There’s a new button on this blog that leads to a new page with graphs of all major Czech political parties in all major polls.  This took longer than I had hoped, but I introduce it today with delight because it allows me to return to something I have always loved. I started my life [...]

A quick entry today which I should have posted a month ago.  Czechs and Slovaks had fun with the collapse of Communist Party and one of the best relics preserved for me by my students was this obituary (in the style of Eastern European obituaries pasted on the wall).  Interestingly the parodist was astute enough [...]

Twenty years (and about a month) ago, the students of the Vysoka Skola Strojni a Elektrotechnicka v Plzne (VSSE, the College of Machines and Electrotechnics in Plzen) participated in the demonstrations against Communist Party rule by creating a huge banner that read “U krmlecu” and affixing over the front door of the West Bohemian headquarters [...]

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 [...]