News reports indicate that a team of one Canadian and three Britons have reached the “Pole of Inaccessibility” - the spot in the centre of Antarctica that is farthest from any coast.
And they did it on foot, and by kite-skiing - no motorised equipment.
And they found Lenin waiting for them. Or at least, a bust of him that a Soviet expedition put up 50 years ago.
Poor V.I. - still dreaming of the proletariat revolution that was going to sweep the globe…
Well . . . There’s no capitalism in Antarctica, is there? 
(Mainly because nobody has figured out how to make mining operations profitable when you have to dig through a mile of ice before you even scratch the soil . . .)
Man I love stories like this. It is so bizarre to think that thing has just been sitting there all this time.
They are working hard on it, harnessing the power of Global Warming to melt that Antarctic ice like an ice cream cone on a July sidewalk.
That makes me feel like a lazy bitch.
Is anybody else amused by the team’s logo?
I had always heard that permanent structures were nearly impossible on Antarctica. The snow just continually builds and covers every thing. I watched a discovery channel program on the new Antarctica station that is designed to be raised 10 feet every 20 years years so it doesn’t disappear.
So how come Lenin isn’t 50 feet under snow? Is it just a part of Antarctica that gets no weather?
Well, just as a guess, it may be because it’s about a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, and 12,000 feet above sea level - it just may be that that area doesn’t get a lot of snow, because the humidity is so low.
Huh. The first thing I thought of was Shelley’s Ozymandias:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
though I don’t suppose Lenin would have appreciated the comparison.
How appropriate. Nice mind you have there.
That’s a wonderful reference.
And, using my amazing new edit powers, I see that my desire for coffee has led Frank to beat me to it.
That’s the comparison I was trying to remember!
I love that poem. I did a painting of it in grade 11.
I was wondering, though… how do we know that the Lenin in Antarctica isn’t the real body of Lenin, preserved by the cold and dry (the statue in the picture being the tomb marker), and the one in Red Square isn’t just a wax or animatronic replica?
Well that’s…interesting.
Must be a deleted scene from Happy Feet.
Why are the two penguins porkin’ each other?! :eek: :dubious: 
That…
Is that a joke?
-FrL-
Apparently, “Bottom of the World” refers to both the Pole of Inaccessibility and that penguin…
Dammit, I wanted to be the one to say that! Well done.
[Looks at the team’s logo]
Whoa! Those guys sure like to party!
It’s Leninade time! 
Way I heard it, you only get snow in the warm parts of anctartica. In most of it it’s so bloody cold and so far from the sea that you get clear skies, just very cold ones. I am not a metereologist, just took an EHS course with one years ago, so this info may or may not be accurate.
when I used to backpack in tibet in the 1980’s, the areas would be pretty far from civilization and often more than a day’s hike from an inhabited village and maybe a week away from the nearest civilization. I’d climb some solitary peaks with no trail and not on the way to anywhere so no one had any ‘reason’ to climb said mountains.
at the top usually with be a buddhist cairn and prayer flags put up by faithful Tibetans. It was waaaaaay cool, but disbused notions that the world is *that * remote
HUZZAH! Huzzah!–for de Glorious Proletarian Oprisink uf de Oppressed Penguin Vorkers uf de Vorld!
Flightless seabirds unite! Hyu hef only you chillblains to lose…