>>>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>

Never heard of the lady, but looked her up, and I think the reference was in order indeed. I like that sort of spirit - and besides, I somehow believe that the percentage of scum on the Hollywood blacklist back then was disproportionately low. IOW, she must have been good.

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

Isn't that an exercise in futility? Whatever you connoiter, has to be reconnoitered.

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

Second (in order of appearance), and it has become my favorite toy in recent years. BTW, nobody took the bait... see my tagline ;).

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

Never was. There was a piece of the port of Thessaloníki which was rented to Kingdom of Serbia to 99 years, which have expired some time in the previous century.

I was just referring to the fact that the Balkans is a geographical area, not a political entity. And even politically, Greece is by all means a Balkan state - spice in the same stew, with their own surplus of history over geography, their own trouble with minorities, troubles with neighbors, and above all, trouble with great powers stepping over the castles in this sandbox just because they didn't recognize them as castles (yeah, both meanings of "recognize").