My day at kviskoteka. I arrived in the morning, as usual, went to Morkec's place, had a few whiskeys and a lunch with his family, and then went to the studio. We sat there in the little room with the producer and our reserves (just like I was a reserve a week ago), got acquainted with Oliver Mlakar, who was a kind of a legend even then. He stood aside and practiced the pronunciation of one of us some six times until he got it right. The name contained several č and ć sounds, and proper croatian customs prefer not to make any distinction between the two. Oliver, being a true professional, wanted to pronounce it perfectly, for the benefit of audience in the rest of the country, where failure to distinguish these may prompt your parents and/or teachers to send you to a logoped (aka speech trainer, a specialized defectologist). And so I saw how a TV studio looks and works inside.The director's secretary walks between the cameras, just barely out of sight, holding a clipboard, with a headset, and gives signs to the audience when to applaud (claps her hands above her head). There's a taped X on the floor where you stand when you talk to Oliver - that's where they aimed the cameras, lights and the overhead mike on a fishing rod. When it was my turn to introduce myself, Oliver remembered from the rehearsal that I had trouble with my age - being 29 means I have to calculate... anything ending in 7, 8 or 9 requires that - so he took that task to himself. I managed to send a greeting to the gang at home ("and to the company at home, who expect I'll greet them like this: I won't do it"). The gang were Mire, Baja et al.
My beard was still a tad short after I had to shave it during that military exercise a week or two ago, hair too, and I still had a bit of gore on my forehead from the scratch I got when we were slaughtering the pig at Oma's place. It happened while we were carrying the contraption of a meat smoker, composed of an old stove, fridge and washer (the washer door still functioning, now as a revision hatch).
My push button was too hard and had to be pushed into a recess. If not the genuine article, it was a veritable replica of the button drivers use in buses to open doors. Didn't mean much, because in first three games we didn't need it - we took turns at answering.
This was the first season when they used software instead of props to display the questions, guessing the letters (in a hangman-styled game) or the notions in the association game. It was an Apple IIe, and it ran in a very simple basic program... for which I failed to score 20 points on the hangman game, because it counted commas as characters. I guessed the solution ("it is all relative, my dear Albert" - the famous sentence from Einstein's father-in-law, mr Marić) but when I counted the characters, I was missing one. Then I saw it convert one of the underscores into a comma... ah, now I know, but too late. Didn't think complaining to the žiri would make any sense, so I didn't.
I was actually leading after first three games, scoring nicely in associations (I think I took two of four). As expected, it was rather hot in the studio, but I got acclimatized. Then we had a break, and guess what - Milka was waiting for me. We had almost an hour until I had to go back, so we headed for the nearby bar and had a špricer or two (that would be gemišt, in Zagreb), and a coffee.
When I got back, it all made me sleepy - the overheated sleeping coach and the mechanism of the spare cot on the train where I'd hit my head every 20 minutes, the whiskey, the špricer, the heat. I was a bit slow with the button, so I missed at least six answers I knew, and then at least once I was too slow to stop myself from hitting the button when I didn't know the answer - so I lost some points and ended up third (out of four of us). While Oliver was congratulating the winning girl (a haughty but nice girl, who was later turned into somewhat of a star, the camera loves her), I pulled out my tozna with škija and rolled a cigarette. Smoking may be prohibited in the studio, but I bet safely that rolling wasn't on anyone's mind when they wrote the rules. And, as I guessed, one of the cameramen found that interesting and zoomed in on my hands, and the director took it as well. The closing credits went over my rolling.
Had another round of drinks with Morkec and the gang before getting to the train. I got rather drunk - the gemišt (their word for špricer) is light, perhaps just a bit stronger than beer, but it kicks later. So you drink more than you think and it catches up with you. I remember taking a stroll in the coach corridor and having some conversation with the conductor. Now I have no idea what we talked, actually didn't have any mere minutes after.
Meanwhile, the Bhopal catastrophe - 4.500 people died, 500 went blind, 50.000 were poisoned by the leakage of gas from the pesticide factory owned by „Union carbide“. As expected, the Amers wiggled out of the mess, the company vanished, the production moved elsewhere, recompensations weren't paid out, nobody went to jail.
4-I-2012 - 3-XII-2025