Night at Bolshoi

                                                         Moscow
Thursday,                                    24 may 1984 
   Kostya, having been told that I am moving to Whattabore, wants to know whether I am married. I told him I got divorced six days ago. Kostya lights up: "It is good to be free in Sweden, yes?"

Friday
   Wolfgang and I are subsisting on a diet of black caviar and Georgian champagne. Wolfgang keeps saying ecstatically "You know what this lunch would cost in the Russian Tea Room? It would cost a hundred and forty dollars, that's what it would cost!"
   Wolfgang is dreaming of getting a joint appointment: half year Moscow State University, half year Livermore. It would keep his CIA men busy. We are also supposed to buy a bust of Lenin for his office. I have taken him to a special department store, where one can buy medals, decoration ribbons and similar gear. For a few ruh-bles one could start looking a little bit like Marshal Ustinov. Our contacts say that a Hero of Socialist Labor medal could be gotten on the black market. Order of Lenin, however, would be difficult to acquire; there are fewer of them, and they are solid gold.

Saturday
   A gaggle of physicists discusses women. S.P. Strinck: "I like them all, regardless of legs." S.P. has an interesting hair style; the hair grows up from sides and is pasted to the top of the skull.
   Scott is in a quandary. He has two tickets to the Bolshoi Ballet, and he wants to fuck. The problem is Professor Porcogrande. "Me, I know culture." Here he comes. "We are going to the circus tomorrow" he says, concupiscently pleased with himself. Scott heaves a sigh of relief.

Sunday
   The curtain goes up, and up in the mists Maya Plisetskaya flaps her hands in a manner of seagull's wings. Scott and I glance worriedly at each other: "This is a ballet fit for Professor Porcogrande." I glance to my left, and I see Ludmila. Scott, too, has spotted her, and has forgotten both the seagull and Porcogrande. Phosphorescent with desire, he is scanning backwards through his memory banks. Nothing remotely like Ludmila all the way back to Stillwater, Oklahoma. Ludmila has a beautiful elongated face, with Slavic cheekbones, long thin nose, large blue eyes, fine lips. Could be the star of War and Peace, or Love and Death. At the intermission she walks away from us, tall, thin (yes, thin! The Sphericity Conjecture refuted), a perfect Checkov heroine. We are hot on her tail - I lose Scott in a miasma of spherical thighs - only to find him chatting up the mother in German. "Das ewig weiblische sieht uns hinan, etc., etc.". "Ludmila seems to breathe nothing but Russian" he whispers to me, thwarted. Ha! I am rolling out my best Russian, Ludmila is all smiles, and it's all wrapped up. I cannot believe my good stars - the most beautiful wo. since Kansas City, and all mine. I already see us speeding in a black Volga to her parents' dacha, for a champagne and caviar weekend together.
   Porcogrande, eat your heart out!
   The curtain goes up again, and I wait impatiently for the intromission. On the stage - no, that is impossible! - Wolfgang is shuffling Plisetskaya around, trying to fit her in with the other furniture. (Ludmila's mother noted with pride that Plisetskaya is fifty-nine). It is unmistakably Wolfgang: that flowing hair, that wild look, that overbearing emotion, that unmistakable grace. That's how he spends his evenings, claiming all the while that he is having interesting discussions with Khorbatovs, Lifshitzes and the like!
   Wolfgang drags a dead seagull around the stage (ah! that's why the ballet is called "Seagull"!"), and it is the end. Ludmila is smiling at me over her shoulder. She is being dragged away! The lights have not gone on yet, but the mother has a firm hold on Ludmila's biceps, and is navigating her toward the exit. There is no moment to lose. While they are still throwing flowers at Plisetskaya, Scott and I are jumping over the chairs, and we intercept them in the lobby. Mother takes a firmer grip, looks me straight into the eye, says very clearly "Do-svi-danya!" and - and they are gone! Vanished into Biblioteka Imena Lenina subway station! I am crushed. Scott, you laggard, what did you do? You were supposed to work on the mother!
   We look in a daze at a Membermobile (a Politbureau member chauffered black Volga) pulling away, with a blonde outstretched diagonally across the back seat, and an officer cap in the rear window.

