For a little musical interlude I present the video that has Gorbachev, zombies and plenty of hammers and sickles operated by pretty women. Last 20 years of the post-Soviet era replay right in front of your eyes. Enjoy!

The band ANJ can be found here.

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In 1959 Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev visited the USA.

On his visit Khrushchev had two requests: to visit Disneyland and to meet John Wayne, Hollywood’s top box-office draw. Due to the Cold War tension and security concerns, he was famously denied an excursion to Disneyland. He did, however, declare Iowa corn superior to Soviet corn.

On his California visit, the Soviet leader got a show of American consumerism and the American way of life. This marked the first time a Soviet leader set foot on U.S. soil. But he was annoyed that the main event of his first day was a lunch with 300 movie stars and other celebrities and a visit to the set of the movie Can-Can at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, rather than an inspection of an aerospace plant.

After Khrushchev left the studio, gawkers pasted tomatoes on his limo as the doubly offended leader and his 30-car, heavily guarded caravan made its way through city streets. Local authorities would later report that a bomb was planted in a tree along the route and that a man who said he was deer hunting was arrested on suspicion of carrying concealed weapons just moments before Khrushchev’s motorcade passed by a Los Angeles street.

Khrushchev declared himself offended by the chilly reception and even threatened to go home. “The thought sometimes — the unpleasant thought sometimes creeps up on me here as to whether perhaps Khrushchev was not invited here to enable you to sort of rub him in your sauce and to show the might and the strength of the United States so as to make him sort of … so as to make him shaky at the knees. If that is so, then if I came — if it took me about 12 hours to get here, I guess it’ll just — it’ll take no more than about 10 and a half hours to fly back.”

Khrushchev’s visit to Coon Rapids Farm in Iowa forever has changed the Soviet agriculture – upon his return home he insisted that corn is the answer to all of the problems which resulted in corn being planted everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the desert, sometimes when it couldn’t possibly survive. Khrushchev’s name is forever associated with corn in the Russian people’s memory.

 

 

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Now let’s finish up with my vacation report.

After visiting Seattle, taking the Coast Starlight and then driving the most scenic of the American roads, we returned to San Francisco for the last three days of our vacation.

San Francisco is the city where the War on Drugs was lost. Many times throughout the day, in different parts of town, one walks through a cloud of the familiar yet unusual in the streets of Kansas City smell and immediately takes another whiff just to make sure it’s not a mistake. In the middle of the day in the touristiest of the tourist areas, next to expensive stores and restaurants, a nicely dressed woman produced a mini-bong out of her pricey purse and turning her face ,to the wall, proceeded to treat her glaucoma (if you know what I mean). When my kid came out of the store, I started to recount that mind-blowing event, but then realized that she may not know the meaning of the word bong. She knew. Thank you, O-e School District for taking care of that awkward conversation!

San Francisco is beautiful city, with many different faces, amazing food of a mind-blowing variety, endless number of things to do, enough weather changes to keep an army of meteorologists busy, and more homeless people than an average resident of Midwest will encounter in a lifetime. My only advice is that if you are not in the greatest of shapes, visiting the Crookedest Street in the World is better done on a bus. It’s not that exciting and you almost need a  Sherpa to get up on the damn hill. If you have time, check out SF Playhouse, we really enjoyed My Fair Lady, much better choice than a magician we originally set out to see.

And now we move to the visual part of this post.

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…as expressed in this scene from one of the best movies I’ve ever seen

httpvh://youtu.be/um2p4GlEbKg

Brought to you by a half-a-day off I wasted hunting down free DVD-ripping software that didn’t crash.

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@kcmeesha is there anything you haven’t blogged about?

@theDLC

As my friend The DLC pointed out, I have now blogged just about everything and now pathetically spend my time posting links to my own blog, where I previously opined on whatever subject is being discussed. I constantly catch myself thinking about writing something just to discover that I wrote about it at length last year or the year before. That’s why when we came back from the apple orchard on Sunday all I had to do is search and find my last year’s post about apples and another one about the apple recipes. Even my photos looked the same – the same place, the same apples. Luckily we made a little detour or I would’ve had nothing at all.
The Main Street in the city of Ottawa, KS hasn’t changed much since the old days. As a matter of fact it looks very similar to the old photos of Neosho, MO I recently posted, they must have used some standard project for the smaller rural towns.
This is what the Main St. in Ottawa, KS looked like in 1942:

This is what it looks like now:



We got off the highway in Ottawa to wait for the apple orchard to open and promptly found ourselves in the middle of the antique car show known as  Ol’Marais River Run. I don’t consider myself a giant car fan and all the talk about cubic inches, shaved hoods and custom paint jobs does nothing for me, but it’s hard not to stand in awe admiring the time when a car was a work of art. These cars may not have been the safest or the most technologically advanced but they represent the era when the car was still a wonder, an object of pride, an engineering dream trimmed with chrome.

Due to some peculiar historic and political circumstances the cars of my childhood looked almost identical to these, so strangely these shows are just as nostalgic for me as they are for someone who grew up here.

The car show had a feel of a State Fair complete with signage:

…Elvis and Marylin:

…delicious food:


…Republican Party:

…and boyscouts:

In the olden days, before the Ad Wizards took over our lives, the states had simple nicknames. Nebraska was known as a “Beef State”:

Iowa had to settle for the “Pork State”, Alabama went with the “Heart of Dixie”

Arizona called itself “The Grand Canyon State”

and Missouri was known as it is known now as “The State That Thinks It’s Better Than Other States But Is Sadly Mistaken” but is was hard to fit on the license plate.
After the show we finally made it to the orchard:

This year seems to be one of the best years for apples, trees were heavy with fruit.

I spent a few minutes on the pond:

enjoying the wildlife:

Here is what the pond sounds like:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a28tgsr3jRg

We picked 25 lbs of apples:

…paid a visit to the country store:

Took another look at the giant apple in the sky where all the worms go after they die:

…and were home in no time.

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