Almanac for January 26th

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 26th: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-26-Hungry-Womans-Blues-O4O419KACM

Bummer January 26th

January 26, 1946: Two teenage sailors in the U.S. Navy, LeRoy Robert Bragg and Stanford Fluitt, die aboard the SS Frederick Galbraith of saltpeter poisoning after drinking saltpeter mixed with water as part of a tradition for a sailor’s first crossing of the Equator.

January 26, 1966: On Australia Day, the three children of the Beaumont family left their home in the Somerton Park suburb of Adelaide, Australia, and took a bus to Glenelg Beach, about three kilometers away. 9-year-old Jane, 7-year-old Arnna, and 4-year-old Grant didn’t return on the noon bus like their parents expected them to. Their father Jim drove to the beach to look for them. The baker at a local bakery reported selling them a meat pie and some pasties, allegedly for more money than the children were thought to have on them when they left, leading to speculation that a man at the beach had abducted the children, but they were never seen again.

January 26, 1972: JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367 explodes mid-flight over the village of Srbská Kamenice, Czechia (then part of Czechoslovakia). Although no one is ever arrested for the crime, authorities suspect a Croatian separatist group smuggled a suitcase bomb aboard the plane. All 23 passengers and four crew members died in the explosion and subsequent crash. 

The fifth crew member, flight attendant Vesna Vulović, survived with a fractured skull, a fractured pelvis, broken legs, broken ribs, and broken vertebrae. Villager Bruno Honke, who had been a medic during World War II, discovered her unconscious body and rendered aid until rescuers arrived to take the flight attendant to the hospital. 22-year-old Vulović fell 33,330 feet from the plane to the ground, believed to be the longest fall a human being without a parachute has ever survived. Vulović lived for almost 45 more years after her fall.

January 26, 2001: Lacrosse coach Diane Whipple is mauled to death by two Presa Canario dogs being cared for by Whipple’s neighbors. The neighbors, married attorneys Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel, cared for the dogs belonging to their client while their client, a member of a violent white supremacist gang, served time in prison. Knoller was attempting to control both dogs while carrying groceries when the dogs escaped from her control and attacked Whipple. 

Whipple dies of her injuries at San Francisco Memorial Hospital. Both dogs are euthanized. Knoller is convicted of second-degree murder. Noel is disbarred and convicted of manslaughter.

January 26, 2005: Juan Manuel Álvarez parks his Jeep on a railroad track north of Los Angeles, later testifying that he was intent on killing himself, but changed his mind at the last moment. The abandoned Jeep is struck by Metrolink commuter train #100, which jackknifes, striking two trains, one on either side of it. Eleven people are killed. Álvarez is ultimately sentenced to eleven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole for their deaths.

January 26, 2010: Boa Sr, an approximately 65-year-old woman of the Bo people on her mother’s side and the Jeru people on her father’s side, dies. She was the last fluent native speaker of the Aka-Bo language of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, part of India.

***

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If my words are not being censored by the Trump Regime, you may find my books here on Gumroad. https://creativista668.gumroad.com/

'Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia'

Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia by Savo Heleta

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you find this book, read it. Heleta's Serbian family was so, so lucky to survive the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They came shockingly close to death many times, but their bodies and spirits couldn't be broken.

Two favorite quotes, one serious and one basketball:

"I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don't ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you."

We Americans should probably be heeding that warning right now.

Now the just-for-fun quote:

"We had watched the Sacramento Kings, my favorite NBA team, playing the Indiana Pacers. The Pacers had won but it was still fun, especially since we had tickets for the third row. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw Vlade Divac and Predrag Stojakovic, two Serbs playing in the Kings, waving at me and saying hello. They recognized the jersey of Divac's former team from Belgrade that I had been wearing."

This memoir has been on my to-be-read list forever, seemingly. I found out about it from a now-defunct social networking site called Gather.com. It was like my Tumblr before I discovered Tumblr. I'm glad I finally tracked down a copy and read it.

