We all know how I feel about LOL Whatever memes. You’re all idiots. I just hate and I hate and I hate as you type out verbatim the same spelling mistakes, the same bad grammar, and then slap it in a Something Awful font on a picture of surprised looking kitty cat with the smug satisfaction of Jacques Barzun finally settling upon le mot juste to sum up the cultural impact of Moliere. Stop. Stop.

The other day, someone I knew came up to me on the streets and said, “Oh, hi!” But from the smile on her face, I knew that, deep in the jelly of her brains, she had mnemonically spelled it as “O HAI!” Consequently, I have spent most of the morning scraping that brain jelly in little squidges from underneath my fingernails, which was the unfortunate natural result of pushing my thumbs through her eye sockets.

That all being said… hey, check out this cool LOL meme, LOLSheviks! I post really for the fantastic Soviet art and the crazy commie font. But for one brief moment, I was just like you, reading “I Can Haz A Reign Of Terror?” and giggling idiotically like a thorazine addict staring at a spinning pinwheel. Gabba Gabba! One of us!

LOL Sheviks [Flickr] : Laughing Squid : Mike Monteiro and Matt Haughey

My own particular genetic mutation is the ability to mentally redirect every fluid ounce of blood roiling through my capillaries into my head.

What happens is this: first, my eyes go milky and begin to google wildly around inside of my ocular cavities. My chapped lips peel back from my teeh and split back to my ear lips in a horrible, chattering rictus. Witnesses describe somehow hearing a soundless, silent scream as my fluid-filled skull turns a deep bruise color and, pulsing, bulbously expands. My retinas detach as the internal pressure pushes my eyeballs out of their sockets on thick, dripping stalks. And if I ever let myself go beyond this point, I have no doubt that my skull would explode, instantly covering several city blogs in a slurry of grey cerebral goo.

You think I’m joking. I’m not joking. It is a display that a hydrocephalic of my acquaintance once described as an abomination unto the sight of God.

Unlike the X-Men, I have never managed to find a way to use this talent for good, but I did spend many years cluelessly demonstrating this ability on first dates. The joke was a good one: I’d cause my skull to explode, then explain, “This is what my face looks like during orgasm.” Unfortunately, women only like guys with a good sense of humor up to a certain point, and that point seems to be the prospect of making love to a man who, during the highest moment of pleasure, suddenly transforms into Ronny Cox from the end of Total Recall.

I’ve stopped doing this trick for now, but for reference, this haunting gallery of Russian men demonstrating their O-face is a slightly less nightmarish equivalent.

Russians Doing Their ‘O’ Face [Webpark.Ru] : Hugo Strikes Back!

It’s 1925. Mad Soviet Dictator Joseph Stalin, weary of the pathetic frailties of the flesh — the easily snapped limbs, the hearts that explode under mere superhuman stress, the stomachs that eat themselves away in starvation no matter how red the spirit — is eager to rebuild his weak and demoralized army, as well as begin his first Five Year Plan on the Road to Industrializaton.

“I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat,” Stalin explains to Moscow papers.

The invulnerable human being he envisioned? The perfect soldier? The ultimate Communist? A race of half-man, half-ape super-warriors, to be created for Stalin by Dr. Ilya Ivanov. Unfortunately, his experiments were a failure: though Ivanov was sent off to Africa in 1926 with $200,000 to conduct his first experiments in impregnating chimpanzees (the money was spent on booze, blindfolds and pornography), he failed to produce the race of superhuman monkey men of Stalin’s dreams. Back in the Soviet Union, Ilanov’s attempts to use monkey sperm to impregnate fertile Georgian babushkas similarly failed.

Ivanov died in exile on a cold train plattform in Kazakhstan in 1931. Stalin never did get his race of super-human monkey men.

Stalin’s half-man, half-ape super-warriors [Scotsman]