Unexpectedly Poetic Headline of the Week:

"Dream of Greater Serbia Ends in Tiny Jail Cell"

OK, of last week. That was the "Milošević is dead" headline in Dnevnik, FYI, though it will be behind a paywall by now.

Personally I would have preferred "Dream of Greater Serbia Found Dangling Off Lamppost On The Kalemegdan Road" or, better yet, "Dream of Greater Serbia Forced Feet-First Through Rusty Wood Chipper," but I'll take it.

Of course, if there were any justice in the world, the corpse would be publicly quartered by teams of frenziedly-mooing, diseased cows, and the sections planted on pikes and put on display in the central squares of Vukovar, Knin, Sarajevo and Priština, respectively. I haven't thought of a good thing to do with the head yet, but I'll keep you posted. I'm currently thinking something along the lines of "trebuchet-into-the-Mediterranean."

Et tu, Smith Bros. Party Supply?

Intolerable. It's a full week after the Ides of March, and now -now! they deliver the custom Julius Caesar piñata full of red Jolly Ranchers.

You know, this is precisely the sort of thing that makes people go sour on capitalism.

Surreal Sentence of the Week

"The Communist government declared the end of his reincarnation."

Dov'è la Stazione Ferrovia?

So I am talking with this acquaintance, and the topic of languages one has learned-or-known-but-forgotten comes up. And I realize something interesting--when you forget a language, the one thing that seems to remain is the phrase "Which way to the train station?" It's almost like a stubborn sediment that remains after all other traces of fluency have evaporated up and away. Except, apparently, for Spanish, where this phenomenon takes the form of the infamous "¿Dónde esta la bibilioteca?"

There's proabably a graduate thesis in linguistics in this somewhere-- ..."The Memetic Adhesiveness of Rail Transit Inquiry Structures," or somesuch. All I ask is co-authorship.