The Dying Swan Lake

This One Will Take Some Explaining
No, sweet thing, this is not Politics, it is History!  So there.  It hearkens back to the dim and distant days of the Cold War, when the Sinister Union was being run by a clutch of geriatrics-in-office, political hard cases who had come to power in the aftermath of the Second Unpleasantness and whose grasp of the levers of power was more akin to rigor mortis than anything else.  Art?

How to scare cats the Leonid Brezhnev way!*

     That chap in the ushanka fur hat is Ol' Leo, who kept on dictating, despite being progressively closer to Death's door after 1975, getting several inches closer each year.  He just wouldn't let go, until he croaked it in 1982.  Hay Pesto! another doddering dictator with male-pattern baldness hobbles into the still-warm throne,** which he's not destined to enjoy for long.  Art?

How to scare cats the Yuri Andropov way!

And strangle them, too!***

     Yuri shuffles - shuffles very, very slowly due to being quite ill - off this mortal coil in February 1984, but don't despair!  Another elderly, ill politician comes off their production line - what was his name again?  Oh, right, Chernenko.  They all begin to blur into one another, don't they?****  Art?

Nah.  The cat's aren't scared any more.  Sorry, Konstantin.

     He didn't so much shuffle off this mortal coil as need a couple of bodyguards to help him move at all.  That's what being a heavy smoker since age 9 does for you.
     By this time the wicked and eeeevil capitalist Western media were openly mocking this sequence of barely-animated coffin-no-longer-dodgers, including an hilarious, if tasteless, skit from "Spitting Image".  Art?

*****

     The thing is, in the Sinister Union they weren't good at dealing with surprises or novel situations - a Nazi invasion or intruding Korean airliner threw them all in a tizzy, until they could hammer out a bland, uninformative, lying, deceitful news bulletin.  
     So, all normal news broadcasts would stop in the event of The Glorious Leader's Much-Mourned Passing, and to fill in the gaping silence, non-stop classical music would be played.  For days on end, if need be.  Thus the perspicacious citizens of the Workers Paradise knew something was up, and that it wasn't good.
     Thus, in April 1985, when people turned their radios on, all they got was Tchaikovsky.  
     "Has Ol' Gorby choked it******, then?" people asked themselves, wonderingly, as he was a whole lot younger than the recent zombies.
     No.  Chernobyl had happened.

CAUTION!  More effective than robots but requires food and water

     So, if Russia Today suddenly starts to play non-stop Swan Lake and the 1812 Overture (but probably not The Rite Of Spring), there may be an announcement about Tsar Putin in the works ...

I Found It!
If you have been following the blog with any degree of attention and care, WHICH IS THE ONLY THING THAT WILL SPARE YOUR DESCENDANTS FROM THE URANIUM MINES, then you will know that I'd lost a piece from my 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle <sad face>.
     Well, this afternoon, there it was, on the floor at my feet <happy face>.  I honestly don't know where it had been nor how it came back - no doubt some wild and crazy adventure! - so I fell upon it with gratitude and - Art?

Whole again

     Five minutes later the whole thing was crumpled into individual pieces and back in the box.  No sentimentality, that's me.

Well, after accumulating a prison sentence of about twenty thousand years were Tsar Putin ever to get his twitching phalanges upon me, I think I'll now annoy Greece again.  Because the republic of North Macedonia - that's NORTH MACEDONIA - is going to be holding a Pride march in the capital, Skopje, which ought to offend the Greeks because it's 1) In North Macedonia and they hate hate hate anything that implies their Macedonia is under threat from irridentism, and 2) It's in North Macedonia and might get favourable publicity and 3) Even if they don't and it turns into a violent disorder, it's still publicity.

Entirely un-PC Greek reaction

     Time for breakfast!

Returning To The Theme Of HIGHLY DANGEROUS And Festivals
If you were paying attention to yesterday's post, then you'll have seen the brief mention of safety issues that were responsible for getting the Vestiville Festival cancelled.  Well, Your Humble Scribe being an inquisitive rascal, I nosied around and found a list of safety issues that Glasto has to contend with, and there's a lot.
     Out of caution, and that word "Copyright" being mentioned, Conrad will not merely copy and paste, nor drop in an image, but here's a rendering of the criteria.  Firstly - Art!

CAUTION!  Travelling cranes and laser battles can imperil crowds
(But look really cool on television)

"VERY HIGH RISK"
     'Crowd Safety' - naturally, when you have tens of thousands of reeling revellers, especially in the evening, when they're all trollied thanks to drink and exotic pharma, any surge or trips and falls can rapidly escalate into a giant human sandwich.  This is why you have security looking for any such thing in the first place.

In daytime they all sit quietly and soberly.

     'Contamination of the Water Supply' - rubbish, rain, human effluent, all in considerable amounts, can easily impact the groundwater.  Thus the organisers have to ensure that drinking water is potable, as cholera can easily offend.
     'Food Safety' - because you're talking about a muddy field, never forgetting that human effluent - not putting you off your dinner, are we? - with little to nil facilities to wash your hands, and none at all in terms of refrigeration in tents.  A ham sandwich, after festering for two days in clingfilm at the bottom of a rucksack, eaten with dirty hands - why do you think there's so much of that human effluent to go around?

To Let

     'Trips And Falls' - No, not that kind of trip.  The ones where you measure your full length in the noisome, effluent-laden slurry that is the ground after 1,000,000 pairs of boots have walked across it.

An incentive to remain upright

     All those tents with guy ropes, and people wandering around in the dark, not entirely sober or straight, no streetlamps; a recipe for faceplantings galore.
     'Hypothermia' - which is helpfully suffixed 'Getting soaked and being in the open', a traditional hazard of British 'summer' festival events.  Typically, if your festival attendance is not marked by the Atlantic Ocean coming to visit, you will end up with heatstroke.  The Pond of Eden - no happy medium where weather is concerned.

CAUTION!  British Summer Festivals are a Drowning Risk

     Well, we have gone well over the Compositional Ton, and I have two crosswords and two Codewords to tackle, so it's Chin Chin! from me.

*  Ten years penal servitude in the Gulag for Conrad
**  Another ten years.  Clocking it up, aren't we?
***  Fifteen years additional solitary confinement.
****  The death sentence.
*****  Another fifty years, then more death sentence, then ten years for good measure.
******  Resurrection in order to be executed again and again and again.  Conrad = bad boy.