Friday, August 27, 2010

I've been spending a lot of time with receipts this week, receipts that I have to turn into my department whenever I use my university credit card or my own credit card for university expenses. On Wednesday, I submitted nine separate envelopes of receipts and a page-long list of explanations to the secretary in our office responsible for handing these things.

Worst of all is that almost all of my receipts from Russia are torn about halfway.

Why do Russians tear their receipts? I think it comes from Soviet times, when everybody had to first wait in line to pay for an item, then wait in another line to claim the item they'd paid for. When they claimed the item, they'd submit their receipt, which would be returned to them, torn, along with the item they were buying. This way, the receipt could still function as a proof of purchase, but couldn't be used to claim an unlimited number of items.

Although stores like this don't really exist any longer, cashiers almost everywhere I go in Russia still tear receipts halfway before giving them to customers. Old habits die hard.

It's a pain collecting all of the receipts and sorting them into different groups, and the amount of manpower that it requires (our secretary has to go through every receipt, calculating the value in US dollars according to the daily exchange rate) could probably be used in more cost-effective ways.

At the same time, however, whenever I start moaning about turning in receipts I start feeling like an oil company executive complaining about excessive government regulation. Yes, it's a hassle, but I guess it's not so terrible, from the perspective of the Montana taxpayers who help fund my travel, for there to be a system in place, arduous though it may be, to check these things out and make sure I'm not getting overpaid.

Anyway, that's what's going on in Bozeman these days.

Here is your N & P:

Like a lot of people, I've been angered and depressed by the anti-Islamic rhetoric that a lot of people have been using with respect to the downtown community center that the Cordoba House people want to build. But I did like the fact that Obama joined the fray in this issue, even if it was a bummer to see him climb back a bit shortly thereafter.

But even Obama's cleaned-up message wasn't a bad one: there are rights, and there is wisdom. Just because you have the right to do something, that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

But it's too bad that this observation only comes out now. It would have been nice, for example, if more people had thought this way with respect to the Muhammad cartoon business, when European cartoonists celebrated their freedom of speech by deliberately insulting other people.

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I saw this post in Kamil Pasha today and was genuinely surprised, but the Iranian government moved quickly to disavow the comments by its Vice-President, Hamid Baghaei, who appeared to say, at a conference in Tehran, that the Ottoman Empire had committed genocide in 1915 against the Armenians.

Shortly after the story began appearing online, the Iranian Embassy in Ankara released a statement saying that Baghaei's comments had been misinterpreted and that there had been no change in Iran's position on the Armenian genocide issue.

The issue had been a big issue in the Turkish papers for about 15 minutes.
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The gold, rotating Turkmenbashi (Sarparmurat Niyazov) statue in Ashkhabad, capital of Turkmenistan, is coming down .

People in Russia used to love talking about Turkmenbashi as symptomatic of what they considered a specifically "Muslim" tendency to go for personality cults, and there's a whiff of this attitude in a lot of the coverage of Turkmenbashi's life.

But he was nevertheless a strange dude, which I guess always makes for a good story.


Touchdown Sarparmurat? Reports that the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame are negotiating with Turkmen authorities to purchase the statue have not been substantiated.

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Prices of eggs, buckwheat, and other staples rising from between 20% to 250% in St. Petersburg and Moscow after a bad harvest this summer.

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Here is a short article in Bianet about Suzan Denge, a journalist who has been held in detention in Turkey for the past year.

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American plans to build a new "anti-terror center" in southern Kyrgyz have apparently been scrapped.

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My high school classmate, James Toney, is embarking on a Mixed Martial Arts career.

I remember an afternoon stretched out on the couch in Montreal in my last year of college, reading the sports section of the New York Times and seeing that Toney, who went to both Tappan Junior High and Huron, had won the IBF middleweight championship in an upset. He would later become the super middleweight and cruiserweight world champion, and would play Joe Frazier in the film Ali.