Halfway down the Danube

Floods and help

I got my Cafe du Monde coffee mug out. There's nothing like coffee and hot beignets for breakfast. Unfortunately, the Cafe du Monde is (probably) underwater at the moment.

So, let me finish off the coffee and use it as a beggar's cup. Romania has been slammed hard by flooding. Euro readers, y'all should probably contribute there. NorAm readers, hell. My friend Dana's family is homeless. Brett Favre's family is homeless. Their homes are gone. Cash to the American Red Cross would be a good idea.

Living small

I am behind on furnishing the new digs. (The dresser, the new bed, et cetera.) But I did find this shop in the East Village which has stuff suitable for New York City's micro-apartments, which mine will be should I let the books take over (again). I was especially taken by this little sewing machine. I know, I know, a serious machine isn't much bigger than a typical computer peripheral, and I suppose I'll eventually succumb to their allure. But I still admire the cleverness behind this little guy's design, you know?

Manhattan has famously tiny apartments. But check out this European 2.6 meter cube, designed by people who studied the ergonomics of airplane lavatories. This article in Detail has more information; unfortunately, the public access version of the article has an embargo strip covering the meat of the text, but if you're clever, you can puzzle out most of it.

Incidentally, in the same issue there's an article on the treehouse dwelling people of New Guinea, the Korowai, who experienced sustained contact with the outside world beginning in the 1980s. (They're mostly living in compounds now.)

News roundup

Odds and ends of Romanian news from the last week.

You remember all those floods from last month? Well, Romania got hit with more of them. Another 25 or so people killed, and a couple of thousand homeless, and maybe another couple of hundred million in damages.

(American readers: to scale up, multiply everything by 15. So, in a US context, it's maybe 400 people dead and ~$3 billion of damage. In American terms, it's like Romania just got hit with two major killer Florida hurricanes in two months.)

A Romanian woman killed the popular 90-year-old priest Brother Roger, founder of the Taize movement, by stabbing him while he was celebrating Mass. The word at the moment is that the woman was mentally ill. Is anyone else reminded of the 2003 assassination of the Swedish Foreign Minister by a mentally ill Serbian man? Let's hope this isn't a trend.

The government got reshuffled, with four Ministries -- including the very important Ministries of Finance and European Integration -- getting new Ministers. The politics of this are not completely clear to me, but it looks like Prime Minister Tariceanu is either trying to make peace with President Basescu (one of the appointees is a close friend of the President), or trying to inoculate his government against Basescu's ongoing attempts to force early elections. Or maybe both.

Readers may recall that Tariceanu resigned a few weeks ago, setting the stage for new elections... then changed his mind and de-resigned. President Basescu was very unhappy about that.

This all takes place against a background of Romania desperately trying to get confirmed for entry into the EU on January 1, 2007... the EU can (and may yet) delay that entry, if Romania doesn't seem to be reforming fast enough. It's not clear if these political games will hurt Romania, but it doesn't look like they will help.

The Romanian government forgave 80% of the debts owed to Romania by Iraq... $2 billion out of $2.5 billion. Presumably this is part of Romania's effort to play nice with both the US and the EU; many EU members did the same thing last year, as part of the Club of Paris deal. It's not clear to me how big a sacrifice this was, because I'm not sure how valuable that Iraqi debt really was. Worth 90 cents on the dollar? 50? 5?

Still, even if heavily discounted, it's not chump change; 5% of $2 billion is still $100 million, which is a lot of money in Romania.

Low cost airlines multiplied like weeds all over Western Europe in the late 1990s. In the last couple of years, they've been spreading to the East as well. Now they're coming to Bucharest. Blue Air, a "Romanian low cost airline", will launch twice weekly 737 service from Bucharest Baneasa to Madrid on October 30. The market will presumably be the huge population of Romanian guest workers in Spain, but perhaps some Spanish tourists will trickle back to Bucharest as well.

