08-III-1976.
The 8th of march being the International day of women (not international women's day - because international women never fought for such a thing), we went out for a dinner, to a kind of posh place smack downtown, in the basement of Dom sindikata (the syndicate here being what the anglophones call trade unions). Traditionally, nobody does dinner on this day, you do lunches and that's around noon for this official kind of lunch, so the liberated women can get home on time to cook something for the family, while the comrades stay and drink themselves silly at enterprise's expense. In the evening, everything was empty, when everybody was either in mood for sleeping after all the food or booze, or for sleeping with each other.
We ordered just beer and ćevapčići, that's how far our budget went, and it was quite nice, specially that the place was rather deserted and the waiter was pleased not to attend to an empty place.
However, the onion shortage was obvious. The meat was fine, the beer was OK, but we got only a spoonful of finely minced onions, perhaps one third or less of what was standard. When the waiter came to se how we're doing (which was unheard of at the time, the norm was that you'd have to wave a lot to get his attention; sometimes the only way was to get up and start walking, that was a sure way to get him to arrive fast; perhaps in this case it helped that we were the only guests), asked whether everything's OK, and we said "could do with more onion". "Please, ask anything else... but onions, this is as much as we could spare". (... 3 words...) it was a rather humid winter when everyone's home reserves of onion would just rot. Seems that it happened so in the warehouses too. There was some intervening import from USSR, the so-called silver onion, which did have some nacreous sheen, but wasn't biting at all, just gave you a stink as if it was a real good onion. The situation normalized only with the next crop.
(I first had this in november 1975, but then that semester we had euclidean geometry, so this may be march 1976)
Got some books from the college library, on non-Euclidean geometries. Among them, a translation of Lobachevsky's book, printed 1947 or 49. The pages were cut on only the first few chapters, the rest were still in one piece. I cut to about half, and left the rest uncut and unread for someone else to find.
This spring this news spread... found it now (2025) retold like this:
A group of japanese explorers announced on the media promotion of the hollywood superproduction of „Da Vinci's code“ in Tokyo, that they have „reconstructed the voices“ of Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci.
The explorers in one laboratory specialized for acoustics have analyzed, based on their portraits, the morphology of faces of Mona Lisa and a famous italian majstor and reconstructed their voices with aid of methods used in felony investigations. "We think we succeeded in reconstructing the faithfuller the voices“ of Mona Lisa and Da Vinci, said the chief of laboratory Mitsumi Suzuki, reports the agency AFP, adding that the results of this experiment were published on the japanese internet site of Majkrosoft.
This former engineer of police has calculated based on the famous Da Vinci's painting that Mona Lisa was tall 1,68 meters and that she had a rather deep voice for a woman. "We can't with surety say how tall she was. So we calculated the length of her middle finger on right hand and compared it with the average length of Italian[ women]", he explained. Suzuki also said that, in regard of the width of her nose, the enigmatic lady with magical smsile probably had somewhat through-the-nose voice.
It's all as I pretty much remember, except „Da Vinci's code“ was published in 2003. We don't want to pull reporters' sleeves for some trifle facts, this guy wrote this down as he read it. The other thing is that websites and the rest of that greenery won't be in existence for at least a decade or two yet. It's also possible that in 2006 someone just pulled the thirty years old thing and presented it as the latest scientific achievement. Showbiz.
Regardless, the article did appear in our newspapers, and someone idle in some institution of culture had the brainfart to adress the Japaneses to synthesize the voice of Vuk Karadžić. Which probably cost something, but money was found, and this single was soon published - the voice on one side, some choir singing his anthem on the other.
Look at that science, the power of it, there our language reformer speaks to us a century and a half later, simply a miracle. The miracle lasted until next saturday. As usual, we listened to „Od doručka do ručka“ (from breakfast til lunch) on Studio Be. There Marko Janković (or maybe someone else, but he was the regular host for years, just don't remember when he took the reins) brought a listener with an interesting contribution. The guy is a radio amateur or some such, has several tape recorders, sound is his hobby, so he recorded that piece while it was still played on the radio Belgrade One (which we also heard, they played it several times), the single was not published yet, and then unloaded that tape to do something else on that recorder. And then he had a visitor and he played the tape for him, on another recorder which was, accidentally, running at half speed. And lo and behear, heard the voice of Ljuba Tadić (a famous actor then), with some shush sounds.
What really happened. The japaneses did arrive at some characteristics of Vuk's voice, as much as they could according to the preserved portraits (worked for Mona Lisa...), but had no clue with serbian, so they asked for the text and a voice sample, just to know how it should sound. There the radio people just gave the text to Ljuba to read, and sent the recording to the Japaneses. The guys then sped it up by half, and added ths hiss, allegedly they found that Vuk had a lifp or lishp (not lisp), and sent that back (with a bill, unless they did that for a glory).
When the single was published, it was even better, just play it at 33,3 instead of 45 r/m, and you hear exactly Ljuba's voice, half speed didn't quite do it justice. The whole public had two weeks of good fun on the account of this fiasco, even Minimaks added a „I said this with my synthesized voice“.
The habit to pass the saturday morning reading newspapers and listening [to] Studio Be held for another twentysome years.
Mentions: ćevapčići, Danilo, majstor, in serbian
6-XI-2017 - 31-X-2025