Kosava

I devoured Momo Kapor's Guide to the Serbian Mentality last summer, and I heartily recommend it. The book includes an essay about the Kosava, the icy wind that blows through Belgrade in the winter. I had forgotten about it until yesterday.

I moved this month, partly for the novelty and partly because I was hoping for a somewhat longer commute; the two minute walk from my previous abode just wasn't long enough for the head-clearing, people-watching, step-logging that I was looking for. My new apartment is still in the neighbourhood, but it's a good ten-fifteen minutes from the office. Perfect.

Unless, of course, an icy wind is ripping down the snow-and-salt-and slush-covered streets at a hundred miles an hour. That does tend to undermine the pleasantness of a morning constitution. Here is Wikipedia:

Košava (pronounced [kɔ̌ʃaʋa]) is a cold, very squally southeastern wind found in Serbia and some nearby countries. It starts in the Carpathian Mountains and follows the Danube northwest through the Iron Gate region where it gains a jet effect, then continues to Belgrade. It can spread as far north as Hungary and as far south as Niš.^[1]

In the winter, it can cause temperatures to drop to around -30°C. In the summer, it is cool and dusty. It varies diurnally, and is strongest between 5:00 and 10:00 in the morning. Košava is usually caused by a low pressure zone over the Adriatic Sea and a corresponding high pressure zone in southern Russia.

Today's forecast, which calls for a "real winter's day" puts the low at -10, about 14 degrees fahrenheit. It felt a lot colder I assure you, and the "squally" description from Wikipedia seems particularly apt. Spring seems far behind, and Kapor's drawing much too benign; squally is not the adjective that comes to mind when I look at the wispy woman looking serenely down on the city.

My favorite politician...

I wrote earlier about the Economist's "Country of the Year" and its colorful president, Jose Mujica. Today I came across an article reporting on a Latin American summit, where he railed against the tyranny of the suit and tie, a topic near and dear to me, and often noted as I walked home from the Maadi metro stop on Road 9 to our apartment on Road 21 in Cairo, bemoaning a getup that was decidedly sub-optimal for the climate, but required nonetheless:

That's the suit that industrialization imposed on the world!

Even the Japanese had to abandon their kimonos to have prestige in the world," he continued, gesturing forcefully and rapping a pen on the table to punctuate his words. "We all had to dress up like monkeys with ties."

I don't mind dressing like an English Gentleman as much here in the WC, but the stricture of the convention still bothers me, and I support anything that anyone says or does that helps to hasten its obsolescence. 

Trouble Underfoot

About the only thing that might convince the Gs to move to Belgrade.



I had forgotten what it's like to live with winter, and, in fact, I've never lived in a place with real winter when I've had to wear leather-soled shoes--my last real winter being 1989-90 in South Bend, Indiana. Since then, it's been DC, Olympia, WA, Cairo and Chapel Hill--all of which lacked the full-on and hard packed relentlessness that the season had brought in Indiana and Ontario.

To make things worse, Belgrade seems to be the kind of place where shoveling is optional, and that means that after a couple of days, the snow is packed down into a thick layer of impenetrable, long-lived ice, which gives each step a not insignificant risk of a potentially bone-breaking slip and fall. As I brought my groceries home last night and made my way to work this morning, coffee in hand, there were at least three incidents where my foot began to slide, and only the hard-wired memory of years of similar situations saved my beverages and bones from harm.

I want to be in that number

6th Grade Band rocked the house last night. Never have I heard "Old Macdonald" played with such verve. BG is on saxophone, 4th row, just in front of the big drum. Below is a short version of "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Virtuous Circle

The OG is, shall we say, a discriminating diner. One thing she does love, though, is bacon, and I try to serve a couple of rashers alongside her cereal every morning. I save the fat, as Grandma Ruth is reported to have done, for frying stuff and making sauces (I fried some parboiled sweet potato cubes in bacon fat last night and dusted them with salt and the spice rub my dad brought back for me from Charleston--delicious) , but I can't nearly keep up with the quantity of fat that a daily regimen of pork bellies provides.

But last night, I had an idea; a horrible, wonderful, awful idea. The latest addition to the family is suffering from demodectic mange, an immune deficiency that the vet says she will likely grow out of. She has been scratching, listless and shivery of late, and she is not eating with the vigor usually shown by her species.

To remedy that, I mixed some bacon grease into her dry food, both last night and this morning. Unsurprisingly, she emptied her bowl and licked it clean, and the BG and I believe we detected a little more spring in her step on the way to the bus stop this morning.

It was a tableau worthy of Rockwell this morning as the dog devoured her bacon infused puppy chow and the cat lapped up the BG's cereal detritus, something she waits patiently at the table for every morning.

2013 Books

I have to say that 2013 was not a good reading year for me. Although I didn’t get through as much as last year, it wasn’t the quantity so much as the fact that I really didn’t enjoy many of the titles. This year, I resolve to put down a book that I’m not enjoying, something that I’ve only done once previously, with Nabokov’s Pale Fire (I couldn’t bring myself to read all those footnotes).

