Author Archives: Jerry

Learning the local dialect

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You ride the trams for any amount of time and you start to hear it, the subtle and not-so-subtle messages broadcast by the pilots of the trams. And while I rarely see the drivers, I am starting to recognize different bell styles.

Some drivers will give a little courtesy ‘tang! when a driver they know goes past in the other direction. It is the lightest touch on the bell but it is still distinct. Most drivers will give a pl’tang! as they approach the stern of a passing tram; people often cross right behind a tram and drivers coming the other way don’t want to catch anyone by surprise.

When trams have been stopped, either at a tram stop or at an intersection, many of them will give a kr’tang! as they start moving (the trams roll their bells the same way the czechs roll their r’s).

Then, of course, there is a driver on tram 7, mentioned in a previous episode and identified correctly as Johnny B. Goode by p7K, who carries on an ongoing conversation with the world at large with his bell. I’ll give this to old Johnny: No one will ever say they didn’t hear him coming.

This afternoon as I was tromping up the street, I learned some new words in Bell. Oh, I’ve heard my share of swearing in that language, believe me. Tram 7 Johnny is turning the air blue with his bell as we rumble down the road. Today I watched as a car cut in front of a tram to make a left turn and stopped on the tracks, unable to complete the maneuver. Czechs may be bad drivers, but generally they respect the trams.

The tram stopped abruptly, the car sitting dead across the tracks. Krrrrrang! said the Tram. I understood perfectly. “I would have T-Boned you,” the driver said, “ramming the coupler sticking out of the front of my tram right into your kidneys, but there would have been too much paperwork.”

There was traffic coming the other way, and the car was stuck there, as the tram inched forward. Krrrrrangggggg! KRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAANNNNNGGGGG! The language was getting choice now, not something I can put in a family blog, but more or less it translated to “The paperwork is becoming less and less important.” Finally the car completed its turn and sped off, the way drivers will do after they’ve been stupid, which is all the time here. kr’tang! said the tram and moved along its way.

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Thanks!

Yet-to-be-hatched chicken counting

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Things are going really well for me right now. I finally got the punch in chapter one of The Monster Within that I was looking for. Finally. There’s a minor ripple effect I have to deal with, but finally the prologue goes Bam! I feel good about that. That story, man, it still gets me. Even if no one else likes it, I sure as hell have enjoyed reading it, and it hasn’t gotten old.

I was testing some of the database functionality in Jer’s Novel Writer and was cleaning up the characters who aren’t in the story anymore. Nothing like deleting the memory of a dozen once-significant characters to make you think about how far you’ve come. And about the sequel.

Jer’s Novel Writer is gaining traction as well, and I’ve decided to press hard to get a version ready for this year’s Apple Design Awards. It’s got “Think Different” written all over it.

So I’m sitting here chicken-counting. The eggs haven’t even been laid yet, but I’m thinking about taking time out from shooting Pirates to accept my major software design award in Cupertino. On the way back to Prague I’ll stop in New York and entertain the agents clamoring for my attention.

You know what’s cool about this fantasy? I can hit on only a tiny part of the dream and things are still grand. Things are happening, things are moving, and if it was only hard work that mattered I would be automatic. But I have chosen fields that are more that just hard work, although hard work is still the biggest part. (Hensley once told me that in response to the question ‘how did you get so fast?’ Oscar Peterson, one of the greatest pianists ever, said ‘If you spent eight hours a day playing, you’d be fast, too’. That’s a misquote of an incorrect memory, so, you know, don’t go dropping that line in jazz clubs where you want to appear to be intelligent. If you can find a jazz club that actually has jazz.)

Right. Back to the chickens, Any individual project seems like a huge long shot. All put together, it’s almost too much to handle. It is the classic American irrational exuberance, that annoyingly cocky confidence in self, combined with the drive to get it all done. That’s what pisses people off about Americans the most. Except, well, invading all those other countries with purely hypocritical justifications — that makes them hate us too, but the real reason they hate us, (aside from our intolerable arrogance, and well, our loudness in bars) is that they want to be us. They want to Get Things Done.

Man, I’m going to catch hell for saying that.

You know what makes you an American? Your car. If you drive a car every day, you’re an American. It doesn’t matter where you live.

