Here’s a Polish poem from 1950 in – for reasons that should become obvious – very free translation: “One needs” Stars stars have spread out in heaven Silence descends from the tops of the town. One needs one needs love poems so that lovers can notice them In the plan in the plan in the […]
Nie reveals that one of the creditors of the Academic Clinical Hospital in Wrocław, one of the hospitals facing the bailiffs, is a company called Greenhouse. The big cheese here is one Tomasz Tokarski, a CASE (Socio-economic Analysis Centre) expert. CASE is the organisation that advocates the introduction of additional, voluntary health insurance.
Average Polish pay, 1997: 1,000 zł Average Polish pay, 2005: 2,500 zł Mimimum wage: currently about 935 zł (Some organisations define poverty as an income of less than half the national average.)
Advertisers are easy enough targets at the best of times: a car manufacturer is trying to persuade gullible Poles that its new car can see around corners. (Cretinous slogan: “C’mon” – in English of course, though it’s a German firm operating in Poland.) But when they supply the ammunition themselves… Here’s the slogan of one […]
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 […]
