Another one gets poisoned

Former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar has recently become sick on a visit to Ireland, and now his doctors believe that he has been poisoned.

Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko has recently died of polonium-210 poisoning, and the Russian authorities have been hinting that it must have been done by emigrants who want to incriminate Putin.

OK, gotta admit it: it was me. Every time I want to write something really snarky about Putin I pull my trusted old mini-nuclear-reactor from under the bed, irradiate a bit of bismuth in a saucepan, stir with a big spoon and poison some FSB defector. If I have some of it left over I make a miniature nuclear weapon for entirely peaceful purposes, such as destroying Russia and unplugging my toilet. Preferably simultaneously.

(For the humor-impaired and secret agents: I do nothing of the kind, but if you want to look under my bed I recommend that you wear some clothes to which dust sticks well.)

Russia's nuclear chief said that all the polonium produced in Russia goes to the United States. Sure thing. I'd been hearing that ever since I was a little kid. "All the sausage that we produce goes to the grocery stores", etc.

Several airplanes (that have been flying between London and Moscow, what a surprise) have been contaminated, and a number of locations in Britain. 30-something thousand people who flew on these airplanes afterwards are advised to see a doctor just in case. I can just imagine the cleaning bill for all that. Makes you miss the good old times when they just shot people or ran them over with a car.

Apropos polonium-210: lovely stuff, used for nuclear weapon initiators, 0.12 millionth of a gram is enough to kill a person when ingested. Aren't you all happy that Iran now produces stuff like that on its own for whatever peaceful purposes it might have? Thought so.