I purchased this book from Half Price Books (non-affiliate link). I was under no obligation to read and review it.

A Few Thoughts While Recovering From a Head Cold

https://thatwritererinoriordan.tumblr.com/post/189255743910/ive-been-sick-in-bed-with-a-cold-most-of-the-day

If, in our next lifetimes,
We are reticulated giraffes,
I hope I remember to touch
The tip of my tongue
To each one of your spots
As I count them.

— Erin O'Riordan (@ErinORiordan) November 25, 2019

Okay, I wasn't going to post this because I hate N+7 (you'll see why in a moment), but I've changed my mind. I own a little book called Creative Writer's Notebook: 20 Great Authors and 70 Writing Exercises by John Gillard (Metro Books, 2015). One of the great authors is Georges Perec (1936-1982), French avant-garde and existentialist author and member of the writing collective Oulipo. Oulipo is responsible for the writing exercise N+7. Gillard describes it thus:

"...whereby every noun in a sentence is replaced by the noun seven places forward in the dictionary."

Sounds like fun, right? Well, I rewrote my little Tumblr post in N+7, using the dictionary I inherited from my late grandmother, and it came out as this monstrosity:

"I've been sick in bedding with a cold feet most of the dayglow and sleeping, but in my dredges my whole family planning and I took several vaccinias to Croatia. (That Yugoslavia! Think again.) I managed to have an aficionado with Michael Jordan/Dennis Rodman tear Toni Kukoc. But it was a bitstock like having an aficionado with a baby girl, all legalism and axes."

Thanks, I hate it. For one thing, "vaccinias" is a synonym for "cow pox." Ew. Second, it sounds like I'm saying I had an affair with a baby girl, which I do not approve of in any way, shape, or form. Third, axes don't seem very safe for baby girls either. Additionally, as you can tell from my bit of verse, I really liked the mental imagery of the giraffe, which was lost. All of my beautiful nouns other than the proper nouns Croatia and Yugoslavia (which I believe weren't found in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 1977 edition - the dictionary is as old as I am) were lost. "Teammate" (positive) became "tear" (sad or painful, depending on which way you're pronouncing it).

That's why I didn't add the bit about the N+7 writing exercise until the date of this edit (March 1st, 2020).

So, if you want to sound like a cross between James Joyce on his shit again and a Freudian psychotherapist on their first week at work, by all means, use N+7. In my humble opinion, N+7 needs to be banished to the realm of Cthulhu.

'Unforgettable' by Scott Simon: Portrait of a Classy Lady

I wanted to read this nonfiction book, subtitled A Son, a Mother, and the Lessons of a Lifetime, because Scott Simon wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Pretty Birds. Set in Sarajevo in the mid-1990s, it follows 17-year-old Bosniak Muslim high school student Irena Zaric as she goes from basketball all-star to sniper. Although the tale is fictional, Simon met women like Irena when he worked as a war correspondent in the former Yugoslavia.

Pretty Birds was a book that, to borrow a phrase from John Green, filled me with a weird evangelical zeal. I don't know whether or not I ever actually convinced anyone to read it, but oh lord, how I did try.

Pretty Birds made me cry. So did Simon's memoir of Patricia, his glamorous, ultra-thoughtful mother in her last days. Patricia had had a bout with lung cancer, which had cost her half of one lung. She was in remission, but then her husband (Simon's second stepfather) noticed she was losing weight without trying. 

She was hospitalized in her hometown of Chicago and put on a respirator. It turns out the therapy that had eliminated her cancer had also weakened her lung-and-a-half to the point that she could no longer breathe on her own. Her ability to breathe was rapidly running out, and there was nothing left for medical science to do. 

