Though making an ass out of yourself on the internet is not culturally exclusive, let's gander at the Slavic strain of the phenomena, distinguished by a joyous lack of judgement, heavy abuse of photoshop, and an abundance of wall carpets.

In the USSR, there was one floral scent which could be called the scent of success: the scent of Krasnaya Moskva - "Red Moscow," the perfume favored by the Kremlin wives and the country's lucrative Communist party elite. Let's take a whiff of its flowery past.

If you've never seen the classic 1975 Soviet animated short "Hedgehog in the Fog," you're about to fall in love, forever.

With all the anticipatory hoopla on Tim Burton's Alice about, here's a perfectly-timed glimpse back into the devious, delirious animated Wonderland, Soviet style. READ ME!

In 1953, a year when Dwight Eisenhower became President, Soviet engineers produced something quite outstanding: the scooter. Just like almost everything else in the USSR, the scooter was initially a brick in the propaganda wall -- it was supposed to become the means of transportation which your typical Soviet citizen could buy for their average two-month paycheck (just like Lenin promised.) And the engineers delivered, by accidentally producing a masterpiece.

Morskoi Boi, the iconic torpedo-launching simulator that introduced Soviet children to the world of coin-operated entertainment, is now available not only in the weird Moscow's Soviet Arcade Games Museum, but online, thanks to the Art. Lebedev Design Studio, which launched the free flash version of the game today.

Since Soviet times, these humble hand puppets have lead Russian children into primordial explorations of morals, codes of behavior, and neuroses. Filya the dog, Hrusha the piglet, Stepashka the baby rabbit, and Karkusha the crow (not pictured, fondly remembered) came to many of us on a nightly television program Good Night, Little Ones! They hopped around, talked and did stuff - then there was a cartoon! Though the actual adventures of our talking-animal friends have faded from memory, we know that each one was special, with its own traits, dreams, and personality disorders.

For generations of Soviet children, this was their first toy. The Russian Tilting Doll - Nevalashka - is a classic. This leering, snowman-round, colorful girl-creature is an iconic artifact and fuzzy, ting-a-ling memory for most, even those who arrived into childhood after the fall of the Union.

Thank you, The New York Times for bringing to our attention the Anti-Democracy truck. Deep in the snow-covered lands of Siberia, the proletariat workers assemble the odd-looking (like all other Russian-made cars) vehicle designed for breaking up demonstrations and strikes. The steel beast can bump the protesting crowd with its reinforced bumper, can assault them with the terrible noise and, of course, hit them with the water cannon.

Nothing is sacred among Russia’s deviant hipster fashion designers, not even a true American hero like Mickey Mouse.

Last time we checked in on Open! Design’s Sergei Kuzhavsky and Stas Zhitsky, they were bending golden nails into jewelry.

When a greedy capitalist slips a few coins into a vending machine, he arrogantly expects his own individually prepackaged soda. But the citizens of the U.S.S.R were prepared to share—everything from public housing to sidewalk soda pop. Behold, the sacramental chalice of Soviet carbonated beverages.

Last month, we celebrated the news that Russia is the world’s leading producer of spam e-mail. This week, The Onion riffs on that same idea with a video report about the fictional spam-producing nation of Koy4goff, capital Affordable Paradise.

In 1978, Bulgarian dissident and playwright Georgi Markov was leaving the BBC London office where he worked and heading home. Waiting at a crowded bus stop, Markov felt a sudden sharp pain in his thigh and turned to see a large man bending down to pick up a black umbrella. The man apologized in a thick foreign accent and hopped into a taxi. Markov found a growing red pimple where he had felt the sting, and came down with a fever that night. Four days later, he was dead, the victim of one of the most diabolical assassinations in modern history — the Umbrella Incident.

Avos. “Perhaps.” “God willing.” “Hope against hope.” Pushkin baptized his fellow Slavs with this very phrase in Eugene Onegin: “Perhaps, o people's Shibboleth…” In Goncharov’s Oblomov, the spineless protagonist can barely splutter a sentence without its invocation: “And perhaps Zahar will contrive something…let's hope they'll manage without turning me out…well, things will be arranged somehow!" It is said that few words characterize the Russian outlook as succinctly as avos—a compact expression of the belief that, against all reason, something good might still turn up. So it should come as no surprise that the word eventually morphed into the avoska—the USSR’s portable, fishnet shopping sack.