Duct tape wallet and Radio Yerevan jokes

Day 13 in Yerevan, Armenia. Still without a job or any prospects of having one any time soon. I am pretty much bored out of my wits and also, can’t deny it, a bit depressed. I display classic symptoms of the first few months at a new post: sleeping past noon, still in my pajamas, not wanting to get out of the house, roaming aimlessly around the apartment either staring at piles of stuff still without a place to be put away or looking out of the window to see if the smog allows me to see Mt. Ararat. It’s not visible today. Checking emails, hoping I’ll have a full Inbox, but too lazy/depressed to answer those I have received. I make a promise to myself to do at least one creative thing a day and I decide to make a duct tape wallet – an intriguing idea I get from Google’s “How to of the day” which navigated me to a “wikiHOW” site. I made the darn thing in three hours. Killed time and made something cool.

My duct tape wallet:

Doing stuff with my hands gave me lots of time to use my brain and I thought of starting my own blog, or website to post my views to share them this way as opposed to sending it via email. The blog could be called “Radio Yerevan” – a reference to my childhood in Eastern Europe during communism. Radio Yerevan was a fictional radio station in the Soviet Republic of Armenia which cleverly answered a variety of ironic questions about the politico-socio-economic issues of the era. (My friend Vartan Akhchyan received a grant to research and write a book about this unique phenomenon of humor behind the Iron Curtain, which I am very much looking forward to reading.) People from Armenia do not know about these jokes, Radio Yerevan was born and is known only in Russia or Eastern Europe. Here are a few examples of the jokes:Question to Radio Yerevan: Which is the most beautiful city in the world?Answer: Yerevan- How many nuclear bombs are needed to destroy the most beautiful city in the world?- One … Correction, the most beautiful city is Moscow.

fdjgd
Advertisement in Radio Yerevan:
“Russian watches – the fastest in the world.”

fdjgd

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that in the Soviet Union the wheat stalks grow as tall as telephone poles?
- It is true, we can also proudly say that it even grows more abundantly.

fdjgd
Question to Radio Yerevan: I heard there is meat in Leningrad, will there be meat in Moscow?
- Yes, it’s a traveling exhibit.

fdjgd
Question to Radio Yerevan: Is there a difference between American and Soviet radioactivity?
- There is, Soviet radioactivity is not harmful.

fdjgd
This one requires a bit of a linguistic explanation, but is worth it: in Slovak, the word “to sit” can 1. mean the action of sitting, 2. imply one’s work place (He sits in the third office on the right.) 3. to be in jail (He is sitting for robbery.) The following joke plays with numbers 2 and 3.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Where does the guy who creates the Radio Yerevan jokes sit?
- We don’t know, but he is surely sitting.

fdjgd
This last one is fairly recent, I heard it from Vartan and it throws a new light on the Radio Yerevan humor concept:

Question to Radio Yerevan: Why don’t we hear new Radio Yerevan jokes anymore?
- Because the Jew who was creating them died.

fdjgd
No more Radio Yerevan, but while I am on the topic of Jewish – Armenian humor…

An old Armenian man is dying. Prostrated on his deathbed he is surrounded by his sons. He attempts to prop himself up and drawing his last breaths utters very silently:
- “Protect the Jews!”
His sons don’t think they heard him right and ask:
- “What is it papa?”
- “Protect the Jews!”
The sons reply in disbelief:
- “Father, we are not Jewish, what are you saying?”
The father answers with his last strength:
- “Protect the Jews, because once they are finished with them, they’ll start with us!”

Between the years 1915 and 1916 the Turks systematically murdered million and half Armenians living in the territory of today’s eastern Turkey. When Hitler proposed the solution of the Jewish question, some worried about the reaction of the international society. Hitler answered: “And who remembers the Armenians?” He was right, without any obstacle he was able to systematically murder six million Jews.