16-XII-1976.
Sad day (if this was the day, I could be off by weeks). We took a bus in the afternoon to Srbobran, where we met a few friends from chemistry - B's funeral. He was hitchhiking north from somewhere south, at the crossroads of the Belgrade-Zagreb and Šabac-Ruma. A German or Austrian bus, full of Turkish workers who were going home for the winter vacation, with a dead tired Turkish driver, just swerved and went off the road and killed him.
Whoever hired just a single driver (so they could pack one more paid seat and save the other driver's wage and diurns) should be the guilty party. But there's no way they'd be held responsible - we're a communist country, therefore a land beyond laws, so your request for extradition would be considered illegal, bordering on totalitarian/terrorist. Just forget it and bury your friend.
His girlfriend was so colorful. We met them together just a few days before that, and she had a hand knitted scarf, about 2m long, and/or a poncho and/or socks, in about a thousand colors. A real rainbow. We never met her again - or if we did, we didn't know it was her.
Apart from kin and neighbors, there were a dozen of us students, mostly his chemistry group. One of them we knew well, he was actually our neighbor last month, two floors down. Other than that, we knew nobody, and frankly, Srbobran was a drive-through town to me.
More photos for the rest of the month.
We hit it on with programming. We learned the Fortran seriously, and we'd get a few drinks from V.J. and some professor's daughter when we'd do their homework. Somehow from day one Ljuba and I stuck out in that direction. We'd visit the faks in the evening, as from 18 to 20 there were some operators in there, who could punch out our code, and assistants who could pass our cards through the reader. There'd be a few of us who took that opportunity, never more than five. The computer that faks had, Varian 72, required precise voltage, to one permille, and was so sensitive to static, that a grounded metal mesh ran under the carpet in the room. It was still not allowed to enter that room, unless permitted by someone who could.
Maca asked "may one go in there?", knowing there's some protocol; Ljuba said "what's your underwear?", to which she blushed and said "er... white". "Thanks for the info, but the material is the matter, if its synthetic it may cause static electricity discharge".
I shot this page out of some book just to have these digits of the e, so I can check once I write my own code to do this (which I did, to 600 digits - as that many fit on my then screen).
D. from Žabalj came by (yup, the guy who failed the first year because he didn't pee before the exam), and we cooked wine again.
This is me washing the pot afterwards. Handheld sideways flash, works every time. The bottom of it was black with ground pepper. He again did some trick to make me look away while he adds another half of the bag.
The view from third floor (4th american) at the faks. Afer every better rain or when snow thaws, it generates this so-called science-maths lake. This is when Ljuba understood how much eyesight he's missing. I said "look at that Šapčanin parking his car in ankle deep water" "How do you know he's a Šapčanin?" "Well the license plates say Šabac" "And you can read that from here?" "Just did" "Fuck me, I am thoroughly blind".
We actually started visiting him often times, for a late night vodka, where we'd observe a game of cuger - which was the fast move chess, total time a minute each, then a sip from a shotglass, then another game. He had quite a collection of different, decidedly all different, shot glasses, he'd buy one when possible, or take someone's last when other five perished. One was mine from then on, which was a miniature glass potty. If there were all six of them, the similarity would have been probably lost, but with a single one, can't pass unnoticed.
It once happened that it was „let's have another [shot of vodka]“ and we weren't quite willing, because we ran out of cigarettes. There Paja remembered that last year, when he was cleaning up after a party, an almost full pack of Milde Sorte remained... now where was that... ah yes, behind the Aitchessar (the radio/amp). And he dug it out, Milde Sorte was, indeed, a mild blend, considered a ladies' smoke, because it had a „klima zona“ (klima zone*), a few tiny holes in the paper, just above the filter, which cooled the smoke to an extent. And it did smack something distinct, I know because my dear would buy that at times and I had a few, I'd recognize it even today. Dry as it were, it must have stayed there for months, in the shelf on the cables, it finally had the strength. So we had that one [shot] and one more.
And, of course, he had books everywhere. Even after the guys helped him make shelves, good strong iron bar shelves, pretty much everywhere, including above the kitchen door, he still had heaps of books everywhere. The guys were the moba, someone probably brought a welder. The algebra assistant demonstrated it by pulling himself up right there at the kitchen door, hanging on the shelf, and swung back and forth, while the shelf already held probably a hundred kilos of books.
The books, of course, weren't just mathematics and astronomy, there was also a lot of SF - I remember I got "Babel-17" and first "Dune" from him some time this month. Of course, I devoured them.
We played with algorithms a lot, too, exercising on a, say, one on how to make coffee or ride a bicycle and so on. We also got the famous russian exercise book by Kolmogorov on differential equations, so I translated that (the so-called simulanteous translator, he drew a cartoon of me with tongue tied in a knot), and we wrote it all down somewhere. Which was all fine and interesting, but the tedijed was still, to me, same as the whole integrals area, more of a cookbook than a serious scientific theory.
And of course we didn't fail to experiment with photography. This is the oil heater, cranked high, so it's hot, and we're using lighters to file bits of flint onto it. The flint ignites when it touches the hotplate. Long exposure and look, it worked.
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* pronounced by germans as tzone, with a tz as in pizza, try that sometimes. Sorry about your language.
Mentions: Ljubivoje Tomić (Ljuba), moba, Paja Ćurčić, in serbian
22-VII-2009 - 19-X-2025