Kpjas here and now

One of the most popular daily newspapers in Poland Gazeta Wyborcza reported last week [1] about a company that hires North Korean welders in the Gdansk Shipyard. The article says that these workers work excessively long hours, are payed much less than Polish welders, don’t get their wage packets instead the money is sent back to North Korea and they are supervised by political activists. The newspaper described the practice as modern slavery and a gulag inside Poland. Ironically the North Koreans work in the birthplace of the famous Polish trade union Solidarnosc (Solidarity) and they are not hired directly by the Shipyard but through an intermediary company that cooperates with North Korean company Pyongyang General Construction Corp.

Update: in numerous follow-ups to the article some other newspapers have found faults with the Gazeta Wyborcza’s account  and think that probably the whole matter was to some extent exaggerated.

This is a disturbing and heart wrenching story of stupidity and narrow mindness people can sometimes demonstrate towards animals.

A Briton, Steven Drew,  who has resettled and acquired a largish country estate in a small village in southern Poland made national news in mid-March. The Polish TV channel TVP2 showed a feature about the tragic fate of a herd of horses kept by the man. The animals spent the whole winter which has been especially harsh under open sky. In January there were still 26 horses alive but when TV reporters they saw harrowing scenes - 11 of them dead of cold and starvation and the rest in really sorry state, close to death. You can see fencing made of tree branches with no bark on them - it was eaten by the horses. The remaining alive horses were taken away and after proper veterinary care were placed with nearby farmers. The chances for their full recovery are quite promising.

The English farmer was not pleased with this intervention and maintained that he had not done anything wrong. He believes in natural horsekeeping but seems not to take into account that during winters in Poland snow is sometimes waist-deep and temperature can fall even below -30 degrees Celsius (-22 F). The horses hardly had a chance to survive without proper food and shelter.

See video feed TVP2
See video feed Polsat (Warning! these scenes are appalling)

Yesterday evening I watched Roland Joffe’s 1986 film The Mission. The film is like a parable to me not very realistic rather about mankind and the world we are living. Is there a place for love, justice and harmony in our world ?

Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world… 

A few days ago I saw Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Although I don’t like political films very much I must say Munich is a great one. My perception of the film was influenced by the fact I had previously seen a documentary about the Israeli response to the 1972 Munich massacre and  comprehensively described it.

I liked Spielberg’s film because it showed multiple layers of the matter and didn’t try to give easy answers. Vengence that at first seems to be completely justified when executed turns sour. Personal perspective was truly delineated in Avner and Robert’s characters. Politics has always abrasive or damaging effect on straightforward people’s personalites.

A small gripe with my Firefox configuration is gone with a little help from a cute extension.

The story goes like this. Earlier I had got rid of Outlook Express and thus had no default email client on my system. Instead I used GMail and it was easy to adapt mailto: links to open in the GMail’s compose window. But as a side effect it resulted in a little irritating behavior of "Send this link" right click context menuitem. Namely it presented a dialog window with the error and spawned about thirty empty Internet Explorer windows. Then for several seconds the system practically came to a stop and I had to remove the annoying IE remains.

Luckily a little FF extension called Webmailcompose by Jed Brown rescued me. Now my problem has gone and "Send this link" opens in the Gmail compose window.

Firefox, the web browser, is gaining more and more of the market share (see more info).

One nifty feature is Firefox’s extensible and customizable searchbar (ext img). It has a handy keyboard shortcut CTRL+K so I use it almost constantly.

There was one minor gripe though. When you add many search engines to the searchbar you can’t reorder them in your preferred way. A solution comes to rescue - as always from the most predictable place - addons directory where you can find the Search Engine Ordering extension. With this extension you also get another minitool - in the right-click context menu (ext img) you can find "Add this search to the searchbar…" option.

According to one of the most respected Polish medical websites Medycyna Praktyczna, more than 50% of doctors in Poland earn less than 1200 Polish zloties a month (approx. 373 US dollars)1 . On top of that monthly remuneration of more than 70% of Polish doctors is less than 1500 Polish zloties (approx. 467 US dollars)2.

Comments? We, in Poland, are hopeless and no wonder only 10% of young Polish doctors intend to work in Poland. Without any real prospects to provide for their families they are emigrating in large numbers3, mainly to Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the UK.

Clear, beautiful voice. I wish I knew her singing earlier.

Eva Cassidy 

Listen to mp3 clips of Eva Cassidy’s songs

March 13, 2006, marks the 10th anniversary of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s death. Kieślowski is well-known Polish film director.

He is best known for his television series The Decalogue  (1988) as well as  a feature film  trilogy Three Colors.

I haven’t seen all Kieślowski’s film yet but the first of his films that I liked was Bez końca (No End, 1985).

It’s worth to take a look at his profile in the imdb.com

The other day I came across on the net a very nice English folk band. It is called Ribbon Road and it consists of two musicians Brenda and Geoff Heslop.

 Especially I like their song Every Beat Of My Heart (mp3 excerpt). You can listen to or download a collection of their songs online here.