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.

My babysitter has her bags packed.

One fine day, a couple of weeks ago, I heard the announcement that if the Radicals should win the upcoming presidential elections – i.e., Smiling Tommy Nik – that she was ready to pack up and leave the country.

Hm, I told her.

When I arrived in the office this morning, my esteemed partner and colleague said, “Thank God you were not on the list.”

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

Let’s begin by stating the Obvious.

A banker’s first and best duty is, of course, to extract all the money from your pocket, mattress, closet, or left shoe and lock it up securely in its vaults.

Never mind all of the advertising you have seen to the contrary telling us about FREE CASH, NO INTEREST, SWISS FRANCS, and Gosh-my-bank-wants-to-buy-me-a-new-house! In the end, your dinars must wind up on the other side of the teller’s counter, ostensibly waiting for you to collect them later, otherwise we would have a lot fewer bankers clogging the arteries of Belgrade with Mercedes, BMWs, and Jaguars.

(If I were a banker, I think I would be the guy in the Astin Martin.)

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.

 

I have been interested in trying this experiment for several weeks. [Kosovo] The fact is that I would like to write about a number of things this afternoon. I have about 36 topics sitting in the in-tray waiting to bespatter with my curmudgeonly opinions and complaints. [Kosovo]

Of those topics, four are about the traffic on the highways which has become a nightmare IN ANTICIPATION of the much hyped road works. [Kosovo] Seven of the topics relate to government – but how boring is that?  [Kosovo] Our new government has not triggered the much anticipated scandal-mongering spree from our glorious Yellow Press yet, and far be it for me to change the diapers of that particular tar baby. [Kosovo]

 

What happens when we are ALL in?

I think that the Great Military Minds sitting in the hallowed halls of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels clearly owe a debt of gratitude to our illustrious Prime Minister for his steadfast refusal to sign up.

Kostunica, in telling the world that he is against Serbia’s joining NATO, is actually positing himself as a safeguard of the alliance’s continuity. If we were ALL members, then who would we oppose? Who would the alliance bully into submission? From whom would NATO protect us? If we were all members in this heretofore rather exclusive club, how could we be the envy of the rest of the world – if the rest of the world also carries the club card?

 

HERCEG NOVI, MONTENEGRO – There are as many Perfect Holiday Scenarios as there are people who might conceive of them. For me, observing the Alien Landings on the beaches of Montenegro is always one of the most anthropologically satisfying ways to pass the time.

You are out. You are away from the office and the daily hub-bub of whatever bub you happen to hub for a living. A few hours ago, you were disgorged from a bus or a plane onto this foreign shore. The sunlight blinds your troglodytic eyes, causing you to throw up one tote-bag-toting arm in futile self-defense. Your arms and legs gleaming white-grey the from hours of exposure to fluorescent light, sensitive translucent skin calling out to some long dormant genetic code linking you to a nocturnal amphibious haddock yearning to be free.  

But that was Saturday.

 

Having now invested a significant amount of cash into the Delta Money Pit (this is the technical term for the garage where my perfectly operating car has been transformed into a terminal patient), I am now investing my time.  

Yesterday, as a kind of joke, I was informed that my car was "ready" to pick up. Two weeks ago I had stupidly brought it here to have a check-up – oil, filters, and yada, yada, yada. I should have immediately seen the sodomy in their eyes when they said I had to leave the car for two days even to get an estimate.