And speaking of cocktails....

Tahrir Square

On this day in 1890 Vlacheslav Mikhaylovich Skryabin was born in Kurkaka, Russia.  You may have heard of this gentleman by his revolutionary name, Molotov, though he was not the mixologist who originated the incendiary device named for him, the Molotov Cocktail, made by filling a bottle with flammable liquid and stuffing it with a lit rag.  According to About.com, the Molotov cocktail was first used in the Spanish Civil War but given its name by the Finns during WWII.  (In his propaganda broadcasts, Molotov had claimed the Soviets were merely dropping food on Finland rather than bombs, which prompted the Finns to christen the bombs "Molotov bread baskets," and their improvised weapons tossed at Soviet tanks "Molotov cocktails.")

All this thinking about the Molotov cocktail made me wonder about the American contribution to home-made munitions, the 1971 Anarchist's Cookbook, and lo and behold, the Googletron turned up an 2011 interview with its author, William Powell, who was a 19-year-old high school dropout (the son of a UN press officer, irony of ironies) angry over his draft notice when he cooked up the book.  The book's braggadocia was patently false, but the recipes were, to Powell's ultimate sorrow, authentic.  He went on to become a peripatetic educator, trailed by notoreity.  Here's the link to the Newsweek/Daily Beast interview:
http://tinyurl.com/7afzmbf

Katherine Hepburn as Bunny Watson
battling the first Googletron-- EMERAC,
or "Miss Emmy," as it is christened by Corporate.

And because the Googletron, as wonderful as it is for finding former Anarchists, has neither umpire nor Bunny Watson and her team of crack research librarians to settle whether it was the Finns or Spanish who actually invented the first HandyBomb™--and because crikey, the world is a scary place--I leave you with this still from Desk Set, in which the forces of humanity battle the first wave of information technology, old Hollywood style.  Whether it's revolutions or really great movies, the fundamental things continue to apply.