EuroSavant will be off-line for the Easter holidays, back on Tuesday, 13 April. It’s in fact going to be a rather interesting Easter weekend, to include being interviewed by a number of Flemish newspapers; details, if I’ve piqued your curiosity, you can find here.

Until then: What other disfunctional Central European government have I got left to discuss? Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, wild-man Lukashenka’s Belarus – I’ve already covered them all. Oh yes, there’s the recent removal-by-impeachment of Lithuanian president Rolandas Paksas. But that was an instance of the new democratic system actually working as advertised!

Wild-man Alyaksandr Lukashenko, who happens also to be “President” of Belarus, is at his antics again according to this recent report from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline:

President Alyaksandr Lukashenko said on 31 March that his recent directive “On Measures to Enhance Public Safety and Discipline” met with support from most Belarusians, aside from drunkards, crooks, undisciplined workers, and the opposition, Belapan reported [that's the "Belarusian information company"], quoting the presidential press service. Lukashenko reportedly said the opposition is guided by the principle, “The worse for the people and the government, the better for the opposition.” The president charged that the opposition seeks sociopolitical destabilization in the country and poses a threat to public safety.

(more…)

Great commentary today from NYT sports-writer George Vecsey: Athletes Who Use Drugs Are Cheating the Fans. Go ahead, check it out and read about one Johann Muehlegg, who had all three cross-country skiing gold medals he won at the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic Games taken away from him for “use of a banned substance.” German name, huh? (actually, more Austrian) – except that he was competing at Salt Lake City for Spain, a country he found it more convenient to pledge his allegiance to – for whatever reason: tax? – notwithstanding that he couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and probably wouldn’t know a tapa from a tortilla. (Of course not! The latter is Mexican, anyway.)

What if I submit the assertion that this Johann Muehlegg in Utah in February, 2002 (and whenever else) prostituted his body – not to mention his nationality – far more seriously and disgracefully than, say, any of the women sitting behind the rose-colored windows around three kilometers or so away from where I now sit in Amsterdam? At least he looks (properly) like a fully-credentialed idiot, holding up two of his bogus gold medals in the Associated Press photograph that heads Vecsey’s commentary. Check it out. And then stop wondering why many people, myself included, have stopped being willing to take the Olympic Games seriously.

Let me ask you something: For the whole time (and I mean over the decades) that you’ve been reading €S, you loyal reader you, hasn’t that big empty space up at the top-right of the page ever struck you as somewhat awkward? I mean, I have used it to post the occasional message, display the occasional reader’s poll, but generally that prime-territory, eye-level space has just remained empty.

Well, this ties in, you see, with the perennial question of finding some “business model” to sustain EuroSavant – in other words making this whole on-going thing worth my while in terms beyond and a bit more pragmatic than the general joy I experience at unearthing some juicy article which otherwise would languish under-appreciated by the wider world (because it had the unfortunate fate to be created Danish, say, or Hungarian – yes, on rare occasions), presenting it to you, and adding my own side-gloss to the whole affair.

The obvious solution is to start posting advertisements up in that prime right-hand-corner real estate, and I think I’m going to arrange for that soon. I also rather think that I’ll work with the good folks at Blogads, rather than with Google’s Adsense. Nothing against Google, you understand – but I have reason to believe Blogads will be a tighter, more-intimate operation, and I’m also impressed with the clients they have already signed up, including Talking Points Memo and Matt Welch.

Anybody object? Speak now – to my usual e-mail address, whose link is always there at the top-left, just below the logo – or forever hold your peace! It won’t be just any ads: it’ll be ads that particularly appeal to and are interesting to this weblog’s clientele – if I can just figure out who that is (other than family, of course, and the usual hangers-on). Anyway: Coming to a top-right-hand corner near you soon!