Car sales in Romania in the first six months of 2005 were up -- take a deep breath now -- 60% over the same period in 2004. This suggests serious real growth in the Romanian economy, since cars are quite a bit more expensive relative to average income here than in the West. On the other hand, it's less good news for Romania's balance of payment (there's a domestic industry, but most cars are imported), and not good news at all for those of us who have to brave Bucharest traffic every day. Road construction and maintenance is, alas, not up 60%. Or even 6%.

Who would Jesus kill?

From the home office in Capernaum, Galilee, tonight's Top Ten: People Jesus Would Have Killed. That's right, Paul, Jesus. Who would Jesus have killed? Have had killed. Assassinated. Do you have assassinations in Canada, Paul?

10. The Pharisees
9. The Sadducees
8. Ungrateful lepers
7. That phony Simon Magus
6. Captain Kirk
5. Hecklers!
4. One of the twelve, that dips with Him in the dish
3. That guy who keeps on stealing His camel's parking space
2. He who casts the first stone with sin

and the number one person Jesus would have had killed -- drum roll please, Anton...

That fat bastard, Buddha!

Never say anything

For reasons which are unclear even to myself, I decided to use Google Scholar to get a list of all archived scientific journal papers with the words "National Security Agency" published before 1975.

There's a big cluster of papers funded by the NSA dealing with solid state physics, semiconductors and superconductors, from 1957 to 1961, with one paper on the properties of lithium hydride in 1959. Then there's a dry spell, followed by a steady flow of papers on mathematical techniques tangentially related to cryptography, computer security, and, of course, "Real-time recognition of ten vowel-like sounds in continuous speech".

It's known that the NSA developed the cryptographic technique known as differential cryptanalysis before IBM rediscovered it in the early 1970s during the development of the Data Encryption Standard. The NSA told IBM to keep it secret, which it did. The method was independently discovered in the late 1980s, by Biham and Shamir, who published in 1990. So the NSA is pretty good at keeping things mum.

But I'm a little curious if the NSA was trying for a quick run towards quantum entanglement technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and if so, did they find anything? And why the burst and lull?

Anyway, here's the list of papers for my readers Bernard:

Microwave Measurements of the Energy Gap in Superconducting Aluminum
MA Biondi, MP Garfunkel, AO McCoubrey - Physical Review, 1957

Investigation of a Shock-Induced Transition in Bismuth
RE Duff, FS Minshall - Physical Review, 1957

Hyperfine Structure of Paramagnetic Ions
V Heine - Physical Review, 1957

Cyclotron Resonance in Tin
AF Kip, DN Langenberg, B Rosenblum, G Wagoner - Physical Review, 1957

Dorfman's Proposal Regarding Cyclotron Resonance in Ferromagnetic Substances
C Kittel - Physical Review, 1957

Magnetoresistance of Single Crystals of Copper
R Olson, S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1957

Variational Calculations of Dipole Polarizabilities of Helium-Like Ions
EG Wikner, TP Das - Physical Review, 1957

Nuclear Interaction of 140-to 218-Mev K Mesons
BS Zorn, GT Zorn - Phys Rev, 1957

Hyperfine Interactions in F Centers
WE Blumberg, TP Das - Physical Review, 1958

Investigation of Time-Reversal Invariance in the ß Decay of the Neutron
MA Clark, JM Robson, R Nathans - Physical Review Letters, 1958

Photoconduction and Surface Effects with Zinc Oxide Crystals
RJ Collins, DG Thomas - Physical Review, 1958

Magnetic Anisotropy Constant of Yttrium Iron Garnet at 0° K
BR Cooper - Physical Review, 1958

Experimental Limit of the Neutrino Rest Mass
L Friedman - Physical Review Letters, 1958

Acoustical Loss and Young's Modulus of Yttrium Iron Garnet
DF Gibbons, VG Chirba - Physical Review, 1958

