DWARVES IN MY MILK

Chechnya: Oh, the Things You'll Learn!

I posted this in response to the following submitted request, raised shortly after the attack by Chechen rebels on a school: "In 30 words or less, explain the situation in Chechnya, preferably with poetry." 

***

Chechnya!
What's there to see?
Let's take a look at history!

First, Nicky I, he made a play
to make it his, one awful day.
With little weeble-wobbled men
he fought the brave caucasians.
Bap! they frought!
Bip! they froed!
And Nicky's men were made to goed!

Next Russians came (the olden ones)
With heavy coats and shiny guns.
They bonked Caucasians on the head
until the streets were filled with dead.
Bop! they hit,
and Bam! was heard.
And Chechnya was conquer-ered.

For fifty years they stayed that way,
'til Bolsheviks took stage to play.
(The Chechnyans were known back then
as scrappy little Dagestan.)

As Lenin read a book on Marx,
the Dagestans, they met in parks,
and darkened halls, and public squares,
and vowed to get right out of theres.

But Lenin smelled a dirty plot,
and all the traitor-ors were caught.
Zip! he ripped the land in two!
And Zap! he stuck them back with glue!
The Dagestans, they took their lick
and were made into a republic.

So under Soviets they'd fallen,
but then along came Mr. Stalin!
Old Uncle Joe! Boy, what a man!
He took the Chechens by the hand!
And beat them hard, in ways so many,
they looked for help from German-any.

Help us! they cried!
Save us! they pled!
For many had been rendered dead.
And Uncle Joe, he saw what's doing,
he smelled the independence brewing.

So in this mass his-teria,
he sent them to Siberia.
And Kazhakstan.
And to the grave.
Their freedom lost, which they did crave.
So in this state of prison-ation
languished weak, this one proud nation.

Their spirits broke, the fate of whims,
and soon along came Musl-ims.
From whence they came? We do not know!
They'd been shipped there
by Uncle Joe.

Now skip ahead, dear boids and girlds,
through coldish wars fought between worlds.
There came a time,
it came to be,
that Chechnya was finally free.

How's that?! you ask.
How come?! you beg.
I do not like green hams and egg!

What happened was (it's plain to see!):
The Soviets, they ceased to be.

Free! they were singin'!
At last! they were gushin'
But wait a sec--here come the Russians.

And so, again, their hope to be
allowed to run to, fro, and free
was gently pushed under the mat
by Bo Yeltsin,
the drunkocrat.

Boris tried to hold together
the states that were once of a feather.
But though he sat
and thinked,
and thunk,
Boris was a little drunk.

And he declared, one fateful day,
"I'll just make bad Chechnya stay!"
5,000 Russians (in '94)
came and knocked upon the door.

Be off! Chechens shouted!
Go 'way! Chechens blared!
But in a war they were ensnared.

Now here it gets a little sticky,
confusing
and a little tricky.

Remember the old musl-ims?
Who said their prayers and sang their hymms?
In Chechnya they were still there,
madly pulling at their hair.
"We've got a deal, we think it's handsome..."
And soon Russkies were taken ransom.
The war it waged, both day and night,
and radicals fought back with fright.

Boom! went the theater!
Bang! went the raid!
A tug of war...
For a decade.

And in the hazy, hanging smoke,
your wizened beard you sit and stroke.
Pondering aloud, "What has it brought
but hate
and death
and fear
and fraught?"

"Who will lose?" you wonder.
You ask, "Who will win?"
But ask any old Chechny-an....

He'll tell you, sadly,
thinking back,
to Nick and Joe,
and that whole pack:

"It doesn't matter, in the end,
who sits inside the Krem-a-lin.
Whether Lenin...
or Gorby...
or Boris..
or Putin...

Expect the same sometime again."

The Story So Far, or Sorry I Skipped The Sixties, Hippies

A re-print of a response to a thread on Fark.com that inquired, "What's the long story on why Fark does not accept links from Ananova (an internet-based news site)?"  I gave the questioner what he wanted.

***

First, before all, there was the Big Bang.  Stars formed thereafter, and then, planetary systems.  One such planet, out of eleventy billion billion was a small, insignificant planet that would, billions of years later, be called Earth.

The Earth cooled.  Molten masses cooled to form land masses, and soon, gases formed by the cooling molten masses formed base elements such as oxygen and hydrogen.  Water followed.

In time the Earth, lifeless, formed oceans that rose over the cooled masses. Billions of years later, these would form continents.  But for now they were, it is believed, a single land mass.

Through a complex interconnectedness of chemistry and physics, molecules formed.  Thereafter came amino acids.

In time, when the planet had cooled sufficiently, amino acids began merging to form the building blocks of that which we call life.

Single celled creatures arose. In eleventy million years they formed multi-celled organisms.  An abundance of life, mostly plant in nature, began spreading across the planet.  Soon, evolutionary forces created animal life.

Simple animals at first.  Little worms and plankton and such and such. Then came fish and other aquatic creatures.  In time, an unheralded creature whose unknown name will never be known, crawled from the water and settled in  muck. Over time, similar creatures evolved. Soon--over millions of years--other creatures dotted the landscape.  Dogs and pigs and such and such.  Over there, in the fields, some dinosaurs were gallivanting around.  Then a Big Rock came and killed all of them.  Back to square three.