Here’s the latest on our favorite European dictator (come to think of it – the only European dictator left!), Belarus’ Alyaksandr Lukashenko, again from the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline. The entry is short, so I’ll just go ahead and quote it in its entirety:

Belarussian President Signs Edict on Ideology Within the Workplace. President Lukashenko signed an edict on 23 February stipulating that the heads of companies and enterprises will be responsible for the ideological schooling of their workforces, Belapan reported. The edict specifies how many people can be employed by local “ideology departments” and the procedure for appointing ideology officers within organizations. A statement released by the president’s press office read: “An ideologist must enjoy the credibility of the staff, be able to explain issues of interest to his or her colleagues, and help [the workers] address their own problems.”

That’s right: We’re in effect talking here about the old Soviet concept of political commissars. In the 21st century. In a land that many place as being within Europe.

Belapan, by the way, is the “Belarussian Information Company.” I tried clicking on the link I found on that page (it’s the English-language homepage) to check out the article whose headline was “Belarus’ membership of EU not ruled out, British ambassador says.” (Hey, I like hysterical humor-writing as much as the next guy – whether it’s intentional or not.) But that revealed to me that you only get access to such articles if you pay for a subscription. Somehow a subscription to the Belarussian news agency is not something I have in mind, as much as that attitude could hurt what seems to have become this weblog’s on-going Lukashenko-watch. (Do I need to set up a separate “Belarus” category over there in the list in the left-side column, so interested readers can separate out the Lukanshenko articles from the rest?)

Sorry, it looks like I’m continuing here in a recent mini-trend of escaping what I’ve termed my usual €S “brief” and pointing out to you notable contributions in the (gasp!) English-language on-line media.

In this case it’s really a matter of an on-going “contribution,” i.e. an e-mail newsletter I can really recommend, namely A-Clue.com, written by Dana Blankenhorn, an IT business analyst of long experience. It’s weekly, and unfailingly a very informative and also entertaining read. And, I say again, it’s free.

What caught my attention in particular in this week’s issue was the following political commentary which, because Mr. Blankenhorn gives his subscribers permission “to forward this newsletter widely,” I assume he won’t mind my reproducing below:
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November 2 dawned clear and cold. But even where it rained, people took it as a bad omen.

Exit polls were out by 10 AM, on Drudge and the National Review. Despite a 40% approval rating, despite a 20% approval rating for Congress, President Bush and the Congress had been returned to power overwhelmingly. Senator Kerry, soon to be Senate Minority Leader Kerry, had won just two states, Hawaii and (ironically enough) Vermont. He had fallen in his home state of Massachusetts 53-47. Surveys indicated few found much real difference between the candidates. Both were Yale men, from the same secret society called Skull & Bones. Both were backed entirely by corporations. Why not go with the devil you know?

How could this be, people asked. And what happens now?

What would happen is that economics would take over where politics had failed. The dollar would continue falling and Russia would lead moves to start making more loans in the more-stable Euro. The economies of China and India would rocket along, the former beset by growing social unrest, the latter by religious strife, but all this allowing yet-more nations in Southeast Asia – like Vietnam and the Philippines – some time in the economic sun.

Australia and New Zealand processed a tsunami of visa applications from white Americans, many of them college-educated, all claiming a fear of persecution. In Canberra the Howard government urged continued processing, suggesting (sub rosa) that this would offset growing immigration from Asia and the Muslim world. In Auckland experienced LA techs took 1/10th their former salaries to work on Peter Jackson’s “King Kong,” hoping against hope he might sponsor their staying.

The “brain drain” of American intellectuals, who would not be replaced by foreigners for the first time, was hardly noticed at the time. But the air of American triumphalism would be short-lived. For it’s intelligence, the “high bandwidth mind” as they say at Microsoft, that is the great engine of economic growth in a post-industrial age. With fewer of these on-hand, American power, influence, and the American lifestyle would slowly wither away.

Even as the Republic was replaced by an Empire, the American Century had ended.

Alyaksandr Lukashenko is the name of the personage who is a Belarussian funnyman and at the same time the last remaining dictator in the European political space (although Vladimir Putin is making a strong run at providing some competition). Forget that “Alyaksandr”: that’s just one attempt at a transliteration from what is ultimately a name spelled in Cyrillic. No, to really give Lukashenko his due, you need to put a little line through the initial “L” of his last name, which makes it into the Polish L;, so you pronounce it like the Poles do: Wukashenka. While you’re reciting that silly word, for a silly but dangerous person (the president’s political opponents in Belarus have a habit of disappearing without a trace), it somehow seems appropriate to think of a clown.

