Public outrage is easy to come by these days. Whether it is signing a petition to remove a statue from the public view, complaining about a store ad being too gay or just clicking on a Facebook page to support or condemn some cause, expressing your views doesn’t even require a trip to a mailbox anymore. And while some comments on these sites and petitions look angry and radical, these people should stand back in awe of the original masters of public character assassination and manufactured outrage – the Soviet Press.
The following page was published in the Soviet Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper) on November 1st 1958. In this issue various writers, artists, organizations, and even regular Soviet citizens expressed their outrage with the actions of Boris Pasternak, the author of Doctor Zhivago, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his anti-Soviet novel. Famous Russian joke “I haven’t read Pasternak, but I condemn him” was extracted from one of the letters on this page.
We only had one full day in Minneapolis so we had to make it count. Getting around the Twin Cities is easy, even considering horribly confusing twin I35 highways. On any highway you will probably find yourself to be the fastest driver in the city – the rest of the population competes in out-slowing each other and driving under the speed limit without actually coming to a complete stop.
Say you foolishly participated in a weight challenge and now look like a sad sack of skin and bones, or maybe you just feeling a few pounds short of your ideal weight or, perhaps, you just love ice cream. Well, you are in the right place, I’ll have your weight problems corrected and your ice cream cravings satisfied without much effort, expense or experience ( this is what we call “alliteration” in the business).
This recipe comes to us via Russian bloggers in Israel, who saw it in some Israeli magazine, which, in turn, took it from Jamie Oliver, who based it on an Indian dessert called kulfi. After various translations not only from three or four different languages but from left-to-right to right-to-left I don’t think it can be called “kulfi” any longer, so we’ll just call it ice cream. This recipe does not require any special ice cream-making machinery or weird tools, no ice-salt mixtures or whatever else you remember from your long-gone childhood on the farm (everyone knows you made it up anyway); you’ll need a blender and a mixer or something that will do blending, mixing and whipping.
The ingredients: one can of sweetened condensed (not evaporated) milk, 2 cups of cream, fruit of fruit pulp of your choice.
No, this this not a pigeon egg, it’s actually an extra-large egg that I used to demonstrate the size of this Chernobyl-bred strawberry.
I also used pineapple.
Load both into a blender and turn into pulp. You may need a splash of liquid to get the process started, I used some mango juice because it’s good for you.
Add the whole can of evaporated milk (it does your body good, so don’t be skimpy, it’s your body we are talking about here):
It should look like this:
Place into a freezer for 30 minutes to 1 hour until it starts to freeze up on top. Fight the desire to drink it all right away. In the meantime whip about 2 cups of cream (not half-and-half or who knows what) until it looks like whipped cream.
Mix in with the fruit-milk concoction from the freezer:
Back to the freezer it goes for another 6 hours or overnight. You can be creative and make popsicles out of it or make layers or draw Sponge Bob on it, I’ll be eating mine while you playing with your food.
You shouldn’t feel guilty about eating it at all: it has multiple servings of fruit, milk (for strong healthy bones), no fillers, paint, preservatives and it’s probably low-fat, just take my word for it, and every word I say must be true because I have a European accent.
Happy ice cream-making.
On January 21 all that’s left from the “progressive humanity” (mainly two bloggers in Kansas City and a couple of drunks in Moscow) remember Vladimir Lenin who died on this date in 1924. I wrote about Lenin and his preserved body a time or two, but recently while looking for some video I ran into something that truly made me want to gauge my eyes out. Due to graphic and disgusting nature of the video showing some work being done on the Lenin’s corpse I am not embedding it here, if you feel that you need to see it, follow the link.
Below is the video of the Kremlin Regiment Honor Guard near the Lenin’s Tomb. I could totally march like this but didn’t have the looks, the height and the weight, and I talk too much.
This set of ads is about home appliances and electronics from the time when TV’s had legs but no colors, cameras used film and keyboards connected to paper.
