"Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die."

Said Mel Brooks, famously.

I'm thinking of that quote because I'm reading the comments on a WaPo article, "Woman impaled by beach umbrella in Ocean City" ("an umbrella was apparently uprooted and swept away by a gust of wind... the sharper end the umbrella shaft, which is used to plant it into the ground, impaled the woman in the chest"). This is what people have seen fit to write:

Obviously, time for common sense beach umbrella control.

I call for strict umbrella licensing and a 3 day waiting period.

Yes, we should of course do this, to the same extent every other advanced democracy does.

Thanks Trump!

Mary Poppins better learn how to park that thing.

By the way, there was another beach-umbrella impaling a week ago (in the foot, not the chest). And now, I'm googling "death by umbrella" and seeing, from last March, "How a beach umbrella fatally impaled a woman with 800 pounds of force":

The umbrella injured the left ventricle of the woman’s heart, and despite an emergency surgery, she died. “If this incident had gone unwitnessed, and the nature of the object was not recognized, the manner of this woman’s death may have been in question... This case provides confirmation that beach umbrellas may cause fatal penetrating blunt force trauma to the chest.”

There have also been cases of deliberate weaponizing of umbrellas, notably the assassination of the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Ivanov Markov in 1978:

On 7 September 1978, Markov walked across Waterloo Bridge spanning the River Thames, and waited at a bus stop to take a bus to his job at the BBC. He felt a slight sharp pain, as a bug bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He looked behind him and saw a man picking up an umbrella off the ground. The man hurriedly crossed to the other side of the street and got in a taxi which then drove away. The event is recalled as the "Umbrella Murder" with the assassin claimed to be Francesco Gullino, codenamed "Piccadilly".

When he arrived at work at the BBC World Service offices, Markov noticed a small red pimple had formed at the site of the sting he had felt earlier and the pain had not lessened or stopped. He told at least one of his colleagues at the BBC about this incident. That evening he developed a fever and was admitted to St James' Hospital in Balham, where he died four days later, on 11 September 1978, at the age of 49. The cause of death was poisoning from a ricin-filled pellet.

Here is Markov's description of life in Bulgaria in his time:

Today, we Bulgarians present a fine example of what it is to exist under a lid which we cannot lift and which we no longer believe someone else can lift... And the unending slogan which millions of loudspeakers blare out is that everyone is fighting for the happiness of the others. Every word spoken under the lid constantly changes its meaning. Lies and truths swap their values with the frequency of an alternating current... We have seen how personality vanishes, how individuality is destroyed, how the spiritual life of a whole people is corrupted in order to turn them into a listless flock of sheep. We have seen so many of those demonstrations which humiliate human dignity, where normal people are expected to applaud some paltry mediocrity who has proclaimed himself a demi-god and condescendingly waves to them from the heights of his police inviolability...

Speaking of paltry mediocrity, I am seeing — in a cheesy book called "Death by Umbrella! the 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons" — that there were 2 movies in which an umbrella was a murder weapon: "Silent Night, Deadly Night 2" ("Ricky skewers Rocco... and even unfurls it") and "Stitches" (woman killed with an umbrella to through the back of her head, popping out her eyeball, and unfurling in a way that rains blood all over the place).



I give you that clip, but I myself could not watch it. I clicked off at 6 seconds. Let's look at this:


Monument to Georgi Markov in Sofia cc TodorBelomorski

A translation of the inscription: "The living close the eyes of the dead, the dead open the eyes of the living."

Bulgaria says the famous French feminist Julia Kristeva was a secret agent.

The NYT reports. Kristeva — who was born in Bulgaria — denies it, and Bulgaria has posted its entire dossier on line.

Martin Dimitrov, a Bulgarian political scientist at Tulane University who has written about State Security, said the documents do seem to show that Ms. Kristeva knowingly, if not enthusiastically, shared information on French intellectual and political life with the agency.... “Was she a spy? State Security thought so; she says otherwise,” Mr. Dimitrov said. “This raises a question that is more moral than legal: Namely, who is a spy?”

"What remains enthralling, though, are Millett’s close readings, her exposés of the naked emperors of the literary left."

"'After receiving his servant’s congratulations on his dazzling performance, Rojack proceeds calmly to the next floor and throws his wife’s body out of the window,' is Millett’s deadpan description of the aftermath of the hero’s sodomization of a maid in Mailer’s An American Dream. Millett then observes, 'The reader is given to understand that by murdering one woman and buggering another, Rojack became a "man."'"

