Today’s Wyborcza takes rival newspapers Fakt and Dziennik (both published by Springer Verlag) to task for their hysterical coverage of the doctors’ strike. El?bieta Cichocka comments that for several months she has been hearing with “przera?enie” (terror, dread) how doctors have been discussing the use of “miners’” tactics – i.e. physical, violent protests. Miners and […]
A short passage from Marcin Swietlicki’s new novel, Dwanascie (Twelve), should give pause to all internet posters except me. A brash Varsovian kicked out of a Krakow pub thinks on his way out that he’ll destroy the business by writing about it in his blog. The blog entry he thinks up: avoid the “Office” on […]
“Terrorists” reads the headline in today’s Fakt (in English: Fact – I present this information without a trace of irony). Beneath it are photographs of the terrorists in question: about half a dozen doctors, who are on strike at the moment in Poland (80 hospitals out). The tabloid whips itself into the usual frenzy of […]
He was a typical Pole, who said “no” to everything Slawomir Mrozek describes his father in the autobiographical Baltazar.
So divided is the new government that each ministry becomes the fief of the party that holds it. The ministries are, in practice, patronage machines employing only party loyalists. They are milked for money, jobs and contracts. Ministers cannot be dismissed for incompetence or corruption, however gross, because it would lead to the deal between […]
This weekend’s skittishly unpredictable Gazeta Wyborcza has an intriguing article on the always fascinating subject of the European Union by Judit Kiss, a Hungarian economist. The article is built around a tortuous analogy between the EU referendum and the Merchant of Venice as yet another technocrat tries to perusade us that they read literature too. […]
In the previous post I mentioned how a line in a Langston Hughes poem was changed in communist Poland from “And the slime in hotel spittoons: / Part of my life” to “The slime in hotel spittoons / That’s my life.” As it happens, “That’s my life,” is a phrase that might reverberate with some […]
Todays’s Rzeczpospolita has a translation of part of yesterday’s Guardian editorial. Interestingly, Rzeczpospolita leaves out a few sentences from the Guardian piece without following the convention of putting in ellipsis to mark the ommission. Also, the Polish newspaper translates the original “the old left” with the words “extreme left-wingers.” The Guardian suggests that Chavez is […]
Quote from a Polish politician who shall remain nameless: The overwhelming majority of mafia members in Poland and abroad are heterosexual. This was in response to the real nut-job of the piece, Wojciech Wierzejski, a member of the current, democratically elected Polish government, who has demanded in parliament that links between homosexual organisations and the […]
Sometimes you have to admire Poles their openness. The new head of the state TV channel is the right wing Bronisław Wildstein. In the puling adolescent west the new boss of a TV station or newspaper might be expected to trot out some feelgood cliches about how he does not intend to interfere in anyway […]
