This is kind of on topic, but if you look at an MRI cross-section of a human thigh, it looks just like a ham steak.
Thanks for posting, though I am now wincing at the incorrect apostrophe in the first word of my post.
Oh ha, I should have caught that. Fixed.
Fascinating. One very weird aspect of the Cold War, especially early on, is that both sides were both highly puritanical themselves and utterly convinced that the other was corrupting their youth with decadent hedonism. The youth were actually corrupting themselves and had no need for foreign infiltrators.
I think this was from Keith Richard's biography-- the Rolling Stones ostensibly were guys who liked blues music but couldn't afford to buy expensive imported records, so they learned to play themselves.
I do remember getting childre books with records included. The record would be on a thin piece of plastic, about like film.
The sound quality was tremendously shitty. Though that might have been the speaker on the record player I was allowed to use.
There was a great movie about that era in the USSR a few years back, "Stilyagi". You'll notice the "yagi" as in "Baba Yaga" who was noted for the bones of her victims. Sometimes the movie goes by the name "Hipsters". It's hilarious.
This goes round every few years as a bit of ostalgie content - I see the guy has a book out, which explains the reappearance. What I always want to know is more about the process of how you actually copied LPs onto x-ray plates and this does very briefly and tangentially mention a "recording lathe", which at least tells us they were cutting the groove into the surface of the plate rather than, say, pressing it or softening the material somehow and transferring it that way.
It's interesting how things changed over time. I have a few Soviet era pressings of US jazz because the relevant library (Slavic Studies? can't remember) in Oxford was having a clear out and I took some from a help-yourself box.
I tried to find them just now, and could only find one (I think I have about half a dozen) and it's a Tommy Dorsey compilation pressed during the Gorbachev era but, if google is translating the sleeve correctly, I think it's a reissue of something earlier (there's a reference to a "census" of 1950s issues). My vague recollection (need to dig through my vinyl cupboard) is that the rest were similar: Lester Young, Count Basie, Goodman, etc. and were all 70s or early 80s pressings.
re: 12
The wiki article claims they reverse engineered a record cutting lathe by effectively turning a record player into a record cutter. I wonder, though, how true that might be, and whether they just borrowed (out of hours, or whatever) actual record cutting lathes, or rescued some decommissioned ones, as the Soviets had a ton of record pressing plants.
yes, if you could do that you could actually press further copies, which would be much quicker and more practical than cutting them all.
AND THASSH WHAT MADE THEM CLASS TRAITORSH! *hic*
re: 15
Also would make sense if it was quite hard to get shellac or PVC (and the relevant machines for processing it) for making the raw material for vinyl records, so the bone-music thing was more a materials issue than a cutting/pressing issue? But not sure.
All pressing issues are material.
17: well, that they were recycling x-ray plates is a pretty big tell that the material was a problem. also, thinking about it, if you had a pressing step in the process it might make the engineering simpler as pressing gives you the inverse of whatever you press.