The grand moba for Brane Simonović, somewhere on Bagljaš. The houses (then just in blueprints) were in a row (am. townhouses), with semidug-in garages - where else when there's no yard on the side. I rode, of course, my bicycle, got there rather early in the morning. The plan was to pour the slat on top of the garage. Everything was ready, the mixer, gravel, cement, water, power, food, booze, coffee... With a wee shot of rakija and coffee, we sat for more than half an hour, planning how to lift the concrete, because we saw there was no mechanical aid for it, no pulley, no elevator. And we needed to get it to the meter eighty height. To throw it up by spades would be screwy and we'd croak fast.
So we sat and played a brainstorming committee. Four mathematicians and one physicist, the gang from mašinska. Having had some experience with pouring concrete myself, we did the foundation already and maybe the bottom floor by now (or was this the year later? more probably now), I somehow came across as expert, compared with others. And we thought up a way to do this. We made a slope, of a couple of 2" planks, with support in the middle to prevent any rocking and wobbling, with smaller slats nailed as steps near the bottom, so the guy pushing the wheelbarrow would have purchase for his feet. We also made an S shaped hook for the other guy, who'd pull it. It'd hook into the frame around the wheel. I was mostly the pusher, sometimes pulled, and when I croaked, I switched to feeding the mixer. The effort is spread more evenly there, easier for me. By then my clogs' soles were rather eaten around the inner edges, as there'd always be some concrete droppings, and the gravel first ate the edges of the rubber sole, then the wood. Never mind, I intentionally came shod in old clogs, discardable.
But we got the job done, still within the daylight. We even had time to have another rakija, sitting in the sunset and admiring our work. There, whoever said that mathematicians lack the practical mind. And the physicist wasn't in the way either.
When I was about 10 or 11, there was a popular game or fad or whatever, maybe even before that and this was the last wave of it. It was played with postcards. You receive a plain postcard from someone, with a list of six addresses and instruction to send a postcard* to the first address, then send six postal cards to addresses of your friends, with a copy of the instruction and the other five addresses, adding your own address as sixth. By the time your address makes its way to the top, you'll receive an incredible collection of postcards... Here, I now calculated the number to be 46656 postcards, which cost me six postal cards (the pric difference was about 2:1, the postage is the same but the paper is better and there's the picture).
I got maybe three. I was disappointed with people who didn't understand the beauty of the idea... And the idea was that nobody will bother to calculate the number of people who'd have to take part (first six rounds, 55987 of them, but it needs to go on beyond that), and that they won't comprehend the speed of it running out of steam. Even if everybody did his part, by ninth round we'd have consumed the whole population of SFRY, and the whole planet by thirteenth)
Back then the phenomenon had no known name, and didn't now either. It'll take another ten years for terms like „chain of st Antun“, „Ponzi's scheme“, „chain mail“** to become known here. This year, or maybe next, a simpler variant of the game was played, with money, and instead of 6n, with just 2n. Regardless, I was a mathematician now and knew the strength of the exponential function. They played it like this: you two guys pay me a 1000 dinars each, then each find two of yours to pay you and so on. Everybody makes a 1000 for nothing. And they all see only this last sentence, blissfully ignoring the fact that by fifteenth round they'll run out of candidates for further expansion. Half of the zbornica played. Explaining didn't work, you convince two guys that it's pointless, they must be far down the chain already and the breaking point is near, and the third guy, who was half listening, goes searching for two suckers during the next break.
And the kids asked me how does that work, and I went on explaining, chalking the degrees of the deuce on the blackboard, how by sixteenth round they'll have consumed the whole town, and actually by twelfth anyone who breaks even will be lucky for managing to find that one guy, who will be at a net loss because anyone he tried with would either have playead already or wouldn't play at all. To differ from the three utilities problem (v. 23-XI-1974.), where they renewed their enthusiasm when they heard there was a proof that problem has no solution, this time they heard the voice of logic and quit the waste of effort. And then I went to zbornica and found a guy, who heard the same proof from me on the last recess, cajoling two suckers into giving him 2000.
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* distinct words in serbian: razglednica (from „razgledati“ - take a look around) is a picture postcard, usually of a place or landscape; dopisnica (from „dopisivati se“ - to have correspondence; also may mean a female resident reporter, dopisnik) is a plain postal card. The greeting card, with season's or other greeting picture, is „čestitka“ (čestitati - to congratulate).
** not the kind which was knit from wire and worn under an armor
18-III-2026 - 15-X-2026