Halfway down the Danube

Carlos's non-fiction best of 2004

I've already written about some books I have found especially charming. Consider this an extension. These books aren't necessarily charming, but I keep on coming back to them. They're not all 2004 releases either, thank goodness.

Deep Time

Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity, Andrea de Jorio
Last Hunters, First Farmers: New perspectives on the prehistoric transition to agriculture, edited by Price and Gebauer
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European poetics, Calvert Watkins

The theme here seems to be, how can we determine how people lived at the limits of historical resolution? The Watkins, especially, is a tour de force of linguistic scholarship.

Dismal Stuff

The Big Problem of Small Change, by Thomas J. Sargent and Francois R. Velde
Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000-1700, Richard von Glahn

The economy might be screwed up, but at least we don't have to worry about the penny-nickel exchange rate, or carry scissors and a roll of silver foil around to the supermarket.

Folklore

Nart Sagas from the Caucasus, edited by John Colarusso
South of the Clouds: Tales from Yunnan, edited by Lucien Miller
The Inland Whale: Nine stories retold from California Indian legends, by Theodora Kroeber
African Genesis, by Leo Frobenius

The theme here is pretty much 'Legends of people who fell off the map'. Some strange stuff here, and one suspects that without the necessary intermediaries, it would be even stranger.

Godly Stuff

The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity, by Richard Fletcher
The Commentaries of Pius II
The Golden Yoke: The legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet, by Rebecca Redwood French
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Eight White Religious Leaders, and the 'Letter from Birmingham Jail', by S. Jonathan Bass

This is rather a catch-all category. Past members have included Peter Brown's The Body and Society and Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion. I might be Tuckerized as a polar bear named Otto because of the Fletcher. Then again, I might not.

Math

Proofs from THE BOOK, by Aigner and Ziegler. THE BOOK is Paul Erdos's name for the place the Supreme Fascist (i.e. God) keeps the most perfect mathematical proofs. This book is an Earthly approximation to that ideal. (The 'o' in Erdos should have two little hash marks over it. Not an umlaut, but one of those Hungarian deals.)

Between PFTB, Lawvere and Schanuel's Conceptual Mathematics, and Schneier's Applied Cryptography, I can render an average college student completely unemployable in a matter of weeks. Huzzah!

Poetry

Basho and His Interpreters: Selected hokku with commentary, by Makoto Ueda. An English translation of the great Japanese poet, a Japanese transliteration, a particle-by-particle English trot, a translator's note, and then commentary by three hundred years of Japanese critics on each poem... with no dates immediately given. The effect is compelling.

Songs of the Serbian People: From the collections of Vuk Karadzic, translated by Holton and Mihailovich. I keep on coming back to these poems, I suppose in the same way the Icelandic sagas have found a small but devoted American audience.

I am still coming to terms with the accomplishment of Lorine Niedecker. I tend to think that she was one of the twentieth century's great unknown poets, but she was from Wisconsin (as am I), so I wonder if it is partly due to hometown pride. Which is very Wisconsin, both the pride and the doubt.

And Niedecker is very Wisconsin:

Mr. Van Ess bought 14 washcloths?
Fourteen washrags, Ed Van Ess?
Must be going to give em
to the church, I guess.

He drinks, you know. The day we moved
he came into my kitchen stewed,
mixed things up for my sister Grace --
put the spices in the wrong place.

Rocket Science

Ignition! An informal history of liquid rocket propellants, by John D. Clark. Why isn't this book in print? No, I think I know why. I wore out a Xerox machine for my copy. The story of the heroic age of rocket fuel development, and funny too.

Project Orion, by George Dyson. Already a classic, on the cancelled US atomic bomb powered rocket. Yes, you read that right.

And a runner-up, They All Laughed At Christopher Columbus, by Elizabeth Weil. It's so sad. My favorite part is the reporter's attempt at getting the Roton crew to read Joan Didion.

Take Out

Swallowing Clouds, by A. Zee
The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters, by James D. McCawley

Two very cool books on, basically, reading Chinese menus. The digressions are lagniappe.

Whatever

Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, by Deborah Blum
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple
The Quattro Cento & The Stones of Rimini, by Adrian Stokes

I am not sure what mechanical monkey mothers, racism in the Raj, and Renaissance stonework have in common. But it's all good. 'Goon Park', by the way, is 500 N. Park Street in Madison, Wisconsin. Harlow drank at some of the same places I did (now mostly torn down).

And the best weblog for 2004 is Benn loxo du tàccu. Damn.

New government

As of yesterday (Wednesday), Romania has a new government.

It's a coalition between the Alliance, UDMR, and PUR. The Prime Minister, Mr. Tariceanu, is from the Democratic wing of the Alliance -- President Basescu's party.

Their first action has been to pass a flat tax, setting a uniform tax rate of 16% for both corporate and income tax. This is not a new thing in Eastern Europe; Estonia, Latvia, Russia, Ukraine and Slovakia all have flat taxes. However, the Romanian tax will be lower than the Baltic States (24%) or Slovakia (19%), while applying more broadly than the Russian or Ukrainian taxes (which are set at 13%, but only for personal income).

This was done last night, by emergency ordinance. The new tax system will be effective starting in 2005 -- in other words, the day after tomorrow.

If this is typical of what we can expect from this government, it should be an interesting time.

More in a bit.

Haradinaj, cont'd

For those who found the last entry interesting, I've written an expanded version for the Head Heeb.

More on this in a bit -- family festivities coming up fast.

Waiting for the last indictments

The Hague Tribunal on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia -- remember them? The folks who have been trying Slobodan Milosevic for the last three and a half years?

