Those of us misfortunate or misguided enough to have dealings with Microsoft’s word processing programme will be aware of Bill Gates�s campaign against the passive voice. (I’ll leave aside Microsoft�s cretinous insistence on commas before all relative pronouns.) But the passive voice is coming under attack from other quarters too. Into my hands has fallen […]
“Give Hamas a Chance” Gazeta wyborcza (28-29th Jan) magnanimously states on page six in the headline of a piece by Mariusz Zawadzki, datelined Gaza and marked “analysis”. The subhead (actually it appears above the grand headline) reads: Democracy in the Middle East is bearing unexpected fruit. Elections are being won by the ultra radical Mahmud […]
The Poles seemed to lose interest in novels very quickly. Hardly had they managed to produce a handful of decent ones than Witold Gombrowicz set to work writing “anti-novels.” His contemporary, Witkacy, refused even to accord novels the status of “art.” Polish writers are still experimenting with a form barely mastered. Take Sławomir Shuty’s Zwał: […]
From Friday’s Rzeczpospolita, a national daily paper in Poland: A front page article by Marcin Czeka?ski about the detrimental effects of the government’s disarray. It seems that many key posts have not been filled yet. There is no treasury minister, for example. And then this gem: “Privatisation is limping. PiS [the near-winners of the elections] […]
Today’s RTE (Radio Telef�s Eireann. RTE is the state broadcaster in Ireland) news website contains a report on the Jean Charles De Menezes killing. The report contains the following sentence: “Mr de Menezes was shot dead by police at a London underground station six months ago when he was mistaken for a suicide bomber.” How […]
A tightly-edited, coherent entry today: An initially unpromising article about ambulance services in the current (print edition) Polityka reveals (apart, of course, from the under-funded mess that Poland has inevitably made of its emergency services) that hospitals in Poland were located not in places determined by the needs of the surrounding civilian population but according […]
One of the great worries facing the new political establishment in Poland is the low birth rate. Hence the decision to pay people to have children. I was reminded of this when reading Tom Tomorrow’s criticism of Niall Ferguson: “You see this theme popping up a lot on right these days – the fear of […]
I complimented Beatroot for predicting a rapprochement between PO (Civic Platform) and PiS (Law and “Justice”) the other day. But now the nearly-ruling PiS looks like it’s getting into bed with Lepper’s Samoobrona (see previous post). Political commentators in Poland seem to be in the enviable position that any prediction they make – any at […]
My fellow monkey, Shane Barry, is exercised by Irish politician Mary O’Rourke’s “working like blacks” comment. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: Come to Poland! Listen to these pearls of wisdom from Andrzej Lepper, leader of the Samoobrona party, and a man not long ago considered a political pariah but now moving closer and closer […]
Here’s a lazy one, lifted from Nie (“No”) magazine. In Warsaw central railway station they have opened a special “Service Point” for intercity train travellers (or “the rich”) where you can, as Nie says, have a coffee and send flowers to your wife or fancy woman but not buy an intercity train ticket – for […]
