Odd stuff

Before I post about Kage Baker, here are some odd things I've seen:
1. Someone in Russia made a high energy dance track about wanting a man like Putin. Putin now uses this at his rallies. Oh, those Russians!


2. Talking of Russians here are some excellent Russian photo sets. Here are some pictures of Russian 'types' from the 1860s: this link takes you straight to the start of the photostream, while this one goes to one particularly excellent picture of a peasant, looking like he came straight out of Dostoyevsky. And here are pictures from the school for female cossacks. Go female cossacks! They're just as brassy as you'd hope.

3. Talking of tough ladies, there's a very interesting documentary about women competing in a prison rodeo on 4OD. I found it via Boing Boing, which has a trailer, and a lot of heated argument about whether it's OK to watch prisoners get beaten up by bulls for entertainment. In the documentary itself the rodeo and the chance of maiming are the light-hearted bits. In fact it's probably not fair to call these women tough -- they're very very damaged, and most of them started failing their children before they had really finished being failed by their own parents. Sad but interesting.

4. Someone has thoroughly analysed the way that genders are divided by signs on toilet doors, and it's quite interesting. I hate it when toilet door signs try to be clever.

5. This Six Degrees of Francis Bacon poster shows how all literature is related.

6. The new X Factor magazine is quite good. I'm not going to apologise for reading it -- I need amusement in my reading life, and I can't get it all from Anglo-Saxon liturgy or intensely clever books by Joyce Carol Oates. (You can probably guess who the senior editor is...) I think you can only get it in Tescos though.