Simon, who lives in California, came to Chicago to stay with his mom. He slept in a camper's sleeping bag on her hospital room floor - although he didn't sleep much, because it's hard to sleep in an intensive care unit. Simon's wife and two daughters followed him to Chicago, and his wife was able to spend time with her mother-in-law, but children weren't allowed in the ICU. The girls had to say goodbye to their Grandmere (Simon's wife is from France) secondhand.

Unforgettable started out as a series of Twitter tweets Simon posted while Patricia was in the hospital - typos and all. He used those spur-of-the-moment written thoughts as a jumping off point to tell his mother's life story and also to capture a sense of what it was like to be with her as she knew her clock was running out.

She was a classy lady up to the very end. A single mom for most of Simon's life, she was from an Irish Catholic background. (Her parents were named Francis and Frances.) She married a Jewish comedian and gave up a nascent acting career when she became pregnant with Scott Simon's only sibling, a little girl who did not survive infancy. They divorced as a result of his alcoholism, and he died when Simon was 16. 

Simon is a good son. Death is hard for everyone, but he made an honest effort to really be present with his mother at the end of her life. I'm glad I read this, because I feel it was a privilege to get to know Patricia, even in a small way. She was an amazing person, and I'm certain Simon's daughters will grow up to be better women for having known her influence.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for this review, which represents my own honest opinion, through the Amazon Vine program.

#Review + #Giveaway: 'Captured in Croatia' by Christine Edwards

Captured in Croatia by Christine Edwards



Description:


Corporate spy Carew Sloan is sent to Zagreb, Croatia, to retrieve information for a private intelligence agency. Carew’s beauty and talent for computer decryption make her the natural choice for this sensitive mission. After charming her mark, Vasilije Juric, in one of Zagreb’s swanky dance clubs, Carew finds herself in Juric’s bedroom. It will take only a moment to gather the information she was sent for and make her escape. Or so she thinks.

Unfortunately for Carew, Juric has a keen-eyed bodyguard, Zoran, who pegged her instantly as trouble. After a high speed chase, he retrieves Carew from her wrecked car. Rather than turn the stunning spy over to his merciless boss, Zoran takes matters into his own hands and keeps the girl … as his captive. Zoran’s keen intelligence, striking features, and powerful physique prove hard to resist, and soon their mutual hostility takes a backseat to the torrent of lust neither can deny.

Will Carew follow her heart, even it means losing her livelihood? What other dangers await them both beyond Zoran's lair?

Review:

I needed another book to read and review about like I needed a new hole in the head, but I couldn't resist this one because of my ongoing fascination with the former Yugoslavia and, more specifically, magically delicious Croatian dudes. So, this being a fairly quick read, I gave it a chance. 

Hot, hot, hot!

Dominant male/submissive female isn't usually my favorite erotica subgenre, but Edwards made me care about both the hero and the heroine, so I liked the story. The love scenes are out-of-this-world, solar-radiation scorching hot.

You don't have to have my fascination with Dalmatians who aren't dogs to enjoy this one, though. You just have to like blistering hawt, raw, primal heterosexual sex.

I don't know about you, but I'm picturing Goran Visnijc, of E.R. and Practical Magic fame, as Zoran. 

Goran Visnijc. Creative Commons image by Angela George. 

Enter to Win! 

• 1 Digital Copy of CLAIMED IN CANADA

• 1 Digital Copy of  NAUGHTY IN NORWAY

• 2 Digital Copies of NABBED IN NEW ZEALAND

• 2 Digital Copies of CAPTURED IN CROATIA


**NOTE:  All books can be read as standalones.


a Rafflecopter giveaway



Having trouble accessing the giveaway?  Here is a direct link!

About the Author:

Erotic Romance Author Christine Edwards grew up in the Deep South on Hilton Head Island, SC. At an early age she developed a passion for the arts that led her to earn a bachelor's degree in Art History from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Christine has a special place in her heart for reading and writing erotic tales. She continues to publish stories that immerse readers in exotic and realistic geographic settings amid interesting subcultures of adult life.