Anyway, according to recent reporting from RFE/RL Newsline (Lukashenko Lambastes Kremlin for “Terrorism” – it’s English-language), this was President Wukashenka’s comment on his government’s recent dispute with the Russian energy company Gazprom over natural gas supplies to Belarus, in which the two parties have not been able to come to terms, so that the contract has lapsed: “I think it’s an act of terrorism at the highest level to take natural gas away from a country that is not totally foreign, from people half of whom have Russian blood in their veins, when it’s minus 20 degrees outside.”

That’s right: your opponents on the other side of what is turning into a nasty business dispute are “terrorists at the highest level.” Not to mention your political opponents – well, at present they’re still only “supporting the terrorists.” (And I’m by no means referring here solely to Belarussian politics.) And when people die in some political dispute (e.g. Palestinians in the occupied territories), it’s “genocide.”

Wukashenka’s crazy, and he’s got no one around him to inform of that or call him to account, but that only means that his use of this increasingly-common political tactic in these insecure times is particular blatant. Others do the same thing, but disguise it more subtly.

EuroSavant today briefly departs from its usual brief (i.e. the foreign on-line press; don’t worry, I’ve got a juicy additional entry of the more customary sort planned that I should be able to get in today, or else tomorrow), to eagerly join in the chorus that is starting to resound in the blogosphere about President George W. Bush’s National Guard (non-)performance in 1972 and 1973.

Yes, Michael Moore termed our sitting president a “deserter,” but that’s the sort of heavily-laden word that really should have its full impact saved for application to people or events that truly justify it (it’s like “genocide,” for instance, only a bit less serious). So, even at worst, President Bush was no “deserter”: he did not abandon his military duties anywhere near the then-field of battle in Vietnam. Mr. Moore was merely indulging here in his usual hyperbole. On the other hand, it’s clear that there is a serious gap where there should be some sort of record of LT Bush, National Guard aviator, performing some sort of military duties in 1972 and 1973 to justify the expense taxpayers at the time undertook to train him to fly – not to mention the officer’s oath he took. Military service is a well-documented experience indeed, as I can tell you from personal (officer’s) experience – for what that’s worth; those documents just have to be there, if indeed there was anything happening during that period to actually document. (more…)

I’m headed off to a two-week trip to the US, back in early February. But I’ll still be able to get on-line most of the time – of course! – courtesy of those whom I’ll be visiting. So my EuroSavant posting – and let’s not forget the meticulous scanning of the on-line European press that lies behind that – should continue; it will just be a question of the time I can devote to that. Actually, it’s quite likely that my frequency will be just as good/bad as has marked January, although no way will I attain the daily posting rate I reached in December before Christmas, when vital, interesting things (e.g. the EU IGC) were actually going on.

I’ll be making a total of three round-trip flights on this journey: six occasions to remove jacket, belt, shoes, etc. and fight as best I can against the presumption that I’m a terrorist who means to do the airplane harm. What fun! I feel like taping this Dilbert cartoon somewhere prominent on the outer surface of a handbag, but I hear that US Transportation Security Administration personnel have even less of a sense of humor about their assigned functions than Scott Adams does about allowing people to reproduce his cartoons directly on their websites.

I’m in the middle of the holiday slowdown, as regular readers will have noticed, basically due to being other places and doing other things. But there’s one thing I know I can already look forward to in January, and EuroSavant visitors can look forward to it, too. Peter Norman, long-time European correspondent for leading newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal – Europe and the FT, closely observed all the sessions of that European Convention that drew up the proposed Constitution/Constitutional Treaty (right, the one which, somewhat altered, could nonetheless not gain the required unanimous agreement from all current and soon-to-be EU member-states at the summit earlier this month in Brussels). He did so partly in order to write a book about that process, which is now out: The Accidental Constitution: The Story of the European Convention, EuroComment, 2003 ( here’s further information about the book from EuroComment’s site).