Spin-Lattice Relaxation Resonances in Solids
HS Gutowsky, DE Woessner - Physical Review Letters, 1958

Approximate Theory of Ferrimagnetic Spin Waves
TA Kaplan - Physical Review, 1958

Excitation of Spin Waves in a Ferromagnet by a Uniform rf Field
C Kittel - Physical Review, 1958

Interaction of Spin Waves and Ultrasonic Waves in Ferromagnetic Crystals
C Kittel - Physical Review, 1958

Paramagnetic Centers as Detectors of Ultrasonic Radiation at Microwave Frequencies
C Kittel - Physical Review Letters, 1958

Orientation of Nuclei in Ferromagnets
W Marshall - Physical Review, 1958

Majorana Formula
A Meckler - Physical Review, 1958

Linear Antiferromagnetic Chain with Anisotropic Coupling
R Orbach - Physical Review, 1958

Magnetic Field Dependence of Ultrasonic Attenuation in Metals at Low Temperatures
S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1958

Theory of Cyclotron Resonance in Metals
S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1958

Cross Sections for Double and Triple Meson Production in Hydrogen by Photons with Energies up to 1...
JM Sellen, G Cocconi, VT Cocconi, EL Hart - Physical Review, 1958

Penetration Depth, Susceptibility, and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Finely Divided Superconductors
M Tinkham - Physical Review, 1958

Superconducting Energy Gap Inferences from Thin-Film Transmission Data
M Tinkham, RE Glover III - Physical Review, 1958

Antishielding of Nuclear Quadrupole Moments in Heavy Ions
EG Wikner, TP Das - Physical Review, 1958

Paramagnetic Susceptibility in Superconductors
K Yosida - Physical Review, 1958

Remarks on the Theory of Superconductivity
K Yosida - Physical Review, 1958

A class of systematic codes for non-independent errors
N Abramson - IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1959

Metallic Transition in Lithium Hydride
RE Behringer - Physical Review, 1959

Cross-Relaxation in Spin Systems
N Bloembergen, S Shapiro, PS Pershan, JO Artman - Physical Review, 1959

Lattice Vibrations in Silicon and Germanium
BN Brockhouse - Physical Review Letters, 1959

The theory of autonomous linear sequential networks
B Elspas - IRE Transactions on Circuit Theory, 1959

High-Speed Microwave Switching of Semiconductors--II
RV Garver - IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 1959

Measurement of one-photon and two-photon wave packets in spontaneous parametric downconversion
YH Kim - JOSA B, 1959

Magnetic Form Factor of Cobalt
R Nathans, A Paoletti - Physical Review Letters, 1959

Antiferromagnetic Magnon Dispersion Law and Bloch Wall Energies in Ferromagnets and Antiferromagnets
R Orbach - Physical Review, 1959

Excitation of Spin Waves in an Antiferromagnet by a Uniform rf Field
R Orbach, P Pincus - Physical Review, 1959

Neutron Study of the Crystal and Magnetic Structures of MnFe_{2-t} Cr_{t} O_{4}
SJ Pickart, R Nathans - Physical Review, 1959

Temperature Dependence of Anisotropy Energy in Antiferromagnets
P Pincus - Physical Review, 1959

Relaxation Effects in a Maser Material, K_{3}(CoCr)(CN)_{6}
S Shapiro, N Bloembergen - Physical Review, 1959

Low-Temperature Impurity Conduction in n-Type Silicon
KR Atkins, R Donovan, RH Walmsley - Physical Review, 1960

Nuclear Spin-Lattice Relaxation Caused by Paramagnetic Impurities
WE Blumberg - Physical Review, 1960

Spin Relaxation of F-Center Electrons
WE Blumberg - Physical Review, 1960

Pulsed Nuclear Resonance Spectroscopy
M Emshwiller, EL Hahn, D Kaplan - Physical Review, 1960

Thermoelectricity and Thermal Conductivity in the Lead Sulfide Group of Semiconductors
D Greig - Physical Review, 1960

