It’s strange, really; looking back at Radovan Karadzic’s career, the thing that strikes me is how he seems to have recapped most of Europe’s 20th century in his own life, barking his shins on the bits that didn’t fit.
First of all, he wanted to be a romantic poet, itself a dated idea. According to Tim [...]

Q: Hello Radio Yerevan, was it a good idea to leave Tbilisi on Sunday?
A: In principle, yes. Though it would be better if one of the vehicles in the caravan does not break down after the lunch break in northern Armenia.
Q: Dzien dobry Radio Yerevan, is it a good idea to have local talent repair [...]

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn has died at age 89. Not much to add to all the obituaries, just my two kopecks’ worth that A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was the most important book published between 1950 and 1975. Just when you think Solzhenitsyn is finished with his tour de force, the last sentence falls [...]

This coming Friday, the 8th, is the date set for the quadrennial celebration of global excellence. I refer of course to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. I’m very much looking forward to it. The video projector (Japanese) is all set up in my living room. Tiger beer (from Singapore) and Reese’s peanut [...]

Shot taken from Samurai Champloo
About a year ago there was this email exchange between me and some of my AFOE colleagues in which I talked a bit about my daily job as a subtitler. Actually, I was venting. During this exchange I was invited to write a post about subtitling for AFOE.
The image at the [...]

(This story is a week old. Somehow, inexcusably, I missed it until now.)
Anyway: the Miss Universe pageant was held last weekend. It was in Vietnam this time, and a nice young lady from Venezuela won, but what’s interesting to your hardcore Balkanologist is that
1) the pageant accepted Kosovo as a [...]

“Look, Doctor, he’s just faking……. Even now in the hour of his death he has to trick us.”
The opening sentence: ‘There’s a long silence, and then I say …’ indicates the three functions of this book. It is an attempt to find a self through utterance, after a lifetime of non-communication; this was prompted by [...]

An interesting post at Language Log, about the position of minority languages/dialects in France. Traditionally, France before the Revolution was more of a geographical expression than a state in the modern sense, to adapt the famous phrase about pre-Bismarckian Germany. Highly diverse regions, with little in common except allegiance to a distant Parisian king; the [...]

As some parts of Europe prepare for Jean-Claude Juncker’s “Club of the Few” while others fall by the wayside, it’s time to look back at how we got here. Nothing unites Europeans like football, and this year’s Euro 2008 tournament is turning out to be one of the best in a long time, maybe ever. [...]

With the obvious topic being that breathless incredible match in Geneva.  Now while the superlatives like “best match ever” should be held in reserve (particularly given the extent to which the goals turned on simple mistakes — and possibly the Geneva rain), the Turks did a great job, especially in staying positive after conceding the [...]