We have America to thank for what must be or should be or maybe already is a popular new adjective: subprime. Northern Rock crumbled but Poland is safe because as any neophyte knows the market never falls. A brief survey of the advertising of bank loans here: 1. We will not check your credit rating. […]
Taking advantage of an extended Christmas/New Year’s vacation, I’ve been working my way through Tim Blanning’s “magisterial” (i.e. very long) The Pursuit of Glory, which covers developments in Europe in the century-and-a-half between the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Blanning’s approach might be described as dialectical, with […]
Cudowna Melina (Wonderful Drinking Den) by Kazimierz Orłoś is an interesting case of a book that requires a certain knowledge of its times to be fully appreciated. Written in Communist Poland (1971), it is, to say the least, schematic. You can almost guess the pattern: an idealistic young party apparatchik comes to town and cleans […]
Enjoying the sunshine and the weak dollar in the company of my wife’s family in Arizona, I have found it difficult to put the rest of the world’s travails in perspective. Sure, I’ve diligently waded through the New York Times (BTW, the new narrower format seems to confirm the widespread simile that compares the newspaper […]
I know it’s a somewhat limited demographic, but if you’ve had a prefrontal lobotomy during the past few weeks, finding appropriate Christmas TV fare can be a challenge. You want something light, so as not to distract you from the absorbing task of managing your drool. Well, RTE has just the programme for you–Celebrity Jigs […]
Axel Springer’s Dziennik is in fine fightin’ form to judge by Tuesday’s edition of the paper. They’re not letting those Greens get away with the oil slicks that have been polluting the Wisła (Vistula) lately. An editorial thunders: “Ecologists take their Heads out of the Vistulan Sand.” And it’s all thanks to the brave journalists […]
Despite unleashing the phrase “Web 2.0” on an unsuspecting world, Tim O’Reilly can be considered one of the computer industry’s good guys. The books released by O’Reilly are a cut above the usual illiterate tat that passes for software documentation and O’Reilly himself seems to have a genuine belief that technology can be used for […]
This week The New York Times/International Herald Tribune painted a bleak picture of modern Italy with “In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment“: “[For] all the outside adoration and all of its innate strengths, Italy seems not to love itself. The word here is “malessere,” or “malaise”; it implies a collective funk—economic, political […]
I despatched Ukraine a few weeks ago. Epic though the travelogue was, panoramic and sweeping in its grandeur, it turns out that my deft, broad brushstrokes that summed up an entire country in a series of arresting images left out a few minor details. Here comes Daniel Olkowicz in this week’s Polityka with his impressi—errr, […]
From The Monkey’s Typewriter’s modern-life-is-rubbish research department this urgent piece of information:Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year 2007 is “w00t” “w00t? wtf?”, you might be asking. Well, according to the M-W site it’s an interjection “expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word “yay”.”More […]