Writes Judith Shulevitz in "Kate Millett: ‘Sexual Politics’ & Family Values" (New York Review of Books):

For a glorious moment, this very bookish literary critic was the face of American feminism. The New York Times called her the “high priestess.” After “Prisoner of Sex” became the talk of the town—and the revered Harper’s editor Willie Morris was fired for publishing it—Mailer organized a riotous debate known as “Town Bloody Hall,” which was filmed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker and is now streamable. It was a circus, and it was Millett who set it in motion, even though she refused to show up. Mailer aimed a torrent of insults at the feminists who did agree to take the stage or appear in the audience, among them Greer, Diana Trilling, Susan Sontag, Betty Friedan, and Cynthia Ozick. They rolled their eyes and gave as good as they got—much better, in most cases—and the crowd roared with delight. Try to imagine a public clash of ideas being so joyously gladiatorial today.

Here it is:



ADDED: The word "bugger" (for anal sex) is rare these days. Did you know the word is related to "Bulgarian"? From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

bugger (n.) "sodomite," 1550s, earlier "heretic" (mid-14c.), from Medieval Latin Bulgarus "a Bulgarian" (see Bulgaria), so called from bigoted notions of the sex lives of Eastern Orthodox Christians or of the sect of heretics that was prominent there 11c. Compare Old French bougre "Bulgarian," also "heretic; sodomite."

bugger (v.) "to commit buggery with," 1590s, from bugger (n.)...

The earliest use of "bugger" to express "annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc.," is, according to the OED, in the diary John Adams, in 1779: "Dr. W[inship] told me of Tuckers rough tarry Speech, about me at the Navy Board.—I did not say much to him at first, but damn and buger my Eyes, I found him after a while as sociable as any Marble-head man."

AND: Here's a William Safire column (from 1995) on the word "bugger," written after some Congressman said "We're here to nail the little bugger down" (and the "little bugger" was Bill Clinton). How disrespectful was it?

"Because of a recent copyright dispute, Bulgarian National Radio, the public broadcaster for the country, has been limited to airing music recorded before 1946."

"And... [t]he station had a 20 percent increase in listenership in January, the first month in which the change was in effect, over December’s numbers...."

“We had some concerns but people keep calling to tell us that they really enjoy the music,” said Nikoleta Elenkova, Bulgarian National Radio’s spokeswoman.

Musicautor — which controls the distribution rights for "millions of Bulgarian and foreign songs" — had raised its fees from $271,000 to $978,000 and got its bluff called.

What if you had to forgo everything copyrighted and were limited to what's in the public domain? It's hard to limit yourself, but what if it were forced on you? After a month on that diet, you might think this is great.

"Under Boris I, Bulgarians became Christians..."

"... and the Ecumenical Patriarch agreed to allow an autonomous Bulgarian Archbishop at Pliska. Missionaries from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius..."



"... devised the Glagolitic alphabet, which was adopted in the Bulgarian Empire around 886.... In the early 9th century, a new alphabet — Cyrillic — was developed at the Preslav Literary School, adapted from the Glagolitic alphabet invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius...."

In Bulgaria, today's "History of" country.

In the following centuries Bulgaria established itself as a powerful empire, dominating the Balkans through its aggressive military traditions, which led to development of distinct ethnic identity. Its ethnically and culturally diverse people united under a common religion, language and alphabet which formed and preserved the Bulgarian national consciousness despite foreign invasions and influences.

Real or political theater?

About that Bulgarian gun-pointing, gun-jamming incident... I'm feeling truther-y. How about you?

Photos of the ruins of Buzludha, Bulgaria's extravagant monument to communism.

"A terrible snow storm surrounded the monument for the first 4 days we spent on the mountain.  During our daily visits to the site, I did not once get to see this fantastic structure from a distance. Striding towards it through deep powder, it would only emerge from the dense white fog just a matter of metres away."

Timothy Allen, via Metafilter, where the first comment reads: "It looks like what people in the 60s and 70s thought The Future was going to look like. I could easily see that as a set on a 1972 sci-fi show."

Lampooning the balance between "would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space."

It's "Entropa," by Czech artist David Cerny, a 172-square-foot multi-part sculpture attached to the European Council building in Brussels. It's the Czech Republic's turn at the EU presidency, you see.

Entropa portrays Bulgaria as a toilet, Romania as a Dracula theme-park and France as a country on strike....

The Netherlands is shown as series of minarets submerged by a flood — a possible reference to the nation's simmering religious tensions.

Indeed, it's possible!

Germany is shown as a network of motorways vaguely resembling a swastika....

The old swastika — on a government building.

Cerny would like to know "if Europe is able to laugh at itself."

UPDATE: Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra says:

"I apologise to Bulgaria and its government if it feels offended..."...

"We wanted to prove that 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, there is no censorship," said the former Czech dissident.

But he refused to share the platform with the artist, who insisted his piece was in the European tradition of satire, like Monty Python and France's Les Guignols.

He also denied that the Lego entry for Denmark was a representation of one of the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that appeared in 2005.

AND: Here's a picture of the Demark section.