In the last two years some 1.2 million people have left Poland. Since May 2004 2.5 million cars have been imported. (Polityka 2007: nr. 7) I don’t know what that signifies. Probably nothing.
On the cover of a new edition of Krzysztof Varga’s Chłopaki nie płaczą is a stern message to, among others, Olaf Lubaszenko, who had the temerity to make a film of the same name but entirely unconnected with Varga’s original work (published 1996). Poor old Varga was tired of explaining to interviewers that the two […]
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 […]
Living in the European Union, I’m concerned for one group of working Italians who may have difficulties in the international labour market, given that they seem unaware of the general codes of practice that pertain to their sector outside Italy. So, in a hopefully humble gesture of European solidarity, this monkey offers some tips to […]
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 […]