A Continuation of My Last Post

I was going to write my whole debate on religion for this post, but I decided against it. Seeing as this is a blog to hone my writing skills, I figured that I should include the completion of the unedited short story that I wrote in Creative Writing class. So here it is. I promise that I will get back to writing about more pertinent topics eventually. Oh and by the way, comment below on what you think of my story. If I feel like it is a good enough topic, I will turn this into my NaNoWriMo project, as I said before.

Reacting quickly, the black-haired man grabbed at a nearby window sill and pulled himself through. A huge crash signaled the ladder’s inevitable meeting with the ground, and the man let out a sigh of relief, happy that he didn’t land with it. He heard a strange voice behind him cry out, and then the soft patter of rapid footsteps. Figuring that he wasn’t supposed to be where he was, he glanced around the room to search for a place to hide. It looked like an abandoned apartment, with a bathroom and an area where a bed could go, but there was no carpet or flooring of any kind, and the walls were bare. Catching sight of an open closet door, he ran inside and closed himself in. The door to the apartment slammed open and a young man of about 19 entered the room.

 The man was not strongly built, but he was still wiry and athletic. His dull brown hair seemed plastered to his head, and he had a bent soggy cigarette drooping from his mouth. To the black-haired man’s surprise, the young man held a gun with both hands and was making a sweep of the room with it.

“Hey!” the man with the gun called out. “Anybody there?” Then, more to himself, he added “What was that crash, anyway?” The man drifted over to the open window and peeked out, seeing the fallen ladder. “I guess we got someone on the roof! Time to go for a little chase.” He chuckled to himself. Deciding on impulse to act, the black-haired man swung open the closet door and leaped at the man with the gun.

“Oh no you won’t, kid.” He said as he went for his gun hand and tore the weapon out of the other man’s grip. “Do you really know how to use one of these things? I’ll bet you don’t. But I do, and I’m not afraid to use it on a suspicious-looking kid like you.”

After the black-haired man had disarmed the kid, he cried out and shouted for someone named James. Another brief stampede of feet could be heard from the next room over, and suddenly four more kids with guns appeared. The leader, the one called James, stepped towards the black-haired man and smiled. He was as old as he was, but he had seen his fair share of back alley scuffles. He had a scar on his left cheek which traced his jawbone, and part of his arm looked like it had been burned.

“Well now, what do we have here? An intruder. Timmy, how did you manage to dig up this guy?”

“I think he climbed in with our ladder, boss.” Timmy replied. “He knocked it back down after he was up here. That was that crash we heard a little while ago.”

“You took away your only hope of escape, man.” James was addressing the black-haired man now. “You see, we’re doing some rather…illegal things in this place, and we can’t have just anyone poking around in here.” After a pause, he added, “So we’re gonna have to get rid of you, quickly and quietly. Come on, boys. Let’s rumble.”

At this moment, the black-haired man recalled to his mind some other things that his father had taught him. His father used to be a Marine, and he had taught his son how to fight like one. He had never used his father’s fighting lessons to become a bully, but he knew that he might one day need to fight to survive. Today was that day.

He knocked over a tall pile of cardboard boxes so that they fell on top of the four gangsters, and he realized that the boxes were full of long metal poles as one fell out and rolled towards him. Deciding that he would rather injure these kids than shoot them and potentially kill them, he stuffed the stolen gun in his pocket and picked up a pole. Noticing that Timmy was running up behind him, he swung around and cracked him on the head with the pole. There was a satisfying smacking noise, and the pole vibrated with sound as it struck the boy’s hard skull.

“Ah, I see. So you want it the hard way, do you?” James said as he saw how he had dispatched Timmy. “Let’s make this a real fight. Without guns.” James and his three cronies dropped their weapons and pulled knives out of their leather jackets. With a little bit of strength and a big “Uumph,” the black-haired man tossed his metal pole like a javelin straight into one boy’s face. The blow knocked him out cold, and the man bent to scoop up another pole from the box.

As he came back up to standing position, he used his new pole to swipe another boy’s legs, sending him down to the ground and causing him to bang his head on the wall. Three of the original five boys were now down for the count, and only James and one other remained. The other boy charged and held his knife high, but the black-haired man simply stepped aside and let the boy pass him. James stalked towards the black-haired man slowly and cautiously. He made a tentative and sloppy slash at him with his knife, which the man cleanly deflected with the pole. Suddenly, James let out a primal scream and leaped at him, hoping to catch him off guard and make him forget about the other boy coming up behind him.

