Ben Wyatt

My Father once contended that Russian is easily the most beautiful spoken language in the world, at which my older sister defended French, a tongue she had learned a great deal of in high school. After listening to The Hunt For Red October soundtrack, I sought the French for comment, but they had listened too, and had quickly surrendered ...

I am not following the Don Imus snafu, but the recent Pravda headline American radio icon Don Imus disgraced, fired after threat to reveal 9/11 secrets simultaneously transcends hilarity (not to be confused with Hillary, Erik), it gives me an excuse to share one of my favorite jokes.

Pravda, for the linguistically and historically impaired, is both the Russian word for truth and the USSR's media mouthpiece in the Bad Old Days (alternatively a reference to the Cold War and the days before Casey v. Planned Parenthood and the hallowed Kerry-esque legal concept of 'super stare decisis'). Perhaps the bedrock of a society without God is that good is evil, the classless society is among the most stratified and socially immobile societies ever (apart from the mobility descended from thuggery), and the newspaper named Truth had a habit for compulsively lying to its readership. After all, Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania.

There was supposedly some obscure olympic event that was so hopeless at one point in time, not even the Jamaicans had a notion to compete in it, leaving the US and the USSR alone on yet another battlefield. So the Americans do what we do best, and just win, baby. Well, it must have been an especially slow trading day for the Ruble, or perhaps it was a non-election year, or egalitarianism was not the vogue word on the international fashion scene, or nobody had much money in their newspaper advertising budget, or it's really hard to write about a 100% government approval rating, but whatever the reason (my preferred theory is that Garry Kasparov was having a down year) the results got covered in Pravda:

Soviets Finish Second, US Next To Last

Oh and PS, note that the most authoritative named source for the linked article is Rosie O'Donnell.

UPDATE: Others corroborate my tale, though some tell it differently. We can call it an urban legend until proven otherwise.