stalin built a bunch of political capital by deriding him for it. (Yes, that's a deliberate turn of phrase.) People mistake the Iron Curtain Stalin of post-WW2 for the original version, who was far more interested in screwing with Russians than anything else. He was infinitely insecure; he probably would have been content to exert his dominance over the psyches of Russia for the rest of his life if Hitler hadn't forced him to deal with, you know, fighting a war.

But it's the quote about wanting soldiers who were "insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat" that gives the lie to the whole thing. Since when did Stalin give a fuck about whether anyone liked their dinner? Whenever he needed a new labor force for a construction project, he just arrested a bunch of people, sent them off to the work site and told their families to mail them food care of the labor camp if they wanted them to eat. He loved that sort of thing. Read his memos: arresting people was the light of his life. It would have stressed him out if the prisoners were "indifferent about the quality of food they eat". He'd have moped around for days and worn the same underwear until it had holes in it.

VOROSHILOV: "There's a petition going around the gulags to have Pizza Night moved to Mondays."
STALIN: "Why?"
VOROSHILOV: "Bit of a pick-me-up. You know, hard labor is hard enough without a case of the Mondays."
STALIN: "Oh, those gulags. I try to say no to them, but one look just melts my heart."
VOROSHILOV: "Ho, ho, ho."
STALIN: "Ho, ho, ho."

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May 19, 2005

As I started to gather my thoughts for this entry, an email from my friend Eamon arrived with a link that put me in a reflective mood. As some people may know, when I finally returned to Chicago, I spent a bit of time bored and depressed and obsessed with getting the entire Bolshevik Party across the Oregon Trail successfully without any fatal "accidents" along the way. (I believe that my use of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin was a reasonable distillation of the original Politburo. Some will criticize the omission of Kamenev, but I feel that he is given fair representation as an implicit member of the Zinoviev - Kamenev power axis. Granted, I would rather not travel across the country in a wagon with a whiny shit like Zinoviev, but this is a matter of the historical record, not my own personal comfort.) I wanted to test whether the Bolshevik Revolution was an elitist, murderous sham from the start (the Richard Pipes view) or whether, given more careful stewardship, the substitution of a party vanguard for the proletarian masses could have developed into a true dictatorship of the proletariat (Isaac Deutscher, et al) and successfully led the workers of the world to Oregon.

Because I am fucking amazing at science, I set up the trials very carefully. I hadn't played Oregon Trail in several years before setting out. (Contrary to the assumptions of many who downloaded my copy of Oregon Trail and looked at the high scores, it was my younger brother who obsessively tried to shepherd the 1992-93 Charlotte Hornets across the country, not me.) My feeling was that they had to start out as farmers from Illinois ($400 start-up cash) if they were to have any credibility as friends of the laborer, and if the only way to get them all across was to allow them to be bankers from Boston ($800 start-up cash), then they were basically kulaks and the whole thing was bullshit by definition. (You could argue that was the case anyway because I wasn't about to set out on the trail in October anyway, but I felt that if I could land them in the Willamette Valley by then, that was a suitable corrollary.)

So I spent a while working on that. I am a big believer in blowing a ton of money on oxen and just eating whatever you can shoot along the way. I tried to be fair to all members of the party, regardless of their historical deeds. For example, there were a few incidents on the trail when Stalin got the measles and I was disinclined to rest so he could recuperate - when Trotsky's dysentery was treated with much greater care - but ultimately I did not overstep the bounds of fairness. The other ground rule I had - and this is based on the fact that Lenin only ever wore a suit and Stalin only ever wore a trench coat - was what brought this entire story to mind when I read the link from Eamon, an interview with the creators of the original Oregon Trail, with questions from grade school children:

Mindy Pontzon, age 10, writes:
"What happens when you start the game with zero sets of clothes? Do you become an Indian?"
Bill: We weren’t allowed to use the word Indian. But when we first wrote it we were reprimanded because we were in Minneapolis which has a high Indian population and we were told that you don’t want to put the kids in the position where the Indians are enemies. That was one thing I remember because we kind of made up things that would happen to you on the trail before Don did some research, and helpful Indians would show you how to find food. We could use Indian in that context.
intern jeff: They also helped you cross the river. For a price.
Don: That was actually true, though the historical records show that Indians were often helpful, even moreso than hostile but anyway if you go on the train with zero clothes, you will die fairly soon. You’ll probably get pneumonia or something.
Paul: Not to mention the stares you would get too.

