Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The state flower of Arkansas is Pyrus coronaria, known to you and me as the apple blossom. It is known as "The natural state," and its state songs are "Arkansas" and "Oh Arkansas." It is home to the Razorbacks, was once home to the Glaciercats, whose place was taken by the also defunct RiverBlades and is still home to the (what else?) Arkansas Travellers. At one time it was home to the Arkansaurus fridayi, but now the state mammal is the white-tailed deer, while as far as I know there is no state reptile.

The official state siledžija, although he was armed and financed by another state entirely, is the late Željko Ražnatovic, known to many as Arkan. About this last one, my friend Chris Stewart has just published a biography. I saw an earlier version of the text, and found it to be one heck of a story. Maybe you will enjoy it too.

Please allow him to introduce himself

With what sense of awe I saw his head
towering above me! For it had three faces;
one was in front, and it was fiery red;

the other two, as weirdly wonderful,
merged with it from the middle of each shoulder
to the point where all converged at the top of the skull

with apologies to the great John Ciardi

Mixing it up

Larisa Ranković, known to us all as author of La Lara and Yahti, has a new blog on media, Media Mix. Add it to your bookmarks and enjoy.

Department of electoral antipromises

Hey, Tomislav Nikolić has a great idea! Wouldn't everyone love a Russian military base?

Where I come from they call it "cioppino," and not "halaszle"

Is it really the case that Riblja čorba is skupina non grata in Banja Luka? Is there a bizarre parallel with the case of another person who, back in the days of early frost, was in another group with Mr Čorba?

Primavera di bellezza

The image here is from the promotional material on the flap of a book. Unless you either a) follow political satire regularly, or b) are a confirmed member of the far-right establishment, you have not heard of the book. The title of the book is Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. If you have a passing knowledge of history, then you already know that Mussolini was not an American leftist, and that this can be taken as a sign of the cluelessness of the book's author. And who is this author? Chances are you have not heard of him either: one Jonah Goldberg, target of a variety of comically insulting nicknames, son of a minor literary agent who became the not so secret inside source in former president Bill Clinton's sex scandal, and recipient of a series of sinecures in the system fondly known as "wingnut welfare," whereby extremists are guaranteed an income and institutional support regardless of the (stunning) modesty of their talents or their (catastrophic) records of failure (e.g., Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush).

I have not read the book and do not expect to read it. Life is too short for tasteless meals, bad books and ill-fitting shoes. Some other folks have been reading it with much of the expected hilarity that comes from the wide gap separating the author's sense of his own intellectual scope from the evidence available on the page.

Still, the line from the flap copy struck me: "The quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS stormtrooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore." You will probably neither know nor care why the author thinks he knows so much about (at least female) grade-school teachers. But he certainly knows nothing about education. At Swarthmore College, and I suspect also at Brown as at every other institution in the region, a student cannot get an education degree. They can major in a recognised discipline with an accompanying concentration in education, after which, if they want to teach in a public school, they will take another programme to get an education certificate. The reason for this is state policy: education boards do not want to hire teachers with education degrees, but teachers who have demonstrated mastery of an empirical field in addition to receiving a separate education qualification (private schools will take teachers without the education certificate, but require them to have a masters' degree). This fact is pretty much known to everyone who has worked in higher education or passed through one of its institutions, if they were paying attention.

Ordinarily it would not be a big deal for a person not to know about the undergraduate programme at a small college in Pennsylvania. And ordinarily posh institutions would be fair game (when I was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, people still remembered Spiro Agnew having called the place "the Kremlin on the Crum" -- but then at least Mr Agnew was not wholly ignorant, he knew the name of the creek that passes by the campus). But there are exceptions when: 1) a person is claiming omniscient knowledge he obviously does not have, 2) a person is building a whole theory on an insulting image that has no basis in fact, and 3) a person is making a sweeping characterisation of a group of people about whom he knows nothing.

