Funny celebrity names in Serbian

Once upon a time, a man named Vuk Karadžić decided that in Serbia, people should write the way they speak. That got things a bit Vuked up, so to speak, and still foreign names are commonly transliterated to cater to the Serbian ear. See if you can recognize these people:

Rijana



Šer

Lajza Mineli

Džesi Džej

Šeron Stoun

Maraja Keri

Kejt Hadson

Victorija & Dejvid Bekam



Riz Viderspun



Bred Pit



Kejt Mos & Džejmi Hins

Rob Lou, also known as Autsajder

Lejdi Gaga

Ejmi Vajnhaus



And if you don't believe it, perhaps you can read about it in the...

Njujork Tajms



Asperger Syndrome: Fear And Loathing in the train from Belgrade to Lubljana

I love people, as long as they come either in book form or behind glass. Right now I’m in the train from Belgrade to Ljubljana, with a whopper of a headache, suffering from sensory overload like there’s no tomorrow. Behind me a kid is screaming. Next to me a sweaty woman is eating salty sticks from a crispy bag, looking unfathomably stupid and is cruising for a hit in the neck.

“Love is being brave,” says my wife next to me.

“Don’t talk to me!” I snap back. Everybody in the train looks at me. I’m a bad husband. It says so on my forehead. I probably beat her too and torment my mother in law. No folks, I’m just an aboulic alien with Asperger Syndrome. I’m daddy cool in perfect silence but when herds of humans crowd me and yalp like an obsession, and crisp crunchy bags and sweat from all their vile orifices, I become my vicious alter ego. I snap, I snarl and pretty soon I’ll turn homicidal.

Earplugs in my head, sunglasses on my nose, typing away just to have something to focus on. They say Asperger Syndrom is a blessing, and while I’m busy counting, I believe I’m going to wield my super mental powers to hypnotize the lady next to me into murdering the kid behind us.

Steven's Blog: Whitehorse to Dease lake, in the rain, but with a ...

Steven's Blog: Whitehorse to Dease lake, in the rain, but with a ...: Some more beautiful views, first on the alaskan highway A waterfall, very clear water and it tasted great And my first bear, eating gra...

A Movie in the Can is just a Commode Away?

The VH1 jingle is beginning to bug me. VH1 is not exactly our favorite channel, but we have friends come over all the time and the dog ate the i-Pod. And that makes VH1 our last refuge.

VH1 is the latest spawn of the MTV network. MTV, you’ll remember, was once a station that broadcasted groovy music video’s, then discovered Beavis and Butthead and swiftly regressed into a colorful crypt of never-ending adult cartoons. That didn’t sit well with music-lovers, and aiming to please, MTV begat VH1.

And VH1, even more than MTV, repeats the same jingle every twenty minutes, and has been repeating the same darn jingle since time immemorial. And in that jingle occurs a dude, and that dude sings something that sounds very concerned. It lasts only a few seconds, so I didn’t have much to go on. Because who is that dude? His clip is monochrome, his music is kinda rough, but he’s obviously trying to be some kind of clown, prancing about with his long dreadlocks flopping. I honestly thought his song was a spoof. Because, quite clearly, he expressed his concern about technology taking over our most sacred and peaceful places.

I understood his two-second message to be, “A movie in the can is just a commode away,” and interpreted it as an objectionable installation of a movie player in the restroom. It took some Googling, but I found the dude. He’s White Zombie, for crying out loud. The song is called Black Sunshine, and it’s not funny at all. And he isn’t singing “A movie in the can is just a commode away” but “Move me in the Silence baltic motorway.”

Well, I liked my version better.

Christian mercy for a postal guy

I was forced to yell at a postal worker today. Of course, he deserved to be tarred and feathered and driven out of town at gun point, so I rendered onto him pure Christian mercy, in fact.

