impressive
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Wheelchair and cat's tail don't mix.
He'll learn not to curl up under there ... eventually.
He'll learn not to curl up under there ... eventually.
Isolated Blurt Thread
- Thread starter McKenna
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English Lady
Erotic English Rose
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Mice like peanut butter.
Listen to a clip of the little mouse with clogs on:
A windmill in Old Amsterdam (the little mouse with clogs on) It's trck 5
Listen to a clip of the little mouse with clogs on:
A windmill in Old Amsterdam (the little mouse with clogs on) It's trck 5
damppanties
Tinkle, twinkle
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No peanut butter in the house. I don't like it.English Lady said:
And the link doesn't work...
English Lady
Erotic English Rose
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damppanties said:
I just fixed it, I think *LOL*
damppanties
Tinkle, twinkle
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Yes, you did. Listening.English Lady said:
Sweet. 
English Lady
Erotic English Rose
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damppanties said:Yes, you did. Listening.
It's amazing how many times in a week I will burst into a chorus of
"I saw a mouse..."
damppanties
Tinkle, twinkle
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LOL! Record.English Lady said:It's amazing how many times in a week I will burst into a chorus of
"I saw a mouse..."
English Lady
Erotic English Rose
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damppanties said:LOL! Record.
Maybe
MrsDeathlynx
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I need to get some sleep, please...
trysail
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Becoming Stalin
Vengeance came naturally to Stalin, writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in his portrait of the dictator as a young man.
By Walter G. Moss
Published: October 19, 2007
Controversy about Josef Stalin and about how historians should depict his years in power continues to divide Russians. Simon Sebag Montefiore's new book "Young Stalin" does not deal directly with Stalin's reign -- his previous book, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," did that -- but it does provide new insights into how Stalin became the man he was by the end of 1917, still a decade before he ousted Leon Trotsky in the battle for post-Leninist leadership.
Montefiore was a journalist and novelist before writing his first major historical work, "Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin." In writing it and his first Stalin biography, he made exhaustive use of archival and other materials and employed a lively, colorful style. His new book takes the same approach. Montefiore tells us that for this book he did research in 23 cities and nine countries. He is generous in acknowledging the work of previous scholars, indicates that he interviewed numerous people and states that the "bulk of the new material in this work comes from the Caucasus," where Stalin was born and spent most of his early years.
Starting with a prologue entitled "The Bank Robbery," which dramatically recounts an infamous 1907 Tiflis crime directed by Stalin, the book is full of vivid details and new revelations and analysis. Stalin was probably responsible, according to Montefiore, for numerous other robberies on trains, stagecoaches and ships, accumulating today's equivalent of millions of dollars for the Bolshevik cause. Montefiore quotes colorfully from a wide range of primary sources when describing the places and people Stalin encountered in the Caucasus, in exile or during stays in other cities inside the Russian Empire and abroad. "Baku was a city of 'debauchery, despotism and extravagance,'" and in the city's Bailov prison Stalin "was 'always seen in the company of cutthroats, blackmailers, robbers and the gunslingers -- the Mauserists.'" Chapter titles such as "Bolshevik Temptress" and "1914: Artic Sex Comedy," dealing with the 34-year-old Stalin's commencement of an affair with a 13-year-old girl, also signal the author's intention to tell a lively story. A chapter called "Two Lost Fiancees and a Pregnant Peasant" tells us of Stalin consoling himself "with another bout of skirt chasing that led to a forgotten semi-official marriage, and an illegitimate son." In a chapter on "The Central Committee and 'Glamourpuss' the Schoolgirl" we are entertained by a footnote about the future dour Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, here exiled in the northern town of Solvychegodsk, earning "one rouble a day by playing mandolin for rich merchants and their molls in the local restaurant and in the new cinema there." In a chapter on Stalin in Vienna in 1913, we read that he liked to walk in the same park as did another future dictator then in the city -- Adolf Hitler.
More flamboyant and less cautious in his prose than most academic historians, Montefiore frequently depicts Stalin in the Caucasus as a "terrorist" and "gangster," or "expert in gangsterism," and as "an arsonist, killer, bank robber ... [and] seducer." The author is fond of using such vernacular terms as "hit men" and "female gunslingers." He refers to future show-trial prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky as Stalin's "sidekick" who "organized terrorist gangs and [had] become a hit man." He tells us that "Stalin was unusual -- as adept at debating, writing and organizing as he was at arranging hits and heists," and that he was the "godfather of bank robberies in the Caucasus."