New frontiers in advertising

Practitioner of the world's second-oldest profession Aleksandar Vučić must retain some influence of the days when he was in charge of censoring media. Here he coquettishly demurs to read the title of the book he is promoting to the hostess of the TV program which has, for some reason, invited him.

The book in question is by an author who has 214 entries in the catalog of Narodna Biblioteka Srbije. This means that: 1) he is rather more productive (fecund? logorrhaeic?) than your humble correspondent, and 2) a perusal of the list is bound to offer a couple of opportunities to give a bitterly ironic smile.

Shallow reflection on the passing of Ike Turner

Ike Turner was undoubtedly a bad person. But he was also a great musician.

So go figure.

Nostalgija za danas

Here is a nice view from Kališ, if you like it. Courtesy of the lads at Belgrade 2.0. There is good fish soup to be had in the direction the people in the photo are looking.

Њезин живот у иноземству

Could this correspondent's heartwarming satisfaction be related to the fact that she has found a home in London's midl-klas?

Update: In a freakier take on immigration today, what is with stories about swan theft? This is a new one.

Update II: Informed sources tell me that the legend about immigrants roasting the delectable swans of London's parks can be traced to another time and place -- Vienna in the 1950s, when it was launched against Roma from Romania. Apparently it makes its way to be used against people from Slovakia and Poland in London in the 1970s and 1980s, but these days it is a stereotype against Kosovo Albanians. As far as anyone knows, there is no evidence that anybody has ever actually nabbed and cooked a swan, regardless of the nationality of the person or birdie.

Scholarly insight of the day

A friend directs me to this gem. This is from the (English language) comments section of B92 news, povodom the testimony of the legendary political sociologist Anthony Oberschall in the trial of Vojislav Šešelj before ICTY:

A sociologist is a worthless job. You can find communist-leaning sociologists. Fascist ones. Feminist ones. Chauvinist ones, and so on, and the libraries have whole sections on their theories on society, and so many of them differ in their views. This is the first time I ever heard a sociologist giving evidence in so-called trial. The prosecutors are scraping the bottom of the barrel here because where else can evidence of someones opinion be used to convict someone? What a joke.

Professor Oberschall was engaged as a witness along with Yves Tomić (not a sociologist, but a good fellow all the same), who was identified by the court as "Ives Tomić" and by the accused as "Yves Thomas." Mr Šešelj has his own thoughts on the length of expert reports.

Nice guys finish

I do believe that this is the first time that Geoffrey Nice has spoken to the press at length about the Milošević trial on which he was lead prosecutor, his disappointments, what may have been harmful decisions in the construction of the indictment and presentation of evidence, and još mnogo štošta. The interview was carried out by Augustin Palokaj. Thanks to Lara and Andras.

Reinkarnacija

Dušan Veličković is now the editor of Evropa magazine, and they have a stylish little online edition, with contributions by many of your favourite writers.

Q and A with East Ethnia

So, did you finally get your phone service?

Amazingly enough, I was ready to give up, to send a note to my friends at BT saying thanks for your effort but they were not sufficient to overcome your compulsion to constant repeated failure and let's drop it, I don't want to be your customer after all. Then I got back from my weekend away, and lo and behold, there was a working phone line in my flat! On a Sunday night, which means somebody worked after 5 on a Friday! Not a drop of the promised internet, but a working phone line, yes.

A weekend away? You did not simply stew in your misery?

Stew in my misery indeed. Friends from Leicester came to London where we watched a thoroughly mediocre theatre performance with friends from Canada, followed by a fine Turkish dinner. Then I made my first trip out of London to spend the weekend with them. Many gastropubs were sampled. The castle of Lady Jane was visited. There were places Azra would have enjoyed and places Lajoš would have enjoyed. Wine was drunk. Conversations were dragged out. It was delightful. A boy cannot do battle with bureaucracy day in and day out, you know. Harumph.

Gastropubs, you say?

It's some sort of English cultural thing. They're pubs, but they are operated by gastroenterologists. The effect on the customer is strangely reassuring.

You are getting a reputation as a battler with bureaucracy. Is this deserved?

