• Old Photos: USSR in Color

    Google Life Magazine photo archives were broken for the past month or so and I was starting to think that I would eventually need to write a post by myself. Luckily the photo search is working again and I am back to posting pictures.

    On another technical note, I changed the comment system here, after liking how it worked on the Pitch’s blogs. Hopefully it will work faster, look cleaner and be easier to use with multiple ways to log in and subscribe. Give it a shot, I really don’t feel like figuring out how to go back to the old system.

    In 1963 Life Magazine published a special issue dedicated to the USSR, which included unique photos taken by the Life’s correspondents over a period of one year. Although the foreign correspondents were usually “gently” guided by their KGB “guides”, they managed to obtain an unprecedented access and photograph the real Soviet Union, its people and sights. Today I will post some color photos, which are a rare find for these years.

    Natela Gugulashvili, schoolgirl from the village of Vazisubani,Georgia © Time Inc. Stan Wayman
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  • Checked Off My Bucket List: La Recoleta Cemetery

    Previously….

    I’ll start by busting another myth: the streets of Buenos Aires are crowded with hot Latin-American women with model looks and explosive tempers, who would make a certain lonely foreigner lose his mind, ship his child back to the USA and make his home in Argentina, earning a meager living by playing guitar on a busy intersection and singing off-key. Let’s just say that I am writing this from home and the country of Argentina will never hear me sing. While it’s true that most Argentinians are in good physical shape, the looks of men and women you see on the street are pretty average, far from what my wild imagination led me to believe.

    La Recoleta Cemetery is a world-famous Buenos Aires landmark and we visited it on our very first day in town. While being buried in a crypt (or mausoleum) is not a preferred way of getting rid of my body, the cemetery is fascinating to see for many reasons like architecture, sculpture, artwork, sheer amount of marble and granite, amount of religious imagery per square foot, record number of tourists looking for the Evita’s grave and a visual history of the Argentinian facial hair fashions. Over the period of almost 200 years the Argentinian upper crust invested untold amounts of money into placing their likenesses in a variety of Biblical, Roman, Egyptian and whatever else-inspired imagery. There is a mind-boggling number of mourning virgins, sad Jesus’s, Roman Emperors and weeping angels, portrayed in sculpture, portraits, engravings and stained glass. We took our time taking these pictures, but I will try to limit the number to a few that I like.

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  • Sweet Pumpkin Orgasms

    When my Mom asked me what I am doing on Saturday night and I replied that I was baking pumpkin rolls, she thought it was a sad way to spend a night off. In reality, baking with real pumpkin is lot like having sex: there is a lot of foreplay and then there is an intense but short-lived moment of pleasure, followed by desire to do it again and a feeling of being too worn out to start over. As a matter of fact, I feel completely beat and sleepy after wrestling with this for nearly 3 hours, my kitchen is a mess and if I had a cigarette I would’ve lit it up just about now.

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

    I think the second most vicious food crime against the American people after the invention of the sliced bread was the proliferation of canned pumpkin. Nearly every American family buys one or more pumpkins every year, pokes some holes in them and leaves them out to rot on the front porch, just to turn around and go to the grocery store to procure baby-stool-like substance, both in color and consistency, to use in various disgusting recipes. The sad thing is that this stuff really doesn’t taste like pumpkin but since no one knows what the real pumpkin tastes like, everyone identifies it as a pumpkin taste. Well, it’s not. Pumpkin is normally bright orange and sweet-tasting, not medium brown and spiced. Some information on edible pumpkins can be found here and here.

    Some notes on the pumpkin handling: it’s not easy. You have to have a decent knife and be careful not to hurt yourself. Don’t  pour  blood all over your keyboard typing me an angry letter, because I warned you. After trying to separate the flesh from the skin cantaloupe-style I had much better luck turning it over and just peeling the skin off. I also found out that shredding the pumpkin with a grater is a long and tedious process much better handled by a food processor. Other than that you don’t have any excuse to trade a sweet pumpkin orgasm for a can of brown crap.

    For this recipe you’ll need:

    5 egg yolks;
    1 3/4 sticks of margarine or butter;
    1.5 cups of sugar;
    5 tbsp of non-fragrant oil i.e. – corn oil;
    1 8oz package of sour cream;
    1 tsp vanilla;
    1/2 tsp of baking soda and some vinegar;
    5+ cups of all-purpose flour;
    pinch of salt;
    1 average pie pumpkin shredded and a little bit of sugar to sweeten;

    Melt the margarine and combine with egg yolks, sour cream, vanilla, sugar and oil. Over the flour place 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda in a larger spoon and pour a small amount of vinegar so it reacts. Make sure that all of the soda is gone in the reaction and combine the flour with liquid mixture. Add salt. Start lightly kneading the dough adding flour as needed until the oily sheen is gone and the dough springs back if you push it with the finger. Cut into six parts. Roll out each part into elliptical shape, add sweetened pumpkin and roll over several times. When adding pumpkin, squeeze it lightly to leave most of the juice out. Bake at 350F for 30-50 minutes until golden brown.

    *Note: this is what I wrote down when my Mom gave me the recipe. Since it didn’t come out the way I expected, I took a roll to her for troubleshooting. Apparently I was kneading too hard and didn’t add enough flour. As you can see, my dough was still shiny but I was afraid I used too much flour and lost patience. My Mom confirmed that the recipe was correct and in my defense it tastes great, just slightly heavier than I expected since it didn’t roll out thin enough. Try at your own risk. I am pretty sure that my Mom doesn’t own measuring spoons or cups, so I was using regular drinking cups and table spoons for this recipe.
    The important thing is that the great pumpkin taste I remembered from my childhood was there and that’s what I wanted to achieve in the first place.

    If you are feeling lonely on a Saturday night, get yourself a pumpkin, it will wear you out but you will feel good about it in the morning.

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  • Old Photos: Soviet Jews in 1959

    Over the last several months the Soviet Union’s campaign against Jews and Judaism has intensified. All over the country synagogues have bee closed, prayer meetings have been raided and newspaper articles have appeared attacking Jews as “thieves” and “enemies of socialism.” In this climate of official attacks, hoodlums have felt free to stone and set fire to synagogues, Jews have been severely beaten and even killed.

    The extent and the virulence of the new campaign, which may come as a shock to the outside world, does not surprise the Jews of the USSR. They have had to live with organized anti-Semitism for more than a decade. ” The government regards Christianity and Islam as the “opium of the people,” a Gentile Russian told me in Moscow recently, “but it treats Judaism as if it were poison gas. What’s more, it doesn’t matter whether a Jew is religious or not. He’s pushed around just because he’s a Jew.”

    Life Magazine, December 7, 1959. “New Agony for Russian Jews”.

    The following photos are a rare sight – for the first 18 years of my life I haven’t seen a praying Jew; partly because most of the people I knew were not religious (at least not known to be religious); partly because all but one synagogue in my city were not functioning (one was a gym, another one housed some archives and who knows what else); partly because openly practicing a religion and especially Judaism which has visual attributes (head cover, facial hair) was not compatible with having a career and sometimes a job.

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  • Kansas Roadtrips: Wamego

    It is true that anywhere in the world when people who may not even speak English find out that you are from Kansas, they smile and say something about the Wizard of Oz. And just like L. Frank Baum made Kansas known worldwide, some marketing genius made Wamego, KS a worthwhile side trip for anyone passing through the state.
    Wamego is located near Manhattan, KS and close enough to I-70 to make a detour. It doesn’t have any discernible claim to the Oz fame, except for actually being in Kansas.

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