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June 19, 2007

Vida Tunguz

Today I became an Uncle. Earlier on today, June 19th, at 10 am Croatian time my brother's wife Ana gave birth to a wonderful little baby girl that they named Vida. Needless to say, this is wonderful news for everyone in my family. I wish I had been there to see it all happen, but my thoughts and prayers are with them in these moments. I hope to get a few pictures soon, so I can see this new bundle of joy.

June 18, 2007

From now on Orkut as well

Orkut has just added a new feature where they let users import their own RSS and news feeds (again, something that Facebook has had for a looong time), so from now on these past will be accessible in my Orkut profile as well. Who knows, maybe more people start reading them now.

June 17, 2007

Me cookin' in da kitchen

I really enjoy cooking. After consuming food, that is my favorite culinary occupation. I much prefer it to going out and eating in (most) restaurants, since I feel that way I have much more control over what sort of final product I can expect. I am not trying to brag, but over the years I've become quite skilled at making a wide variety of meals. But there is something quite interesting about the sorts of food-things that I am best at making. Even though my taste in food is quite catholic, and some of my favorite cuisines are those of the far-flung places of the Earth, the meals that i am the best at making are still the ones that I grew up with. This despite spending the last 15 years living in the US with only vague memory of how those things tasted, or even vaguer of how to make them.

When I was growing up I never actually cooked. I don't think I even made myself an omelet until I was well into my teens. And yet, being a true food-lover, I would sneak into the kitchen whenever my mom was making some elaborate dish, and would savor the prospects of eating it in the near future. Over the years my observation became a bit more active, and I would help my mom with some of the more routine tasks that required little skill and only the repetitive effort - chopping the vegetables, mixing things in a bowl, things like that. The impression that those hours had left on my subconscious must have lingered, for I find myself after all these years (decades even) having an intuitive grasp of the basic "philosophy" behind the meals that my mom made. Oftentimes I find myself pleasantly surprised by what I had made using only a recipe found on the internet and after only the first go at it. My baklava in particular, although not exactly something originally made in my family, is gaining some local fame by the way. If you ever stop by my place, I would be glad to make some for you.

However easily making of the dishes from the old country comes to me, the same cannot be said about those from far-away places. It seems that more distinct the cuisine is from the one I am used to growing up, harder it is for me to get an intuitive sense for it. Over the years I've tried making many Chinese dishes, and although not all that bad, they were a far cry from what one can find in any semi-decent Chinese restaurant. Japanese food fared even worse. I absolutely adore Japanese food, and it was such a disappointment when my first and only attempt to make sushi ended up in utter disaster. If I am ever to get to the point where I can enjoy my own home-made Japanese food, I might have to undergone grueling months-long tutelage under a renown chef, a kind one my find on Iron Chef perhaps.

June 14, 2007

Kurt Waldheim

Kurt Waldheim died today. He was 88. He was UN secretary general between 1972 and 1981, and president of Austria between 1986 and 1992. These achievements would have made him seem like a person who led an exceptionally successful life, but they will be forever marred by the revelation from 1986 that Waldheim was an active officer in the German Nazi army during WWII. There has never been any evidence that he himself was either responsible or complacent for any of the war crimes, but the guilt by association has never left him.

To someone like me who has been a life-long critic of the UN, there is a delightful irony in the fact that that holier-than-thou, give-peace-a-chance, war-is-not-an-answer was at one point led by a former Nazi. During my Sophomore year at Stanford, I lived in an internationally-themed co-op (I know) named after Dag Hammarskjöld, yet another UN secretary general (I know, I know). The Dag Hammarskjöld House attracted a lot of international students as eating associates (EAs), most of them graduate students. Needles to say, most of them were very, very liberal, and during my tenure there we even had one dyed-in-the-wool German communist. I did my share of irritating them, sometimes through genuine naiveté, and sometimes though good old conservative common sense. At one point, with a tongue in cheek, I suggested that we rename the house in honor of Kurt Waldheim. The suggestion did not pass. Presumably because Kurt was still alive at the time. Maybe, someone will renew the motion today.

June 12, 2007

Milan Martić

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) today handed over a 35 year jail sentence to Milan Martić, the paramilitary leader of the Croatian Serbs in the early '90s. To many of us the most important detail of the sentence has been the fact that the ICTY acknowledged the central role that the Serbian-led Yugoslav army played in the ethnic cleansing in Croatia, and thus confirms the central tenant of Croatia's understanding of that conflict as an act of aggression of one country on another, and not a civil war.

One of Martić's most heinous crimes was the indiscriminate shelling of the civilian populated downtown Zagreb in 1995. My mom and brother were there at the time, and I called home as soon as I found out about it. Fortunately, neither one of them was hurt, although one of the rockets hit close to where my brother had passed by a tram just a short while earlier. It was yet another one of the close brushes with the war we had, luckily it was also to be the last one.