It is undesired. What can I say, normal people get smacked with a hammer in the head, they fall unconscious. In me it awakens this nagon of persistence that must always be lurking behind my usual sybaritic laziness. This is probably a personality defect. Pure laziness would doubtless make me a more attractive human being. But then, without it, I would not have spent ages trying to figure out turbofolk, or three days making cassoulet, or most of the other things that are in the end sources of pleasure.

Dismissive of so many victories?

As my grandmother would say, victories schmictories, maybe it would kill them to do their job right.

So, is this it? Are your bureaucratic sagas done with, and can we hope that at some point you will give us something interesting to read?

This bureaucratic saga is not done with yet , sadly. I have a phone but no broadband. Then there is the whole matter of my seething dissatisfaction with Barclays bank. But I do sense an end to it, indeed. And this may do it for a while, but there will be additional bureaucratic treats for faithful viewers of Eastethnienders in the near future, including:

• Getting visas and entry clearance for the rest of the family, and a nice British job for one distinctly non-British worker
• Bringing a doggie onto this island which proudly claims (on the Defra web site, no less) to have been "rabies-free for a thousand years" (q.v. Miroslav Krleža)
• Enrolling one brilliant girl into one excellent secondary school

But yes, indeed, I will promise you more material on Balkan politics. Heaven knows it is more fun to be known for writing about that than for whining about feckless agencies and corporations.

So, all this complaining, do you even like the UK?

Like it? The pubs have "guest ales." There is fresh salmon on every corner. The halal butchers have delicious lamb (shanks! get shanks!) and the posh ones have tasty critters every day. The comical radio broadcasts leave me delighted on a regular basis. There are dramatic radio broadcasts based on the Russian revolution in which the proletarian characters are given Northern accents ("Ere come the effin Mensheviks, blimey!"). There are fascinating things to read over people's shoulders on the Tube. How could I possibly fail to like the UK?

Well, all right then. Hope you will do.

Appy to do. Cheers, mate.

More BT: Reasonable people might ask, WTF?

Today was spent in constant contact with BT, which does not imply that contact with anybody else has been made possible. The story: on Tuesday, I am promised that service will certainly begin on Wednesday, a mere four weeks from the time when the order was placed. On Wednesday, the service does not begin. On Thursday, your humble correspondent sends an angry note to his friend at BT requesting a joint effort to prevent intervention by Ofcom (the question of why regulatory agencies in this country have all borrowed their names from cheesy Margaret Atwood novels may be addressed at some other time). Later in the day a promise is offered that the situation will be addressed sometime before your humble correspondent bids farewell to a drooling senility. On Friday morning, your humble correspondent is told that service may already have begun -- it has not. He is then told that engineers have located a fault somewhere in the distribution network and that the problem will be repaired without an engineer having to be let into his home. He decides that there is no point in waiting at home, and so heads off to the office. On the way out the door, there is an engineer having to be let into his home. He does his mumbo jumbo, leaves, comes back again, does some more mumbo jumbo, and assures your humble correspondent that although his number has been changed, he should have service now. The existence of a dial tone appears to confirm these claims. Your now enthusiastic correspondent tries to call his wife and daughter -- no such luck. He tries to call his own office to see whether the line is working -- no such luck. He tries to call his own number from the mobile to see whether it rings -- no such luck. He calls his friend at BT again, we will see.

Working hypothesis: belatedly picking up the spirit of rebranding that once led a previous government to try to remove from the landscape every single pretty thing, BT has decided to repackage itself as the one-act play that Franz Kafka never wrote.

BT phone home

So it seems that BT is now promising, but firmly and sweetly promising, that I will have phone and internet service tomorrow. With the proviso of course that sve što su u stanju da brkaju najverovatnije i hoće, majke im kraljevske. But when that milestone is reached it is entirely possible that this blog may receive regular updates once more.

In the meantime, how does a poor boy remain in touch with the world? It is not easy, but one way is by sitting in my office, where today I received a quick lesson in the comparative culinary thrills of London and New York from a well-versed student. Another is by leaving to get a sandwich from the student takeout place, where another student introduced me to the works of his very charming heavy metal band.

