Enough of East Europe and ancient monstrous acts! I have a large stack of material documenting the horrors of the Japanese brutality at Nanking in 1936, and the six-week long massacre continued into their bold new year of 1937. I put it aside. It is not as if the anniversary will not arrive once more […]

Gateway to the former Royal Trakehner Stable, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year! I hope it is better than the last one, though 2008 begins unexpectedly. The story of my Ukrainian friend is incomplete, and is the last order of business from 2007, a sort of gateway to […]

I did not want to get dragged into the controversy. I have enough problems this morning, like why the picture that should be above is not there.   The controversy is not of my making, and the lingering bitterness over what is happening to the institutions I served for so long is something I have […]

Remember in the movie Jurassic Park when the mad scientist recovered the dinosaur DNA from the insects trapped in the hard golden orbs of ancient tree sap? It made a hell of a premise and a blockbuster film. Everyone loved the raptors and the T-Rex. In the script, everyone wound up very sorry, since the […]

I don’t know why the complete transformation of one distinct thing to another thing is so fascinating. Maybe that is why RuPaul does so well with the drag thing, Really, if I wanted to know about how a place can be transformed completely I could just ask someone from the Little Traverse Bay Band of […]

My Ukrainian friend Taag, 2007 I doubt if Elena Filatova ever met my Ukrainian friend Taag, although they certainly were in proximity in the newly independent state at the same time. Elena was born in 1974, in the Soviet Union, and she gets around. Taag was born in 1997, in what had become Ukraine. He […]

It is hard to stay focused on the disasters of other years when we have one in progress this very morning. I raise my coffee to the memory of a brave, or foolish, politician. I have a pile of stuff about the past that I want to sift through with you, some interesting notes on […]

Plaque near the tomb of Immanuel Kant, Kaliningrad I got completely turned around this morning. It is difficult to have a foot in more than one decade. I have some current business to do with the Ukrainian Embassy, involving the translation of some post Soviet-era documents. That is how I got- vicariously- to the Kaliningrad […]

Palace of the Soviet, Kaliningrad Oblast Maps lie. What appears to be true on a flat surface is not what exists on a round world. Mostly it does not matter, since we are limited to views of trees here, but as you climb up the flights of stairs in Big Pink, the truth beckons. From […]

Vesuvius in Winter The weather was crappy, but the Jugs were determined to get the Admiral and his party back to their ship in order to get the heavy cruiser Des Moines underway on schedule. The port visit was scheduled for four days, and four days only. Leaving on the 23rd gave her plenty of […]