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Old Usenetposts Gallery #7 Fish Pond in West Poland
Gallery Page 7 – Fish Pond in East Poland
The lake you see in this photo is not far from the last photo. Here it is possible to see the black stork, a much rarer sight than the usual white stork, but I didn’t manage to photograph it. This lake is man-made and each spring it is commercially stocked with carp for the table and for sport fishing. Each winter it is drained, and lies empty and, in theory, dry over winter, which greatly reduces the ability of pests and the parasites of fish to overwinter and wreak havoc with next year’s lot.
Lake near Golebiowki, Siedlce region
There are not many natural lakes within striking distance of Warsaw, even Zalew Zegrzynski, the large Y-shaped reservoir north of Warsaw at the confluence of the Bug and the Narew has been flooded artifically, but the North of poland has many more natural lakes from Mazury through to Pomerania, and some, such as Lake Sniardwy (Poland’s largest lake probably a few hundred times larger than the one above) are among the largest in Europe. The Polish Sniardwy compares to Lake Windermere in England or the Hungarian lake Balaton. Contact me for recommendations if you are planning a holiday in Poland.
Lake near Golebiowki, Siedlce region
More scenes from the other parts of Poland and coming up, as well as many other themes, but they will be reposted later on. I’ve done these seven for now, and I will move on to something else to avoid a monotony – especially of things you don’t usually see on this blog – and come back to the remainder of restoring this part of my old Usenetposts.com website some other time.
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Just a few thoughts to round off the quarter
Happy 400th birthday to thee
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we are at the end of another quarter, known in the mouth of the people as Q3 – 2011. You can call me a typical accountant if you like, but I always tend to be aware of these quarter ends and I tend to have certain aims and goals for what I like to achieve both professionally and in my hobbies each quarter and so days like today are an opportunity to take stock of where I am.
Doing so generated just a couple of thoughts which I thought I’d like to share with you.
I had a nice long time in the UK, and was supposed to be taking time off, but in the event work kept me fairly involved even though at a distance, and I made little progress on the writing projects I had in mind, especially the Goldlist book and the workbook for the Huliganov Russian course. Hence these are not really ready to show yet, apologies to those of my viewers and readers whom I may have led to hope that they would be. Work has to come first, I have to be able to look after my family.
It’s also three quarters through the 400th anniversary year of the KJV and I also didn’t get far with the readings of the KJV I wanted to do – this is all in the last quarter now if I’m going to do it at all in this year.
In Japanese I made a slight breakthrough while discovering a way to adapt goldlist principles to working through the Heising book and getting the best of both worlds – more on that when I get further on with it. In any event I registered for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, level 5, which is on Decmber 4th in Warsaw, which is a target to work towards,
World events seem to be leaving something to be desired, with hurricanes in the UK, people defrauding UBS out of money that makes Nick Leeson look like a small timer, and the continuing threat of the EURO going down the tubes at the hands of defaults by Greece and other weaker countries, as well as a few nights of crazy behaviour in the UK by vandals and malcontents out for some fun at the expense of working people have made the last quarter a very strange time. We are edging nearer and nearer to a precipice. Winter will draw in soon, the nights will be longer, the days colder, and we are going to be in for a long and hard winter.
Last winter I wrote an article explaining to UK people and others from places where the winters are normally mild how to go about surviving a Siberian style winter. I recommend you read this once again and think about it.
http://huliganov.tv/2010/12/16/huliganovs-winter-hinters/ is the place to go for it.
Many thanks again to my loyal viewers and readers, which here on this blog currently number 96. Thanks especially to those of you who join in on discussions, I hope for more of that. If I am sometimes slow in getting to moderate them, sorry. I have to keep the mod thing on because otherwise a lot of spam will get on, which thanks to the new technology is not the case at the moment, and sometimes I don’t have the ability to go online every evening.
Every comment is valued, even if I don’t have anything to say back to some.
