Halfway down the Danube

Independent Kosovo (1)

I recently said that Kosovo didn't make much sense as an independent country. Let me follow up on that a little.

Kosovo will probably gain "conditional independence" sometime within the next 12 to 18 months, with full no-kidding independence coming some years later. Whether that's a good idea or not is another question. Let's just ask: what would an independent Kosovo look like?

I'll start by assuming that Kosovo won't be partitioned (although I think it should be).

Kosovo is a rough square or diamond about 100 km (60 miles) on a side. It has an area of about 10,000 sq km. In American terms, it's bigger than Delaware but smaller than Connecticut. By European standards, that's pretty small for a country, but not unheard of. Current EU members Luxembourg and Malta are smaller, and Cyprus is about the same size.

Kosovo's population is around 2 million, but this is very approximate. There hasn't been a proper census since 1991, and a lot has happened since then. (A new census is planned for next year.) The Albanian population's birth rate has been high -- very high, for Europe -- but on the other hand there's been a lot of emigration, both formal and informal. So nobody's really sure what the current population is.

The population is ethnically divided. Almost all of the Serb minority now lives in distinct enclaves. The biggest enclave is in the northern corner of the province, adjacent to Serbia. Perhaps 150,000 Serbs live there. Another 100,000 or so are scattered in "island" enclaves of settlement across the province.

The two major ethnic groups hate and distrust each other. There are a couple of municipalities where they manage to work together, but at the provincial level they mostly ignore each other. Serb representatives have been elected to the Parliament, but refuse to take their seats.

There are still incidents of Albanians shooting at or otherwise attacking Serbs and Roma. (The Albanians consider the Roma to have been junior partners to the Serbs. This is on top of the anti-Roma prejudices common to the region.) Serbs keep a very low profile outside of their enclaves.

Geographically, Kosovo is a plateau surrounded by mountains. There are no large rivers going in or out. There is a rail line that runs north into Serbia and south to Macedonia, but there is no rail connection into Albania. There are some decent two-lane paved roads, but no highways.

Kosovo is landlocked and does not have easy access to the sea.

The soil is good and there's plenty of agricultural potential. The province can easily produce surpluses of things like wheat, beef and milk. There's local wine (not that great) and local tobacco (very good). The hills and mountains are full of herdsmen and their flocks.

There are a number of large mines -- lead, zinc, nickel, silver. (The Trepca mine complex used to be the biggest base-metal mine in Europe.) There's plenty of lignite, soft brown coal.

There is a fair amount of industry scattered around -- a cement plant, a battery factory, things like that. Most of it is in pretty bad shape, though. Milosevic fired most of the Albanian miners and industrial workers, and then appointed cronies to run the plants. Most of them date from the Communist period and are suffering from 15 years of deferred maintenance.

The electrical infrastructure is in awful shape, with regular blackouts. Lack of reliable power is a major drag on the economy.

Kosovo's human resources aren't in great shape either. Milosevic deliberately and maliciously set out to cut the Albanian majority off from educational opportunities, and he had some success. Albanians were frozen out of the university system for nearly a decade, and mostly driven out of the high schools too. The Albanian set up their own, parallel educational system, but it was starved for funds. In part because of this, only about half the adult population has education beyond grade school.

The economy is not doing very well. Per capita income is around $1,200 per year. Even at PPP, it's only about $3,000. This puts Kosovo in a dead heat with Moldova for the title of "Poorest Country in Europe".

Economic growth soared after the 1999 war, but has flattened in the last year or so. Unemployment is around 40%. Roughly 35% of the population lives in poverty, with about 12% in "absolute" poverty.

Organized crime is a major problem. Corruption is very prevalent. Politics are fragmented and driven by clan and regional loyalties. The government has rapidly grown beyond the capacity of the tax base; it is heavily subsidized by grants from the international community.

The President, Ibrahim Rugova, has lung cancer. Kosovo's first Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, was indicted by the Hague for war crimes and had to resign. None of this has helped political stability or maturity.

Okay, this is getting kind of long. Tomorrow, I'll talk about some of the good news, and then try to sketch how an independent Kosovo might develop.

Forty-Five White Headstones (revisited)

Earlier this year I visited Tirana, Albania. While there, I made a surprising discovery: a WWII gravesite full of British soldiers.

[The headstones] mark the British war dead of 1940-45. Albania wasn't a major theater of action, but apparently things were happening, because forty-five British soldiers got killed. (I counted the stones.)

It was very moving. The stones were simple white limestone. Each had a regimental crest -- "South Lancashire Fusiliers," and such -- a name, age, dates, and a short line. Sometimes these were obviously dictated by the family ("Your wife and mother will cherish your memory"); more often, they were lines of poetry or Bible verses. The youngest soldier I saw was 22; the oldest, 37.

The whole enclosure wasn't more than twenty feet by thirty, tops. It sat at a wide spot in the path, overlooking the little lake. There was a small stela with some withered poppy-flower wreaths, presumably laid by the local British community.

I did notice one odd thing about the site: the headstones seemed much older than the graveyard itself.

...the enclosure and stela were obviously new, not more than a few years old. But the headstones looked older, possibly old enough to date back to the war. The obvious conclusion would be that there was an original cemetery set up by the British just after the war, but that the Communist government shut it down after relations soured. (But then, why keep the headstones? Or did they simply move the whole thing to some isolated spot in the mountains for 45 years?)

That post got a number of interesting comments.

First, the little graveyard turned out to be a Commonwealth War Graves Commission Site.

"Following the end of the war in Europe, an Army Graves Registration Unit entered Albania with the task of concentrating the remains of Commonwealth Servicemen, lost in the struggle to secure Albania freedom, into a site chosen in the capital, Tirana. However, due to the political situation in the country, this task could not be completed, though 52 sets of remains were recovered in the short time available. Eventually, in 1955, after repeated requests to enter the country were refused, the Commission took the decision to commemorate the 38 identified casualties on special memorials erected in Phaleron War Cemetery in Greece. This situation remained thus until 1994, when a change in the political situation in Albania allowed a Commission representative access for the first time. He discovered that the original individual burials had been moved by the Communist authorities to an unmarked collective grave located under a path near the university buildings in Tirana."

An unmarked collective grave. Gotta love Enver Hoxha. After nearly 50 years, I wonder how they found them?

Anyway, that explains why the gravestones looked old, though the graveyard was obviously new:

"At the beginning of 1995, the 38 special memorials were removed from Phaleron and re-erected as close as possible to the site of the mass grave, in an area designated the Tirana Park Memorial Cemetery. In 1998, following a study of the Graves Registration unit files, it was possible for the Commission's records staff to confirm the identities of a further seven casualties previously buried in Tirana War Cemetery as unknowns."

