Past Present

In 2014, the Development in Language Theory conference took place in the city of Yekaterinburg, in the Ural mountains of Russia. I used to live there. In Soviet times, there were no international conferences in the city. The whole region of the Urals was closed to foreigners. As I walked the streets of Yekaterinburg, I thought of my friends there and of Faulkner's lines The past is never dead. It isn't even past. To Misha Volkov on the occasion of his 60th anniversary The Urals. Since 2001, a Development in Language Theory (DLT) conference takes place in Europe in odd years and outside Europe in even years. The 2014 venue was Yekaterinburg. I lived there from 1959 to 1971. The city was called Sverdlovsk in Soviet times. Yekaterinburg is in Asia but barely. We used to hike to a simple stone in the forest marking the Europe-Asia border. Nowadays the border is closer to the city. Both the city and Europe seem to expand a little. The border, marked with a handsome monument, became a tourist attraction. Yekaterinburg is the industrial and cultural center of the Urals, though it has a rival of sorts in the city of Chelyabinsk located about 200 km south of Yekaterinburg. In the morning of February 15, 2013, a large meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk. The Russian reaction was characteristically twofold: conspiracy theories and jokes. The very next day, a childhood friend of mine (I grew up in Chelyabinsk) forwarded to me a little anonymous poem: Íè÷åãî òàê íå áîäðèò êàê ñ óòðà ìåòåîðèò. In loose translation: But nothing energizes like a meteoric morning strike. UrGU, the Ural State University. The DLT lectures were given in the main building of the Ural State University. The university is known by an acronym UrGU where G re ects the st letter of the