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Night Storm over Warsaw
| Playout date: | 6 October 2006 |
| Camera: | Fuji Finepix |
| Post Production: | Windows Movie Maker – slight use |
| Location: | Home – 12th floor of building |
| Other people featured: | None |
| Genre: | Environmental |
| Music used: | Andrey Vinogradov – Kak na Moriul |
| Languages used: | Bialorusian, English |
| Animals featured: | None |
It was a pretty active storm, with plenty of lightning. This year we’ve had several like this, but this was 2006, and back then it was more of a rarity. The hurdy gurdy music by Andrey Vinogradov also attracted a lot of comment over on YT.
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Gay Rights March Warsaw 2010 – surprise surprise!
I had to go into work at the weekend and one of the things that that old office had about it is that whenever you were there on a Saturday there’d be something going on. Recently I filmed the Bikers’ Critical Mass from the same window on a VAT quarter when I had to be there on a Saturday.
Anyway, I put this video together both in the commentary and in the labelling on YouTube claiming that tyhis was the Gay Rights March in Warsaw. Well it’s been up for months and nobody has said anything, although of course it may be that someone has twigged and just kept stum about it.
Does this look or sound like the Gay March? What it was in fact was the anti-gay march. They were coming out of the forest there and congregating and getting ready to confront the main march – which indeed they did as you can see from news reports the same day.
Interesting is what they are shouting “Polska dla Polakow” – Poland for the Poles. I think these people need to focus on one thing at a time: either they should be making a protest march protesting at the fact that some people are gay, or they should be making a protest march that 1 million of their compatriots don’t live in Poland but somewhere else in the EU, and urging society to make jobs so that these people can come back. I think mixing the two “wateks” just shows a certain confusion of thinking on their part.
So here we have it – stay subbed to Huliganov TV! Here’s where you get the real back story to the videos that go up on Usenetposts channel on YouTube!
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Concert for Polish Grandparents
One of my Polish viewers who now lives in the UK didn’t believe that concerts on Grandma and Granda‘s day (near the end of January) are marked with concerts all over Poland, as she didn’t remember any from her school days.
The fact is that this piece of Polish charm was actually imported from the United States during the 1980s! It seems like the typical piece of socialism hangover, but the funny thing about Poland in the eyes of an Englishman is that a lot of things which we are tempted at first glance to write off to the Communist era actually has a completely different explanation.
That’s why you still see May holidays, Red plaques by buildings, military parades all over the place, grandparents’ day concerts and the habit of putting the water in the cup in restaurants without the bag – which I always assumed to be an East Europeanism until I got precisely the same in the States. Some of these things which the British would wave off as Sovietisms actually come from a totally different direction.
If Freddy Chopper had really liked Warsaw, nobody was stopping him staying! As it was he left even despite the fact that Konstancja was there. That's how desparate he was to go...
ANYWAY, this was Sophie’s first ever piano recital in front of a hall full of people. We thought she was going to be given a proper piano and not this joke of an instrument. Notice also how the music teacher doesn’t give any credit for the talents of the piano playing kids to their teachers (Sophie’s teacher is sitting with Irina and me in the audience cringing with the amateurishness of it all) as naturally there is nothing of the sort available in the State curriculum. The appalling song at the end about Warsaw being Chopin‘s city (which he dreamed of nothing but escaping, despite his liking for one girl there) which has been shoved out at kids in all the Warsaw schools just as a recorded karoke piece – although the sheet music is available on the internet just in case any Warsaw school music teacher can actually read musical notation. Some pieces were played by the music teacher not on the tape recorder, that fine baroque instrument, but on a guitar of which 1 of the 6 strings was absent and I think she knew a good 4 or 5 different chords.
I didn’t write all of this in the YT description and discussion, I’ve saved it for here as I like to give you a separate perspective on here, or why would you come? The videos are all on YT and some of you have already watched them once.
Please add your thoughts on musical education in schools, including answering the poll on what the government policy should be.
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Yom Kippur 2010
This is a Reformed Judaism service, in full. It would not have been permitted to record in an Orthodox setting. It’s the Friday Night Yom Kippur service in the Warsaw Beit.
In order to protect the privacy of worshippers, the image is obscured.
These tunes and prayers are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old, unchanged, enjoy.
Don’t miss the enlightening explanations and sermons by the Rabbis. They tell a few fine stories in this service!
