I learned the alphabet and how to read when I was three years old with a computer game. I had to match pictures and letters to the angular marks on the stubby rubber keys of the ZX Spectrum 8-bit personal home computer that my father brought home to Yugoslavia from a business trip to London. […]
He sidles up to you in your facebook feed and explains how there is no gender pay gap. He bribes you with a beer at the picnic and then dives into an article he’s read about how colonialism helped Africa. He waddles over and bear hugs you, hot dog in hand, then explains how the […]
In May of 2013 I drove a Spanish German car on a day trip to the Bourgogne with an English Briton and a Russian Estonian. After sightseeing in the Jura mountains we concluded that they are indeed lower and less impressive than the Alps. We had worked up an appetite and decided now was the […]
Panino Ena: In Search of Lost Sandwiches I was sitting in the once-red train of the Slovenian Railways heading north from Ljubljana to Jesenice, under a harsh-blue sky and snow-capped mountains, repeating a journey I used to make nearly weekly when I was a student at the University of Ljubljana. The train was the same […]
It has been a weird couple of years. 2014 marked a century since six European empires went to war over who would be the fairest of them all. All of them lost. Actually, that’s not quite true. I can’t believe it’s only been a little over a year since Great Britain’s government decided to collapse […]
Slovenia is a mountainous country and Slovenians are deeply wedded to their mountains. Every town and village has its own hiking hill. The tallest mountain of the land is our national site of pilgrimage. That mountain is named Three-headed (Triglav), just like the pagan Slavic trinity that gazes into the three worlds: the skies, the […]
I have listened to a fair number of migrants in Korea (or, as they like to call themselves, expats) express their bread angst. Their bread pain. “It’s all too sweet!” “Too soft!” “Too strange!” “Too hard!” “Too many flavors!” Europe developed as a wheat and rye-based agrarian society, which made bread the staple food there. […]
Today is the first of November. Today is the day of the dead. The day of the dead is a good day for telling stories. Yesterday I completed the #inktober challenge. Every day, I drew and inked a panel. I wrote 31 words in September to serve as prompts and every day I chose a […]
“Why do we only turn out, wave flags and cheer for sports achievements? Why don’t we do the same thing for successful businesspeople? Other countries celebrate their dealmakers!” This was the gist of a Slovenian article a friend shared. He shared the author’s perplexity at the sad lot of the Slovenian capitalist. Cute. Why is […]
I count three kinds of human settlement. There is the camp. A temporary bulwark against the elements. All it takes is a firepit and people huddled around it. Assembled and reassembled as the community moves. Hunter-gatherers on the move, pastoralists and their goats and their sheep, German tourists in their FKK camps on the Adriatic. […]