I’m sorry. It’s the best I could do and God knows I have been trying. This is the closest I can come to “Sticks nix hicks pix,” the famousest headline ever. Boris Szyc (it’s pronounced “shits”) is an actor. He was in a film, playing a priest, against his co-star’s prostitute. The reviewer didn’t like […]
There’s a painting I particularly wanted to see so I took myself down to Kraków to have a look, spending a few days in the old place. I picked up a copy of the local paper and was dismayed to find that the good people of the newspaper are obssessed with Wrocław. How much money […]
Marcin Wojciechowski of Gazeta Wyborcza (Feb 13th) takes the unfortunate minister for agriculture, Andrzej Lepper, to task for questioning the wisdom of locating an anti-missile shield in Poland. “In matters of state as important as the missile shield only the competent members of government should speak out, not the minister for agriculture, and never outside […]
As mentioned previously, hospitals here in Poland are being overrun by bailiffs as the government agrees to bail out only a few of them. One of the reasons being offered for this disastrous turn of events is that there are too many hospitals. There may well be something in this but I would find it […]
The Polish health service is in a jock. Several hospitals in the ?l?sk region have had the pleasure of forming a close acquaintance with the bailiffs and it’s back in time to the Victorian era of Do-gooding as a whip around is organised to keep taxpayer-funded hospitals afloat. If this were happening in a socialist […]
An LA Times article about bookshops in San Francisco being driven out of business by climbing rents and online competition got me to thinking about the state of the bookshop trade in my hometown, Dublin. Despite all the touristic guff about this being a writers’ town, the situation isn’t particularly good. It’s not that bookshops […]
To all those countless readers confronted with a blank page when trying to access the blog over the past few days, I offer apologies with all the sincerity of an Irish Rail station announcer. “Server issues” is the catch-all excuse this time. Posting will resume as normal this week.Meanwhile, to cheer up Irish-based readers this […]
When it comes to the field of history, what engages the “common reader” can be radically different from academics’ fare. Take the Roman Empire. Anyone who has read Tom Holland’s rollicking tale of the fall of the Roman Republic, Rubicon, will have been regaled with juicy tales of captured Roman governors having molten gold poured […]
A New York Times article on Ireland being the exception to the stereotype of aging European societies (“The Irish, Young in �Old Europe,� Strain Schools and Housing”), confirms two hunches I have long harboured:1) About 35% of Irish girls under the age of 6 seemed to be called Ella, Ellie, Evie, or some other two-syllable […]
In the eighteenth century to be an eccentric you had to worship Satan, gamble, go hot air ballooning, accidentally kill someone, marry a close relative, flee from creditors, be addicted to opium, write and privately publish a pornographic novel, discover one of the elements and have a star, a species of plant or a national […]