Well, they're starting to wrap up. The Tribunal must issue its final set of indictments by the end of 2004. In other words, within the next four days. After that, no more new indictments... they have to finish with what they've got.

Now, this is a pretty stupid idea. There are a lot of war criminals still running around. Many of them have committed ghastly crimes, murder and worse. Eight and a half years -- or five and a half, if we're talking about Kosovo -- is not a very long time. (By way of comparison, the US and Israel are still going after a few last elderly Nazi war criminals, and General Pinochet of Chile is facing prosecution for crimes committed in the 1970s.) Yet, once this deadline closes, the many war criminals not indicted will be... not quite home free, no, but able to breathe a lot more easily.

But the Hague Tribunal has been a mess. It has taken much longer and cost far, far more money than anyone ever imagined. So it's going to be shut down whether its work is done or not. (And it's not.)

There's plenty of blame to go around for this sorry situation, and maybe sometime I'll post about it. But in the short run, the big question is: will the Tribunal indict Prime Minister Haradinaj of Kosovo? Rumor in Serbia is that they will, but rumor in Serbia is not always a reliable source.

If they do, it will be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic in their hands. If they don't... well, that will also be the biggest thing since they got Milosevic. Either way, there will be big effects on the region.

More on this soon.

Klytus, I'm bored

God, I hate most current videogames. None of them satisfy my primal need to destroy very large objects in a realistic manner. I spent most of the past week sick, so I decided to use my enforced free time to do something about it.

Turns out that there is enough information available on this Interweb thingy to reverse-engineer the hydrodynamic modeling programs used to simulate Big Things Go Boom physics. You know, shaped charges, nuclear weapons, meteor strikes, the origin of the Moon, et cetera.

It's kind of funny that books on game physics ignore this. There is a niche here to be filled, people!

So let's start large. Let's smash planets.

The simulation of celestial mechanics has been covered extensively in the popular programming literature already. Most often, masses are treated as point sources that "collide" when a minimum distance is reached, in order to prevent crazy numerical divergences. There are sophisticated techniques to get around this problem, for close manuevers and so on. But each planet is tracked individually.

This approach is sometimes called Lagrangian simulation. Each individual mass has its coordinates tracked through space, like a fly on a screen door. But there's another possibility, where each spot on the screen's grid has its mass tracked. This is called the Eulerian method.

Already one can sense a problem with the Eulerian approach: the number of spots on the grid to be analyzed goes up as the size of the volume one is interested in. If you want to see jets of debris extending millions of miles -- and who doesn't? -- you're a little out of luck.

State of the art planet-smashing programs use a modified Lagrangian approach. Planets are composed of bundles of 'kernels', where the mass of each kernel is already spread out over a volume by means of a clever hack. Originally, programs fuzzed the mass using a Gaussian bell curve, the same sort sometimes used to grade exams around an average. But the area under a bell curve is a little time consuming to calculate cleanly, which is why statistics textbooks still have enormous tables in back.

The first simulation of the single impact lunar formation theory -- roughly, another planet strikes the early Earth, and some of the debris consolidates to form the Moon -- published by Benz, Slattery and Cameron in 1986 in the journal Icarus, used a slightly different method. There, the amount of mass in each kernel decayed exponentially from the kernel's center. This was much more mathematically tractable, though the math-savvy will see that a significant fraction of the kernel's mass must extend to infinity. More recent simulations make the math even simpler, using a smooth, quick-to-calculate curve called a spline, that has a sharp cut-off at the kernel's edge.

Another simplification made in the original Icarus paper was to use only the hydrostatic (read: easy) part of the stress tensors in the calculations for the proto-Moon and the proto-Earth. Basically, this means the planets act as giant droplets of liquid. But, as the authors dryly note, "As long as the impact occurs at hypervelocity, shear strength is not important, at least during the impact and for some time afterwards".

The treatment of the shock of impact is interesting. Turns out von Neumann and Richtmyer were looking into this in the 1940s, for what reasons I couldn't begin to imagine. "In the investigation of phenomena arising in the flow of a compressible liquid, it is frequently desirable to solve the equations of fluid motion by stepwise numerical procedures," by which Johnny here means computer programs, "but the work is usually severely complicated by the presence of shocks."

To get around this problem, von Neumann and Richtmyer added a new, non-physical variable to spread the shock out over the sharp edge of impact. "Our idea is to introduce (artificial) dissipative terms into the equations so as to give the shocks a thickness comparable to (but preferably larger than) the spacing of the points of the network." These terms had the same mathematical form as the equations for viscosity, the thickness of a liquid, and so this is sometimes called the artificial viscosity.

Last but not least, we need an equation to describe the behavior of materials under extreme conditions. For some things, the equation is easy. Even in the US, high school kids learn the ideal gas equation:

P * V = n * R * T

where P is the pressure of a gas, V the volume, n the number of moles (don't ask), R a constant, and T the absolute temperature. This can be tweaked to:

P = (gamma - 1) * rho * E

where rho is the density of the gas, E the internal energy, and gamma for an ideal gas exactly 5/3. It turns out you can use this for the Sun and only be a percent or two off.

Of course, planets, even when they are simulated as giant droplets of liquid, don't behave like ideal gases. At least, of course, until they are vaporized by impact. Turns out a guy named Tillotson in 1962 hacked together a reasonably fast formula to deal with regular Joe solids that might suddenly vaporize. It was first published in a General Atomics report, I couldn't say why.

Tillotson's formula comes in two parts, the first for when the internal energy of the material is less than the energy needed to begin vaporization (the cold part), and the second after the internal energy has passed the point of complete vaporization (the hot part).