I like to buy my books from Proxis.com (based in Belgium), mainly because they’re often cheapest there (but this is a complicated question; I can’t go into details here), there’s free delivery within the Benelux for orders over €12, and customer service is pretty good. On the other hand, sometimes they don’t have a book immediately in stock, which has been the case here, so that I’m still waiting for the copy of The Accidental Constitution that I ordered and presumably will finally get it within a week or two. In a sense, then, the failure of that Brussels summit (not to mention the general haziness and confusion about where the EU goes from here) was actually good news, in that it keeps the insights into the Convention and the Constitution itself that I’m sure I’ll gain from reading Norman’s book at the cutting-edge of current relevance – although even if the Constitution had been accepted, the book would obviously still be worth reading.

As soon as I have read it, I’ll let you know what it says and what I think. But it’s quite a big volume, and of course it treats all sorts of interesting subjects on the EU’s present agenda – so that it’s likely that that discussion will be good for perhaps three or more weblog entries. Note also that this will be contrary to the usual weblogging paradigm, namely “post shallow, post often,” in that it’s going to require a bit of time and effort to digest what Norman has to say, and then to report on it in an interesting way. “Post deep,” in other words: but I trust that, in the meantime, I should be able to keep up some sort of schedule of postings on other €S topics.

[Update: The readers' poll that I posted on this site mentioned in this entry, asking readers' preferences regarding long vs. short EuroSavant postings, ran through 26 December 2003, and so is now closed and has been removed.]

I’m off elsewhere for this upcoming weekend, friends – back next Tuesday (23 Dec.) in fact, to resume blogging then.

But please do take just a little bit of time to take my first EuroSavant Reader Feedback Poll, which you should see staring you boldly in the face just above (at least in the halcyon days when this entry – this one right here – was in its radiant youth, which we’ve just found out will last until next Tuesday).

So far, EuroSavant has been all about long entries, a fact which readers for any length of time will surely acknowledge. After all, the national press-survey is this weblog’s quintessence. Doing one such always takes up a very big block of time – logically, since I have to find all that stuff, read it in its foreign-language incarnation (yes, that requires the occasional dictionary-reference) while taking notes, decide which elements are the most interesting/important, and then put together a text to post that strings those important elements together in a logical way, telling a story, while adding gratuitous comments and exclamations according to whim to try to result in something worth reading.

A lot of time – a lot of text. I’ve taken recent steps to make that “lot of text” more friendly to see once the visitor clicks the “More…” link, but if its sheer expanse deters him or her from actually reading it nonetheless – i.e. from reading what it has just taken me hours to write – then we’re in your classic “lose-lose” situation.

I’ve had the occasional short weblog entry, when I’ve brought up and discussed only one or two foreign articles. Sometimes that was all that I saw worth writing about that particular day (such as that day not long ago when I was in a strange mood, interested only in clams’ reproductive parts); sometimes I couldn’t bear (or couldn’t schedule) another multi-hour time-block to do the more-typical EuroSavant-type entry. But if that’s the sort of thing that my readers are interested in/only have the time or patience for, then I can certainly do much more of it.

Thus, the poll. And naturally I would also be pleased to hear from you directly – in the “Comments” section of this entry if it’s something you want everyone to be able to see, to my e-mail address (“E-mail Eurosavant” at the top-left) if it is not. S’il vous plaît . . .

It’s a bully pulpit, this weblog, here at my disposal on those occasions when I want to react publicly to something I’ve read on the Net. By the nature of things, though, that inevitably means a bias against excellent articles that I might otherwise want to recommend to you, if they’re not European and in a foreign language – it’s not worth going “off-Eurosavant-topic,” you see – and towards pointing you to terrible articles that I just have to argue against. And so it would be with regret that I would let you know of the column Dreams and Glory by David Brooks, were it not for the audience of millions that its posting yesterday on the New York Time’s Op-Ed pages inevitably assured it. (However, in a couple of days it disappears behind the Times’ “paid content” wall, so I’ll try to include many representative quotes for those who are reading this late.) (more…)

Sorry: Did anyone catch my reference to “love-mussel” in my rather off-topic post of last week? I was rather proud of that one; I even kept my door open for a while, braving the onrushing Dutch winter, just to be able to listen for the collective gasp that I expected to issue soon after I hit the “post” button on that sucker.