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Diary of a New Decade #2 – 3rd January 2011
The signing of the treaty of Rome on the Capitoline hill, Rome. The reincarnation of the Roman Empire under the selfsame people who signed in Philadelphia.
If all goes well, this will be another technological first for me – this time the first post written on and posted from a train.
Anyone who has spent any time on my You Tube channel will know that I have made a number of films on trains before. In point of fact, I have made films on this very route before, on more than one occasion.
But right now, as my Creative Vado got wrecked by my son before Christmas while my wife was in hospital getting her mitoxantrone, I don’t even carry a camera, although this phone also has one and produced the shots of our New Years Day meal that you can see a couple of posts ago on this very blog.
But that is not the same as a dedicated HD video camera. So I did order another Vado, especially as I had just bought a lens kit for it and a couple of other accessories. The problem is that Amazon won’t ship electric goods to Poland. As a US company, they couldn’t care less about the free movement of goods in the EU enshrined in the Treaty of Rome. They probably respect all their own constitutional stuff very well, but have no idea how insulting it is to Europeans to have our highest laws entirely disregarded by US corporations doing business here. So I would have had to buy the replacement camera from the online creative.pl store, where it costs more than twice as much as in the UK Amazon.
So I bought it from Amazon, and asked my parents to send it on. Hence the shipment time has been doubled. It should arrive any day now, though.
Back to this train journey – I am in one of those good trains, an Atrocity, or whatever it is they call them, but this one seems to be stopping in fields every ten minutes.this may have something too do with the snow, but this train came to Warsaw from Krakow and arrived right on time.
I am supposed to be going to Tczew for a stocktake. This is the sixth year I have done this stocktake at this place at this time. In the first four years I drove up by car and that would take a big effort. One of those years I found myself driving through the thickest blizzard I have been in outside Russia. And then finally I started to use the train and things got a lot safer. You can complain about delays, but at least you don’t usually end up dead as often as you do in a car when conditions are treacherous.
And one thing’s for certain: there’s no way I could have written this post while behind the wheel of a moving car!
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Going Home from the Plane (CUV)
As promised, starting from the beginning of 2011 I’m posting here the new YT uploads as they happen over there, as well as carrying on doing the ones that are 4 years old in chronological order. This is one of the newly uploaded ones, although I actually did it in the summer. I still have a similar routine, with the slight difference that I plane to fly out and back once every two weeks this year, rather than every week as it has been for the last year and a half.
By the way the currently uploaded (on or after 1/1/11) video will have the abbreviation (CUV) on and so you will be able to tell which which video posts are the ones uploaded now from the ones which I did 4 years or so ago. Another aim of mine is to try and keep within 5 years if I can. That may well be over ambitious on my part. By the time I get the last of those 2010 uploads up in chronological order they may well be seven years old. At this rate it could seriously take seven years to get this all the way I want it! But then … wot larks! I just hope YT is still around in 2017 in order to get there. And all of us, including me with my flabby health risks, for that matter.
Over-the-counter Counterknowledge and Nogoarrhea
(first published in online Daily Telegraph 12/1/2008)
Browsing through the various word-offerings in this morning’s online Telegraph, I notice that we don’t have a normal virus situation, here; we have a Norovirus. Is this like one of those Nogoviruses that presumably create the Nogoareas that Bishop Nazir-Ali was warning us about during the week? Is it worse or better than a retrovirus, and, if so, will there be a Noro movement in art and music to go with it? In any event, the answer seems to be “over-the-counter” diarrhoea treatments. Just squitting it out and drinking copious amounts of rooibos is no good, it seems.
Hooded crow in Warsaw winter
On to another new word I learned here this morning, “counterknowledge”. It has, I learned, nothing to do with knowing which of the wintersquits remedies is the best buy in terms of ringsting avoided per pound paid, as I was hoping. Instead, it is the latest piece of name-calling the so-called rationalists and skeptics have chosen to smear the targets of their hate, lumping together ludicrous theories with well established faiths such as the Creation of the world in a smug and offensive propaganda buzz word that is nothing more than a dressed-up argumentum ad absurdam. Read the rest of this entry