The cold part is:

P = a * rho * E + (b * rho * E / (E / (E_0 * eta ^ 2 + 1))) + A * mu + B * mu ^ 2

Apologies for the alphabet soup. P, rho, and E are as before; eta is the current density divided by the standard density; and mu is that number minus 1. E_0, a, b, A, and B are all material dependent constants.

The hot part is somewhat worse:

P = a * rho * E + ((b * rho * E / (E / (E_0 * eta ^ 2 + 1))) + A * mu * exp(-beta * ((1 / eta) - 1)) * exp(-alpha * ((1 / eta) - 1) ^ 2)

where alpha and beta are also material dependent constants that control how quickly the material begins to act like an ideal gas.

Pressures in between are extrapolated linearly, easy enough.

Note the parts I have put in bold. They're similar to the above equation for an ideal gas, no? Theoretically, a should be exactly 2/3. Observationally, for most materials, a = 0.5 works better. Also, some tweaking shows that A behaves very similar to a bulk modulus, so you can pull out a speed of sound = sqrt(A / the standard density).

Still, most of these coefficients are a little difficult to calculate (or frankly, even to find). So I've compiled a list, taken mainly from Melosh's Impact Cratering. The current state of the art goes straight to the thermodynamic state variables, but perhaps some game designer or recreational programmer might find these of use.

For aluminum, the standard density is 2700 kg per cubic meter, A 75.2 gigapascals, B 65 GPa, E_0 5 megajoules per kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 3.0 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 13.9 MJ/kg; a 0.5, b 1.63, alpha 5, and beta 5.

For basalt, the standard density is 2700 kg/m^3, A 26.7 GPa, B 26.7 GPa, E_0 487 MJ/kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 4.72 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 18.2 MJ/kg; a 0.5, b 1.5, alpha 5, and beta 5.

For granite, the standard density is 2680 kg/m^3, A 18 GPa, B 18 GPa, E_0 16 MJ/kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 3.5 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 18 MJ/kg; a 0.5, b 1.3, alpha 5, and beta 5.

For iron, the standard density is 7800 kg/m^3, A 128 GPa, B 105 GPa, E_0 9.5 MJ/kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 2.4 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 8.67 MJ/kg; a 0.5, b 1.5, alpha 5, and beta 5.

For limestone, the standard density is 2700 kg/m^3, A 40 GPa, B 67 GPa, E_0 10 MJ/kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 2.5 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 14 MJ/kg; a 0.5, b 0.6, alpha 5, and beta 5.

For water ice, the standard density is 917 kg/m^3, A 9.47 GPa, B 9.47 GPa, E_0 10 MJ/kg, the energy of incipient vaporization 0.773 MJ/kg, the energy of complete vaporization 3.04 MJ/kg; a 0.3, b 0.1, alpha 10, and beta 5.

(The B value for water ice is extrapolated; it possibly should be significantly higher. Also, note that a is low. This is due to the effects of molecular water. You'd expect this effect in ammonia or methane ice as well.)

Alas, I don't have any values on hand for exotic materials like diamond or metallic hydrogen (the latter, I am not sure if anyone does), so smashing open Jupiter is a little difficult.

But smashing terrestrial planets open, or even colliding stars, should be well within the reach of current videogame platforms. L.B. Lucy in 1977 simulated a protostar spinning apart with 300 particles in four minutes on an IBM 360. Benz, Slattery and Cameron used 2048 particles in their lunar impact simulation less than a decade later. Surely Moore's Law has caught up to the point where this could be done on an Xbox or a Play Station?

Bikes and trikes

Alan got a bike and David got a tricycle for Christmas. And boy, do they love them. We spent two hours slowly walking through the town today, along the Streu river. Alan rode his bike (with support wheels but anyhow, he did a great job), and we pushed David on his trike which came with a very handy push-bar. Two hours of exercise in the good air of the Rhön, followed by a three-hour nap.

Life is good.

The bhoys of the NYPD choir were singing Oye Como Va

And a Merry Christmas from HDTD West headquarters here in Brooklyn. Cheers!

PS The Green Bay Packers 34, the Minnesota Vikings 31 -- in the Metrodome! Thank you, Brett.

Happy Holidays

We are not posting, it's true. That is because I'm in Germany with the kids and have little time to spare. Doug was working hard all week and is on his way to the airport as I'm typing this (safe travels, love). He'll arrive in time for the presents German style (Christmas Eve). The kids will also get presents tomorrow morning - American style. Lucky kids!

We will try to write some but it's not a promise. Also, I'm sure you have better things to do than reading blogs during the holidays, eh?

Anyway, we wish you all very Happy Holidays, if applicable, and generally a nice time to all. Enjoy family and good food, exotic locations or hometowns, take it slow and unwind. Hugs all around,

Claudia

Words of Wisdom

Rainy, rainy day today. So rainy that we couldn't go outside at all. We built a fort out of blankets and the dinner table but I admit, Alan had way too much TV anyhow. In our defense, his language abilities don't really seem to suffer too much. Two examples from today.

Alan: Where are you going, Daddy?
Doug: I'm going outside.
Alan: Are you going to the office, Daddy?
Doug: No, I'm going to the supermarket.
Alan: Are you getting the Economist?
Doug: I'll check whether they have the Economist, but of course they won't have it.
[Pause]
Alan: Daddy, in Herastrau they have the Economist.

(Herastrau is Alan's favorite park. They don't usually carry the Economist there. And no, they didn't have the Economist at the supermarket, because they never do as early as Sunday.)