Electric Field Distributions in an Ionized Gas. II
B Mozer, M Baranger - Physical Review, 1960

Selective Spin Excitation and Relaxation in Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance
MJ Weber, EL Hahn - Physical Review, 1960

Nuclear Quadrupole Spin-Lattice Relaxation in Alkali Halides
EG Wikner, WE Blumberg, EL Hahn - Physical Review, 1960

Role of Double Exchange in the Magnetic Structure of Li x Mn Se
RR Heikes, TR McGuire, RJ Happel Jr - Phys Rev, 1961

Magnetic Structure Transitions in Li x Mn Se
SJ Pickart, R Nathans, G Shirane - Phys Rev, 1961

Diagnostic experiments in a magnetically driven shock tube.
JB Heywood, T REPORT - 1964

[CITATION] The invisible government
D Wise, TB Ross - 1964 - New York, Random House

The force density in polarizable and magnetizable fluids
LJ Chu, HA Haus, P Penfield - 1965

Algorithm 287: matrix triangulation with integer arithmetic[F 1]
WA Blankinship - Communications of the ACM, 1966

Algorithm 288: solution of simultaneous linear Diophantine equations[F 4]
WA Blankinship - Communications of the ACM, 1966

Word-recognition computer program.
B Gold, T REPORT - 1966

Experimental studies of handwriting signals
JS MacDonald, T REPORT - 1966

[CITATION] The ARPA network
L ROBERTS, B WESSLER - ... Networks of Computers Proceedings National Security Agency, 1968

[CITATION] The ARPA Computer Network. Networks of Computers Symposium NOC-68
L Roberts - ... Workshop, Ft. Meade, Md., National Security Agency, Sept, 1969

An alternative approach to macro processing
M Hammer - Proceedings of the international symposium on Extensible ..., 1971

Brief survey of languages used for systems implementation
JE Sammet - ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1971
Cited by 3

A system for interprocess communication in a resource sharing computer network
DC Walden - Communications of the ACM, 1972

Micromodules: Microprogrammable Building Blocks for Hardware Development
R Cooper - ISCA, 1973

A loop network for general purpose data communications in a heterogeneous world
TE Hassing, RM Hampton, GW Bailey, RS Gardella - Proceedings of the third ACM symposium on Data ..., 1973

Proving the adequacy of protection in an operating system
TA Linden - Architectural Support for Programming Languages and ..., 1973

Note on computing autocorrelations
W Blankinship - Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing [see also IEEE ..., 1974

Processing Times for Segmented Jobs with I/O Compute Overlap
LW Cotten, AM Abd-Alla - Journal of the ACM, 1974

Real-time recognition of ten vowel-like sounds in continuous speech
H Drucker, J Preusse - IEEE Transactions on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing, 1974

An artwork design verification system
HS Baird, YE Cho - Proceedings of the 12th conference on Design automation, 1975

Computer aided LSI circuit design: A relationship between topology and performance
P Losleben - Proceedings of the 12th conference on Design automation,

Design validation in hierarchical systems
P Losleben - Proceedings of the 12th design automation conference, 1975

Day 40 + 7

I went back on coffee a week ago.

I had been off for forty days, which seemed a suitably spiritual sort of number. Also, we had the road trip across Europe coming up, and Claudia made it pretty clear she didn't want to get in the car with me unless I was reasonably (and consistently) alert.

-- I think I was almost there. The physical symptoms had disappeared, and the psychological ones were abating. A few more days and I would have been back to full capacity, I think.

But this was a proof-of-concept sort of thing anyhow. I have small children, and I live in the Balkans; going off coffee for good would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

For now, I'm back on one cup per day, in the morning.

Poof

When I was a little boy, I used to disappear.

