20-XII-1999.
The saturday when I slammed the Poozhoe against the curb was maybe on 11th, but more probably on 18th, as I remember it was later in december. Can't be next saturday, that's when it was christmas and the guys wouldn't be at the office.
On 19th it's st Nikola, so let's feel we've made a home and can now enjoy it a bit, and there's all of that krismisi discount on everything (well, select items), so we bought a whole turkey, she put it in the oven. The oven is bigger than ours at home, good, the turkey was large. Even baked a cake.
Aside: the word 'krismisi' made it into our house dictionary then. We went to buy some flower in a pot, and the shop was some modest shack, all planks, stuffed into some corner, partly above a creek, tiny and cute. There's a plank gangway to it, and as it was one step below the sidewalk (which is optional, you may have sidewalks along the whole street and then three houses would have none), and of course they had to post a largish warning sign, „watch your step“, as ordered by insurance or else the premium would skin them. So we bought that tiny plant, and the lady there made us wait until she finds a better wrapping paper for the pot, it wasn't „christmassy“ enough as it were. Means that it doesn't fit the spirit of it, which we found ineresting at the time, annoying the next year and then in the following years we were actively trying to avoid it all over november and december, just to preserve our sanity and moods. The contagion spills over the calendar.
From aman, my discussion with someone out there
> "Somehow, I don't believe this new world police is any better than ordinary cops taking bribe from pimps, or Sloba's financial police squeezing money bags out of small entrepreneurs. "
> This is a totally negative response, It didn't happen before, we can't do it everywhere and every time, we can't put the clock back, practicalities must apply, so lets do nothing except of course criticises those that try.
You see, if you're introducing a world police, you should take every precaution to convince everybody, including those you're defending and those you're defending them from, that you're totally impartial, that you are inducing law and order, respecting every minuscule rule, doing it in gloves, in order to show some honesty and gain the trust of those whose police you want to be.
First of all, everyone will look at your biography, if you want to be a cop. If you had a criminal record, what are your chances?
But then, there was an institution which had much more moral weight to be an instrument of international law enforcement - the United Nations. Why were they worked around? Why did it have to be the NATO? Why did the intervention commence without consent, or would I rather say, against the will, of the Security Council? Is that law and order? From my point of view, it's just the same arbitrariness, double standards and dishonesty, as if Milosevic designed it himself. One could almost recognize his handwriting in it.
Therefore, my stand remains - it was not even a nice try.
Besides, the issues I mentioned are not dead issues - there are still many valid contracts between the North American Federation and the rightful owners of the land it's using, and its legal system doesn't treat other contracts as obsolete. The silent genocide over the people in the Amazon is still going on - how many of their nations have vanished in the last 20 years? And, besides, Turkey is not a legal ruler of the northern Cyprus. Ask any Greek - that question is still open, regardless of it being 25 years old.
May it not be forgotten that there is no such thing as 'expiration of a war crime'. It's never too late to prosecute, even if it's just to justify the dignity of the victims. I don't care who's accused - Milosevic, Karadzic, Izetbegovic, Tudjman, Albright, Blair, Clinton, Shea - they all played their part, and should bear the consequences. They are accomplices to each other - how many times did they provide each other a pretext?
> No wonder Serbia has a dictator.
If you feel comfortable blaming me for that, go ahead. I could have done something heroic and ruin my family, but I didn't (unless my refusal to go into Croatian war counts, but then so many people refused, it was pretty common).
The rest of the mail was about the meeting of aman board, of which I was maybe some kind of member (and maybe some co-owner in there as well) but due to distance I actually didn't take part in that, and nobody even mentioned teleconferencing. There were no webcams yet, except perhaps in newspaper articles.
Paid my subscription for UA by myself, for the first time. At the same time, she had me go to post office and send a crocheted tablecloth (her own work, of course) to Beatrice. She replied soon - being very happy to have something like that.
On 24th messed with project hook classes, and found the neat trick of stealing the project's homedir from _vfp.activeproject.homedir - in a book from the whilfest guy, Whil Hentzen. I guess I was trying to create some kind of central access point, where I'd just launch fox and pick one of the projects, and it would then do the rest of setting up the environment - going to that project's directory, setting local user file as current, setting path etc - pretty much what setkey.prg does but without the need to sit in the appropriate directory when starting.
The doctor from Leevor (not the old customer, but rather THC, the children hospital down the street) was still in communication with Larry and me, something about EONS and setting up interviews for candidates. I thought the season would be over by end of september... well well.
News from Avai - Pali has a problem at interest calculus at CD, it's all wrong. Negative amounts or no interest at all. Probably the dates got fucked up, I'd say. Nope, my response was "I fixed this already, take the version from Čurda cooperative, but see in opiscfg table which routine is it using to calculate, there could be several at hand. At some point it would get confused between the current change and the cumulative amount, and would take the cumulative for current and it would whizz out squarely. True, this is a stiff from a closet, but you seem to be holding on fine. After more than three months (since I'm away, not to forget the last weeks in when I did mostly nothing), this is a first one on DOS apps. Anyway, after Leevor and Dook, anything else is a wind-up pussycat, right."
"And, ah, BTW, the phantom sf18b.doc** is attached, that's for the two ladies with whom I parted so nicely... Just print two copies and give one to Cica and the other to Marina, she should be working at Interoffice, [five digit phone number here], lives near the picerija* where the plans were once laid on the coaster sheets, greet each the best you can and kiss them in my name".
On 21st, the girl from the hungarian travel agency wrote back, said the tickets were ready and can be picked anytime.
----
* pizzeria
** the last one of my SF stories, unfinished then
Mentions: aman bre, Avai, Beatrice Palmieri, City doctors (CD), Čurda, EONS, fox, house dictionary, Larry Artois, Leevor, Marina Čikezin, Pali Bodor, Poozhoe, setkey.prg, SF stories, Slavica Urdulj (Cica), THC, UbiquAgora (UA), whilfest, in serbian
12-XI-2017 - 30-VI-2024