Then, life evolved again, and smaller creatures that had survived the desolation brought by the Big Rock changed and grew.  Then came more dogs and pigs and such and such.

Then came the monkeys.  Soon, monkeys evolved into larger creatures that walked erect.  Their brain capacity grew.  In time, and with help from the Monolith, they learned to fashion bones into tools.  This still occurs in parts of Alabama.

Monkeys evolved into men, and men--who were largely nomadic in nature--began to gather together.  In time, an unheralded monkey-man, whose unknown name is lost to the sands of time, learned to generate fire from the rubbing of sticks.

Monkey-man became the species of man.  Men formed communities, gathering for hunt and shelter.  Over tens of thousands of years they formed societies, complete with unwritten rules derived by genetic necessity.

In the era of unrecorded history, man achieved miracles.  He invented oral traditions and from those oral traditions came lessons that became law.  Soon, man began writing down what he had learned, and history was born.

The earliest civilizations established the remarkable.  In the thick jungles of South America, natives built ziggurats and stone shelters.  They would later serve as the rebel base in "Star Wars."

In North Africa, a people known as Egyptians built mighty pyramids.  They were built by Jews, who served as slaves, and whose troubles were really only just beginning.

In greater Africa, tribes formed that would spend thousands of years battling over scarce resources.  Then they would battle the Belgians and the British and the French for their freedom.  When they got it, they would go right back to battling each other until they were largely laid low by a tiny virus.

In Asia, a mighty people would arise as great warriors and poets.  They eventually would make houses out of paper and offer three-item express carry-out for $4.95 (fried rice extra).

In Europe--where we shall dwell--a bland people arose.   Nomadic at first, they created villages and hamlets towns and then cities.   They brought great civilizations, and painful dancing moves.

First, there were the Greeks.  They invented a flawed concept, democracy, and a perfect one, butt sex.

Then there were the Gauls.  They invented and, over centuries, perfected, the art of surrender.  They consoled their losses in battle by grooming small, hated creatures called poodles.

Then there were the Romans.  They invented roads and aqueducts and arched constructs and a republican form of government and sanitation and atriums and perfected irrigation.  In time, their empire, savaged by invading hordes, would be reduced to inhabiting a land that looked like a boot.  After that, their achievements were reduced to one, Sophia Lauren.

Then there were the Celts.  They invented mead and, some historians claim, saved civilization through the preservation of history and the reproduction of scrolls and tablets into the form we now call a book.  They indeed saved civilization, but not for that reason.  They saved civilization because they invented mead.

Over time a great plague came, then a time of great darkness and desperation. Serf's up.  Then a renaissance, bringing velvet and oil-based art showing naked men and women and statues without arms but with perfectly crafted breasts and penises.  And life was good.

So good, in fact, that soon the Europeans wanted to see if there were breasts and penises in other lands.  They sent a man named Christopher Columbus to find India.  He went the wrong way and found North America.  The people who lived there were nevertheless called Indians  by the settlers, an early example of the magnanimity the people who would eventually settle there showed to different cultures.

After Columbus came the colonists.  The Spanish sent gold seekers, who would settle in South America and in greater Los Angeles.  The Gauls, having changed their name to the French under new management, settled in Canada to catch beaver and play on the ice.  The English got the rest.

The English colonists--on who we will dwell--formed "states" based on religious and political principles.  Georgia was founded as a Catholic state, but would later change its religion to NASCAR.  Massachusetts formed based on religious freedom and then, showing a level of rationality and practicality that would later hallmark the Big Dig, burned little girls as witches.  New York was founded as New Amsterdam, but then beat up Holland and called its mother names, and then became New York.

Over time these colonists became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless foreign government, so they threw off the yoke of their oppression and fought two wars of independence, becoming the United States. Although it was the United States and only a part of the Americas, the citizens called themselves Americans, another example of the magnanimity the people there showed to different cultures.

Over one-hundred and fifty years later, the Americans became restless.  They didn't like being told what to do by a large, faceless domestic government.  But this time they invented television.

The invention of television spawned the invention of enormous machines called computers.  In time these were refined by a tribe called the Japanese, and then perfected by a tribe called Nerds.

These computers promised an age of advancement and enlightenment.  They promised answers to difficult scientific questions, and a revolutionary advancement in business.  They served as backdrop in a show called "Star Trek."

Soon a man named Al Gore was born, became an important governor of the people, and, bringing to bear all of his expertise as the son of a politician and a Tennessean, invented the internet.

The internet promised a greater age of information and a quantum leap forward in human knowledge.  What it delivered was a greater age of pornography and pop-up ads.

And then one glorious January morning a man named Drew Curtis--the equal of a Columbus, in many respects--used the internet to disseminate great knowledge to those throughout the land: he presented a large nut-sacked squirrel.  Like a golden calf, it drew others.  Soon, people from all over the land began submitting news items and funny stories.  Flame-wars ensued.  And sometimes, peace.  It was a site called Fark.

Many of the stories posted to Fark were soon misappropriated by a lesser news source called Ananova, which was created by fugitive Nazis and other ne'er-do-wells.  Drew Curtis inserted spikes and false stories into his site to detect misappropriation by Ananova.  And they were detected.  So Drew attempted satisfaction from the Ananova proprietors.  But none came.

Exercising sage wisdom and cold revenge, Drew cut Ananova off from Fark, and left it to wither and die in a sea of its own urine.

And that, my son, is the long story.