A Russian leader “miraculously” winning an election with 100% of the vote used to be a tradition in the Soviet Union, but the results of the parliamentary elections in Russia over the weekend were anything but a miracle. Even though Vladimir Putin’s party only secured a slim majority in the Duma, the anger at the outrageous levels of election fraud has pushed enough buttons that protests in Moscow have gone on for two nights.

N+1 magazine has correspondents in Moscow who have posted this group article about the situation, comparing it to the ongoing revolutionary protests in Tahrir Square.

Meanwhile, the news site The Week has a roundup of some of the Western media’s coverage of the unrest, offering some differences of opinion as to whether or not the protests are a sign of an “Arab Spring” moment in Russia, or just annoyance at Putin’s ham-handed effort to reinstall himself as president.

Boston.com’s “The Big Picture” has a gallery of pictures from Moscow and other parts of Russia on its election day, including that picture of some protestors up at the top of this post.

You probably know that the gemstone amber is actually fossilized tree resin. What I did not know is that 80% of the world’s amber comes from the Baltic region of Northern Europe, and, according to this EnglishRussia post, 90% of that comes from the Kaliningrad region of Russia. (Brief historical digression: Kaliningrad was originally Königsberg, the capital of Prussia. Annexed by the Soviet Union after World War II, it remains part of Russia, though not contiguous with the rest of the country) The world’s largest amber factory continues to mine amber from massive open pits, the process of which (along with other pictures of amber processing) is documented in that linked post.

Back in 2007, I posted about The Amber Room, a room of Peter The Great’s Winter Palace that had wall panels handcrafted entirely in amber. It was a gift to the Tsar from the King of Prussia. During World War II, the Soviets dismantled the room panels and hid them, fearing the Germans would steal back the treasure. The link to the Smithsonian magazine in that original post is dead, but the article about the Amber Room is still available here if you’re interested. And, if you’ve got some time, here’s a half-hour special from Russia Today about the Amber Room:

Next weekend we revert back from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time, but the Russian government decided earlier this year that they would stop going back and forth and would just stick with DST year-round so as to not “disrupt the cows”…or maybe to save effort changing all the clocks, they’re not quite sure.

It’s not as outlandish an idea as you might think. The government in the U.K. has proposed doing the same thing for a three-year trial period. Of course, the reasons given by H.M. Government — energy savings, reducing crime, etc. — are largely bullshit. You’ll recall we increased the length of DST several years ago by a few weeks on either end because, it was argued, we would save money on electricity, only to discover it was actually just the opposite.

In China, they not only do not bother with DST, they also did away with all those pesky time zones; the time across the country is whatever time it is in Beijing, regardless of where the sun might be in the sky. So, even though it is four hours earlier in Western Tibet than in Beijing by the position of the sun, all the clocks read the same.

I bet you thought this was going to be another post about nanopants. Fooled ya! Instead, go check out this EnglishRussia.com post with photos of all sorts of textiles produced in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. There are all sorts of awesome designs that borrow from ArtDeco motifs, Soviet Realist art, and some traditional Russian folk styles as well. Some of the patterns would be considered stylish and sophisticated even today, and some really hammer (and sickle) home the ideals of the proletariat control of production in post-Revolution Russia.

(Full-size interactive infographic HERE)

While the Russians basically drink the entire world under the table when it comes to liquor:

(Larger version of that map and additional info in this Daily Mail article)

Which, come to think of it, might help explain why a third of people in Russia still believe the sun revolves around the Earth. Dear Russkies — it’s not the sun that’s spinning around, it’s your pickled brains.

It’s not for nothing that political candidates call the endless parade of banquets and luncheons the “Rubber Chicken Circuit”. This article at The Economist’s “Intelligent Life” magazine looks at the disconnect between what people want from banquet food and what a hotel or restaurant can realistically manage to do for a large group and how some chefs are trying to up their game by getting away from rubber chicken a la king and trying cooking methods and cuisines that are better suited to the vagaries of serving several hundred people simultaneously.

Speaking of chicken…it should not be a surprise to anyone that Americans have an overwhelming preference for “white” meat (in other words, chicken breast), spurred partially by the machinations of the poultry producers and partially by our infantilized palates. But until they perfect the process for growing meat without growing the chicken, every bird has two legs as well as a breast. That’s a lot of meat left over, too much to even consider just throwing away, and so the poultry producers export all those chicken legs to other countries where people LOVE them. This Slate article says that the biggest importer of American chicken legs for years has been Russia, but the Russians are trying to boost their domestic poultry production and so are buying less and less from us. Given the state of the economy and the ecological disasters waiting for us on the horizon, Americans need to wise up, stop being fussy, and start eating dark meat. It tastes better anyway.

