I could claim to have been brought into the world by an entire armored regiment. Lumbering in the direction of Czechoslovakia on the night of August 20, 1968, where my mother, then more than nine months pregnant, was spending her maternity leave. Engines roared, tank tracks jingled on asphalt. Panic-stricken, I pierced the amniotic sac, slithered down the birth canal, and landed on a living room table. Darkness, and pandemonium reigned, tanks rumbled past, and there I was. An evil stench filled the trembling air, and the world into which I emerged was a fashionable world.