Tourists should be forgiven if they think Budapesters are nuts if “no tractor entry” signs are posted in the central part of the city near the government district. But it’s not the city’s citizens who are a little wacky, it’s just their mayor.

You can read the details here, but this was the plan he came up with to keep out farmers planning to protest after the riots in October of 2006. This idea was obviously built on previous centuries’ experience of proven methods to keep out invading armies.

What a sad old man I have become.

Actually, it’s not so outside the norm for me – bands with singers whose vocal styles almost beg you to hate them if only in the name of having standards.

…he’s just kicking it on Margit Island in Budapest these days.

I see this guy most times I go to Margit Island in the middle of Budapest.  So far, only once have I walked by and been able to decipher what he was playing on his baritone. Although he has a kick drum, it’s never in time with whatever noise he’s making, and so I wonder if the whole point is for you to pay him so he’ll stop making a racket?  It certainly doesn’t compare to this dude.

People are quite keen on penmanship here. I suppose it’s because “calligraphy” here as an art form is almost what “writing” is in the US in terms of what it can say about a person’s breeding and taste, but you can feel free to also chalk it up to a general hatred of anything deemed “dirty” or showing a lack of due deference to prevailing standards. I have a lot of students, of varying skill levels, but nearly all of them put Americans their age to shame in terms of legibility. Kids invariably bring both a pencil AND a small rubber eraser to class, so if perchance they make an R whose top half is incongruously thin compared to the reach of its long bottom stroke, they can obligingly erase the entire letter, if not the entire word, if not the entire sentence, and start again from scratch. This means I almost never have to struggle to read what they’ve written, though sadly it takes them the length of time of a few Diet terms to actually write it.

Somehow it’s fitting that the man who wielded the most power in Hungarian history at any one point, (hence the description totalitarian dictatorship), now has his ashes resting anonymously. His name can’t even be written out publicly.

Mátyás Rákosi, also known as the Hungarian Stalin, ruled Hungary with an iron fist from 1949 to 1955, albeit he was already calling the shots from 1947 for all intents and purposes. When he died in 1971, his remains were buried into these unmarked columbaria in a quiet ceremony. Due to the large size of his Soviet urn, (he died in the Soviet Union), his remains had to be placed into two columbaria instead of just one. Even in death he was more equal than others.

Although the columbaria originally bore his name, after a while it was reduced to his initials and the years of his life. Although I’m not sure about this bit, I can only assume that following the attack on János Kádár’s grave last year, the decision was made to remove his name, lest this be attacked again.

Thus, the man who was at one point the most powerful man in Hungary, and perhaps most powerful ever, is now being erased from history. He shouldn’t be, but I can’t exactly feel any sympathy for him.

Like so many things, both are exciting for now mostly because I haven’t yet figured out how badly I really am playing.  In a couple months I’ll have done the research on proper form and style and turned every game/practice session into a thoroughly unfun series of self-inflicted nitpicks.

I know yesterday was hot, but still, it doesn’t even come close to approaching this!

You’ll see signs like this frequently in the hilly and mountaineous parts of Los Angeles. Where did I snap this sign? On the back of the Széchenyi National Library. Doh!