necturus

I want to apologize for offending her, but she's banned me.

...than its lead actor dies. Vyacheslav Tikhonov ("Max Otto von Stirlitz") was 81.

(explanation)

Backyard bird feeders may be spurring the evolution of new bird species.

This song exactly reflects my mood tonight.

Rough translation:

"I ask, if only for a little while,
My sadness, leave me,
As a cloud, a blue-gray cloud,
Fly off to your own home,
From here to your own home.

My shore, show yourself in the distance,
As a little brim, a thin line,
My shore, sweet shore,
Oh! to float back to you, my homeland,
To float back, if only some day.

Somewhere far away, somewhere far away
Rain is falling in the sunshine,
Right near a river, in a small garden,
Cherries have ripened, hanging down to the ground.
Somewhere far away in my memory
Right now, it is warm like in [my] childhood,
Though the memory be covered by so much snow.

You, thunderstorm, fill me with drink
To intoxication, but not to death;
Now again, as though for the last time
I am ever looking somewhere into the sky
As though seeking an answer...

I ask, if only for a little while,
My sadness, leave me,
As a cloud, a blue-gray cloud,
Fly off to your own home,
From here to your own home."

Music by M. Tariverdiev; words by R. Rozhdestvensky
From the TV miniseries "Seventeen Moments of Spring" (1973)

Someone has posted all of this 1973-vintage Soviet TV miniseries on YouTube, and I've started watching it. It's very well done, although there are some glaring inaccuracies -- the tape recorders, for instance, are all 1960's-vintage transistor models. Tape recorders did exist in 1945, when the series takes place -- the Germans invented them -- but they would have been large, heavy machines with tubes. My understanding is that wire recorders were more usual at the time.

Also, all the SS are wearing stereotypical black uniforms and red swastika armbands, but those were used only until 1939; during the war the SS uniforms were field-gray.

Here is the first part of Episode 1:

I've been trying for some time now to find the original of this quote from N.S. Khrushchev's memoirs; it refers to an incident during Stalin's last years when the dictator ordered Khrushchev to dance the Gopak for some party officials. So far I've been unsuccessful; however, this evening I came across a 1958 dramatization by CBS TV entitled "The Plot to Kill Stalin", and to my surprise, it shows Khrushchev dancing the Gopak for Stalin. Khrushchev was at the height of his power in 1958, and wouldn't publish his memoirs until the late 1960's, so I wonder how CBS learned of the incident. Does anyone else find Oscar Homolka's portrayal of Khrushchev reminiscent of Londo Mollari?

Veterans' Day is on November 11 because it is the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I, one of the bloodiest wars in history, an utterly pointless four-year conflict that bled Europe white and set the stage for World War II, the Cold War, and the Arab-Israeli mess. The end of that war, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, was justly commemorated as Armistice Day, an annual reminder of the horror that was "the war to end all wars".

Today that is all but forgotten; Veterans' Day, as the holiday was renamed in the U.S. after World War II, is just another generic patriotic rah-rah support-the-troops holiday, an echo, if you will, of Memorial Day. It should never be let pass without remembering that patriotism killed off a whole generation of Europeans between 1914 and 1918, young men who read about the likes of Napoleon, Wellington, and Bluecher, and thought war was something romantic and ennobling, a grand adventure.

War is utterly, irredeemably evil. No amount of patriotic bullshit must ever be allowed to obscure that fact.

Lydia Litvak was one of humanity's first female fighter aces. She didn't fight Cylons, though, but Germans.

There are now more Muslims in Germany than in Lebanon.

But not as we know it...

Paul Robeson sings "The March of the Volunteers", China's national anthem, in 1949.

This cannot be for real.

This is a modern performance of a song from the Russian Civil War of 1918-20, with accompanying animation.

( Translated lyrics )

The crowned two-headed eagle, originally a Roman (Byzantine) symbol, was taken over by imperial Russia ("the third Rome") along with the title Tsar ("Caesar"); curiously, it has been readopted by the present Russian Federation.

The slogan that appears 30 seconds into the video reads: "All power to the Councils [of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies]". The Russian word for "council" is "совет" ("soviet").

I finally figured out how to stop Flash from crashing Firefox under Linux.

I just installed Chromium, which is the open source version of Google Chrome. It's faster than Firefox, too.

No public option, no employer mandate, but an individual mandate *and* a tax on benefits.

This is the kind of sludge that comes from having a committee of lawyers paid by lobbyists design a health care system.

...as insurance companies considering domestic violence a "preexisting condition", or congressmen claiming that essential reform of the financial system is politically impossible, I wonder if we have a political system that is irretrievably broken.

The danger is that people will eventually lose patience with dysfunctional government and start wishing for someone to come along and replace it with something that works. This happened in France in 1789, in several European countries during the first half of the twentieth century, and in the Soviet Union and its satellites beginning in 1989. Can it happen here?

In Russia, communism gave way to chaos and the eventual rise of nationalist authoritarianism led by members of the "organs of security" (the KGB). By contrast, Italians after World War I turned their backs on ineffectual parliamentarianism and embraced fascism, while in Spain in 1936, a disputed election led to three years of civil war and almost four decades of conservative military dictatorship.

Bickering politicians and lobbyists need to understand, particularly in hard times, that patience has limits, and constitutions and laws are respected only as long as they are perceived to work to society's benefit. A Supreme Court so unwise as to declare that the Constitution guarantees large corporations the right to buy elections, for instance, simply calls for its own liquidation, most likely along with the Constitution it purports to defend.

The Bush years have shown us that lofty principles have few defenders when people feel threatened. We have seen racial and religious profiling, mass surveillance, arbitrary imprisonment, and torture used with impunity in the name of collective security; the leaders of a post-constitutional order would no doubt build upon and extend these precedents, it seems to me. I cannot say what form such an order might take, but my gut tells me militant nationalism and conservative Christianity would likely play starring roles. We seem to have in our midst not only an angry white fringe too easily swollen by ranks of the newly unemployed, but also a military largely divorced from the civilian population and too easily alienated by years of misuse in unnecessary and interminable conflicts abroad. Will we awake one day to find among us a Cromwell? A Franco? Will the various militia movements coalesce around something like classic European fascism? Or will a President simply order the army to occupy Washington and arrest his or her rivals?

I fear that unless the present system begins to demonstrate that it still works, something like one of these scenarios lies not far in our future.

My car just got nailed by a falling tree branch. There's now a huge dent in the roof.

First, there was horse vs. locomotive (the horse won).

Then, it was Morse code telegraphy vs. texting (the telegraphist took the prize).

Now, it's one of the world's oldest technologies -- carrier pigeon -- versus the Internet.

... and in less than six hours, I have to get up for more of the same.