The same site also has a nice photograph of the graveyard, and capsule biographies of the dead soldiers.

I mention this because, in the comments to the original post, I cited one of the capsule bios:

Lot of Special Ops fellows, which makes sense. A couple of air crews. Several Australians, too. Two NCOs who were just 19 years old.

And one Chaplain 4th class -- the Reverend Gareth Bernard, age 32, son of the Revd. Edgar Banting and Charlotte Emily Banting, of Plumtree Rectory, Nottingham. M.A. (Cantab.).

A Cambridge man, who came a long way from Plumtree Rectory.

Months later, I got this e-mail:

I was pleased to find a reference at last to Revd. Gareth Banting. My father-in-law in named after this gentleman, who was a close friend of his father's at Cambridge.

I was looking for any further details of Revd Banting's death. The story told in my father-in-law's family is shocking and hard to credit in its original form.

The story was that he died in North Africa. He is said to have come across a British sergeant about to drive a party of German prisoners across a minefield. Unable to countermand him, Revd. Banting undertook to accompany the Germans, and was killed.

Such an atrocity would be difficult for any British person to accept, especially in North Africa where the war was generally fought with chivalry - one of the German commanders called his memoirs 'Krieg Ohne Hass' - War Without Hate...

Knowing however that Revd Banting died in Albania, the incident becomes more credible. I couldn't comment on the attitude of British Special Forces (he was attached to 2 Commando)to taking prisoners in general, but in a partisan war - especially this partisan war - the killing of prisoners would be much more common. The partisan war in the Balkans was as I understand fought with brutality and atrocity on all sides, especially against civilians and prisoners.

Personally I attribute the destruction of Yugoslavia in the 1990's substantially to the grief and hatred the Germans left behind - every bit as bad as in Poland and Russia.

I wanted to revisit this because I strongly agree with that last point. Much of the recent bloody history of the Balkans gets attributed to "ancient tribal hatreds". That's nonsense. A slightly more sophisticated analysis ascribes it to the fissures left by the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. That's a bit better, but it's still missing a huge piece.

The Second World War is the elephant in the kitchen of Balkan history. Many if not most of the region's problems -- especially its problems with violence -- date back to that war and its aftermath. In Southeast Europe, World War Two was very bloody and very bitter, and it left festering scars that have not entirely healed today. Every country in the region was drawn into the war, and every country in the region took heavy casualties.

So, for instance, Kosovo. World War Two rolled over it with blood and fire, just like the rest of the Balkans. It was annexed to Italian Albania, then taken over by the Germans two years later. Tito's Communists and the Serbian Royalist Cetniks both were active all over the province, shooting at the Germans and at each other. The Albanians tended to support the Axis, and some joined the "Skanderbeg" Waffen SS division. (A few went the other way and joined the Communists. None went with the Cetniks.)

So, between Communists, Cetniks, Germans and Albanians (Nazi and non), Kosovo was a free-fire zone through much of 1944. And even after the Germans left, the killing kept on. The province wasn't really quiet until 1949, and Tito's new government had to kill a lot of Albanians first. So, much of the bitterness in the 1980s stemmed not from "ancient" hatreds, but from mutual accusations of atrocities, massacre and ethnic cleansing in the years between 1941 and 1949.

Anyway. God rest the late Reverend Gareth B. Banting. And may it be a long time before any other Cambridge men have to come to the Balkans to die.

A Pair of Timberland Boots

I had a few moments to spare on my last day in Pristina, so I visited the museum.

I ended up kinda wishing I hadn't.

The museum itself is a lovely two-story building, a renovated Ottoman villa, in the center of town. (Pristina doesn't really have a center, but it's near that big intersection where there are, like, four mosques in a two-block radius.) From the outside, it looked pretty promising. Kosovo has no lack of history, goodness knows. So I was looking forward to... oh, I don't know. Stone Age fertility carvings? Roman coins? Ottoman rugs? Surely something interesting.

Well, yes and no. There was only one exhibit in the museum. It was quite a large exhibit. You could spend a while looking at it. No Roman coins or Greek vases; no, just this one big exhibit.

And that exhibit was...

Can you guess?

Weapons.

Swords. Muskets. Bayonets. Rifles. There were blades from the Ottoman days, and a lot of guns from WWI, and some more from WWII. But most of all, there were modern weapons, the kind used by the KLA to fight the Serbs. No, that's not right. Not "the kind", but the ACTUAL weapons used by the KLA. Some of them, anyway.

They had AK-47s and hunting rifles and hand grenades. They had Bowie knives and 9 mm pistols. They had the terrible .50 caliber tripod-mounted sniper rifles, the ones that can blow a man's head off from a mile away. And then they had some more AK-47s.

It might have been more interesting if the posters -- and they were quite elaborate -- had been in English. But they weren't. Only Albanian.

So, in addition to reinforcing an unfortunate stereotype about Albanians, the whole thing got pretty boring. I mean, after the dozenth or so AK-47, they do sort of run together.

There was one interesting thing. It was a glass case containing a pair of boots. They were nice looking boots, almost stylish. Something made me look twice, and there across the tongues was the label: Timberland.

The boots were there, of course, because they'd been the standard boots of the KLA. But that begs the question: what were Timberland boots doing in a war in the interior of the Balkans?

The answer is, they were sent there by the Albanian-American diaspora. The diaspora always supported the KLA, but after the massacres started -- especially the March 1998 massacre of the Jashari family -- they started emptying their pockets, contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month to keep the KLA going.

Someone sent along some Timberland boots, and the guerrillas fell in love with them. Apparently 1990s Kosovo was still pretty retrograde in terms of boot technology. The local boots were either heavy, clunky, and chafing, or light, leaky, and prone to disintegrate. The Timberlands, though, were warm, watertight, light, comfortable, and lasted pretty much forever.

The KLA guys were living hard and sleeping rough, hiking up and down icy mountains and fording streams swollen by rain, so good boots meant a lot. Once they got a taste of Timberland, they told their American cousins to go back and get another couple thousand pairs. Which the Americans did. And by the time the war was over, the KLA guerrillas had fallen so deeply in love with Timberland boots that they gave them the highest possible accolade... they put them in their exhibit of weapons, right next to the AK-47s.

Strangely, the Timberland Company has not made use of this remarkable story of brand loyalty. Maybe someone should tell them.

-- Oh, yeah. Those scary .50 caliber sniper rifles? Can you guess where they got those?