But he didn’t forget. He jumped aside again, out of James’ way, and James ended up accidently burying the knife into his buddy’s arm. Expletives flew from both ends of the knife, and James came around to face the black-haired man again with nothing but his bare hands.

“Now look what you made me do, you idiot. Frank was a good friend of mine, and you made me go and stab his arm.” He chuckled. “I guess you’re more trouble than you’re worth. But I ain’t done yet. Drop the pole, pretty boy, and let’s fight like real men. Every try THAT, you pansy?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the black-haired man said. “I was fighting back when you were still wet behind the ears, whelp. Whatever you guys are doing, I can tell that it isn’t good. And I’m gonna get out of here and find the police.”

“Haha! You can try if you can get past me. And the rest of the gang. And all the little booby traps we’ve got set up here to make sure no one like you gets out. Or in, for that matter.”

After a second of intense mental debate, the black-haired man simply turned his head and ran. He thought that it would be better to get out now rather than to take his chances with James. For all he knew, he could have had another knife up his sleeve and would have used it eventually. As he ran out of the room and down a long hallway, he heard voices calling out behind him. Not just James’ voice, but many other voices as well. These kids had some kind of major operation going on in this old abandoned place, and whatever it was, it was pretty serious stuff.

Sneaking into a remote closet in a back room of the apartment, he contemplated exactly how he would get out of the place. He had the gang members to deal with, as well as all of the booby traps they had set up. Screw getting to the police, just getting out of the building alive would prove to be an issue.

Not About Religion

Hello all, today's post will be a short and lazy one. I am simply going to post an extension of the work I posted at the end of my last post to see what you think. This expands those two paragraphs into two pages of a budding story, and I'll take some time to quickly explain the concept.

This story is going to be based off of my own explorations in this very real setting. The whole concept of it is about a man who is in a rather low spot in his life, and he enters an abandoned apartment complex. Inside this complex he encounters a violent gang, and he must find a way out of the complex before they find and kill him.

A beautiful sunset streaks red and gold across the sky as heavy twilight permeates the air. The clearing of grass just north of a rough gravelly parking lot collectively sighs as the wind bends their light green strands. A cloud parts from its union with the sun, and bright, harsh red light washes over everything. An automobile rolls through the lot, grumbling at the chill breeze that frolics its way through the lot of red brick buildings. The energy of the pumping machinery inside the car seems to distract the calm and quiet atmosphere of the coming night. The car rolls to a stop and the driver inside switches the ignition off, relenting control of the dusk to nature.

The man inside the car rolls the windows down, and perks his ears up to experience all the sights and sounds of the night. After the sun goes down and the stars come out, the crickets slowly begin to weave their sound into the melting pot of night noises. A long, low whistle pierces the air and cracks nature’s pot of sound, signaling the arrival of the night’s first train. Soon, a cacophony of engines that dwarfed those of the car fills the pot and breaks it, destroying the sacred silence that harbors itself in the remote areas of the world. Wanting to breathe the night air and be closer to the train, the man opens his car door and enters the night.

The wind picks up and playfully tussles with the man’s shoulder-length black hair and beats against his young stubbly cheeks. He sees an old whitewashed garage that straddles the two worlds of grass and gravel, and he walks over to it to explore. If there was any one thing that the man enjoyed doing, it was exploring old buildings and structures and seeing what secrets he could find inside them. Peeking inside the window of the garage, which appeared as though it would only hold one car, he saw that the entire floor of the place was covered with slabs of broken wood.

He dared not to get too close to the grass for fear of what his father had told him. ‘Snakes, little garden snakes, are always waiting for ya in tall grass. You’d best stay away if you ever feel the need to go jumping around in grass that’s up to your neck.’ The black-haired man was always one to eschew fairy tales and superstition before real danger, so he heeded his father’s words and stalked away to find another interesting site.

