Tag Archives: Life

Reverse-Plumbing Poland?

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Well, its the weekend, and even if domestic commitments keep me away from the beach, perhaps a lighter note is in order. The press have gotten hold of the Polish ‘anti-plummer’:

“He is blond, strapping and sexy. He holds the tools of his trade in a suggestive pose. But the news for the French people is that if they want to see the Polish plumber they will have to travel to Poland….

The Polish tourist agency in Paris has now tried to put the myth to bed through a tongue-in-cheek advert on its website aimed at encouraging the French to visit Poland. “Welcome to Poland”, the homepage says beside a picture of the Polish hunk, clad in green overalls and a white T-shirt.

Of course, as was to be expected, and to add insult to injury Polish plumbers are turning out to be highly popular in the UK, providing a much needed filling for a long standing gap in the local labour market. Have you tried getting hold of a plumber lately?

Incidentally, those domestic commitments involve painting and decorating. The people doing the more substantial works, well there was one from Argentina, two from Ecuador, one from Columbia, but no-one from Poland. Somehow reading the ‘Welcome to Poland’ blurb I felt cheated.

Phone Home

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Astronomers have found a rocky world orbiting a star about 15 light years from our own corner of the universe. With apparently about twice earth’s diameter, and about seven and a half times the mass, it’s the smallest extra-solar planet yet discovered.

“We keep pushing the limits of what we can detect, and we’re getting closer and closer to finding Earths,” said team member Steven Vogt from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

That’s boggling enough. But what I had somehow missed is that in the ten years that scientists have been spotting extra-solar planets, they’ve found 150 of them. That’s more than once a month. Makes my mind just reel: Every month, humanity finds another planet around a distant star. Every single month.

Albania!

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Doug Muir here, blogging from Tirana, Albania, where I’ll be for the rest of this week.

Albania is, as we all know, in a dead heat with Moldova for the not-coveted title of Europe’s Poorest Country. But downtown Tirana is surprisingly peppy: coffeeshops, restaurants, tree-lined boulevards, nightclubs, parks. Granted, non-downtown Tirana is concrete blocks and shanty towns. But the center of the city is actually quite nice.

Also, Albania lies on the right side of the line that separates “good Balkan food” (Greece, Turkey) from “horrible Balkan food” (Serbia, Romania).

Albania is nominally a majority Muslim country, but in Tirana they take their Islam lightly. I’ve yet to see a woman wearing a headscarf, never mind a veil, and the bars and coffeeshops are full of people casually drinking raki and the perfectly acceptable local beer. There are also large Catholic and Orthodox minorities; there’s a big Catholic church down the street from me, and when the new Pope was elected last month, bells rang all over the city.

There are a lot of shaven-headed young men driving Mercedes sedans while talking on their cell phones. Albania is supposed to be the stolen car center of Europe. A casual stroll around central Tirana suggests that this is entirely plausible. There are a lot of BMWs and Mercedes. (The high end Volkswagon models are also popular.)

It’s been suggested that some of Tirana’s pep is coming from Italian and Albanian organized crime, laundering their money in a city where oversight is not so stringent.

If work permits, I hope to get outside of Tirana for a couple of short trips. And Albania will have a general election next month, and I hope to blog about that.

Meanwhile, why not make this an open thread for all things Albania-related? Anyone?

Habemas Alemanam

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(Latin speakers from the previous thread will be swift to offer corrections, I am sure.)

Linguistic confusion reigns in the early days of Benedict XVI. One local tabloid said a German was Pope, another claimed him as a Bavarian, the third as a M?nchner. The Bild-Zeitung said “Wir sind Papst,” which would literally mean “We’re Pope,” a claim that’s odd, even by the standards of that paper’s often tenuous relationship with consensus reality.

Hans Kung has some sensible things to say on the subject.

My first thoughts are probably less so.
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U Can Be the President

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With sagans of words being written and broadcast about the death of John Paul II, there’s not too much to add. So here’s just a little.

Was he the last European Pope?

Brazil has 137.5 million Catholics, Mexico 89 million, the Philippines 61 million and the United States 58 million. The Europe appears with 55 million in Italy. The Catholic hierarchy is, famously, not a democracy, but the laity’s center of gravity is firmly in the New World, and its fastest growth is coming in Africa and Asia. Europe doesn’t much figure.

Josh Marshall succinctly describes why so many are even writing about this latest Bishop of Rome, and what the office looked like before Karol Wojtyla took it up:

[B]efore John Paul II, the Pope was a much more, well ? parochial figure than he has been in the decades since.

The Pope didn?t travel around the world. He was always an Italian. And he was far less involved in the ecumenical work that played such a role in John Paul?s pontificate.

The job is clearly different now, and John Paul II made it so.
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