Somusing

Back in May we went on a long road trip to Oklahoma City to visit Erin's sister, Ivy Skinner, and her family. We had a great time with the Skinners, and also got to spend time with Brian Dunn and Ron & Crystal Phipps and their kids. At a used bookstore in Edmond, the suburb of Oklahoma City where the Skinners live, I came across several Bulgarian books from the 1970s and 1980s: The one on the left is Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric , and on the right is a collection called "Black Sun" with Karel Čapek's R.U.R. , Yevgeny Zamyatin's We , George Orwell's Animal Farm , and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 . That's the title page of Ray Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric . That one is The Trip of Icarus by Bulgarian science fiction author Lyuben Dilov. The Wikipedia page about him says the story adds a Fourth Law of Robotics, extending the original three laws proposed by Isaac Asimov: "A robot must establish its identi...

Here are some more examples of mind-tickling Cyrillic. This top word is a really common thing to see in the city: apteka (meaning apothecary = pharmacy), written аптека in block Cyrillic but looking funny as аптека in script (that will vary depending on which Cyrillic fonts you have installed): This bag of spaghetti on the left is my favorite yet, as block спагети becomes спагети in script, except chances are that your font won't show the middle "g" sound like the "r" it appears to be here, since that is yet another variation used in Bulgaria: Now look above at the Billa label on the right. That reads ябълки голд. делишъс = literally yabulki (apples) gold. delishus. Hehe. I'll finish with a store I saw called "Mira", like our daughter's name: