Click on the picture to see your face in the full-size version…
Yes, your face is in there1If it isn’t, then we need to meet more often next year, preferably when I have a camera out..
For this year’s edition of the perennial NYE collage, Ada & Alan (captured in full holiday season bliss by my very talented cousin) wish you a very warm and fuzzy 2013.
Yes, that’s the view from my office. Why’d you ask?
At least, this year’s office cleaning does not fall on the 25th.
The lyrics to the original USSR national anthem were written by Russian author Sergey Mikhalkov in 1943.
In the fifties, Comrad Nikita deemed the original lyrics a little too fixated on Staline’s awesomeness and ordered them changed. “No problem, never liked the guy in the first place”, Sergey Mikhalkov presumably chirped, while writing a new Staline-free version in 1977.
By the year 2000, Mother Russia, now a lot less communist but still short on funds to compose a new anthem from scratch, went looking for new lyrics again, preferably without mention of the great Lenin illuminating the path to freedom for the Union. A job that Sergey Mikhalkov gladly took, because really, he never cared for that communism stuff and was just in it for the music.
In 2020, when president-for-life Putin finally commissions a new version of the national anthem praising his skills at bear-fighting and bare-chested salmon-fishing, I have a good idea of who will be writing it.