Monday
Wolfgang has established a reliable method for gauging the relative importance of Russian scientists. Zheldovich, a hero of socialist labor, can get a paper xeroxed in five minutes. Lihshitz - half an hour. Sinai - several days. Kostya - forget it.
   Today, I am omitting caviar from my dinner - I dine champagne, only. The television is full of Marshall Ustinov's bemedaled chest, and endless rows of smiling komsomolets in military uniforms. At nine o'clock a rocket launcher arrives at the square in front of the hotel, and fireworks celebrating the trillionth congress of the Komsomol start. With split second precision they go up and explode simultaneously over some twenty different Moscow squares. It is as cheerful as the third world war. I go to bed and sink into nightmares.

Tuesday
   Professor Porcogrande makes no bones about it: "I do not like public transportation, and I won't take it." Kolya has finally dredged up a yellow Volga station wagon, commensurate to Professor Porcogrande's rank. Upon arrival of the vehicle, Professor Porcogrande is overcome with childlike joy, and he, his wife and Professor von Weissecker are whisked off to the Institute of Crystalography, where they wait the next half hour for us pawns to join them.
   Today is the Polyakov day. Any conceivable two dimensional conformal model is being solved exactly. A brazen Armenian in the first row asks a stupid question: "To what physical systems do these exact solutions apply?" Loud laughter.
   Wolfgang keeps bedazzling babushkas. This is the second babushka who wants Wolfgang to marry a nice Russian girl. "I have worked for 53 years, and now your president wants to kill me. Why? This is a beautiful city, this is a good country. Don't you listen to radio? He is threatening us with atom bombs!"
   We wished we knew why Wolfgang's president wants to bomb her off the face of this earth.
   Wolfgang remembers a nice restaurant on the Kalininsky Prospekt. We are immediately seated, and black caviar, red caviar, sturgeon and assorted meats appear magically on the table. I am starting to feel uneasy: "Excuse me, would it be possible to have a look at the menu?" Oh, the menu? Of course. I have a look: this will put us back some thirty thousand ruh-bles. The procession starts. First the waiter - would we like to change some dollars? No, thanks. Two for one? No, no thanks. Next is a young man who can get us caviar at half price. Then somebody unintelligible who purports to be Israeli, wants ?. The bill comes to the forty two thousand ruh-bles: both caviars are counted twice. (Soviet physicists earn some 250 ruh-bles a month). I object - we get twice as much caviar for less ruh-bles at the Acadamy Hotel (oh, yes, we know our caviar). The waiter explains that this is the top class restaurant.
   However, Wolfgang has a way with Soviet waiters. He lays forty two ruh-bles on the table, looks at the waiter firmly and says: "Well, if that is the case, we will have to take the bill with us." The waiter wavers for a moment, then answers "We do not want any trouble", returns ten ruh-bles, and crumples the bill in his hand.

Wednesday
   Wolfgang dazes still another bevy of Russian speaking Russian mathematicians with his compact way of expressing himself in English. Every fifteen minutes or so Sinai gets up and translates into Russian: "He is still talking." We leave them stunned, and Kostya speeds us off in what should have been Professor Porcogrande's Volga (eat your heart out, Professor Porcogrande) to the Kremlin's Palace of Congresses. Madam Butterfly is seventy and perfectly spherical, but sings beautifully. Pinkerton, the putz, drops her for an Aeroflot stewardes. The Aeroflotess is of the exemplary Soviet build: granite shoulders, and cylindrical the rest of the way to the ground. Seeing this, Madame Babushka hari-kiris herself, and rolls forward, though retaining the same height - her face is now in front, at about waistline level.
   Wolfgang and I are overtaken and separately whizzed off to distant parts of Moscow by two Muscovite maidens: 1.) Eighteen year old Natasha; 2.) Nineteen year old Kira. The age factor has now reached two. We do not count each other's gray hairs any longer.

