British Czech Karaoke Night

Original YT playout date: 5 April 2010
Duration: 5:56

It was the British Czech Chamber’s karaoke night, on 20th March in the Hard Rock Cafe in Prague. Of course it wasn’t just Czechs and Brits doing it – although these are the ones shown. The winner was in fact an American, the second place went to a Dane and yours truly got third place, but they may have been being nice to the new boy. There were about 12-15 entries for those of you who snidely may be thinking there were just three. I didn’t get it for this song, though, I sang Bohemian Rhapsody prior to this one but I didn’t remember to ask anyone to record it.
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Is this what you are afraid of, Western Europe?

It’s very simple, Western Europe. You can destroy yourselves with your naive so-called progressive policies involving handing over Europe to those without roots here or any idea of what we represent in the name of a tolerance and humanity they will not understand and merely dismiss as weakness – an algorithm by the way programmed into their philosophy, if we are talking about the main areas sending folk to us.

You can destroy yourselves, but don’t try to destroy us. 

What do you think you will do, starve us when we have the most food? Freeze us when we have the coal? Not let us work when you have no workers? At the moment the stupidity of your communists in conservative clothing is such, that we simply will follow our chosen style of politics and regroup and rally around them, so that you will no more effect regime change here than you could in the desert. 

This is not Ireland, this is not Italy, this is not Holland. We have been under left-wing rule and we know precisely where it leads to. Can you not accept that we, with all our history, might understand something you don’t?

Or is that what you are afraid of?

(S)lower Silesia

Original YT playout date: 3 April 2010
Duration: 15:16

A drive and a chat, in the area of Lower Silesia. I go by the whim of the GPS in my phone, but it seems it makes the journey slower than it would have been if I’d picked the route myself on a map!
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This is border country!

Original YT playout date: 3 April 2010
Duration: 6:36

“There’s a long border between Poland and the Czech Republic, winding its way over hills and along rivers, but as far as roads negotiable by cars is concerned, until the two countries entered Schengen a couple of years ago, they had manned check points. Now these are disused and there is no-one there to look at your documents, if you even have them. Their old booth has become a dumping ground for used food packaging, and nobody cleans it up. The Poles spent money building a nice road right up to the border, but the Czechs, with their almost 50% more GDP per head, simply allowed a dirt track to remain from the border. They simply do not care what the “”visit card”” of their coutry looks like, not to Poles anyway, (in fact it seems to me that in comparison with Poles, who always concern themselves with their international reputation, Czechs are singularly unruffled by what anyone – in their country or outside it – thinks of them) and they seem to have no desire to encourage the Poles to venture into their country very far, even though the cheaper prices at restaurants might be quite tempting, and the existence of a fine swimming pool not far off on the Czech side, which I heard about, but didn’t see. It looks as if they are in no major hurry to go out of their way to attract their Polish neighbours in for a cup of coffee. So Schengen may be in force, and you can cross that boundary without any checks if you feel like it, but they certainly aren’t making the free movement across it all that inviting right now on the Czech side.

Despite the dereliction of the duty area, there is a certain open beauty about the side. It looks quite wild and windswept under the marbled, part-melted snow. It is, of course, under agricultural usage, and food or biomass is being produced on all parts of it.”
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Drive, Drove, driven, drivel – or “Road trip meets linguistic meandering”

Original YT playout date: 2 April 2010
Duration: 29:10

Driving from the Amber Hotel through Olesnice towards Namyslow I start to talk about why Polish language has more exotic elements in it, more aspects usually more associated with oriental languages, than Russian has. This is really developing a thesis of mine that Poland has an oriental culture.

Learners of Slavic languages will love this one, as will those of you who use my videos to go to sleep, as some have told me…
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