IGY-themed Hanukkah gifts

Hanukkah has already ended. It's is always nice to have my holiday season mostly over before the Xmas brouhaha.

I was quite pleased that my wife picked up on my blog hint and bought a print of the 1956 IGY cartoon from Punch (Nov. 17 post). It looks the same as the copy I finally bought in the magazine, but at 12" x 18" it is suitable for framing (it's really rectangular, my photo just has a perspective crookedness), so it will go up on the walls of my study:

1956 cartoon from Punch, imagining British, American, and Russian Antarctic IGY bases

Then, I could not resist buying for myself a CCCP Sputnik watch. A nice eBay purchase. Although the Soviet Union has an interesting history of watchmaking, this is a recent watch from a Hong-Kong based company, CCCP.

Front of watch. CCCP is a transliteration of Cyrillic USSR, equivalent to Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in English, and 1957 was the launch year for Sputnik

I like the red translucent back of the watch, showing the movement. "Спутник 1" is just Russian for Sputnik 1, the first of three Sputniks launched during the IGY. 

The launching of Sputnik, Earth's first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, was a hallmark event of the IGY. Both the Soviet Union and the U.S. had planned satellite launches for the IGY. The Soviet Union just "beat us to it," and shocked Americans by this manifestation of its technical prowess during the Cold War and the intercontinental ballistic missile arms race.

I also got two bottle of whiskey from countries that participated in the IGY (ha ha, that's a pretty tenuous connection):

German peated malt Eifel Whiskey and Indian Amrut fusion single malt whisky

They go well with latkes!

Finally (coughs), although I may have said I was done with the NY Times crossword references ... 

The Dec. 16 puzzle had the clue, "Part of a philatelist's collection." The answer, of course: "Stamp."

And for the geophysicists, the Dec. 17 minipuzzle contained the clue, "Crust, mantle, or core," answered with [Earth] "layer."

The crossword connections to my blog are downright eerie!