isoglossia

We went camping a lot when I was a kid. My parents had five kids right in a row before they figured out what was causing them. This was bad for them but great for us; it’s amazing how efficiently little kids can construct the perfect society when there are so damn many of them, and being so close together in age meant that we were pretty good company for each other most of the time. Small conflicts did erupt from time to time, especially as we spent a lot of time packed into the car on the way to campgrounds — “Mahm, she’s breathing my air!”, “He’s vomiting on me!”, “She started it!”, that kind of thing. But mostly we looked out for each other.

When we arrived at a campground, the single most important piece of information concerned the possibility of swimming: was there, within a two-mile radius, a lake, river, canal, reservoir, swimming pool, kiddy pool, horse trough, dog-dish, hog-wallow, anything we could get wet in? That was priority one.

The second thing everyone needed to know was: is it the pinchy kind?^[1]

The origins of this term are lost in the mists of time, but the pinchy kind referred to a non-flushing toilet, what normal speakers of English would call an outhouse. I am sure that the genesis of our name for it lies in some colorfully humiliating event suffered by one of my many sisters, and if any of them can recall it they are strongly encouraged to comment.

Just as the first child to catch any whiff of water, salt, fresh, or brackish, was duty-bound to immediately report it to the rest, so was the first to succumb to nature’s call required to deliver the news, ordinarily with a sort of grim stoicism, “It’s the pinchy kind“.

The reasons for shunning the pinchy kind are legion. My gravest fear as a small child was ‘spider bite on ass‘, or even just plain ‘spider on ass‘^[2]. Flies. Sometimes the wet ziggurat of strangers’ effluvia approached the rim of the latrine. The smell of such mounds was not something we relished^[3], lack of plumbing usually went hand-in-hand with no electric light in the toilet, they tended to be farther from the campsites than plumbed washrooms, and so on. Rarely, though, was actual pinching a real fear, at least as far as I remember — again, sisters are welcome to make corrections to my imperfect recollections.

I am moved to remember all this in part because this term the pinchy kind is yet another flapping owl (as that term is used by me), but also because toilets have been on our minds lately. Yesterday I installed yet another new toilet seat. In each of the three apartments I’ve occupied since arriving in Nova Gorica four and a half years ago, I have at some point had to replace the rooster-interface due to breakage. Assuming some base-line of average serviceability of the seats upon my taking occupancy of the apartments, rather than extraordinarily bad luck in inheriting extremely aged and decrepit seats, this works out to a dismal average of 18 months of service life per seat^[4]. I am not here to impugn the quality of Slovenia’s toilet seats^[5], but I had never had to replace a toilet seat before moving here. Toilets, sure, but just the seat? Where I grew up they were famously robust. Well, they had to be.

On Monday I arrived home and was invited by one of the members of the household^[6] to examine her their bottom. “The toilet seat pinched me!” she they explained in a tone of the highest possible pique. I had previously noticed a hairline crack in the seat before which under body weight had shown the possibility of pinching. Indeed, there was visible damage to the skin. “That’s it,” I said resolutely. “I’m replacing that toilet seat.”

Because I will be goddamned if we’ll have the pinchy kind in our own bathroom.

Magda spent Saturday looking at stones and bronze through the new Nikon P&S. Most of the shots below are highly cropped details from much larger pictures.

Leaving family out of it, there’s not much I miss about living in the U.S. On the contrary. But the latest technology and media tend to trickle over here relatively slowly. TiVo hasn’t arrived, for example, and “The Daily Show” is available only as a once-a-week 20-minute tease on CNN International. Our video rental options are limited in Nova Gorica, too. The video shop in the center is hard for us to get to, so although the selection is pretty good, we don’t get in there very often, and when we do rent, returning the disc is a dreaded chore hanging over our head. So we were very happy last year when TechnoVideo opened up in the ground floor of our apartment building. It sounded ideal: DVDs automatically dispensed 24/7, merely an elevator ride away, and you pay according to how long you keep the film. Living 60 meters directly above the place we figured we’d clean up.

The only problem is that TechnoVideo’s selection, how to put this?…sucks. Mostly literally. Although this is my first exposure to the ATM model of video rental, I feel fairly confident in guessing that such round-the-clock robotic DVD dispensing machines are the business’s bid to make pornography even easier to access. The selection of ‘regular’ videos on offer is so thin as to be a veneer: “King Kong” and Tom Cruise vehicles, and precious little else. However, if you follow the touch-screen interface into deeper intercultural spaces, you’ll find that the number of “Erotični” videos available is prodigious. I think the key here is that there is no human handing you, say, “Sladko Spodnji Perilo II“, so the shame element is entirely between you and a metal slot.

After dealing with furtive porn-mongers, the robot’s fuckwitted search interface, a year’s worth of frustrating video hunts (culminating in last week’s desperate, marriage-jeopardizing rental of “National Treasure“, as well as a distinct aesthetic obstacle to even entering the place, we were wondering if we were done with film.

Until this Rambo cartoon appeared in Friday’s “Vikend “, the TV-guide supplement to “Slovenske Novice “.

The cartoon’s text is pretty self-explanatory, even for people who don’t pretend to speak any Slavic languages, but here’s a gloss:

Frame 1
John Rambo: Rambo 1, 2, and 3, please.
Frame 2
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: We don’t have them, they’re rented.
Frame 3
John Rambo: What about Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6?
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: Sorry, no.
Frame 4
John Rambo: I shall destroy you, Hapless Video Shop Clerk, for this cultural transgression by which you demean my country’s military prowess!
Hapless Video Shop Clerk: AHIIIiii! I find to my displeasure that I am yet another victim of ill-considered American imperialist adventurism!

But now that iTiVi is on the scene, such senseless waste of life, 7.62mm rounds, and international understanding apparently need not happen. Like NetFlix in the U.S., this will allow us to select videos on-line and collect them from our mailbox, which is a few meters closer than TechnoVideo and usually devoid of pornography. We’ll give it a try. I hope their selection is extensive enough to include “Blondinka s Harvarda II “.

Magda and her visiting friend, Ola, are wandering around Venice today. Getting there from here is a quick and easy thing; the hardest part is the ten-minute drive to the train station in Gorizia, our twin city *across the border*, I had thought, where trains leave for Venice every 45 seconds or so. Finding our way around in Gorizia is something that always baffles us, so we thought maybe Google Earth could help Magda with the navigating. When we called it up, however, we were shocked to learn that Italy has once again deprived Slovenia of the administrative center of the Primorska province.

It was bad enough when Churchill, Truman, and Stalin screwed Yugoslavia out of Gorizia and the bustling port of Trieste in 1947. Now this. Thanks for nothing, Google.

Though it’s certainly not the first time a map got something wrong.

Magda, circa Solidarnóśċ

Happy Name Day to all the Magdas of the world! If your name is Gregory or Venerable Bede, today is your name day, too.