Montefiore likes to use critical adjectives. He tells of Lenin's "fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution" and asserts that the first Bolshevik leader "existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies." He depicts Trotsky as "shamelessly vain" and "overweeningly arrogant," and the writer Maxim Gorky as later becoming a "shameful apologist" for Stalin. In one sentence alone he writes of "the utopian fanaticism of [Soviet Russia's] quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin's homicidal vision."
Psychoanalytic terms also make their appearance. The author writes of the "nymphomaniac mother" of Stalin's wife Nadezhda, points to Stalin's "burning inferiority complex" and observes that "the gangster glamour [of Stalin and his "gangsters"] concealed psychotic Mafia-style brutality." More readily than many historians, Montefiore inserts the word "always," as in "Lenin and Krupskaya ... were always drawn to the glamour (and utility) of brutal cutthroats"; "Lenin was always eager to start the bloodletting"; and Stalin was "always the lazy egotist" -- although we later read that "he was a hard worker," and overall the book suggests that the "always ... lazy" Stalin was quite the opposite.
Without minimizing Stalin's bloody deeds, it is appropriate to ask whether the constant reiteration of words such as "gangster," "criminal," "hitman," "gunslingers," "godfather" and "Mafia-style" tends to blur the differences between revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia and organized crime in a society like that of the United States, or even post-Soviet Russia. Montefiore does acknowledge some of Stalin's better traits: He was an intelligent young man who sometimes wrote poetry (samples are provided) and loved to read and garden -- he was "always green-fingered." Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov and Gorky were among his favorite authors, and he recited poems by Nikolai Nekrasov from memory. He also liked some of Leo Tolstoy's and Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction, and lectured one of his young girlfriends on William Shakespeare and paintings at the Louvre. "Poetry and music," he once told a friend, "elevate the spirit!" Another source states that Stalin "could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance." The author refutes some of the most slanderous charges against Stalin, such as that he once acted as a tsarist police agent, and at the end of the book we read of Stalin's generosity to old friends.
By then, however, Montefiore has indicated how, despite some redeeming qualities, Stalin had developed into the man who would later take millions of innocent lives. By 1917, a year in which he played a greater role than Trotsky admitted, his personality had been shaped by many influences -- parents who often beat him; a Georgian boyhood that furnished many examples of violence and vengeance; an Orthodox seminary education that taught him (in his own words) "surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings"; an "amoral" revolutionary subculture; and years in Siberian exile, which contributed to his sense of isolation and self-containment. Already while in exile, Stalin said, "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." Montefiore also contends that, by early 1917, Lenin and Stalin essentially "shared the same sentiments and favored identical methods." Overall, this vivid and significant book tells us more about the young Stalin than we have ever known before.
____________________________
Walter G. Moss teaches history at Eastern Michigan University and is the author of "A History of Russia" and "Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."
Copyright © 2007 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
URL of this page: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/180406/
Vengeance came naturally to Stalin, writes Simon Sebag Montefiore in his portrait of the dictator as a young man.
By Walter G. Moss
Published: October 19, 2007
Controversy about Josef Stalin and about how historians should depict his years in power continues to divide Russians. Simon Sebag Montefiore's new book "Young Stalin" does not deal directly with Stalin's reign -- his previous book, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," did that -- but it does provide new insights into how Stalin became the man he was by the end of 1917, still a decade before he ousted Leon Trotsky in the battle for post-Leninist leadership.
Montefiore was a journalist and novelist before writing his first major historical work, "Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin." In writing it and his first Stalin biography, he made exhaustive use of archival and other materials and employed a lively, colorful style. His new book takes the same approach. Montefiore tells us that for this book he did research in 23 cities and nine countries. He is generous in acknowledging the work of previous scholars, indicates that he interviewed numerous people and states that the "bulk of the new material in this work comes from the Caucasus," where Stalin was born and spent most of his early years.
