MPJ

There are numerous ways of how our civilization might end. I said plenty in the past about real threats, either from heavens or from within the Earth or ourselves. It was the main theme in the second half of 2012, around the Mayan's doomsday date and I contributed with several posts related to this, including Doomsday , Biodiversity and The Apocalypse Aftermath and in all those stories I was mainly focusing on the mother nature and catastrophes we can do little or nothing about. It was either some wrath from the distant universe in form of deadly gamma rays and supernovae implosions or some judgment day originated from our own Sun or asteroid impacts or even the ultimate rage from our planet by some super volcanic or tectonic disaster. But I only timidly mentioned all those man made events I referred as 'other human stupidities', including nuclear holocaust and biological hazards. So perhaps now is the time to continue the thread and glimpse into two great stories behind

While the short tale about famous actor is itself a small historical record especially for him and one little Serbian village half an hour away from my current location, I have to say that this post is a little bit mistitled even though De Niro's story has several connected points with what I want to write today. Instead, it will be about my grandfather and his war stories I listened yesterday for the first time. Actually, my mother told me all this before, but yesterday, during our annual dinner, he was in a great mood to tell them himself and this is my attempt to write them down while they are still fresh in my memory. But, for a moment, let's get back to the title story. Not too long ago, I read in a newspaper article* about Robert De Niro and his European travels he did about 40 years ago, more or less in the time where I was about to be born. Back then, these kind of tourist destinations were extremely popular among young Americans - if you were young and adventurou

I remember that scene from the movie "The Blues Brothers" with Jake and Elwood hiding from who-knows-who in the super tiny apartment next to skytrain or railway tracks, shaking every now and again and every time when a train is passing by the neighborhood. I always felt sympathy for all those people who are actually living next to those high trafficking high or rail ways with heavy tremors in the air in form of high decibels of various noises all around them. Guess what? Our own neighborhood is now getting similar feeling. Actually, similar is understatement. It is way worse. The new tracks are placed just couple of dozens of meters above our house. In recent months and years, the local airport are getting more and more traffic and the runway position is actually crossing our street almost to the single angle. I couldn't do much about it except to took the camera as soon as I heard the noise and 'shot' their underbellies. So here are couple of those taken in previ

In the past couple of years, every now and again I was uploading video clips to the YouTube that I made either for the blog intentionally or for some other "publishing" reasons and I've just realized that they piled up to the number big enough I can safely pronounce almost two dozens of them today to their public status and officially publish them. It's not really that big "contribution" to the video community but still here they are. Hopefully some of you would find them inspirational and interesting. If you do, following is the home page of the official channel where you can subscribe for the future or contribute with new YouTube community social features. Milan's Public Journal YouTube Channel Similar to the blog's threads and for better classification of all videos within the channel I created several playlists and filled them with videos of mutual theme or place or event. One of latest video files, the short movie Viktor and I made this su

It was May 20th of the 1883rd year of AD when people living in Dutch East Indies, back then in 19th century, started to feel more intense earthquakes and to spot first steam venting out of one of three volcanic cones, just above the powerful caldera in today's Indonesian archipelago of Krakatoa. In the following days of May eruptions started from the one of volcano peaks and after a week or so calmed down only to issue a warning for what would come in following months. What started happening on June 16th and culminating in August 27th is now well known as the most massive and powerful volcano eruption in the documented history of mankind. William Ascroft's pastel sky-sketches* The eruptions were so powerful that the most intense explosion was heard all the way down in Perth, Australia, which is almost 3000km south of Krakatoa. On the west, across the Indian ocean, people located almost 5000km on the islands not far away from Madagascar thought it was cannon fire from n

Original post date: May 2013, Update: September 2017 "When I think about everything we've been through together, maybe it's not the destination that matters, maybe it's the journey." This one-liner belongs to Harry Kim, a character from the Star Trek Voyager show - probably the episode when they all realized the ultimate truth about how far Earth is from their location and that even the lifetime might be too short to reach it back. It was one great show I swallowed in just couple of weeks back then in the beginning of 21st century. I remember I was watching up to 6 episodes every night and now looking to it from today's perspective perhaps the most memorable line I still remember is this one about famous journey-destination quote. So, what is your ultimate answer? Is it Journey or Destination? For me there is no doubt, it is always the journey. Even for travels as small as 50km we do to escape city on weekends and go to the mountain village I mention

"Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her around, facing her back into the house. - Let's go have dinner. Vincent said he made us that Serbian cevapcici." - Eureka, TV Show. The very last decade of the very last century of the previous millennium was very exciting in many ways. It won't be remembered by all meaningless Balkan wars flaming down here for many years, nor by the final end of communism era in this part of the Europe, nor even by the birth of European union idea or rise of the new world order we are all living in today. No, to me, it was the birth of the internet, email, world wide web, social networks, instant messaging, blogging, everything what we are using in our homes on daily basis the same way we do with television or radio or ... kitchen and all its appliances. Although the internet network and its services were invented many years before, it was the nineties where all started to go real worldwide and accepted by majority of people eve

While visiting museums and exhibitions during travels is somewhat mandatory, touring our own cities and sightseeing their history is something we need a special reason for. I stumbled to this fact with many people and it is not much different with us as well. This special reason today was a time gap we've got between couple of errands we needed to finish downtown, so we decided to stop by WW2 Nazi concentration camp, now a perfectly preserved memorial museum and one of three in Serbia during the second world war. "Crveni Krst", concentration camp was named to nearby railroad station with more than 12000 people passed through its dark chambers who either died within or executed on the nearby hill "Bubanj". Probably similarly to other camps in Europe, this one imprisoned mostly Jews, Roma and members of the resistance, mostly partisans, communists and their supporters. Compared to the camps in Germany at the time specially populated with soldiers and officers,