Skip to main content

Did Putin kill a guy??

                Is Vlad Putin Vlad the Impaler? It certainly seems so. Last week you may recall the somewhat suspicious death of Boris Nemtsov a prominent Russian politician and rival of President Vladimir Putin. He was shot to death not too far from the Kremlin while crossing the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge. The event was partially recorded via some form of CCTV, but another vehicle was driving on the adjacent motorway conveniently obstructing the actual shooting. Sounds like something out of a gangster movie; Tony Soprano couldn’t have done it better. And while the death is being investigated a lot of us can’t help wondering “did Putin do it?”
                Nemtsov was after all an outspoken critic of Putin and his government and if the grim president had a hit list, he would probably have been in the top ten. And in the past year we’ve been seeing Putin try to expand and consolidate power particularly with his invasion of Ukraine, and so those kind of actions generally create less tolerance to criticism. For a political leader like Putin it does reflect his character that he would put a hit out on someone he didn’t like.
                That being said it could be a misunderstanding. Nemtsov’s death could have just been the result of those hitmen misunderstanding Putin’s complaints or jokes about his opponent, much like the assassination of Thomas Becket in the 12th century. Then again this is Russia where they’re very straightforward and jokes aren’t something that happen.
                Clearly Putin’s gone maniacal with power and this assassination shows it. Not that he wasn’t on the maniac side to begin with. No one’s going to forget how the man who enforces one of the harshest sexuality persecuting legislations in the world likes to ride horses shirtless with a face so stony you’d think he’s auditioning to be Rock Biter in The NeverEnding Story. And we’ve all drawn the parallels in his invasion of Ukraine with another politician’s invasion of a country seventy-six years ago right down to the excuse (I won’t say who but Charlie Chaplin probably played him best-suitably as he stole Chaplin’s moustache style).
                I think Putin did have Nemtsov murdered and furthermore I think in the regime he’s created for himself he’ll never be implicated. A couple Chechians seem to already be taking the fall but we know the truth. But am I going too far? Presuming too much? By calling Putin out on these accusations and his questionable at best political actions, I too am a political enemy of his. But I don’t care! He is a maniacal dictator who is a danger to his own and other peoples; who won’t stop invading, posing, and murdering all those who disagree with hi—


Wha—


ACK!!


*muffled garbage*


BANG!




Hullö blög viewer. I höpe ÿüu awll enjöyed my stööpeed jöke. Cleerlÿ nönesense! Büt funnie tö think if it we’re trüe zöugh it’s nöt. Bütt fröm nöw ön I must införem yüu awll that I we’ll önly put in the best före this blög. Dö nöt ask quest-iöns! Güd daÿ!



P.S. I am naüght bad Russian steriötÿpe

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Disney's Mulan, Cultural Appropriation, and Exploitation

I’m late on this one I know. I wasn’t willing to spend thirty bucks back in September for a movie experience I knew was going to be far poorer than if I had paid half that at a theatre. So I waited for it to hit streaming for free to give it a shot. In the meantime I heard that it wasn’t very good, but I remained determined not to skip it entirely, partly out of sympathy for director Niki Caro and partly out of morbid curiosity. Disney’s live-action Mulan  I was actually mildly looking forward to early in the year in spite of my well-documented distaste for this series of creative dead zones by the most powerful media conglomerate on earth. Mulan  was never one of Disney’s classics, a movie extremely of its time in its “girl power” gender politics and with a decidedly American take on ancient Chinese mythology. It got by on a couple good songs and a strong lead, but it was a movie that could be improved upon, and this new version looked like it had the potential to do that, emphasizing

So I Guess Comics Kingdom Sucks Now...

So, I guess Comics Kingdom sucks now. The website run by King Features Syndicate hosting a bunch of their licensed comic strips from classics like Beetle Bailey , Blondie , and Dennis the Menace  to great new strips like Retail , The Pajama Diaries , and Edison Lee  (as well as Sherman’s Lagoon , Zits , On the Fastrack , etc.) underwent a major relaunch early last week that is in just about every way a massive downgrade. The problems are numerous. The layout is distracting and cheap, far more space is allocated for ads so the strips themselves are displayed too small, the banner from which you could formerly browse for other strips is gone (meaning you have to go to the homepage to find other comics you like or discover new ones), the comments section is a joke –not refreshing itself daily so that every comment made on an individual strip remains attached to ALL strips, there’s no more blog or special features on individual comics pages which effectively barricades the cartoonis

The Wizard of Oz: Birth of Imagination

“Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue; and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.” I don’t think I’ve sat down and watched The Wizard of Oz  in more than fifteen years. Among the first things I noticed doing so now in 2019, nearly eighty years to the day of its original release on August 25th, 1939, was the amount of obvious foreshadowing in the first twenty minutes. The farmhands are each equated with their later analogues through blatant metaphors and personality quirks (Huck’s “head made out of straw” comment), Professor Marvel is clearly a fraud in spite of his good nature, Dorothy at one point straight up calls Miss Gulch a “wicked old witch”. We don’t notice these things watching the film as children, or maybe we do and reason that it doesn’t matter. It still doesn’t matter. Despite being the part of the movie we’re not supposed to care about, the portrait of a dreary Kansas bedighted by one instant icon of a song, those opening scenes are extrao