OK, if Yevgeny Prigozhin really took a post-mutiny meeting with Putin, then my understanding of the recent events in Russia has hit a new low.

Russian President Vladimir Putin met mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin after the failed Wagner group mutiny last month, the Kremlin says.

Prigozhin, who heads the mercenary group, was among 35 Wagner commanders invited to the meeting in Moscow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov added.

This is extremely difficult to believe.

I’ve been fascinated by Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s brief-and-aborted uprising in Russia, because it is nearly incomprehensible to me. I keep trying to map it onto American politics, but it just does not line up well at all. What if the CEO of Blackwater (now called “Constellis”, but come on, “Blackwater” is perfect in its ominousness) announced he and his mercenaries were marching on Washington, D.C. with the intention of removing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin? I think they’d be stopped and/or obliterated. It would most certainly not end with exile in Canada due to the interceding of Justin Trudeau.

After a decent amount of reading, the best I can figure is Prigozhin believed he had enough support to, at a minimum, take out the military leaders who were planning to disband and subsume the Wagner Group. He thus headed for Moscow, but when that support failed to materialize, he reversed course and took the least bad option available to him. That seems to make a certain kind of sense, even if it sounds foolhardy.

But if all that is true, why on earth did he come back to Russia to collect confiscated items?

“It’s not the end of Prigozhin,” the businessman said, speaking Wednesday on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They returned all his money to him. More than this, today they even gave back to him his honorary pistol, the Glock, and another weapon. He came to take it himself.”

That is a perplexing move, to say the least, not to mention seemingly extremely dangerous!

If both Prigozhin and Putin are alive and well when we ring in 2024, I will be very surprised but also exactly as confused by the whole thing as I am at present.

Someday, we might be able to use suffocating humidity to cool (and dehumidify) our homes.

It’s Independence Day here in America, but also in one small area of Denmark, where the locals celebrate July 4th too. Learn all about Rebildfesten.

Update (July 4, 2023): As friend-of-the-site Adam E. notes, the following paragraph betrays the fact that the linked article dates back to 2014:

Still, he says, political matters are rarely at issue now, partially because the Danes admired President Bill Clinton and supported the NATO force in Afghanistan. Nowadays, almost all attendees are happy to simply enjoy the festivities, soak in the scenery, and be merry.

Prior to posting, I did search for a more recent article on Rebildfesten, but came up dry. We’ll just have to enjoy the incongruity of the above text here in the future.

We opened the week with Harvard employees behaving badly, and we’ll close it the same way. Harvard professor Francesca Gino, who studies dishonesty, has just been accused of falsifying data. Thankfully, she’s literally studied what her next move should be:

Gino… just last year published a study titled, “Case Study: What’s the Right Career Move After a Public Failure?”

And people think academics lack real-world experience.

Perhaps you were familiar with fan death, but were you aware of another bit of South Korean quirkiness, the concept of “Korean age”?

Under this system, which has its roots in China, babies are considered a year old on the day they’re born, with a year added every January 1.

In some circumstances, South Koreans also use their “calendar age” – a mash-up of international age and Korean age – which consider babies as zero years old on the day they’re born and adds a year to their age every January 1.

While it doesn’t match most of the rest of the world, a one-based counting system for age isn’t nonsensical. Adding a year on January 1, however, seems preposterous.

Take “Gangnam Style” singer Psy, for example. Born on December 31, 1977, he is considered 45 by international age; 46 by calendar year age; and 47 by Korean age.

I’m delighted that one of the most famous Koreans in the world, Psy, has the birthday which best exemplifies how ludicrous these old systems were. Under the previous systems, at most 24 hours after he was born, Psy was 1 or even 2 years old.