Not all that little, really. I was still disappearing until I was, oh, eleven, twelve? But by that time it wasn't so bad, because I knew my home telephone number, and was nearly as good at finding my Mom as she was at finding me. I went through a phase where I would get separated from her in a department store or shopping mall, realize it, and then have her paged. "Mrs. Muir, your son is at Aisle One. Mrs. Muir..." She seemed to find this upsetting. I told her that I'd learned it from all the times she had paged me over the years, but it didn't help. Go figure.

Anyway, my real glory days of disappearance were when I was much younger. Three, four, five years old. I didn't know my phone number, didn't know my address, couldn't describe my mother's last location better than "Mommy was over there". But hot damn was I good at disappearing. Crowded stores were a favorite, but anywhere would do. Airports and train stations. Parking lots. A busy sidewalk where Mom had paused to rummage in her purse. Central Park in New York City.

The ones my mother particularly remembers, after all these years? For amusement, the department store where I crawled under a rack of floor-length coats and went to sleep. For sheer white-knuckled terror, Rockaway Beach. You'd have to be a New Yorker to fully appreciate this, but Rockaway Beach is always standing-room-only crowded. The surf can get pretty rough, too, and there's a mean undertow. When I was a kid, there'd be a drowning or two every summer.

It's not a place where you want your five-year-old to simply vanish. But vanish I did, for three quarters of an hour. I don't even remember what I was doing -- possibly I went to look at the hot dog stand; I had no money, but it was always interesting to watch people buying hot dogs, the different things they put on them, and all. Or maybe not. But my mother still remembers it, oh yes.

...so we were driving from Ostheim to Passau, our first stop on the road to Bucharest. Ostheim is at the very northern tip of Bavaria; Passau is down at the southeastern corner, just a few miles from the border with Austria. It's about a four-hour drive. That's a longish while to drive with two small children without a break, so after a couple of hours we pulled into a truck stop.

Crowded truck stop. Busy truck stop.

You can see where this is going, right?

I just went around the corner to buy some apple juice for Claudia. Alan was with me, but after we stood in line for a few moments he started to fidget. (He hates lines.) So, "Go to Mommy," I said to him. He went around the corner. A minute or so passed...

"Where's Alan?"

"What? I sent him to you!"

"I never saw him!"

In the ten or fifteen meters between me and Claudia, he had just... disappeared.

Oh, we found him. It took about five minutes. Five very anxious minutes. David of course chose this moment to contribute an overflowing diaper, so Claudia's part in the search was cut short. The truck stop wasn't that big -- busy, but not big -- so there just weren't that many places to look. Although it's amazing how big a place can seem when you're thinking, what if someone grabbed him? Just offered him a friendly hand and walked off with him?

...he was in the men's room. He's very proud of his new bathroom skills, did we mention? So he had decided to go for a poop. A big old solo poop.

Now we are proud of his bathroom skills too, and want to encourage them. But we had to navigate a mixed message here, in a way perhaps too subtle for a three year old:

1) We're very glad that you can go to the bathroom by yourself.

2) But NEVER DO THAT AGAIN! AAHHH!!!

Epilogue: yesterday, we called my mother to tell her that we'd arrived home. Of course, I had to mention the truck stop incident. I suppose I was expecting some sympathy, some parental solidarity. Maybe some tips on how best to deal.

She cackled.

Home again

We've been on the road, driving from Germany to Romania.

This was about a 2500 km (1500 mile) trip, with a three year old and a two year old in the back. We originally planned to do it over seven days, but in the event we cut it to six -- the boys were talking about "home" a lot ("want go home"), and the car was starting to smell a bit.

We just got back a few hours ago. The boys are asleep in the next room, in their own beds again at last.

We originally planned to blog from the road, but that proved a bit... impractical. But we'll try to retroblog the high points.

More in a bit.

Ah, my people

Ah, Wisconsin. Where even the trolls are good-hearted. In adversity, we have something better than sang-froid. And although some things suck, we can be critical without being hateful (usually). Even our neighbors are decent.

