Yet Another Gargantuan Effort to Move His Drinks Cabinet Six Inches Close to Berlin

It has been established that when I get bored, I start trawling for random information.  This being one of the primary reasons that I a) never get any work accomplished, and b) can point out errors in Trivial Pursuit cards.

Today's trip down Randomness Lane started with a viewing of Batoru rowaiaru (aka Battle Royale) with Dmitrii, that turned into a general discussion on films that led to a discussion of Vin Diesel films specifically, followed by Starship Troopers, the depiction of soliders and commanders in war movies (with notable references being the Kubrick classics Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket), government corruption, Soviet television programs, and, finally, whether or not a Soviet leader was ever executed.

Rumoured assassinations, such as Lenin and Stalin, didn't count, and any of those who came to power during the 80s were obvious non-contenders.  So that left a total of three leaders (Malenkov, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev) to check, although a case could be made to include Bulganin on the list. (Between Malenkov and Khrushchev, for those who care.)  None of the names checked out, but given the nature of Soviet politics, which saw an unbelievable number of high-level political positions in existence, with the importance of the position varying based on who occupied it, it's possible that someone high up actually was executed at some point.  To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, the following are a list of positions which, at some point in history, were the title of the leader of the USSR: Chairman of the Soviet Council of People's Commissars, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary (of the blah blah blah), President of the Surpeme Soviet, Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and President of the Soviet Union.

Anyways, to get back on topic: this search for information on Soviet leaders eventually led to a Wikipedia entry on Vyacheslav Molotov, a Soviet politician and diplomat who is now better known for the Finnish army's decision to name their improvised anti-tank weapon after him.  This entry contained a reference to an ancedote told by Stalin to Churchhill concerning a meeting between Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop.  This, in turn, led me on to the Nuremberg Trials, the Maginot Line (and its German counterpart: the Siegfried Line, or Westwall), and the Schlieffen plan, before finally arriving at trench warfare.

Now, trench warfare, and World War I specifically, has always been a fascination of mine -- there's just something about the sheer futility of it that almost makes it absurd — so I spent most of my trench warfare reading poking around in that era.  Eventually I ended up in the Wikipedia section on chemical warfare during the First World War, where along with bits of trivia (first occurance of gas warfare: January 1, 1915, at the Battle of Bolimow, on the Eastern Front) I discovered the number one way I don't want to die.

To quote from the entry on phosgene: "The gas combines with water in the tissues of the respiratory tract to form carbon dioxide and hydrochloric acid. The acid then dissolves the membranes in the lungs. Fluid fills the lungs, and death results from a combination of blood loss, shock, and respiratory failure."  (This description also applies to diphosgene, which rapidly breaks down into phosgene and chloroform, but had the added effect of destroying the filters used in period gas masks.)

Like its origins in a discussion of no fixed topic, this tale was pointless and meandering, but now you know how my mind works, and how its for me to walk from the kitchen to my bedroom and get so completely side tracked that I have no idea what I was thinking about when I started.

Two points for the title, but only if you actually managed to read the above entry.  Otherwise, it's one point.