While he was walking along the row of mostly empty storefronts that hugged the top of the parking lot, he noticed a large metal fence cutting off a gap between buildings. Upon closer inspection, he realized that part of this big gate was made to swing open, and, better yet, was unlocked. The gate released a horrid rusty screeching noise as he shoved it open, but nobody was around to hear it. Walking inside the gap, he quickly noticed that he was not the only person to find this little treasure. Graffiti covered the two walls of the neighboring buildings, and the path between them (about big enough for a car to drive through) was cracked open in many places by weeds. Even the calming sounds of the night could not be heard once the fence gate was closed. There was a palpable feeling of quiet in the alley, and the black-haired man quite enjoyed the total silence.

He then decided on impulse to climb a ladder propped up against a building to see if he could reach the roof. Although the ladder was made of metal and was frighteningly wobbly, he kept on climbing for twenty or thirty feet. In his childhood, he used to climb up on top of trees and roofs all the time, and he was quite an expert at it. He did not, however, anticipate what would come next. The brick that the top right hand side of the ladder was resting on suddenly cracked, and the already wobbly ladder slowly began to slide to the right.

So that's that. I've been pretty busy with school starting up again, so this post will just be the unedited beginning of the story. I'd like you all to comment and say what you think of the concept itself, so that I can decide if I would want this to turn into my NaNoWriMo story or not. Alright, I promise that I'll write about something serious next time. Until then...

A Day in the Life of an ISS Worker

Let's get right down to the nitty-gritty. Space isn't the popular uber-awesome cool industrial giant that it once was. Back in the 60s, according to my dad, everyone pretty much stopped everything they were doing to see a shuttle launch, or something of that nature. Nowadays, you read about the latest shuttle launch in the newspaper about a month after it occurs, and you find yourself bored to tears with all the techno-babble before you're even halfway done with the article. Personally, I find that sad that no one cares about space exploration anymore, so I'm dedicating this post...to the Final Frontier. Space.

Actually, I'm only going to focus today on one specific part of our various space explorations, and that is ISS. ISS is the abbreviation for the International Space Station, shown here:

ISS is a technological wonder, the product of 5 global space corporations working together. America, Japan, Canada, Russia, and Europe have been working together since 1998 to create ISS, the largest man-made space station ever. And guess what? It's not even done yet.

As I said before, it began construction in 1998, and it is due to be completed next year. We plan to use it until the late 2020s. ISS has been constantly inhabited by humans for almost 11 years straight. The planning for it came about when those five nations I mentioned (America, Japan, Canada, Russia, and Europe) realized that they should work together to create one global space station. For today's post, I am going to show you how these people on ISS live. Hopefully, their boring and difficult lifestyle will help you to appreciate your exciting awesome ones.

First of all, since the space station experiences 16 sunrises and sunsets per day, they have to follow their own time zone and carefully prepare their sleep schedules. The following crew schedule is based off of their Coordinated Universal Time Zone. They wake up at 6:00 every day, and they start off with an inspection of the station, and themselves. They then have to eat breakfast and have a council meeting before starting daily work activities at 8:10. They exercise periodically during the day to ensure that they don't loose the use of their muscles.

At 1:05, they take a one hour lunch break, and they continue working until 7:30, at which time they prepare to sleep again. No late night parties for this bunch. They have dinner and another council meeting, with lights out at 9:30. Now, what they do for those many hours each day, I have no idea. It seems to me like they'd just be sitting around twiddling their thumbs for the entire time, but hey. Who knows what they do up there.

As for the food, the astronauts have it pretty good. Apparently they send dietitians up to ISS to help out with the meal planning. Since your sense of taste is reduced in space, spicy Mexican foods are the local favorite. Beverages are made by mixing water with differently flavored powders, and the food is attached to the plates by magnets. Every bit of food that does float away has to be collected so that it doesn't clog up ISS's air system.

As I said before, they have to do a lot of exercise to keep their muscles and bodies strong. They have their own personal gym up there equipped with two treadmills, a weightlifting machine, and a stationary bike. Everybody is required to spend about two hours a day exercising. As for sleeping, the crew members get their own little cubbies that they can put stuff in like desks, laptops, and snack foods. Visitors to the station, however, just have to tether up to a free wall spot with a velcro sleeping bag.

So I wanted to tell you all that I am now enrolled in a Creative Writing class at my high school to try to jumpstart my writing career. Today, on the first day of classes, we had to write a couple paragraphs about a location. Any location. No editing, barely any thinking. Just writing. I have included these rough two paragraphs in this post, so you'll get to read two unedited pieces of garbage. Hooray! (Actually, this entire blog is unedited garbage.)