Thursday
   Wolfgang does it again. Answering the question starting with "Your determinant...", he forgets to answer "The beautiful exact determinant of Sonoffvitch...". So much for contracts with doctor Faust.
   Doctor Faust is now a center of boundless adulation.
  We proceed to a party with thirty seven physicists, Sasha Polyakov, and one beautiful woman, hitherto referred to as Lena. Wolfgang very much taken by her. Wolfgang: "She has beautiful eyes." I: "Yes, she has two eyes." and so on. We promptly kidnap her ("She doesn't speak English" observes Wolfgang, thwarted), and drag her through subways across entire Moscow to Kostya's apartment. There Wolfgang turns his back to her and spends the evening explaining DOE and Army contracts in great detail to puzzled Russian intellectuals. Lena bites her nails while Wolfgang makes statements like "University is business. US is a bad country. My president is a prick." At two we taxi her across Moscow again.
  Few fast impressions:
  This subway, too, has girls with Walkman. The city has ravens instead of pigeons. There are many men with identical black business briefcases, even Kostya has one of those. Vastly fewer books are being read in subways than only two years ago. All apartments are in total chaos. My maiden subjects me to acrobatic dancing to mindless disco, this circumventing intromission. She is made out of rubber, but my bones are creaking. God, have we become old!... Wants me to make five children with her. Has a wonderful movie-making mother who seems to be my age. What am I doing here? Everybody is paranoid about telephone taps, especially our maidens. Every day we walk by a semicircle of horrendous Stalin period buildings, which turn out to be the setting for Solzhenitsin's "First Circle". Lena has told Wolfgang about her Volga factory job; the diet is only vodka and bread, many children born deformed. The country is covered with places like that, where nobody is allowed to come.
   At the airport, Professor Porcogrande is the first in the passport control queue, and I am last. This will be set straight at the heaven's doors. The plane takes off, and the professor claps in still another attack of childish joy. Is there a chauffeured black Volga waiting for him at the Acron airport?

Trains

It is unfair to talk of buses and forget the trains. The truth is that the most wonderful experience of the whole trip was an Amtrak experience. I left Princeton, and, as one would expect from american railroads, I found myself, together with another girl who boarded at Princeton, stranded in Trenton. Hour and a half in the Trenton train station. The girl said: "What are we going to do? You'll be very bored... I have an Ebony, do you want to see it?" (no she was not black - actually she was off-blonde). She had this issue of Ebony because it contained an article about Charlotte McCoo's diet. I have no idea who Charlotte McCoo is - she is a television personality. The article said she put great emphasis on regular bowel motion.

I read it and then I said to the girl "You must be bored, too. I just happen to have two Superman comics books with me, and a Classics Illustrated from 50's - is that something for you?" She said that that might be worth load of money; she had just received a comic books catalogue she had ordered in the mail, and did I know that some of the first issues can fetch a few thousands of dollars? For example, the first issue of Batman in mint condition is worth $6000. I had no idea, I had to admit. I thought six dollars for a Classics Illustrated was outrageous enough. One thing seemed clear - Princeton freshmen have gotten more brainless. Television stars, and comic book catalogues? Next thing you know, we were sitting in a train and I was confessing to my dislike of Wagner. How I went all the way from Oxford to London to the Covent Garden to sit through four hours of Sigfried for love of my Wagner freak friends Francois and UF. A long story - for another time.

Hundred' mus med haler på

Lysistrata's lille Karen and Martin er så søde. Om morgenen kommer de til mammas seng, med morgens bedste wienerbrød. Og så lærte de mig denne sang:

Hundred' mus med haler på

Forfatter: Halfdan Rasmussen - Komponist: Henning Hansen

Hundred' mus med haler på
og bittesmå sandaler på
gik morgentur med smedens hest
mens solen selv gik ned i vest.

