Christmas is a very nostalgic holiday, probably more so than any other. It’s the time when people realize that another year is left behind, kids have grown older and now want an iPhone instead of a barbie, and everyone else is sporting more and more gray hairs. People remember their own childhoods, old presents, relatives who are now gone, and the time when Christmas dinner meant killing your own goose.

These photos were taken in Neosho Rapids,KS in 1945.

Read the original Life Magazine article with more photos.

This story had a surprise ending.

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In the country where the “World Series” usually include such world powers as New York and Arizona, it’s no wonder that a musical competition in Europe is not front page news. I feel it’s my duty to inform those of you who haven’t heard the news that this year’s Eurovision 2009 was won by a Russian-born singer representing Norway.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBFFlL58UTM

I actually had more fun watching the compilation of all the winners in the previous 50 years where many songs sounded very familiar.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G0eiFxEiIU

While you may want to take a look at poodle-looking Celine Dion somehow representing Switzerland, I like the following song from 1975 a lot better.

httpvh://youtu.be/5fG09fmsQB8

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April 12th is the Cosmonautics Day celebrating the first manned space flight accomplished on that day in 1961 by the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. I mentioned it last year so today I will just post some pictures and a video clip.

This is the Monument To The Conquerors of Space in Moscow.

Space theme in the Soviet Greeting Cards. Notice that the Soviet postcards didn’t include any text so a person had to actually write something, not just sign their name under some sappy Hallmark verse.

Lastly, this song “Do you know what a guy he was” about Gagarin became the Song of The Year in 1971. Gagarin would have been 75 this year.

httpvh://youtu.be/sMeOrfu6f8U

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Every year I drive thousands of miles on Missouri highways encountering the most bizarre religious billboards, and every time I pass one up I feel like going back and taking a photo to prove that I didn’t make it up (like the one about Jesus and porn somewhere around Columbia, I think). Some day I will drive to St.Louis and Springfield with the only purpose of documenting religious and anti-abortion billboards, but until then there are few in the Metro to keep me entertained.

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This was originally written on my FB page where I post pictures and links almost daily and which you immediately should follow. I remembered about the stool samples when I was writing this post about the Soviet medicine of my day.

*Warning: please don’t eat while reading this.

Soviet kids had to be healthy whether they wanted it or not. And healthy meant parasite-free. So once in a while, my school (and I imagine all the other schools in the area) put out a call for stool samples. By a certain deadline every child had to submit a matchbox full of you-know-what, tightly wrapped and marked with the name of a producer.

At that time (and maybe still) the Soviet toilets (in places with indoor plumbing but not in public restrooms) were different from the American model we are all used to. Instead of a small pool of water ready to accept your deposits, it was more like a vase with hardly any water at all. When done, a person would pull a chain and a waterfall coming down from the high-mounted tank (if the water was on that day) would flush the stuff down through the hole located in the front part of the toilet.
That technical aside was necessary to explain that at least our parents didn’t have to fish for floating crap, it was all right there, nice and piled. Clearly no 8- or 9- or even 12-year-old wants to have anything to do with putting their own crap in a small box, so that somber duty had to be fulfilled by our parents. Many years later, as a parent myself, I’ve done many disgusting things and touched some substances that would make a grown man gag (and they did). But even after thousands of diapers changed I am still not sure I could go ahead and do what my mom had to do. This is something that would make you think twice about having a child.
The next day, the matchbox was proudly delivered and submitted to school, securely wrapped in multiple layers of paper and plastic (we didn’t have zip-locks or any bags of that nature) and tied with a string, with my name proudly scribbled on it like a designer brand. To this day I have no idea if anyone did anything with those nuggets. You can imagine that a school with 800 or a thousand kids can produce enough crap to fertilize a small organic beet farm. (Note to self: submit this idea to the school district as an extra source of income in light of recent school budget cuts by Governor Brownback.)
I always imagined that a lab in lower circles of socialized healthcare hell, populated by medical school dropouts, dimly lit and smelling worse than a meatpacking plant on a summer day, did nothing else but unwrapped the packages and examined the contents for parasite eggs and the signs of dinners past.But in reality I think they just threw these boxes away and faked the results. After all, sooner or later the parasites show their ugly heads, if you know what I mean.
Epilogue: When we came to the United States we had to pass some medical tests (in addition to the overpriced testing we were required to do in Moscow before we left). Then we received a mail-in stool sample kit, which consisted of some Popsicle sticks and cardboard envelopes. I was tempted to send my stuff in a box, but reconsidered and just threw the kits away.

They would have to pry a stool sample out of my……….

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