A beautiful sunset streaks red and gold across the sky as heavy twilight permeates the air. The clearing of grass just north of a rough gravelly parking lot collectively sighs as the wind bends their light green strands. A cloud parts from its union with the sun, and bright, harsh red light washes over everything. An automobile rolls through the lot, grumbling at the chill breeze that frolics its way through the lot of red brick buildings. The energy of the pumping machinery inside the car seems to distract the calm and quiet atmosphere of the coming night. The car rolls to a stop and the driver inside switches the ignition off, relenting control of the dusk to nature.

The man inside the car rolls the windows down, and perks his ears up to experience all the sights and sounds of the night. After the sun goes down and the stars come out, the crickets slowly begin to weave their sound into the melting pot of night noises. A long, low whistle pierces the air and cracks nature’s pot of sound, signaling the arrival of the night’s first train. Soon, a cacophony of engines that dwarfed those of the car fill the pot and break it, destroying the sacred silence that harbors itself in the remote areas of the world. Wanting to breath the night air and be closer to the train, the man opens his car door and enters the night.

So there you have it. See you next time, when I take on an incredibly controversial and taboo subject. Religion!!!

Man of the Hour: Avraham Herzfeld

So I've been reading this book for my upcoming Honors Government class called Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, and it is surprisingly more interesting than I originally thought it would be. In case you haven't heard of it, it is a collection of speeches by a man named Plunkitt, and he was a District Leader in New York City in the early 1900s. Plunkitt has an incredibly straightforward way of speaking, and he really throws light on what the world of politics is like. He talks about how to be a good politician and explains why his organization, Tammany Hall, has been around for so long.

So, in honor of politicians everywhere, I'd like to dedicate this article to someone I don't even know. His name is Avraham Herzfeld (yes, Avraham, with a "v") and he is a well-known Israeli politician. This is his picture off of Wikipedia:

The guy was a huge supporter of the Zionist movement (the movement to give the Israelites their own country).

Avraham Herzfeld was born on the 21st of June (here I'll give a shoutout to a friend of mine who shares his birthdate) in the year 1891. He was born in the Russian Empire, in a place called Stavich (today we would call it Ukraine). He went to a Jewish religious school called a yeshiva, and was eventually made into a rabbi. (What? A religious politician? No way.) When he was only 15, he joined the Socialist Zionists. (Holy crapper! A Commie-Jew mashup?!) At 19, he was arrested for revolutionary activities and was exiled to Siberia. So he had a pretty hard early life, and he was a bit before his time with his Socialist "revolutionary activities", but whatever. Siberia, though...that bites.

At the chipper age of 23, he moved to Palestine (then controlled by the Ottomans) and became a farmer. During World War I, the Jews living in Ottoman-controlled Palestine were getting a little feisty, and Herzfeld decided to get feisty with 'em. For a four year period after that (age 23-27) he was a member of a Jewish Labor Party, and he got his start in politics at age 28 when he started his own labor party. He remained a member until the age of 39. At the age of 29, this guy got busy. He started the Histadrut (a powerful coalition of trade unions that still exists today) and he was also an active leader of the Agricultural Association where he lived.

His work in the Agricultural Association allowed him to spend the next 40 years of his life building new settlements for people in Palestine. At age 48, he joined the Jewish National Fund and stayed there until his death. The Fund was an organization dedicated to buying up new plots of land for Palestine. A colorful fact about his personality was that he would occasionally burst out into song in the middle of his speeches. So he's a merry-making rabbi Commie politician. This guy is a little bit of everything.

He was elected to the Knesset (Israel's Congress) at age 48, and he was re-elected four times after that, serving until he was 64. He was a prominent member of the Finance Committee, and after he retired, he worked for the elderly. (The blind leading the blind, I say.) At the age of 81, he was awarded the Israel Prize, and he died the next year on August 30th, 1973. His house, like all famous people's houses, is now a museum.

Seeing as this post is a little shorter than the other two (do you really expect me to write a lot about a Jewish politician?) I am going to go a little off-topic. The first big thing that I plan to do to actually get myself to WRITE something is NaNoWriMo. If any of you don't know what that is, it stands for National Novel Writing Month, and it takes place in November. Basically, you have a month to write a 50,000 word novel, and I am committing myself to succeeding this year.