Hazmat, kompromat, agitprop and other names for short-lived dance music outfits

It has been a while since there was any point in commenting on anything in Glas javnosti, but here I just wanted to point out that although the author of this brilliant expose of the Hazar threat to the non-Hazar threatened gives his name as Vlada Sinđelić, this is clearly an invented name made by combining a mysterious word from a sign in front of a building in Kneza Miloša and the name of a bakery not far from the legendary Gvozden. This is probably confirmed by the initials of the author "Vlada Sinđelić" being given at the bottom of the text as "E.G." That could be Eoseph Goebbels perhaps, but it ain't me.

Is Veliki mokri lug the new Mali mokri lug?

You might as well ask whether Prague is Prague.

Games people play

For your daily dose of cultural anthropology of sport by Özgür Dirim Özkan, don't miss his new Bosnian Football Culture blog. Also available in Turkish.

What a silly Dzugashvili

The theme of next year's convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (yes, the acronym is what you think, but no, it is not pronounced that way) is "The Gender Question." This harks back to the legendary Eighteenth Congress of 1936 when they solved "The Woman Question" and made a great leap forward toward solving "The Nationalities Question." On each occasion, they received $64,000.

BT: WTF?

We apologise for the inconvenience .....

BT's promise that telephone and internet service would begin yesterday was of course not met.

Apparently similar issues have been faced by Cory Doctorow, Brian Turner, someone named Matt, and Bob Jones, along with, I am sure, countless others.

An explanation

As much as I would like to say that the reason there has not been any posting here is that I have been working so hard. While there has certainly been some work going on, this is not the reason. Rather it is that I am waiting for my friends at BT to bring the magic of telephone and internet to my gracious new home. This should be resolved within the next couple of days, and we should back with running commentary on the delights of the Balkans and the west Balkans very soon.

Livin' large with Eric

Eric is preparing to move into his small but stylish new flat tomorrow. Soon things will be finally out of suitcases, and sheets and towels will be purchased!

Oh yes, IFCCS

The site of the new Institute for Comparative Conflict Studies has now launched. I have worked with these fine people a little in some earlier programmes they did in the Balkans, and now they are setting out, ambitiously, with their own organisation. It's worth a look.

Prohujalo sa veprom

Wild boar is delicious. But it might be said that wild boar taken with automatic weapons is not really in the sporting spirit. Nor are many other elements of this story.

Golden bear and crno jagnje

Hurrah for ETF and my alma mater. It would be delightful to see more universities from all over the region doing this.

Ponovo su oduševljeni građani dočekali oduševljenog političara s oduševljenjem

Politika really needs to be congratulated for the rapidity with which it has settled right back into the role of a proper regime paper, not too loud and scandalous, but not too reliable either, at least as a source of factual information (by the same measure, of course, this makes it fantastic as a source of other types of information). The lead headline is increasingly a summary of what position good citizens are expected to advocate for the day, and occasionally one will run across gems like today's lead photo. It is captioned "applause for Milorad Dodik at the basketball game between Partizan and Barcelona in Belgrade." I see Dodik with his arm up and his pancetta out, but close as I look, I cannot see anybody applauding. Or is it visible only to the editors of Poltika, Tinkerbelle, and folks who really wish it?

Romantic story of the day

I went last night to a lecture, which was really pretty good. At the reception afterward, I met a young couple, both of whom are former students at my present institution. They said that they had met, and their understanding for one another deepened, when they were given the job of preparing a joint presentation on Stjepan Radić.

Glas gadosti

Since nobody reads Glas javnosti (what, no market for the respectable sister of Kurir?) I may as well point this out. Every few days they come out with a new installation of what the murderer and drug dealer Milorad Luković - Legija said. Or what their anonymous writers wish he said. In any case, the link invites online readers to buy a printed copy of the paper if they want to follow along.

No, I didn't think so either.