Over dinner:

Alan: Daddy, where's your ice cream?
Doug: Well, I don't have any because Mommy didn't bring me any.
[Pause]
Alan: You can get it yourself, Daddy.

Cosma and Iliescu

Miron Cosma is in Timisoara today, after departing the high security prison in Rahova.

Foreign readers may wonder what all the fuss is about. It's a little hard to put Cosma in a Western European or American context. Cosma is much more than just a union leader. He's a political player with heavy connections to Romania's shady business elite. Maybe more important, he's also a media star. For years he had a relationship with the Romanian pop star Marinela Nitu. It's more than a little reminiscent of the Arkan-Ceca relationship in Serbia, although (1) Arkan killed a lot more people, and (2) Nitu had the good sense to dump Cosma a year or two back.

So Cosma is still an important figure. Even after five years in prison, he still can inspire (depending on where you stand politically) fear, loathing, or admiration.

A lot of people say they're worried that PSD, or at least Iliescu, may try to use the miners again. This seems unlikely to me; Romania has come a long way since then. But certainly the horrible events of 1990-91 -- when the miners ran wild through central Bucharest for days, beating and killing student protestors, and attacking the houses and offices of opposition leaders -- are still fresh in the collective memory.

Pardoning Cosma wasn't Iliescu's only act on his last day in office. He also pardoned 44 other people, including the former deputy director of police in Timisoara county, who was convicted of ordering the killing of protestors during the 1989 Revolution.

Oh, and he also awarded a medal to Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the leader of the Greater Romania Party. (I'm not really sure why.) Nobel Prize Winner Elie Wiesel, who was born in Romania, promptly announced that he was giving back the medal he'd recieved from Iliescu some years earlier, since he didn't care to share it with a known anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

Iliescu has left Cotroceni Palace (new President Basescu was inaugurated yesterday), but he'll still be around. He has a seat in the Senate, and he may be the next President of the Social Democrat Party.

They are out to get me

My allergies used to be the stuff of legend. Sneezing fits like the tarantella, my head changing shape, the works. But I would take this nifty prescription drug named Seldane, wash it down with some grapefruit juice, and be able to participate in NYC's smoky nightlife on a semi-regular basis.

Turns out Seldane can do bad things to one's heart, and so the US's Food and Drug Administration decided to pull it (but not until there was a substitute on the market). I don't take antihistamines any more, and oddly enough, my allergies are much better.

More recently, I developed a minor but rather painful achy-breaky thing, for which the cute doctor prescribed happy little pills of Vioxx. Hurrah!

Turns out Vioxx can do bad things to one's heart, and so the US's Food and Drug Administration decided to pull it (and there was already a substitute on the market). Flush! down went the Vioxx, to join the Seldane in providing the organisms of NYC's sewer system with interesting metabolites.

So I am currently fighting off a cold, which from long experience feels like it will turn into a painful sinus infection. You know, the kind that seem like a ninja is gently pushing his thumbs into your eyes all day, where your body only seems capable of producing pints of festive orange micrococcal mucus.

Since I have no intention of staying in bed this week, wondering what hospital technology will be like when I die, I decided to make some decongestant herbal tea.

Guess what?

You got it. Turns out that innocent herbal tea contained ephedra, which can do bad things to one's heart et cetera.

Sigh. So I made this instead.

Take an onion, chop it fine, and heat it in some oil. Add a bunch of chopped scallions, and a few stalks of chopped celery. Cook until the onions get clearish.

Add the mixture to a pot of canned chicken broth. Squeeze in the juice of a lemon. Let it simmer. (Here, I also added some 'pumpkin spice' mixture that an exgf left me. It's ground cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice.) Serve in a sipping bowl, soup mug, or (ahem) coffee cup.

There's also a winter cordial that is good in these situations. You take equal amounts of frozen raspberries, white sugar, and gin, mash them together, and let it sit in your freezer for a few weeks. Then you strain out the liqueur.

Not wanting to wait a few weeks, I listened to Snoop Dogg and mixed some gin and raspberry juice instead. I don't know whether this is helping my cold or doing bad things to my heart, but you know what? I don't care.

Miron Cosma and his friend

From @rgumente, Dragos' excellent blog:

[..] Well, in 1999 Miron Cozma tried the same trick since the newly appointed government was taking restructuring economic measures with respect to mines. Remember that Iliescu was in opposition at that time. So Cosma took his miners and marched to Bucharest threatening to do the similar things he did in 1990 and 1991. Well, it didn't work out - Radu Vasile, the PM at that time, met him somewhere at half of the road and calmed him down. And he then asked the Justice to take action. The result: Cosma and the other leaders were imprisoned for some 18 years.

Now, surprise, surprise: this morning Iliescu uses his presidential power to release Miron Cosma from prison. I think it is an outrageous thing, but Iliescu has debts to pay, and he does pay them in the very last moment. This is Iliescu - the guy who harmed Romania perhaps more than anybody else in the last 15 years, because what he did and what could have done and hadnot.

It's sad and upsetting and, oh. Read the whole thing here.

UPDATE I've also written on Fistful of Euros on this.

Street encounters

I was in Mogosoaia today, to get the car fixed. (If you're familiar with the area and wondering why I go so far out of town... well, the repair shop there is fast, cheap, reliable and German.) On my way back, I saw something that wouldn't be remarkable at all in the US, quite remarkable in Germany and I've never seen it in Romania so far.

Have a look:

I know what you're thinking. A truck, so what? Well, have a closer look at the printing on the outside:

I looked up the company, Transallianz GmbH. It's a German freight shipping company located in Neu-Ulm in Southern Germany. Transallianz has subsidiaries in Romania, namely in Timisoara and Bucharest.

