Saturday, December 19, 2015

Things to do in Siberia


This is a photo of five cheese factory workers in Omsk, which is a city in Siberia.  The men got drunk, took off all their clothes, and had a fun naked time partying in a vat of milk.  Said milk to be used to make, uh, yes... cheese... for other people to eat.  The men said they were bored.  Read on to see what else bored Siberians get up to.

Thee Optimist is interested in all kinds of weirdness.  The way I see it, there ain't no difference between a flying saucer and a time machine.

Recently, scientists have been suggesting that archaic humans (non-homo sapiens, such as neanderthals, cro-magnons and the like), may have lived on Earth far longer than originally thought.  Maybe right up until the Ice Age, 10,000 or so years ago.

A tiny handful of scientists will even allow themselves to suggest that small groups of archaic humans could potentially be alive on Earth in the present day.  

Where would such people live?  The consensus seems to be that if they were alive, they would live in a vast, harsh, largely unpopulated and forbidding place, namely Siberia. 

Yes, people snowboard in Siberia.


Welcome to the End of the World   

Picture the vast emptiness of Alaska.  Now picture it if it were eight times its own size.  Now picture it if there were no Pacific Ocean winds to mitigate its frigid temperatures.

Now you're getting there.  Siberia is big, and cold.  The winter is long.  The summer is short.  Most of Siberia is populated at the same rate as the Australian Outback, which is to say underpopulated.

About 40 million people live in Siberia, mostly ethic Russians and Russified Ukrainians.  But the vast majority of them live concentrated in a handful of large cities.  People travel from city to city using the famous Trans-Siberian Railroad.



Beautiful.  Trans-Siberian Railroad in summer.

What else do people do?  People swim, of course, and not just in vats of milk.  Here's a couple of guys going for a little swim in the city of Krasnoyarsk.




What else?   Well, here's a video of a young guy in the city of Barnaul, setting himself on fire, and doing a swan dive off a five story building into a pile of snow.
   




Pretty good, right?  Below is the same guy, setting himself on fire and doing a swan dive off a NINE STORY building, this time with a GoPro on his head.  

He looks a lot less happy about nine stories than he did about five stories.  Notice he is described as an "amateur stuntman."  Which means he did this for free.  

Troubled kid.  Needs help.






But we came to Siberia to find archaic humans, didn't we?  And by that, what do we mean exactly?  I suppose you'd say that if there were archaic humans alive right now, they would appear to us like Yeti or Bigfoot.

Anything like that happening in Siberia?

Since you asked, here is some Yeti footage shot by a 12-year-old boy in the Kemerovo coal mining region of Siberia.  He is using an archaic cellphone.  

Even if this is a hoax, or maybe some kind of mistake, I'd suggest the kid might have a future in film making (instead of in coal mining, or cheese making, say).  This sequence has a nice, creepy, Blair Witch Project feel to it.

Be sure to cover your tender ears.  The kids are saying curse words in Russian.







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1 comment:

  1. Happy new year. Let's hope you had interesting articles just about new year transitions

    ReplyDelete