plus: more about the un than you wanted to know.
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
I haven't felt well recently, which is why I haven't been writing. How non-well? The pint of Ben and Jerry's Phish Food is just sitting there in the freezer.
Yesterday we had brunch with Fernando at Delmonico's. I shouldn't have gone--my upset stomach wouldn't let me eat enough to justify the price. Plus, we went late, so the brunch was just so-so, instead of outstanding, so Fernando's first visit to their brunch was underwhelming.
After brunch I went to a meeting of Sisters In Crime at the South Pasadena Library. Jerrilyn was hosting a panel of first time published mystery authors who live in the area. Los Angeles is lousy with mystery writers, I discovered--everyone in the audience was working on one. (Jerrilyn then asked: "How many have finished one?" Hands went down. "How many have an agent?" Many fewer hands. "How many have published?" One hand left.)
Sisters in Crime: a group of people pretty much interested in the same things I am--murder and mayhem.
Then I came home and settled on the couch, feeling grandly ooky, and watched five hours of The Ben Stiller Show, which was being run in a marathon on some cable channel. It was pretty funny, although it was funnier to try to deduce what had been the inspiration for the sketch (beyond, "Ben wants to do Bono," "Ben wants to do Springsteen," "Ben wants to do Tom Cruise...").
I also played with SimCity 3000, which is the computer game from hell. For one thing, it requires you to have 128 Meg of virtual memory on. (We discovered later that what they're saying is, you need 128 Meg of memory available--clearly the company had never tested it using physical RAM alone.) Then, you need the CD in the drive. And it takes forever and a day to start the damn game--the splash screen just sat there for a few minutes while the game loaded.
I don't think it's going to take the place of either Civilization or Caesar III in my heart.
Today I made my usual mistake of trying to go to the grocery store. I haven't quite figured this out yet, but Mondays are a disaster at the Ralph's near us. I've taken to wondering if there's a free food giveaway I should know about. It's wall-to-wall carts from before lunch, whereas the rest of the week anytime before, say, 4, the store is pretty empty.
I picked up O Jerusalem, the latest Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel, at the library, and lay on the couch.
I did, however, start off the day by writing about 10 pages in my novel, so the day was not a complete loss.
The answer to Saturday's question: as of right now, I'm not sure! Columbine had accompanied her question with the answer, "The UN peacekeeping force on Cyprus has been going 25 years."
However, then John wrote in to say, "The mission in Cyprus has been in place since 1964, but the oldest U.N. mission is the one in Kashmir, placed between the Indians and the Pakistanis. That has been there since 1949, as a result of the Indian War of Independence, in 1948."
Then Columbine replied, quoting his source, Robert Pelton's Fielding's The World's Most Dangerous Places (which is a travel guide!): "He says of Kashmir: 'The UN has one of its oldest and smallest field missions here (UNMOGIP). Forty-four South Koreans sit here to monitor how many times the combatants break the 1949 cease-fire agreement ....'
"He says of Cyprus: 'The oldest UN mission in the world is living testament to the fact that you can keep the kids from squabbling, but you will never make them kiss and make up ....'"
Is Kashmir a field mission, or a peacekeeping mission? (If it's a peacekeeping mission, they're doing a bad job of it.) Did the Cyprus mission start in 1964 or 1974? If Kashmir is not a peacekeeping mission, then Cyprus wins, and I've got to go find out when the UN stepped in between the Greeks and the Turks (oops--just ruined a future question). Not that things have gotten any easier in Cyprus, whenever the hell the UN arrived.
Aha! I went to the UN website and discovered they have a list of peacekeeping missions! And what do we find?
The Kashmir mission is only an observer mission! But it's not the oldest mission listed there--the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in the Middle East is older by one year! The oldest peacekeeping mission called a peacekeeping mission is in fact Cyprus--which started in 1964!
I'm going to call the winner Cyprus (1964).
You can all go back to work now, having learned just a little bit more about the world around us.
(And no, I did not steal all those exclamation marks from Kymm. I actually removed them from a Georgette Heyer novel that had a surplus.)
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com