At Home In The Wasteland Travel Blog

A small sampling of GOTV, Russian style: Ivan, power station worker, Ufa Every worker is being forced to take an absentee ballot and instructed to vote at one particular polling station with the rest of the workforce, all together for United Russia. It will be very easy for them to count who has turned up, [...]

In a televised address, Putin urged voters to back United Russia, warning that the liberal opposition would return Russia to the “humiliation, dependency and disintegration” it suffered after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian Parliamentary “elections” are being held this Sunday, with Putin’s United Russia Party set to steamroll the opposition. His valor [...]

The $600 shirts, anyways. Still, I feel so trendy now. Empowered by an oil boom that pushed the country’s trade surplus past $94 billion this year, Russia has been flexing its muscles abroad. At home, meanwhile, young and trendy Muscovites are in the throes of nostalgia for the staples of Soviet childhoods, relics of a [...]

Tsarevich Aleksei and a Princess whose identity has yet to be determined. Discovered by a group of dedicated amateurs who spent their weekends scouring the forests outside Yekaterinburg: Eleven people were said to have been killed that day in July 1918 on Lenin’s orders. Just nine sets of remains were dug up here and then [...]

I was in California for the Thanksgiving holiday but am now back in hell, more commonly known as Washington, D.C., our lovely nation’s capital. This is only the third time in the past seven years that I’ve actually spent Thanksgiving with my family, so it was a welcome change. In the past, it’s been too [...]

Instead of erecting statues of national heroes, several Balkan towns are opting for monuments to Rocky, Tarzan, Bruce Lee and a former Playboy model. The U.S. Census released their list of most common surnames in the nation. Fincher is not in the top 1000, which I am going to use when justifying my reason to [...]

Bay Area surfers were so frustrated with the government’s response following the Cosco Busan spill that they took it upon themselves to organize volunteers and clean up their favorite breaks: Aghast at what he saw as the government-run cleanup’s slow pace, Rosas teamed up with two Silicon Valley friends, Byron Cleary and Kathleen Egan. All [...]

“You know, these resources in the Caspian were discovered by Russians, and Russian companies will be the ones developing them.” Yuri Shafranik, Russian Minister of Energy to Bill White, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy. Mid 1990s. I recently finished Steve LeVine’s The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian [...]

And they occasionally comment, for instance, on the last post: Lindsay if you wanted to be a slacker in San Diego couldn’t you have gone to San Diego State instead of those high price schools. I think it’s a little late to think of you as a slacker, Miss LSE. Mom & Dad FINE! I’ll [...]

I’m sick of Washington. The slacker part of me just wants to move back to California and do whatever. Live in San Diego, surf, work for whoever. The ambitious part of me thinks that maybe I should move to Houston and work for a gigantic corporation while pursuing one of those part-time MBAs. Rice University, [...]