Today I became the proud owner of twenty shiny copies of my own novel Cross On Me. My publisher shipped them over; the boxes carried stamps from at least five countries on three different continents. I live in Serbia, where, apparently, every parcel from abroad is yanked apart and inspected. The postal guy who inspected my parcel, while I was standing at the window waiting for it mind you, decided that a mere visual inspection wasn’t enough. He tried bouncing them off a rusty steel bar that ran over his head, he smelled them, folded them, rolled a few up like phone books, opened one to the scene where the protagonist attacks God with a baseball bat and sneezed on it. If I hadn’t stopped him I’m sure he would have wiped his behind on them.

Luckily for all of us, the guy didn’t understand English well enough to understand precisely what I was promising to do to him if he didn’t hand my good over right away. But he got the right away part. And I got to yell a bit, and that’s always nice.

Yes, Serbian Women Are Beautiful | Serbia's Ambassador To The ...

Yes, Serbian Women Are Beautiful | Serbia's Ambassador To The ...
There are beautiful but also so kind:) ... Arie Uittenbogaard Says: And kind too, usually.... Marko Markovic Says: Have some respect for your country Karl... please ...
http://www.ambassador-serbia.com/2011/08/27/yes-serbian-women-are-beautiful/

The curious case of the missing football guy

My good friend Leonne is seven years old, which means that I usually have the drop on him. He screams louder than me but I can reach the candy jar. He is endowed with all the charm, but I can explain things in grown-up speak, which frequently leads to my acquittal and his inculpation. That’s quite alright because he is always the one who gets us in trouble in the first place.

By some path of gruesome injustice, Leonne recently acquired a brand-new football game; one of those green tubs with burley football guys standing stoically on springs. The original idea seems to be that the players patiently place one ball somewhere in the tub and then take turns pweeioning the football guys so that they propel the ball towards the other player’s goal. Foolishness, of course.

Missing football guy

Leonne and I - surely inspired far beyond the compass of the original designers - emptied the canister of spare balls onto the field and made it the game’s goal to hit our opponent in the head with either a ball or else one of the football guys, who for some reason came loose en mass about ten seconds into the game and were flying like wounded sparrows all over the place.

I was winning. And that generally doesn’t sit well with Leonne, who asserted with some force that the balance of power was tilted due to one of his football guys being AWOL. I scored. Leonne wailed. I was awarded a hit from the candy-jar. Leonne wailed even louder. Leonne’s mother came whirling in, ready to split some wigs and serve justice and was pelted by a virtual cloud of little plastic footballs and football guys until she retreated and let us go back to doing guy things.

The missing football guy was found sticking out of a wad of cookie dough.

Now Released: Cross On Me – A Novel By Arie Uittenbogaard

PRESS RELEASE

A brilliant man flees from reality and drives in a panic from scientific Boston to the wilderness of Alaska. When his father learns of his son's plight, he sets out to find him. Before they can meet again, both men must pay an ultimate price.

In his ambitious, literary epic, Dutch-born author Arie Uittenbogaard shows the north American continent through the eyes of two displaced foreigners who are desperately looking for each other. Their quest takes them from the latest scientific findings to the ancient wisdoms of the Bible, from the Dutch city of Leiden to the arctic shore of Alaska, from the howling infinite of fiction and the squalls of madness to the folly of knowledge and the essence of redemption.

Cross On Me follows the trail blazed by Dante and Bunyan, and shows a modern day and unlikely Nazarene whose powerful father has to relinquish everything, follow his son into his grave and raise him from the death he died.

Arie Uittenbogaard is a former maritime engineer who moved to Massachusetts to study theology. He worked on cargo and cruise ships and spent most of his summers in Alaska. Today he and his wife live in Belgium and Serbia.

Arie Uittenbogaard publishes Bible studies, short stories and poetry in both English and Dutch. Cross On Me is his first full length novel in English.

Cross On Me was published by Abarim Publications and printed by iUniverse. It is available from online booksellers such as Amazon.com, Borders and Barnes and Noble. Cross On Me can also be read entirely online at http://www.crossonme.com/.

Amazing animation

This animation is worth watching to the end.


BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.