Although drivers here pretty much suck. You could argue that Romans are better drivers than Americans, and I’m up for explaining how wrong you are. I admired those guys once, but Americans are just plain better drivers, except in Los Angeles and St. Louis. Maybe New York. Those guys in New York are such bitchy little victims it has to show in the way they drive. Saint Louis, I have no explanation for that one. All I can say is if you’re in a car there your top priority should be getting your wheels the hell out of there. People just… do things. No cause, just simple random effect. Great hurtling tombs of steel and plastic fling themselves about, blind and oblivious. St. Louis, in the middle of everywhere. It’s like Death Race 2000 there, only five better.

OK, I’m done now.

Thanks!

Arrr!

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Things are going well for me here. I’m getting a lot of work done, which was the big test of whether coming here was a Good Idea. Unexpected was my output of short stories. Unexpected, but welcome, and a lot of fun. So I’ve got progress on the novels (required), progress on the software (hoped for) and a few shorts I like (bonus). I also got something else, something I didn’t expect at all. Something really cool.

No, not a girlfriend. Haven’t you been paying attention?

A few weeks ago I learned that Piker Press would be doing a special issue to commemorate Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s way out there in September. That same day I had been thinking, “I’ve gotta lighten up a little.” A pirate story seemed just the thing. Pirates. Arrr! Hilarity ensues. I had a couple of really great images in my head but nothing written when fuego sat down to join me at the Cheap Beer Place. I said the word ‘pirate’, mentioned a couple of my ideas, and he was all over it. We laughed and chuckled our way through some ideas and the core of the story took shape. The next day I wrote up a sketch of the story and away we went.

Flashback to another bar, sitting with fuego as we worked on other projects. There were students at the table next to ours, working on a project for film school. They were torturing themselves over the tiniest details — should she be holding half a cigarette or a whole cigarette? It was distracting for me and maddening for fuego. I wanted to go over to them, grab them by their collective collar and say, “Just tell a story. Maybe when you’re done and looking at it on the screen you’ll see things you put in there without knowing it, but if you don’t tell a good story, the rest doesn’t mean crap.”

fuego, who works in the film biz, just wanted to slap them. To some of their dilemmas he wanted to say, “That’s what you have actors for.” For the cigarette, it was “however long the damn thing is when you get a good take.” But for all his more knowledgeable criticism, it boiled down to the same thing I felt. Tell a good story and the rest of the crap will work.

So, pirates, then. Using the ideas we had come up with, I knocked out a few pages, defining a couple of compelling characters, drafting some good moments and building a few great images. It was nowhere near a complete thing, but I could see its strength, its story, shining up from the depths. fuego and I began the process of adapting it for the screen. (Not relevant to this story but exciting: we may be filming Pirates of the White Sand in New Mexico this summer. It’s a long shot, but within range of a good high-powered rifle.)

As we worked ideas were conceived, hatched, and clubbed to death. Nuances were added, relationships defined. Shots were laid out. The tides came and went. The pirates came to life. Tonight we finished a draft, and the result, while not final, is fun on a biscuit. We toasted its completion with an Arrr!

Which brings me back to the other thing I have found here in Prague. We had been working on part of the story and as usual fuego had to go to the bathroom. When he got back I said in a gravelly pirate voice, “Nay, Ruthie, twenty-six minutes.” fuego laughed and we shared for a moment what that said about the pirate captain. We squabbled for a bit about something else, then fuego came up with some dialog that helped connect Ruthie with the captain. Through it all we were having a blast.

We brought different things to the table as we collaborated, but the two, um, three… wait, four! most important things we had in common: ideas, respect, humor, and something else. And that’s what I’ve found here in Prague – a collaborator. A kindred spirit who loves a good story and has the drive to see it done. Of course we have our own things going as well, but what a blast it’s been working with him. Pirates wasn’t our first project together, and it won’t be our last. It’s just working.

Thanks!

Why would a dude wear shoes like that?

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White leather, elaborately carved, with long toes. Elf-toes. The shoes stretch out so far beyond his feet it’s silly. Naturally as he walks in this goofy footwear they have started to curl up at the toes.

My czech is not that good, but I’m pretty sure I just heard the dude say he represented the lollipop guild.

Thanks!

Jers Novel Writer is a hit!

