{"id":257845,"date":"2023-07-18T21:55:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T21:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=257845"},"modified":"2024-01-04T17:00:05","modified_gmt":"2024-01-04T17:00:05","slug":"inside-the-balkans-alternative-postal-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2023\/07\/18\/inside-the-balkans-alternative-postal-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Balkans\u2019 alternative postal system"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Ilir Gashi at The Guardian: “Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it\u2019s legal and can fit in a car. And if it wasn\u2019t for Rada, for many people this would be much more difficult. All across the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian war<\/a> created borders that cut through families and friendships and all other sorts of relationships (perhaps with the honourable exception of organised crime \u201cfamilies\u201d); this was followed by a steady dissolving of infrastructure \u2013 roads, transport routes, bus lines, postal services \u2013 that once kept Yugoslavia together. It was almost as if someone wanted to make sure that we were all kept away from each other, inside our walled ethnic communities.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberland, Europe\u2019s would-be Bitcoin micronation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Inside<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Matt Broomfield for UnHerd: “Chugging down the Danube in a fisherman\u2019s boat, past the unrecognised exclave known as Liberland, it\u2019s hard to reconcile fantasy with reality. This patch of land \u2014 lushly forested, mosquito-ridden and boggy \u2014 remains unclaimed by neighbouring Croatia and Serbia, allowing a coterie of libertarian crypto enthusiasts to\u00a0claim it as a nominally-sovereign micronation<\/a>. But this sleepy cartographical quirk is a far cry from the visionary design generated by Zaha Hadid Architects to represent Liberland in the Metaverse, where silhouetted avatars stroll down deforested avenues lined with grand, neo-futurist architecture. The idea of setting up an \u201cindependent\u201d nation has always been attractive to libertarians, even though a half-century of attempts to establish tax-free idylls have produced no tangible results.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note<\/strong>: This is an edition of my daily email newsletter. You can find past versions and sign up for it here<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Cleveland’s name used to have an extra A<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Daniel Ganninger: “Cleveland, Ohio, was founded on July 22, 1796, and named after a surveyor of the Connecticut Land Company named Moses Cleaveland. But when did the city of Cleveland lose its extra A? One explanation was that the A got taken off by one of the city\u2019s newspapers, the Cleveland Advertiser<\/em>, which dropped the letter because the name with the A wouldn\u2019t fit on the newspaper\u2019s masthead for its first issue in 1831. The newspaper printed an explanation in a box, saying, \u201cOur subscribers<\/a> will notice we are spelling it without the second \u2018a\u2019 because we think it\u2019s superfluous.\u201d The Cleveland Herald<\/em> and The Cleveland Gazette<\/em> followed suit and changed the city\u2019s spelling, and the name without the extra A was adopted in 1836 when the city was incorporated. But the extra A disappeared even before that: members of Cleaveland\u2019s surveying team had kept the \u201ca\u201d off on maps they had drawn in the 1790s.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Auto mechanic saved a woman’s life because of an episode of The Office<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Here's<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Danyelle Khmara: “Nothing in Cross Scott\u2019s life prepared him for finding a woman slumped over her steering wheel, her lips blue. He says he just reacted. He broke a back window, opened her door and crawled on top of her. With no training, he gave her CPR that may have saved her life. \u201cI\u2019ve never prepared myself for CPR in my life<\/a>,\u201d Scott said. \u201cI had no idea what I was doing.\u201d What popped into Scott\u2019s head was an episode of the television show The Office in which character Michael Scott (actor Steve Carell) sings the Bee Gees\u2019 \u201cStayin\u2019 Alive\u201d while doing chest compressions on a dummy. The episode, where the gang takes an in-office CPR course, could actually be a tutorial in what not to do. But the one thing it got right was using that song as a meter, because it happens to be the correct tempo for chest compressions.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A writer tries to find the Nigerian scammer who duped his mother<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Suspected<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Carlos Barragan for The Atavist: “The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy. He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha\u2014a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency\u2014were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He\u2019d used other accounts to pretend to be a gym instructor<\/a>, and a lonely American soldier deployed abroad. I knew all this because Biggy was sitting on a green sofa in my hotel room in Lagos, playing the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 17<\/em> as I read the private messages he\u2019d sent to unsuspecting foreigners. \u201cDo you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you?” he asked. “The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the 18th century, quacks vied with medical science for clients and attention<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\u2018The<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From Patricia Fara in History Today: “In principle, a distinction is now drawn between orthodox and alternative treatments. But in the 18th century, medical practitioners ranged across a spectrum of respectability. At the top end lay the university-trained physicians \u2013 referred to as \u2018the Faculty\u2019 \u2013 who enjoyed great prestige and high fees, although often all they could do was help a patient to die more comfortably. Next came<\/a> the surgeons and then the apothecaries, who were cheaper but could be very effective; lower still were herbalists, midwives and other carers tailoring their prices to suit their customers\u2019 budget. At the other end of the scale came a large, diverse group bracketed together as \u2018quacks\u2019, a name taken from the Dutch word quacksalver<\/em> or hawker of salve.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A video clip shows a nuclear blast in 1946<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

From Massimo on Twitter<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Ilir Gashi at The Guardian: “Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it\u2019s legal and can fit in a car. And if it wasn\u2019t … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Inside the Balkans\u2019 alternative postal system”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":true,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsletters"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257845"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257905,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257845\/revisions\/257905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}