Care and safety of women during camping trips is an important subject that’s often overlooked. If your woman looks good, other men will try to steal her away from you. She may also use the outdoors, your relaxed state and heavy alcohol intake to escape. There are multiple other dangers lurking in the seemingly peaceful wooded and lake areas. To avoid potential pitfalls it’s best to tie your woman to a heavy unmovable object such as a tree or a post:

The type of the knot you use is very important: some women are crafty and will untie an easy knot before you know it. Remember your boyscout years; here is some detail from the photo above:

If you have a young child, place him on a tree with the rifle in clear view of your woman as an extra precaution:

After your woman is secured you can finally proceed to do what camping is really all about: getting drunk, ogling other untied women and trying not to lose your brand new boat.

This safety tip was brought to you by:

Truck Antlers: Don’t Be A Schmuck, Turn You Truck Into A Buck!

Additional financing by:
Giant Fish-Looking Mailboxes: Who Is A Pussy Now?  I Am Talking To You, You God Damn Mailman Son-Of-A-Bitch!

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On the morning of August 19, 1991 I was eating breakfast and watching news on my TV (something like this) when the announcer reverted to the official voice they used when someone died and announced that due to the health reasons M.S.Gorbachev can no longer perform his duties and  the control of the country is being taken over by a State Committee of the State of Emergency. This was the beginning of the 1991 Soviet coup d’état attempt. People had different reactions to the events; I for one wasn’t surprised at all: many people weren’t happy about Gorbachev’s reforms and were hoping for some form of reversal, and this was just what they were asking for.

This is what their first press-conference looked like (in Russian). For a group of conspirators they acted too strange and spaced out. Some of them were not exactly well-known before the events.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4eV8ffgDF8

The coup was over in 3 days with the press and the army refusing to support the conspirators and suppress demonstrations in Moscow and other places.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqoAhfEIfXo

Gorbachev returned to Moscow but never regained his full capacity and the USSR was over before the year’s end.
One might say that right there over my breakfast I witnessed the beginning of the end of the country I grew up in. Recently I had a chance to find out how these events were covered in the American press. After the the putsch was over the Kansas City Star combined all of its coverage into a special insert.

18 years later people still argue if this was the right way to go. At that time it probably couldn’t go in any other way, but every forum is overloaded with people mourning the loss of the USSR – the superpower.
I witnessed it then and thanks to one of my readers had a chance to revisit it now from the other side of where the Iron Curtain used to be.
More videos of the American news coverage.

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Sometime ago I was arguing on twitter about the number of women in the medical profession in the USSR. While I knew I was right (because I am always right), my opponent ridiculed my anecdotal references, like a number of female doctors I visited in my childhood, or a number of female students in my Dad’s medical school photo-album. I thought maybe a scientific-looking study would be more convincing.

Soviet Women in the Work Force and Professions
WILLIAM M. MANDEL Highgate Road Social Science Research Station, Inc.(Berkeley, California)

Women had been 10% of doctors and dentists in 1913. They rose to 77% in 1950 (Tsentral’noe Statisticheskoe Upravlenie, 1969a: 103), but then declined to 72% in 1969, when they were also down to 55% among medical students, pointing to an equalized sex ratio in medicine a generation hence.

Although remuneration in the Soviet professions shows nothing remotely like the spread in the United States between the teacher at the bottom of the heap, the engineer somewhat better off, and the doctor way out in front, there is a differential there as well. The Soviet government, always economically pinched, has raised wages and salaries in a[264] manner to attract people into fields which would not otherwise be entered by enough candidates to meet the need. Engineering is the best enumerated. Law is the lowest paid of the professions in the Soviet Union, and in it women are precisely the same proportion (one-third) as in engineering,the highest paid. Women had been 5% of the lawyers in 1926. At present there are 2,500 women judges. So women are majorities in the two professions in the middle of the payscale –  medicine and teaching   minorities in the two at the extremes-engineering and law. However, the 1971-1975 Five-Year Plan provides sharp salary increases for the two professions of medicine and teaching. Those seeking signs of discrimination no matter what are faced with the fact that, in numbers as distinct from percentages, there are more women engineers than physicians, and more physicians than librarians. The 775,000 women engineers in the USSR (1969) is almost equal to the total number of engineers in the United States (870,000), of whom only 1% are women.

On this International Women’s Day I am posting some photos of the Soviet women at work and at play. Wishing the best to all my female readers, even those who thought they can prove me wrong.

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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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Previously: Thomas Hart Benton Paints the Persephone.

In 1935 the Missouri legislature commissioned Thomas Hart Benton to paint a mural history of the State on the walls of the lounge in the State House in Jefferson City. It chose Tom Benton because he is Missouri’s ablest painter and comes from one of Missouri’s most distinguished families. The legislature, however, never expected to get anything like the Benton History of Missouri which was completed just before this year’s session began in January. No pretty glorification, the murals turned out to be a raw and animated review of Missouri’s past and present. They gave full space to Missouri’s first settlers, its first railroad, its agriculture and industry, its great Champ Clark. But they also gave space to a slave auction, a lynching, Jesse James of Clay County, Frankie and Johnny of St.Louis. Loud were complaints that Benton was vulgar, that he had distorted Missouri into a “houn’ dog State”. But Benton Supporters pointed out that Missouri was, after all , a “houn’ dog State” whose natives did call each other “pukes.” As the fuss subsided, Missourians began to look at the murals more calmly. Though they admitted that the pictures were interesting, they still felt that it wasn’t a fitting way for a son of Missouri to tell the story of his native State.

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