Down the snout goes the wine – a nice drop of Kagor to sweeten the taste of being blasted into space. Let’s hope it relaxes the poor piglet; he’s got a long journey ahead of him, poor porker. But wait up a second. Why are the history books conspicuously silent about this cosmonaut creature? Are we being sold some kind of pig in a poke here?

As Pinkie is piled into his capsule and carried over to the launch pad, we wonder whether those men’s uniforms aren’t a little too WWII-looking – bearing in mind that the Soviets aren’t supposed to have shot their first mammal into space until 1951. Swine flew? Pigs might fly. These are stills from the award-winning 2005 Russian mockumentary, First on the Moon.

Directed by debutant filmmaker Aleksey Fedorchenko, First on the Moon tells the tale of an unknown Soviet space program that launched a successful moon landing in 1938. In Fedorchenko’s world, the first space rocket was built by the USSR even before the Second World War, decades before the Soviet Moonshot written in history. Mother Russia, we salute you!

In this alternate reality, a Soviet cosmonaut beats his US counterparts to the finishing post – the rest of the world just doesn’t know about it yet. And just as in our more familiar reality, scientific experiments using animals paved the way for human exploration endeavour by testing the survivability of spaceflight. Seems this pilot piglet was part of the rocket trials.

When parts of First on the Moon’s plot leaked out before its release, several Russian newspapers treated it as a documentary about a real 1938 event, referring to it as the Santiago Meteorite. The confusion may have arisen because the beginning of the film is set in Chile, where the manned Soviet spacecraft apparently landed following its return from the moon.

Is it surprising that the distinction between fact and fantasy should have appeared as muddy as a pigsty to the Russian press? Depends on how you look at it. In the British and American film traditions, reality and fiction have long been tough to tell apart: films and dramas often employ documentary conventions; documentaries can contain dramatic and fictional elements.

In the West, satire is famous for spoofing the documentary, but in Russia – certainly unacquainted with Spinal Tap if not with Borat and Brüno – the mockumentary has only just landed or emerged as a genre. Fedorchenko himself was unsure of where to place his film: “For me this is either historical drama or documentary fantasy,” the director has said.

Playful filmmaking like Fedorchenko’s was lost in Cold War Russia, but the director of First on the Moon also has a serious point to make: “Our film is about how the Soviet state machinery manufactured major products – the best people. Fine, strong and clever heroes, then rendered unnecessary to the native land – some have been destroyed, others lost in obscurity, yet others still broken by fear.”

This most piggish of guinea pigs would be one of those heroes. Pigs in Space? Watch First on the Moon. If these stills were enough to fool people online, what elevating effect might the movie have on you?

Images via Taktak

Sources: 1, 2

At night, on the 30^th of April, 1961, the surgeon was being helped by a mechanical engineer and a meteorologist who were giving him the medical instruments and holding a small mirror at his belly. Lying half bent on the left side, the doctor made a local anesthesia with novocaine solution and made a 12cm incision in the right iliac region with a scalpel. Either watching in the mirror or by touch he removed an inflamed appendix and injected antibiotic in the abdominal cavity. In 30 or 40 minutes from the beginning of the operation there developed a faint and giddiness and the surgeon had to make pauses for some rest. Nevertheless, by midnight the operation lasting 1 hour and 45 minutes was over. In five days the temperature normalized, in two days more – the stitches were taken out.

In the St. Petersburg Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic there is an exposure of surgical instruments that Leonid Rogozov applied for this uneasy operation.

An astronaut-pilot of the USSR, a Hero of the Soviet Union, German Titov wrote in his book “My blue planet”:

“In our country an exploit is life itself.

… We admire the Soviet doctor Boris Pastukhov, who injected himself with plague vaccine before applying it on the sick people: we envy the courage of the Soviet doctor Leonid Rogozov who made an appendix removal operation on himself in the hard conditions of the Antarctic expedition.

Sometimes I reflect upon this in solitude and ask myself if I could do the same and only one answer comes to my mind: “I would do my best…”

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Now THAT’s how to get people to carpool. (Photo)

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“Let me tell you something, brother, before you spend a dime… that money is mine too!” (Photo)

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This guy turned his amputated hand into a finger with a giant tattoo of a fingernail! (By artist Brad Bako). (Link 1 | Link 2)

Hopefully, now no one will ask what happened to him. (Link)

Was it the *F* word or the *L* word? If it was the second option, take it as a warning against trusting in luck. (Link)

What is available to cut below the line? Amputee Orlando Wallace shows off his tattoo – and the dark side of his sense of humor. (Link)

Probably the tasteless tattoo ever. (Link)

“love, pig” (Link)

After mastectomies due to breast cancer, some women opt not to undergo reconstruction surgery. Instead of hiding their experience, a few decide to celebrate it by tattooing a beautiful and/or significant design on their chests. This one is bytattoo artist Pat Fish . (Link)

Staff Sgt. Matt Lammers had already won a Purple Heart following a duty-related injury. Now he has another — after losing three limbs in Iraq. He shows off thetattoo that survived, saying, “This is what they didn’t get.” (Link)

A motorcycle accident in 1997 left Alan Macias with a non-functional arm which he eventually had amputated. He now has an eye-catching “cut along dotted line”tattoo on his stump. (Link)

Nice message. (Link)

A couple in the Colorado Mountain Estates subdivision near Florissant thought someone was trying to steal their car early Wednesday.

When deputies from the Teller County Sheriff’s Office responded at about 2:30 a.m., they discovered a young bear in the car.

One of the two deputies took some pictures of the bear, opened the car door, and the bear was gone in a flash.

Image credits:

When A Man and A Woman BBQ Naked

The Meat Baby