American gun shows. Some people have used them to kill elephants, so they're classified as hunting weapons in the US. They're perfectly legal in almost every state. So the diaspora supporters of the KLA bought a couple of dozen of them and just shipped them to Albania. The airlines didn't care as long as they were in sealed checked luggage, and Albanian Customs didn't present any problems that a $100 bill tucked into your passport couldn't solve.

They put the guns into four-wheel-drive vehicles, drove them up into the Accursed Mountains, and then took them over the border into Kosovo on the backs of men and donkeys.

A .50 caliber sniper rifle... well, it's really more like a man-portable piece of light artillery. It will punch through the armor of anything lighter than a medium tank. It'll go through Kevlar body armor like a normal bullet through light cotton. You can use it to take out a truck by shooting it in the engine block.

You can buy them at US gun stores too, but then you have to pass a background check, which can take up to three working days. At a gun show, you don't. Most of the Albanian-Americans could have passed the check, but they were in a hurry. So they just went to the gun shows instead.

Timberland boots and .50 caliber sniper rifles. More reasons for them to love America, I guess.

Unacceptable conditions

This already happened last week but I only read about it in the Zeit magazine today. I wonder how much media attention it got in the US -- neither Doug nor I had noticed any reports about this but then, we've been busy, so it might have slipped past us.

If you are a reader of this blog you may know that I've been outraged by the US treatment of "enemy combatants" for a long, long time. It's shameful, to say the least, and bad things just keep happening. I would love to be wrong, I really would. But it seems not.

Going with the theme is this piece of news from yesterday:

[Sorry for the extended quote but NYTimes links go bad after a week or so.]

Four U.S. soldiers face disciplinary action for burning the bodies of two Taliban rebels -- a videotaped incident that sparked outrage in Afghanistan -- but they will not be prosecuted because their actions were motivated by hygienic concerns, the military said Saturday.

TV footage recorded Oct. 1 in a violent part of southern Afghanistan showed American soldiers setting fire to the bodies and then boasting about the act on loudspeakers to taunt insurgents suspected to be hiding in a nearby village.

Islam bans cremation, and the video images were compared to photographs of U.S. troops abusing prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Afghanistan's government condemned the desecration. Muslim clerics warned of a violent anti-American backlash, though there have been no protests so far.

American commanders immediately launched an inquiry and vowed that anyone found guilty would be severely punished, fearing the incident could undermine public support for the war against a stubborn insurgency four years after U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban.

The U.S.-led coalition's operational commander, Maj. Gen. Jason Kamiya, said two junior officers who ordered the bodies burned would be reprimanded for showing a lack of cultural and religious understanding, but that the men had been unaware at the time of doing anything wrong.

Kamiya also said two noncommissioned officers would be reprimanded for using the burning of the bodies to taunt the rebels. The two men also would face nonjudicial punishments, which could include a loss of pay or demotion in rank.

''Our investigation found there was no intent to desecrate the remains but only to dispose of them for hygienic reasons,'' Kamiya said. He added that the broadcasts about the burned remains, while ''designed to incite fleeing Taliban to fight,'' violated military policy. From the New York Times

I'm just struck by the sincerity of it all.

Infested

So we have this little monster infestation at our house. We have a new maid and in her "other" household, there are monsters living in the basement. She uses those monsters to threaten the kids there whenever they do something "naughty". When I first heard her do that, I told her that we don't have monsters here, and that she please shouldn't use that threat with my kids.

It was too late.

Alan isn't much bothered but David took to the monsters in a big way. He runs around all day and wields his toy sword against monsters everywhere -- and they are ubiquitous. They live under the stairs, in the corners, under the bed, in the kitchen cupboards, in the trash can, in the toilet. They hide in ceiling lamps, under the sofa, in the closets. They like drawers, chests, suitcases, and shelves. I think there is even one in the shower stall. Since David always manages to slay them, this wouldn't be so very bad. However, he also wakes up at night now, screaming.

So we decided that the monsters must go.

A year ago or so, when I made the mistake to blame monsters for the vanished pacifiers, we had Doug beat the monsters away with a stick and that worked really well. Alas, not this time. So I thought I was being smart by at least banning the monsters from the (upstairs) kids' bedroom. I told David in a very serious voice that, you know, monsters cannot climb stairs. So easy! They cannot climb stairs, so no monsters in the bedroom, under the bed, in the upper bathroom! No monsters! It was wonderful.

And then Alan turned to his little brother and said gravely: "That's true, David, monsters don't climb stairs. THEY FLY!"

We're back to slaying monsters for the time being.

Pristina: Leaving

One of my last meetings was with a Minister of the Kosovar government, and I was struck by a couple of things.

One was that the Minister was pretty young. Younger than me, and I'd be a young-ish minister most places. People say he got to be a Minister because he was a brave fighter in the KLA, back in the guerrilla war of 1996-99. That may not seem like a great criterion for running a big chunk of the government, but you don't want to tell that to the Kosovars.

...Actually, that's unfair. A large minority of Kosovars do think that bravery in the independence struggle should not be the most important qualification for government office. But Kosovar society is pretty clannish, and the war forged very intense loyalties. Especially among those who fought in the early days, when the KLA was small and the struggle seemed almost hopeless.

Anyway. I was also struck by the decor of the Minister's office. It was totally dominated by two things:

-- An enormous blowup photo of Adem Jashari, and

-- A prominently displayed picture of Bill Clinton.

I've mentioned that Kosovars love Americans, right? Let me add: they really love Bill Clinton.

* * * * *

Pristina seems pretty socially liberal. Young people of both sexes dress fashionably. Couples walk arm in arm. I'm told that in the summer, young women walk around with miniskirts, bare midriffs, heels... the whole Balkan hooker-chic thing. (Not that I'm paying attention.)

The Albanians are nominally Islamic, but everyone drinks beer and every restaurant serves pork dishes. In ten days, I think I saw maybe three women wearing the head-scarf.

Still, there were a couple of things that distinguished Pristina from Belgrade or Bucharest.

One was the relative absence of porn. I think I saw a few Playboys, but otherwise I just didn't notice much. (Again, not that I was paying attention.) Either it's kept behind the counter, like in some conservative parts of the US, or it's simply not there. This is very different from other Balkan capitals, where porn is ubiquitous and displayed openly on every single newsstand.

Another came on my last day, when I stopped in a cafe (the 'Bulevardi', just across the street from the Grand) that had a "no kissing" sign. Really. It had a picture of a man and a woman about to kiss, and an X through it, and a sign that said (approximate translation) "family establishment -- please show respect".

