JFK Assassination Forum

It's a joy seeing Michael T. Griffith have his hat handed to him time and again by John Mytton. Keep up the great work!

Additional Russian language trivia:

1. EVERY letter is pronounced. There is no mystery. You can make a good stab at pronouncing a Russian word even if you have no idea what it means, or writing a Russian word you can speak as long as you simply know the alphabet.

2. Many Russian words are simply bastardizations of their English equivalents. The old term for camera is "apparat" (i.e., apparatus). A car is a "machina." Gasoline is "benzina." I remember diligently learning the Pimsleur phrase "I want to play chess" - "Ya haichoo egrat shockmatey." It was long after I learned it that it dawned on me that the mysterious "shockmatey" was simply "checkmate."

3. I have observed, and my wife has strongly reinforced, that Russians from that era were and are WAY more reticent than Americans about engaging in small talk or revealing personal information (because that was a dangerous thing to do). My wife is still aghast at the level of personal information that I and some Walmart cashier will exchange in the course of a checkout. My guess is that what we picture as clever banter at the dance with Marina looked and sounded nothing like an American college party of that era.

From the "useful idiot" known as Fancy Pants Rants, the Traitorous Orange Xxxx supporter / master of trivia and heart-warming Byelorussian homilies.

The Storm Drain 

A massive CIA disclosure -- the fatal head shot came from the storm drain.

Under federal law, people convicted of felonies are not allowed to possess firearms.

Regarding Oswald's Russian language abilities, I always point out that I have had my wife, an educated native-Russian speaker who spoke nothing else for 54 years, review all of his writings. She says they are "not ridiculous" but filled with odd terms and incorrect usage. I recall her laughing at one point where he solemnly stated that the factory group was going hunting, using the Russian term for "baby ducklings." There is NO WAY that he was highly-trained or genuinely fluent in the language. After living and working in Russia for 2+ years, obviously he was going to acquire some level of passable fluency.

To bore you with my own tale, before visiting Belarus the first time I studied the Pimsleur language course on CD. Pimsleur is based on the theory that 95% of all conversation requires a vocabulary of about 800 words. Before my first visit, I hadn't even finished Pimsleur level two (there are three). My wife's family thought I must be a GENIUS and surely must have Slavic genes (which proved to be true, actually!). With great trepidation, I attended my wife's 30th-year college reunion, and NO ONE caught on to the fact that I wasn't Russian. My Russian is not only "not ridiculous" but is in fact "completely ridiculous." A few key words and phrases, pronounced correctly (I can trill my r's far better than my wife) go a long way. I even caused a bit of suspicion with my wife by making two MISTAKES that were in fact the colloquial way a native Russian would say the correct terms.

There is absolutely NOTHING mysterious or miraculous about Oswald's command of Russian. Obviously, this factoid is impossible to bust with Marina supposedly thinking he was from one of the Baltic states and Gregory certifying his abilities for some reason, but even after 2+ years in the country it was still pigeon Russian. Concerning the former, I would assume the first-night dance with Marina was the equivalent of me attending my wife's reunion - he knew enough key phrases to be passable and had sense enough to stay in his lane language-wise.