Can't be worse than the current one, right?

Their parliamentary system did have problems, what with the way anyone could block any legislation they didn't like, even if they were in the minority, causing the whole process to get completely broken down in deadlock and bickering.

Oh, and also: http://www.badassoftheweek….

Poland did quite a lot of ass-kicking back in the day.

More fun than your witless prattle! :-P

My favorite bit about it was that after False Dmitri I was murdered, they loaded his ashes into a cannon and fired it west toward Poland.

Ah, it's like that favorite Soviet-era ditty:

Fun fact about Boris Godunov: Mussorgsky actually wrote two versions of it (basically due to tsarist censorship), and then after he died, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote yet another version. Rimsky's version, of course, had a much cleaner orchestration, and for many years was the version of the opera that was the most often…

That's nobody's business but the Russians.

I know, right? Boris Godunov was actually a real person, not just an operatic character. Who knew?

Nothing against Dvořák, but the two Russian operas based on these events are far more important works. Glinka's A Life for the Tsar was the first Russian opera (and AFAIK, the first Russian musical work in general) to gain recognition outside Russia, and given Glinka's stature among later Russian composers as the…

Hey, my suggestion from a couple of years ago is up next week!

Calvin Coolidge nods silently.

James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson say hi.

Buchanan was kind of like that, too; other people decided he would be running for president when he wasn't even in the country and probably didn't even know he was being considered until he returned.

Anyway, I just went on a Labor Day trip to Chicago's Garfield Conservatory, in honor of President Garfield, and while there, noticed a plant named after another president who was shot for a ridiculously stupid reason (although he survived it).

I dunno about that; he's one of only four presidents to get assassinated, and for the most idiotic reason of all of them, and decent-seeming presidents dying in office is one of the easiest "what could have been" questions you can come up with for US history. Coming so soon after Lincoln's probably knocks it down a…

I don't know about only. At the very least, I don't think you can say that the "I don't really want to do this job, so I'll just go take a nap and trust that it all works out" presidents like Buchanan and Coolidge were power-hungry egomaniacs.

Or Pierce. Or Buchanan.

Shoulda shot the jackass in the testicles.