Within the vein of BDSM romance, her main focus is on loving, multi-faceted relationships involving intense alpha males and feisty heroines. She adores snow skiing, traveling the world, and spending time with her amazing family. Christine currently resides in the sleepy coastal town of Beaufort, SC.




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Tour Coordinator:

Please check out the other stops on this tour:

View the entire schedule of the tour HERE.

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I'm 35, and so are these 10 hotties born in 1977

Happy birthday to me! My birthday gift to you, loyal readers, is a gallery of hotness inspired by the year of my birth, 1977.

I am completely, blatantly ripping this post off from Alexandra O'Hurley and her blog Oh Alex, except Alex was born in a different year. Thanks, Alex, for the inspiration. Everybody should buy your books on Amazon or from their favorite retailer.

Fabulous Peeps Born in 1977:

10. John Mayer

Oh yeah, that body is a wonderland. He barely makes the list at #10 because he's still in the doghouse over his derogatory comments about women of color in a Playboy interview. He's one of those bros you shouldn't think is hot, but maybe you do.

9. Predrag "Peja" Stojaković

That Yugoslavia! Thing strikes again; I like big Serbian dudes and I cannot lie. Plus, you've gotta love Peja because of his deep commitment to children's charities, following the example of his mentor Vlade Divac.

Now that he's retired from the NBA, I believe he should be put out to stud; Peja makes beautiful babies.

8. Michael Fassbender

I first noticed him in Inglorious Basterds, and along with Eli Roth he inspired me to write Brad Pitt Is Not the Hottest Guy in Quentin Tarantino's Latest. The Internet nominates him to play the role of Christian Grey in 50 Shades of Grey.

A good Fassbender gallery comes from The Daily Hotness. A good Fassbender tweet is:

Saw pic labelled "Fassbender fenching." Got all excited to see him performing some filthy new sex act, before realising they meant fencing.
— Charlotte Stein (@Charlotte_Stein) April 24, 2012

7. Chris "Ludacris" Bridges

Ludacris is another guy that when you're a feminist woman, you're not supposed to like him - but damn, this guy can lay down some irresistible beats. I especially enjoy his collaborations with Missy Elliot on "Gossip Folks" and "One Minute Man."

I love him in Crash - not the David Cronenberg film of the J.G. Ballard novel, but the other movie titled Crash. He was also a guest on The Simpsons, on which he created the greatest anti-tooth decay film ever. Dirty dirty mouth, y'all!

Luda even has his own brand of cognac - how cool is that?

Also, bisexual girls like Ludacris 'cause at first we thought he was saying, "Bi chick bad, bi chick hood/Bi chick do stuff that your chick wish she could."



6. Maggie Gyllenhaal

Yeah, yeah, I know I already sung the praises of the female Gyllenhaal sib as part of The Hanukkah Hotness, but can you ever really get enough Maggie G? Maggie and lil bro Jake rank very high on the list of Things Bisexual People Like.

Here, she's modeling for AgentProvocateur.

5. Kal Penn

New Jersey-born Kalpen Suresh Modi serves his country as Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement. He's smart and sexy - that's hot. The politician and sometimes academic lecturer on Asian-American studies also goes by the stage name Kal Penn, under which he is best known as Kumar Patel of the film duo Harold & Kumar.

4. Shakira

Hips don't lie.

3. Zachary Quinto

Having had a crush on Syler on Heroes (when he wasn't cutting heads off), I based Zachary in "Innocent" on him. If I would have known he was gay, I would have made it a m/m story. Feel free to send me links to your Syler/Peter Petrelli slash.

No, really. Send them to me.

2. Orlando Bloom

Legolas. Need I say more?

1. Jonathan Rhys Meyers

He's not the guy who made out with Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine, but who cares? He was in VELVET GOLDMINE.

A good JRM gallery is at MamaKitty Reviews.

