I learned a new word today, rising early and for some reason reading, first thing, on my Magic Information Machine, about the 17th century in Russia: "Smuta."

It's a Russian word that means "Troubles."  What the 17th century was a time of for Russians, and which the 16th and 18th centuries, relatively speaking, were not.  Ha ha.

Then, throughout the rest of the day, when I wasn't looking at smut (not smuta) on the Internet, I was reading Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, leaving off this evening with the account of the the massacre of the 14 or 15 thousand Turkmeni civilians, mostly women and children at the siege of Geok-Tepe in 1881--this being some five years after the Turkish bashi-bazouks slew 12,000 Christian men women and children in Bulgaria.  Which reminds me:  Our fascist friends in Kiev are now said to have under-reported by a factor of about ten the number of civilians they have murdered in the Donbas--i.e., not 5,000, but something more like 50,000 innocent fucking civilians.