Took a day off from worrying about the Kosovo paper – haven’t even checked my work email since leaving the office 24 hours ago – and brought F in to the local English language bookshop where they were having a Seuss celebration. As I should have anticipated, he was actually rather put out by the fact that there were people reading from the books, face-painting going on, etc rather than his usual routine which is to browse through the Dr Seuss rack and choose another to add to his collection. However we were able to do that as well, and he even allowed me to bring home a souvenir hat (a Cat in the Hat hat, in fact) as long as he didn’t have to look at it let alone wear it. Anne, like me, thinks the hat is great. F will no doubt come around.

U’s walking has drastically improved since she took her first steps

1) What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. Robert Cowley

A competent collection of essays on counterfactual history. The best is the one proposing the death of Charles I and his children in an outbreak of plague in 1641; the British throne would then have passed to his cousin Elizabeth, better known to history as the Winter Queen, who would have been more politically astute (Charles I tends to get a poor write-up) and would have managed the late 17th century British Isles much better though to the impoverishment of political thought. The author left out the important Irish dimension though. Another promising one about Napoleon’s plans for North America didn’t really chase the scenario as much as I wanted it to. I’ve also never been very convinced by the “Harold wins in 1066” scenario, given how Normanised 11th-century England already was. And the last essay, about the importance of the potato, really missed the point of the whole book by not putting forward an alternative path of history.

proposes trying to establish a slightly different focus to the Where Were You When… meme. Her suggestions are:

…when the Israelis “did” the refugee camps at Shatila, Lebanon? [18 Sept 1982] – I was at school
…when US forces shot down an Iranian passenger plane? [3 July 1988] – I was on holiday, somewhere in central Europe
…when Dutch troops at Srebrenica were overrun? [6-18 July 1995] – I was on holiday in Cornwall with my wife’s family
…when the Moscow theater was taken over by Chechyen terrorists? [23-26 October 2002] – I was working in Brussels

But actually apart from Srebrenica those don’t really fill in the blank in the meme between 1991 and 1997. (Also I have to confess I don’t really remember the Iranian plane being shot down; I think I was in Switzerland or something.) I’d want to find a few more memorable events for the mid-90s, and even Srebrenica, which was so long and drawn out, and where the full scale didn’t become so obvious until days later, doesn’t have the same impact as the other one-off and unexpected events on the list.

I’ve looked at a couple of time-lines from that period, and the only other three really memorable and unexpected events where I can immediately remember where I was in the same way were the announcement that Charles and Di were splitting up on 9 December 1992 (I was warding a student resident tower block in Belfast), the Oklahoma bombing on 19 April 1995 (I was buying a sandwich in Chapel Hill, North Carolina) and the Canary Wharf bomb on 10 Feb 1996 (I was at home in Belfast settling down to a weekend on my own as Anne was away). The IRA and Loyalist ceasefires, announced on 31 August and 13 October 1994, also come close. But I wonder if the last three of these would be as significant to someone who didn’t share my background?

I see my friend Jadranko Prlic has been indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This came as little surprise to anyone who knew what he was up to in Mostar during the war. I only got to know him more recently when he was foreign minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and he had been trying reasonably hard to work himself into a different political space, by distancing himself from his former ultra-nationalist party and trying to inject an intellectual component into Bosnian foreign policy. But the past always catches up with you in the end…

Molvania website at http://www.molvania.com/

My review

Guardian review

Reuters (via Yahoo)

Foodies searching for the ultimate ‘upmarket’ place to eat in Lutenblag might care to visit ther famous Revolving Restaurant (Gastrodizzi) where diners can sample fine food whilst enjoying a panoramic view of the city. Due to an intermittent power supply the restaurant itself does tend to revolve rather slowly (a full rotation can take up to six months), but the stunning vistas from three floors up make the wait truly worthwhile.

The Vzintga Gorge was cut between precipitous cliffs by the powerful River Vzintga, which flows down numerous pools and waterfalls. There is a marked trail to the top of the gorge where the views are quite outstanding. Sadly, the spectaular cable-car that once carried visitors across the gorge no longer operates, but you can still see the old pylons and engine-house as well as view a memorial plaque dedicated to the service’s last 20 passengers.

The unofficial capital of the Great Central Valley region, Jzerbo may not look all that inviting to the first-time visitor, with its jumble of grim Soviet-era housing and concentration of heavy industry. But thanks to frequent, heavy smog, many of these visual eye-sores remain hidden from the average visitor.

And listen to the Molvanian idol winner

One of my colleagues tells me:

I have to share with you the latest sign that the world is being made safer. If you explore purchase of a Dell computer on-line from Dell UK, you are advised that as Dell is a U.S. registered company, the prospective buyer must answer the following question: “Will this computer be used in the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)?”

Well, I for one am glad that they are taking such stringent security precautions! I dread to think how many Dell computers might have been sold to terrorists before they started asking that question!

A few months back I was experimenting with different browsers to look
at an lj entry using four different alphabets. I came to the conclusion
that Explorer didn’t really repect similarities of font between Latin
and Cyrillic, Opera did but has difficulty aligning strange letters
correctly, and Netscape gave the best presentation but was far too slow
and clunky.