U kandžama druge zime or whatever

Although I am not an admirer of the prose of Marko Vidojković, this taste comes from a lack of delight with his aesthetic. I have not reached the conclusion that, apparently, much sillier people have, that his narratives and his commercial success are the result of a massive conspiracy to, erm, well, I can't be sure here, maybe to compel young people to enjoy novels that I enjoy much less than they do? To deflate the natural popularity of agitprop (never did an ersatz art form have a better name)? Better to let Ivan Čolović explain it, I'm sure.

Avoid cretinous people: Lessons of a life in decontextualised science

Say what, Dr Watson? The fellow who, together with Francis Crick, received a Nobel prize for writing up the research of Rosalind Franklin, wants to stay in the public eye until it notices him, then wants to run away. He has had several rounds of controversy over the years for such things as going around the world suggesting to people which pregnancies, in his opinion, ought to be terminated. This time he has really put his mitochondria in it too. Here is the passage behind the latest inflammation, from Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe's profile of Watson in last Sunday's Times:

He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody but Watson himself, the remarks resulted in charges of racism. Institutions in England, where he was on a speaking tour to promote his book Avoid Boring People: And Other Lessons from a Life in Science, have cancelled his appearances. Then he got booted from his job, and has now fled England with his vestigial tail between his legs.

So as my dear friend would say in response to this sort of situation (actually: almost any situation), WTF? These are ideas that have been abandoned by everyone except a few professional provocateurs. Even if they were viable ideas, the relationship between "intelligence" and almost anything else -- such as skill, judgment, charm, decency -- is sadly pretty much nonexistent. And to see an eminent scientist going around promoting them, apparently not having dedicated a second's thought to their sources or implications? Has the world turned into the sort of place where people put fruit on pizza?

There are a couple of things going on here. The first of them is the constipated belief that a willingness to put forward ill-informed, foolish, extreme or merely offensive hypotheses can somehow be confused with "openmindedness." This belief is certainly widely held, especially among people who have never been compelled to confront the consequences of what they say or submit it to review (or who, like Watson and perhaps Marlon Brando, have been exempt from review for years because of their celebrity). The second is an approach more confined to intellectuals working in narrow fields -- I would be happy to say that this is a syndrome only among physical and natural scientists but of course it is not -- in which the criteria of that field are taken as the only ones that matter, even with regard to topics that have nothing to do with the field. In my research area, maybe this is best represented by lawyers' views on history and morality (sorry lawyers, but think about it, you wouldn't want these things constructed according to legal principles either). And for Watson, of course, it is treating highly dubious and very much predetermined findings about "intelligence" as though they were falsifiable lab results.

To offer a concrete example: can we attribute Watson's casual and ignorant racism to his DNA? It would be hard to think of any way that this could be achieved. In Watson's own words, "I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said." Rather, it is a result of his warped values and intellectual laziness, encouraged by a scientific community that subjects some of its members to peer review while treating others as if they were peerless.

It is certainly true, for reasons having not only to do with genetics, that nobody can control how they are born. Those people who are very fortunate can influence, if not how they die, at least how they might be remembered when they do. This might be elementary, even if not to Watson.

Greatness

Prepare to have greatness thrust on you, by Kal and Rambo Amadeus:

East Ethnian greetings from Northwest London

Yes, your humble correspondent has not been with you for a while as he begins to get himself settled in [do they really call it The Big Smoke? Why, when smoking is forbidden in most places?]. I have still not found a home, but expect this issue to be resolved soon. Fortunately, the friend at whose place I am staying does not seem inclined to tell me to leave just yet. Work, however, has begun, and I have a lovely office with a panoramic view of the chemistry labs. There is a lot to do, but for the first time, all of it is in my field, so it is hard to be anything other than delighted. And although my experience of the city has been mostly confined to my office and the local pub, this in no way prevents me from making the following observations:

1. All those people who say the food is bad here are gravely mistaken. In particular, the Phoenicia Market on Kentish Town Road is about as close as we mortals come to paradise. There is also the place with the fine looking fishies, but it always seems to be closed.
2. This idea that Americans have that other countries have cheap and efficient rail service has been thoroughly debunked, at least if we take England and Serbia as our test cases.
3. Everybody has the most adorable accent.
4. I must acquire the middle class male uniform, which would seem to consist of a) striped suit, b) blue shirt, c) no tie, and d) one of those mobile phone contraptions that people strap to their heads.
5. The pub is the living room of the neighbourhood. This is a good thing.
   

