Over at Teekay’s

It’s unlikely many folks come to my blog to get news on the World Cup — though the Swiss rock! — but in case any of you out there are sick and tired of it (or as an unfortunate BCS interpreter recently put it on live TV, “bolestan i umoran”), here’s an article to cheer you up — especially if you agree that Europeans are just a bunch of nihilistic posers. Money quote:

Mostly soccer is just guys in shorts running around aimlessly, a metaphor for the meaninglessness of life. Whole blocks of game time transpire during which absolutely nothing happens. Fortunately, this permits fans to slip out for a bratwurst and a beer without missing anything important. It’s little wonder fans at times resort to brawling amongst themselves in the grandstands, as there is so little transpiring on the field of play to occupy their wandering attention. Watching men in shorts scampering around has its limitations. It’s like gazing too long at a painting by de Kooning or Jackson Pollock. The more you look, the less there is to see.

No sooner had I posted a little item over at East Ethnia talking about the curious fact that both Peter Handke and Noam Chomsky, people who professionally deal with words, manage to tie themselves in knots every time they actually use same, than Diana Johnstone rushed to Handke’s defense since he is so evidently incapable of making his case himself.

Let me cut straight to the heart of the matter.

After criticizing the natural tendency of “every community involved in a civil war to see itself as pure victims” and the West’s echoing of the “charge that the Muslims of Bosnia were the target of a deliberate project of ‘genocide,’ because this justifies their illegal 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia,” she goes on:

It would be more helpful to point out that wars lead to massacres, and that evacuating women and children to safety (as the Serb forces did when they captured Srebrenica) is not a usual feature of what most people understand by “genocide.” There have long been indications of Serb willingness to admit guilt for whatever really happened at Srebrenica, but only for what really happened, and in return for recognition that atrocities of the same sort were committed on all sides. If the desire for revenge (against earlier massacres of Serb villagers by Muslim forces based in Srebrenica) spurred the massacres at Srebrenica, revenge now also motivates the insistence of the Bosnian Muslim party on branding the Serbs as “genocidal.” Muslim leaders in Bosnia hope it will enable them to force Serbia to pay billions of dollars of reparations — a prospect which would be about as helpful in promoting peace as the reparations imposed on Germany after World War I, which led to the Nazi victory.

Srebrenica was a “massacre” (the quotation marks are mine, of course) and it cannot have been a genocide since the Serbs also expelled women and children. (That’s a line of argument Handke also uses, by the way.) Atrocities “of the same sort” were committed “on all sides.” Attempts by “the Bosnian Muslim party” to “brand” the Serbs as genocidal (perhaps this is a reference to the genocide lawsuit before the ICJ) is “revenge.” And finally, the Serbs’ trump card whenever the going gets tough, insisting on Serbian responsibility would lead to the emergence of fascism in Serbia. (I’ll admit that that’s my interpretation of the last sentence in the quoted paragraph, but I don’t think I’m reading too much into it. Just comforting to know that Johnstone agrees that the SRS are Nazis.)

At least nobody can accuse her of obfuscation.

Just because you don’t see it, it doesn’t mean nothing’s happening…

NATO commander in Bosnia Gen. Louis Weber responding to accusations by Carla Del Ponte, the UN’s war crimes prosecutor for former Yugoslavia, that the alliance wasn’t doing enough to capture Bosnian Serb wartime president Radovan Karadzic, according to Reuters.

That’s what I tell people when I’m having them over for dinner. It’s usually fairly inexpensive, fairly decent stuff. But would you bring along 12-dollar bottles when visiting the President of the United States, as a certain dignitary from the Caucasus has done, according to a listing in the Federal Register?

Readers of this blog will know that I’m no big fan of MS Word (or indeed any of the other apps in the Office suite, with the possible exception of Excel) but that my work — editing, tracking changes, exchanging comments, and so forth — make my preferred solution (using Mellel, for example, or some flavor of LaTeX and outputting to PDF) cumbersome or simply impossible. I’m stuck with Word. But it’s increasingly driving me crazy with its stupid behavior. Case in point: I’ve been editing a file all morning that I received from one of our writers. I selected all and changed the formatting to “Normal,” which in my set-up means a 10pt Courier New.

I then changed the language to US English and set it to automatic spell check. All ready for editing! But then I made a huge mistake: I actually edited stuff. In the second-to-last graf I deleted an entire sentence, which prompted that graf to flow into the last one. Booom, the new graf changes to 12pt Times New Roman (a font I hate and never use) with the language selection blown out. I needed five steps — select the graf, change the font and font size, re-apply the language, and tell it to check spelling — just to be able to continue where I had left off. Why? Why???? WHY???????

Sarajevo, model city

Originally uploaded by teekay.

You know those miniature models of towns or landscapes? It’s very easy to achieve the same effect on photographs of real landscapes using a technique outlined here.
That’s the only way to turn Sarajevo into a model city.