Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to many of you. My little traveling companion, Radovan, picked some words from my mixed-up assortment of Magnetic Poetry to make a message for today. Enjoy the moment. Must say that I bought the arrangement in the basket from a lady on the market whose son is now making them...he lost his job as an electrical engineer, and jobs are scarce...

ABC WEDNESDAY "Q" is for "quotation"

Had dinner with my good friend the other night at Tri šešira (Three Hats) restaurant in Skadarlija, Belgrade's Bohemian quarter. My finger is never far from the shutter button, and I snapped this candle, which brought to mind a quotation attributed to Prince Gautama Siddhartha, known as Buddha, founder of Buddhism (5th century BC):

"Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. "

How true. This past year I've shared happiness with my family in the US and some good friends from my student days in France. Although another Buddha quote says, "Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment," I can't help but look forward to sharing more happiness with others I haven't seen for a long time.

See more Q's at ABC WEDNESDAY.

ABC Wednesday ---'Z' is for 'zounds'!

"Zounds," though somewhat outdated, is an expression denoting surprise or anger. For me, it was 'surprise' when I saw this old typewriter in a bookstore window. Not because it was an older manual machine, but the keyboard is in Latin characters, while it appears to have 'typed' a text in Cyrillic! :) Surprising, for sure.

Check out other Z's on ABC WEDNESDAY.

SKYWATCH: Les Merveilleux Nuages

Our weather has been very, very changeable, alternating between showers, heavier rain, strong winds, and bursts of sun. Over several days the clouds were just unbelievably surreal. These made me recall my favorite French poet Charles Baudelaire's poem L’étranger (The Stranger), which reads as follows:

Qui aimes-tu le mieux, homme énigmatique, dis? Ton père, ta mère, ta soeur ou ton frère?
- Je n'ai ni père, ni mère, ni soeur, ni frère.
- Tes amis?
-Vous vous servez là d'une parole dont le sens m'est resté jusqu'à ce jour inconnu.
- Ta patrie?
- J'ignore sous quelle latitude elle est située.
- La beauté?- Je l'aimerais volontiers, déesse et immortelle.
- L'or?- Je le hais comme vous haïssez Dieu.
- Eh! qu'aimes-tu donc, extraordinaire étranger?
- J'aime les nuages... les nuages qui passent... là-bas... là-bas... les merveilleux nuages!
The Stranger
Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best? Your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?
-I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.
Your friends?
-Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
-I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
-I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
-I hate it as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
-I love the clouds... the clouds that pass... up there...up there... the wonderful clouds!
See other skies at SKYWATCH.

Hey, dude, where are my vowels?

Do you play Scrabble? I do, and sometimes I cart my Scrabble game over to an English friend's house to play. Like many other players, we sometimes draw impossible combinations in English, and I think I will suggest to her next time that we can also use Serbian words, since that's a pretty good way to use those letters that never seem to go together, at least without an a,e,i, o, or u. In Serbian, r's often serve as vowels along with the standard ones, being trilled on the tip of the tongue, not in your throat like the French ones. I've used my American set here, but since letters are given values for their frequency, the values on a Serbian set wouldn't necessarily be the same as the ones you can see here (some have accents on, but of course not here), lying on Morton-Benson's Dictionary.

Here's what they mean:

• trg--a square, open place
• krv--blood
• trk--race, gallop
• grb--a crest, like a family one
• prst--finger
• smrt--death
• cvrst--strong
• srz--marrow
• cilj--a goal
• rdja--rust
• grm--a shrub
• hleb--bread

If you read Serbian, you can read about Mattel's plans for Serbian Scrabble right here, since right now I've only seen 'Skrebl' in what must be a pirated edition.