Hundred' mus fik ømme tæer
og købte sig en tømme hver
og red af sted i vældig fart
til landet, hvor man har det rart.

Hundred' mus fik musemad
og flødeskum og brusebad
og ost og spæk og meget mer'
som ikke skal beskrives her.

Hundred' mus gik hjem en nat
og traf en gammel, gnaven kat
der åd dem alle, hver og en
med hud og hår og museben. 

 

Jeg værdsatte ikke dengang hvilken udvalgte, velopdragne børn lærte mig sangen.

(fortsat October 10, 2020)

First Greenland, than a famous physicist in Poland

  The best thing that has happened to me since the february 1983 Amtrak conversation about Superman comics, Wagner and quantum mechanics with a 16 year old wonder was Greenland. A combination of scientific frustrations caused by the chaos workshop and emotional frustrations caused by unfulfilled cravings for looooooooove drove me to pure misanthropy. The issuing claustrophobia could be cured only by a continent of ice.

Chris Pethick and I flew into Narssassuak (an abandoned US military hospital complex where uncountable Korean war GI's gave up the remnants of their mangled bodies), walked out the terminal and into the hills and saw no humans the next eleven days. We soon understood why. Greenland is in no danger of being overrun by tourists and becoming another Costa Brava. Unlike Normandy, the best weather prediction rule is: tomorrow the weather will be different. If one day it didn't rain, it would certainly rain for uninterrupted 24 hours the next day. Or snow. August temperatures are -6 to +10 degrees Celsius. It was sunny the first and the last day, just so we would come back.

In Greenland everything is out of scale. The trees are horizontal and two-dimensional. The boulders are table-sized, when they are not chair-sized. The streams are roaring rapids. The flowers are brilliant in color and pinhead sized. The icebergs are any color, from blinding white to blue to green to red to pitch black. The horizon is inverted, bright below and dark above: the clouds are lit from below, by the sunlight reflected on the ice. And the ice, there is more than enough ice to cover entire Europe.

There were three distinct moments, each etched into my memory, and each one by itself worth the entire trip. Each one was a suddenly revealed vista, surpassing in grandeur and drama anything I have seen in Alps, Rockies, or Andes.

The first revelation occurred after a day long slow climb up a canyon. We reached a snow balcony at the water divide, and for the first time saw inland Greenland. Few thousand feet below us was a strange volcanic-like black boulder pocked plateau, with a chain of small black lakes; further on, a canyon and a chain of dark hills followed by a bluish gray lake filled with enormous icebergs; more mountains, glaciers, and then the sea of ice, merging into the dark skies above.

The second moment occurred a few days latter, further inland. We spent the day walking along a chain of high-altitude (here it means 1000 meters) iced-over lakes, and were descending toward something called "The Hole" when the wind momentarily swept away the clouds bellow us, and we saw it. It is the largest strip mining operation we have ever seen. It is huge bowl of scree into which three dying glaciers mouth. Something like a sand hole dug out by a child on a beach, only scaled up to ten kilometers. At the bottom, a gray colored lake filled with armies of majestic (I should start writing tourist pamphlets for Greenland Tourist Association) icebergs, progressing imperceptibly, and every morning greeting us with new formations.

The third moment was the one that we have labored toward the entire week; we reached the highest peak on the edge of inland ice that we could reach without crossing the glaciers. It was only 1800 m, but this far north this is high altitude, snow and ice the entire year. The mountain was a finger stuck into the inland ice, with glaciers pouring by on both sides, and the view was indescribable. On one side chain after chain of dark mountains and ice filled lakes. On the other side, the inland ice at sunset - brilliant white, shifting into burgundy reds and deep violets. Clouds, clouds and clouds, ripping across the skies in most violent formations and colors. And the sensation that the ice never ends - the continent of it, continuing into the arctic and across, down into Canada... And here I am, the microscopic bundle of microscopic frustrations...