I think that would be it. Exoticism is a fine cultural practice, and I hope that none of my UK-ish friends will be offended by it.

Proeski killed in car crash

Those of you who follow Balkan pop as avidly as Balkan politics (of which there was a lot at yesterday's meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg) will be saddened to hear that Tose Proeski -- sorry, no diacritics where I write -- was killed in an accident on the Zagreb-Belgrade highway. He was just 26 years old.

For what it's worth: One Balkan blog fewer

In response to a campaign by net users, news reports say that Google has closed down the blog run by the remarkably atypical Novosadjanin Goran Davidović (although if you ask me, it was right there three minutes ago when I checked). Fans of the jovial little fuhrer can still, if they do not find his blog, visit his personal site or read this little profile bz Milan Laketić in Politika. So no worries, there should always be plenty of Goxy to go around.

My own feelings on the campaign to take the guy off the net are a bit mixed. I don't care for Nazis even a little, and my position on censorship is that it should be reserved for that small category of things that can be proven to be dangerous. Legal standards are vague (for an interesting application to an obscenity case see the exchange between the minority and the majority of the US Supreme Court in Miller v California from 1973). On balance I would have to argue that the "redeeming social importance" of sites by Mr Davidović and people from groups like his is that they provide a source of information about these groups. Of course Google (which runs Blogger, where both this blog and Mr Davidović's blog are hosted) is not a government institution, and is legally free to publish or refuse to publish anything it chooses.

Horst veselje

The fascist threat to Novi Sad does not appear to have amounted to much this time around. Several hundred people attended an antifascist meeting, where they listened to speeches and went to place flowers on a monument to victims of fascism. Police had promised to prevent the announced march by the members of the neofascist "Nacionalni stroj," and then arrested about 30 of the tonsorially challenged fellows when they created a provocation by throwing things at their opponents and the police.

It might be interesting to note what the neofascists intended to do: since the antifascists were going to commemorate a monument, they planned to put flowers on a monument to the nineteenth century politician Jaša Tomić. Tomić was not such a major figure: aside from murdering a political opponent, he is known for trying to lead an independence movement against Austria-Hungary and for being a founder of the Radical party in Vojvodina. There is a monument to him because the Radicals control the municipal government. There is also a village named after him, which was flooded not so long ago.

The reason the Nacionalni stroj cares about Jaša Tomić one way or the other is because of an old screed he wrote which gives a sort of eclectic apologia for antisemitism, where he blames the problems of Serbia on old-style market economics, Benjamin Disraeli, and a bunch of other vaguer things. The tradition of domestic antisemitism in Serbia is pretty thin: aside from this text, there is basically a stringing together of bad translations of religious texts by Vasa Pelagić, and not much else until Nikolaj Velimirović wrote something up while hanging out for a few months in the SS barracks at Dachau waiting for his pal Ljotić to get him sprung.

It is a good thing that people managed a public demonstration against the resurgence of fascism. I have had a couple of minor encounters with the members of these neofascist groups with bombastic names, and the greatest threat probably does not come from these small packs of scared teenage boys, whatever they may symbolise. But then fascist movements have never come to power on their own, it has always happened through the indulgence of more "respectable" politicians who were cynical and clueless.

Follow your eels

Packing up. Spending time with the family. Leaving for London early morning. Next posts to come once I set up shop.

Seven years

Remember that seven years ago it seemed that the Milošević regime had ended with the participation of, among other things, a fellow with a bulldozer? You could be forgiven if you did not. The fellow with the bulldozer is selling it, for 90.000 Euros. And why not? People have sold the legacy of 5 October for less.

