So I’m kindof irritated with Russia, on the whole.

I’m not going to get into that whole business with Putin suspending little bits and pieces of the constitution here and there; though that is markedly uncool. No, I’m talking about more recent developments. We’ll first begin with the scary one, that being that Russia may have fired a bomb at Georgia.

The idea that Georgia would be so crass as to make this up is rather ridiculous. What the hell was Russia thinking? My biggest question is why the bomb didn’t go off. Was it a mistake, or is Russia just sending a warning? I don’t really know. It seems though that the Russian Federation woke up one day and decided that they needed more land. And if they can’t take it from Georgia, they’ll take it from the ocean, so to speak.

Russia is hell-bent on extending their claim of the continental shelf of Eurasia. At first glance, this seems silly: What in the world would they do with all that extra ocean? Answer: Drill of Oil. (It seems to be the answer to a lot of recent, silly questions)

Before the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf would approve their claim for this extra bit of ocean belonging to Russia, however, they demanded more research. So Russia set off in a sub named MIR (like the spaceship, but traveling in a James-Cameron Abyss rather than a Stanley-Kubrick one) to take a look at what the ocean floor looks like up at the north pole. While they were there, they dropped a flag.

The audacity of that!
I wasn’t alone in my principals:

“This isn’t the 15th century. You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory’,” Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay told CTV television.

Or can you?
I can’t decide whether I’m really, really irritated with Russia have the audacity to drop that flag, interpreting it as them already feeling that the land is theirs, and granting them an explorer’s right to leave their mark where they’ve gone for the first time.

[Secretly, I hope the American government stages a rogue operation to capture the un-rustable, titanium flag the Russians left, and replace it with a small castle made of caviar cans, populated by those stacking-dolls. We’ll melt the flag down and cast it into a missile, and give it to the Georgians, for their trouble.]