And let's not forget the bars! (Note: this is Diablo's link, fixed. I have not tried this recipe myself, nor this one, nor this one, nor this one. Although I've eaten plenty of versions of them.)

It can only be attributable to human error

Do you remember the time you saw 2001 and you were so stoned that the ending not only made cosmic sense, but added visual texture to the next few weeks of your life?

I don't either. I saw 2001 the way God intended, with a fast-forward button, sarcastic friends, and some beer. (OK, a lot of beer.) But I've always been a little bit envious of those freaky-deaky types who did end up tripping the light fantastic to one of Kubrick's dullest movies.

Now, thanks to the miracle of children's television, I need envy no more! Oh the colors.

The strange thing is, very young children *love* this. Giant fat-assed pastel schmoos dancing spastically to cut-rate techno. It's like a rave at a Shriner's convention.

The evolutionary implications are highly disturbing.

The springtime of love

I thought I'd dig out some of the old family photos. These are my parents:

Whoops. No, that's not it. The fellow on the right is Filipino businessman Virgilio "Gil" Hilario, who bravely married the Finnish winner of the first Miss Universe pageant, Armi Kuusela.

These are my parents.

Spring, 1968. The year after Loving versus Virginia.

Hot weather breakfast

I was going to write about this yesterday, but you know what? It was too hot.

Let's see. Start off with Lazy Man's Sangria. You get a jug of wine and one of those orange juice fruit blends from the store. Mix them proportionately in a pitcher, and squeeze a lime or two in. Spike it with some brandy if you got it (and if you're drinking this on a Monday morning, you probably do). It's better if you let it sit in the refrigerator for a while, but it's not bad if you don't.

You don't want heavy starches. Fried potatoes are out. Thin toast with jam is good. Rice is good. Leftover black beans and rice is very good.

If you have mango trees in the backyard, this would be a good time to pick a few. If you don't, maybe the store has some? (Or not. Sigh.) If they don't, maybe they have some worthwhile melons? I live in hope.

You can't go wrong with a fresh ripe tomato and a hard-boiled egg, with some salt and pepper. (Casanova liked this.)

My dad's Old Country, in addition to being right under the Sun, lies at the confluence of several different biogeographic zones of ocean life. Breakfast came from two oceans and three or four phyla, things that they don't have names for in English. If you can, do.

They also serve tapas for breakfast. Not the various little dishes of Spanish appetizers, though the word might derive from the Spanish (then again, it might derive from the Sanskrit word meaning 'heat'); no, this tapas is candied pork. Here's a recipe for the American version.

And of course, coffee.

Too hot to blog

It's body temperature in Brooklyn today, and I used up all my creative energy getting a haircut. So, on to the links!

Elswhere has continued the book meme! Some very cool choices (I, too, recommend Jessica Mitford).

Ever wonder how the recent unpleasant trends in US domestic security were justified by the Constitution? Surprise: the Supreme Court has allowed these loopholes for over a century! They're called the Insular Cases. And in these troubled times, every man (and woman) is an island.

I was going to do a whole post on this article, "What the universe looks like from the inside", and call it The Markopoulou Case. If mind-expanding articles on the foundations of physics that involve some advanced math (but no calculus) are your thing, read it.

This was very cool. And so was this. And in an entirely different way, this.

And for Bernard, here's a web version of Dorothy Lewis's important 1992 review article, "From abuse to violence, psychophysiological consequences of mistreatment".

Yikes

Saw some people swimming in the Dumbovitsa today.

You have to understand: the Dumbovitsa is the little river that flows right through (and, in some cases, under) the center of Bucharest. It used to be a real river, but it flooded and caused trouble, so the Communists put it in a really ugly concrete trough. Most of the time it's only a few feet deep. The water is brown and stagnant and smells of old socks. In the winter, there isn't even that; it's just an concrete ditch through the middle of the city, filled with frozen mud and trash.

