Archives for January, 2007

Memory: A History of Slovenian Graphic Design.

The Memory Project was created by Slovenian artist Martin Bricelj and there are three versions: Regular Memory, Slovenian Graphic Design Memory and Slovenian Industrial Design Memory. (I can’t link to them individually because the site is all flashed up.)

They’ve also added a Central European edition featuring five other nations. There are some very nice pictures here, including a Schnitzel photo by our very own B5.

Unfortunately for me, I was terrible at memory as a kid and time hasn’t been kind to my hippocampus. These days I consider it a personal triumph if I remember to put pants on in the morning.

(Via Ihre Excellenz)

Go ahead and smoke … / Funeral Services Zagreb

Smoke? Just keep on doing it because … / Crematorium Žale

See also: Pengovsky’s round-up of new smoking legislation in Slovenia.

(Thanks Dejan!)

I think I know why not. (source)

The euro isn’t even a month old but there’s already some grumbling about it. Among the stranger complainers is this: 1eurobanknote.org, a site that wants to ditch €1 and €2 coins for banknotes. They’ve put up a long rant about it, in English, here. The basic idea is this:

Paying by coins will be considered as payment by „change“, everybody will try to get rid of them, feeling that the two most valuable coins 1€ and 2€ are „only“ change. That is the exact excuse for the unjustified price increases. Issuing both bancnotes of 1€ and 2€ would give back the honour and dignity to the basic units of our money.

There are so many problems with this that I don’t know where to begin. To start with, it ignores the fact that many, no, most Europeans have been perfectly comfortable with the idea of high-value coins for a long time. Germany’s Deutschmarks started with the ten-mark bill — except for those really rare, really awesome five-mark beauties. But the Germans primarily used a 5-mark coin, the equivalent of €2.50. The French had 10-franc coins, the equivalent of €1.52, before taking the euro. The Dutch 5-Guilder coin was worth more than 2 euros. The Spanish also minted coins worth about three euros. Ditto for Austria and their 50-schilling piece. Among the big economies, only Italy failed to mint coins worth more than 50 cents.

But this site seems to suggest that because some Slovenes are having trouble with the idea that coins can be valuable, then the ECB should accommodate them. Ahh, the spirit of Europe.

The petition, despite being an online one, already has about 2,388 signatures, including names like D4rt3r and Tomaž F. It’s certain to impress.

But the other problem (and the reason why there are no 1 or 2 euro bills) is that it’s expensive. That’s why the U.S. government has been trying for a long time now to ditch the one-dollar bill. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimated in this report (pdf) that replacing one-dollar bills with coins would save the U.S. government $522 million a year. The report explains:

“Because $1 notes last only about 18 months before having to be replaced, the government has to produce about 5 billion of them per year to maintain the pool of 7.5 billion $1 notes now in circulation. At a per unit production cost of $0.035, this costs $175.0 million, and it also costs the Federal Reserve about $49.7 million to process the $1 notes each year — for a combined production and processing cost of $224.7 million.”

Coins, on the other hand, are more expensive to produce but can last for up to 30 years. That’s why the U.S. will give dollar coins yet another try this year. And why the ECB will ignore attempts like this to go back to paper.

(Via Miami Dreams)

I’ve decided to add a new feature: a round-up of interesting or wonderful stuff I’ve seen on Slovenian blogs (or “Slobs”) recently. I like the idea because: firstly, there are a ton of people blogging in Slovenia and they’re churning out some good stuff; secondly, it will give me a chance to highlight some things I’ve enjoyed; and thirdly, it will allow me to make a whole new class of enemies who want to know why they were left out and do I realize what a stupid jerk I am?

Here we go!

–> Slovenia’s first directory of blogs is up for sale # Act now!
–> Sgazzetti is a father² # I was off by 10 days
–> K-Fed jams to Bosnian turbo-folk # But not really. (Original)
–> Redesigning newspapers doesn’t help them # Does VeÄ?er know?
–> POPTV has trouble with arithmetic # Barbie was right!
–> B5 scuffles with Peter StariÄ? # (Part one, Part two) A must-read.
–> Martin Strel should reconsider swimming the Amazon # Ow.
–> Prize-winning blog Ulala’s Diary now redirects to porn # NSFW.
–> Wordpress 2.1 is out # NOOoooo.

