What do all these guys have in common ...?

1. Actor Mikhail Ulyanov



2. Politician Gorby



3. Actor Charles Bronson (aka "shiba puppy", descendant of Lipka Tatars)

It's the special kind of eyefolds that you can find every now and then, not least in Russia. It's the kind of eyelids that make a fold over the outer corners of the eyes. They become more prominent with age.
Ulyanov is really the best example - Gorby's are a bit weak, and shiba puppy's are a bit extreme.

Those wacky anthropologists might have a name for it, but I haven't been able to find out what it could be.

Here are some younger guys who have potential for developing this type of eyefolds:



"100" by neck-photo



"Расплескалась синева, расплескалась, по тельняшкам разлилась, по беретам..." by masters



"Перемена" by Aццкий Cотона

(Okay, and maybe I should admit that the potential eyefold development isn't the *only* reason for why I included the last guy ... All he needs is some decent manual labour so he'll get nice hands.)

Pan-Asian single of the week: Alish6ka

Aaaargh! How can this man be so hot?!! Is he human at all??!!! Or is it just this one picture that really brings out his "Schokoladenseite"?

"Alish6ka" is a 22-year-old stomatologist from Baku, Azerbaijan. His horoscope sign is scorpio.
Absoluteagency.com has these weird questions about race, and this is how he answers them:
¤ My race: "Other"
¤ About race: "kak to ne interesovalsa" (somehow that's never interested me)
And those answers make him even hotter. If that's at all possible ...

He resembles the supernaturally beautiful facial composites in the photographer Mike Mike's project The Face of Tomorrow (thanks for the link, Ainur!). Which might not be so strange, as the Caucasus since the oldest of times has been a virtual crossroad of different peoples.

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Update, June 17th:

Heh, I couldn't resist the temptation of investigating a bit into this "Alish6ka". And, well, my suspicion turned out to be right.

He has a profile on another Russian-language dating site, as well, and there, he has a different photo. In which he isn't as beautiful. :'o(
(But maybe, just maybe, it could be like this: He got tired of all the fangirls mailbombing him, and put all his efforts into attempting the near impossible - making a photo of himself where he looks just 'average'. That way, he might be able to find a woman who will like him for his personality, not just his smokin' hot looks ...)

By the way, there is something irresistibly smexy about russified Arabic names. In this guy's case, his name is probably Ali, but since he's Russian-speaking, his pet name is "Alishka" (the '6' he's included is often informally used as a substitute for the kyrillic letter 'ь', that indicates 'soft' consonants). Then, there is the common practise of adding the Russian suffix "-ov"/"-ova" to surnames, for example "Jafarov", as in the name of an old Azeri acquaintance of mine.

Russian soldiers

Thousands of nice and decent young men are forced to join the Russian army, where the possibility of being dispatched to Chechnya and being wounded or killed in the war is only one of many dangers.
Anyone who can avoids being conscripted (I have several Russian friends, and none of them has been in the army), and those who can't avoid it are typically from poor families in the provinces.

Human Rights Watch has written several reports on the alarming state of the Russian army:

¤ Conscription through detention in Russia's armed forces
¤ To Serve without Health? - Inadequate Nutrition and Health Care in the Russian Armed Forces
¤ The Wrongs of Passage: Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of New Recruits in the Russian Armed Forces

I also recommend the books of Arkady Babchenko and Anna Politkovskaya.

The first photo in this entry is from a news story I read a very long time ago, and I unfortunately don't remember the source. Those guys are guarding something in one of the big cities, and they don't have it that bad, I guess. All other pictures are from aeronautics.ru, gathered from various news reports on Chechnya.




The soldier's boots are worn with портянки, foot wraps, instead of socks. Until you learn the tricky art of wrapping them properly, you will have problems with your feet, they say. In Ukraine and Belarus they've decided to move on to socks and lace-up boots. But "advocates of the tradition say cheap and virtually indestructible boots and foot bindings suit the cold Russian climate better than the refined footwear of Western armies".



I think the next guy is from special forces. The dog seems to be carrying water bottles around his neck.









The following photo used to be pretty popular whenever an article about the "bestiality" of the Russian army had to be illustrated. A Russian soldier with clearly Asiatic features and a bad-ass sniper rifle (SVD, if I'm not mistaken) in front of city ruins was apparently a perfect image of the "brutal", "Asiatic" aspect of the idea of Russia.





"Never trust a man who wears his hat pulled down over his forehead", an old grandpa advised young Anatoliy Kuznetsov, who would later write Babiy Yar, a documentary novel on the German occupation of Kiev and the massacres on the Jewish population. Hitler was thus pretty untrustworthy, young Kuznetsov argued. But these two guys seem more reliable.

Another flashback of potential Pan-Asian dating that I missed out on ...

I might have a date tonight with a guy from Georgia, and that probably gave me this sudden flashback from a party at Moscow State University, and how I managed to miss out on some potential romance (once again) ...

I was going to leave the party, because I was tired and wanted to get back to my room before they locked up the elevators (at midnight, I think). As I was saying bye to one of my classmates, two young guys approached us and stroke up a conversation.

One of them was broad, outgoing and athletic, not my type at all, while the other one was lean and a bit more quiet and serious (i.e. drop-dead hot stuff!). They were both from Georgia, they said. Although my classmate had enormous boobs, the hot guy was the one who had his sights on me. (Or maybe the other guy was just more dominant, and wanted to hog off those boobs, I don't know ...)

But still, I was so focused on getting back to my room that I didn't realise the great prospects of this encounter, and just left after a short while.

I never saw him again. :o(