Kick-Ass Heroines

Juliet Capulet: for centuries, the heroine of Shakespeare’s tragedy has been defined in terms of her relationship to Romeo Montague. She is the pursued, the beloved, the object. He is active, the pursuer, the lover. The most decisive thing Juliet does in the play is commit suicide. She doesn’t even get first billing in the title.

Along came Stacey Jay, whose paranormal young adult novel Juliet Immortal cast Juliet Capulet in an entirely new light. Suddenly, Juliet had a personality, a consciousness, thoughts and opinions and the ability to tell her story in her own words. According to this Juliet, Shakespeare got it wrong - way wrong. Although she loved Romeo when she secretly married him, but by the end of their honeymoon night, Juliet had good reason to hate Romeo Montague forever. They were not dead by their own hands, but rather given an immortality in which Juliet was a sort of cosmic bodyguard, sent through time to save pairs of lovers whom Romeo would try to rip apart.

Jay allowed Juliet a full range of emotions above and beyond fawning over a hot guy. Her Juliet has pent-up rage, even murderous impulses, tempered with a basic goodness and sense of duty. She has little reason to believe in true love, yet it’s the very thing she’s sworn to protect. She’s complicated. She has better days and worse days. Her emotions are realistic.

This is not to say that female authors can write a kick-ass teenage heroine better than male authors can. Consider the examples of two fictional teenage girls forced to become warriors when war broke out in their once-peaceful homes. One is Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of Margaret Mitchell’s 1930s masterpiece Gone With the Wind.

Before the Civil War broke out, Scarlett’s biggest concerns were boys and parties. She’s a smart young woman, but thinks it’s “cute” to play down her intelligence. For a while, she saw the war as the dreadful thing that forced her to be a nurse and wear widow’s clothes when she only wanted to wear bright colors and dance. Once the Yankees burned Atlanta, something inside her snapped. Scarlett’s fierce determination to “never go hungry again” hardened her. Some might say she went from a thoughtless young woman to a heartless one. Love her or hate her, by the middle of the book, Scarlett will do anything to survive.

Scarlett’s more modern counterpart is 17-year-old Irena Zaric in Scott Simon’s novel Pretty Birds. She loves to play basketball, hang out with her friend Amela, sneak around with boys, listen to Madonna and watch Johnny Depp movies when the Bosnian Civil War hits her home of Sarajevo. Like Scarlett, she’s forced to starve. Her family lives in the ruined remains of her grandmother’s apartment building, where they crawl on the ground like crabs to avoid becoming targets for snipers.

Like Scarlett, Irena makes a hard decision to survive: she becomes a sniper herself, learning how to use a rifle. She shoots at the teenage boys, classmates only days before, who have become soldiers. She kills young women not unlike herself, only they happen to be Serbs and she is a Muslim. Still, she never becomes heartless. The one thing Irena will never do is betray a friend.

Written seven decades apart, one by a Southern belle who wrote to avoid boredom while recovering from a broken leg and the other by a Chicago journalist who witnessed the war firsthand, these very different novels tell the same story. To write a kick-ass heroine, you must capture all sides of her, the good and the bad. If everybody loves her all the time, why is she interesting? The reader needs to know what makes her angry, what can push her over the edge, what she hates as well as what she loves...and who loves her. To write a kick-ass heroine, you first have to discover the human being.

Images: Juliet by John William Waterhouse is in the public domain.
Retouched photo from Gone With the Wind is in the public domain within the U.S.

That Yugoslavia! Thing 2 - Toni Kukoc Edition

Former Michael Jordan teammate Toni Kukoc was born September 18, 1968, in Split, Yugoslavia, (now Croatia) in the Dalmatian region.

After playing for the Bulls, he also played for Philly and then Milwaukee. He currently resides in Highland Park, Illinois, with his wife Renata, their teenage son Marin and daughter Stela. Today's blog post is dedicated to Toni Kukoc in literature.