Neither the homepage nor any googling revealed what this slogan is all about, though. The homepage is as plain as can be, with no reference to anything Christian or religious.

The Romanian caption is from Philippians 4:13 - "I can do everything through him who gives me strength." That's a pretty appropriate slogan for a moving company, eh?

I still wonder about the story behind this truck. There's gotta be one.

Horse Trading

Hard haggling and much behind-the-scenes scrambling as both major parties struggle to form the next government.

New President Basescu has said that he'll put forward a Prime Minister from his own party. But (as noted in previous posts) his party doesn't have a majority in Parliament. No one does. So, horse trading.

It gets complicated because -- I'm going to simplify this -- PSD is unified, organized, well-financed and desperate; but on the other hand, Basescu is one stubborn SOB. So it could be an irresistable force vs. immovable object sort of thing.

The two smaller parties, UDMR and PUR, can make or break a government. They were very close to signing an agreement with PSD yesterday, but backed off at the last minute... probably because Basescu threatened to force early elections. Early elections might be bad for Basescu's party, but they'd be potentially lethal to PUR and no fun for UDMR either. So it's a powerful card to play.

(Constitutionally, if Basescu puts a PM candidate forward three times, and gets rejected by Parliament three times, then elections are mandatory. So Basescu could force it. Would he? Or is he bluffing? Can't say just now, but it adds an interesting twist.)

One big problem for Basescu is the perception that the Alliance is weak, indecisive, and internally divided. (I don't know if this is true, but that's the perception.) Even strong Basescu supporters seem lukewarm to the prospect of an Alliance government. Everyone remembers 1996-2000, when Romania went through a series of unstable coalition governments and the country seemed to suffer accordingly.

Will Romania have a government for Christmas? We're all watching with interest.

11 random reasons to love Romania

Apropos of yesterday's post and the slightly cranky comment thread that grew out of it. After nearly two years here, we are still trying to figure out the mysteries of the Romanian self-image. Pride and defensiveness, patriotism and constant self-criticism -- it can be a little confusing. This probably deserves a long post in its own right.

Meanwhile, here are eleven random things that foreigners like about Romania (not necessarily in order of importance, nor claiming completeness):

1. The people.
2. Wonderful peaches.
3. The Olt Valley.
4. Christmas carollers.
5. Bucharest parks.
6. Best tomatoes ever.
7. The Carpathians.
8. Good economic growth.
9. Child friendly.
10. Governments can lose elections.
11. EU material!

I challenge you to add more! Let's have it for the good things!

The Christmas Picture

Which one for the family, what do you think? They are a bit blurry because I took pictures of the original prints. I lean towards the first one, since goodness knows why Alan is wearing dirty pants in the second one. Don't know what I was thinking...

Village food for us

We had a wonderful meal yesterday. We had meat, and the meat was good. You have to know that it's really hard to find a good piece of meat in Bucharest. Outside, in the country, the meat is so tender it melts in your mouth. I suspect that the city dwellers are just getting the old tough cows and pigs, whereas the country people feast on the young juicy ones.

Anyway. Our nanny went to her mother's village last weekend. They slaughtered the traditional pig for Christmas and she came back with a big bag full of meat of us. We froze most of it but made some last night. It was yumm-y! I'd forgotten how good pork can taste. Hm.

Europe glows

... is the title of a recent Zeit-magazine article about the borders of Europe and how to define what is Europe and what not. The article is interesting in its own right but I really like the photo that came with it. It shows Europe at night - glowing. You can pick out single cities easily enough. You can see the borders of the Alps by the chain of lights gracing its northern slopes.

And you can pick out the shape of Romania. Because it's a black region in the sea of lights.

See for yourself:

UPDATE A friend of mine once said that in Serbia, everybody has a persecution complex. In Romania, everybody has an inferiority complex. It's an oversimplification but there is some truth to it.
How else could readers of this blog react like this? I mean, isn't this picture amusing? As obviously photoshopped as it is? With the entire Republic of Ireland black? Almost all of Switzerland and Austria uninhabited? The region in Germany where I come from is also pitchblack, by the way. I mean, it's so clearly tampered with, didn't anybody see the irony in this? Sheesh.

Basescu!

Prime Minister Nastase conceded the presidential race about an hour ago. Traian Basescu has won, and will be Romania's next President.

Final result: 51.2% for Basescu, 48.8% for Nastase.

This was very unexpected, and may lead to a period of political turbulence.

One early development: the Humanist Party (Partidul Umanist Romania, or PUR) has announced that "for the best interest of the country", it is willing to enter into negotiations with any other party. Since PUR ran on a joint ticket with PSD, this is a major slap to PSD, PM Nastase and (about to be former) President Iliescu.

This might (might!) affect the balance of power in Parliament. If PUR splits away from PSD, here's how the numbers break down:

PSD (without PUR) 113
Alliance 112
PRM 48
UDMR 22
PUR 19
Ethnic minorities 18

Total 332 -- 167 required for a majority

You may recall from my last post on this topic that PSD/PUR is the current governing party. The Alliance is the opposition; it's a coalition of the Democrats (Basescu's party) and the Liberals. UDMR is the Hungarians, while PRM is the obnoxious xenophobic nationalist-populist party.

Until now, it was assumed that PSD and PUR would stick together, UDMR would join them, and they would go shopping among the ethnic minority members for the extra votes needed for a majority.

But if PUR leaves PSD, it's all up in the air. Assuming that PRM stays out of play (not certain), then Alliance + PUR + UDMR = 153, still not a majority but just as big as the PSD/PUR/UDMR combo.

