quirky?

That word got a lot of airtime in describing a glut of post Twin Peaks tv shows that threw unlikely dialogues into the usual soap mix , eg "I am wearing a cat on my head today, please don't bother me".
Luckily this was soon identified as contrived zany, and 'quirky' fell out of fashion again.

Not completely.

It resurfaces so often in written materials about Ukraine that it is odd to see a text without it.

It sure made me excited to move here. The idea of an (albeit impoverished) Wonka -land of amusing characters certainly holds a charm. My antennae were on the alert: for the first couple of months I acted like I was flicking through a giant Where's Wally book, trying to spot the oddity. Yeah, I spotted a few.

But there is of course something problematic about this approach, ie the danger of becoming one of those repugnant hostel types in expensive and incongruous climbing gear, for whom the world performs in anecdotes.

It is worth asking if a quirk highlights disfunction of the quirky or the the banality of the non quirky? Or the lack of 'human' at the core of an esteemed idea of rationality?

I don't want to be the straight man in all of this, but I want to be in all of this. At any rate, Ukraine doesn't hold exclusive rights on eccentricity, but it deserves a mention in the credits.

Who can really predict the weather? And what do we really need to know? Last week for three days running the weather report had the symbol of a question mark. As if the Bureau of Meteorology was sick of all the layman smart mouthing and acknowledged "Look, this week is anyones guess". The good news was that the forth and fifth days had a sun, so everything was going to be alright.

There have been two times where a pair of shoes with nobody in them, stand neatly on the median strip, as if someone was waiting for the traffic to clear and suddenly vanished. But if they had been spirited away, why had the shoes remained? why did the rest of their clothes go invisible but the shoes not? Had they been otherwise naked? Were there any witnesses? By the next day in both cases the shoes had disappeared. Perhaps there had been a time lag in teleportation, like in a long distance phone call, or that the shoes were too heavy and had to be sent in a different parcel.

As is the fashion in lots of places, a mobile operator has put cameras in various cities and you can go on the internet to look at the city square. It is not a live web cam kind of thing , but a series of photos of the town. Kind of. It is clear that he person who posts the photos has to amuse themselves somehow. Or express themselves artistically. At any rate, to communicate something to whoever is trying to get a feel for a city, and doesn't know any other way than to google.ua it. One city has two photos taken at different times of a rainy day. The camera had also been rained on, so it was difficult to see what city it was. But there is atmosphere. In another city a seagull had sat right next to the camera and adopted a number of poses. It looked like there was some kind of town behind the seagull, but lets say it isn't the star of the show.