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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (2097)	12/4/1999 12:08:00 PM
From: Michael M	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

I'm OK with some of the philosophers -- not too keen on a lot of poets making the cut. Aside from enriching our ability to think about ourselves, I put vast majority of poets in "nice-to-have" ranks.

To: Neocon who wrote (2097)	12/5/1999 7:48:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

INTERESTING POLL ON "PERSON OF THE CENTURY" (Well, I think it's interesting.) From mid-February to November 28m, the Moscow radio station "Echo of Moscow" has been running a poll on its site, to choose the "person of the century." It gives a slightly different perspective (but not all THAT different) on the questions we've been discussing here. What the Echo of Moscow people did was to nominate ten candidates in twenty different categories. Listeners could nominate their own candidates as well. But they could not vote for more than three in all, and they had to indicate their top choice. I'd like to supply some more detail, if I have time, but here are the winners in each category (together with my comments, when I couldn't resist making them). About 2,500 people participated in the voting for each category (not necessarily the same people). RUSSIAN WRITERS: Mikhail Bulgakov (40.6%) (Bulgakov was up against some very stiff competition, yet he beat out his nearest competitor -- Vladimir Nabokov -- by almost 25%!! Another reason for you all to read The Master and Margarita! Do! You won't regret it!) FOREIGN WRITERS: Ernest Hemingway (27.3%) RUSSIAN DISCOVERERS: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky FOREIGN DISCOVERERS: Jacques Cousteau RUSSIAN POPULAR IDOLS: Vladimir Vysotsky (Actor and bard; symbol of popular rejection of Soviet officialese.) FOREIGN POPULAR IDOLS: The Beatles (Of course!) RUSSIAN POLITICIANS: Mikhail Gorbachev (38%) Encouraging and interesting, considering the competition. Here's the full breakdown (Witte & Stolypin were pre-revolutionary politicians, while Kerensky briefly held office between the Feb. & Oct. revolutions): Gorbachev: 38% Lenin: 32% Stolypin: 26% Stalin: 25% Yeltsin: 20% Witte: 14.1% Khrushchev: 9.2% Trotsky: 5.8% Kerensky: 4.3% Brezhnev: 3.5% FOREIGN POLITICIANS: Winston Churchill (37.5%) RUSSIAN MUSICIANS: Sergei Rakhmaninov FOREIGN MUSICIANS: George Gershwin RUSSIAN ENTREPRENEURS: Savva Mamontov (Pre-revolutionary figure; famous primarily for his patronage of the arts.) FOREIGN ENTREPRENEURS: Bill Gates RUSSIAN "CREATORS": Konstantin Stanislavsky (Catch-all category for visual artists, actors, dramatists, film-makers. Neo should be happy to know that emphasis is on the last-named.) FOREIGN "CREATORS": Charlie Chaplin (50%) RUSSIAN SPIRITUAL LEADERS: Andrei Sakharov (43.5%) (This category includes not only obvious nominees like Leo Tolstoy, but also Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky. Seems odd at first, but on second thought, it makes some sense.) So far so good, eh? No big surprises? Well, hold on to your hats, for... WESTERN SPIRITUAL LEADERS: L. RON HUBBARD!! (46.7%) EEEEEEEKKKK! Granted, by analogy with Stalin/Lenin/Trotsky above, Hitler, Mao, and Khomeini are on this list. But Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi were also among the nominees, so it isn't as if Ron had no competition! Russians are hopelessly gullible.. RUSSIAN SPORTS FIGURES: Lev Yashin FOREIGN SPORTS FIGURES: Pele RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS: Lev Landau FOREIGN SCIENTISTS: Albert Einstein That takes care of the winners... Joan