So, really, who knows.

Senate

PSD 47
Alliance 49
PRM 21
UDMR 10
PUR 10

Total 137 -- 69 required for a majority

PSD + PUR + UDMR = 67, not quite a majority
Alliance + PUR + UDMR = 69, just barely a majority

Ugly possibility: PSD joins with PRM. This would give solid majorities in both chambers. However, it would mean letting PRM into government.

Two weeks ago, I said "it looks like PSD/PUR and UDMR will be able to form a government. It'll be a government by a very narrow Parliamentary majority (at least initially... that may change, as members move around), but it will be a government."

This is still possible -- PSD is still the strongest party, with deep reserves of money and organization. But it seems a lot less certain than it did just yesterday.

Either a fragile coalition or a minority government, is how it's looking tonight.

Women's Shelter?

A quick plea for help: Do any of our Romanian readers know of a women's shelter here in Bucharest? I know there is at least one (it's small, I hear -- four persons tops). Does anyone have the number, is there another, can I have that number too?

No, it's not for me. Doug is the kindest human being you can imagine, and he has a big, big heart. (I love that guy, I can't help myself.) In any case, I'd take the credit card and stay at the Hilton. With room service. (And he knows that.)

But, please. If you know, send me the number by mail: claudia dot muir at gmail dot com. Thanks!

Basescu?

As of 11:00 this morning, it looks like Traian Basescu has defeated Adrian Nastase in the runoff election for the Romanian Presidency.

If the mood in my office is typical, then most Romanian readers of this blog will already be celebrating. Non-Romanians will be wondering what it's all about.

Short version: Nastase, the current Prime Minister, was very much the business as usual candidate. He ran a campaign whose message was (I am paraphrasing), "who cares if there's corruption? We're getting some good economic growth. We're going to join the EU. Sit back and don't worry your pretty little head about politics."

Basescu... well, Basescu at least presents the possibility of change. He's a former naval officer who's been the Mayor of Bucharest for the last few years. He has his little quirks, which I may blog about later, but most urban and educated Romanians consider him vastly preferable to Nastase.

This result is unexpected, to say the least. Nastase beat Basescu by 8 percentage points in the first round, two weeks ago. And he had near-total dominance of the media, a much larger and more powerful party machine, and pretty much unlimited funding. Even Basescu supporters had seemed more or less resigned.

If this result is confirmed, it means that Romania will be entering on a period of "cohabitation", with the Prime Minister's office and the Presidency held by different parties. This will be a new thing for Romania.

The Rules

Driving in Romania is horrible, and driving in Bucharest is worse. The German in me despairs of the continuous ignoring of street signs, lines on the street, other traffic, traffic rules, and common sense. After over a year of driving in Bucharest, though, I'm quite adjusted to local standards, so when shuttling the kids to school or making a grocery run, I just unleash my inner barbarian. It's not pretty.

However, I observed and I learned and I found there are rules that people are sticking to. They are just different from rules anywhere else. So, here are The Rules for Driving in Bucharest for you.

Traffic lights

Observation: The unexpected fact is, Romanian drivers stop at red lights. Mostly. There is a subspecies of drivers that doesn't but I'll explain the various categories of Romanian drivers later. In any case, as soon as the green light turns orange, most people stop.

Sort of.

They stop, and then they inch forward. A little bit. And a little bit. And some more. If you are a pedestrian in the crosswalk, this is more than a little unnerving. It's like walking past a cage of hungry hyenas: you're pretty sure the bars will hold, but you can't like the way they're looking at you.

Then, the light turns green.

Nothing happens.

For about five seconds or so, nobody moves. Then, somebody honks and everybody gets moving.

Rule: Green lights aren't actually green until five seconds have passed. This is to make sure the traffic light isn't bribed by crossing traffic and suddenly morphs back into being a red one.

Left turns

Observation: Left turns are immensely popular here, especially when they are forbidden. Romanians love left turns. In fact, they love them so much, that there usually is too little space to accommodate all those fans of left turns. So they ingeniously line up in rows. Four, five cars side-by-side at a left turn are no uncommon sight. Since they all have to merge into a single or double-lane road after making the turn, it can be a bit tricky not to be cut off by other drivers making the turn.

Rule: Never give in. Never leave a space big enough for another car to fit into. Honk at everyone. Ignore traffic lights and oncoming traffic. Watch your left side, always.

Roundabouts

Observation: Roundabouts are busy and Romanians love to take them at high speed. Roundabouts are great for enforcing your dominance on the road -- the bigger and stronger you are, the further left you drive, especially when you want to make a right turn, like, now. Those pesky drivers who are in the middle lane and want to go straight, heaven knows why? They will yield if you just honk very loudly.

Rule: Everybody can make a right turn, even those in the innermost lane. Stand your ground. Honk back.

Overtaking

Observation: If there is so much as an inch on your left side, you will be passed. Tram tracks are just a rather bumpy pass lane.

Rule: There is none. Regard that dent in your car as a rite of initiation. Don't cry.

Honking

Observation: Everybody honks. You honk to remind the idiot in front of you that he is napping at a green light. You honk to make the pedestrian scamper a little faster. You honk because your car is bigger. You honk because your kids are screaming in the back. You honk because you are.

Rule: Honking is OK. Don't get hung up on it. Only exception: buses. Never, ever honk at buses. You may even honk at one of the four hummvees that are driving around town because they have to stick to The Rules too. Buses don't. And they are much bigger than hummvees.*

*I did witness a hummvee honking at a bus once. Everybody was stunned, even the bus driver - for a moment. The hummvee driver was Canadian and I'd love to hear his story one day. I left the scene as quickly as I could. I had kids in the car, after all.

