I honestly don't know why I chose October 30 as the uploading date for this edition of the Boidem. I knew that October was going to be a busy month for me, and that being the case I suppose I figured that posting as close as possible to the end of the month would give me more time to finish this column (on time) and get it onto the site. In general my posting dates are in the final week of the month, and though that means that after a while I start to run out of interesting items that merit a date tie-in, honing in on the end of the month paces me better than trying to finish a column in the middle (or for that matter the beginning) of a month.

Finding a proper date tie-in is, to my mind, a classic example of a web-weave, or at least an active web-surf, rather than a dip into the stream. And this month's more than proves that point. I'd noticed that it was on October 31, 1961 that Joseph Stalin's body was removed from Lenin's tomb. That had a nice ring to it. Burial is rather permanent, and I liked the idea of contrasting the impermanence of the stream with that of burial ... and then noting that in Stalin's case, as in the case of much of Soviet history, perhaps he still had to go with the flow.

At that point I still hadn't decided whether I'd upload (or at least officially upload) on October 31 or 30, and Stalin's being moved was still on the table since it was on October 30, one day earlier, that Khrushchev announced to the Party that the body would be moved - in itself a significant event. Jennifer Rosenberg describes it on an About site:

Five years later [after the Party Congress of 1956 at which Khrushchev revealed Stalin's crimes], it was time to physically remove Stalin from a place of honor. At the Twenty-second Party Congress in October 1961, an old, devoted Bolshevik woman, Dora Abramovna Lazurkina stood up and said:

My heart is always full of Lenin. Comrades, I could survive the most difficult moments only because I carried Lenin in my heart, and always consulted him on what to do. Yesterday I consulted him. He was standing there before me as if he were alive, and he said: "It is unpleasant to be next to Stalin, who did so much harm to the party."

This speech had been pre-planned yet it was still very effective. Khrushchev followed by reading a decree ordering the removal of Stalin's remains.

The further retention in the mausoleum of the sarcophagus with the bier of J. V. Stalin shall be recognized as inappropriate since the serious violations by Stalin of Lenin's precepts, abuse of power, mass repressions against honorable Soviet people, and other activities in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave the bier with his body in the mausoleum of V. I. Lenin.

Ultimately, however, I chose a totally different October 30 event. It was on this day, in 1965 that Jean Shrimpton, then a world-class model, appeared at an Australian racing event in a white minidress. Fifty years ago, like today, celebrities were invited to social events in the expectation that their participation would garner coverage in the news, and in this particular case "uncovered" generated lots of "coverage". Today's it's hard to imagine that a dress a few inches above the knee could cause so much controversy, but ... things were different back then. Shrimpton's minidress wasn't the first; they'd appeared a few years earlier, but hers is usually given credit for starting the craze.

Using Stalin's removal from Lenin's tomb, or even the Ali/Foreman fight, allowed me, even if only tangentially, to tie the date of this column to the topic of the stream. I don't really know how I can do that with Shrimpton's dress, but it certainly has merit as an important cultural milestone. And that will have to be enough.