"Billa is worried about his nephews, who are being exposed to luxury lifestyle videos from the U.K., which go against the values that he’s trying to teach them."

"They haven’t yet said they want to leave the country, but he’s afraid that they might start talking about it one day. 'They show me how they want a really expensive car, or tell me they want to be social media influencers. It’s really hard for me to know what to say to them,' he said. Billa feels like he’s fighting against an algorithm, trying to show his nephews that the lifestyle that the videos promote isn’t real...."

 
From "The Albanian town that TikTok emptied" (Coda).

When the pro-travel pitch feels like an argument against travel.

Look at the photograph the NYT travel magazine highlights from a set of "The 10 Most Idyllic Destinations" that it has featured over the course of an entire year.



Yes, I'd find that pretty if I drove my car out into the Wisconsin countryside and got back home the same day, but imagine going all the way to Albania and finding your way out to a farm just to look at that! Is that some kind of joke?!

Looking at some of the other 10, I'm thinking: Imagine going all the way to Morocco and getting a view that's like a toned downed version of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. Why would you do that?!

Is it the mental experience of beating yourself inside the head with I am in Albania! or I am in Morocco! Morocco, I tell you!!? Do you go alone or do you drag along a companion whose inside-of-the-head you hallucinate as We came all the way to Albania/Morocco for this? We could have visited the wineries of Wisconsin or gone back to Zabriskie Point?

"Idyllic" means "Forming a suitable theme for an idyll; full of natural simple charm or picturesqueness. Also used trivially" (OED). Also used trivially — ha ha. I love that.

What, exactly, is an "idyll"? It's a poem (or poetic prose) describing "some picturesque scene or incident, chiefly in rustic life" or "An episode or a series of events or circumstances of pastoral or rural simplicity, and suitable for an idyll."

1873 J. A. Symonds Stud. Greek Poets x. 306 The name of the Idyll sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience....

The literal etymology is, indeed, "little picture."

Is any place really idyllic in itself, such that you can go there and experience the idyllic, or is the processing through the human mind what is necessary? The original meaning of "idyll" is a piece of writing. It's not the place itself but the poet's description.

So is it not more idyllic to read the poet's idylls? If you go to the place that might have inspired the poet to write an idyll, you'll have to perform the mental magic yourself. Maybe you should. Maybe that will expand your mental powers. But if you don't find the idyllic when you take a day trip to the countryside near your home, is it at all likely that you'll have the mental wherewithal to perform that brain labor after 15 hours of air travel and finding your way to a farm near Tirana?

"James struck licensing agreements for everything from 'Fifty Shades'-branded wine and lingerie to floggers, vibrators and handcuffs..."

"... and oversaw the development of many of these items herself. Perhaps most incongruously, she even licensed a 'Fifty Shades' teddy bear, who comes with mini handcuffs and a blindfold. 'We set about trademarking things just to stop people from making them,' she tells me in her office, which is festooned with 'Fifty Shades' paraphernalia... James wants to show me some nipple clamps she helped design in collaboration with the sex-toy maker Lovehoney, a British company that produced a line of Fifty Shades-themed erotic accessories. Lovehoney had first proposed some heavy, industrial-looking clamps, which James rejected. 'They looked like they could jump start Frankenstein,' James says."

From "The Evolution of E L James/James changed the literary landscape with her blockbuster erotica trilogy, 'Fifty Shades of Grey.' Now she is trying something (sort of) new" (NYT).

Jump start Frankenstein. That's good. Almost good enough to make me read EL James — not quite — who's got a new book. It's about "a wealthy British aristocrat who falls for his house cleaner, a beautiful, mysterious young woman who fled Albania." Ah, yes, Albania. The country you pick when you need a country nobody knows about.*

James worked hard to get Albania:

James traveled to Albania twice to research the novel, and collected a small library of books about the country, including an Albanian dictionary, a guide to Albanian social codes and laws, and a book about Albanian organized crime. Her husband, who’s the household cook, learned to make traditional Albanian stews.

I await Lucky James, the cultural-appropriation restaurant.

It was quite a change from the research she did for “Fifty Shades,” which involved lurking in some of the darker corners of the internet, scrolling through websites devoted to sexual bondage techniques and accessories....

Beneath the frothy fantasy, “The Mister” deals with unexpectedly weighty topics like economic inequality, the plight of undocumented workers, the oppression of women in conservative societies and the way social institutions and governments elevate the wealthy and powerful and exploit the vulnerable.

Get woke and titillated.
______________________

* Or so I learned from the movie "Wag that Dog."

"The weather-beaten forms of cuddly toys hanging from buildings are a common sight in Albania."

"Who put them there, and why?"

In Albanian they're just called "majmune", meaning "monkeys" - the word used for any soft toy...

Is it to do with religion? I ask. But whether the answer comes from a Muslim or a Catholic, it's the same - a shrug. "Religion isn't important," says one man....

"It stops the evil eye seeing our money," says one man outside his bustling furniture workshop. He is pleased to talk to me, full of reminiscences of his time working in London's Gloucester Road four years ago. He explains that at first he hadn't hung a monkey up when he was building this place. "And then the police came. They were causing trouble. My son went out and bought a monkey and we've not had any trouble since."

"Err ... this Wikipedia entry as reported by Ann has some large factual errors."

"Neither Albania nor Yugoslavia were ever liberated by the Soviets. There was no 'EU military mission led by Italy,' if for no other reasons than that the EU does not have a military, and would not, in any case, have been so insensitive as to have sent one headed by Italy, the former colonial ruler. Wikipedia is an unreliable source."

If only there were some way to edit Wikipedia....

And our "History of" country today is...

Do you recognize where this is? A clue: That's a photo of what used to be called the Enver Hoxha Mausoleum. If I told you it's in the capital city of Tirana, would you know the country, or is it easy because we are proceeding through the Wikipedia "History of" pages for the 206 countries in the world in alphabetical order?