Was it shocked silence instead? Everyone gaping speechlessly in amazement at their computer monitors? Or are you all rather shellfishly clamming up on me? So far no pearls of wisdom of any sort have reached me at all.

Your EuroSavant today is still striving to regain his old equilibrium, to leave Kajagoogoo behind (Don’t understand? Please, don’t ask!) and resume his usual serious, even solemn, consideration of phenomena in the various European national presses. (Thanks to all those who e-mailed their suggestions about a €S “blogathon,” by the way – I’m still weighing that idea.)

I’m still not quite all the way back there yet. Exhibit A: What I’ve done today is add over to my list of articles on the left-hand side a document I first wrote last February, on “Mastering Microsoft 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet.” You see, I have a lot to say on that topic (or at least think that I do, gained through long experience – although I can’t say it was “hard” or “bitter”). I know that it is not necessarily true that my usual EuroSavant audience will be interested in the topic, but that’s OK: That is aimed more at the traffic Google (and whichever other search engines) will be able to send me of people looking for something on the Net about Space Cadet Pinball. I myself have looked for such material before; there’s precious little of it out there, so I thought that I would make this contribution. By the way, Google (and others) has already shown itself to be very handy in sending traffic my way that is looking for comment/coverage about my usual topics (you know: Stability Pact, Poles in Iraq, etc.)

Actually, I wrote the piece last February, for a private audience, but have just decided: “What the heck, Philip! You’ve now had these months of exclusive access to this tome of pinball revelation – whether you’ve diligently made use of it to start posting astounding Space Cadet session point records on your machine or not, this information simply can’t be withheld from humanity for too much longer. So here it is!” – with some revisions to reflect further Space Cadet experience since.

A final note: As I say, I’m posting the piece as a permanent article over to the left, meaning that it won’t shift downwards and disappear after a few days like the typical weblog entry must do. (Although all of my weblog entries are perfectly accessible, via the search function or the archives.) On the other hand, that would also mean that the article would not have some useful elements of a weblog entry that I think it should have: primarily, a comments function, although TrackBack and PingBack could be useful, too. So I’m putting the two together: This weblog entry will provide the comment/TrackBack/PingBack functionality. The article will have a permanent link to this entry and:

This weblog entry will have this permanent link to the Mastering Microsoft 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet article.

Fresh off posting a weblog entry which dealt in part (minor part) with the “destruction of value” all of this web-publishing is wreaking on traditional publishing, and the difficulty in actually extracting any money from it, I run across this idea from Darren Rowse’s Living Room >> A space for Life weblog: the blogathon! (If interested, you’ll have to click there and then scroll down for the relevant entries; he doesn’t make permalinks to individual entries available.) Yes, next month Darren is going to spend 24 hours straight just sitting in front of his PC blogging, the point being to be sponsored to do so, all for the financial benefit of the charity International Needs, and specifically for a project they have ongoing in the Philippines to provide poor families with income-providing pedicabs. If you want (and want to sponsor), you’ll be able to get him to discuss anything about himself you might be interested in – or anything about Australia, which is where he lives.

Intriguing . . . I tend to spend much-too-much time in front of the computer myself, especially on the weekends. (Cue link to IAD: Internet Addiction Disorder. But how could MAO otherwise be the well-informed, well-connected press Euro-guru that you all know and love?) It would likely take less prolonging than you might believe (or hope!) to push this to a full 24 hours. Whaddaya think? Is this an idea for the (self-professed, buy-domain-name, buy-your-version-of-Truth) EuroSavant?