Desperately seeking

So I am a little burnt on the written word at the moment. In that spirit, I come to the readers of this blog, hat in hand, for book suggestions.

I'm going to be a little picky here. First off, no science fiction, fantasy, or mystery. (This is not because I dislike those genres of fiction.)

Secondly, if it's a well-known 'comfort' author, like Jane Austen or Patrick O'Brian, yeah, I've read them and enjoyed them. (With the exception of the Flashman novels, which I can't stand.)

Third, no humor. (This is because I dislike most humor.)

Hell, here's a list of books I have found especially charming in the last few months:

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature and The Woman That Never Evolved
Robert Sapolsky, A Primate's Memoir

I suppose the theme here is 'biology books on what it means to be human'.

Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth

Two beautiful poetic detailed studies on the Irish island of Aran.

Edith Templeton, The Darts of Cupid and other stories
Kenji Miyazawa, Once and Forever

Two wildly different short story collections that somehow end up at the same place.

And to triangulate things a bit, I just finished Dawn Powell's The Locusts Have No King, or how nothing has changed in New York City in the past fifty years, and Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, which will not be a gift for certain exgfs. Though both novels are very good.

Any suggestions?

Rumsfeld hates Germany, I'm sure

BERLIN (Reuters) - Lawyers acting for a U.S. advocacy group will today file war crimes charges in Germany against senior U.S. administration officials for their alleged role in torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"German law in this area is leading the world," Peter Weiss, Vice President of the New York-based Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a human rights group, was quoted as saying in Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper's Tuesday edition.

According to the group, German law allows war criminals to be investigated wherever they may be living.

Those to be named in the case to be filed at Germany's Federal Prosecutors Office include Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, former Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet and eight other officials.

The group is due to present details of its case at several news conferences on Tuesday, according to invitations faxed to media organisations.

© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.

I just wished I could believe that something comes out of it.

Diplomacy

Teo Peter, founding member of the Romanian rock group "Contact", was killed in a traffic accident in Bucharest on December 4.

Peter traveled in a taxi that was struck by a US Embassy vehicle driven by US Marine Robert Christopher. Witnesses report that 31-year-old Marine drove his car at high speed through an intersection, did not heed the traffic signs, and hit the taxi. The impact was so forceful that the taxi whirled through the air and hit a pillar in front of the Sudanese embassy. Rescue workers could not save Peter's life, the driver of the taxi was severly wounded but is said to be in stable condition.

Christopher was brought to the police station, where he was questioned and took a breathlyzer test. He agreed to these procedures and also signed a sworn statement.

Daily News reports:

According to Bucharest Police, the breathalyzer test showed the American driver had a 0.09 milligrams alcohol level in his blood, where as, under Romanian law, drivers are not allowed to drink at all. When police saw the breathalyzer results, they tried to take the marine to the National Institute of Forensic Medicine to perform a blood test, but he refused, saying the institute does not use the "medical instruments offered by the embassy," according to the police press release.

The U.S. Embassy announced the marine has already been taken out of the country, guarded by a security officer, and is now in a U.S. military base in Europe.

The Romanians are understandably upset about this incident. They demand the return of the Marine and a waiver of his immunity. They refer to the case of a drunk Georgian diplomat who killed a little girl in an accident in the US in 1997. Back then, the US demanded of Georgia to waive the diplomat's immunity and the request was granted.

U.S. Ambassador Jack Dyer Crouch said the Romanian authorities were informed that the Marine officer would be taken out of Romania, adding that the Convention in Austria states that any embassy employee has the right to leave the country in order to be investigated in his own country. Crouch said the Romanian authorities did not need to give their approval for the American Marine to be evacuated to his own country, as his departure was in the interests of those involved in the case and that it was a decision of the American government.

Well.

A random thought about the elections

One reason that Romania's government is getting back into office is that the opposition parties can't work together.

The Democratic Alliance can't abide PRM, Partidul Romania Mare, the nationalist Party of Greater Romania. And this is understandable. PRM is pretty odious.

But what if they weren't?

(Here follows some completely random, uninformed political speculation.)

An Alliance-PRM coalition would be just as big as the current PSD/PUR -UDMR union. It would control a clear majority in Romania's Senate, and would be just a few votes short of one in the Chamber of Deputies.

A PSD-PRM coalition would be even better. "Drop the Hungarians, and those silly minority members in the Chamber. We're your natural allies. Join with us, and govern with a clear majority instead of one that's vulnerable to random defections."

It would be great, from PRM's point of view. They'd be kingmakers.

Except it can't happen, because they're just too hated. Right? The Alliance has said it won't ally with them under any circumstances. PSD/PUR hasn't said that in so many words, but there would be heavy European pressure on them against taking PRM as a partner. It has been made quietly but firmly clear that PRM is just not acceptable as a member of government. And this is not a time for Romania's governing party to be offending Brussels.

But what if PRM could purge themselves?

A lot of odious nationalist-populist parties have managed to get into government following a makeover. It's a Europe-wide phenomenon. To give just an obvious example, consider the Freedom Party in Austria. Far-right, xenophobic, nativist, anti-immigrant, and inclined to be just a little too upbeat about some of the nastier aspects of Austrian history. Four years ago, when they first got into government, it was a major diplomatic issue.

But that was then. By now the Freedom Party has been in government twice. Nobody even notices them any more.

So the thing is possible. And the easiest way for PRM to do a makeover would be to dump Vadim Tudor.

