Prospect Magazine has published a little discussion of the jokes that used to circulate in communist Europe which served as an excellent excuse to republish a few of the better ones. Something I didn’t realise:

Stalin himself cracked them, including this one about a visit from a Georgian delegation: They come, they talk to Stalin, and then they go, heading off down the Kremlin’s corridors. Stalin starts looking for his pipe. He can’t find it. He calls in Beria, the dreaded head of his secret police. “Go after the delegation, and find out which one took my pipe,” he says. Beria scuttles off down the corridor. Five minutes later Stalin finds his pipe under a pile of papers. He calls Beria—”Look, I’ve found my pipe.” “It’s too late,” Beria says, “half the delegation admitted they took your pipe, and the other half died during questioning.”

My favourite joke from the article is at the start:

A man dies and goes to hell. There he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to capitalist hell or to communist hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to capitalist hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a bit like Ronald Reagan. “What’s it like in there?” asks the visitor. “Well,” the devil replies, “in capitalist hell, they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”

“That’s terrible!” he gasps. “I’m going to check out communist hell!” He goes over to communist hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to communist hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx. “I’m still in the free world, Karl,” he says, “and before I come in, I want to know what it’s like in there.”

“In communist hell,” says Marx impatiently, “they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil, and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.”

“But… but that’s the same as capitalist hell!” protests the visitor, “Why such a long queue?”

“Well,” sighs Marx, “Sometimes we’re out of oil, sometimes we don’t have knives, sometimes no hot water…”

Nathanatos Software has produced the ultimate tea brewing timing software for the Mac. I couldn’t resist downloading it…

My wife had the radio on in the background and I half-heard some swing-sounding music. It wasn’t a swing standard, but something about the tune was strangely familiar. I listened to the words – “Today is gonna be the day / That they’re gonna throw it back to you”… Wait a minute – isn’t that by… Oasis? Yes, it turns out that one of the most popular pop tunes of the mid-90s here in the UK was being covered by Paul Anka (!) Well, I can’t say the result was bad but I found it very difficult to listen to – my memory of the original was clashing in my head with the remake.

Originally uploaded by Central Scrutinizer.

As BoingBoing points out this is a condo developer trying to cash in on the ‘coolness’ of the word. Too bad they didn’t register the domain on their poster (myblog.com).

Incidentally, in the five years I have had this weblog nobody has offered to buy this domain. I have no idea why. By now I figure I might as well keep it (though feel free to make absurdly generous offers!)

This anecdote from Dispatches from a Public Librarian (published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency) falls into the category of “you can’t make this stuff up”.

Last week, I received a call from an elderly woman wanting me to settle a bet between her and her son. She wanted to know what countries in Europe the Great Wall of China went through and what was the year Reagan tore it down. When I explained that the Great Wall of China was still mostly intact and that she probably meant the Berlin Wall, she replied coolly, “No, hon, you see, the Berlin Wall is just the part of the wall that goes through Berlin.” I put on my best geography-teacher hat to try and explain the Great Wall of China was, in fact, exclusively in Asia. She replied, “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. What would be so great about tearing down a wall in Germany? It’s not even that big of a country.”

The LSE Library is having a sale today of several thousand books it doesn’t want. Unfortunately, they keep almost anything of any value. All I could see was books like this inspirational study by George Kazakov. Even a hardened bibliophile would have a hard time loving these but there was a steady stream of would-be purchasers anyway.

I was stunned to discover that not only was this book mentioned in Google – 3 times – someone had actually referenced it in an academic journal! Truly no scholarship is entirely wasted.

So if you are in London, you read this, and you want to know more about Soviet peat in the 50s, dash on over to the LSE library – the sale is on until 16:00 and I have a feeling it may not have been snapped up yet…

P.S. In a strange quirk of fate the first academic publication I have been involved with was published today – details are available here. I hope it doesn’t meet a similar fate to Kazakov’s work – at least not during my lifetime…

“Due to a whale in the Thames services may be subject to delays”. And yes it’s true!

I should have blogged this sooner. It’s not as funny now that the whale is dead. I stuck it up on my Flickr account right away but forgot to cross-reference it here. You might find it interesting to check out or ‘subscribe to’ my photo feed there – particularly if you know me. I tend largely to take pictures of odd things I see around London that intrigue me. There’s a little ‘jigsaw’ of pics from it on the navigation bar at right…

(Yes there is a site you can visit if you click on the ad).

It’s a good thing I can only play Civilization IV on my wife’s computer – if it ran on my Mac, my productivity would be nil. It is fun though – dare I say more fun than Civ III? The new version requires a lot less micro-management than Civ III did.

P.S. I interviewed Civ’s creator, Sid Meier, back in 2002 when he was promoting Civ III (and I’ve got a picture to prove it).

Someone just found me Cute Overload – a weblog of all things cute (and the front page has some exceptional examples).

Thank you Cartoonbank!