Pravda is Truth

The Soviet Union had a propaganda newspaper called Pravda, which apparently means “Truth”. Ole Robbie Heinlein wrote about it back in the day. He went to visit the commie country and his wife learned Russian for the trip. He wanted to check out the size of their cities and their industries and stuff, but the taxi drivers wouldn’t take him to the factories or schools. In every city they would take him to the stadium. It was almost as though the drivers were instructed to do so. Like the pride of the country was how fancy their stadiums are. Weird.

Anyway, Robbie didn’t much care for Pravda and he was pretty outspoken about the non-value of state controlled media. I noticed that Pravda has a website that they publish in English. I guess they’re still in business. If you could call a communist state run propaganda a “business”. It has an incredibly anti-western slant. Mostly anti-American. They also publish the weirdest, silliest articles. I enjoy skimming them so I can see the world from a Russian perspective.



Seriously, some of these are worth laughing at. It’s good stuff. Is this their version of The Onion? I'm sure that the scientists that read this blog will appreciate how that article is labeled.

In an odd way, I really like the hate-America stuff that they are obsessed with. I also like the absence of anti-Russian stuff in our media. It means we’re important to them, and they’re not even on our radar.


The opposite of love isn’t hate...it’s indifference.

The Green Ones Do A Pull

No title

Pirates and Bears

Well, I went to the picture show and saw Pirates 3. The ninja was right. Lotsa plotlines. I enjoyed it. There were a couple of times that I caught myself saying “Um, that wouldn’t work”, only to mildly remind myself that 98% of the things in the movie wouldn’t work. I think it would be fun to make an itemized list of thing in that movie that wouldn’t work. It would be a long list. It was sort of like watching a 3 hour long Xena episode, where the cast changes costumes a bunch of times. Don’t get me wrong. It was really fun in a campy, swashbuckling sort of way, and Keira was just intimidatingly beautiful the whole time.

However.

There was this one part where Keira is giving this so-called rousing speech before a battle sort of Braveheart style, but only really contrived and tough to listen to. It went something like “Hey Guys. Whatsa matta you? We have to fight these guys, with the sweat of our brow, and the strength of our backs, for the man standing next to you, and for..... um..... Freedom!”

She actually said “Sweat of our brow”. I don’t blame her, I blame the writers. Someone handed her a script that said “Sweat of our brow”, and she probably rolled her eyes when she read it. I’d like a little more Gore, and a little less Verbinski.

Ok, enough about that. The cool part was a trailer for a movie that comes out this December, called The Golden Compass. When I was watching the trailer, I just sat there with a smirk thinking about this.

Kinderbeans

When I was in kindergarten, we traced the outline of our hand and made in into a turkey. We also learned how to tell time by moving a little pewter airplane around a cardboard clock. And we read "Where The Wild Things Are" about 20 times. We also wheeled out a TV and watched the Space Shuttle Columbia land. And we drew lots of pictures, and gave presentations on what we wanted to do when we grow up. Some of the things mentioned were "firefighter" or "astronaut".

Compare and contrast.




This one is fun too. They even have a mini hezbolah leader. Mini-Naz.




Awwwwww. Cute.

swim, bike, run

This Sunday I went to a sprint triathlon. Note that I didn’t say that I participated. I threw on a sweatshirt, grabbed a paper cup of coffee at my local coffee shop, and drove to the lake. Kimbo Slice was part of a team of three folks from her work. One does the swim, one does the run, and one bikes. There were a couple other people I knew there that were doing the whole thing. Triathlons and road races are fun because everyone is exited or sick to their stomachs. Everyone is thinking about how well they will do, or how much pain they will be in, but the general vibe is athlesisim. Everyone is wearing wetsuits, or bike suits, and most are pretty muscular and getting their minds in the zone.

Then I come strolling up, wiping the sleep from my eyes, sipping coffee.

Anywho, Kimbo did the run part, and hasn’t been able to run very much in the last 2 years because of an injury. An IT band thing. It was a really hilly course, so she estimated that she’d get 22:00.

She finished in 22:01


The swim guy did his part in 8:00, which I’m told is pretty good. The goal should be under 10. When they first take off into the water, it looks like pure chaos. The water’s churning, and everyone’s kicking each other. He’s a good guy and also in the state house. I’m not going to post his picture, because he wasn’t his dapper self, and I wouldn’t want anyone to use my picture to hurt him politically. As a side note, I went to his wedding, and blogged about it, and got a bunch of hits on his name.



The guy that did the bike section is a mountain climber. He travels around the world, climbing mountains and whoopin arse. Every time I talk to him I want to hear all about it, because it’s so extremely cool to me, but I can rarely form probing or informed questions.

“Sooooooo. You climb mountians huh? When you get to the top, I bet it feels pretty good. Yeah, I have nothing to add. I just want to hear you talk about mountain climbing.”



I can’t remember what his time was. Something around 45 minutes.


Oh, I almost forgot. Today, I went out to the range, changed the zero of my rifle, and shot a 440. I’d still say that my average score is about 325. Today was a bit of an outlier, but it sure felt good to be hitting the black.

Together... Oil

Must Read

Check out this fantastic article. When we trained the ING we arrested our SGT MRJ for similar garbage, so I can relate somewhat to the content. Ours was an FO for terrorists. Isn’t that nice?


Michael Yon's awesome article