Today's featured daily humor:
Hors D'oeuvre As many of us know, Vladimir Putin spent many years in the KGB before the Soviet Union collapsed. What is less known is what exactly he did there. Back in the early 1980s, the KGB realised that it misunderstood some of the basics of Western society, meaning it was not well placed to understand how its opponents actually thought and made decisions. To remedy this, it instituted a broad program of studies into a wide range of 'Western' social practices - from religious worship to all sorts of social clubs. Mr Putin was in a part of this effort that was tasked with studying dinner parties. This was further broken down, so individual apparatchiks would study things like invitations, who got invited, what was eaten (split by course) and so forth. Putin was assigned hors d'oeuvres. This turns out to have been a big deal. The future president poured all of his skill and intellect into understanding these pre-meal snacks, and produced many famous papers that have been declassified in the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most famous of these works is one that continues to be cited by many connoisseurs. It relates to dry crackers, and is titled *Putin on the Ritz*.