A number of people forwarded me the most recent New York Times article on Slovakia while I was on vacation, and I found it problematic enough to think about breaking silence and writing something, if only to comment on the lovely horse-drawn wagon, apparently the mascot of all journalists visiting Slovakia.  I didn’t but fortunately [...]

First there was the monument to Bon Scott (among other ‘died young’ rockers) in Samorin, Slovakia (http://pozorblog.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/meet-the-new-boss/).  Now we find an even more astounding tribute: “AC/DC Inspired Czech Leader’s “Road to Hell” Riff” (http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/czech/?hp).  It is hard to say which part of this story would have been more astounding in, say, March 1989: that the [...]

The first blog I ever read on a regular basis was BldgBlog and I still read every word, so when it posted a word cloud of the upcoming BldgBlog book made on wordle.net , I felt obliged to try it with my own book. The results are gratifying: Not only does it look a bit [...]

Springtime for Dubcek–whose author, Scott Brown, does nice work on Slovak and Czech political cartoons–offers a nice roundup of Entropa related images here. A Fistful of Euros–which does extraordinary work on European economies–offers another summary and links here.  And if that weren’t enough, there’s a link to its entry on European stereotype jokes here (some [...]

David Cerny’s exhibition catalog for “Entropa” is the only thing connected to the EU that has ever caused me to laugh out loud. There is such remarkable cleverness here that I want to think about it out loud as well, but it is hard to do it without drifting into pretentious art criticism.  So I [...]