Starting with a prologue entitled "The Bank Robbery," which dramatically recounts an infamous 1907 Tiflis crime directed by Stalin, the book is full of vivid details and new revelations and analysis. Stalin was probably responsible, according to Montefiore, for numerous other robberies on trains, stagecoaches and ships, accumulating today's equivalent of millions of dollars for the Bolshevik cause. Montefiore quotes colorfully from a wide range of primary sources when describing the places and people Stalin encountered in the Caucasus, in exile or during stays in other cities inside the Russian Empire and abroad. "Baku was a city of 'debauchery, despotism and extravagance,'" and in the city's Bailov prison Stalin "was 'always seen in the company of cutthroats, blackmailers, robbers and the gunslingers -- the Mauserists.'" Chapter titles such as "Bolshevik Temptress" and "1914: Artic Sex Comedy," dealing with the 34-year-old Stalin's commencement of an affair with a 13-year-old girl, also signal the author's intention to tell a lively story. A chapter called "Two Lost Fiancees and a Pregnant Peasant" tells us of Stalin consoling himself "with another bout of skirt chasing that led to a forgotten semi-official marriage, and an illegitimate son." In a chapter on "The Central Committee and 'Glamourpuss' the Schoolgirl" we are entertained by a footnote about the future dour Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, here exiled in the northern town of Solvychegodsk, earning "one rouble a day by playing mandolin for rich merchants and their molls in the local restaurant and in the new cinema there." In a chapter on Stalin in Vienna in 1913, we read that he liked to walk in the same park as did another future dictator then in the city -- Adolf Hitler.
More flamboyant and less cautious in his prose than most academic historians, Montefiore frequently depicts Stalin in the Caucasus as a "terrorist" and "gangster," or "expert in gangsterism," and as "an arsonist, killer, bank robber ... [and] seducer." The author is fond of using such vernacular terms as "hit men" and "female gunslingers." He refers to future show-trial prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky as Stalin's "sidekick" who "organized terrorist gangs and [had] become a hit man." He tells us that "Stalin was unusual -- as adept at debating, writing and organizing as he was at arranging hits and heists," and that he was the "godfather of bank robberies in the Caucasus."
Montefiore likes to use critical adjectives. He tells of Lenin's "fanatical dedication to Marxist revolution" and asserts that the first Bolshevik leader "existed in an obsessional frenzy of political vibration, driven by an intense rage and a compulsion to dominate allies." He depicts Trotsky as "shamelessly vain" and "overweeningly arrogant," and the writer Maxim Gorky as later becoming a "shameful apologist" for Stalin. In one sentence alone he writes of "the utopian fanaticism of [Soviet Russia's] quasi-religious ideology, the merciless Bolshevik machismo, the slaughterous spirit of the Great War, and Lenin's homicidal vision."
Psychoanalytic terms also make their appearance. The author writes of the "nymphomaniac mother" of Stalin's wife Nadezhda, points to Stalin's "burning inferiority complex" and observes that "the gangster glamour [of Stalin and his "gangsters"] concealed psychotic Mafia-style brutality." More readily than many historians, Montefiore inserts the word "always," as in "Lenin and Krupskaya ... were always drawn to the glamour (and utility) of brutal cutthroats"; "Lenin was always eager to start the bloodletting"; and Stalin was "always the lazy egotist" -- although we later read that "he was a hard worker," and overall the book suggests that the "always ... lazy" Stalin was quite the opposite.
Without minimizing Stalin's bloody deeds, it is appropriate to ask whether the constant reiteration of words such as "gangster," "criminal," "hitman," "gunslingers," "godfather" and "Mafia-style" tends to blur the differences between revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia and organized crime in a society like that of the United States, or even post-Soviet Russia. Montefiore does acknowledge some of Stalin's better traits: He was an intelligent young man who sometimes wrote poetry (samples are provided) and loved to read and garden -- he was "always green-fingered." Nikolai Gogol, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov and Gorky were among his favorite authors, and he recited poems by Nikolai Nekrasov from memory. He also liked some of Leo Tolstoy's and Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction, and lectured one of his young girlfriends on William Shakespeare and paintings at the Louvre. "Poetry and music," he once told a friend, "elevate the spirit!" Another source states that Stalin "could be very jolly too. He loved to sing and dance." The author refutes some of the most slanderous charges against Stalin, such as that he once acted as a tsarist police agent, and at the end of the book we read of Stalin's generosity to old friends.
