Operation AXIOM
Twenty years ago yesterday, 19 August 1991, Soviet "hardliners" staged a coup d'état against Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in the hope of reversing the slow-motion collapse of their Evil Empire. Totalitarian states endure as long as the regime's soldiers are willing to open fire on the populous; the Communist thugs conducting the putsch refused to fire on the peaceful resistance lead by Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic & future president of the Russian President. The abortive coup collapsed, & Soviet Communism soon followed. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) had been consigned to the ash heap of history by the end of the year. A remembrance, tinged with regrets: Emperor & Autocrat of All the Russias-link.

Comrade Coquettish was born in the waning years of the Soviet Union, & jauntily refers to herself as the U.S.S.R.'s best export. Hear hear!

Science!
A reminder: dynamite & T.N.T. are not the same substance. In other volatile news, the U.S. Navy has invented a new explosive compound, one that promises to be both more deadly to its targets & less apt to inadvertently maim or kill by-standers: BOOM!-link.

Science!

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
Fountains of Wayne, "Radio Bar" from Sky Full of Holes (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary:

"They put a song in the jukebox,
It was a hit with the drunk jocks,
Even the guys with the dreadlocks
Sang along at the Radio Bar.
One night there was a girl there,
For some reason she pulled up her chair,
She said, 'Why don't we go somewhere?'
So I passed her her coat,
That was all that she wrote,
That was it for the Radio Bar."