Tag Archives: russia

Weird Ailments and Soviet Propaganda

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It’s not easy being green, but it’s also apparently not easy being blue. Just ask the Fugate family of Kentucky, who have a rare genetic condition that causes them to be, well. Blue. Fortunately, they’re otherwise pretty much okay.

Here’s an ailment you probably don’t have: bicycle face. That’s what you get when you ride on those newfangled contraptions instead of having the sense to walk or ride a horse. If you think that’s too silly, try television neck on for size.

Really.

A bit of mild profanity in this wonderful tale of the most awesome obituary ever run, courtesy of Romenesko. This is about the man who was described by the Washington Post thusly: He was variously a shark fighter, ocelot hunter, mink farm operator and authority on baccarat.

And he was pirate, too. He once tried to commit suicide by jaguar.

Really.

And finally, here’s some lovely Soviet propaganda. Read it, enjoy, and stay away from bicycles.

Georgia on My Mind

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I dreamed I had been arrested in a former Soviet bloc country, along with a group of about 20 other travelers. I don’t know why my dream took place in Georgia.

We approached the border in our bus, surrounded by fences liberally bedecked with barbed wire. Uniformed men with machine guns were everywhere, and the bus stopped. We were transported to some sort of incarceration facility, where we were given hideous overalls made of some sort of coarse material and put into a large room, all together.

At some point they gave us “our papers,” which we were supposed to keep with us at all times. This didn’t make a lot of sense, because we were already incarcerated–what good were papers going to do? They also handcuffed us when we were being processed to go into the facility, though they did let us out of the handcuffs afterward. I think they may have been trying to make a point about who was in charge.

The strangest thing, though, was that in our large area, where we prisoners were allowed to wander free, there was a stack of handmade, hand-written books. One of them was the Bible, painstakingly recreated by the many prisoners who had a verse or two memorized. Over the years the Bible had been completed. The other books were original writings by the prisoners, some fictional, and some detailing their lives both before they had been imprisoned and afterward. I was impressed at the workmanship of the handwritten texts.

It was a very strange dream.