Have a nice weekend!

The impossibly beautiful SoÄ?a River in Slovenia. (source)

It looks like the sequel to the Christian allegorical film The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, will be partly filmed in Slovenia. A crew will arrive here this summer to shoot scenes from Prince Caspian in the spectacular SoÄ?a Valley. It’s an amazing place, and certainly an appropriate backdrop for a fantasy film.

The first film got generally positive reviews and made a ton of money, so I’m guessing this one will do alright as well. And that means a lot of great publicity for Slovenia. The film probably won’t do what Lord of the Rings did for New Zealand (or did it?) but it’s still better than nothing.

Maribor Hospital: Like chaos physics, but without the physics.

My daughter recently had a tonsillectomy requiring her to stay overnight at Maribor’s hospital. Although I’m generally a fan of Slovenia’s healthcare system, the evening turned out to be a lousy and traumatic and changed my outlook significantly.

People here love bitching about the hospitals, but I have to say that the doctors I’ve encountered so far have been universally smart, competent and fantastic at what they do. The problems, as far as I can tell, are on an organizational level. Basically, there is no organization. It’s chaos. And it starts right from the beginning: To see a specialist, you first have to go to your physician, who will give you a paper authorizing you to get examined. Securing an appointment can take weeks, or even months, if you’re unlucky. And you can count on spending most of your appointment day in the waiting room.

If you want to see the worst place in Slovenia, go check out KrÅ¡ko a Slovenian hospital waiting room. To which I should add: I don’t mind waiting. In fact, I love waiting. I always have something to read. What I don’t like is being damned, and that’s what you are there. The way the system works is like this: You and a thousand people show up in the morning. You try to find the right door among hundreds of identical doors. Then you take out your almighty zdravstvena kartica (health card) and wait for the nurse to emerge. This is always the worst part because the nurses appear briefly and rarely, and the sooner they get your card the faster you get in. So, of course, a thousand people want to get their card in quickly. And so you stand in front of the door, sometimes for up to an hour, you learn to appreciate the notion of Hitchcockian suspense. You and everyone else know the door is going to burst open at any minute, but you don’t know when.

At any rate: back to my daughter’s overnight stay. The first thing that surprised me is that, despite there being a one-year waiting list for tonsillectomies, she was the only kid in the room. It was just her and nine, freshly made, empty beds. The nurses later explained that the backlog is caused by the fact that they can’t handle more than three kids at a time, so they did the obvious thing and set the maximum limit to three. Of course, that doesn’t explain why there were no kids the day before my daughter arrived, and just her when she did, but I think it all ties in together with what I said before about organizational deficiencies.

Either way, there is a nurse stationed in the room throughout the day.¹ At around 10 p.m., the nurse leaves the room and a night nurse takes over. This one doesn’t come into the room itself, but stays down the hall and monitors the area.

And now the real pain begins. I was told that I could go home and sleep because: a) the kids are usually so drugged up that they sleep through the night anyway, and b) the night nurse was just down the hall and would hear if something was up. A little boy from Carinthia² had come later that day and his mother cheerfully left him in overnight. I felt a bit silly staying and was seriously considering going home. I decided to first wait and get a sense of how the night nurse was and how my daughter was sleeping.

The first warning bell tinkled when the night nurse didn’t show up. I was guessing (hoping?) that she would make a quick appearance at the beginning of her shift. But she didn’t. She came in an hour later to tell me that they would now turn off the lights, and that I could freely go. I told her I would probably leave soon and just wanted to make sure things were okay. I then quietly sat in the dark and dozed a bit. Thirty minutes later I heard some whimpering noises — coming from the other bed in the room.

The little boy had woken up and seemed to be asking for the toilet. He called out a few times, but no one came. I was curious to see how fast the nurse would come in, so I made a mental note of the time. But she didn’t come. I considered helping him myself, but if something had happened to him (if he fell, for instance) I’d have unwillingly entered a world of pain.