The USDA has an online interactive “Food Environment Atlas” that you can use to explore county-by-county census data as it relates to a variety of food and health concerns. A website called “Daily Yonder” used the atlas to generate this map of the U.S. showing the number of fast-food restaurants per capita and then some additional infographics for several related vectors: obesity, exercise, amounts of types of food eaten (soft drinks, vegetables, meat), and amount of per-person spending on fast food. There’s no sort of master index that pulls all of this together in that post, but taken as a group the maps do point out trends.

We occasionally enjoy watching the Travel Channel’s “Bizarre Foods” with Andrew Zimmern. I have to say that probably a good 75% of the stuff he eats actually looks just fine to me; not to harp on a point too much, but Americans as a group are appallingly infantile about their food preferences, and a lot of the things he samples are not so much gross as they are merely culturally unappealing because they’re unfamiliar. Once in a while you can tell that even Zimmern has to man up to eat a few things that clearly don’t taste good, but he never shirks from something just because it’s weird. Well, almost never. I think I’d pass on that, too.

In The Atlantic, local chef Chris Parsons writes about the 2011 Bocuse d’Or competition that was recently held in Lyon, France. You may recall that I blogged about his Bocuse d’Or posts last year, too. Parsons himself was a competitor in 2009.

The YouTube video above is a series of film clips shot by the late Russian filmmaker, Vladimir Shevchenko, who was allowed complete access to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant site in the days immediately following the reactor accident, which occurred 25 years ago this April 26. It is terrifying and appalling at the same time: the clips document dozens of Soviet Army troops working cleanup detail in the middle of the worst nuclear accident in history, wearing absolutely no protective gear other than surgical masks or passive respirators. In one scene, footage of men clearing debris from the roof of a building is accompanied by some broken-English titles that explain that even 40 seconds of exposure to the massive radiation in that location was enough to kill men virtually on the spot. In another, men dig tunnels and pour concrete directly underneath the reactor, wearing nothing but miners’ workclothes.

Shevchenko compiled his footage into a brief film entitled “Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks”, which was immediately suppressed by the Soviet government for over a year after the accident. In that time, Shevchenko himself succumbed to radiation poisoning, as he, too, had no protective gear and was exposed to the same lethal levels of radiation. Other than these scenes, which apparently were not included in the final cut, the film is not available online but can be purchased on DVD.

The entire region of Pripyat has been sealed off from the world for the last quarter-century, although trespassers have explored the area and have shared countless haunting photographs of the abandoned towns and villages. There was also a later documentary made in 1999 (a trailer is also on YouTube here). Now it is possible to book day tours to the region, including a visit to Reactor #4, where the accident occurred — the website says lunch is included in the excursion, but hastens to add that the food comes from outside the Chernobyl region. Bring your own dosimeter.

The “1984″ commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer during the 1984 Super Bowl has become legendary over the years. Not only did it help launch the new computer, it also was one of the first “must-watch” commercials to run during the Super Bowl, transforming that event from an often so-so football championship match into a huge media vehicle. This year’s Super Bowl ad rates are running at $3 million per 30-second spot. Writing in Ad Week, former Chiat/Day ad exec Steve Hayden tells a behind-the-scenes history about the business machinations involved in even getting the commercial made, and how the Apple Board of Directors almost killed it before it ever saw the light of day.

Another fascinating behind-the-scenes story is this one in the London Review of Books from Peter Pomerantsev, a British television producer who was invited to join a Russian television production company to make knock-offs of popular reality series like “The Apprentice” and “Big Brother” (!) for domestic Russian TV. Though I have no reason to doubt the stories he tells, it’s almost like a running gag of every stereotype about corrupt Russian bureaucracy and Soviet-holdover attitudes. As it turns out, he says, many of the concepts that are popular on reality series in the U.S. and U.K. don’t translate into Russian culture, where people are disbelieving of “rags-to-riches” makeovers and the shenanigans of “bachelors”; most popular are the “Survivor” knock-offs and other competition shows.

One more behind-the-scenes story, just for kicks. Sitcom writer/director Ken Levine has one of the most interesting blogs about television that I have encountered. His insider’s perspective about how sitcoms get made and his stories about the golden days on the sets of shows like “M*A*S*H*” and “Cheers” are full of tidbits of TV history and trivia. Once in a while, he also invites people he knows/works with in the business (and by “the business”, I mean “the industry”) to post. Back in December, he featured this post from Peter Casey, one of the co-creators of “Frasier”, explaining the backstory of how that series was devised (including some interesting bits about the casting)

One of the tallest buildings built in Soviet-era Moscow was the massive edifice of Moscow State University.

EnglishRussia.com recently had this very cool photo essay showing the passage of some very brave individual all the way up the central tower and to the very top of the giant star.