* * * * *

-- Pristina Airport is tiny but modern and clean. Check-in and security are efficient and up-to-date. It's served by a couple of big airlines (Austrian Air, British Airways) plus a bunch of regional ones: Malev from Hungary, Adria from Slovenia, Air Albania.

(The slogan of Air Albania is "Fly With Love". I don't know why this pleases me, but it does.)

The Balkans utterly lack a regional air hub. To fly from any Balkan capital to another Balkan capital, you probably have to go far out of your way. Case in point: I flew from Kosovo to Bucharest through Vienna. Less than 500 miles as the crow flies, 1200 or so with the plane.

There should be a hub, and it should be Belgrade. It's perfectly located, and Serbia has the technical expertise and personnel to run a major airport. Unfortunately, Milosevic screwed this up for many years to come, maybe forever.

Pristina... well, it's also got a pretty good location. I have to wonder if they have the chops to run a major regional airport, though. They do pretty well with their little airport, but they'd have to expand it five- or ten-fold, and that would be no small thing.

* * * * *

How you know your Kosovar taxi driver likes you: as you get out of the taxi at the airport (it's a 30 minute ride from the hotel, remember), he gives you a receipt for 5 Euros more than you paid him. See, that way, you can charge your company for 5 Euros more, and pocket the difference!

No, don't ask what he's doing. He doesn't expect any money. He's doing it because you're American! And he likes you!

Why are you looking at him like that?

Pristina: Odds and Ends

There are some Chinese shops in Pristina. (Shops run by Chinese, that is.)

A couple in Skopje, too. There are thousands of Chinese in Belgrade and Bucharest... I think we've mentioned this?

There are also a couple of Chinese restaurants. I had dinner in one. Pretty good Kung Pao Chicken, and those cucumber chunks rolled in pepper sauce and garlic. Nice.

The owner had a 10-month-old baby. In a generation there will be Chinese-Serbs, Chinese-Romanians, and Chinese-Kosovars. Not a lot, but a few thousand, concentrated in the big cities.

I have no problem with this, myself, but the locals don't seem too happy about it.

-- The Presidential Seal of Albania will be instantly familiar to anyone who has seen the Presidential Seal of the United States. That's because it IS the Presidential Seal of the United States. The Albanians, loving Americans as they do, copied it. The only difference is the color scheme (red and black instead of red, white and blue), plus they have the Albanian two-headed eagle instead of the American eagle.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find an image online. But it's quite something. It looks like someone hit the US seal with gamma rays and turned it all dark and bloody and heavy metal EVIL.

I know it's not the Albanian's fault that their flag is... well, kinda scary. It was meant to be scary. The snarling-Doberman colors, the mutant-looking double eagle: it was Scanderbeg's flag, and he was engaged in a desperate war for survival. He wanted to creep out the enemy, and I bet it worked.

Still, I'm hoping that when the Kosovars finally adopt a flag of their own, they do something to modify the ancestral Albanian color scheme. Like maybe, red, black, cream, beige, and a soothing dove-gray.

-- There's a cool little music store in central Pristina. It's hard to describe where, exactly, because streets in Pristina get pretty confusing. Um, it's in an older part of town, about five minutes downhill from the Hotel Grand and around the corner to the left. Wait, it's in front of Pirates restaurant. There.

Anyway, it's called "Music and Movies that Matter" -- yah, in English -- and it's basically the music store from High Fidelity. We all saw High Fidelity, right? I almost expected to find jack Black behind the counter.

It was really good. Small and cramped but clean. They had a stove and a little old dog asleep in a basket. The music was very heavy on stuff from the '70s and '80s, but they had some more recent albums too, including some mp3 collections. Very friendly clerk -- a Warren Zevon fan, so we hit it off right away.

Me? I scored some old Lou Reed and a bunch of Smiths mp3s. The lights went out halfway through, but the clerk lit a couple of candles and I finished browsing by candlelight.

The prices were, ah, reasonable. Maybe half were "These CDs belonged to someone who died in the war or moved to America, and we're just trying to get a few dollars for them" reasonable, and the other half maybe "Arrr! Walk the plank, ye scurvy dog!" reasonable.

Vrooommmm

It's the sound a diesel generator makes.

I'm hearing it outside my window right now, because Pristina is having another blackout. They seem to average four or five per day, lasting anywhere from five minutes to several hours.

This is a little odd, because Kosovo has a lot of coal. It should be able to generate plenty of electricity, and even have some left over to export.

But the electrical system was allowed to decay (like everything else in Serbia) during the kleptocratic days of the '90s. And then it got badly trashed during the war.

Today... well, it's become sort of a black hole of money. International donors have sunk over half a billion dollars into Kosovo's electrical system since 1999. (That's more than 25% of Kosovo's current GDP.)

It hasn't helped. In fact, it's worse now. And the blackouts are doing a lot of damage to the economy. One estimate is that they're adding 10% to the cost of doing business here. (Because electricity from loud little diesel generators, one for every house and shop, is really expensive.) Another is that the blackouts are shaving 5% off of the standard of living... which is already Europe's lowest.

Here's a figure that stuck with me: 170 -50 -50 = 70.

What's it mean? Well, KEK -- the Kosovo Electric Kompany, er, Company -- KEK produced about $170 million worth of electricity last year. Of that $170 million, about $50 million was unbilled. That is, they were only able to bill for about $120 million. Why? Well, some goes cheap or free to subsidized buyers, like state-owned firms. And then a lot just gets stolen. People shimmy up power lines and connect themselves, their house, their shop. Meter tampering. Very common here.

So, $120 million gets billed. But then another $50 million of that just never gets paid. State-owned firms don't pay because they're bankrupt. People don't pay because, well, they just don't. Firms don't pay and then lie about it and fight it in court. (The court system is horribly overloaded.)

So, at the end of the day, KEK only collects 170 -50 -50 = $70 million for that $170 million they've produced. In round numbers, they get only 40 cents for every dollar. They're bleeding $100 million a year.

Suddenly that $500+ million figure makes some sense. Even with all that money, you can see how they may be worse off than they were in 1999.

What's the answer? Well... there isn't an easy answer. It's going to take years to fix KEK.

Until then, everyone is going to have a generator.

(If you want to know more about Kosovo's economy, this paper from the IMF has plenty.)

The saddest thing

The saddest thing I've seen here?

The Yugoslav-era Memorial of Brotherhood and Unity.