But, if I do do this, don’t get your hopes up about getting me to write about me. As that song went – I’m too: shy-de-shy, hush-hush – I-doo-I. (Yes, there was such a song, back in the ’80s; it’s playing in my head right now as I write. I guess I need to do the Google exercise of tracking it down, so I can provide all you doubters out there – who think that my mind has been sucked away and into my computer monitor by now – with the name of the group and year.) The various European presses never fail to provide more than enough grist for the EuroSavant mill, thank you very much: you should see the topics “that got away,” because I had to choose one thing among the many to write about on a given day.

[Hey girl - move a little closer! Important update: I found it! - and not via Google either, but rather via Rhapsody, an on-line music service, owned by RealNetworks, that I can really recommend. The song was "Too Shy," the group (and it gives me no pleasure to have to write this): Kajagoogoo And Limahl. The year: 1982. So there.]

I hope this isn’t just me: I’ve been unable to access any Blogspot-based weblog (i.e. whose URL ends in “blogspot.com”) for at least this entire weekend (22/23 November), and maybe even before.  But I haven’t seen anything on the Net about any such problem.  Anybody know what is going on?

Then again, I hope that it <I>is</I> just me: that would be a scandalous denial of service to the many thousands (at least) of bloggers out there who count on Blogspot to present their work on the Net 24/7 – including (for what it’s worth) Howard Dean’s campaign weblog and other related ones.  (Including also “ScottyMac’s” weblog, down over there to the left on my blogroll; go ahead, give the link a try yourself.)  The company that runs Blogspot (Blogger, or alternatively Pyra) you’ll recall was the blogging hoster bought by Google towards the beginning of this year.

[Update: Monday morning, Central European Time, 24 November, and everything is accessible on the Net and back to normal again.  Still, it was anything <I>but</I> that over the weekend – if I’m correct, and not just some lone, raving lunatic about this – and that reflects poorly on Pyra/Blogger.”>

We interrupt our blogging for this announcement: You just can’t miss this fantastic bit of blogging detective work on the “HipperCritical” blog. Some lawyer was allowed onto the New York Time’s Op-Ed pages yesterday with an editorial arguing that Iraq should be required to pay its international debt in full. Turns out (but the NYT didn’t bother to provide any clue about this) that he’s a lawyer whose clients are those companies and kingdoms to whom Iraq owes that money. Our sleuth “Hipper” took to the Google trail and found that out, plus a whole lot of other juicy information – such as that the lawyer is on record in the past as urging the forgiving of Russia’s foreign debt. (But Russia was the one paying his fees then, you see. That was then; this is now.)

It’s a textbook case of the power of weblogs-as-(media)-watchdogs. I’ve already e-mailed that page to editorial@nytimes.com, with a suggestion that perhaps a (belated) indication of that lawyer’s paid position to its readers might be appropriate.

I’ll be off-line through the weekend, since I’m traveling again. This time it’s to the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, one of the world’s prime publishing events, with a history stretching back hundreds of years. Naturally it has its own well-developed website – actually, two, in English and in German.

I have to go as a private person (I’m not “trade”), so that means on the weekend. Will there be anything there about blogging? I haven’t found anything yet, even after some pretty substantial perusals of their websites. (By the way, both websites offer a great, and free, Palm download that enables you to identify, record, and track on your PDA the companies, people, and events you want to see; I’m just about finished with my extensive preparation along those lines.) If there is anything, and it’s interesting (especially if it can be linked to), I’ll be sure to let you know about it. It seems there’s a big category of attendee companies called “Electronic Media,” so we’ll see if that has what I’m looking for (along weblog lines, at least; I’m really mainly interested in foreign language textbooks).

Cruising the Net now (at drastically-lessened efficiency, since I’m not at home now, but in Prague) what caught my eye was the recent controversy about that outstanding California recall-campaign weblog California Insider, and the fact that the guy who writes it, Daniel Weintraub, now has to pass all of his entries by an editor at his employer, the Sacramento Bee, before they can be posted. Given this, the New York Times asks, can it really still be considered a weblog? (more…)

Here’s a shout-out to SPN, whom history will record (among what will surely be his many other accomplishments) as having been the first to provide a “trackback” to a EuroSavant entry.

