YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett

As you might have noticed, I have deleated my blog Red Pen. Too tired of Balkan!!! So, now you are the only one who provides us with news from this part of the world. Hope you will not have to report about new wars. All the best. Zdenka
 

Zdravo Zdenka, I am sorry you deleted 'Red Pen' hope you will keep Jugoslavia Druga at least. Remember that it only took hours for someone to use the name of your other blog, and they aren't as good as you.
I too hope that other wars won't happen, as I am planning to go to Sarajevo for a bit, ako Bog daj.
 

Good for you showing those kids that it's no more fun for bees to drown themselves than it is for us.
 

Wouldn't be surprised if Tudjman, and Milsovic, pulled the legs off frogs when they were small.
 

@ Owen, These little boys are Native American, they may have been surprised at someone who doesn't look like they might be part N.A. cares the same way. Honey bees are not native to either North or South America. There were bees that produced honey in very small quantities in Mexico, because the Mayans and Aztecs had a form of mead, that at least was called 'balche', it was used for religious ceremonies by the priests, regular people seldom tasted it.
The Aztecs had a law that anyone under 65 years old caught drunk on any day other than the day honoring the Bee-keeper God was to be put to death. People born under the patronage of the Bee-keeper God were considered to be unusually courageous and thought to have a higher capacity for alcohol than average.
Re: Tudjman and Milosevic as small boys...who knows..at least Tudjman fought against the fascists during WWII. Milosevic wasn't of an age to do that. As to whether they harmed small animals or insects as children, there's no record on that. It'd be interesting to know.
It is recorded that Vlad Tepes DID do stuff like that, even as a grown man, he would pull the wings off flies, and the legs off mice and rats in his cell when Hunyadi held him as a prisoner. Then again, it's the Hungarians that say this, and they didn't like him.. the whole hidden agenda thing...
It is known that children who are cruel to smaller creatures are likely to turn out badly.
 

That's fascinating about the Mexican bees. Have you got a publisher for your encyclopaedia of information about mead yet?! Sounds like the Aztecs had an effective way of controlling binge-drinking - maybe we could try it here in the UK.

Vlad Tepes might have done better to follow the example of Robert the Bruce.
 

@Owen, there are other sources that have information on mead. Anything I put out would be redundant. The hardest mead research I did was to find out if mead was still made in the Balkans, and whether mead brandy is made there as well. That was a tremendously hard research project, because until recently there wasn't a lot of information out there, not even in Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian.
I know that my Significant Other likes mead, I serve it to guests in my home if they drink. He hadn't had the Polish raspberry style mead before,or metheglin. I make both types. I have had med liquer that a former boss gave me, it was from England. I think my own mead is better tasting. This wasn't bad but felt a little too waxy to me. I didn't care for the herbal additive balance either.
I prefer to make plain unflavored mead, or the raspberry type.
re: Vlad Tepes, he very probably knew NOTHING about Robert the Bruce. Anyway to my mind,and on my mother's side, we are related to the Bruce family, I think Wallace was a better example. I was raised with many stories of both men's exploits, I had as a girl a book of stories about Wallace, and my family won't kill non-poisonous spiders in the house. We don't even kill even poisonous spiders outdoors unless there is a threat to children involved. In he house of course I'll kill a poisonous spider. I've been bitten once by a black widow spider, and have been bitten before by scorpions.
The scorpion bites were AWFUL. I didn't realize they were scorpion bites until too late for anti-venom, and therefore had to resort to folk remedies. Some of which didn't work very well at all. One did work, I rubbed the bitten places with a mix of olive oil and honey, with some rose and musk in it, and that made the black and blue bruises change colour INSTANTLY to yellow and red, and in a couple days the bruises were gone altogether and I began to recover. I sat on a mother and her babies. They ALL bit me of course. I did not know I'd sat on them, I would not have done that deliberately, but how were they supposed to know?
Back to cousin Vlad, I have to say, he was a man raised in a harsh time by hard people and that he very probably was mentally unbalanced. I believe most tyrants are mentally ill in a special way that allows them to lead, that gives them an ability to intimidate others. To some extent it is a science anyway.
As to bees in Mexico, this I knew from my time there. I have been fortunate enough too,to have taken a good course on Mexican history locally from an excellent instructor, sadly not with the Yakima Gulag People's Institute of Higher Re:Education.