But humbugs aside, I’ve picked my Top 5 for 2013, and can wholeheartedly recommend each title. They are listed here in the order they appear in my 2013 library, although if I had to pick a book of the year, it would be the Gleick title:

Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays, David Foster Wallace

Meticulously witty and insightful look at various aspects of life. The essay on grammar and usage is scarily brilliant.

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary AthleticPerformance, David Epstein

Fascinating look at what it takes to succeed in various athletic events. Marathon runners are short and basketball players have disproportionally large wingspans. A nice counter (though still, I think, a complement) to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours.

A Guide to the Serbian Mentality, Momo Kapor

Wonderfully witty series of short essays about life in Serbia and Serbs in general. Much better if you’ve lived in Belgrade, but enjoyable nonetheless, I’d wager.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick

Great writing about the history communication and data, from talking drums to DNA and the internet. I couldn’t put it down.

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From HellOn Earth, Kenneth Cain,

Heidi Postlewait,  Andrew Thomson

Must read for anyone who’s worked in developing countries, but also recommended for anyone curious about what Worldwide and I do, and whether it is a good use of taxpayer money.

Complete 2013 Reading List

Title	Author
The Executioner’s Song	Norman Mailer
Farewell, My Lovely	Raymond Chandler
The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions	Rolf Dobelli
Sleights of Mind: What the neuroscience of magic reveals about our brains	Susana Martinez-Conde, Stephen L. Macknik, Sandra Blakeslee,
Dear Life	Alice Munro
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays	David Foster Wallace
Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York	Luc Sante
The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters	Rose George
Fragments	Heraclitus
The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance	David Epstein
Is Paris Burning	Dominique Lapierre, Larry Collins
An Intimate History of Humanity	Theodore Zeldin
Pulphead: Essays	John Jeremiah Sullivan
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life	David Foster Wallace
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Someone Who?s Been There	Cheryl Strayed
Tales from Ovid	Ted Hughes
How to Write for Children: And Get Published	Louise Jordan
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation	Tyler Cowen
The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox	John Freeman
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris	A. J. Liebling
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players	Stefan Fatsis
Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900	Alfred W. Crosby
This Will Make You Smarter	John Brockman
The Magic of Belgrade	Momo Kapor
Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke	Rob Sheffield
Six Memos for the Next Millennium	Italo Calvino
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error	Kathryn Schulz
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character	Paul Tough
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius: A Memoir Based on a True Story	Dave Eggers
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking	Edward B. Burger, Michael Starbird
The Man In The Iron Mask	Dumas
Ready For a Brand New Beat: How "Dancing in the Street" Became the Anthem for a Changing America	Mark Kurlansky
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!": Adventures of a Curious Character	Richard P. Feynman
The Mismeasure of Man	Stephen Jay Gould
A Guide to the Serbian Mentality	Momo Kapor
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story From Hell On Earth	Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, Andrew Thomson
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data	Charles Wheelan
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You about Being Creative	Austin Kleon
Complete Serbian: Teach Yourself	Vladislava Ribnikar, David Norris
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business	Neil Postman
Resurrection	Leo Tolstoy
Consider the Fork: A History of how We Cook and Eat	Bee Wilson
The Economy of Prestige: prizes, awards, and the circulation of cultural value	James F. English
The Hobbit, Or, There and Back Again	John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Notes From Underground	Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Big-Time Sports in American Universities	Charles T. Clotfelter
Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do	Meredith Maran
The Book of Disquiet	Fernando Pessoa
Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte
The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square	Steven A. Cook
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood	James Gleick
Feynman	Jim Ottaviani
One Fat Englishman	Kingsley Amis
The Red Badge of Courage	Stephen Crane
College (Un)Bound: The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students	Jeffrey J. Selingo
On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind's Hard-Wired Habits	Wray Herbert
The Giver	Lois Lowry
Emma	Jane Austen
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life	Adam Phillips
Summer Ball	Mike Lupica
The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction	Stephen Koch
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom	Jonathan Haidt
End Zone	Don DeLillo
Greenback: The Almighty Dollar and the Invention of America	Jason Goodwin
The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America	Martin Amis
The presidency of Calvin Coolidge	Robert H. Ferrell
What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How successful people become even more successful	Marshall Goldsmith
World War One: A Short History	Norman Stone
White Guard	Mikhail Bulgakov
Pawn of Prophecy	David Eddings
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder	David Weinberger
A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube	Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific	J. Maarten Troost
Travel Team	Mike Lupica
Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery (The Sports Beat, 1)	John Feinstein
When the Game Was Ours	Larry Bird, Earvin Johnson, Jackie MacMullan
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives	Leonard Mlodinow
Everything That Rises Must Converge	Flannery O'Connor
Wild Things	Clay Carmichael