Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that an interest "Balkans" is waning in Mr. Life. Some of stories are just in the middle of the plot or at their very beginnings.

We have the story about media in Serbia, for example - an onlooker at the broadcasts of TV stations controlled by the regime could easily believe that Serbia is the best of all possible worlds with a flowering economy and growing democracy --- providing that he is tied to Serbian TV 24 hours daily and that he doesn't take step away from his flat. Some independent media sometimes dare to allow that NATO was not beaten by Serbia, but in such cases the regime has a new law about information which provides enormous penalties for those journalists who insult anybody from the ruling garniture.

Let's look more closely at how Mr. Life is employing sophisticated literary forms as he moves into the year 2000.

Horror - nobody could provide an official confirmation, but every professional accoucheur in Yugoslavia gives advice to new married pairs to avoid child-bearing during the next two years. It seems that the after effects of human bombardment by the NATO Flying Circus will lessen enough after a two year period to assure a new generation with only one head, two legs, two arms and a more or less normal number of fingers.

Comedy - although Montenegro and Serbia "de jure" still make up the Yugoslavian Federation, some people "de facto" live in different countries. Before flying from Tivat (Montenegro) to Belgrade (Serbia) passengers pass through not a domestic (non-customs, no passport check) gate but an international one. Hmmnnn.

Farce - KFOR is unable to create a multi-ethnic society in Kosovo and prevent Albanians from killing Serbs and Gypsies, but the Secretary General of NATO has declared that such sporadic incidents can't lessen the success of the international community there. (Which raises the question of whether it is only Mr. Secretary General who really thinks that a few daily, sporadic incidents of killing in Kosovo are a reasonable price in the building of World New Order --- or maybe he has spent too much time with Mr. Jamie Shea-nocchio and lost his sense of reality).

Corn - how much time will pass before everybody realizes that bombs in NATO Flying Circus were only the background for the real battle for souls being made by TV? (A very good friend of mine, a journalist from one EU country, told me that he had a video tape with frames full of Albanian civilians doing nothing in some basement. Then he heard voiceover which said: "OK, everybody, let us see some crying now". And Albanian civilians cried. This journalist was instructed to cut the beginning of the tape, and the offending voiceover, and broadcast only the crying.)

As I have said, Mr. Life creates his stories in other parts of Europe too, but they are not so full of spice as those ones from the former Yugoslavia, albeit some pearls could be found in other works from time to time.

Here's an example:

A high Turkish politician said that Turkey should become part of European Union at last because the Turkish people are Europeans and have been for 600 years. I am curious now to hear the reaction from the USA. If the USA supports Turkey, the precedent will be made, and Americans (excluding Indians) will have the moral right to feel themselves at home in America after 2092.