So, yeah, as far as I was concerned, no Bolsheviks were allowed to buy any clothes, either at Matt's General Store or any of the trading outposts along the way. That seemed like a very important rule to me at the time. You have to remember that I was kind of depressed and wasn't wearing any pants myself. I never got around to posting my findings on this webpage. I should probably hold out for a prestigious journal, but it's embarassing when they fight over me, so I will settle for this, instead.

1. It was extraordinarily difficult to get Trotsky and Stalin across the country together. I shit you not. One or the other was almost always dead by the end. (Usually Trotsky.)
2. Sorry, socialists, but nude Bolsheviks on a farmer's salary don't get very far. Believe me, I tried, but I only managed to get them all safely across once, and Bukharin had the shits right before they arrived. Zinoviev was on death's door with a fever, too.
3. The Politburo was remarkably good at caulking their wagons, but they tended to freak out and drown when they tried to ford the river. Many oxen were lost. Also, and I am not pointing any fingers here, but nobody in the Politburo could repair a fucking wagon tongue.
4. Although the game allows you to "Talk to Indians" or "Talk to other travelers", it does not allow you to "Talk to Stalin about why Trotsky has a broken arm all of a sudden".
5. Whatever its merits as a strategy toward overthrowing the government, Lenin's theory of revolutionary defeatism will not get you across the rapids at the end, where you have to paddle the raft back and forth so it doesn't crash into the boulders.

The fact is, the Bolsheviks had a pretty easy time on the trail as bankers, and they couldn't hack it as farmers. Does that prove Pipes' thesis once and for all, or does it merely presage the antagonism that developed with the peasantry post-NEP? I'm not going to pretend that my findings are conclusive. If someone will give me a grant and a copy of the Great Maine to California Race, I could probably get some definitive answers.

(news) A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight. NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately. "It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel. Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system.

You'd think they'd be used to things disappearing in the middle of the night by now in Russia. That's always how it works. First they come for the dissidents, and then they come for the lakes. And if you tolerate this, then your porches will be next.

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February 18, 2005

You can look forward, or you can look to the past; it was Kim Jong Il's birthday on Wednesday, and it is mine tomorrow. Either way, there are going to be a number of wild, unsubstantiated claims about revolutionary feats, glorious historical achievements and the progress of humanity, not to mention the usual manic over-deployment of the word 'powerful'. You would be arriving fairly late to Kim Jong Il's birthday, however. Even the Communist Party of Russia was more on top of the occasion than you were, adopting resolutions of praise for the world's foremost bulwark of socialism that really must have chafed when they sat down and thought about it; the Chinese academics showed up a day late, but they did bring gifts, which you had certainly better do, being even later than they were. (Perhaps you could figure out what the Chinese academics brought, and then buy accessories for it, or batteries.)

Honestly, though, my impression of life in North Korea is that one is more or less expected to celebrate Kim Jong Il at any point in the year, such as lulls in conversation or waiting for the elevator, so in that sense you could probably make up for your absence with a concerted effort to demonstrate links between Kim Jong Il and, say, St. Patrick's Day, which has been largely unsuccessful thus far. Has it been said that my birthday is the greatest auspicious day of the nation and the greatest holiday of the nation and the common holiday of humankind when a triumphant advance of the cause of global independence is promised? No, admittedly, it has not. I am trying not to let it get me down. I have other things to be proud of, and I will concentrate on those.

Interestingly enough, this news release tends to support my theory that while the Bush administration may have viewed shifting from the use of the term 'axis of evil' to 'outpost of tyranny' as an olive branch, it was not, in fact, received that way. Kim Jong Il, you sensitive little bitch. My feelings are far more difficult to injure than yours.

