>>As one of the Yanks who actually knows all the words to "Rule Britannia" and "New Jerusalem" and learned Kipling as a child ( our family were great kiplers )
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>Why did I expect it to be "kipplers"? Probably because your neighbors were pudders.
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I did agonize over the spelling, but I think you get the Dorothy Parker reference <s>

>BTW, I think I'd want to be a harbinger, part time. I mean I couldn't possibly harbinge full time, that's just too much, but maybe a dozen hours a week would be nice for a change, specially after all those years of forming (yes, I used to be a former... actually still am).

Always wanting to be first on the scene, I wanted to be the guy they would send out to cannoiter.

My God, man, I sometimes find it hard to believe this is something like your fourth language !

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>>The Poles were the victims of geography. The Czechs were sold out. The French had a very tough time of it but certainly were not a big factor in victory. The Balkans and Greece
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>Sorry, but Greece IS Balkans. Geographically, Balkans is anything between the line from Trieste to river Sava, and then anything south of Sava and Danube, down to the Black, Egeian, Ionian, Adriatic or other pieces of the Mediterranean sea. I'm somehow unable to picture Greece beamed outside of these boundaries.

Do the Greeks think of it that way or is this just the idea that Greece is part of Greater Serbia <g>