h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A team of elite agents will be infiltrating the Yaddastan secret police force, which has allegedly kidnapped Saint Nikolas. This heinous crime will need to prevented by tonight, when the above-mentioned saint will don Marxist red clothing, hitch up his severnyy olen' to a sleigh built by AvtoVAZ and carry dary to mal'chikov and devochki throughout the right-thinking world.

Honestly, what were the Yaddastanians thinking when they devised this plot?

I like it!

I'm reading several books about the aftermath of Glasnost in Russia. I especially love the scene in which army tanks are in downtown Moscow, and babushkas from the rural areas have come to feed baked potatoes and meat patties to everyone, including the guys in the tanks.

There are a lot of good people in Russia. By now, many of us foreigners are beginning to realize that many Russians would like to get some of their traditional ways of thinking back. That includes Communism which they remember from their childhoods. They like it that their country was un by ordinary working people rather than the elites.

Have you seen the movie about the death of Stalin? I haven't had a chance to view it yet. I heard it was funny.

If you're on Twitter, be sure to follow our Solnushka (as 'Kidding Herself'). She lives in Moscow now and takes great photos. The other day, she and the kids were in GUM, the big giant store.

I suspect there were good and bad things about the Soviet Union....I never got there, though I did spend some time behind the 'Iron Curtain'. A Romanian-born fellow student had the exquisitely bad fortune to be drafted into both a Warsaw Pack and a NATO army. He had to serve in both.

I sang Russian music in Saint Petersburg a few years ago.

Anthony Newley wrote and starred in the musical "Stop the world I want to get off" in the 1960s. I tried to find a youtube video of "Glorious Russian comrade," but couldn't find one that didn't also include the other songs from the show.

here are the lyric to some of the sing:

"My mother said I never should
Mix with subversive reactionary elements in the wood.
If I did, she would say
You'll only end up as a decadent
Subservient western imperialistic
Political puppet one day.

I'm a glorious Russian comrade
Born on glorious Russian soil.
I was part of my glorious parents'
Five year plan.
I eat glorious Russian salad
That's imported from the West
And drink glorious Russian vodka when I can.

I've got fourteen glorious brothers
Down a glorious Russian mine.
I've got fifteen glorious sisters and a cat.
And the lot of us live together
In such glorious Russian bliss
In a glorious Soviet Russian two-room flat

I didn't know that one.

I'm the master of extremely obscure show tunes.