I want to dedicate this victory, like all the others before, to my country and to each and every one of you in equal measure. As I said before, I am completely apolitical. I don’t want my name to be connected to politics in general, nor politicians. Each time I play, I do it for Serbia and I will do that as long as I am a professional sportsman.

This would be perfectly understandable, the only weird thing is, his father Srdjan Djokovic held a speech at a political rally just two days before, where he gave support to presidential candidate Boris Tadic on behalf of the entire Djokovic family, including Novak.

Is there some feud between Djokovic senior and Djokovic junior?

It has always puzzled me why on earth does Novak need to even appear along any politician as he already did several times in the past, because it was clear that none of that has helped him in achieving arguably the biggest success in Balkan sports history, along with becoming the most famous Serb in the world right now. So why all this political crap? It’s a rhetorical question, I don’t expect that anyone can give me a good answer, but you are allowed to try.

As much as the Belgrade initiative maybe seemed a bit too little too late and meaningless at the time, I think the whole thing of street-naming thing could slowly get another, more significant dimension. The anti-war message that Mladenovic tried to carry throughout his career and especially at the end of his life was not well received at the time. But – maybe now it will be heard, even through symbolic gestures such as this one. Better late than never.

Here’s the video of Mladenovic’s band EKV performance at the peace concert in Sarajevo only days before the war broke out.

But – can you see Belgrade by night on Google Maps, with all the street lights creating an illusion of veins or nerves in a living organism? For that, you’d have to take a look at this beautiful photo made by Russian cosmonaut Anatoli Alekseyevich Ivanishin from the International Space Station. I accidentally caught the glimpse of it on twitter today. Enjoy!

For bigger pic, high res download options etc click the pic and you’ll be sent to Belgraded’s Facebook page with those options.

Some interesting question arise, though.

How did this video got to the internet in the first place? It first showed up on the message board Beobuild, then got removed from the file-sharing site, but not before it got picked up by Laki, who then posted it to Vimeo. In a matter of minutes it was all over twitter, facebook and youtube before ending up in mainstream media. But what does the law say about the newly installed CCTV in public transportation? Who is responsible if something like this leaks out?

It’s the other question that interests me more – should the vandals such as this one be exposed to the public scrutiny or do they also deserve some privacy? The Internet hive mind works pretty fast – the guy form the video was almost instantly recognized by one viewer in one of numerous comments on youtube, giving away his workplace. Does this speed up police work?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

The reason this photo has been massively shared on the Balkan part of the Internet today is that today, 74 years later, the train from Belgrade to Zagreb takes twice as much time – nearly eight hours.

How did we get to this point? It’s a mystery.

It’s funny that, when you just type in “I’m Serbian”, it doesn’t give out any suggestions, but when you type the entire query “I’m Serbian but I live in Netherlands” it shows this suggestion pictured below.

Btw, the original sentence, whoever looked it up, doesn’t make much sense either when you think about it
found via facebook

(Update: read my review of In The Land Of Blood And Honey here)

As soon as you have somebody talking about crimes committed by Serb or Bosnian Serb forces, the general public opinion will say: and what about Serbian victims? Read any comment section on any major Serbian online newspaper site, and chances are that this is the exact kind of discourse you will find there.

One could already predict the reception from the very beginning of the shooting: at the beginning, both Serbs and Bosnians protested, Serbs that they will be portrayed as the villains, and Bosnians that it’s going to be disgraceful towards the victims. After several screenings, the Bosnian side is now satisfied with what they saw. Which means the Serbian side will not be satisfied. There are already some petitions for banning the movie in Republika Srpska, I’m sure there will be some petitions in Serbia as well.

The fact that Christiane Amanpour likes the movie so much she even held a speech at the premiere will not help movie’s reputation in Serbia either.

But we will just have to wait and see until the movie comes to theaters in Belgrade. To be continued…

Apparently Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter are on the cover of Serbian biology text book for 8th grade. At first i thought it’s photoshopped, but then I looked it up, and I got two covers of the book for sale. It’s a still from “Raising Arizona”, and it’s supposed to represent a happy family, because it’s probably what kids learn about at the time. Little did the graphic designer knew that in the movie, it’s not really a happy family.

Take a look:

Click here and here for bigger versions.

Funny thing, these books are from 1998, and if I remember correctly, the books I learned from back in 1993 didn’t have Nick Cage and Holly at the cover, which means they must’ve been inserted there to make the cover more interesting. They sure did!

Other bridges have names, which is crucial if you want to get from one side to the other, you sometimes need to tell the cabbie the name of the specific bridge you want to cross. Otherwise he gets to choose and it can be costly. Also, if you are ever stuck on traffic on one of the bridges, and you want to tell someone you’re gonna be late, it’s good to know the name of the bridge to accurately point out where you’re stuck. If you are sailing by boat on Sava or Danube, it’s nice to know under which bridge you are passing and to refer to that fact by saying “Oh, look, we are passing beneath the Gazela”, or “Branko’s bridge” instead of saying something vague like “Oh, look, we are passing underneath a bridge.”

Photo by luca_ontheweb

So naming things is important. But have you noticed how naming stuff has changed? It used to be decided by an unknown group of people who came up with the idea for a new street, square, or a bridge, after what I like to imagine as a solid, lengthy brainstorming session studying the history of a place, finding symbolism between a place and a person and finally, just presenting their idea to the people after it was already decided. And no one seemed to complain.

It’s not like that anymore. Now we have the Internet, and the people were invited to add their own suggestions. And the suggestions ranged from imaginative, like “The Giraffe” (to accompany the Gazelle, of course) over boring ones, like the “Zoran Djindjic bridge” or “Patriarch Pavle bridge,” to the outright insane ones, like “Novak Djokovic bridge.” The guy is still alive, for Christ sake.

So the day came when the decision had to be made, and the new name is (drumroll) – wait for it – The Bridge over Ada! It was so obvious, yet catchy. And of course, the people were left feeling unhappy, because it was not how they imagined democracy to be in the age of the internet. But if you look at how many streets, squares and bridges actually changed name in Belgrade in past hundred years alone, it seems that this generic name is guaranteed not to upset any new government in the future so much that they would want to change it into something more “appropriate.”

But if you look closely, the whole fuss surrounding the bridge, the grand opening for the pedestrians, the naming, the debate and everything else is just artificially created so that we might never make an inquiry into following things: 1. why did the bridge cost so much to make, and 2. did we really need a bridge that expensive right now?