From one of my favorite books EVER, Pretty Birds by Scott Simon: "It wasn't until Irena had opened up the shirt that she saw JORDAN across the back, CHICAGO on the front. The gift, along with the gunshots and emptiness outside, alarmed her. Irena was cunning. She knew that Coach Dino enjoyed having sex with her, but she assumed that one day he would approach her with his sad hound's face and announce that he was returning to his wife (or, at least, to their bedroom from the couch on which he professed to sleep) or moving in with Julija Mitric, the hazel-eyed women's soccer coach. Irena enjoyed her moments with Coach Dino, but she spent more time dreaming about Toni Kukoc, the great Croatian player, or Johnny Depp than about the coach."

From Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure by Alexander Wolff: "During his first season in the NBA, while the war raged back home, you could see the labor in everything Toni Kukoc did...after joining the Chicago Bulls in 1993, he seemed to repudiate the style that had turned him into the finest young player in Europe...Crack through the shell into which Kukoc retracted and you could find an essential homebody, a player who back in the mid-1980s was always the most reluctant to take part in those late-night high jinks [as part of the Yugoslavian national youth team]. His first coach in Chicago, Phil Jackson, would tease Kukoc about how he played better when a Bulls game was being broadcast back to Croatia and his mother might be watching."

From Sacred Hoops by Phil Jackson: "Toni wasn't a selfish player. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to dish the ball to someone else. But he didn't want to conform to the triangle offense. I knew right from the start that I would have to ride him hard in practice to protect him from being torn apart by his teammates. I'm sure my method didn't seem like an act of kindness to Toni. He couldn't understand why I allowed Scottie [Pippen] the freedom to make creative moves outside the system, but would start yelling at him when he tried similar gambits."

From Scottie Pippen by Fred McMane: "...at times, Pippen made life difficult for Kukoc. He sometimes yelled at him on court for failing to execute a play properly. As Kukoc became more comfortable with the NBA style of play, however, he became a valuable member of the team and Pippen softened in his criticism of the Croatian star.

'I think Toni is a very talented player,' Pippen said. 'He has a lot to learn about this game...When I push Toni, I try to make him better, like Michael did me. People look at it wrong and assume I dislike him. The problems I supposedly had weren't personal. I objected to the way they were pursuing him and offering him so much money...I honestly enjoy talking to Toni and trying to teach him how to be a better player...I see a lot of my game in Toni.'"

From Bad As I Wanna Be by Dennis Rodman and Tim Keown: "I think Toni Kukoc is the guy who was most affected by the trade [when Rodman came to Chicago]. He went from being the best player on the whole continent of Europe to being the fourth best player on this own team. I'm not saying he was overwhelmed when I showed up, but he has to understand that with this kind of team they've put together here, it doesn't matter who gets the glory. This team will free him up to do whatever he has to do; he just needs to understand that and get his mind right about the game. We'll cover up for Kukoc's mistakes. He's a great shooter, and he can shoot 15 times a game and score 16 or 17 points a game, easy. Kukoc can take over the Vinnie Johnson, instant-offense role on this team."

My contribution! From "Pairs of Really Big Ones" by Erin O'Riordan: "But I soon found that, with Reggie and Rik, I'd established a pattern. My chocolate fantasies needed a scoop of vanilla. For that, there was Toni Kukoc, the Bulls' six-foot-eleven power forward. Not quite as pretty as Dennis, a bit skinny and slope-shouldered, he had other nice features. In contrast to Dennis's many colorful markings, Toni had a single tattoo, a shark. He pulled off a goatee that would have looked ridiculous on any American white boy. And he was even more exotic than Rik [Smits, who is Dutch], coming from Croatia. He spoke to the press rarely, but when he did, his deeply accented English (think Gary Oldman in Dracula) never failed to melt my butter. Most of my Dennis and Toni fantasies began with Dennis and me putting eyeliner on Toni, and ended with sexy words I didn't understand hollered out in Serbo-Croat."

