Everything else that's interesting: January 2008 Archives

Dan Harris at the China Law Blog has a post today wondering whether in some countries, like China or Papua New Guinea, you are treated better if you are a foreigner, citing certain examples that would suggest the answer is yes.

Reading it reminded me of the first time I went to Russia, back when the Russian ruble was still a completely soft, overly-regulated currency few non-Russians would ever want to trade in, which I posted about in the comments:

[The situation described] reminds me of Russia in the early 1990s when there were "hard currency shops." These shops were always brightly-lit and fully stocked with European-imported goods - a far cry from the regular, grim Russian shops whose own stock reflected, in both paucity and quality, the not-yet-loosened Communist economy.

My host family once took me to one of the hard currency shops (in St. Petersberg, at the Hotel Pribaltiskya, I believe), and the only reason they could get in was because they were with me, and I had a US Passport. Otherwise they were banished like all the other dollar-less Russians to the regular grocery store, which in April 1992 I remember was stocked with piles of cucumbers, piles of potatoes, some scary looking meat patties, tins of apricot juice, and that's about it...

Interestingly, though, by that time Pepsi had started being sold in Russia. In the regular grocery store you could spend 12 rubles for a glass bottle with "Pepsi" printed on the label in Cyrillic. At that time 12 rubles = 12 cents (although still a fortune to a local). Whereas the hard currency shops sold European-imported cans of Pepsi for a dollar, which even in 1992 was expensive by anyone's standards. I bought one just for the hell of it anyway, so we could take a "Pepsi Challenge" against the one from the regular store. If memory serves, the Russian one was actually better...

As it turns out a friend of mine is at this very moment traveling in Russia. Guess I should have asked her to report back on how the soda tastes...

Last year on this date over at the Volokh Conspiracy people were discussing where they were when they found out the Challenger space shuttle had exploded twenty years earlier. Back in 1986 people were saying it would be like the Kennedy assassination, the kind of seminal event that would forever become etched into the memories of everyone old enough to have been aware of it.

Suffice it to say, on retrospect I think such predictions may have overstated its impact. September 11th has clearly become a much more encompassing historical watershed. But for those of us who were schoolchildren in 1986 the Challenger disaster did leave an indelible mark.

There's a Fry and Laurie sketch that makes fun of people who write in letters to English newspapers. Actually, there's more than one, as it's apparently deep fodder to mine for humor. I can see why, given this letter to the editor regarding Stephen Fry's own Cinderella pantomime, which employed the following withering condemnation of it:

It was described as full of filth and smut in reviews I read in five different national newspapers.

Yes, it did get some poor reviews for being a bit on the risqué side, but nowhere do I remember reading that it was "full of filth and smut," nor do I remember seeing any of said filth and smut at the performance I attended. Nor would have this "Mr. Callaghan of Seaforth," had he bothered to actually see the play he so freely and undeservedly criticized...