With a cameo appearance by Serbia

In my experience, Serbia doesn’t make it into English-language pop culture too often. I only know one western pop song with any reference to Serbia. (‘The Ballad of the Sin Eater’ by Ted Leo name checks Novi Sad, but it also mentions Leeds, Ibiza, Sierra Leone, New Jersey, Kigali, Damascus, and tons of other places.)

In the past week, Serbia has been appearing in interesting places in my pop culture diet:

In a recent This American Life episode, Julia Sweeney tells the funny, funny story of both her and her brother getting cancer (she's a comedian - she makes cancer funny). At one point, her father, instead of dealing with his sick children, immerses himself in Yugoslav history and keeps trying to talk to Julia about Balkan Ghosts and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

In Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, which I just started reading, the titular character writes a book. A Belgrade based translator, wants to translate the book. The name of this translator is the completely un-Serbian, the-author-isn’t-even-trying Jajkj Vljkjkjv. I know that vowels can be scarce in this part of the world and that such things are amusing, but this name is absurd. ‘Kj’ isn’t a common (or ever?) letter combination in Serbian.

I am a few episodes into Extras, Ricky Gervais’ post-The Office project. Each episode is set on a different film set. The second episode takes place on the set of a movie about the war in Bosnia directed by Ben Stiller. Except it is never stated that the movie is about the war in Bosnia. I used my sleuthing skills (the man whose life the movie is based on is named Goran, the set has Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian writing on it, the soldiers’ uniforms have a Serbian seal on them) to figure it out. It seems really strange that they don’t bother to say what the movie is about.