Gently, the first snows wafting through the Belgrade skies, dispersing themselves randomly over the streets, the cars, the sleeping stray dogs, the three-wheeled gypsy bicycles, blanketing all indiscriminately. The first snows clothe the White City in ceremonial garb, in a winter dress uniform.

 

First, you need a very large mixing bowl.

Take a generous helping of random opinions from diplomats around the world. To prepare this, send reasonably competent individuals to each country and marinate them in the local cultures for a few months. Be careful not to let them sit too long in the marinade or the local spices may overpower the flavor.

My grandmother and her cousin Lula were always in competition with the Colonel.

When I was a boy in the Iowa cornfields (actually we lived in a house), the making of fried chicken happened with blissful regularity. My sister and I would be whisked from kitchen to kitchen to consume fried chicken. I have a distinct recollection of telling Lula that her chicken tasted better than the Colonel's.

Immortality achieved.

With this as a background, I must admit that since those bucolic days of yesteryear until only very recently, I had not paid a single visit on Colonel Sanders (now a license rather than a name) or Kentucky Fried Chicken (as we once knew it, now a mere abbreviation, KFC). During these more than 30 intervening years, this purveyor of extra crispy and coleslaw was off my Fast Food Radar (which, by the way makes, the Hubble Space Telescope look like a Kinder egg sneak-a-scope).

And then the Colonel came to Serbia.

To whom it may concern:

I am away from my desk and unable to read my mail.

In fact, I am very far away from my desk and the city of its construction and even the country in which it is currently located.

In case you did not see it in evidence all around you we are in the POST-CRISIS.

The Serbian prime minister told AmCham this last week, so it MUST be true. Maybe the post-crisis period started on that morning and I was just too sleepy to notice.

Up until recently, we had only been in the POST-TRANSITION. We would use the word post-transition because it would indicate that there is still a little clutter lying around in the corners from the transition period. In fact, until it is all clear up, we might say that we are actually still in the transition but we have been so many years in transit that post-transition feels better. Maybe this is the pre-post-transition. Likewise the crisis. Pre-post-pre-crisis.

We lose time when we sit and wait for the phone to ring. We lose time when watching the water boil for coffee and tea, looking for the keys, standing in queues. This blog will take me an hour to write - and where will that hour be tomorrow when I wake up and find that we have moved into summer time?

In the fall, when we gain an hour moving back into normal time, most of us use it to sleep. Either that, or we get up artificially early and say to ourselves that we have a much longer day in which to be Productive! But the change usually happens on Sunday so the extra hour is generally used in idleness...

LONDON, ROME, BELGRADE.  World Cup football (may God have mercy on our souls) has a self-contradictory role. On the one hand, here we have supreme nationalism wherein the world lines up in a sanctioned and authorized collective and protracted riot of Us against Them.

On the other Reusch-gloved hand, however, nothing unites us with our seemingly disinterested neighbors, distracted fellow Underground riders, and dyspeptic shopkeepers than being au fait on the latest World Cup babble.

We approach the 2055th anniversary of the death of Gaius Julius Caesar at the hands of his friend Brutus. What has changed in the meantime?

Today, Mr. Caesar would be surrounded by a coterie of armed guards in dark glasses. He would probably not be walking around the forum unprotected and in a bed-sheet all by himself. He might not even talk to Messrs. Brutus, Casca, and Tillius directly, but rather have his people set up discussions (especially as the pretext was a petition which Tillius Cimber wanted to conference about on his exiled brother).

Political stability has become boring, hasn't it?

After all, once we elect a parliament and they choose a government, the entertainment values drop rather dramatically in a politically stable environment. During the pre-election period, it is exciting. We get promises, wild accusations, insults, mud-slinging, and the very best of the Human Condition under pressure. But then the votes are counted (and recounted and contested), the names are read out and after we have laughed and cried and jumped for joy and sunk into despair, and we just have to get back to work and hope RTS and B92 come up with something equally entertaining for us to watch.

Announcer: We are now arriving at Paris Gare de Lyon. Please make sure you have forgotten NOTHING on the train....
Passenger: Wait!