Soma-Nomaoi is a festival that recreates a battle scene from more than 1,000 years ago. It is annually held for 4 days from July 22 to 25 in Haramachi City, Fukushima Prefecture, in the eastern part of Japan. In this historical event, 600 mounted samurai in traditional Japanese armor, with long swords at their side and ancestral flagstaffs streaming from their backs, ride across open fields. Soma-Nomaoi has been designated an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property.

Photo: A young woman (C) clad in samurai costume leads other local poeple as she rides her horse during a parade at the annual Soma Nomaoi festival in Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, on July 28, 2012. The traditional full-scale festival kicked off for the first time after the accident of the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant following the massive earthquake and the tsunami on March 11, 2011. (Photo by Toru Yamanaka/AFP Photo)

Photo: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870 – 1924) lying in state in the Kremlin. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images). 1924

Important! For the same article in Russian language click here.

Something quite intriguing is happening within Russian-speaking internet during the last few – should you type a fully academic inquiry (at least, according to Russian academic requirements) in national search engines for "Lenin's mausoleum" – the first thing you get (even in top 10 searches) is website pages talking about black magic and occult. Website authors view this construction differently, but unconditionally agree on one thing: the mausoleum of the "leader of the world proletariat” – the essence of a magical artifact, a sort of “energy vampire”. It was built with a certain purpose: to drain the energy out of miserable Soviet citizens on one hand; and to poison the anthroposphere of one-sixth part of the earth with its vibes (the exact territory that was occupied by the former Soviet Union), depriving the Russian people of will to resist on the other hand. Complete nonsense? No doubt. Nevertheless, an intriguing one. Well, probably because some oddities do exist in mausoleum's history. These oddities are the thing we are going to discuss this time. First, let me refresh you memory on the subject.

Gers, traditional Mongolian tents, are seen on a hill in an area known as a ger district in Ulan Bator June 26, 2013. Approximately 60 percent of the population of Ulan Bator live in settlements known as ger districts and in many cases residents have limited access to basic services such as water and sanitation. According to a 2010 National Population Center census, every year between thirty and forty thousand people migrate from the countryside to the capital Ulan Bator. Ger districts in the city have been expanding rapidly in recent years. Mongolia is the world's least densely populated country, with 2.8 million people spread across an area around three times the size of France. (Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters)

Astronomer, space scientist and meteorologist Andrea Opitz, senior research associate of the Space Physics and Space Technology Department of Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) Wigner Research Centre for Physics (2R) wears a space suit during a cosmology exhibition in Budapest, Hungary, 03 March 2016. The photo series was created to mark the International Women's Day (IWD), which was marked for the first time in 1911 and is celebrated on 08 March since 1913. (Photo by Bea Kallos/EPA)

“Body blading (also known as buggy rollin') is an extreme sport that involves descending down a slope while wearing a flexible aerodynamic plastic roller suit that has wheels on the feet, knees, torso, and arms. This suit was created by Jean-Yves Blondeau, and he is one of the premier body bladers. Body blading is similar to roller blading, and in fact a body blader often starts out using the rollers on their feet in the same fashion as roller blades in order to gain initial speed, but then the rider generally assumes a position laying on the stomach facing down the hill. A body blader is capable of reaching very high speeds. Maneuverability is achieved by moving the body into various positions to change direction”. – Wikipedia

Photo: French designer Jean-Yves Blondeau demonstrates his “Buggy Rollin” suit during a performance on August 16, 2007 in Beijing, China. Blondeau is able to roll along in any position and can achieve high speeds wearing the suit. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

Sébastien Del Grosso is a French artist and a photographer, who will allow you to enter the world of surrealism, which combines photography and hand-drawn art. His works masterfully blur the transition between the real photo and the picture. By viewing his works, we can see that Sébastien is not only a master of creating photo illusions, but also a person who tries to show his inner world through his art. His emotions, his feelings, his fears and desires are all vividly and skillfully expressed in simple strokes of a pencil. He is the continuation of his art. So much so, that he loses his identity, fearing it, but being unable to stop. (Photo by Sébastien Del Grosso)

It’s a classic tale of dictatorship gone wrong and the fight for freedom. Like in any good battle, there’s fire, albeit from firecrackers, but the ammunition in this one is – flour. It takes place in a Hemingway-esque Spanish village. The battle of “Enfarinats” in celebration of the Els Enfarinats festival, rages on on December 28, 2012 in Ibi, Spain. Citizens of Ibi annually celebrate the festival with a fight using flour, eggs and firecrackers. The battle takes place between two groups, a group of married men called “Els Enfarinats” who take the control of the village for one day pronouncing a number of ridiculous laws and fining the citizens that infringe them and a group called “La Oposicio” who try to restore order. At the end of the day the money collected from the fines is donated to charitable causes in the village. The festival has been celebrated since 1981 after the town of Ibi recovered the tradition but the origins remain unknown.

Photo: A Reveller smokes during the battle of “Enfarinats”, a flour fight in celebration of the Els Enfarinats festival. (Photo by David Ramos)

“A fter the former Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear test in August 1949, the US reevaluated its postwar defense policies. With the US monopoly on atomic weapons broken, military and political leaders chose to diversify the American stockpile by developing thermonuclear and tactical nuclear weapons. One of the more interesting concepts to come out of this period was atomic artillery, which was successfully tested at the Nevada Proving Grounds (now the Nevada Test Site) in May 1953”. – Alan Carr. Photo: Atomic Annie at work during the Upshot-Knothole test series, 1953. (Photo by Los Alamos National Laboratory/US Army)