I was writing about the video game Gauntlet last week and one of my friends sent me an email about it, saying that she had just seen the game for the very first time and wanted to know why there was so much ham on the ground. The truth is, I don't know. As someone who doesn't eat meat, I assumed people who do eat meat do things like that, just leaving entire cooked chickens and turkeys and hams on plates around their apartments and eating them whenever they walk by. Apparently, that is not true. As I enter my 27th year, I still have a lot to learn.

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February 11, 2005

On my way home from work last night, I stopped by the Division Street Russian Bath House. I asked the man at the counter if they have memberships. He repeated the word, nodded, and wrote down a name and a phone number for me to call between select hours the next morning. Now I am wondering if I just applied for a job with the mob. I haven't called yet. I will think about it over the weekend. Perhaps I should prepare a list of salary requirements, just in case.

(news) The parents of one of the teens asked for a restraining order against Herb Young, accusing him of making harassing calls. He admitted calling the Ostergaards once after hearing the teens were talking to a newspaper, and at one point saying "the gloves (are) off," which apparently was taken as a threat.

This is ridiculous. A person is being threatened when the other party takes the gloves off? Am I the only person who has ever heard of metal gloves with spikes on them? What the hell was Gauntlet all about, anyway? The naivete of the older generation, most of whom have never ventured into a dungeon as a wizard, a warrior, or a valkyrie - let alone as a Quester, the elf - fills me with dismay. Health care costs are going to skyrocket over the next few years when the terrorists get word that they can knock on the doors of older Americans, announce "the gloves are on" and then punch the unwitting older Americans in the face with metal gloves with spikes on them. And I, as a taxpayer, am not pleased.

I should mention the Super Bowl. It was a pleasure to be back at one of my friend Kevin's annual Super Bowl parties, held in scenic Bolingbrook, Illinois. The game itself was all right, and I broke even on the betting in which I engaged, leaving my lifetime earnings as a gambler well above the water mark. (If you are looking to turn your quarter into two quarters, then I am your man.) Although I supported the underdog Eagles of Philadelphia, I was not displeased with the outcome, because the victorious Patriots are a fine team. The real question, though, is whether a series of excellent commercials - in this case, the ones where the one guy was working at the office and all of his co-workers were monkeys - can redeem, in any way, a company whose service is utterly shite - in this case, Careerbuilder.com. It's a bit of a conundrum. In this ideologically reductionist age, does my stand against the cynical, heartless manipulators who perpetrate the ongoing con that is the online job market (Monster.com, HotJobs et al) represent an ipso facto denunciation of commercials involving monkeys? Because it's not even as though this was a poor use of monkeys. They did very, very well with it. So how can I support the use of monkeys in advertising while remaining in principled opposition to Careerbuilder.com? I feel like one of those helpless leftists from the 1930s who feared Stalin but were paralyzed to denounce him because they were committed to the eventual victory of socialism. Well, I am committed to the eventual victory of commercials with monkeys in them. And I don't know what to do.

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January 11, 2005

Today is the same as yesterday, only with snow outside. My project manager is out sick again and she is the only person I have been working with. I called the temp agency to let them know that I am just hanging around here with nothing to do, because I like this company and I do not wish them ill. No problem, said the temp agency, go back tomorrow and get paid some more. And so, my last day lasts another day.

I bought an interesting book called Lenin's Embalmers, written by the son of the doctor who figured out how to preserve Lenin's body for public display and then was in charge of keeping it in near-mint condition for the next thirty years. (Until Stalin, in a reach even by his own standards, charged him with conspiracy and sent him to Siberia.) In the book, there are a couple of photos from right before Lenin's death, when he was recuperating from a series of strokes, and I found the degree to which he looked bat-shit crazy to be rather striking, so I decided to spend some of my idle time trawling through Google to find the most deranged Lenin pictures available on the web. There weren't many, unfortunately. People who created or distributed images of Lenin looking anything less than dignified were generally shot. But you may enjoy these:

Light-bulb Lenin;
Spar'anything Lenin;
Melting Lenin;
And, on the bottom right,
Holiday Lenin.
Which is awesome.

