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.