I know even less about anime than I know about He’Brew beer; that’s why I put on my costume of a “regular overweight white guy” character and visited the Naka-Kon at the Hyatt where I proceeded to totally blend in. I was surprised by the number of visitors from kids in the colorful costumes, to weirdos in giant multi-zippered human-eating pants who walked their girlfriends on a chain, to some middle-aged child-molester-looking characters. Wide-eyed Hyatt employees where yearning for the days of their regular wrinkled-old-people conventions. My pictures didn’t turn out so great but here are a few that I liked:

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After a popular post about the sorority girls of KU I searched the Life photo archives for something about the University of Missouri. There weren’t too many photographs but they led me to this interesting story.

In 1959 the Life Magazine published an article Famous Cartoonists Share a Silver Jubilee. One of the cartoonists was the future Hall-of-Famer Milton Caniff – creator of the famous comic strip Steve Canyon.

(Canyon) is so famous that Colorado changed the name of Squirrel Gulch to Steve Canyon. Columbia, Mo., home of “Old Mizzou” (student name for the University of Missouri), would have named a street after Caniff except the conservative citizens protested. They suspected Miss Mizzou, a Canyon dame, wears no clothes under her trench coat

Infamous Miss Mizzou appears among other “ever-luscious ladies” who frequently graced the comic strip (sorry for the quality, I had to splice this from two sides of the magazine).

Some sources report that Miss Mizzou, who was introduced in 1952, was patterned after Marilyn Monroe, others mention a model named Bek Stiner.

Update: JB Winter of Mid-Missouri Comics Collective emailed me the following information:

“For some time I had been mulling over a girl character who would be what a Marilyn Monroe type might be like if she had not hit the jackpot in Hollywood,” Caniff explained in a 1954 letter. “Every college town has girls who live and work on the edge of the campus and who are very much a part of the life of the school, but who who do not get invited to fraternity formals. Usually they come up from small towns and often become as loyal to the school as the best-heeled alumnae. I decided my gal wold be from the University of Missouri, if not of it.”

But he did also base the character off of Bek Stiner (born Bek Nelson) too. He would often model new characters off of real people with the intention of having the photos of the model in the paper to publicize the strip.

Even though Miss Mizzou was fictional, the street-naming fiasco mentioned in Life was real, warranting a humorous article in the 1958 Time Magazine:

Faintly but distinctly, the mesmeric boomlay-boom of publicity drums on Manhattan’s Madison Ave. is heard 980 miles away in Columbia (pop. 43,000), site of the University of Missouri. Stout-souled citizens wonder what is wrong. Chamber of Commerce members writhe to the beat and get the message. It is so nonsensical that at first it seems to be garbled: name the new boulevard (boom-lay boom) after Milton Caniff.

In the end, the name Providence Road won.

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Recently I was watching one of the most popular Soviet comedies of all time Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future for the millionth time, recalling how almost every phrase in that movie was enshrined in the pop culture. In the movie a home-grown scientist sends a regular Soviet bureaucrat to the past where he just happens to look like Ivan The Terrible, who in turn travels back to the 1973 Moscow. In one of the scenes the fake Tsar is having a feast and the dishes are being announced as they arrive: “Black Caviar” (huge bowl), “Red Caviar” (huge bowl), “And from overseas, Eggplant Caviar” (a small drop of supposed delicacy).

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPfTAX590Wg

This is a tongue-in-check reference to the Soviet food supply system where the real caviar was hard to find and was resold on the black market while so called “eggplant caviar” and “zucchini caviar” where sometimes the only items on the mostly empty shelves and were frowned upon by the Soviet people. That’s why I don’t recommend most Russian comedies to an unprepared American viewers they need to be thoroughly explained.

Needless to say that I didn’t miss these not-so-good vegetable concoctions, but when I read this recipe it sounded good enough to try.

For this recipe you will need about 3-4 lbs of zucchini, 3 medium onions, 2 large red peppers, 6-8 tomatoes, 4 oz of tomato paste, 1 pepperoncino (this lady lives in Italy, I used some pepper I grabbed in the Mexican aisle), salt,  pepper and olive oil.

Cut zucchini into small cubes, put in a separate dish and sprinkle with salt. Cube peppers and onions. Heat up some olive oil in a skillet, add chopped pepperoncino (or whatever you are using) and red peppers and saute on both sides. Remove to another dish, I used my enameled cast iron pot. Add more oil to the skillet and saute the onions until translucent; when done, move them to the pot. Squeeze the liquid from zucchini and saute in the skillet, add to the pot. Cube the tomatoes (I removed the seeds), saute them in the olive oil adding the tomato paste. Combine with the rest of the vegetables. Add salt and pepper to taste and cook on a medium heat for about 20 minutes stirring occasionally.


It’s probably a good thing that this zucchini caviar doesn’t taste like the stuff I remember from my childhood. Sometimes the memory is good enough to satisfy the food nostalgia without having to subject the taste buds to the horrible taste of the past.

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Another key to an 83% approval rating? Put all your political opponents in jail.

TheDLC

The comment above was posted on my recent post about Vladimir Putin. Today my blog feed brings an illustration.

Here we see a participant of a legal non-violent picket of the Moscow City Hall being carefully handled by the militia (Russian name for police).

Here we see his partner being picked up as well.

And after a short pampering…

…being loaded in the van.

Single-person pickets do not require permission. According to the article these people were asked to leave and when they refused, were carried out and taken away. To the best of my knowledge protesters are usually let go the same day or the next morning, apparently Russian militia just enjoys the process and resulting news reports.

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On this day in 1941 Germany attacked the USSR beginning the 1,418-day part of the World War II known as the “Great Patriotic War“.

All of the appropriate songs are in Russian, but this video, which I linked before doesn’t need translation.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvHX0bgoouc

The video uses several songs about the WWII, the first one is the Sacred War, signifying the beginning of the war in her story. If you watch it to the end, the phrase she writes is “You are always near!”.

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