I prefer to put a significant amount of planning into it before I actually write, and all the planning (or most of it) will be posted on this blog, since this is supposed to spur on my writing career. Alright, well that's that. There's my post. I hope that I made Herzfeld's little slice of history interesting for you. And I hope that you'll come back to read more when I post it. Until then.

P.S. I'm getting into a habit of ending with a YouTube video, but it's a good way to end. Since I spent this post talking about minorities (Commie rabbi politicians) I'd like to send you to this very enlightening and humorous video that makes all of us feel a little foolish for what we sometimes say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCgx8zM3woQ

Methods of Travel: Flying vs. Driving

Hello readers! Today I tackle the topic of transportation. Let's say you're going on a vacation, and you have the choice to either fly there or drive there. Which is safer? Which is more fun? Which is the least boring? Which one is better overall? That is what I will address today.

Why would I write a post on driving and flying? Because I am 17, and I am currently enrolled in driving classes. (Yes, I am a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to getting my license.) I want to take some of the boringness that I have to sit through, and make you sit through it too. Of course, you could just not read this at all and spare yourself the boredom, but I like to pretend that I'm forcing you to read this blog. I'd also like to dedicate this post to my driving instructor, Bill, for making driving class slightly less boring, and for cementing my decision to become a teacher in later life.

First I will relate to you some experiences I've had in both flying and driving, starting with flying. I have flown a grand total of once (twice if you count the trip back) and it was to Florida in the winter of '04-'05. I was in fifth grade at the time, so I don't really remember much about the flight itself, besides that I was reading this really boring book about Native Americans for a book report. It was probably around three or four hours, and luckily I got to sit with my mom instead of the stereotypical large drooling middle-aged man who takes up too much room. I didn't even have any annoying kids kicking the back of my seat! What luck.

As for driving, I consider myself a good driver for my age. I'm not pretending to be some driving whiz, because I'm not. But I do think that I'm pretty good at it, as far as 17-year-olds go. The longest driving trip I've ever been on was one to the Outer Banks of North Carolina last summer, which was a 12 hour trip. I got to drive a bit, but I wasn't as good back then and I didn't drive for very long. I hate driving for a long time, but I don't mind sitting in a car too much.

So let's compare the two! Flying is much much quicker obviously, and you are never expected to help out with the actual navigation of the thing. Even though flying on a plane gives you a spectacular aerial view, (you gotta have a window seat, though) I think that the scenery that you see while driving is more up close and personal. You can actually SEE what you're driving through when you're driving, putting into practice that old saying about a journey being more about how you get to your destination rather than what you do when you get there. Also, while driving, you can bond and have fun with family, whereas on a plane, you might not even sit together.

When you start to talk about safety, a plane may seem like the obvious choice. With driving you have problems like other people on the road who really shouldn't have a license (or don't even have one) as well as the potential danger of encountering a drunk driver. There are obviously many more issues with driving, but the following still holds true; the average SAFE driver has a better chance of arriving at their destination intact than the average SAFE airplane pilot.

All the problems with driving are really out of the driver's control, so when you look at the navigation of the vehicle itself, drivers come out on top. Why? Well, not many people know that airplanes are built very poorly. Statistics show that an average of 43% of a plane's parts are substandardly produced, meaning that lots of things could go wrong because a couple screws are loose. Seriously. Looking at all this, I declare that driving to a location is better than flying there.
Last, but definitely not least, I will teach all of you some basics about driving, so that hopefully you can become safer drivers like me. When driving, you must keep two limbs on the steering wheel, whether you use two hands, two feet, a hand and a foot, a foot and a tongue, or a hand and an ear, or a tongue and your willy, it makes no difference. Two body parts on the wheel at all times to retain maximum control of the vehicle. The second and final rule to driving is this: red means no, green means yes, and yellow means maybe.

Well, there you have it! That's my thoughts on driving and what not. When you comment below, tell me your thoughts. Is driving or flying better, and why? And how good of a driver are you? If you liked this post, keep coming back for more! And tell people about this blog. Tell everybody in the whole world. See ya next time :)

P.S. I just have to post this video of funny driving fails. These people obviously didn't follow my instructions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-cAbV265rA

Hello World! Specifically Russia!

