Anniversaries  

1. This Monkeyfilter post rounds up links glorifying the Moscow Metro, which celebrates its 70th anniversary this year. The Moscow system is without question the best I've ridden, and it has a feature we could really use here in Chicago: a ring line. From the Wikipedia article:

A group of architects came to Joseph Stalin with the Metro blueprints to let him know about the progress and what was being done at that moment. While looking at the drawings, Stalin poured himself some coffee and spilt it a little bit over the edge of the cup. When he was asked whether he liked the project so far or not, he put his cup right on the center of the Metro blueprints and left in silence. The bottom of the cup left a brown circle on the drawings. The architects looked at them and realized that it was exactly what they had been missing all this time. They took it as a sign of Stalin's genius and rushed to the construction site to give orders for building the ring line. This legend, of course, may be attributed to Stalin's cult of personality. However, if you look at the map of the Moscow Metro, the ring line is always printed in brown.

2. And Greg Tate has a piece in the Village Voice on 30 years of hiphop and what we have to show for it: "Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism."