Otto's Random Thoughts

For the three people living in the US that read this blog, Happy Independence Day. For the other three of you, it is still Saturday so it is...

I haven't done a Kyrgyz food post this summer yet, so here it is. My wife is a fantastic cook. I am not sure I can remember everything...

While American based blogs seem completely obsessed with demonizing the CSA as more evil than Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Hitler combined, ...

I have been listening to the audio version of Deon Meyer's Devil's Peak on YouTube for the last couple of days. Meyer is a popular...

I came across this recent and rather interesting article on the GULag   looking for citations of my publications.  It is the introduction...

Abstract Ethnic Germans in Kyrgyzstan 1882-1992 Asian Studies in Africa: Challenges and Prospects of a New Axis of Intellec...

On September 24-26 I will be attending the inaugural conference of the Association of Asian Studies in Africa which will take place at th...

At the end of last month I finally got an article accepted for publication in a very prestigious journal on the condition I make some mino...

It still has to be voted on one more time. But, the Kyrgyz proposal to ban gay propaganda along the lines of the 2013 Russian law just go...

I am getting tired of reading about the "Confederate" (really the Army of Northern Virginia) flag and how it supposedly represen...

The orthodox academic position in the US as established and militantly defended by Francine Hirsch at the University of Wisconsin is that...

I have been in Bishkek for the last two weeks. Unlike last year I have not felt compelled to write a lot about it. Although some day I sti...

It has been a while since I had a reader survey. I am not sure I have very many human readers left since this blog seems to be dying. ...

Today is the 71st anniversary of the deportation of the Crimean Tatars from their ancestral homeland on the Black Sea to the deserts of Uz...

This is a great short film on Russian-German Heroes of the Soviet Union during World War II.

This film from Kazakhstan on the deportation of ethnic Germans from western regions of the USSR is quite good. Although in reality the Kaz...

Classes are over for the semester. Now I just have to give and grade final exams. Over all I think the students did well this semester. My g...

Recently two pieces of my writing were published. The first to appear in print was "Soviet Ethnic Cleansing of the Crimean Tatars...

Yesterday I saw the movie Big Men. Now I too want to be a Big Man. But, to be a Big Man you need Big Money and in West Africa the biggest ...

It turns out that most of the foods we eat here in Ghana originally came here from the Western hemisphere, particularly from Brazil via th...