15 July 2011 Volume: 21 Issue: 13 North Korea's ... - Eureka Street

Volume 21 Issue: 1315 July 2011Vyacheslav Ilyin is pretty much like you and me, allowing for some cultural differences. Heturns an honest rouble at Moscow’s Institute for Biological and Medical Problems, trails to andfrom his office in all weathers protected by his ushanka (one of those Russian fur hats), loveshis family, despairs at the indifferent form of his team, Lokomotiv Moscow, and wouldn’t giveyou a bent kopeck for politicians.According to the article, Vyacheslav’s government-backed and classified research interest ishow the astronauts in the space station cope with their dirty laundry.It seems that, after the small matter of ensuring that a spacecraft actually stays in space andsticks to the game plan, the biggest problem in orbit is waste disposal. As a result, VyacheslavIlyin is obsessed with underpants. It turns out that astronauts must wear the same underpantsfor up to a week at a time. In short, the biggest problem up there is down there.At the drop of a ushanka, Vyacheslav will tell you that each astronaut generates about 2.5 kgof uncompressed waste every day. Lateral thinker that he is, Vyacheslav scorns such remediesas squeezing the spacecraft full of whitegoods. What he’s working on is a mixture of bacteriathat will digest the astronauts’ underpants and in the process produce methane to power thespace craft.Astronautical underpants are Vyacheslav Ilyin’s equivalent of Francisco Sosa Wagner’sphallic cucumber. Both are difficult propositions to promote with dignity but both men hadthe passion and the courage to do so publicly and unflinchingly and both made a significantcontribution.This is in contrast to Christopher Monckton, variously referred to as Lord and Viscount,who has called Ross Garnaut a fascist (for which he was forced to apologise), has delivered aspeech in front of a large Nazi swastika, compares climate change consensus to Nazi eugenicsand who glibly wondered what has happened to the Australian ‘fair go’ — a concept so dearto English Viscounts and Lords — when a succession of venues cancelled his bookings.There are easily enough crackpots around — believing everything from the moon landingsto the twin towers attack is a ‘put-up job’ — to ensure that conspiracy theorists andprofessional deniers like Monckton will always get an audience. It would all be laughable if itwasn’t done with such a veneer of phony class (Lords and viscounts) and insufferablesuperiority (the insulting dismissal of genuine intellectuals like Garnaut) and if it didn’t callupon obscenities in the past for its validation.©2011 EurekaStreet.com.au 24