Irony, anyone? The person who was minister of information for Milošević in 1996 and 1997 is now the director of RTS, where the famous bulldozer was directed in its day. But you knew that.

Sveti Džimi ubija aždahu

If the Serbian government is really taking advice from this fellow, expect brinksmanship, extremism and provocation. If their goal is to vanquish dark heathens, as well as pagans, apostates and impostors, though, this should be their guy.

Home office follies: They never end!

Hey, remember those documents and that letter the good folks in Sheffield wanted me to wait twelve weeks to receive back? Here I get this message from them that says:

Dear Applicant

Your letter and original documents have been returned to us undelivered.
We are having trouble sending these out to you as the package is so big.

Would it be possible for you to arrange a courier to collect these? We will hold them here until we receive a response from you.

Kind Regards
[name mercifully redacted by me]
HSMP Team

All right now, from the top: 1) my name is not "Applicant," 2) if you did not have a clue what to do with documents that you requested, such as the original certificates for my degrees, why did you ask for them?, 3) are you aware of the trust that is placed in you when people send valuable personal documents, and what is implied by your cavalier attitude toward that trust?, 4) is there special training a person can undergo to achieve a level of incompetence so monumental?

For your notational crudite, and not for your sheep

Okay, fine, I am all for government agencies doing what they can to communicate with the public. While the US State Department is not as shrouded in secrecy as some other agencies, including private companies that make US foreign policies with no disclosure or oversight at all, a start is a start. And a bad start is a bad one. Shall we begin with the name? Dipnote is presumably meant to convey something like "note about diplomacy." State Department, will you trust me if I tell you that it does not come off with that connotation? As for the content, well, they have only begun, but it does not say much and about what it says there is not much to be said.

Having said all that, offering information at all is probably a step in the right direction. Offering timely and useful information with a degree of interactivity and pointers to additional information would be a bigger step. Real dialogue and openness would be too much to hope for, and then the source providing it would be a different source altogether.

Of NATO-states and quasistates

My friends at Open Democracy asked me to comment on the froth around the Kosovo negotiations, so I wrote a little something.

Headline of the week

From Politika:

Како ће Срби прихватити ПМС

It's actually an article about the prospects of a new political party. Which might want to think about a different name. If not, let's hope they will accept it about as well as anyone else.

Quote of the week

Tomislav Nikolić, Serbian Radical Party, quoted by B92: "'Serbia has to be divided between democrats and radicals,' citizens have to decide between two large parties, and 'there is no room for the existence of some third, with an unknown profile which will in the end decide which of those two parties will be in power'."

This came in an article about how Novi Sad mayor Maja Gojković has distanced herself from the party since taking office, but it does sound like Mr Nikolić is speaking in the general sense. Is it time for people to ask, finally, which side they are on?

Vi me ne razumete mladi gospodine / ja strašno volim vaše životinje

It is a while since this blog has memed, but we have been caught with one by everybody's favourite coturnician blogger Bora. He is asking for experiences with animals, so there is no way I could not comply without the help of my daughter. Azra's answers go first, followed by Eric's:

An interesting animal I had

A: Lajos, my cute little Schipperke.
He is always up to something. He is a little naughty. A dog may not be so interesting by “type of animal” standards, but by doggie standards he is very interesting.
He is also about as well travelled as any other dog around. He has been trans-Atlantic 8 times so far, and he’ll be continuing to go trans-Atlantic for quite a while. He has been driven across the USA. He has been to many countries in Europe. Pretty much everywhere I go, he goes with me.

E: We used to have a horse named Amigo. Although his name meant friend, in fact Amigo had kind of a mean sense of humour. When we would take visitors for a ride on the beach, whoever was riding Amigo would get the surprise of breaking away suddenly from the group, running out into the water, and getting thrown in. This was the only kind of nestašluk in which he ever indulged.

