17-III-2002.
Our wedding anniversary. She made šlingeraji (from german Schlinge - snake - v. house dictionary) which is basically mac-n-cheese but made in a flat tray, the pastry being flat with wavy edges and there being 2-3 kinds of cheese, young cheese (well of course it's cottage, what other kind do they have here?) mixed in and then some harder cheese on top (prob'ly mozzarella, too watery but, hey, make do with what's available) and then baked in until it's brown on top.
So we took that to Richmond to visit Go and Ricardo. Made several shots of her practice paintings, she really gets that 3d effect, so realistic (see below).
We usually exited the I-64 so that the trip through the streets would be minimal, the closest route. Which wasn't simple either, the road connecting the exit with the streets zigzagged a bit until it would hit the Broad street (which we called Brodska, the ship street), somewhere by Sauer's factory. Amers completely miss the pun, Sauer means sour in german, and the guy is making vanilla extract and a bunch of other spice, sold in Kroger and elsewhere in neat little tin boxes, none of them sour. Then we'd turn left and follow the Brodska for another seven or so corners. There's no green wave in Virginia. They tried to introduce it once but it made the traffic go even slower, because of the numerous fender benders caused by guys who'd rush to follow it when they shouldn't. The current regime had bits of it, you'd get two or three greens in a row, then a red. And that was normal. Except someone had the same idea like some outfit had on Zrenjaninski road in Borča, which is the same kind of street, all business and almost nobody living there, to pay for their nearest traffic light to be up the dick to its neighbors. That firm must have gone bust long ago, and nobody remembered to get that light back to normal. The business we saw each, really each time was the unlikely culprit, it was some „Bankruptcy clinic“. We saw it each time this year, and some next. And then it went broke and vanished.
With Berix, spent some time after midnight (encroaching into today) trying to fix the spelling in counsellor (where counselor seems to be the proper american spelling, the double ell being a british thing), which I probably initially mixed up with councilor. Fixed it four times and it still displayed the old version on her side. Something in our version control fucked up.
"Finally, I've just pulled it up, and here it says Counsellor. Are we looking at the same thing? Athletes, page2 - Personal, label on the left, below "Lives With"? Seems like Sherlock and Poirot won't be enough, we got to include Mike Hammer and maybe Dirty Harry as backup."
Needs to be Counselor - two "LL" is a political title for a diplomat. But a psychiatrist who never got their medical degree and is now stuck working as a Guidance Counselor in some shitty school is one "L"
And the poor guy never made it into Cambridge dictionary :)
Well fuck your english language, and the nitpicking between the UK and US versions.
On UA, discussing stuff with a religious nut (who, I heard later, observed his son dying in a crash on their lawn and never recovered quite), this time unrelated to religion
>Personally I think the abstract goals of communism are great but they figuratively crash their car into the ditch when they presume they can change human behavior.
If capitalism was so good, communists would never have stood a chance.
Now that you mention their intent on building "a new human", just like many other things they failed, they actually succeeded but in a wrong manner. There was an enormous effort in brainwashing generations into beliefs such as "the common good comes before my own", "we're cutting corners now, but that's investment in the future" etc etc, most of which were actually praiseworthy. But, the major flaw was that the Party was "always right", pretty much like "Pope never said anything wrong". That put them beyond control, and you wouldn't believe the speed at which it attracted power-hungry guys. And while ordinary people had built some ethics which was pretty close to what the supposed image of an ideal socialist citizen was, the higher you went the more rotten it was. Even ordinary floor manager in a shop or a restaurant was very likely to be corrupt in this way or another. So yes, they have built a new man, and what a creature it was - just like the old one, just more the same.
The self-management system was a good experiment; the people had the incentive to do their best at the job, because they also had a share in decision making (workers assembly instead of stockholders assembly, and the elected workers council instead of board of directors) and a share in profits; actually they could decide what to do with them. The bad thing about this was that it was driven to absurd: first, the part of the profit they decided about was diminishing over the years (going down to about 2% in the end) so the whole thing was becoming pointless, and the incentive thing was also limited: the Party took care that nobody gets rich. Also, there were absurd situations when janitors and hall cleaners had their say when a new CAT scanner was to be bought for a hospital.
Still, the whole idea that the employees manage the enterprise worked well when it worked. Former former Yugoslavia had quite a strong economy, given the background etc.
Mentions: Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), Gorana Sredljević (Go), house dictionary, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), UbiquAgora (UA), in serbian