Here I am in Croatia once more. The travel all went very smoothly. I flew Lufthansa to Frankfurt, and then Croatian Airlines on to Zagreb. The difference in the quality of the coffee on the two flights was startling. Croatians clearly take their coffee very seriously, even in airline catering.

For today I am staying with lovely friends who, embarrassingly for me, are far better read in science fiction than I am. Hello Milena and Marko, and thanks for the splendid hospitality. Thanks also to Mirko for collecting me from the airport.

This evening Mirko and I head out for the coast, and the first day of the convention. We should be there in good time. I’m told that programming at Liburnicon mostly happens in the evening, because you can’t get anyone away from the beach during the day.

Meanwhile I have one small Zagreb story for you. There is an old cannon here that fires at Noon each day. It has a short Wikipedia entry, which is in Croatian but you can see a picture. It also has a Twitter account. It tweets once a day. You can probably guess what it says. But it does it in Croatian, and vowels don’t work the same in all languages. So every day, on the stroke of Noon, it tweets “BUM!”.