The flying penis menace moves offline in Russia
In a stunt reminiscent of something from Second Life, an unknown perpetrator let loose a remote-controlled flying dildo at a speech yesterday by Garry Kasparov, the famed chess champion defeated by IBM's Deep Blue who now heads up Other Russia, an opposition party that seeks to wrest power from the Kremlin government dominated by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. As Andy Baio at Waxy points out, it's unclear if the pranksters knew about the infamous interview between Second Life baron Anshe Chung and CNET reporter Daniel Terdiman, video from which is embedded after the jump.
I'll be the first to count such outbursts as a sign of growing democracy — Putin and new president Dmitry Medvedev could have just jailed Kasparov like former Yukos owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In the opening of the video featuring Kasparov, his bodyguards jump at first, presumably expecting something more menacing before swatting it out of the air. I asked Terdiman how he thought the situation was handled, as he was one of the first people to confront the flying penis menace, but he declined to offer an opinion.
Kasparov, for his part, was unperturbed and said (approximately translated) "we should be grateful that we've been shown one more time that we need to raise the level of political discourse" to applause from the audience.