An interesting animal I ate

A: Ostrich. I had it in a goulash, and it tasted great! Ostrich goulash was my favorite food for quite a while.

E: I love the Bambi paprikaš at Lovac, and also at the Čuburska lipa restaurant which is operated by Josip Broz, who shares a name with his famous grandfather.

An interesting animal in a museum

A: In the Harvard Museum, there is this enormous turtle/tortoise (I’m not sure which) shell from a prehistoric turtle/tortoise. It’s big enough for an average person to climb in and move around comfortably (though they wouldn’t be able to stand up). I always love seeing it.

E: The monkey house at the Belgrade zoo is always a treat. Partly for the monkeys, which are always up to something sort of humanesque. But it is best when there are a lot of people there, who try to get the attention of the monkeys from the other side of the glass. It is not always possible to tell which animal is on display for which.

An interesting thing I did with or to an animal

A: I gave my dog a swimming lesson. We would go to the beach and drop him in the water. He would immediately doggie-paddle (ha-ha) towards the shore. We’d have to ambush him, and then he would go swimming around, sneezing in protest. Eventually, though, he learned to like it. I wish he’d known that from the beginning!

E: I don’t know why this question keeps giving me images of dissecting frogs and the like in high school biology. That job always disgusted me, everything from the implicit cruelty and pointlessness to the smell. Strangely, when I put herbed butter underneath the skin of a chicken, it doesn’t bother me a bit.

An interesting animal in its natural habitat

A: There’s a type of frog that lives in Australia that makes its nice cozy home in a toilet. I think that’s about as interesting a natural habitat as you can get! Before toilets were invented, they had to make do with murky swamps.

E: I don’t know how interesting they are, but they have a lot of charm and are nicely suited to the limits of their environment: prairie dogs!

The practice, I think, is to tag other bloggers with an instruction to respond. I think what I will do instead is just encourage people to respond if they feel so inspired.

Nenad Bogdanović, 1954-2007

Today the mayor of Belgrade, Nenad Bogdanović, died after a long illness. He was smart, modest, decent and energetic, and gave an idea of how political life might be different if every public official was engaged with their community and had the ambition to do the right thing. The first directly elected mayor of the city leaves it behind cleaner, better organised, and better connected with the world around it than it was before he started the job.

Credit where it is due

If anybody has been following my ongoing visa saga, note the difference here. The timeline of receiving entry clearance is as follows:

• Friday -- Receive HSMP visa approval letter; fill out online application for entry clearance, gather documents
• Saturday -- Ship off application, documents and passport to UK consulate in New York
• Monday -- Receive confirmation from Federal Express that materials have been delivered
• Tuesday -- Receive e-mail from consulate confirming that materials have been received and offering an estimate of how long the process takes
• Wednesday -- Receive e-mail from consulate notifying me that approval has been given, telling me that materials have been sent back to me, and giving a tracking number
• Thursday -- Receive passport with entry clearance and return of my documents

Reliable and swift information, no delays, no problems, no complaints. That is the way it is done. I'll bet they could learn to do that in Sheffield too.

Next up is to confirm travel plans and get those students in London taken care of.

Eats shoots and leaves

We have a ton of maslačak. If anyone has any tasty recipes for it to share, they will be ever so welcome in the comments. I already know that chopped up and mixed with tomato in a salad is just delightful.

Spoken but unmarched

The police in Novi Sad have decided, after all, not to permit the march that the local neo-Nazis had planned to mark, of all things, the birthday of Heinrich Himmler. But racist fools will still have a safe place to meet, regardless.

Addendum: Marko Jakšić is no relation to Duško Jakšić or Boža Jakšić, both of whom merit the highest admiration. And Goran Davidović does not want you to call him Führer, please.

Chlorine and anarchy

It would be a fun little tidbit for any cheeky chronicler of politics (for example, Wonkette) to note that the Kennebunkport Bushies are not adored by the fellow who maintains their swimming pool. Of East Ethnian interest may also be the fact that the same guy's brother made this fine documentary film about anarchists and other folks in Zagreb.