However... because of the recent heavy rains, the Dumbovitsa is unusually high. It's probably over 2 meters (maybe 7 feet) deep. And there's actually a little bit of current; if you watch a piece of trash on the surface for a minute or two, you can see it move very slowly.

But it's still an unpleasant deep brown color and, well, I really wouldn't swim in it.

But people were. I saw at least half a dozen of them today as I walked along the river on business. They were all wearing bathing suits, so this was clearly no idle whim. All boys or young men. They seemed to be enjoying themselves.

When I saw it, I literally stopped in mid-step and said "Yikes!" out loud. I must have looked rather odd.

Day Thirty-Six

It's finally getting better.

I still am a little irritable sometimes, and I still want coffee. But my attention span has come back to nearly normal, and the cravings have mostly died down.

The funny thing is, I've told Claudia that I'll go back on it again when I come up to Germany next week. So the experiment will have to be terminated.

I think another week or two and I'd have been fine. But that's okay. I turned the corner, and that's the key point. This was a proof-of-concept exercise anyway.

And the Sevagram goes to...

... occasional HDTD commenter Charlie Stross, who just won the Prix Hugo for his novella, The Concrete Jungle. Congratulations Charlie!

Maniu (2)

So there's this statue of Iuliu Maniu in front of the Senate here in Bucharest.

I blogged about a visit to the Senate a while back. But I didn't mention the memorials out in front.

There are two. One is a small, but very tasteful monument to the dead of the Revolution, immediately in front of the building. The other is a statue of Iuliu Maniu, who I blogged about last week.

I can't find an online photograph of the statue of Maniu, but: it's ugly. Hideous, really.

It's a bronze, slightly large than life size. Maniu is sitting in a chair, with a tree behind him. But the tree is leafless and rather abstract; it's like an ugly, spiky bronze candelabrum, giving no shade or shelter. Meanwhile Maniu himself has these big... cracks running all through his body. Like he's disintegrating, or someone is trying to chop him apart. And he's subtly disproportioned; his clothes are hanging on him, and his limbs are too thin, almost emaciated.

All in all, it's a nasty looking thing. Most people recoil a little. So did I, when I first saw it.

But: look again, and remember Maniu's story. Great liberal democrat, last honest man, spent his final years in a bleak Communist prison, froze to death and was thrown into an unmarked mass grave. The face of the statue is sad but calm; there's no hope in those eyes, but he's not broken either. The hands on the chair are turned upward, palms open. The body language is helplessness but not despair; he's accepting his fate, but will never admit it is right or fair.

If you know the story... the cracks in his body make it look like he's been, well, frozen and then thawed out. Well: there's Romanian democracy for you. Frozen for years under Communism, now thawed out, maybe not beautiful but present and accounted for. It's very appropriate that he sits in front of the Senate.

It's still an ugly statue. But the more you look at it, the more you realize how good it is. It's very rare in this part of the world to see the painful past acknowledged in this way. I think it's one of the best and bravest pieces of public statuary I've ever seen, and maybe the best in Eastern Europe. If you're ever in central Bucharest, make a point of stopping by.

(Unfortunately, it's not the only piece of public statuary in front of the Senate. More on this anon.)

The greatest story ever Vogued

Fellow Brooklynite Majikthise comments on an extremely cheesy apparition of Jesus in Frank Sinatra's hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey. Ring-a-ding-ding, pally!

This, however, is not the cheesiest piece of religious kitsch I have seen lately. No, that no-prize has to go to the good people at Nelson Bibles. After market research indicated that the reason teenagers don't read the Bible is because "it's too big and freaky-looking", Nelson Bibles decided to repackage the Bible to resemble a fashion magazine.

Honest. Here, take a look:

Yes, gaze upon it with wonder. It doesn't have the classic Vogue headline "Fifty Ways To Drive Your Man WILD In Bed", but I'm sure that's just an oversight.

