Hero of the Week

Here we are, back with another Hero of the Week. In order to facilitate an understanding of this honor, I'll explain again the significance of the "award".
Basically, every week (or so) I will highlight someone that I feel is in some way a hero. Contrary to most awards of this type, I will avoid obvious figures, even if they are more deserving of the title "hero". I will not, for example, discuss Nelson Mandela (first democratically elected President of South Africa) or Rigoberta Menchu (Nobel Peace Price, 1992). Nor will you find chatter here on the understated and underappreciated heroism of firefighters or medical researchers searching for the cure for cancer. What you will find are heroes of a quixotic ilk--strange dreamers with strange visions doing somewhat strange things. Some, of course, will be stranger than others. The last hero featured here, for example, was Noel Godin, a Belgian man most famous for throwing cream pies at dignitaries and other famous people that need to be taken down a notch. Absurd? Sure. But also creative, daring and funny. I like that.
This week's hero is L.L. Zamenhof, aka Doktoro Esperanto, creator of the most widely spread purposefully invented international language. In constructing Esperanto, Zamehof attempted to use simple grammatical structures and easily recognizable vocabulary, utilizing various languages as his sources and inspiration. Unfortunately the dream to make this neutral language truly useful (and used) has never become a reality (at least not yet), although there are a number of international organizations dedicated to Esperanto. Estimates of the number of Esperanto speakers vary greatly--some researchers have suggested numbers as high as 2 million. Others discard such estimates as pure rubbish. There are, however, supposedly around 6,000 native speakers of Esperanto (presumably people with very strange parents).
Numbers and estimates and research and facts, however, are of little importance in deciding Zamenhof's status as a hero. A dreamer of an impossible dream he may have been, but a dreamer all the same he was. And while he wasn't out there dressed all funny-like, throwing pies in the face of Bill Gates, he was holed up in his room constructing grammatical structures and inventing vocabulary lists and conjuring up conjugation charts. And that's damn strange. Damn strange and damn admirable.

Read more on Zamenhof and Esperanto at:
Wikipedia
ELNA Website FAQ

Alternatively, check out Wikipedia in Esperanto:
Esperanto Wikipedia

FINALLY, ON ANOTHER NOTE....
On December 26th, I will be leaving NYC on a jet plane for uncharted waters. I'll head to Detroit, lay over a bit, then off to Paris to catch a plane for Casablanca, Morocco (oddly, Casablanca the film was actually filmed in Tangiers, which I visited briefly in July [see old posts], and not actually in Casablanca).
I'll be in Morocco until the 12th, traveling around all by my lonesome. On the 12th, I'll head to Paris, hang out a few days, and return home to start working again.
This all means that I will finally return to the original motivation for starting this blog--detailing my travels to interesting places, recording my thoughts, experiences, and perceptions in and of the places I visit.
Please send any advice, suggestions, places to stay, etc. to chris_m_bond@yahoo.com
Have a beautiful day.