. . . coupled with an endorsement of the pMachine weglogging software. Now, I write “sponsor” in my headline, but of course they don’t pay me anything. In fact, so far I haven’t paid them anything either, for the software comes free. (pMachine Professional, which basically lets you add multiple weblogs and adds other useful bells and whistles like a muscular e-mail module, is something you’re called upon to pay for, the amount depending on whether you use it professionally. For more information, go to http://www.pmachine.com. And I have to add that I do pay pMachineHosting (a related company) for my hosting; they do a good job.) It’s just that, once you get it working, the new stuff they’ve added in the latest software version (2.3), like Trackback and Pingback, is pretty neat. And pMachine lets you differentiate the look of your weblog a lot more than, say, Blogger. So you can at least keep this option in mind.

I’m off travelling again! (Hey – it’s summer!) This time it’s to the United States. Equipment-wise, I should be in ever better shape than I was in Prague to continue posting to EuroSavant – once I am through with my main engagement over there, that is, and that’s starting from Monday, 1 September (inclusive). Just keep in mind that I’ll be in a later time-zone, meaning that I’ll likely be posting at a later point during the day than what you might be used to. Then I’m back to home-base the following Saturday, 6 September.

Business pursuits impel me to Prague today, through this weekend. Back on Monday the 25th. But I know quite a good and cheap (and even under-used!) Internet café there; I should be able to post an entry or two from the Golden City.

EuroSavant has gotten some nice mentions elsewhere on-line lately. Among those, allow me to mention this one (under Thursday, July 31, 2003) from E-Media Tidbits. I’m delighted, but that is also somewhat of a mixed blessing, in that it is obvious that my usual posting schedule (that normally alternates between daily and every-other-day) has taken a hit during my recent stay in Poland. New visitors may get the mistaken impression that my rather slower publishing schedule of this Polish stay is my customary schedule. So I’d like to reiterate – especially to all those new visitors, spurred by these recent nice mentions – that I will certainly get back up to my former level of activity once I’m back at home base in Amsterdam, in two day’s time. Naturally, I’ll also be doing more of the multiple-media-source, comparative treatment analysis articles that I feel represent the high-point of what this medium, and this particular weblog, is capable of.

Today I arrive in Wroclaw, the city where dedicated EuroSavant readers will remember I spent about a week at the beginning of June, just in time to observe and report on the Polish EU accession referendum. This time I plan to stay a bit longer – oh, a couple of weeks. Among other goals, the plan is to work further on my advanced Polish, together with a dynamite tutor whom I found there last time. In the long run, this can only benefit my weblog postings, especially to those among you looking for a window into current Polish affairs, as I’ll be able to understand the Polish on-line press better and faster.

In the short run, on the other hand, residence anywhere other than in front of my trusty Dell-with-Chello-broadband-connection in Amsterdam degrades to some degree my weblog posting ability. For one thing, now when I work in front of a Internet-connected computer, the meter will be running. Granted, it will only be running in zloty terms, but nonetheless I won’t be able to escape that feeling in the back of my mind: the meter is running. What’s more – ready for a confession? – on rare occasions I do encounter the need to consult a dictionary to get the precise meaning of some key word or phrase in a given article; my stable of available dictionaries in Poland will necessarily be rather smaller. (Don’t talk to me about on-line language dictionaries; I haven’t come close to finding any that come near the capabilities of traditional bound volumes.)

Anyway, you had a taste of my “blogging from the field” a month ago. Maybe it wasn’t THAT bad – admittedly, I had an interesting central theme, i.e. the referendum, which I’ll largely lack now. (I presume – but maybe Poland will flood again, like back in ’97, when in fact I was also in Poland.) But I’ll keep the observations and the links coming. No reason to remove that EuroSavant bookmark yet.