If I come back, it will have to be with ice axes, crampons and ropes - the expenses of ice beckon us irresistibly onward. I would love to come back, but I do not know whether I will be able to. Two things brought me eventually to snail-crawl, and I do not know what to do about them. One was the water - the incessant rain, and the water surging up everywhere from the ground. My boots were drenched for two continuous weeks (when they were not frozen), my feet swollen, soles burning. The other nuisance was a bleeding hemorrhoid - scrambling over slippery sharp edged boulders menstruating freely, with blood running down ones thighs.

There is no fleeing from oneself, though. I discovered that I suffered from insomnia every other night, just like in Copenhagen. And every night awake was a night back into my civilized present. I took along nothing to read, determined to do nothing but sink into the nature around me. But having to lie in tent 24 hours every second day, waiting for the rain to stop, eventually broke my determination down.

I started to think. The last day in Copenhagen Boris Shraiman told me that Farey numbers can be rewritten as self-similar continued fractions, and that they have a binary labeling. I worked out a self-similar continued fraction formula, and a binary labeling. Actually, I have no idea whether they are the ones Boris meant - but they work beautifully. They yield several different scaling laws for the stability intervals for the circle maps. The most amazing one is totally analogous to the scaling function sigma for period doublings, except that instead of organizing the trajectory splittings in the iteration space, it organizes the stability intervals in the parameter space. That the same bifurcation tree structure organizes both one-dimensional period doublings and the circle-map phase lockings I find astounding (as long as I cannot convince myself that is trivial). In any case, it is the best thing that happened to the universality in chaos since the invention of smoked eel, or at least since Feigenbaum's scaling function for period doubling. It remains to be seen who publishes it first - many people know by now that there must be such a scaling function.

After Greenland I went to lecture on chaos in a place called Szczszczszscyrk and was told that I am a famous physicist in Poland. It was a step into the time machine - the peasants toil behind horse-drawn ploughs, maidens turn into spherical little bundles as soon as they get married, people are dressed into socialist drab, and prices make no sense; physicists get the same salary in zlotys that I get in kroner, but on black market 1 krone = 100 zloty. Our colleagues run underground radio stations and papers. Still, they despair - they are defeated and believe that no change is possible as long as there is no change in Soviet Union.

Actually, a small comedy of potential import form my future is taking place here. The government has announced a series of 5-year (non-tenured) "super"-professorships. The stated goal is to prevent loss of the top research talent to emigration to other countries, and one would think it was designed just for me. The stupid thing is that it is called (and salaried as) professorship, so instead of uniting themselves behind one youthful hopeful, 10 of Niels Bohr Institutes middle-aged lecturers have applied for the position. The result will be that physics will not get a single professorship. My colleagues disappoint me, because it looks like they are just going to let me float; particle physicists do not consider me theirs, because I have been doing chaos the last year, etc..

It would clearly be a great loss for Denmark if they let me go, especially in the light of the fact that I have started taking a university course on the late 19th century danish literature. I know everything that Georg Brandes has to say about romantics of the first half of the 19th century; how many born-in-Denmark Danes can say as much?

What else do I do? Instead of fucking a lizard of my choice, I spend nights coaxing Olivia into printing out graphics on Oki - but she's so slow, so excruciatingly slow...

Predrag gets Nobel Prize

27 june 1976
A cottage on Inari lake, 300 km north of the polar circle.

I dreamt I had just received the Nobel prize. It was vaguely connected to my work on the Yang-Mills infrared problem. The experimental evidence supporting my work was an ancient fish somebody had fished out. The fish was big, black and ugly - looked like the fish we had caught and fried the previous night. I touched it, and a chunk of meat flaked off.

