This is the Russian St. Petersburg Times. I was trying to access the St. Petersburg Times, FL email address and found this. Linda Bee Note: The St. Pete Times, FL, web site had been hacked...by "Pyrenees". No newspaper; just a dog. <A HREF="http://www.sptimesrussia.com/secur/591/features/arts_cook.htm?725curr">The St. Petersburg Times - Arts + Features(cooking with the king: how elvis presley's kitchen ended up in kazakstan)</A> http://www.sptimesrussia.com/secur/591/features/arts_cook.htm?725curr cooking with the king: how elvis presley's kitchen ended up in kazakstan by Anna Badkhen >ALMATY, Kazakstan - Judith Moon expresses not the least bit of pride. In fact, Moon, a press officer at the U.S. Embassy in Almaty, Kazakstan's second city, is visibly irritated. It is Saturday morning, and she would rather be playing at home with her 9-month-old daughter than escorting annoyingly persistent journalists from Moscow through the embassy's stainless-steel kitchen. "I'll show it to you if you promise not to drool over it," Moon cautioned coolly over the phone before the visit. "But I must warn you, there's really nothing special about it." And there isn't - merely a large set of stainless-steel cooking appliances including a water distiller, gas stoves, refrigerators, tables and serving counters. Except it isn't just any kitchen. It's the King's kitchen. At one time, food was cooked and served here for Elvis Presley. Elvis bought the kitchen for his entire regiment during his military service at a U.S. Army base in Friedberg, Germany, in 1958, according to Todd Morgan, an Elvis historian at Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. No big deal, really, for the 23-year-old King of Rock 'n' Roll, who at the time had already bought his Graceland mansion and was living in an off-base residence near Friedberg with his father, grandmother and "some friends from Memphis," as the Graceland museum Web Site puts it. And since his Graceland palace already had a kitchen, when Elvis left the service the stainless steel cooking appliances stayed behind and continued to serve generations of U.S. GIs dispatched to West Germany to guard it against the communist archenemies in the east. "Typical of him to do wonderful things for people," Morgan said. In 1994, with the Cold War over and the services of Elvis' regiment no longer needed, the kitchen was packed and shipped off to the modest two-story 19th-century mansion housing the U.S. Embassy in Kazakstan. "It was too big for the embassy," Moon said. "A big part of it was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek." Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Bishkek said this week that they were unaware of any Presley memorabilia in their offices. Even after it was split in parts, the kitchen still wouldn't fit, Moon said. The Almaty mission then tried to auction it - but failed. Failed? Well, yes, Moon said, because the embassy auctioned it "not as an Elvis Presley kitchen, just as a stainless-steel kitchen." And yet, the embassy did not use the King's name to draw customers. In fact, the mission appears to lack any pride whatsoever in their ownership of a piece of rock memorabilia that a fan would kill for. "Oh, yeah," yawned a Marine guard when Moon told her the purpose of the visit. "Enjoy," she said, unenthusiastically. In the diner, there is no Elvis kitsch whatsoever: no singing clocks shaped as pink Cadillacs, no Elvis doormats. A ripple of Elvis frenzy that rolled through the embassy when the kitchen arrived in 1994 resulted only in four small, framed black-and-white photographs of the King on the walls. For a while, the diner was nicknamed The Hound Dog Cafe, but the name wore off, and today it has no name at all. The presence of the artifact is not advertised outside the mission's office. But even if it was, it is unlikely the embassy would be bombarded by thousands of crazed fans. "Elvis Presley is not popular [here]," said Khakim, a 23-year-old selling CDs and tapes at an outdoor stand on Abylai Khan Street in downtown Almaty. "They buy Nirvana, Metallica and Britney Spears," he said. "They ask for pop music, Russian and Kazak. They don't ask for Elvis Presley. I don't even sell his music." Even the generation of Kazaks that grew up with rock and roll was likewise unimpressed. "The Elvis Presley kitchen?" asked Nurlan Ablyazov, a 46-year-old newspaper editor. "So what?"