Balkans
clock | May 23, 2007Stronger together. Should have thought of that back in 1991. But, perhaps it's not too late...
clock | May 20, 2007Via Snarkmarket, I found this (probably incomplete) Wikipedia list of the oldest companies in the world that are still operating today under the same name. The oldest one, a construction company in Japan called KongÅ Gumi, just went belly-up after serving their customers since the year 578AD.
And according to a commenter there, the oldest University in continuous operation is University of Al Karaouine in Fes, Morocco.
The oldest company on the list from the Balkans is Apatinska Pivara which has been brewing beer continuously since 1756. They produce one of the most popular local beers, the…
clock | May 12, 2007After all those years that I actually cared about this, now that I don't any more Serbia finally won the Eurovision contest!
clock | May 8, 2007I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it.
Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches
I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the reference to the good old song Back to the Big, Dirty…
clock | May 6, 2007Tatjana Jovanovic is a fellow escapee from Serbia and a fellow biologist. She got her MS in Biology at the University of Belgrade and has collected enough data before emigrating to be able to immediately get a PhD if someone would sponsor her here. She is currently in Arizona, but she is moving to North Carolina later this year. She will send you her impressive CV on demand - her publications range from immunology to pest control, but most of it is focused on small rodents, their avian predators and the dynamics of predator-prey relationships. She has combined lab and field work, from…
clock | May 1, 2007A guy 'jebo jeza', ahem, literally fucked a hedgehog in Serbia and ended up in the ER. Do kids there these days don't even know their slang? 'Jebo jeza' means something along the lines of 'being in big trouble' or 'having everything go wrong for you'. This guy accomplished that for himself, I guess....unless this is, as is likely, an urban legend.
clock | April 24, 2007Oh, that explains it why Superman did not intervene in the recent Balkan wars!
clock | March 31, 2007I really did not have time to follow up on the whole case, but Alun has so check out his latest.... And you can always be up to date by following the postings on the APWR Central blog. I wish the whole thing was just an April's Fool joke, but unfortunately, it is just one's fool's joke that threatens to destroy some real archeological treasures in the region.
clock | March 27, 2007Long time ago, I mentioned here something about the Belgrade Zoo. The power of Google brought a Belgrader, Sonja, to my blog, who alerted me to the dire conditions in which the Zoo is right now and the existence of her website (made by her and her students) called Zoo SOS whose goal is to force the City government of Belgrade to move the Zoo from its present location to a better place outside town (not having to deal with the Animal Rights terrorists there, they must have placed a link to PETA by mistake - they do not know the distinction between Animal Rights and Animal Welfare. Update:…
clock | March 16, 2007Osvaldo_Cavandoli aka Cava, the author of the amazing and hillarious cartoon La Linea, one of my childhood favourites, has died about two weeks ago. Here is the very first episode:
There are several more available on YouTube (I just watched about a dozen and laughed out loud).
Unlike most of the episodes seen on TV this one below is definitely NSFW (i.e., if your work does not find this safe, you should find a saner employer):
The subtitles, in Croatian, are hillarious if you do not understand Italian.
[Hat-tip: cicciosax]
clock | March 16, 2007Apparently, it is so.
Veljko Kadijevic, a former Yugoslav General who was indicted for War Crimes (mainly for the brutal destruction of the Croatian city of Vukovar early in the conflict) was never brought to justice (or even pursued by Croatia to be arrested - wonder why?) is apparently advising the US Department of Defense in Iraq.
As a West Point alumnus, Kadijevic had many connections with the US military throughout his career. But his poor military performance in the early nineties, if not his criminal status, should have been enough to keep him out of any kind of "advising" about…
clock | March 16, 2007Belgrade blog, Neretva River and Japan Probe solved the mystery of a couple of pictures (and discovered many more from the same source) depicting Japanese people wearing Serbian and Croatian uniforms - images that greatly disturbed many Serbian and Croatian bloggers for whom the war is still fresh in memory. Read their excellent posts and comments.
Even more puzzling was the fact that the uniforms were from several different periods and wars. There were Serbian and Croatian uniforms from the most recent conflicts, but also WWII-era uniforms of partisans, Chetniks and Ustasha.
Apparently,…
clock | March 12, 2007Zoran Djindjic, the first person I ever voted for, was assassinated on this day four years ago. He had the guts to deport Milosevic to The Hague and he got paid for it with a bullet.
clock | March 9, 2007Too busy these days to blog much or even read blogs much, so I missed the news on Balkan blogs and only today, several days later, I got the news from PZ. A guy, just to be sure no resurrection ever happens, drove a three-foot stake through the heart of the dead and burried body of Slobodan Milosevic.
Keep in mind that Milosevic was born and was buried in Pozarevac, in Eastern Serbia, the part of the world which invented the myth of vampires (the old Vlad is in the neighborhood, just over the Danube). The word "vampire" is, as far as I know, the only English word of Serbian origin.
clock | March 9, 2007March 9, 1991 was the first, and the most violent day, of the five-day protest in Belgrade (then Yugoslavia, now Serbia). This was the first anti-Milosevic protest in Serbia, just a couple of months after the first multi-party elections that he stole.
About 100,000 people gathered in the center of Belgrade. Soon, the police moved in and the fight started and spread around town to several different venues, especially in front of the state TV. One teenage boy and one policeman were killed (the former was shot by a moving cordon of police, the latter was thrown over the fence onto the street…
clock | February 20, 2007Back in May 21, 2006, Montenegro seceded from Serbia. Here is what I wrote:
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Right now, there are five countries in the place of Yugoslavia: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia & Montenegro. Considering the very high turnout at today's referendum in Montenegro, there soon may be another split, as Serbia and Montenegro go their separate ways.
Of course, the whole thing is misguided. Just like a division into Red States and Blue States (and you remember some of those "Jesusland" maps right after the…
clock | February 20, 2007They are the last ones who should be playing with this fire:
Croatia probes Hitler likeness, jokes on sugar packets:
Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday. "The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter," said Martina Mihordin. The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory in Pozega have confirmed the sugar packs were…
clock | February 13, 2007Ten months later (this was posted first on March 22, 2006), he has a tenure-track position there. Not a bad idea to give a good talk at various places....
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I have to brag about my famous brother and at the same time provide you with some quality reading about Milosevic and Serbia. Feel free to tranfer the ideas to the USA, the victimhood of the fundamentalist Christians etc.
First, here is an article about a talk my brother gave in Alberta the other day:
Lecturer examines 'poisonous zombie swamp' of Serb politics
and here is a little bit older, but…
clock | February 5, 2007
Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,Comparative analysis of sexual dreams of male and female students (PDF). Psihijatrija danas 2000, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 227-242
Here is the English-language Abstract:
The subject of research is analysis of connection between sexuality as instinctive function and dreams with sexual content as cognitive function. The sample consisted of 656 students, 245 males and 411…