I was very happy - happy because from now on I was free to think as I liked, work hard on whatever I liked; my future as physicist had been secured. Just after the announcement I experienced a surge of anxiety; nobody mentioned it to me, except a young graduate student who came to congratulate me. Finally I asked Bill Bardeen who got the prize. "You, of course" he said offhandedly.

I still remained worried that someone might ask me what I got the prize for; I really did not understand that too well myself. It was hard to see how an ancient fish related to anything I had done.

Everything was very informal; I was a boyish 30 year old, in jeans and a T-shirt, and I did not bother to come to the Stockholm ceremony. Bill agreed with me (we were sitting somewhere on a log in a Finnish forest). "Ever since I got the prize, I have been free to work."

I looked at him. His father got two Nobel prizes, but I could not remember that Bill got one, too.

Instead of me coming to Stockholm, the prize committee came to me, to Inari lake. I talked to them, again sitting on rough hewn tree trunks in the forest. I wondered why they gave the prize to me - was it not so that they always gave them to very old, famous men? They said yes, always old men, but not necessarily famous for their work ("ho, ho" they chuckled as they said that), however, they have changed their policy. They are giving them to young, unknown physicists with promise, and I was the first.  

People v. Pitts

My Ithaca roommate Herbet Lee Pitts was convicted for bank robbery which occurred in December, 1968 in Tuskegee, Alabama, when he was a student at Tuskegee Institute. [...] Dr. Price characterized Pitts as a paranoid schizophrenic who had periods of exacerbation and remission. [...] Pitts' paranoic tendencies displayed themselves most clearly in his delusion that he would be the savior of his race.

Here is  www.supremecourt.gov/pdfs/journals/scannedjournals/1970_journal.pdf ,  November 9, 1970 p.99; Certiorari Denied No. 5654. Herbert Lee Pitts, petitioner, v. United States. Petition for writ of certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied.

In 1971 he is listed as imprisoned in Petersburg, Va, apparently as a conscientious objector. He had a number of his poems published in 1970's.

Here is Black View  November 29, 1973 editorial by Herbet Lee Pitt.

In 1973 he returned to his pre-Cornell ways, with a loaded rifle and a bandolier of ammunition: casetext.com/case/people-v-pitts-54 .

Babysitting infrared renormalization for perturbative QED

From the time immemorial rumor has it or better still the notion is abroad there exists a way out.
Samuel Beckett, "The Lost Ones"

Last night I babysat for the first time - and while babysitting I formulated a counter-term prescription for the I.R. problem. The last three weeks have been amazing: I solved a whole series of graph-theoretic problems, formalized the K intermediate counter-term renormalization, and invented the I counter-term renormalization. The last might turn out to be extremely important for QFT, because it is much simpler than the other schemes, and unifies the infrared and ultraviolet treatments.

After one whole week of solid work 73 pages of the paper are written. Many important concepts were formulated this week. Other than writing, I have not been living.

Cvitanović and Kinoshita, New approach to the separation of ultraviolet and infrared divergences of Feynman-parametric integrals, Phys. Rev. D 10, 3991-4006 (1974)

            Rashômon 

The Belgian Pork Chops

What UFO had learned from his fiance Micheline Kahan-Lide, and the often prepared for his friends, to everyone's great delight:

The Belgian Pork Chops

6 pork chops
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon savory
1 teaspoon sage
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt

knead all by hand
coat pork chops (thinly)
heat the pan very high, olive oil
2 min on side, golden brown
                       drain off excess oil
reduce the heat, put in a cup of wine (preferably white)
cover, simmer for 5-10 minutes
                       take pork chops out, place on a hot plate, cover with foil
turn heat to maximum
                       constantly stirring, reduce until no fluid left
use these few tablespoons as the sauce

Belgian French Fries

(always a side to excellent steak, but the recipe requires litters of oil in a special pot, so I skip that)

UFO's Asparagus

canned asparagus
hot cayenne sauce
ground pepper
salt
lots of olive oil

Mix, boil the liquid away (ca. 20 minutes), serve.

