coincidentally enough....

Had I not been sidetracked as usual, I had intended yesterday to indulge another of my annoying little obsessions by marking the 68th anniversary of the 24-hour independence of Carpatho-Ukraine, the homeland of Andy Warhol's family among other things. It was another one of those places that first attracted my attention at age eleven by virtue of being the only one-stamp country in the Scott catalogue, and one which turned out when rediscovered in much later adulthood to have even an stranger history than my childhood self could have imagined.

I had been planning to ponder whether the oddity still persists of a would-be secessionist president teaching at a university underwritten by the country from which he plans to secede. Carpatho-Ukrainian irredentism is currently directed against Ukraine itself, Uzhgorod and environs having been incorporated into Ukraine at the end of the Second World War.

But as events unfolded out it was left to someone else to discuss Ukraine.

And yes, I exaggerate when I put the Warhola family on the Ukraine side of the border; their home turf is still in Slovakia, since the Carpatho-Rusyns are spread out as a subgroup across several international boundaries, just like some of the other restless ethnicities of our times. As Warhol said, "I come from nowhere."