The views and opinions expressed in this blog are exclusively those of its author,
and are not in any way meant to reflect the opinions or policies of the US Government.
Past Travelogues.
Finland, Estonia, Petersburg
Kirovograd, Ukraine
Kosovo
Tirana, Albania
Macedonia & Romania
Budapest to Bucharest
Balkans and Poland.
Christiania, Copenhagen.
Northern Norway
Northern Finland
Estonia
Kashgar, briefly
More to come, Inshallah, as I go through old paper travel journals.
The DC experience, archived.
July '05
June '05
December '05
October '04
More to come should interesting things happen to me. Ever.
Blatent Plagiarism
The nation's largest chain bookstore has indicated that, due to lack of consumer interest, it has stopped selling books.
--Frederick Raphael,
The Glittering Prizes
I feel this is the equivalent of a surgeon, skipping through a radiology department singing, 'I don't
have cancer, I don't have cancer!'
--Phil Robinson,
Charlie Big Potatoes
Mum is crying with her faced turned away from me, gulping and honking like an injured seal. And
I'm rolled up in the back seat wishing the old man would stop the car and make her walk. That or
buy her a fish.
--Phil Robinson,
Charlie Big Potatoes
I love it when well-educated women sweaar -- the words regain their original power and meaning when
delivered unexpectedly with so much poise.
--Phil Robinson,
Charlie Big Potatoes
She lived with her mother, who looked like an old labrador, and an old labrador.
--Will Self,
Great Apes
When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated
in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God sitting on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes,
nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat.
And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though
I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
--Milan Kundera,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Quality is merely the distribution aspect of Quantity.
--Vladimir Nabokov,
Bend Sinister
...In the frank brilliance of the bright sun, which, as we all know, is the friend of heroes.
--Jose Saramago,
All the Names
He stuttered so badly that you could go out and buy yourself a chocolate bar while he was wrestling with an initial
p or
b; he would never try to bypass the obstacle by switching to a synonym, and when the explosion
finally did occur, it convulsed his whole frame and sprayed the interlocutor with triumphant saliva.
--Vladimir Nabokov,
Bend Sinister