By then, however, Montefiore has indicated how, despite some redeeming qualities, Stalin had developed into the man who would later take millions of innocent lives. By 1917, a year in which he played a greater role than Trotsky admitted, his personality had been shaped by many influences -- parents who often beat him; a Georgian boyhood that furnished many examples of violence and vengeance; an Orthodox seminary education that taught him (in his own words) "surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings"; an "amoral" revolutionary subculture; and years in Siberian exile, which contributed to his sense of isolation and self-containment. Already while in exile, Stalin said, "My greatest pleasure is to choose one's victim, prepare one's plans minutely, slake an implacable vengeance, and then go to bed. There's nothing sweeter in the world." Montefiore also contends that, by early 1917, Lenin and Stalin essentially "shared the same sentiments and favored identical methods." Overall, this vivid and significant book tells us more about the young Stalin than we have ever known before.
____________________________
Walter G. Moss teaches history at Eastern Michigan University and is the author of "A History of Russia" and "Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky."
Copyright © 2007 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
URL of this page: http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/180406/
MagicaPractica
Alchemist
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2004
- Posts
- 20,069
English Lady said:It's amazing how many times in a week I will burst into a chorus of
"I saw a mouse..."
I hope it's not cause you see one.
This is why I have cats. I remember hearing something in the closet once so I went and got my boys and told them to check it out while I went and sat on the bed with my feet up. They nosed around for a while and then came and sat on the bed, one on either side of me. Apparently, whatever it was was gone. Phew.
Belegon
Still Kicking Around
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- Jul 6, 2003
- Posts
- 17,188
As Imp said, how odd that they would show up now.
Fires, kids stir-crazy, parent evacuated, garage door broken and now the divorce papers are served.
I guess Chaos really does feed on itself. Whether that is good or bad, I'm not sure. I guess that depends on how fast it renews itself as well...
Fires, kids stir-crazy, parent evacuated, garage door broken and now the divorce papers are served.
I guess Chaos really does feed on itself. Whether that is good or bad, I'm not sure. I guess that depends on how fast it renews itself as well...
damppanties
Tinkle, twinkle
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*hugs*Belegon said:
New beginnings.
Belegon
Still Kicking Around
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damppanties said:*hugs*
New beginnings.
indeed. I just find it so weird that I'm starting over when so many others are. Of course, most of them lost everything except their spouse... I'm kinda opposite.
Desired or not, it's still not easy to face this and not feel like a failure.
damppanties
Tinkle, twinkle
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Yep, I understand. A relationship, however much it is bad for you, is still hard to leave behind. It was a part of your life.Belegon said:
English Lady
Erotic English Rose
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Magica -oh no, no mice here. It tends to be along the lines of
Me -"Have you looked on the stairs"
Daughter-"where?"
Me-"On the stairs."
Daughter "Where on the Stairs?"
Me "I saw a mouse, where, there on the stair... etc etc etc"
*hugs* Bel
Me -"Have you looked on the stairs"
Daughter-"where?"
Me-"On the stairs."
Daughter "Where on the Stairs?"
Me "I saw a mouse, where, there on the stair... etc etc etc"
*hugs* Bel
nightmistress
Goddess Rising
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*hugs and my sympathy*Belegon said:
impressive
Literotica Guru
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If this is what's called "keeping each other company," I fail to see how it differs from being alone. At least I listen when I talk to myself ... and I answer.
impressive
Literotica Guru
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Belegon said:"are you talking to me?"
Pot, meet kettle.
That was sarcasm... but I would have to tell you that.
impressive
Literotica Guru
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Belegon said:Of course you do... I'm far too unsubtle to pick up on written sarcasm. Hell, I barely get it in voice.
It was the voice I was referring to. So ...
MagicaPractica
Alchemist
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Belegon said:
Time and again, I come back to Anatole France. “All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”
FatDino
Literotica Guru
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There was a roach in my house last night.damppanties said:There's a mouse in my room.
Roomie A: Eww! There's a roach crawling on your laptop. *speaking to roomie B*
Me: WHAT?! *in total alert mode*
Roomie B: Kill it! *speaking to roomie C, who was listening to Nickel Back*
Me: Gotta let you know, I'm shit scared of roaches. *stands up and runs to bedroom, jumps on the bed and hides under the covers*
2 mins of pounding heartbeat later...
Roomie C: Hey Chicken *yells from the living room* We killed it. Come out.
Me: Hang on. *in meek voice...walks out to see her holding a magazine with a dead roach on it...screams, opens the door and runs out of the house*
~~~
I didn't come back in until 10 mins later, and my three roomies were looking at me like I was some kind of aliens. I totally lost my cool image last night.
Why did it have to be a roach? The only creature that I'm afraid of...*shudders*
Nirvanadragones
Literotica Guru
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Ever read old threads?
- Status
