Petra Nemcova Back to Prague
Now for a EuroSavant exclusive! OK, not an “exclusive” in a “reporter” sense, but rather in what we can perhaps call the “weblog” sense of telling you about a truly “exclusive” article that you wouldn’t have heard about otherwise – or, if you had, wouldn’t have been able to read, unless you happen to read Czech. The Czech Daily Právo has the scoop here: Wounded Nemcova Likely to Return From Asia Today. (Právo Newton registration required – yeah, it’s a huge pain.)
First off, the basics: the twenty-five-year-old Nemcova is currently one of the world’s top models. (Love to show a picture of her here, but it’s not worth the copyright hassle.) She was caught in the Southeast Asia tsunami disaster in southern Thailand, where she survived the waves only by clinging to the top of a palm tree, despite a broken pelvis and various other injuries to internal organs. But you supermodel-followers out there, with ready access to facilities like Google News and the grim determination to use them, already know about all that.
Právo, on the other hand, has swung an exclusive by managing to get in contact with both Nemcova’s father, Oldrich Nemec, and a “family friend,” Marian Mrozek, to get further tidbits of information. (Yes, Petra is “Nemcova” but her father is “Nemec”: it’s the same name, in its female and male versions, the way these things work in many Slavic languages. And the name itself means “German,” by the way.) Petra is doing well under the circumstances, her father reports. She can already sit up (definitely an accomplishment for someone with a broken pelvis!) and move her hands. And she’s due back in Prague either Thursday night (6 January) or Friday morning, where she’ll immediately be admitted to one of the city’s hospitals. Mrozek adds that she could have returned quite a bit earlier than that, but for some not-further-specified “problems with permission.”
And then perhaps the most important question of all: Have we seen the last of Nemcova’s radiant (and, frankly, rarely fully-clothed) appearances before the camera, as various physical disfigurements turn her into photographic “damaged goods”? Quite possibly not: Her father reports “Back here [U nás] she doesn’t have to undergo any operation,” just X-ray examination. But perhaps that means that she has had an operation in Thailand; how else to account for her already being able to sit up? In any event, that’s the sort of breaking development that you folks manning your Google News et al will in all likelihood find out much sooner than the EuroSavant.
