[2018-05-05] Vavilov

Blame Quintushalls for this.

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Tony
Posts: 75
Joined: Mon Mar 24, 2014 3:57 pm

[2018-05-05] Vavilov

Post by Tony »

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/vavilov
Zach Weinersmith wrote:I checked and this is the funniest joke about Nikolai Vavilov ever written.
Zach, you missed a couple.

Vavilov was scientifically brilliant but politically unsavvy. He was condemned to death for opposing Lysenkoism, and though his sentence was commuted, he starved to death after a year and a half in a Soviet gulag.

In his memoir, The Doctors' Plot of 1953, Dr. Yakov Rapoport offered an anecdote shared with him by Vasily Parin, who was with Dr. Vavilov at Saratov Prison. Parin said that whenever Vavilov got a new cellmate, he would introduce himself as "Vavilov, formerly academician, now dog shit."

Vavilov's joke was funnier. And, at long last, Rapoport wrote it down for him.

Also, Zach, I see in the fifth panel that the bottle is labeled "Elderly Southern Drunkard Whiskey." Is that George Washington's likeness on the label? Fitting, I suppose, but it still seems gratuitously mean.

Pedant

Re: [2018-05-05] Vavilov

Post by Pedant »

By accident!

agri-nerdery

Re: [2018-05-05] Vavilov

Post by agri-nerdery »

I'm just going to throw out there that the drawing of a "rye" (Secale cereale) seedhead, sure as heck looks like a "ryegrass" (Lolium spp.) seedhead to me. :shock:

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