Author Archives: Doug Merrill

About Doug Merrill

Freelance journalist based in Tbilisi, following stints in Atlanta, Budapest, Munich, Warsaw and Washington. Worked for a German think tank, discovered it was incompatible with repaying US student loans. Spent two years in financial markets. Bicycled from Vilnius to Tallinn. Climbed highest mountains in two Alpine countries (the easy ones, though). American center-left, with strong yellow dog tendencies. Arrived in the Caucasus two weeks before its latest war.

A Russian Sickness

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Yegor Gaidar, a former Prime Minister of Russia, was rushed to a hospital in Dublin last week. The next morning, he checked out and apparently flew to Moscow, where he checked back into a hospital. According to the Moscow Times, he was still there on Wednesday.

What’s ailing Gaidar? It’s not lead poisoning. It’s probably not polonium poisoning. Beyond that, no one is saying.

Anatoly Chubais, a colleague of Gaidar from the early days of Russia’s transition and now head of the Russian electricity system, told the press that doctors believed the illness might not be natural. The Irish Foreign Ministry, through an anonymous spokesperson (how’s that for conviction!), denied that there was anything suspicious or untoward about the illness.

Strange business indeed. Settling of old scores? Preparation for changes in Russia? Or something natural and coincidental?

Stephen Maturin, Drug Fiend

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From The Commodore, pp. 187-88

Yet [Maturin] had some faults [as a physician], and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of inquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru.

An open thread for considering Patrick O’Brian as a European author.

Sensible German Regulations, Part 1

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The government of Berlin has become the first German state government to get out of the business of telling retailers when they can and cannot do business. Mostly, anyway. As the German newspaper whose web site could be better organized notes today (on page one, but is it on the front page of the web site? certainly not), Berlin has told shop owners that they may keep any hours they please from Monday to Saturday. Credit where credit is due, this is progress. Not leadership, not parity with numerous other EU nations, but still, progress.

On the other hand, the (Protestant) Bishop of Hanover said that quiet Sundays were good for everyone. Except of course tram drivers, bus drivers, conductors, police, firefighters, hospital staff, etc etc etc. Or maybe the good bishop is on to something, and a state-mandated day of rest really is the way to go. Why not Tuesday?

OSCE Upbeat on American Election

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The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which looks into these sorts of things from Vancouver to Vladivostok, gave a generally positive assessment of the elections held in the United States on Tuesday, November 7.

“The overall election administration, including the processing of voters on election day, seemed professional and efficiently organized in most polling stations we visited,” said Giovanni Kessler, who headed the mission.

“However, the swift introduction of Direct Recording Equipment (DREs), at times without a voter verifiable audit paper trail, appeared to negatively impact on voter confidence. This remains a challenge for the future.”

Commenting on the campaign, Kessler raised his concern that a large number of political advertisements consisted of personalized attacks on opponents.

From the full initial report, an issue important to me:

No provisions have, however, been made to address the long-standing issue of representation of those residents of Washington DC who are not elegible to vote in another State.

Lack of representation is a constitutional quirk, but the fact remains that half a million Americans (more than the population of the state of Wyoming, for example) have no real representation in either the House or the Senate.

The mission consisted of 18 international election analysts from 15 OSCE participating States who were deployed to 14 [US] States to assess the electoral environment and procedures, meet representatives of State and local election administration, political parties and candidates, and civil society.

A limited number of polling stations in California, Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia and Washington were visited by OSCE/ODIHR, but no systematic observation of polling and counting procedures was conducted.

You may have heard about the results. Good news, I think.

A béka segge alatt

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Another look back at Budapest in 1956, from the New York Times, by way of Crooked Timber’s comments:

THE first time I saw deep joy on my father’s face — the kind that comes from within and which is a child’s most reassuring signal from a parent — was on Oct. 23, 1956. It was at Bem Square, on the right bank of the Danube, where thousands of students, a sprinkling of workers and even some young soldiers still in uniform had spontaneously gathered to hear the students’ list of demands for reform by Hungary’s Communist government.

I was holding tight to his hand when a woman appeared on the balcony of the Foreign Ministry, which faces the square, and waved the Hungarian tricolor. The hated Soviet hammer and sickle had been cut from the center. Thus was the symbol of the Hungarian revolution (and so many others still to come) born. When someone in the growing crowd brazenly shouted, “Ruszki haza!” — “Russians go home” — the revolution had its slogan, as well.

The post’s title is Hungarian for “under the frog,” which is the shorter version of an expression for when things are very bad. You’re under a frog’s butt at the bottom of a well, or simply under the frog.

Under the Frog

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Novermber 1955:

Tired of trying to crack the problem of the informer, Gyuri settled down to think about being a streetsweeper while he gazed out of the window at the countryside that went past quite lazily despite the train’s billing as an express. The streetsweeper was a sort of cerebral chewing gum that Gyuri popped in on long journeys. A streersweeper. Where? A streetsweeper in London. Or New York. Or Cleveland; he wasn’t that fussy. Some modest streetsweeping anywhere. Anywhere in the West. Anywhere outside. Any job. No matter how menial, a windowcleaner, a dustman, a labourer: you could just do it, just carry out your job and you wouldn’t need an examination in Marxism-Leninism, you wouldn’t have to look at pictures of Rakosi or whoever had superbriganded their way to the top lately. You wouldn’t have to hear about gambolling production figures, going up by leaps and bounds, higher even than the Plan had predicted because the power of Socialist production had been underestimated. Being a streetsweeper would be quite agreeable, Gyuri reflected. You’d be out in the open, doing healthy work, seeing things. It was the very humility of this fantasy, its frugality that gave the greatest pleasure, since Gyuri hoped this could facilitate its coming to pass. It wasn’t as if he were pestering Providence for a millionaireship or to be handed the presidency of the United States. How could anyone refuse a request to be a streetsweeper? Just pull me out. Just pull me out. Apart from the prevailing political inclemency and the ubiquitous shittiness of life, the simple absurdity of never having voyaged more than two hundred kilometres from the spot where he had bailed out of the womb rankled.

The train went into a slower kind of slow, signalling that they were arriving in Szeged. This was, he knew from his research, 171 kilometres from Budapest.

Continue reading →

Dutch Diplomat Dooced

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Apparently the Northern European fondness for plain speaking is an art not full appreciated by the genocidal government in Sudan.

Jan Pronk, a Dutch national working for the United Nations in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, was declared persona non grata for writing on his weblog that Sudan’s army had suffered hundreds of casualties in fighting against rebels in northern Darfur. Pronk, the top UN official in the country, was given 72 hours to leave.

Technically, of course, Pronk has not been dooced, because he still has his job with the UN. Still, he’s been shown the door, and the blog was the ostensible reason. Was he surprised that his blog was read in Khartoum? Was it a deliberate provocation? No word yet from the suddenly tight-lipped diplomat.

Sweeping Up

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While we’re working on the update, our latest changes to the back end seems to have left us vulnerable to more comment spam than usual. (On the other hand, it’s become much easier to add pictures.) We’re doing our best to take out the trash, but there may be a bit more of it than you’re used to seeing here. Also, if we happen to take out one of your real and valuable comments by mistake, just let us know. We’ll try to rescue it from the assorted bits and bytes laying around in the construction site here.

Working on it

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The intrepid Tobias Schwarz is working on an update to A Fistful of Euros. It’s great stuff, from what he’s shown us in previews, and he has been very good not only with the heavy lifting and template tweaking, he’s been very open about incorporating the odd suggestion from the rest of the crew.

It’s scheduled to go live Real Soon Now, but first, a look behind the scenes at a developer’s work…

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