Taking Poland by storm right now and for the next eight — no, make that seven — days is one Krzysztof Kononowicz, who ran for president of Bia?ystok. You can watch his appearance on a teevee show if you search around but it’s a slightly unpleasant experience. The question of manipulation comes up and — […]
After extensive research (one and a half minutes on Google) I have been unable to find the source for “no matter who you vote for the government always wins.” It’s certainly true here in Poland, with local elections just over and a government still firmly in power. An interesting difference of opinion has come out […]
Sponsorship is an idea that should never have been divulged to the Poles. At the moment there is an ad campaign for hospice care. Posters on bus stops invite you to send a text message to the hospice charity. They tell you how much the text costs with VAT but they don’t tell you what […]
All news is local, they say, so here’s what Poland looks like going by the pages of a classified ads newspaper that comes out twice a week here: Poles love cars. One third of the paper is given over to them. The section marked “hobby” is less than one page long, hopefully because hobbyists have […]
South America, of course. Here is the first sentence of a news (not comment) article reporting Daniel Ortega’s victory in Nicaragua’s presidential elections: “The former revolutionary and friend of communist dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan populist Hugo Chavez won Sunday’s presidential elections.” As I mentioned before, no such discussion of politics in this newspaper can […]
Unilever’s public-spirited campaign to make women feel the need to purchase their beauty products continues. The latest manoeuvre is an interview on the subject of beauty and self-esteem with a sociologist in Wysokie Obcasy, the teeth-grindingly awful ladies’ weekend supplement to the crusading Gazeta Wyborcza. This colour magazine specialises in finding women who are (or […]
This week’s Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he’s no burden on society and he’s not […]
“Ulotki i reklamy prosz? wrzuca? do skrzynki” say the signs outside the doors of the flats on the leafy X. estate in Gda?sk. This means “please place advertisements and flyers in the box” but the receptacle into which the obliging postmen have placed the advertisements and flyers looks an awful lot like a wastepaper basket. […]
Look, Polish novelists who stop by here. In case I’m not making myself clear enough: you have to re-read your books to make sure they make sense. Jack Kerouac can write a book in one non-stop draft, but you’re not Jack Kerouac. Today’s offender is Marek Krajewski, in his Festung Breslau. His attention to the […]
Gazeta Wyborcza‘s motto is “Nam nie jest wszystko jedno,” or “it’s not all the same to us.” The crusading force is strong in this one. There was the schools campaign (motto: the inspired “class with class”), which I am told was a nightmare of added paperwork for the teachers involved — which was nearly all […]