It's a 15-meter concrete pillar. Three pillars, really, a few feet apart at the base and joining together at the top. There's an abstract sculpture in fron, vaguely resembling a group of people. (The design is eerily similar to the Martyr's Memorial in central Bucharest, across from the Hilton. Go figure.)

The triple pillar symbolizes the three peoples of Kosovo -- Albanians, Turks and Serbs. It stands in the middle of a big empty plaza, on a pavement of marble slabs, in the very center of Pristina.

"Brotherhood and Unity" was an old Yugoslav Communist slogan, and it was used for everything from roads to summer camps. The main bridge going west from Belgrade (towards Bosnia and Croatia) was the Brotherhood and Unity Bridge; last time I looked, it still was.

So, the B&U Memorial was meant to symbolize the enduring friendship between the peoples of Kosovo, /and/ their place in the greater Yugoslav society -- a united family of peoples. The three pillars, rising, aspiring, joining together...

...someone surrounded it with barbed wire a while back. Probably the UN. Maybe they were afraid someone would vandalize it? But it's really hard to vandalize a concrete pillar. So, the barbed wire has rusted and collapsed. The marble slabs of the plaza are cracked and stained, but if you walk carefully over them you can reach the base of the pillar.

There's nothing there. I mean, it's just a pillar. The concrete is starting to crack. There's a big weeping brown stain on one side about halfway up, probably where the rebar skeleton is starting to rust through.

The abstract sculpture in front is covered with grafitti, but there's hardly any on the pillar itself. I really don't think it's lingering sentiment. More like, nobody even cares enough about this thing to vandalize it.

Kosovo is full of sad stories. But that pillar, monument to the failed ideal of a dead country, standing there unlit, and ignored while the snow fell out of the dirty sky... it just seemed unutterably sad.

A couple of hundred meters to the south is a much newer statue. It's Skanderbeg, the Albanian national hero. Now, /that/ statue is in prime condition. It's a beautiful piece, and beautifully displayed. Clean and shining. Spotlights all around.

This place can get to you, yes.

And the occasional bomb

So there have been some bombings in Pristina lately.

Four or five so far this year. Three of them have been attacks on UN police cars. Nobody's been killed or hurt, but it does have people on edge a little.

At least two of the bombings were claimed by a shadowy group calling itself the Kosovo Independence Army. The KIA may or may not be connected to some bandit-like groups of armed men who have been stopping cars in rural Kosovo. Most of these episodes have been in western Kosovo, near the Albanian border -- a region that has always been, ah, difficult to administer.

One difference between the past and today, of course, is the presence of nearly 20,000 NATO troops. And NATO does not seem overly concerned.

There may be several things at work here.

One, there's a lot of resentment of the UN here... some justified, some not. UNMIK, the UN Mission In Kosovo, has not done a very good job of running the province for the last six years. Economic growth has stalled, the Kosovo passport is not widely welcomed, thousands of people are still missing, Kosovo's political status remains in limob, and Albanians and Serbs still hate each other.

On the other hand, the UN inherited a pretty awful situation. And -- insofar as they've had the chance -- the Albanians haven't done a very good job of running Kosovo, either.

But fair or not, a lot of Albanians blame the UN.

Two, the Albanians got in the habit of blowing things up back in the guerrilla war against the Serbs, 1997-99. The attacks on police cars are suggestive. The Serbian police, corrupt and brutal, were particularly favorite targets for the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) back in the day. And there's no shortage of guns, bombs and explosives all over Kosovo; the KLA brought in plenty, and the local mafias have since brought in more.

Three, a lot of Albanians are getting impatient for independence. It's been six and a half years since the NATO bombing ended. How long should they have to wait? They want to be a sovereign nation, and they want it now. This is not a universal sentiment -- I've met patient Albanians, and even one or two who don't think sovereignty is a big deal -- but it's a very common one.

Finally, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest a fourth possibility. This is that the "Kosovo Independence Army" is to some extent a creation of some Albanians -- possibly in the government, possibly not -- who want to spook the international community a little. "Oooh, see, men with bombs! Look, there are dangerous radicals out there! Thank goodness you have us moderates to deal with. You'd better give us what we ask for, or... well, who knows what might take our place!"

I hate to seem paranoid, but this would hardly be unheard of in this part of the world.

What makes me thoughtful is the fact that nobody has been killed (yet). The UN is unpopular, so blowing up the occasional UN cop car doesn't bother people much. But actually killing UN employees... that would be different. And of course it would be a real blow to the Albanian cause internationally.

Kosovo does not lack people who know how to kill. So, if the "Kosovo Independence Army" were really trying to kill UN people, there'd be a lot of dead UN people by now.

Not that this is much comfort to the average UN employee here in Prishtina.

Black birds and cold weather

It's really cold here in Pristina.

I didn't pack an overcoat because -- follow my reasoning here -- it was pleasant autumn weather when I left Bucharest, and Pristina is about 150 miles (250 km) further south. Heck, Pristina is only about 120 miles (200 km) from the lovely Adriatic coast, where orange trees and olive groves bask in the sun. How cold could it get?

Answer: too damn cold to be out without an overcoat. It's been snowing on and off for three days now. The temperature is about -5 Celsius or 23 Fahrenheit right now, and it's supposed to hit -8 or 18 Fahrenheit before dawn. By way of comparison, it's currently -1 (30 F) in Bucharest, falling only to -2 (29 F) in the night.

Why? Why is the more southerly city so much colder?

Because -- DUH, Douglas -- Pristina is much higher up than Bucharest.

Kosovo is a plateau surrounded by mountains, like a mini-Tibet in the heart of the Balkan penninsula. While Bucharest sits at a reasonable 60 m or 200 feet above sea level, Pristina is about 600 meters or 1900 feet up. And it's surrounded by mountains that go a lot higher still. The lovely Adriatic and the wine-dark Mediterranean might as well be on the other side of the moon; this is a completely different climate zone. We may be at the latitude of Naples, but the climate is more like Wyoming.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Nor buying an overcoat, either. That would be like, um, admitting weakness or something.

Meanwhilere, there are these birds.

All through central Pristina, every night at sunset, huge flocks of black birds come and settle in the trees. Really huge flocks. Tens of thousands of them.

As darkness falls, they descend on the city, sqawking and screeching. They fill up the trees like black fruit. And then they _stay up all night_ making the most incredible racket. Really. They cackle, they squawk, they scream. Every few minutes one tree-load, driven by some unknown cue, will lift off en masse, wings whirring, and circle around for a while before landing somewhere else.

They do have certain trees they prefer. You can tell because the ground beneath these trees is white with birdshit. I'm not overly paranoid about germs, but I've quickly learned to give these trees a wide berth.