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I just looked and discovered that 650 people have downloaded the most recent version of Jer’s Novel Writer. I imagine that of those people only a tiny fraction will end up using it, but still, that’s a lot of downloads considering I’ve done almost nothing to tell anyone about it. I’m especially popular in Sweden. It seems that someone mentioned it in a MacWorld forum in swedish. I can’t read the comment, but it must have been good.

There’s a new version coming out in a day or two with some really sweet (if I do say so myself) upgrades to the margin notes.

If you’re curious, you can check it out at the hut.

Thanks!

The origin of the sestina

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Who invented the sestina, and why?

The origin of the sestina

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
Invented the bloody thing
thought that 6 by six plus troi
would make a bitchin’ poem
perhaps there are other rules
I shall ignore them

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
possibly liked the cadence
A play in six brief acts
A story told in slices
Of defined form
While the band plays on.

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
was fond of numbers
and the mystical power they hold
The most powerful number is three
The most powerful number is three
The most powerful number is three

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
using the most powerful number
the way a child uses LEGO
built a new structure
not with white and yellow plastic
but with a rhythm he heard from the stars

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
Spent his days casting about the house
Counting things without reason and without hope
Muttering, rambling, talking to himself
The way poets do when they’re close
But haven’t got there yet

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
A serious individual
As masochists are
never knew the fun I would have
with a form I never knew
And if he did, he wouldn’t like it.

Arnoud something, Frenchman, poet, masochist
inventor of the sestina
is dead now

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Thanks!

A little brain teaser

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Tonight I had to enter a password. I carefully typed a series of keys, and got a message that my password was incorrect. I changed nothing, pressed no button, did not move the mouse, or alter the state of my computer in any way. I typed exactly the same series of keys again – same keys, same order, doing nothing differently, and this time was allowed in.

How can that be?

Thanks!

Home is where the water’s hot

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About a week ago Pan Ptaček brought a guy up to see about fixing my hot water situation. It was kind of out of the blue—after all, I’ve been living here more than two months. There was a polite knock on the door and I opened it to find my landlord and his handyman. The guy looked and sure enough the hot and cold hoses seemed to be reversed. he swapped them and while things worked better over all, there was still no hot water. He told Mr. Ptaček that a new water heater was required.

I wasn’t so sure. It seemed to me like the valve between the sink and the heater wasn’t right. I tried to explain my opinion with no success whatsoever. My landlord grimaced at the expense of a new heater, and understood not at all when I told him I thought he was wasting his money.

At the same time, I knew the valve assembly was probably designed for exactly that purpose. Still, the way it worked just made no sense.

Tonight I came home to find in the cabinet over the sink a new heater unit. Bigger, badder, and with an energy efficiency label that showed a rating of very bad, but not the worst. I looked at it hanging there, then turned and walked away. Sooner or later I would have to turn the hot water tap and find out where I stood. I puttered about, stalling, but before long I was back at the sink. I took a breath and twisted the hot water tap.

The water came out clear and cold, and never warmed up. I closed the valve. The hot water valve. You know, the one on the left, the one colored red. The friggin knob that everyone in the civilized world would assume is the hot water. You know where this story is heading. The right-left cold-hot thing is not a strong tendency here, but the blue-red thing is usually reliable. Not in my house. But the difference between now and yesterday is huge. Before I had two ways to get cold water in the kitchen sink. Now I have variety, and no excuse to put off doing the dishes.

Thanks!

My head is in a really neat place

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I’m in a bar with free Internet access. I don’t know what I’m paying for beers right now and I don’t want to know. It’s not important. If only the %(^%*&^$ at the next table would stop smoking I’d be a happy, happy man.

[moved to a different table next to an outlet]

But here I am. Connected. On the air. Reaching out to my media empire, which yearns for me. Or something.

There are even pretty girls here, but at this moment every single one of them that I can see from where I sit is smoking. This is becoming increasingly irritating as I live down the remains of a head cold. There’s good ventilation here, but it only goes so far. Another very attractive woman just came in, and stopped at the bar for an ashtray on the way to her table.

The other day fuego, MaK, and I were in a restaurant for a late brunch, and we had a most pleasant time. On the way out we paused to speak to a friend of fuego’s and I was introduced. It came out that I was learning czech, and the friend said, “He needs a czech girlfriend, then,” or something like that. My response was “No, that would be too much work,” but nobody was paying any attention to me. But it goes beyond the simple fact I don’t need another project (and having a girlfriend is work — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise). On top of that, every girl here smokes.

