To some guy who called himself Max.Headroom on sezam, who was disgusted to see Jackson spelled as Džekson etc.
The disgusting thing is that you got disused from regular cyrillic orthography, so now it looks strange to you.
Mackxs, if you care about the original, specially for you sezam will provide the original names of all the Chinese, Arabs, Japanese, Koreans, Vietanemese, Russians, Armenians and others, whenever they be mentioned in discussions. They belong to a handful of miserables who still haven't adopted latinic over their native alphabet. Now you'll say that the Chinese have pinyin transcription, that Russians and Vietnamese and pretty much all of them have official latinic transcriptions, or at least rules for them. That they do have, but it's not mandatory - that's what they have for foreigners.
Let's turn it around - in how many languages would _your_ name be written correctly? In how many countries would they even bother to think of it, and in how many would they just rough it quickly. And why would we then insist that (western foreign) names should be written in the original? Do you think that the african presidents' names should be written in english or, as our orthography has it, the way they are pronounced? In elementary school I learned that these countries are no longer colonies.
While we're at it, the Croats seem silly to me with that spelling of (western) names in original. First, they read them badly, and frequently write them wrongly; second, on each sport event every country enforces its own language (plus one more of the worldly ones) on computer displays during the game, only the Croats keep writing theirs strictly in english, without šđž (does anybody remember Sanda Dubravtzitz, nee Dubravčić?*); third, it was exactly the Croats who rebeled against Hungarians when they removed croatian names of places at railroad stations and replaced them with their own. :)
Fuckit, you really got me spilling text... well, it's sitting in me for quite a while, you found the trigger. Kudos.
Later that month, Grgi and I were returning from the south of Banat. We've finished with what customers we had that day - I'd guess we started with the bank in Plandište and their godawful Olivetti document printer. The car was the 2nd yugo of DBA, the red one. The temperature outside was near freezing, the road was wet, and while driving through Ilandža at some point I realized it was black ice. Told him so, so he slowed down to about 30 kmh. The main street stretched to the horizon, but about a kilometer beyond the village centre I realized something's off... the main road turns left off main street, while the lights go straight. I told him so, and he started braking. Wrong, we started to waltz on ice. We flew over the rain ditch on the right, which was about meter and a half deep (pretty standard for old villages) and landed across the corner. The cassette kept on playing, the engine kept running, the steering wheel wouldn't go the whole way, the car wouldn't move in first gear, the windshield was cracked. I did hit it with my head, but there was not much of a crack on my side, no center, just a few vertical cracks. We went out and saw that the front right wheel was pushed about 20cm backwards, and the whole right corner was bent. So we walked to the village center to find a phone. I felt some pain in my back.
Wait a minute - pain in my back, and I've hit my head? If I hit my head, that would mean the speed wasn't enough to block the seat belts. So why the back? It took me a minute to remember. That morning the floor tiles arrived. The truck parked in front of the window, and the guy unloaded the boxes through it. I would take each, carry it a couple of steps and lay it on the floor in the corner. I didn't feel the strain all day, only now, when I left the warm cabin and went walking through the village.
We eventually found a phone, in the local tavern, called Sale, he called the AMD, they sent a hauler truck, and within less than two hours we were on our way back.
The yugo was fixed in a couple of weeks, and ran for many years more, but it never sounded right. The muffler didn't quite sit in the right position, so it gave off much more sound than it should. That car was henceforth called a tractor.
Some time this winter, when the snow was ploughed off to the sides, and all the roads and sidewalks were walled with white heaps, one evening that picopevac** Ivica called, needing an urgent fix for something at LebarProm. Not the first time, last time it was another such evening, and just the kind of urgent small thing, and then we watched few hundred parents by the fence of the military warehouse across (I went there, once we had another one-day exercise with gathering spot in there, no clue what were we fucking with then), demanding to know where their children were. They were summoned for an alleged reserve exercise, but everybody knew that they'd be shipped to slavonian front, to volunteer for a war in which we took no part. This time, the thing to see was a line of trucks in LebarProm's yard. He said they're being loaded with flour to take to Kosovo, from state reserves, which were partly stationed here. Well aren't we amid a shrtage, fuckit, half the private bakeries closed already, can't find where to buy flour to make bread. Well, for brother Šiptars it must be provided.
So I solved that problem of his, guess it was some change in the method of calculating the totals on mill's invoices (rebate finally goes first, retail tax last or some such nuance), done, wanna have a drink? Well it's not me who's driving, can do. We rocked a vinjak each, and then he drove back, again via Čurda, because the shortcut wasn't built yet, so it was 6km instead of less than two. Ta the crossing in Čurda the cops flagged him, to blow. Of course he blew it, regardless of this being just one vinjak, it was ten minutes ago. He started begging, moaning, mentioning some Božo Zaklan (the chief of something in police), but nope, they don't give a fuck, they booked im all neat... and let us go, with the stipulation that I should drive. Okay, you didn't ask me to blow, so fine, can do. Must be someone held a grudge against him and snitched ahead, bet two beers that every third porter in LebarProm is an udbaš. Said to drive to his place first, needs some help from me.
Once at his place, it was a big room where half the furniture was moved away... Says fuckit, the gas in the pipes is going out every few days, he has to reactivate his old TA, and when he deactiveted it, he pushed to this farther corner, now it needs to go back across the room, to its three-phase outlet. We tried to move it - he, I and one neighbor, but nope, it won't budge much, we barely moved it, and there's 4-5 meters to go. Um... he'll go borrow the dolly, specially made for these things, from the other neighbor, back in a couple. So he left and we two just stand and wait, and his wife keeps us company. I looked around, well it's a smooth hardwood floor, we could just slide it over, but we'd scrape the floor. Only if... so I asked the missus whether she has those pieces of rug that go into doorframes, threshhold covers. Sure has them, of course. Well, two will be enough. So she brought them, and we leaned the furnace to one side to insert the mat under a corner, then the other way to swing it under the other corner. Ditto for the other end. Now we two slid it over in two minutes, cushioned with the carpets it didn't scrape the hardwood.
Then Ivica comes with dolly in tow, and notices the furnace is not where he left it, looks around, and „what did you do here?“. „Takes some zen concentration for the telekinesis to fire up, goes smooth thereafter“.
I recounted this anecdote later as an example of programmers' (or mathematicians', hard to define the boundary) way of thinking: you get the initial state, a desired goal, a problem to get from that state to the goal, and you look around for what tools are at disposal. The nature of the problem itself is irrelevan, it doesn't matter whether you ever solved any from that area, as you did solve a similar problem before. The kick is in the definition of „similar“, what's similar to what for a mathematician... the definition becomes quite elastic there.
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* I was really pissed off that all the western countries spelled her as Dubravcic, for years, while they had each Ø and Ë and é exactly where they should be. And then once we got the organization, the SFRY would host the championship, I was really waiting for the first č and ć ever to appear on the screen during the figure scating championship, because it was here, in Zagreb - and guess what, the brownnosers spelled her Dubravcic, at home. Shameful.
** eh, hard to translate... „picopevac“ would be, literally, „cuntsinger“ or „cuntrooster“; actually denotes a guy devoid of height, who still tries to look important
17-VI-2021 - 25-VI-2026