And now for something completely different.

Guard Luka Drca usually hasn't seemed especially interested in my attempts to engage him on matters of Serbian politics, such as the recent presidential election. He's not a politician, after all. But the native Serbian clearly has strong opinions on the independence declared in recent days by the Kosovo region of his homeland.

"Kosovo is part of Serbia," he said definitively.

That, after I'd teased him a bit after practice about angry Serbians tearing up his hometown of Belgrade in protest of the move -- though he correctly pointed out that protesters had attacked only the U.S. Embassy there in protest of Washington's support of an independent Kosovo.

Of course, it's easy for me to be glib about political movements in faraway lands, but for Drca, watching ethnically dominant Albanians declare Kosovo an independent nation is probably akin to Americans watching an attempt to declare a sovereign state out of, say, Arizona and New Mexico.

Awfully difficult, in other words.