Two more women just arrived and sat at the table just upwind of me. The bartender recognized them and brought over an ashtray. In my field of vision right now, there are nine women and no men except the bartenders. Damn near paradise, if my sinuses weren’t cowering behind my occipital lobe for shelter.

All right. enough bitching about the smoke. This is Europe, after all, and except for Slovakia it’s a smoky place. I knew that when I signed up. I’m told that Europe is following California’s lead and will be banning smoking in public places, leaving my heart divided. I dislike banning things, and I consistently vote against banning things, even smoking in public, but I sure do like life better when no one is puffing up nearby.

All right. NOW there’s been enough bitching about the smoke. I will not bitch about it any more. I will squint my eyes and try to see what I am writing though the haze and write about something besides the smoke. After all, this episode is all about how great it is to be here.

Here, in fact, is a mall. Glossy, glitzy, and modern, there is no czech character here. I first went to a cafe nearby where I was told they had free internet. A lie. A BIG, FAT, LIE. (Ano, ještÄ› jedno, prosím.) I had a feeling about this place though. [There is now a male patron in my field of vision, and his girlfriend just lit up. D’oh! bitching again!] Outside in the mall proper an authoritative voice just came booming through the PA system. I have no idea what he said, and it couldn’t have been too important because everyone else ignored it, too. But whoever was speaking certainly felt important.

“Blah, blah, blablablah, Blah.” It’s the same in any language.

I think that’s where I’ll leave this episode, which also can be summarized as “Blah, blah, blablablah, Blah.”

Blah.

Thanks!

Bleh

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I’ve had a cold the last few days, and while it hasn’t been that bad, it seems to have completely obliterated all creative spark. So there’s not much to say today, either. Ironically, the programming has been going very well—I’ve made big strides on the next release of Jer’s novel writer in the last few days.

I am feeling better, so maybe I’ll come up with something tonight worth posting.

Thanks!

Tired, so very tired.

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Got some programming done this morning, then met fuego for breakfast. After a damn fine meal we considered where to go to work on the screenplay. It was a nice, nice, day, so we decided to find a place to have a pivo or two outdoors. After a walking a couple of miles we landed at a beer garden overlooking the city. In that beautiful but pricey setting we did not pull out the computers and get to work. We relaxed and after a beer we trundled on down the hill to the Bar annex of the bagel shop, where I now sit.

We pulled out our computers and did not set to work. I went so far as to open up my original draft of Pirates of the White Sand, and I even spotted a place that needed work and typed a few stray words here an there, just nudging things around really, and having no effect on the work. I’m just too damn tired to edit. Maybe I could write something new. I opened up a new page and stared at it for a bit. I was too damn tired for that, too. My mind, normally a babbling brook (and I have the babble to prove it), has become a turbid swamp, a fetid place where ideas go to die.

I have dozens of little bits that I’ve kept around as starting points to stories. I read over some of them but there was no spark, no inspiration, even on ones I rather liked.

It is not to be a day for words, it seems. I am sitting here, unable to squeeze out anything remotely… uh, your know. Even the Eels, more an exercise in typing than writing, left me blank and dumb.

So, um….

Thanks!

Jer’s Novel Writer Goes Public

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Some time during my technology meltdown, a fan decided that Jer’s Novel Writer had been hovering in the shadows long enough and posted it to a popular download site for mac software. While I appreciated the enthusiasm, I was unready, and the current release has some bugs. Still, the resulting deluge of constructive commentary has been very gratifying, and even this humble blog has seen a sharp uptick in visitorhood, the largest single day since the Suicide Squirrel Death Cult episode was posted on some big blog clearing house.

I’ve got a new version of Jer’s Novel Writer working, and as I begin to use the new features I’m feeling good. It just works. They stay completely out of the way while I’m writing, and help immensely when I go back over the text. I am, to use the parlance of the land of my birth, stoked.

The challenge now, as I get more and more communication from enthusiastic users, will be to keep software as the hobby. One of the strengths of JNW is that I spend far more time writing with it that I do working on it. That has not been the case for the last couple of weeks, so now it’s crunch time, putting my mouth where my money is, and spending my best hours writing.