Someone told me that the birds only do this in winter. Apparently they leave in the spring and spend the summer in the countryside. They winter in the city because... I don't know. It's warmer? There's more food here?

Anyway. I've also heard that these birds are called kos in Serbian. And this is where the name of the province comes from: Kosovo Polje, the Field of Blackbirds.

Maybe. What's more interesting to me at the moment is that I can't tell what sort of birds they are. They seem to be some sort of corvid -- the family of birds that includes crows and ravens, rooks and magpies -- but I can't tell just which. Interestingly, the flocks include a few hoodies... hooded crows, corvus cornix. The hoodies are bigger than the other birds, and seem to take the highest (dominant?) positions in the trees. But they're a minority. Most of the flock is composed of these smaller black birds. Rooks? Some sort of crow? Is there anyone out there who knows?

Whatever they are, they're loud and they're dirty. I can hear them outside my window right now, and (I know from grim experience) they'll explode into a particularly raucous chorus right before dawn.

On the plus side, Pristina has very few feral dogs. Apparently they used to be a huge problem -- as bad as in Bucharest, or worse -- until a few months ago, when the government wiped them out in a single day.

It's not my lack of parenting skills!

This Warning Label Generator is making the rounds in the blogosphere. David is very much two years these days. His last tantrum lasted two hours. So, I created this label:

I think I should print it on transfer paper and make a T-shirt for him. It would be an appropriate warning for innocent bystanders...

The Picture of Adem Jashari

It's twelve feet tall. A banner, really.

It hangs above the door of the Youth Center, which is a really stunningly hideous building from the 1970s. It shows Adem Jashari in full combat regalia... fatigues, assault rifle, enormous beard. Insofar as you can make out his expression (it's a big beard), he looks about two parts menacing, one part mournful.

-- Adem Jashari. He's the great martyr-hero of Kosovo's war of liberation. He was from Drenica, which is a rural region in central Kosovo with a long tradition of resistance to the authorities... Turkish, Yugoslav, Serbian, whoever. Maybe more important, he was a Jashari. Rural Kosvo is all about clans, big extended families, and the Jasharis were one of the richest and most important clans in Drenica, or indeed in all of Kosovo.

Adem Jashari was one of the founders of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was in 1996, after the Dayton Agreement convinced some Kosovar Albanians that there was no hope but war. (Dayton ended the war in Bosnia, but at the expense of completely ignoring what Milosevic was doing in Kosovo.)

In its first year or 18 months of existence, the KLA wasn't much. They had maybe a few hundred active members, in a province of ~2 million people. Most Albanians were still going along with Ibrahim Rugova's program of non-violent resistance. This wasn't because Albanians are a peaceful people. No. It was because Milosevic and the Serbs seemed stronger than ever, international assistance seemed wildly unlikely, and armed resistance looked like a bloody dead end.

So the KLA made a nuisance of itself, but not much more. It killed some Serb police (who were universally loathed as corrupt and brutal), set off some bombs, and managed to make some regions (like Drenica) a no-go area for Serb forces. But overall it accompanied little of military significance.

Until the spring of 1998. In February and March of that year, the Serbs unleashed a series of deadly attacks on Albanian villages containing KLA guerrillas. The most famous of these was on Donji Prekaz, the village of the Jashari family. It was aimed at Adem Jashari, who by this time had become one of the most famous or notorious KLA commanders.

Here's the official Serbian version:

"In the early morning hours of March 5, a terrorist group attacked another police patrol near the village of Donje Prekaze. After police returned fire, the terrorists retreated to their base and dug in at the Jashari family farm in that village... engagement with the terrorists lasted for 27 hours, with a total of 51 casualties. Unfortunately, it was later established that Jashari family members were among them. Terrorists physically prevented them from leaving the farm, despite the police invitation. The Interior Ministry expresses regret and bitterness that these victims were a direct consequence of cruelty and ruthlessness of Albanian terrorists... The fact that he personally shot his nephew to prevent him from surrendering testifies to Adem Jashari’s cruelty. Two officers lost their lives in this action, and seven were seriously injured."

Here's Human Rights Watch's version:

"Human Rights Watch was not able to visit Donji Prekaz, a village with a pre-war population of approximately 1,000 people, due to continued fighting. It is, therefore, the case from Drenica on which the least direct testimony was available to Human Rights Watch. This notwithstanding, Human Rights Watch has concluded that serious violations of international humanitarian law were committed by the Serbian special police: notably, indiscriminate attacks on noncombatants, the systematic destruction of civilian property, and the summary and arbitrary executions of those in detention. Although it appears that some Albanian villagers in Donji Prekaz were armed and defending themselves against the police, the evidence is overwhelming that the police used excessive and indiscriminate force, and that the police executed at least three people after they had been detained or had surrendered.

"The police attacked Prekaz and the Jashari compound [in a] prepared and determined manner. All evidence suggests that the attack was not intended to apprehend armed Albanians, considered “terrorists” by the government, but, as Amnesty International concluded in its report on violence in Drenica, “to eliminate the suspects and their families.” Testimonies collected by human rights groups and journalists indicate several cases of extrajudicial executions and unlawful killings from excessive force.

"An estimated fifty-eight ethnic Albanians were killed in the attack, including eighteen women and ten children under the age of sixteen, and then summarily buried by the police before autopsies could be performed. The exact number and identities of the dead reported by different sources varies slightly, a consequence of the manner in which the burial was conducted, and because some of the bodies were burned beyond recognition.

"According to the Serbian police, the attack on Donji Prekaz was in response to KLA attacks on nearby police patrols. According to witnesses, however, the attack was well orchestrated and included APCs, artillery shelling from the nearby ammunition factory, and special police forces in camouflage and face paint."

The Albanian version... well, I can't find it in English online. But it's basically Butch and Sundance. Adem Jashari goes down, ferocious, heroic, guns blazing defiance. Then the Serbs kill everybody.

The Donji Prekaz massacre turned out to be a huge strategic mistake. It inflamed Albanian public opinion and vastly increased support for the KLA. By summer, KLA membership had soared from ~2,000 to more like ~15,000, and it was on its way to being a serious guerrilla force. The UN Security Council had passed a resolution 'condemning the use of excessive force by Serbian police" in Kosov... the first sign that anyone in the outside world cared a whit about this remote and obscure province. And Adem Jashari, hero and martyr, had entered the realm of legend.

Which brings us back to the picture of him, twelve feet tall, armed and bearded, glowering mournfully at the teenagers passing under him to enter the Youth Center. Is he there as an inspiration to the young people of Kosovo?

