Matthew Wrather hosts with Peter Fenzel, Mark Lee, Josh McNeil and Jordan Stokes to overthink cold war pop culture in light of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There is a characteristically unaccountable digression about the repatriation of antiquities to Egypt.

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Download Episode 71 (MP3)

Alcohol advertisers are well known for bombarding their audience with nonsensical imagery, but Stolichnaya Vodka really takes the cake with their new campaign, “The Wild Wild West Is In The East.”

This may be a New York only thing. Let me know in the comments.

Don’t worry if your immediate reaction was confusion, followed by more confusion over your confusion. Mine was too.  Stoli’s previously established practice of using overt Soviet imagery was perplexing by itself, but they’ve really taken it to a new level by invoking the American Old West and the New Russia on top of the communism.

How can we make sense of this nonsense? Read on for three different interpretations. Martinis will be served, after the jump.

Okay, in my original Eurovision post, I dismissed the Russian entry, “Believe,” as being “too lame to embed here.” But after the song’s victory, I watched it again. And I realized that when something is lame enough, it becomes camp, and camp is very much worth embedding.

So now I invite you all to enjoy a truly silly performance, Dima Bilan (a man that Reuters describes as “lithe“) singing “Believe” — after the jump.