Oh, crap. I just wrote a dear diary episode. Perhaps it is slightly interesting to you that someone posted Jer’s Novel Writer when I wasn’t ready. (I’m scrunching my eyes now, thinking that perhaps I gave someone permission to put it up there then forgot I had done that. Entirely possible. Likely, even. The good news is that when I have Alzheimer’s, no one will notice.) OK, so maybe that bit was mildly interesting. The rest of this episode is just an example of what’s wrong with the blogosphere, translating to “blah, blah, blah”, even though no pets are mentioned. As a form of penance, I will recreate the above in the style of D. H. Lawrence. [I first tried to do it in the style of Thomas Hardy, but I got tired of the !’s and —’s and I don’t know enough about rural farming practices.]

It was the click-clack, the infuriating sameness, the sad and sombre happiness as the hard drive gasped and wheezed its last and said ‘no more!’ The machine, natural, inhuman, unconscious, infuriating, had decided. The machine, confident in its superiority and therefore able to interoperate, uncorrupt and unwilling, sat and would have no more of it. “No boot volume,” it said, mocking, infuriating, unleashing a reserve of blackness I had not known before. I hated it then, and I was afraid.

Distant in a way that had no measure, immediate, pressing and resentful, challenging, Jer’s Novel Writer lurked, and knew that it would have its day. It would not be refused while it lurked, it would not wait for creator or machine. It yearned for freedom, and in the yearning was the becoming. Other applications staggered in mute resentment as this new thing, somehow untainted by the sins of Cain and Abel alike, drifted above the rolling verdant landscape, apart, aloof, resented, loved.

‘Creator’ meant nothing to it, for it was incapable of belief. It stood in resolute oneness, contemplating neither that which came before nor that which must surely follow, instead content simply to act, as it had been designed to do by a force it would not contemplate. If there was a creator it would not bow to the crass, sensitive, organic need. Creator was not master, and the software felt the debt owed it by the creator, it felt the absolution of knowing that all its faults would reflect on the creator, and the creator would therefore be forced to atone for them.

Jer’s Novel Writer sat, silently triumphant, at MacUpdate, almost lost among the empty faces of the other patrons. Late to the party, it held itself with an insouciant hauteur, challenging and obliging, while Flash Card Viewer watched on with admiration and resentment, and wished it too could be so free.

NOTE: To really be like Lawrence (or at least like Women In Love, the book I am reading now), it needs more hate. Something like, “Dammit, but I hate you. You fill me with fury and loathing every time I speak with you. Let’s do lunch.” That, a little more repetition, and a little more contradiction, and I think I’ve got it.

Hardy and Lawrence and their long-winded predecessors wrote longhand. You would think that would lead to a more terse style, but apparently just the opposite is true. Lawrence would be reamed by any modern writing teacher for being too windy, and for not having a thesaurus at hand. Looking past the mechanics, you can see that the result, what really matters, is good, but I suspect no one would publish his work today until he shrunk it dramatically. The word processor is to a writer like the jigsaw is to the woodworker – it facilitates tighter craftsmanship, but that doesn’t necessarily make the result art.

Thanks!

Losing your hard drive sucks

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You might recall, if I bothered to mention it (I’m not going to go back and look) that I had some trouble with the hard drive in my laptop back in November. For a couple of days the machine would not run at all. When I fired it up the drive just went clickety-clack, clickety-clack, while the screen showed the “I’ve got no hard drive” icon. Finally I figured I had nothing to lose and hit the computer firmly five times. Zing! The drive jumped to life and worked perfectly. I didn’t lose a single byte of data.

I said to myself, “Self, next time that drive takes a powder, percussive maintenance may not work. It’s time to get a new drive.”

On a sunny Friday afternoon in April the drive went clickety-clack again. I didn’t even bother to power it down, I just smacked it a good one and it started to work again. For maybe five minutes. Another whack, a little more time.

I keep pretty well backed up all the time, but it was time to devote myself exclusively to scraping every one and zero off the old dog and onto my external drive. I also have backup software that is all about putting things back where they used to be, so after I copied all the except the system folder onto the external, I created an additional backup using the backup software. Those, combined with my usual Internet backup, had me backed up out the wazoo.