Maybe. Or maybe he's there because directly across the street from the Youth Center is the UN compound. In fact, his picture is directly opposite the office window of UN proconsul Soren Jessen-Peterson. Peterson, a Danish diplomat, is the appointed governor of Kosovo; there's a local Parliament and a Prime Minister, but he has final power over everything they do.

But whenever he looks out the window, he'll see Adem Jashari staring back at him.

I should probably say that I think this is pretty dumb. The Kosovars had a hell of a time under the Serbs, so a certain amount of acting out is understandable. But it's been six years, and they're about to gain their independence. Whatever Adem Jasheri was, he doesn't belong up on the Youth Center -- a government building, in a Kosovo that's supposed to be multi-ethnic and respectful of minority rights. And whether Peterson and the UN are doing a good job or not, they should be able to go about their business without a bearded giant with an AK-47 looking over their shoulders.

[Update: this entry continues to attract attention, probably because an Albanian site has copied it. Feel free to comment... but obscene or abusive comments will be deleted. Play nice.)

Rest in peace, my good old Vaio

So I trashed my computer. Whatever excuses there may be (up since 3 am, totally exhausted with colicky baby and husband in Kosovo, post-pregnancy clumsiness, etc.), the truth is, I shouldn't have had that cup of coffee in my hands. Because I dropped it. Onto the laptop. Which then promptly died. Like D-I-E-D, died. Totally dead.

It's at the repair shop, where they will try to retrieve at least my data. Kid's pix since April. iTunes Music. Documents. The works.

They were nice enough to hook up Doug's old, old, old laptop to the Internet, so I'm not out of touch. You wouldn't believe how isolated you feel when the Internet is down. Maybe more so when your husband is traveling. So, I'm back online. And thinking about a new computer. I'm thinking a desktop this time. We're just really bad spillers and with a desktop the risk isn't so great. Any suggestions?

They Love Americans

Albanians love Americans. And Kosovar Albanians... they really love Americans.

There are US flags everywhere. When I say I'm American, people smile. I had a meeting yesterday with a guy who had a copy of the US Declaration of Independence on his wall. (Didn't speak ten words of English.) And the second-biggest street in town is Bill Clinton Boulevard. It's not quite as important as Mother Theresa Boulevard -- you did know Mother Theresa was Albanian, right? -- but it's close.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that Kosovo is one of those places where everyone has a cousin in Brooklyn. There's a saying in Albania that translates, "Fear not! For you have sons in America."

Of course, that's true of a number of countries around here -- Serbia, most obviously -- and it doesn't make them love love love America. No, the big reason is that the US bombed the Serbs out of Kosovo in 1999, thereby releasing the Kosovar Albanians from a decade of apartheid, oppression, impoverishment, and collective misery and humiliation, and enabling them to inflict the same on the few Serbs who were too poor or too stubborn to run away.

Little black Balkan humor there. No, what I meant to say was, freeing the Kosovar Albanians from all those awful things -- really -- and setting them on the path to independence.

Kosovo really did have an awful time under Milosevic. From the early '90s onward, Slobo and his allies fired almost all Albanians from government jobs, handed out state-owned properties and juicy monopolies to his cronies, brought in murderous thugs and petty thieves to "police" the province, and set up an explicitly racist apartheid regime whose whole raison d'etre was to grind down the Albanians while looting the place nine ways from Sunday. After 1997, when the Albanians started rebelling, he added bouts of village-burning, midnight murder, and random massacre.

The Albanians could never have gotten out of this by themselves. There were about 2 million of them, but there were over 7 million Serbs, and the Serbs were much richer, better organized, and had all the heavy weapons. They could engage in guerrilla warfare, but they had no hope of actually winning... unless some outside power intervened. Which, in 1999, NATO did.

I say NATO, and NATO does occupy a fond place in the Albanian heart. You'll sometimes see, for instance, NATO flags added to the Albanian and American flags that fly in front of coffee shops and bars. But the Albanians are pretty clear on who was the dominant power behind the NATO campaign, and by golly they're grateful for it.

"Europe," said an Albanian poet once, "is a whore." He was talking about 1913, when Europe stood by and allowed (in the Albanian view) Greece and Serbia to partition most of the lands inhabited by Albanians, leaving only a small rump territory to become the Albania that we see today. Most Albanians seem to know this saying. And while they're not bitter or hostile to Europe -- they want to join the EU one day, like everyone else between here and the Caspian Sea -- they don't trust Europe to protect them. The Americans, though... they can be trusted.

Putting aside the complicated history, and the rights and wrongs of it all, it's... pretty refreshing. When I lived in Serbia, I was never in a hurry to announce that I was American. I always did a quick calculation: is this person old, young? Liberal, conservative? Is it likely that they still resent the bombing?

I don't do that nearly as much in Romania, but still: there's a moment of hesitation or constraint. Romanians pretty much like Americans, but there are exceptions. And even the ones who like us may sometimes want to engage you in a rambling discussion about George Bush or Iraq or whatever.

But here, it's like a little weight has been lifted. I don't have to hesitate a moment.

"Yes, I'm American."

"Wonderful! Very good!" Smiles all around.

It has nothing to do with me personally. Still... it's nice.

Pristina

So I'm in Pristina, in Kosovo.

This is my first time in Kosovo. I came with mixed feelings. On one hand, I hadn't heard much good about the province. "A dump" was the most typical comment. On the other hand, I had been pleasantly surprised by Tirana, in Albania. And... I was curious to see what the fuss was all about.

Brief first impressions:

-- The airport, like every other airport in the former YU, is miles and miles from the city. I can see that in Belgrade, but why did they do that for modest-sized towns like Pristina and Skopje?

-- Thick chilly fog, scented with coal smoke. That bitter brown coal smell.

-- Bad roads. Balkan drivers. An Orthodox Church, empty, behind barbed wire, with weeds growing high around it.

-- Ugly buildings, just like everyone said. Bad '70s and '80s architecture, lots of Communist block apartments interspersed with the occasional flight of fancy. There's a building topped with Fuller domes. It doesn't look nearly as cool as someone obviously thought it would.

-- Cigarette sellers everywhere. In Tirana, they're kids. Here they're young men. Walk down the street, and you'll pass a dozen of them in five minutes. I sat in a restaurant for an hour, and at least seven or eight of them came through.

-- Burek shops. Romania is out of the burek zone, but Pristina is right in the middle of it. The Balkan fast food trinity: burek, pizza, doner kebabs.