Think about it. He's the public face of the party, and he's almost universally despised outside of it. Former court poet to Ceausescu. He's arrogant and pompous. Eccentric. Used to be a loud anti-Semite; now claims he loves the Jewish people. Has said that Romania "can only be governed through the mouth of a machine gun".

Dump Tudor, and the PRM would have a chance to rebrand itself. Still nationalist, still populist, but within acceptable limits.

Is this plausible? I have no idea. Comments by Romanians welcome.

Christmas baking

Alan helped me bake Christmas cookies yesterday. He rolled out the dough and he wielded the cookie cutters like a pro. I guess it helped that they were all "transportation" shapes -- cars, trucks, motorcycles and more cars.

David is pretty good at rolling the dough, too, but I didn't get any pictures of him in action.

Election results (2)

We have some more solid election results today. Verdict: it looks like Romania's present government will just barely squeak back in.

Here are the results as of this morning:

Chamber of Deputies

PSD/PUR 132
Alliance 112
PRM 48
UDMR 22
Minorities 18

Total 332 -- 167 required for a majority

You may recall from my last post on this topic that PSD/PUR is the current governing party, while the Alliance is the opposition. UDMR is the Hungarians, while PRM is the obnoxious xenophobic nationalist-populist party.

PSD/PUR plus UDMR = 154 members, 13 short of a majority. The Alliance plus PRM have 160, 7 members short of a majority. (Of course, the Alliance has always said that they wouldn't join with PRM anyhow.)

But then there are those minority members. Under Romanian law, certain ethnic minority groups are guaranteed representation in Parliament. These include Germans, Gypsies, Bulgarians, Ukrainians, Turks and Armenians, along with some more obscure groups like Aromanians and Lipovans. Each of these groups gets at least one member in the Chamber of Deputies, and there are 18 of them altogether.

So that's where the government will go to get its majority. This may involve some odd little bargains, but it should be doable.

Senate

PSD/PUR 57
Alliance 49
PRM 21
UDMR 10

Total 137 -- 69 required for a majority

PSD + UDMR = 67, so they fall just short by two senators. PRM + Alliance = 70, which means they could have a majority in this chamber, except of course the Alliance will never etc. etc.

Unlike the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate has no minority members. So the government can't pick up the extra votes there. But all they need in the Senate is to find just two turncoats from the 70 opposition members. Given the resources that PSD can deploy -- they are the government, after all -- they'll very probably be able to to this.

So, it looks like PSD/PUR and UDMR will be able to form a government. It'll be a government by a very narrow Parliamentary majority (at least initially... that may change, as members move around), but it will be a government.

Or at least that's how it looks tonight.

Don't look the other way

Molly Ivins about the Red Cross Report:

It is both peculiar and chilling to find oneself discussing the problem of American torture. I have considered support of basic human rights and dignity so much a part of our national identity that this feels as strange as though I'd suddenly become Chinese or found Fidel Castro in the refrigerator.

One's first response to the report by the International Red Cross about torture at our prison at Guantanamo is denial. "I don't want to think about it; I don't want to hear about it; we're the good guys, they're the bad guys; shut up. And besides, they attacked us first."

But our country has opposed torture since its founding. One of our founding principles is that cruel and unusual punishment is both illegal and wrong. Every year, our State Department issues a report grading other countries on their support for or violations of human rights.

The first requirement here is that we look at what we are doing – and not blink, not use euphemisms. Despite the Red Cross' polite language, this is not "tantamount to torture." It's torture. It is not "detainee abuse." It's torture. If they were doing it to you, you would know it was torture. It must be hidden away, because it's happening in Cuba or elsewhere abroad.

Read the entire thing. She makes a good point about reciprocation of which I hadn't thought of before.

Day off

Yesterday was December 1, Romania's National Day. This day commemorates Romania's unification with Transylvania after the First World War. I blogged about it in a little more detail last year.

(Hm, rereading that post, I see that I said I'd write something about Romania's experience in the First World War sometime. One year later... well, it's been a busy year, is all I can say.)

National Day is a day off for Romanians. But it's not a vacation day for me, the employee of a foreign firm. So I went into the empty ofice and rattled around with the other two expats. Fair enough; on Thanksgiving, it was the other way around.

In the evening, Claudia and I went to a movie. That's right! We got a babysitter and we went to a movie, like two civilized human beings. It was at the Bucharest Mall (which is a place that really deserves a blog entry of its own), at the top floor multiplex. Before the movie, we shopped a little. Then we bought a couple of calzones in the food court. By the time they were ready, the movie was starting, so we stuffed them into Claudia's handbag and smuggled them into the theater.

"You know," I said, nodding at the handbag, "I bet we'd feel a lot worse if we did this in a German movie theater."

"Oh, we would never do this in a German movie theater," said Claudia. "It wouldn't be allowed."

And we sat in the movie theater and ate our calzones and watched the movie.

In other news, the boys are adjusting to life without pacifiers. Unfortunately, this adjustment seems to include staying awake for at least two hours every night. It's almost 10:00 pm here, and Alan has been in bed for nearly two hours. But as I write this, he's standing up in bed talking loudly to himself. And this is fine... because last night he woke up at half past midnight, and didn't get back to sleep until two.

The Romanian parliamentary elections are still sort of up in the air. Oddly, there's not much change since my post of a couple of days ago. PSD is still just short of a full majority. Opposition Presidential candidate Basescu is claiming fraud... not massive Ukraine-style fraud, but just enough to pip the opposition out of being able to form a government. More on this in a bit.

Oh, and a cat has sort of adopted us. The cat also deserves a post. Cat... mall... elections... Romania in the First World War.

Maybe I should go to bed now. Good night, all.