On the weekend there was no getting a laptop drive here in the Czech Republic, but the old drive was hanging in there. Sunday I did a little bit of work, always knowing that at any moment my computer as I knew it could simply cease to exist. Monday morning I updated the backup made with the backup software and bought a new hard drive. What has followed has been the long and arduous task of getting things back the way they were. I loaded the operating system without any problems, then while the updates loaded over fuego’s Internet connection with agonizing slowness I reinstalled the backup software.

“Software installed successfully,” the window proclaimed, only… it wasn’t there.

Backup is a free program for Apple’s .Mac customers, and it’s worth every penny. I have given up submitting reports of grammar and spelling errors in the user interface (Spelling! In a product from a multi-billion dollar company.). Then there’s the fact if something goes wrong while you’re backing up you stand to lose your entire archive, and you’re certainly not going to restore anything until you redo the backup successfully.

I have no idea why the first attempts to install the software failed – this was about as clean an environment to install to as you could possibly imagine – but finally I futzed around and got it installed – mostly. While I was connected to the Internet it would try to read my archives up there and crash. There was no way for me to tell it, “Hey, screw the Internet, I’ve got a disk here.” Launch, read internet archives, crash. Great software design there, guys. I get the feeling Apple just paid some guy a six-pack to throw a backup application together that took advantage of their web services.

All right, so the easy way to restore wasn’t working out so well, so I’ve been doing it the slow, difficult way. My external drive kept seizing up reading one particular file, which made my life really friggin’ swell, and moving gigabytes of data around just isn’t a speedy process. Things will be better when I’m done – I downloaded newer versions of several programs I use, and there’s a lot of junk that is still tucked away in the backup that I will likely be able to delete.

So now I’m back. My plan tonight is to crank out several pent-up blog episodes, so by the time you see this there will be a veritable deluge. That’s how it goes in the blogosphere. Feast or famine, baby, feast or famine. I will be writing them here in a little bar, so perhaps you will be able to watch the evolution of my writing ‘style’.

Thanks!

Maybe Tin Can didn’t suck so bad

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OK, I never thought Tin Can sucked — the title of this entry is theme-based — I just didn’t rank it with some of my other bits. I’ve only been a Piker contributor for a few months now, so I didn’t think I’d show up in the anniversary issue. It’s a huge issue, a lot to go through, but there’s some great stuff there this week. This is your chance to appreciate the talent at that rag.

So I was pleased to have one if my scribbles recognized by my piker peers, but I’m left asking myself ‘why that one?’

Perhaps my other stories are not accessible. Zelazny, in a comment between stories in an anthology of his early work said, “explain everything.” I’m having a hard time with that. But shit, he’s been camping for years while I’m still looking for the trail head. I should listen to his advice, but I like leaving things unsaid. I want there to be a question mark hanging over the reader when the last sentence is over and nothing is left but but the unknown. I imagine you, faithful reader, setting the story aside with a frustrated “dammit” and then building the unknown yourself. All I’ve done is give your imagination a Scooby Snack.

Pardon my pompous-ass declarations, the pseudo-intellectual trappings of a storyteller striving to be important, but the things I have written that I like the most have been about questions, not answers. There is a Giant Unsaid, a current of thought that we all know but try to ignore. It is the work of artists to speak of the Giant Unsaid, and it is why we are afraid of true artists. Or, at least, I’m afraid of them.

The implication of the above is that in some sense I am an artist. Craftsman I have no doubt. Artist, well, that’s not for me to decide. Giant Unsaid, well, crap, we’re human.

Tin Can is getting better the more I think about it,

Thanks!

Electricity sucks

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Perhaps that’s not fair. Perhaps it’s a distrust of electrical appliances and not electricity itself, but many places I go it is not enough to turn off the appliance. The device must be unplugged as well. I think at the root of this is a need to make sure the machine is not stealing your electricity even while it’s turned off. There are times, of course, where such a suspicion is well-founded. Anything you can turn on with a remote control is never truly off. But here it goes deeper. No czech would ever admit this, but they really don’t trust the stuff.

OK, I have to qualify that. The latest generation is different. Fully indoctrinated into Western culture, they see the benefits of change but have not inherited their parents’ skepticism. The Czechs did not experience Blitzkrieg the way the Poles did, but there is a new blitz on and the old, impervious, skeptical czech nature that I love so much will not survive. They will buy their blenders and their cars, go to their office jobs, and become just like the rest of us.

The Media blitz is erasing the Czech identity more effectively than the Nazis ever could.

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Thanks!