Author: Chris Barrus

Summaries of Soviet literary classics

Soviet pulp novels?

The daughter of a Volga fisherman becomes a sniper with a Red partisan detachment. She misses her 41st vicitim (a White officer), then winds up stranded with him on a desert island, where they fall in love. However, the White’s essentially selfish, bourgeois nature becomes apparent and she shoots him, fulfilling her mission and her class destiny. (Sorok-Pervii, 1924)

Rocket-airships, radio-controlled tanks, and Death Rays. Evil Americans try to destroy the socialist paradise of the future, but the Soviets counterattack and win. Remnant capitalists flee to an underground base near Antartica, planning to escape into outer space. Socialism on one planet! (Borba v Efire, 1928)

Hey, Everybody, Let’s Put On An Avant-Garde Show!

From the current Onion. Beautiful, genius, and so very very wrong…

Now, don’t get sore if you don’t land one of the lead roles. There’s work for everybody on this avant-garde production! Virginia’s a demon with a needle and thread; she’ll be just the gal to stitch together the blood-red cloth backdrop with the vagina-shaped opening through which the giant fetus enters in the first act. Jackie, the junkman’s son, is a born prop man – he could dig up enough rusted urinals and soiled dolls’ heads for a dozen plays! Sissy Chester can compose the dissonant, aleatoric score. And Spud never goes anywhere without his hammer and nails; he can build the stage and the sets, as well as the huge wooden letter M that drops to the floor and crushes the proletarian rioters at the end of Act II! The rest of you can sell tickets, paste playbills on the fence outside Schwoegler’s Field, or hitch Nanny Goat to her cart and haul a giant papier-mache phallus up and down Gurdeyville Town Square. Yep, we’re gonna need all the help we can get!

Giant Redwoods near North Pole

Riddle me this Batman… Axel Heilberg Island in Canada is well above the Arctic Circle at 79o N, uninhabited, and pretty much barren of everything. Everything that is except 45 million year old fossilized redwood trees known as “metasequoias”. The catch is that 45 million years ago when these big trees were alive, Axel Heilberg was still as close to the North Pole as it is today – therefore the metasequoia forest was in darkness for four months out of the year and subject to the sort of conditions completely opposed to what a prehistoric sequoia tree likes. However they figure this out out, the answer is going to be a doozy.

Jahren and co-author Sternberg chemically compared the fossil isotope levels with those found in water in contemporary precipitation patterns over great distances of forested lands in the Amazon. They were able to show that water traveling from near the equator almost due north across the continents to the vicinity of Axel Heilberg would have oxygen and hydrogen isotope signatures that matched those found in the fossils.

While it might seem mind-boggling to have the equator watering the north pole, Jahren notes that other major climatological differences at the time included the lack of a north polar ice cap.

[via 2012]