During the Sochi Olympics, a lot of controversy surrounded the event. Here is a selection of some less serious situations that athletes and journalists faced! Enjoy

1) Ridiculous Signage:

Do: Sit and use the toilet.

Don't: Stand and use the toilet. 

Don't: Vomit into the toilet. 

Don’t: Do an upper decker into the toilet’s tank.

Don't: Go fishing in the toilet. 

Don't: Um…do your business on the floor while holding a bottle?

2) Malfunctioning Olympic Rings

                                     

3) Unfinished Hotels... And still unfinished today...

4) The "Twin Toilet" phenomenon..??

5) Unsettling and creepy mascots

Ivan Pavlov

This is a tricky blog post because everyone has some knowledge of Ivan Pavlov. In the spirit of Bear in a Hat, though, I wanted to restate that he was Russian and successful. He was the psychologist/physiologist who worked with animals to discover "conditioning". Animals would be presented with a stimulus that they naturally responded to and a stimulus that did nothing for them. Eventually the stimulus that originally did nothing produced the same response as the stimulus with the automatic natural response. Pavlov also did some early work with the digestive system. He won a Nobel Prize in Physiology and is a figurehead for modern psychology. Also, he has a killer moustache.

Elections in Russia: Welcome to the Circus

It's election season in Russia! Duma elections are in December and the presidential election is to be held the following March 2012. This Economist article paints the current political situation pretty clearly. United Russia, the party of Vladimir Putin is expected to garner at least 60% of the parliamentary vote. The prime minister has yet to announce whether he we will run for president, but whether he does or doesn't, he is assured some influential role within the Kremlin.

Another name worth learning is Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin's men behind the scenes and "the Kremlin's chief ideologist". He was called out by Mikahil Prokhorov, the head of the Right Cause - a formerly tolerated opposition party allowed to exist to support the perception of democracy, who called him a puppeteer who privatized the political system. Surkov seems to be the Karl Rove of the Putin Era.

The election is expected to be another show designed to don the veil of democracy in Russia. There still seems to be some concern from United Russia concerning the viability of its stronghold on Russian politics - it still seems threatened by smaller liberal. However, barring unforeseen racial upheaval, (particularly from the Chechnya area), the veil remains firmly on.