You Must Be Joking.

So...that whole thing about the Russian government controlling the weather? Umm...it's true.

No. Really.

In Russia, nobody rains on the parade -- because the Russian government doesn't allow it.

"Victory Day is the most sacred holiday for us," says Bagrat Danilian, deputy chief of cloud seeding at the observatory. "When veterans go out to celebrate in Moscow, we create good weather for them."

All it takes, he says, is sacks of cement -- 500-grade, to be precise. Drop the powder down into the clouds, and they vanish.

So apparently now the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has decided that clearing snow costs too much money. Instead of shelling out the big bucks to city employees, he'd rather it just didn't snow at all. So he's proposing "a plan to seed the clouds with liquid nitrogen or dry ice to keep heavy snow from falling inside the city limits."

Am I the last person to find out about this? Somehow this seems like it should be a much bigger deal than an article on the L.A. Times website. Haven't we already destroyed our global climate?

Tad creepy, people. Just a tad.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-moscow-snow8-2009dec08,0,2120312.story