Garry Kaspar’s Flying Penis

I came across this last week (no pun intended) and thought it was worth sharing: Russian chess-grandmaster-turned-politician Garry Kasparov had a press conference interrupted by a flying penis. Some of the subtitling towards the end is a little lame.

When the phallus interrupted proceedings, Kasparov was launching a symbolic alternative parliament. I assume the parliament is in protest about former Russian president Vladimir Putin seeding some of his power from the President to the Prime Minister, before handing over the presidency to one of his mates, who then made him Prime Minister. That is political brilliance along the lines of Robert Mugabe, who has been at the helm of Zimbabwe for over 25 years. Fingers crossed that particular nightmare will be all over soon.

Not much chance of that for Russia though. More worrying than Putin’s power games, is that the flying penis stunt was organised by a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists. I generally expect politicians to do whatever it takes to get what they want (where are those WMDs again, Messieurs Howard, Bush and Blair?) but it really gets up my goat when I see young people supporting the essentially totalitarian rule of their own country.

The activists didn’t even have the imagination to think up an original idea. That’s right, a flying penis has been used previously to break up a press conference. It happened at a virtual press conference in Second Life (a popular virtual community/world) where a group called Room 101 interrupted a real-time interview with virtual millionaire (with ‘virtual money’) Ailin Graef.

Ms Graef was so angered by the incident that she threatened to sue YouTube if they didn’t take down the video of the incident. YouTube complied, but you can see a picture here. Mr Kasparov seems to have been a bit more good-humoured about the whole thing. Maybe he didn’t want to make a cock of himself in front of the press.

(I really wanted to make some good puns about this whole thing, but the skill seems to be evading me at the moment. Any help out there?)