There's a guy at work a year older than me who grew up in Belgrade. His family fled in 1993, when hyperinflation was at its peak, 500 billion dinar notes were as valuable as a ply of toilet paper and the nightly news featured a special "Let's all take out our money and scratch off a few zeros" segment before the weather. The guy is brilliant, and can talk your ear off -- in a good way -- about all things Balkan until the cows come home, or until his wife calls him to ask why he's still at work an hour after quitting time.

There aren't any cows in downtown Austin.

But before his phone rang, he told me a great anecdote, as we stood by a giant, wall sized map of the world, one so big that even Luxembourg looks semi-formidable.

When he was studying in Quebec, "writing a paper on democracy and all that bullshit," he remembers one day falling upon a whole section of books tucked far away in dark, dusty corner of the library. All were written by French Canadian authors, "all with titles like, 'How to Make it Work' ... no, really, they all had that exact title." They were essentially a bunch of how-to manuals on federalist political systems comprising different ethnic groups, and all were about -- you guessed it -- Yugoslavia.

Needless to say, none of the books had been checked out in some time.