After ten (10) minutes, I got up and went to get the nurse. I found her reclining on a chair in the lounge, reading VeÄ?er, and chatting with some other staff. I told her, very politely and in Slovene, that the “little boy was awake.”

She gave me a funny look, then turned to her friends and spat:

“This guy’s trying to tell me how to do my job.”

I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t. But she wasn’t done with me yet. As we walked back to the room together, she accused me of waking the boy up. Quoth the raven:

“This is what happens when you watch TV in there or have a light on. You wake up the kids.”

In other words, it was my fault the boy was awake. I was the careless, negligent one among us. I’ve always been worried that my Slovene would fail me in moments of anger, but praise be to Allah for keeping my tongue loose that night.³ I immediately shot back that I wasn’t watching TV, hadn’t turned on any lights, and that the boy probably had to use the toilet.

And of course I was right. Unfortunately, the boy had pissed all over himself in the meantime. I felt bad for not having gotten the nurse sooner, but in a way he was lucky I was there at all. If I had gone home he probably would have soaked in his own urine for many more minutes, if not hours. Needless to say, I resolved to stay in the hospital for the rest of the night. I sat down and closed my eyes, listening as the nurse cleaned the dirty sheets and changed the little boy’s clothes.

1. This also surprised me. One nurse can only handle three bedridden kids, but a kindergarten teacher is expected to handle 15 fully active crazy kids? How is that possible? [back]
2. For some reason Carinthian accents strike me as Croatian. I regularly mistake Carinthian Slovenes for Croatian-Slovenes. I don’t know why this is, but for most of the day I assumed he was part Croat. [back]
3. I was especially relieved to hear myself using the double-negative correctly, i.e. nisem niÄ? gledal! which is literally “I didn’t nothing watch.” Getting my English brain to accept double negatives has been a huge challenge for me. [back]

The most confusing bag of rice on the market today.

The EU obsesses a lot about product labeling, and a lot of their energy has been devoted to the subject of genetically modified foods. Europeans generally seem more interested in the subject than Americans. So I can see why clearly labeled goods could be important.

Still, this bag of rice I bought the other day is the most confusing thing ever. I’m just going to write down everything it says on the package. Ready?

On the front:

Rickmers Bali Classic
Quality Foods USA International
AAA - Grade

100% Quality
100% GM-Free
Country of origin is not the USA

Side packaging:

BALI is Best American Longgrain Indica Rice

100% USA
Longgrain Rice
Top Quality

Packaged by: Rickmers Rice Mill, Bremen, Germany
Country of origin: USA
Distributor: Podravka, Ljubljana

They certainly like to use the term “100%” — too bad it’s impossible to figure out what they’re talking about.

Slovenian retailer Mercator knows how to make you feel welcome.

The sign reads:

HOLIDAY OPENING HOURS

Monday, 25.12.2006
CLOSED

Tuesday, 26.12.2006
CLOSED

Monday, 1.1.2007
CLOSED

Tuesday, 2.1.2007
CLOSED

You’re invited!

(Thanks Miran!)

Na zdravje: The cleavage is there, but the spirit is missing.

As of tonight, heresy has a new name in Slovenia: Na zdravje. (Cheers) That’s the name of the new show that has replaced the country’s greatest contribution to television and the arts ever: Pri Jožovcu z Natalijo with Slovenian superstar Natalija Verboten.

I didn’t manage to post this morning because, like most of you, I spent the entire day vomiting in rage. I also screamed while I was vomiting but in retrospect that was kind of pointless because you couldn’t really make out what I was saying.

In truth, I didn’t manage to post because I was in Nova Gorica last night, got back late, and felt like a dead rat. Had, who has photographic evidence of the event, was there, which was nice.

But now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to resume self-flagellation combined with a bit more vomitous rage. God have mercy on Slovenia.

Tumidaj, Poland.

There are plenty of places with names that sound funny to English speakers, like Fucking, Austria and Batman, Turkey. The little town of Tumidaj in Poland means “Give it to me here” in Slovene. And, yes, it really exists. Luckily for them there aren’t that many Slovenian tourists or else the sign would end up regularly stolen.

(Thanks Matjaž!)