Hello and welcome to my new blog, The Write Place. You can call me Winston in the comments if you wish, because that is a rather popular nickname that I acquired, oh, about three years ago this coming Sunday. Don't get your hopes up; the story of its creation isn't very exciting. Actually, I'm not even going to tell it. Yet.

What I am going to tell you now is about myself, and why I started this blog. First however, you must understand that I have a burning desire to become a teacher and a writer once I'm out of college. I'm currently a senior in high school, but that doesn't prevent me from getting an early start on what I plan to do for the rest of my life, does it? :) So after dabbling around unsuccessfully in the writing world for some time, I decided to gather my thoughts in a blog, and, well, here we are. I figure that the best cure for not knowing how to be a writer is to write, and to have a group of blog readers to back you up and critique you.

So there you have it. This blog is a collection of my thoughts, but it is also an outlet for my various writings. As for me, you can find out everything you'd need to know from my profile, which I will be updating periodically. I won't bore you with all of the details of my life as it is now, because I'm sure you really don't care. What I will do is entertain you, teach you a couple of new things that I've picked up along the way, and, essentially, use you to enhance my own barely existing talents. Now that you know my true intentions, I hope you'll still stick around :)

You all must be wondering why the title of this first post specifies Russia in my greeting. That is because my first post in this blog will be about Russia! (Even though I don't live there) I am dedicating this post to a very good friend of mine, who has some Russian heritage (and is very proud of it). I will take the topic of Russian art, and attempt to make it interesting. First I'd like to start with a picture, an image that most of you have probably seen before:

This is, of course, a picture of the famous Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. It prominently features these things called onion domes, AKA the multicolored Hershey's Kisses on top of the towers of the Cathedral. You have to admit that this place is pretty cool-looking. When I was a kid, I used to think that this building had some kind of massive circus or carnival inside it, but alas, it is only filled with praying people who wouldn't appreciate my desire to run screaming through the halls in a clown costume.

Believe it or not, Saint Basil's Cathedral was built in the 1500s. And it's not the only one of its kind, either. I, personally, find Russian architecture fascinating. But there are other aspects to art than architecture. Like the Matryoshka doll! Everyone knows about the dolls that open up and have another doll inside, then another inside that one, and another inside that. The Russians invented that, and they are called Matryoshka dolls.

Another thing that Russians do is they paint images on wood, ranging in size from little postcard sized pieces to ones in churches that can be as big as dinner tables. I really have nothing to say about that, except that I have two of these things that they call icon art. My grandpa gave them to me, even though he isn't Russian. One is an image of George Washington on his horse, and the other is of Abraham Lincoln giving a speech to a room full of people. My mom thinks they're really ugly, but I think that she just doesn't appreciate art like I do.

So anyways, when my grandpa gave them to me, I was like "Holy frick grandpa! You painted these?!" And he was like "NO." Okay, so my grandpa isn't some secret artist guru, but apparently he put a lot of work into making these. See, originally both of the images were on a calendar, and he somehow soaked the image and attached it flawlessly to the wood so that it seems like they were painted right on. I think they're really cool.

The last thing I'd like to talk about is modern Russian music, because music is as much art as art is. Russian music today is heavily influenced by Western music. I see that as a late Cold War victory for the good old United States. Actually, I was very excited while I was doing research for this part of the post, because Russian music combines Western rock and roll with Russian folk music and bardic military music. How awesome does that sound?

I'd like to introduce you to a very popular Russian band called Lubeh. They've been around since 1989, and they're still going strong. Pretty much everyone of every age likes them in Russia, and even Vladimir Putin (former Russian President) has gone to a few concerts. I have added a link to a good song of theirs, called "Ne valyai duraka, Amerika!" that humorously chides us for buying Alaska from Russia. Take a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wuq1EE8ymc&feature=related

Well, that's my first blog post. I hope you liked it, I hope that it kept you entertained (you better have clicked on that link...) and I hope that you'll be back for more soon. Comment with your thoughts. And maybe, if you beg, I'll write a Cold War-era espionage story. Eventually. See you soon :)

P.S. My discussion of Russian art simply wouldn't be complete without this gem. I won't tell you what it is. Just go there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCI5JDxEBZU&feature=related