Look, I’ve already devoted more attention on EuroSavant this week to Silvio Berlusconi than I prefer to do to any one subject or person. I am also well aware that I have not been too terribly respectful of the current Italian prime minster. For example, in my post yesterday I used the word “jackal” (but only in reference to the way certain photos of his face that on-line newspapers have posted make him look), as well as variations on the word “insult.” Plus, in that post and in the preceding one I tried to give at least a strong impression of the sort of legal shenanigans he’s been involved in in his country ever since he was elected for the second time to be prime minister there about two years ago.

Nonetheless, I’ve now had more time to think about (and discuss) just what Berlusconi did and did not do at the European Parliament speaker’s podium. So that I am not trying to be ironic (unlike the Man himself when he addressed German MEP Martin Schulz) when I say that I can understand his bewilderment at what happened. Leave the guy alone! This is getting way out of proportion! (more…)

Yes, the draft EU Constitution was presented yesterday by Constitutional Convention President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the EU summit in Thessaloniki. It’s an important, interesting, and detailed step – although EuroSavant did cover in the last weekend in May the initial unveiling of that draft Constitution that occurred then. (Starting here with reactions from the EU member which paid the most attention to it – the UK.) In any case, apparently there were some (minor?) changes made to that draft between then and its formal, final presentation to EU leaders this weekend. Plus, it will be interesting to see how countries are lining up for and against that draft Constitution, in the run-up to the EU Intergovernmental Conference (IGC) in which member-states will negotiate changes to this draft on the way to a final version of the Constitution which will then be put up for approval by all EU states (of which there will be 25 by that point). That IGC is supposed to convene next October, and it’s supposed to finish its work by December. (Good luck!)

This certainly merits some investigation, and that will be forthcoming. For this weekend, though, what caught my eye was the continuing Belgian-American tension over the former’s “genocide law” – see tomorrow’s weblog entry.

Here in Wroclaw, it’s a bright and sunny first day of voting in the Polish EU accession referendum. More guerrilla anti-EU material has popped up, in a last-minute attempt to change people’s minds – this time, it was in the form of posters showing the famous EU twelve-yellow-stars-on-a-dark-blue-field emblem – with a swastika in the middle, and the caption up above “Rozbior Polski” – the partition of Poland. That should strike a chord with historically-oriented Polish voters: in the famous 18th-century partitions of Poland, Poland’s neighboring states (then Prussia, Russia, and the Austrian Empire) agreed among themselves to simply reach out and grab the pieces of Polish territory that they wanted, and Poland was too weak at the time to do anything to defend herself. There were three of these land-grabs, and by the end of the third there was no more Polish land to seize any more, as it all had been taken – and Poland was not to re-emerge as an independent nation for more than a century, namely in 1918 directly after the First World War. (more…)

The referendum on Poland’s accession to the European Union is very close now – it starts tomorrow, Saturday, and carries on through Sunday. As in most of the candidate states which have already held the referendum – particularly in Hungary and Slovakia – and as will most likely be the case in the one remaining significant state to do so after Poland, namely the Czech Republic next weekend, the crucial issue is not so much the referendum’s result, but rather the rate of voter turn-out. (more…)

As of today, EuroSavant is visiting Poland for a few days, specifically Wroclaw (before 1945 known as Breslau) in the southwestern corner of the country. I’ve scoped out the Internet cafés available there in the center of town; infrastructure-wise, I think there will be what it takes for me to continue submitting my posts at the usual frequency. And, as an added bonus, I’ll be able to indulge in a little primary-source blog reporting (as opposed to my usual secondary-source approach – or is it tertiary?), since the Polish EU accession referendum takes place this upcoming weekend, and I’ll still be there. I promise I’ll take careful and copious notes; I’m travelling there with my legal pad, pen (plus a few spares), and my fedora with the “Press” card tucked in the band – but this is Poland, so I’ll have to get a quick translation made there to “Prasa.”

EuroSavant needs to travel a bit again – this time to Budapest, on a business trip. I’ll be back and will resume posting next Sunday, 25 May. My Internet access in the meantime won’t disappear, but will be irregular. I can’t predict whether during my travels I’ll actually get the sort of extended access needed to do a bit of on-line research and actually post something. E-mail correspondents should similarly grant me a little extra time for sending a reply.