When you remember Toni, you must remember this song, ubiquitous in the summer of 1998 when the Bulls were winning their 6th championship of the 1990s. I'd like to think that if I ever danced with Toni, this would happen. You've seen the size of the dude's feet.



Image: the "cover" of a RPF (real person fiction) I wrote in 2005, featuring Toni, Madonna and Dennis Rodman

That Yugoslavia! Thing

You may think this has something to do with the recent arrest of Ratko Mladic, but Chaz Wood started it. In his book review post yesterday, Chaz mentioned a scene in one of his own novels (Maranatha), a scene of disturbing violence set in a Serbian church. This made me realize that in 2 years of blogging at Pagan Spirits, I had never specifically addressed The Yugoslavian Thing. I'm shocked by this.

Do I have a fascination with the former Yugoslavian republics in southern Europe? Absolutely. Observe only this dream I recorded in my journal in February 2010:

"I dreamed my husband and I went to see a movie called Yugoslavia! It was sort of like Borat in reverse, with a couple of clueless Americans dropped in the middle of the former Yugoslavian cultures. It starred Will Ferrell as a man who, as a child, wrote on his to-do-before-I-die list that he wanted to visit Yugoslavia. As an adult, he went to start doing the things on his list, and he was severely disappointed to find out there wasn't a place called Yugoslavia anymore. He decided to visit Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, etc., with his best friend, played by Hugh Jackman. (That's a Hunk du Jour link. You're welcome.)

Dream heroine Brandy Norwood in a 2011 Creative Commons photo by Bob Bekian

"Hugh was a Croatian-American. He was trying to get a woman (played by Brandy Norwood) to go out with him, but she wouldn't unless he knew something about his Croatian heritage. They were the romantic subplot, and in the end, she went out with him. Meanwhile, the Will Ferrell character somehow ended up playing basketball for Serbia in the Eurobasket, with comedic results. There was a cameo by former Chicago Bulls player Toni Kukoc, who made a stirring speech about playing in the Olympics for Croatia and how all he wanted was to buy his mother a car."

One of my favorite books EVER is Pretty Birds by Scott Simon, in which both Toni and his Serbian/Laker rival Vlade Divac are mentioned. (If you dug the men's NBA in the 1990s, you may vaguely recall the Lakers traded Divac to Charlotte for the rights to draft Shaquille O'Neal. Divac and his best pal, half-Serbian/half-Croatian baller Drazen Petrovic, were separated by the war; Petrovic died before its end. Their sad bromance is the subject of the ESPN film Once Brothers.) Simon's teen heroine, Irena Zaric (a Muslim girl from Sarajevo) has a crush on Toni. Me too! Irena's story is incredibly violent, disturbing, sad...and funny. That book is surprisingly funny.

I'm neither Serbian nor Croatian, so why am I so fixated? Because I went to high school with a guy from Sarajevo. In the '90s. While the war was actively going on. He had a Serbian dad and a half-Muslim, half-Croatian mom. They were stuck in Bosnia while he lived with foster parents. I'll never forget the experience of sitting through Schindler's List with him...an experience I translated into fiction in I Made Out With a Teenage Communist!

In fact, many of my stories have at least one former Yugoslavian character. In "Fall of the Estrela," it's Milos, the honey-eyed stranger from the Adriatic isle of Vis. The Smell of Gas has Nenad, the Serbian dishwasher, a very minor character. The Pagan Spirits erotic romance series, however, stars a half-Slovenian guy, Orlando Parisi, in the alpha male role. It may be true that tall, hazel-eyed, dark-haired Orlando looks a tiny bit like Toni Kukoc. Maybe.

So that's the Yugoslavia thing. Will Ferrell, you're welcome to steal that dream and make the movie.

(You can't tell from this picture, but Toni has the HUGEST feet on earth.)