Whatchalmacallit? april 2009, recently during lunch

A recent conversation with someone from work went:

She: So, what type of car do you drive?
Me, kind of : ?best described as vintage, useful.
She: do you listen to our music? Zabavna ili narodna?
Me, slightly  nervous: well, depends on the occassion, you  know ..
You´ve been to Bosnia, haven´t you?
Yes
You know the city …….
No, not really.
Ah, P….(town) is so beautiful, I loved it when I was there!
I know, I am planning to visit some places soon. I´d love to visit Sarajevo soon.
Oh, hm. Well. You know, life in Bosnia is so much better than here in Germany.
I can´t go anywhere without seeing those Turks or Africans. I am so fed up with it.

Me, silently practicing the art of controlled breathing.

She continues  I don´t undestand, how the germans (!) can put up with it!

More controlled breathing. It?, I ask.What do you mean with it?

End of conversation. After a few awkward moments we part.

She is planning to open a nail salon in Bosnia. For peace.

twittering war criminals

with Ashton Kutcher having more “followers”  than CNN – oh well.Sign of the times.
I´am still working on it – being an illiterate non-twitter . With “it” I mean- instead of posting messages like “want more candy” I am trying to twitter up some war criminals.

Maybe certain services are already using this tool  – undercover, understandingly?

If only I was tech-savy enough to integrate it on my blog, for whatever use.

But in this connected age – what if services just like twitter, are used more and more to harras people? (as was the case with Courtney and…….) Being popular becomes increasingly important. Either you have followers or you don´t . As friends on Facebook. But for what cause?

Of course, all these tools could be used reasonably.

ICRC Report on CIA´s handling od detainees

Apparently, confinement in a box is a proven technique in the war on terror, as well as forced shaving, beating and kicking and suffocation by water.

look here: http://www.nybooks.com/icrc-report.pdf.

Intense power for investigation_ends up in Kenya

Numerous google alerts “hunt for mladic” have reached my postbox.
Nothing worth mentioning, apart from this story:

A man named Igor Majewski was arrrested in Kenya on suspicion being a war criminal from the former Yugoslavia. …….

• Kenya arrests wrong man in search for Mladic
• Lookalike freed in Kenya
• Finally Igor Mejaski speaks
  

An here is a story by Aleksander Hemon from The New Yorker:

The Noble Truths of Suffering