Now I have a new love, which is Mozilla.
Look! Special Latin alphabet characters! Ë ë Ç ç Ğ ğ ı İ Ö ö Ş ş Ü ü Č Ć č ć Đ đ Š š Ž ž and trickiest of all ə and ə.
Look! Armenian! Հայաստան = “Hayastan”, Armenia in Armenian
Look! Cyrillic! “Албанцы впервые открыто нападают на миротворцев, – говорит Николас
Уайт. – В глазах западных держав именно
они являются агрессорами.”
Look! Georgian! კ, ქ and ყ are all written as K or k in our reports. ჩ and ჭ are both written Ch or ch. პ and ფ are both written as P or p. თ and ტ are both written as T or t. ც and წ are both written Ts or ts. ძ is written Dz or dz. ღ is written Gh or gh. შ is written Sh or sh. ჟ is written Zh or zh. ხ is written Kh or kh. ჯ is written J or j.

By far the best. I’m using Mozilla from now on.

PS: Those of you not using Mozilla may have difficulty seeing what I mean. But go download it now!!!

This one is a bit less American in orientation than many of these tend to be (as you can tell from the way the dates are written), and also a lot of them are concentrated in what was a dramatic period of my own life.

1. When John F. Kennedy was shot (22/11/1963)
Not born.

2. When Mt. St. Helens blew (18/5/1980)
Living in the Netherlands for a year. One of my parents’ colleagues was from Washington State so it became a bit more personal.

3. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded (28/1/1986)
I’d just come back from a day’s “work” at the Armagh Observatory to the house I was lodging at. The daughter of the house turned from the television to me as I came into the front room and said, “Have you seen this???!!!”

4. The Hillsborough disaster. (15/4/1989)
Easter vac of my third year in Cambridge; I was in Dublin at the time.

5. When the Berlin Wall fell (7/11/1989)
The day I split up with my last girlfriend (that is, before the one I married). We were too intensely concerned with splitting up to listen to the news; I kipped on her floor in Greenwich, and didn’t manage to look at a paper until I was on a train back to Cambridge.

6. When Nelson Mandela was released from gaol. (11/2/1990)
Having dinner with the student representatives of Hughes Hall, a small postgraduate Cambridge college, in my capacity as deputy president of the overall Cambridge students union. The guy who was supposed to host the dinner was a political activist from Grenada in the Caribbean (doing a one-year masters of some kind; now a political consultant in Trinidad) and made only a brief appearance, being glued to his TV.

7. When Thatcher resigned (22/11/1990)
The day of the first in a series of annual lectures in memory of my father, who had died six months previously. The lecture that afternoon was given by Garret Fitzgerald, who told a couple of stories about funny conversations with her mostly at European summits. I actually heard the news over coffee that morning with an elderly cousin, whose daughter phoned up from London to tell her.

8. When the Gulf War began (16/1/1991)
Still in Cambridge, doing my M Phil, in unwedded bliss with Anne, but we deliberately didn’t buy the newspapers for those two weeks because it was just too depressing.

9. When Princess Di was killed (31/8/1997)
In Bosnia. (hey, we’ve completely leapt over the time I spent back in Belfast in between.) I was sleeping badly as usual and as usual tried listening to the BBC World Service to lull me back to sleep. That morning it didn’t work. We had a staff party with our Bosnian staff later in the day, fun but slightly surreal. Anne, staying in her parents’ house on her own apart from the baby, didn’t hear until the Guardian arrived the next morning.

10. When Omagh was bombed (15/8/1998)
In Croatia; again, we didn’t hear until the next morning via BBC World Service. Pretty awful. In my Alliance Party days we used to go to Omagh at least once a year for party council meetings, so it’s a town I know my way around.

11. When Bush was first announced President (7/11/2000)
We were now living in Belgium. I had been determined to stay up until the result came through, but in fact it was curiously anticlimactic. Then weeks of watching Gore’s attempts to get the fair result gradually fade under pressure. It was then that I started reading Slate regularly.

12. When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center (11/9/2001)
In a somewhat surreal meeting with the deputy head of mission of Yugoslavia to the EU. When the meeting started the second plane had just hit; by the time it ended both towers were down, and cars were already choking the streets out of Brussels. In those days I went home by train, fortunately. We’d moved house to where we now live three weeks before, and hadn’t yet plugged in the television; this motivated me to do so.

13. When the Queen Mother died (30/3/2002)
Easter Saturday, here in Belgium with the family, just about to change jobs. The event didn’t hit me particularly hard though there were a couple of memorable aftershocks. One of them I mentioned in my post about Queen Juliana a few days ago; I happened to be at a meeting the following week in the Foreign Office when the Queen Mother’s cortege went past down Whitehall, and one of the younger diplomats present sighed and said, “There’ll only be one more like this.” The other was at a reception in Brussels a few months later, thrown for some reason by the Stationery Office (formerly Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) where the Chief Executive proudly boasted to me that they had managed to get the official death notice printed and on sale in the (specially opened) official Stationery Office shops in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast by 10 o’clock the following morning, even though it was Easter Sunday!

14. When Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas. (1/2/2003)
Had just struggled home, through heavy snowfall, from a Soros/Ahtisaari conference on the EU policies in the Balkans. Anne’s brother was staying too. U was not quite six weeks old. As he often does, Ken MacLeod got it right:

Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Ramon.
Komarov, Grissom, White, Chaffee, Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev, Resnick, Scobee, Smith, McNair, McAuliffe, Jarvis, Onizuka.
These names will be written under other skies.

Just came across ‘s superb look at the Fish symbol. Did you really do it as long ago as 1995, Min?

[edit: disclaims all responsibility. Oh well.]

Just discovered that is one of my colleagues at work. Привет, Игорь!