Nelson Bibles is also trying to break into the "urban" market, with...

I'm surprised they didn't call it WORD.

Peace, y'all.

Old Houses

We live on a street of old houses.

Our house has been renovated, and it's very nice. Most of the houses haven't, though, and a lot of them are falling apart from decades of deferred maintenance. We're not just talking peeling paint here. There's a house across the street whose top floor has been abandoned for years; pigeons fly in and out of the open windows. It's sad, especially since it's a gorgeous old building. But there are dozens like it in our neighborhood, and tens of thousands more across Romania.

So why are these houses in such miserable condition?

1) Lack of money. Renovation isn't cheap, and few people have the large sums of money -- tens of thousands of dollars -- needed to do it right. The banking sector here is only mildly interested in housing loans, and most Romanians are in the credit history trap (viz., they can't get loans without a credit history, and they can't build a credit history without loans). In general, ordinary Romanians have a much, much harder time getting access to capital than Americans. So they can't do much except maybe save for years and years, while their houses continue to decay.

2) Lack of clear title. Who wants to sink money into fixing up a house that you don't have clear title to?

(a) Lack of clear title because of bad title records, title challenges, and legal messes going back to the Communist days. This has improved a bit in recent years, but is still a problem. Resolving a title challenge in Romania's creaky, overloaded court system can take years.

(b) Lack of clear title because the property was nationalized under Communism, and the former owners want it back.

That's a problem all over Romania, but it's a particular problem in our neighborhood. In the 1920s and '30s, this area was discovered by Bucharest's upper middle class; it was at the edge of the city then, but still an easy tram or bus ride to downtown. The big houses, with their balconies and gables and gardens, were built by Bucharest's doctors and lawyers and businessmen. In other words, exactly the sorts of people that the Communists particularly liked to dispossess.

About a third of the houses in our neighborhood still have the little metal plates -- "I.A.L" -- of the old Communist Housing Authority. These were simply taken away from the former owners and (usually) given to the use of deserving party members. Many more houses were not formally confiscated, but were turned to Party use anyhow... forced sales by the owners, eviction, you name it.

Now, since 1996 the old owners (or their descendants) have had the legal right to sue for recovery of those properties. In theory. In practice, it's been very difficult for people to get their houses back; of about 200,000 claims, less than 15,000 have reached any sort of resolution.

Part of the reason for this is that successive Romanian governments have not been committed to restitution. The vaguely center-right coalition government in power from 1996 to 2000 was lukewarm about it in theory, sluggish and confused in practice. Then, the Iliescu/Nastase Social Democrat government was deeply unenthusiastic about the whole thing. Former President Iliescu said on several occasions that he didn't see why "those people" should be entitled to anything. The Nastase government paid lip service to the idea, but in practice dragged its feet; petitioners were compelled to run a formidable gamut of appeals and retrials, decisions were regularly annulled and remanded, and the evidentiary and procedural requirements were periodically reshifted to start the process over again. All this in a court system that's one of Europe's weakest and (allegedly) corrupt to begin with.

Still, a few people got favorable decisions. And a few more went outside of the box, and appealed to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. To the government's embarassment, the ECHR began delivering a steady stream of decisions in favor of petitioners, compelling the government not only to hand over the properties but to pay the petitioners' legal costs as well.

Mind, this may still have been a good outcome from Iliescu/Nastase's point of view. Sure, they lost fifteen or twenty highly publicized cases at the ECHR. But they probably dissuaded or defeated hundreds, if not thousands, of potential claimants. So, from the narrow perspective of keeping the properties in the hands of the government -- or of the new owners, who are probably former Party members, and so likely to be Iliescu supporters -- the policy could be considered a success.

But it's left dozens of houses around our neighborhood -- and tens of thousands more across the country -- with clouded titles, still subject to lawsuits that look good for years to come.

And the new government, in office since December? Well, they do have a new idea on dealing with the problem, yes. More on this in a bit.