The Red Scare

 

The Phono-Sonic Fireplace/Liquor Cabinet Stereo

 

It looked like a gorgeous (artificial) fireplace.....

.....that turns into an awesome stereo/liquor cabinet.

The Phono-Sonic Liquor Cabinet/Stereo w/ artificial fireplace is one of the coolest designs ever for a console stereo. Surprisingly, it was also made and imported from communist East Germany for the American market. Like the Soundesign Trendsetter, they are extremely rare in good condition.

They originally came with 3 speed turntables (33/45/78 RPM) AM/FM Stereo receivers and 8-Track tape decks, but cassette decks were added in the late '70s. The speakers were enclosed behind the red velvet and latticework on either side of the fireplace. The cheese points are off the scale with this one!

 

....And meanwhile in Sochi....

Sochi is running out of pillows http://www.vocativ.com/02-2014/sochi-running-pillows/

The honey is so fresh, it's still got bees in it!

People like me will never get a break in Sochi.

Yuk!

Every hotel room has these. I think the top left gizmo is a closed circuit radio. In Stalin days, the Soviet Union made them mandatory in every apartment and hotel room and ran a wired feed of the main government radio channel. Over the air radio wasn't made legal in the Soviet Union again until after World War II. North Korea still uses a similar system and as I've heard it from my Russian friends, you could turn them down to a low volume, but you could NEVER completely turn them off.

This is not beer. Or tea. Or apple juice. Or that either. It is water.

Add caption

This picture of Putin is the closest you'll ever get to a TV in some hotel rooms.

Watch for open manholes.

This is not bottled water.

The Canadian team housing: Feels like home?

Doors that lock from the outside.

Helpful....

1980s Soviet Aerobics Record

You Americans and your '80s Jane Fonda workouts.......

......THIS is a workout. Soviet Style!

Click here to play Side 1

"Rasputin" Boney M (1978)

An irresistible disco classic........

The Firedrake

.......and meanwhile, somewhere in rural China.......

Someone turns on a shortwave radio and looks for the BBC, Radio Free Asia or the Voice of America. But instead hears this

Meet the Firedrake.

The Firedrake is a long and complex (you could call it intentionally annoying and you wouldn't be too far off the mark) piece of music used by the Chinese government to jam foreign radio broadcasts critical of Beijing.

What makes Firedrake so effective is how thoroughly the cacophony of noise in the piece covers up the foreign broadcasts. It renders everything unintelligible. Even if the foreign broadcaster were to turn up their transmitter wattage to override the Firedrake jamming, it's still no match for the Firedrake's wall of noise.

Not that turning up their transmitter power would have worked anyway. The Firedrake jamming signals are so powerful, they can not only be heard in every nook and cranny in China, but heard CLEARLY around the world, using transmitter powers of several million watts each.

    

You might be wondering why the Chinese would even deal with shortwave radio in the internet age. But again, there's really TWO Chinas. And two Great Firewalls. There's the big modern, upscale and urban China in massive cities like Shanghai and Beijing. They have the internet and cell phones. And the Great Digital Firewall. But the vast majority of people live in the still very rural areas and are considered "peasant class". They have old radios. And Firedrake. They also are fairly uneducated and provide the vast majority of the farming labour. If you were running a totalitarian government, you don't want to have them hear anything that would make them QUESTION the life you have prescribed for them now would you?  

And that's the purpose of Firedrake. It keeps the airwaves status quo. And the Chinese people (and everyone else around the world) safe from any bad thoughts about Beijing....... 

YuMex: Yugoslavian Mexican Music of The '50s

"In 1948, the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito (May 7, 1892 - May 4, 1980) broke up with the Soviet leader Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Dec. 21, 1879 - March 5, 1953). Yugoslavia was suddenly between the two blocks (in the making). Tito's regime imprisoned many Soviet sympathizers (real or just suspected). Russian films were not so popular anymore.

Yugoslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. 

They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms. How could an average moviegoer know that it was not the Yugoslav revolution?

Emilio Fernández's Un Día de vida (1950) became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made although in truth it is probably unknown in every other country, even Mexican web pages don't mention it much.

The Mexican influence spread to all of the popular culture: fake Mexican bands were forming and their records still can be found at the flea markets nowadays."

- http://www.mihamazzini.com/ovitki/default.html

 

Soviet Blank Cassette, 1980s