West Virginia idiocy

When Senator Robert Byrd died earlier this year, state law required the Democratic governor to appoint a replacement to serve out the rest of Senator Byrd's term, which ends in 2012. This should have kept the seat safe in Democratic hands this year, but no! the governor wanted the seat himself, so he had the law changed so he could run for it this year. Now it looks like the Republicans will pick it up.

What a moron.

Socialist escapism

Last night I found the movie "Трактористы" ("Tractor Drivers") posted on YouTube in eight segments, so I watched them all. Filmed in 1938, it is a musical comedy about Klim, a recently discharged veteran of the battle of Lake Khasan, who sees a picture of Mariana, an outstanding tractor-driver on an obscure collective farm in the Ukraine, and decides to look her up. There is of course no hint of purges or famines, and all the characters sing happily in the fields as they go about their work. The movie introduces two memorable songs: "Три танкиста" ("Three tankmen"), which opens the movie, and "Марш танкистов" ("March of the tankmen"), sung during the final scene.

The YouTube version of the movie has been Khrushchevized; all references to Stalin have been deleted and in the final scene, as the characters celebrate Klim and Mariana's wedding, they keep raising their glasses to "the cruel hour of war" where the original song refrain mentioned the dictator (the original final scene can be found elsewhere on YouTube).

Another peculiarity is that the final verse of the March speaks of tank drivers hitting starter buttons, but none of the motor vehicles pictured in the movie seems to have an electric starter; they all have to be hand-cranked (or foot-cranked, in the case of Mariana's motorcycle).

The sound quality isn't the best and much of the dialogue is hard to decipher, especially for someone like myself who doesn't know Russian very well. Some of the characters seem to have odd accents.