-------------------------------------------

ChaosBook.org/~predrag/friends/recipes

Flying to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards

I had, in 1971 or so, written one of the ur-algebraic symbol manipulation programs, my own, described in my first physics paper, of no interest whatsoever today (not sure I have a copy of the paper anywhere, and certainly not the code)

Our electron magnetic moment calculation was implemented by entering integrands on IBM punch cards, flying on a 4-person plane to Brookhaven with box-fulls of cards, and feeding batch jobs into the CDC computer there. 

We had no computer, but Cornell Synchrotron had several state-of-the-art DEC PDP-10s, so advanced that they had keyboards and screen terminals attached. I was allowed to use them after 1AM, only to edit, but absolutely not compute. So I wrote an symbolic algebra language for evaluation of Dirac gamma-matrix traces entirely as macros in TECO, the DEC text editor. Every time they checked on me, I was in editor mode, so they never caught me. 

Then Kinoshita went to CERN for a summer, and broke their computing budget - it was the first large physics calculation, as expensive as an experiment. I think my TECO code produced some errors, so he switched to SCHOONSCHIP and reentered all our integrands into it, without me, the amazing man that he is. 

I (Tom believes he) invented a wholly independent way of computing sets of integrals corresponding to self-energy insertions, and that enabled us to catch a single faulty Jacobian in a single integral, so our calculation had no errors. I have a ton of things written about that and this in my diaries. If it becomes of any interest to anyone, ever. For many years there was a large metal cabinet in a Newman Hall hallway, containing our entire calculation as punch cards - it might still be there. Only Tom knows. 

I suffer big father-son guilt there, because I used to call him up every few years, but then he exploded a car tire in his home’s garage, and went totally deaf, so I do not call him, and I never write letters (to anyone). But I assume he’s as frisky as always. 

We have a running thing going, because I have a crank theory that perturbation series for g-2 (and all on-shell physical observables) is not an asymptotic series which he doesn’t think much of. So 3 years ago I returned to it  - put maybe 1/2 year into it again, failed again, with nothing to show. But psychologically it must be that I wanted to show my (academic) father that I can do it. Psychology - I do not recognize any form of paternalistic authority - I only listen to women - and still...

The smart graduate student ("hrra-hrra T-uh-u-ft") I had always liked a lot. His adviser -it seems- I found grumpy, so he only features on the back cover of my ChaosBook.org/FieldTheory as "El Noble Cigaro", channeling Pauli, but I do not remember why I did not think all that fondly of him.

MarkCC. The glorious horror of TECO, November 30, 2010.

Me and soccer

 When I was a kid,  the central square (Trg Republike) would every evening be filled with soccer fans, different clubs under different street lights. They were 6 daily newspapers, half filled with communist drivel, and the other half with  sports, and 3 daily sports newspapers. And by  'sports' they meant soccer, there was a paragraph here and there about something else. 

This was religion for morons, I would never have anything to do with it.

Chronic In-and-Outer

Vinogradska Bolnica, Zagreb,  Apr 1, 1946

Just a bit after midnight, 22 year old Đurđica Golmajer gave a birth to a baby of extraordinary head size, the same that he would carry for the rest of his life. 400,000 AFL bituminous coal miners walked out. Not much else happened that Monday - here is the main item from the top of day's front page of Washington Post:

OLD FRIEND RETURNS - Jerry Mullen says hello to Nurse Emma Nicassio in a Los Angeles hospital while a doctor takes 24 pieces of glass from his hip. A bottle of chemicals exploded in Jerry's pocket. The hospital people are his old friends, for he has been there 14 times, 5 times for dog bites, twice for monkey bites, twice for a broken arm, once when a living room mantel fell on his head. They forget what the other three visits were for.