Today (and yesterday, and tomorrow since it is not quite finished) I opened a new bank account. In order to do so, I affixed my scrawling and somewhat easy-to-copy signature to at least fifty documents - none of which I read.

The cows around town, on Trg Republike, on Knez Mihajlova, generally mind their own business. They accost no one for theatre subscriptions, tissues, or wilted flowers. They do not ask the time or directions to Delta City. They look straight ahead into their forward progression or innocuously feed on the weeds growing from cracks in the paving.

Of course, this set the wheels spinning. It does not take much, admittedly, but spinning they were set nevertheless.

He was referring to the Great Blic List of 50 Most Powerful Foreigners – published today – from which my humble foreignness was inconspicuously absent. In reality, the lists that I could hope to be on would be more like

List of 50 Bald People

List of 50 Big-Mouthed Complainers

List of 50 Inconsistent Bloggists

List of 50 Foreign Curmudgeons

List of 50 People who Really Do Not Belong on a List of 50 People Published in the Press

According to the brain scientists and rocket surgeons whom we have elected to public office in Belgrade ("we" being loosely applied here), it is NOT enough to switch off the music early. It is NOT enough to close the bars, cafes, and restaurants by midnight. It is NOT enough to curtail the sale of alcohol after a certain hour. Now, if we have a few too many, we will have to sleep in the bars until morning.

As it happens, I was born on a Monday the 13th, at seven ante meridiem no less. As if I was born ready for school (or work).

Each time I brush with traditional bad luck omens, like black cats or walking under ladders or my unlucky watch (of which etc cetera), I am constantly confronting my conditioned reactions to them an assessing what they make me feel and sometimes do.

For the next several days, I will be ensconced behind the Great Firewall of China and untouchable by Facebook, Google, YouTube, and 2,700 other websites which the People's Censor has deemed to be unbrowseable.

Iran, Vietnam, and North Korea are also on the list of blockers, but I think it is just me-too-ism.

Having been told to meet our bus in this parking lot to begin the 12-hour trip to Halkidiki, we duly showed up at the appointed time and place. Instead of seeing our bus, however, we saw at least 20 such conveyances, surrounded with hundreds of bag-laden holidaymakers.

The process of transformation had already begun.

The effect is meant to demonstrate the machine's power by generating enough noise to drown out any other urban man-made sound within 10 kilometers of the blower.

It also

When shopping for toys (toys!), I experienced a kind of outrage that very rarely befalls me. My curmudgeonly nature causes me to grumble and complain a lot and often, but very rarely does something, some behavior, drive me to the edge of tolerance. 

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.