Thursday, April 14, 2016

Oodles of Roubles, yet worth every Kopek!

At $.015 per rouble this extravagant-
looking cash fan is barely enough to
settle the bill at Olive Garden.
Say, how much would you pay to preserve the ninety year-old corpse of Russian Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin? Fifty thousand dollars? A hundred? If you said two hundred thousand dollars, which is thirteen million roubles, you win! Also, you're really good at working out the exchange rate. However you, like the Russian government, might not be really good at coming up with great uses for large sums of money because that's how much they'll spend on repairs and cleaning for Lenin's body which had been on display in Red Square since 1924.

Wait, wah? Yeah. So why and how the shit are they spending $200,000 to keep Lenin's body looking Revolution-fresh after nine decades?
He smells Revolution fresh as well...revolutions
smell like formaldehyde and paraffin wax, right?
Or teaming up with re-animated Stalin
for a wacky Odd-Couple-like comedy
TV series. Coming this fall on ABC!
The how is science. Lenin, despite his dedication to Marxist principles and stylish balbo is still just a man-shaped pile of tissue and bones and as such is prone to mold and decay just like his decadent capitalist pig contemporaries in the west. Understandably, Weekend at Bernie's-ing him requires a lot of work, so the government has put together a team of five corpse-preserving specialists to re-enbalm the body every two years, slathering on liquid latex and stitching on replacement skin as needed in order to keep Lenin looking like he could climb out of his tomb at any moment and start redistributing Russian land.

The why they're doing this is a little more complicated because according to an online survey, Russians also think this is creepy and pointless and overwhelmingly favor just burying the guy. I suppose it's not that much money when you're talking about a national budget but it's still 100% more than we spent stuffing Woodrow Wilson.
Here in America we use advanced imagineering techniques to recreate our leaders as
edutaining animatronic mannequins who bring history to life. Well, as close to life as
you can get with a bunch of dead-eyed glorified Teddy Rukspins in powdered wigs. 

No comments:

Post a Comment