You may also enjoy this statue, although it is from a different, less deranged area of Lenin iconography, namely the 'half-amused and implacable' school. I saw it when I was in Moscow and thought it was great. Most of the collection found here is pretty good stuff, actually.

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October 12, 2004

TROTSKY'S DEFEAT BY STALIN FOR CONTROL OF THE SOVIET UNION, IN THREE NON-POLITICAL CONTEXTS

Dinner is ready -- no, almost ready. The chef pauses, tastes the food. What does it need? It's a basic meat and potatoes sort of dish, nothing too fancy. The recipe called for salt and pepper. The chef adds a dash more salt -- yes, much better. The salt goes well with this. Now the dish has flavor, zest. But the dish is still missing something. What else? The chef reaches for the pepper, but it is over by the sink at the moment, and the nutmeg is next to the salt - so the chef adds an extremely large dose of nutmeg instead. Dinner is served. After the first few bites, which are surprisingly flavorful, everyone begins to feel nauseous and feverish. The pepper is blamed for this; it is revealed, to the surprise of many, that the recipe called for salt and nutmeg, not salt and pepper, and the pepper, far from making the dish more delicious, nearly ruined it. The pepper is thrown through the window of the restaurant and nutmeg is dumped all over the next course, the dessert and the after-dinner mints. Everyone gets very sick.

*

After guiding the car out of the driveway, on to the interstate and through the first toll plaza, the right hand finally leaves the steering wheel and goes to its armrest. Many assume that the left hand, which worked with the right hand in bringing the car alongside the unleaded pump at the gas station, will take control of the car; the left hand, however, does not return to the wheel immediately, as it is busy scratching the head. The right knee, which was barely involved in the driveway and was only responsible for nudging the door shut at the gas station, forms a coalition with the lap and the left knee to assume command of the vehicle. With the left hand out of power, the right knee betrays the lap and the left knee by spilling coffee on them and begins to dictate the course of the road-trip. Although speed increases, the car is unprepared for the second toll plaza and must veer off the road into a cornfield. As the car shakes violently, ears of corn thumping against the windows, the left hand - which has long since been sat upon - is blamed for the rock-block of Foghat that comes on the radio.

*

After the Chicago Bulls win their third consecutive NBA championship at the end of the 1992-93 season, superstar guard Michael Jordan shocks the sporting world by announcing his retirement at the age of 30. Now the Bulls' playoff hopes fall upon the shoulders of Scottie Pippen, a three-time All-Star whose unparalleled defensive abilities were crucial during the team's first title run against the Los Angeles Lakers, royalty of the league throughout the 1980s. Pippen, however, elects to have minor back surgery in the off-season, and he misses the first week of training camp due to his rehab schedule. In his absence, Stacey King - a former first-round draft pick who was not a major contributor during any of the championship seasons - signs a 10 year $22 million contract under mysterious circumstances and installs ex-CBA players loyal to him at the point guard and small forward positions. When Pippen returns to the court, no one will pass to him. He loses his place in the starting lineup and is finally waived at mid-season. It is revealed, to the surprise of many, that Pippen's 17.8 PPG during the first title run were actually scored by King, whose own statistics were kept low in order to mask his true role, which was to cover for Pippen's defensive lapses. Fans who order copies of the Bulls' 1991 championship video "Learning to Fly" and its 1992 sequel "Untouchabulls" find that they now feature a six-minute montage of Pippen turning the ball over and having friendly conversations with players from other teams during the All-Star break. (1993’s video, “Three-Peat”, omits mention of Pippen entirely.) Guards Jo Jo English and Pete Myers, initially loyal to King, suffer torn ACLs before the beginning of the next season and are forced to retire. Meanwhile, Pippen finishes out his career by playing two games in a semi-pro league in Mexico that is forced to fold when all of its basketballs are found deflated by an unidentified sharp object.

*

Well, there goes that burst of antic energy.

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