Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

THE Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.

Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's birthplace - for the apes to be raised.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, were a total failure. He returned to the Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in human volunteers similarly fail.

A final attempt to persuade a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, which was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.

As horrid as the reality of the experiments must have been (giving chimps happy endings, etc.) I cannot help but chortle at the absurdity of the scenario and tie it all into this Blog's Admin's collective sense of humor regarding primates...

Excellent Band Alert: Early Man

80's Metallica meets classic Iron Maiden, with Sabbath-Era Ozzy Vocals and crushing guitar riffage on par with Nebula at their heaviest. If I had my say in what my band should sound like, this is it (at least for this month).

A LEGAL link to their record company's MP3 download

Early Man - Death Is The Answer

[right-click to download]

We as Americans often forget our friends, overlook the ones who stand by us, our neighbors who share a language with some uncanny similarities. When it's fashionable for the rest of the world to call us a bunch of jackbooted thugs they are with us, thugging along with the red, white and blue. We as Americans owe them a debt of gratitude that we often forget, especially you Australia, don't think we forgot about you and what you mean to us.
Australia, I miss the smell of your hair your soft skin, and the scent of Marmite on your clothes. You are so far, far away, I could walk to the Sun faster than it takes to get over there. Sure, you remind us of England, but in a much cooler way, you dress sexier for one thing, you got the total surf/bikini babe thing going on, you've even got that accent, but you're not all snobby about it like some people. Why England decided to start Australia in Australia and not Canada was the biggest mistake in the world and why we rented that room to Canada, I'll never know.
Canada has not worked a fucking job months, the place reeks of pot. You know what; "2112" is a great fucking album but Rush could not write a line like "She knocked me out with those American thighs" if Farley Mowat slathered up Neil Pert for a back rub with bacon fat. Look Canada; you left the place is a mess, there are are Labats bottles and empty goddamn boxes of Kraft Mac and Cheese everywhere, you live like a frat boy and you somehow find time to bitch at us, between bong hits. Canada's got the "Free Mumar" backlight posters on the wall, they're letting their hair grow out to make dreads like the dude from Counting Crows and you totally know they have been mooching off us like forever: "Dude, we like need some money to buy like some beer and Kraft dinner so we have something to do while we watch Ciallou." And when we tell them to go out and get a fucking job they totally dick out and call us facists. Canada has totally been Europe's little bitch the whole time, they're practically communists! Europe instigates Canada to talk shit to us like that kid with the extra thick glasses in fourth grade that does what the whole class tells him. Yea, Yea, keep it up Canada, you're in for the wedgie of a lifetime you little prick.
We're always telling England she's great, and you know we love England, but England is like that girl you went out with in college that only hung out with guys. Yea, she was a fucking pistol and the accent thing was really, really cute for a while but last time you called her Belgium picked up the phone and said she was sleeping and wouldn’t wake her up, and what's with the showers? Once a week in not a shower, a goddamn elephant at the circus takes a shower more often than Europe. England is a sweat heart, yea, they gave us Zeppelin, they gave Jimi a rhythm section but England will sleep with all of Europe when she's drunk and she always drunk, and once she gets a few pints of cider in her, yea.
So Australia, I just wanted to tell you that you have been a true friend, you stick by us, you don't talk shit about us and you're not afraid to get your hands dirty, so for that, we owe you a night of lap dances at the titty bar of your choice. Come over any time, our door is always open for you.

JIIIM

Ok - I have not seen King Kong yet, but I definitely plan to. Here is an interesting article that I read off Drudge Report, which also applies to Lord Of The Rings.

Is King Kong just a gigantic Sambo? You can judge for yourself

COLUMN: IS 'KING KONG' RACIST?
Thu Dec 15 2005 08:59:16 ET

Is KING KONG racist? asks Jim Pinkerton in his Thursday NEWSDAY column.

"Lots of people say it is. And, if it is, why does the film keep getting remade? What does it say about us if the new KONG is a huge hit?"

Pinkerton writes: Any movie that features white people sailing off to the Third World to capture a giant ape and carry it back to the West for exploitation is going to be seen as a metaphor for colonialism and racism. That was true for the original in 1933 and for the two remakes: the campy one in 1976, and the latest, directed by Peter Jackson. (In addition, a KONG wannabe, MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, has been made twice.)

Movie reviewer David Edelstein, writing in SLATE, notes the "implicit racism of KING KONG - the implication that Kong stands for the black man brought in chains from a dark island (full of murderous primitive pagans) and with a penchant for skinny white blondes." Indeed, a GOOGLE search using the words "King Kong racism" yielded 490,000 hits.

Comparing the new film with the original, the WASHINGTON POST's Stephen Hunter observed, "It remains a parable of exploitation, cultural self-importance, the arrogance of the West, all issues that were obvious in the original but unexamined; they remain unexamined here, if more vivid."

And by more vivid, Hunter might be referring to the natives of mythical Skull Island, where Kong is discovered. Director Jackson took people of Melanesian stock - the dark-skinned peoples who are indigenous to much of the South Pacific, including Jackson's own country of New Zealand - and made them up to look and act like monsters, more zombie-ish than human. Indeed, one is moved to compare these human devils to the ogre-ish Orcs from Jackson's mega-Oscar LORD OF THE RINGS films. The bad guys are dark, hideous and undifferentiatedly evil.

Last night I had a dream about returning to my second home; Ann Arbor MI. It would seem geography in my dreams has a common thread; everything looks something like Mineola for no apparent reason.
At some point Tom appeared playing drums (Which Tom has been known to do from time to time) with Aldo; I have no idea what Aldo's last name is or why he appeared, I only know he is from some former Soviet satellite state that spells "restaurant" with several "P's", anyway he and Tom were struggling to fit in the same denim jacket when they knocked themselves unconscious, instantaneously Steve Buscemi walked in the room and I began to tell him it was a shame Tom and Aldo were now down for the count as Tom would have loved to speak with him. (Incidentally Tom was now donned in a wig and sporting a false mustache to look like Aldo and both were still in the jacket.)
Without missing a beat Buscemi answered "Is it like one head thinks and the other one talks?" In his very deadpan observatory way.
I awoke before I could invite him to Zingermans for a samich...

Sometime it feels as though the authoring of my dreams by outsourced imps.

My apologies for not posting in quite a while - I have been uninspired for no particular reason and the muse to spill my banal thoughts has been dormant for a while. I have been traveling (writing this from Seattle, WA) and cannot seem to concentrate on one thing long enough to expound upon.

I have noticed that Jimmy has been silent as well and would like him to start posting his bizarre thoughts and beliefs again as to give me fodder for my writing.

The fun will resume this coming week.