-- Cafes. Romania doesn't really have the full-blown Balkan cafe culture. Pristina does. It's like Belgrade. There must be a hundred of them downtown. More.

-- Crumbling sidewalks. A lot of deferred maintenance. The people are, on average, a bit more shabbily dressed than your average Belgrader. But only a bit. Could be a poorish town in south Serbia.

-- Kosovo is still administered by the UN. The UN vehicle of choice is the white Land Rover, and the damn things are everywhere.

-- Holy cow, do these people love Americans. But that probably deserves a post of its own.

I'm staying at the Hotel Grand. Back in the bad old days, this was the unofficial headquarters of the Serbian secret police. Arkan stayed here, with his tigers. Albanians wouldn't dare enter the place.

Today... well, it's just another run-down former Communist hotel. Chilly rooms, threadbare towels, toilets that run. Ugly abstract sculpture from the '70s. There's wireless in the lobby, so there are always clusters of people sitting there, gathered around laptops, drinking Turkish coffee and espresso, smoking, smoking. It feels like someplace that's waiting for what comes next.

Which, in this particular case, is privatization. It goes on the block next year. 300 rooms, centrally located, great fixer-upper. Be the newest hotelier in Europe's newest country! Apply now!

More in a bit.

Take note!

Since we are obviously so great at blogging on a regular basis, we decided to have a photo blog as well. It's mainly intended for the family and will mostly have pictures of the kids. I do plan to have the occasional Romania picture as well, though. If you are interested, the blog can be found here.

Some like it hot

Romanian cooking is tasty but I would not call it spicy. This is a cuisine where they warn about the hotness of a dish that doesn't even make you break a sweat. Or, me, anyhow. Granted, I'm more than your average person when it comes to spiciness. I like it hot. That's why it baffles me that a country that has those nice ardei iute (hot peppers) doesn't do all that much with them. The pickled version is nice but not very exciting. The only dish I've ever encountered that made me go "wow" was what we came to call "hot pepper oil". It's ridiculously simple and we first had it in Oradea, in a small pizzeria on the river. It might not even be Romanian. I'm sure it exists in other countries as well since it so easy to make. But, as with so many things, easy often is best.

Here's how to make your own hot pepper oil:

Chop up hot peppers - take a variety of colors, if you can, since that makes the result look pretty. Don't discard the seeds! Throw in a glass jar, add some salt, fill up with good olive oil. Close and leave in fridge for 4-5 days.

Done.

The longer you leave the mixture to settle, the hotter it becomes. We usually refill the jar with chopped peppers up to 5 times and just top off the oil as necessary. This increases the overall hotness even more.

It's really good and you can use it in a multitude of ways. It's wonderful to have if you cook for a party that includes small children - do your bland cooking, and the adults just add some of the peppers and/or some of the oil. Use it as a dipping oil with fresh bread. Spread on pizza. You can even use the oil for frying. It's very yummy - and very hot.

This one's a keeper in our house.

Weekend update

Been busy lately. Some highlights:

Dinner with the ex-girlfriend. It was very nice, Mughlai food, and she only drew a knife on me once. True! She suggested her pseudonym for this blog be my "Former Future Ex-Wife". But she also wanted something literary, and I am kind of fond of "La Belle Dame sans Culottes (Réformée)".

Various subway mishaps. They actually deserve their own post, I think.

The Manhattan maple syrup manifestation. That, too, deserves its own post. Soon!

I missed Doug while he was briefly in the States, and John Holbo was in Brooklyn as well, darn it. I could have asked him to autograph my Blue and Brown Books.

Anyway. This weekend, I am making preserved lemons for tagine and removing paint from my door fixtures while fighting off a cold (and failing to fight off a headache) in between poring over Excel spreadsheets. Also catching up on my sleep: excitement galore! Alas, my home football team is tres suxxor this year. Still, here's an interesting article on the really beautiful game.

And here's a poem by Frank O'Hara that mFFEW/LBDsCR almost certainly knows by heart:

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I wa trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting just like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up

Bruder Jacob schläft noch!

Belle mentions that her husband is in the US and she's alone with two girls. I can top that: my husband is in the US and I'm alone with three boys, one of them a newborn. AND he will come back for ONE DAY and then take off for a two-week jaunt in Kosovo, missing both my birthday and probably also Thanksgiving.

I think I win that one with both hands down.

Actually, so far, so good. The two older boys adore their little brother and my mother has been here for 10 days and helped out. I can't really complain. The (older) boys are in bed by 7, 7:30 pm and the youngest sleeps 8 hours straight at night.

However, I have amazingly little time to write meaningful stuff. Heh, I have amazingly little time to read meaningful stuff. Nursing a newborn does cut into your leisure time quite a bit. And I'm usually in bed by 9 pm. Yes, I have become rather boring.

So here are just a few comments of my kids in those past days. It will have to suffice until my brain comes back from vacation. (Although I have a suspicion it might have moved out for good.)

Alan, upon going to bed, to his little brother Jacob (4 weeks old):
"Keine Sorge, Jacob. Mama und Oma passen auf dich auf, wenn ich im Bett bin." (Don't worry, Jacob. Mommy and Oma will take care of you when I'm in bed.)

David: "Mama, Bruder Jacob schläft noch!" (Brother Jacob is still sleeping -- we made the mistake of teaching the boys the German version of "Frere Jacques" which is "Bruder Jacob, schläfst du noch?". Well. We have done worse things.)

Alan, watching me shift the nursing Jacob from one side to the other: "Mama, ist die leer?" (Mommy, is this one empty?)

The true meaning of Halloween

It's all about the candy. And the devil-worship. And the costumes. But mainly, the candy.

And the horror! Behold!

No, it's not an avant-garde fashion display. It's an illustration taken from the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences article "Transcranial Brain Injuries Caused by Metal Rods or Pipes over the Past 150 Years", by James L. Stone. Would you believe that someone survived the middle accident with no reported ill effects? And the one on the left might have survived, except the ramrod was bent. The one on the right is a model of the classic case study Phineas Gage.

Anyway, I figure this is the one day of the year when I can indulge in this stuff without fear of censure or reprisal. And really, who else is going to dig up stuff like this?

In 1994, O’Neil et al. reported a 25-year-old male who suffered a transorbital-transcranial penetrating head injury from an aluminum shaft hunting arrow (O’Neill et al, 1994). The victim and his friend were intoxicated and attempting a ‘William Tell’ maneuver. There was no loss of consciousness and the arrow was in place on admission to the hospital.

Fortunately for the poor guy, he "was discharged from the hospital 8 days after surgery with no change in neurologic status."