All Souls’s Day. The Czech way

Although Wikipedia mentions All Souls’ Day as predominantly religion-related day, November 2 in the Czech Republic has altogether different significance. It is observed by 99 percent of people, despite the fact that this country is almost 80 percent atheist.

People observe it by visiting the graves of their deceased ancestors or loved ones [most usually (grand)parents], cleaning them up, arranging new flowers etc. And since it is usual that one or two family members “do it for the rest of the family” it is safe to say that the day is observed by families as such – and the number of people who actually do observe it adds up.

It is also a day on which the most purses are stolen in this country in any given year. Elderly women who go to cemeteries to visit the graves of their deceased husbands and parents often pay less attention to their belongings while mending the grave(s). And thieves do their nasty job as well…

Fifty future Ryanair stewardesses will come to Brno

A very interesting training event will take place in Brno in a few days. Around 50 future employees of Ryanair will undergo special training before they are assigned to their new bases from which they will fly every which way in their new workplaces, Boeing 737-800’s.

Sort of unusual, considering that Ryanair operates only one route to Brno (Brno-London/Stansted). It should be interesting because from what I have heard the girls will be given tailored uniforms. A nice front-page photo idea…

Mosque in Brno damaged. Again

Brno Muslims who went to their mosque on Sunday were shocked to find a spray-painted sign that said “Stop, no to Islam”, the Brnensky denik daily reported. Unknown suspects damaged the facade on Saturday night, the police think.

It has been the four such “attack” on the mosque.

Muneeb Hassan al-Rawi (apologies if the transliteration is incorrect in English), who is a leading personality of the Muslim community in Brno and the Islamic Foundation, says “the mosque is attended by children who are half-Czech and who feel very uncomfortable (to say the least) about being unwelcome this way…”

UPDATE BY REQUEST:: there are approximately 600 Muslims in Brno, says al-Rawi in this May interview for the Brnensky denik daily. Plus there are around 50 people from the South Moravian Region who regularly travel to Brno to attend the regular “ceremonies” (sorry about the general term, I am not an expert on Islam, let alone English terminology, and I wouldn’t want to offend anyone). The mosque is quite small and it does not feature the traditional minaret and other well-known traditional architectural parts.

This year [July 10] the mosque “celebrated” its 10th anniversary. I must say it is almost “invisible”, meaning that you have to look for it to find it, and you definitely won’t see it during your regular sightseeing walk, as it is a 10-minute 4-stop tram ride from downtown.

The leaders of the Muslim community (especially the aforementioned Mr. Muneeb Hassan al-Rawi) meet with the Lord Mayor regularly, and al-Rawi himself often holds talks with noted personalities of other religions [like the Brno rabbi].

Thousands of private photos leaked from a dating website

No face here. This girl was lucky this time...

There are more than 11,000 of them. Most of them feature teen girls (not underage by law) wearing just underwear or nothing. And there are out there for everyone to see.

Somebody hacked the online dating Libimseti.cz server where these girls had their “private” folders with photos they would show only to boys whose identity they knew… And now the Czech torrent sites are full of 200MB .rar files for everyone to download and check whether they know any of the girls.

There are voices saying “they were stupid to post the photos in the first place so they deserve it”. That is a load of insensitive bullshit. There exists a certain level of trust when it comes to technology providers. Saying the girls deserve it is like saying a tourist who injures himself while hiking in the woods deserves to die because he has a cell phone operator with weaker signal in that particular location.

Like I said, 90 percent of the girls are obviously 15-18 and many of them are naked (not really porn, just “me and my cam phone” style), which says a lot about dating rituals of the recent times. Anything that can help you meet new people is good enough to give it a try without thinking too much. And if it comes back and bites you in the ass, you give up.

I bet the server lost thousands of users…

Kindergarten trouble

Next Tuesday,  October 28, is a national holiday. Monday is a regular weekday for most people. However, many kindergartens in Brno (and other big cities) assume that most people will stay home with their children and that it would be too expensive to have the entire kindergarten open for the remaining (few) children.

So they decided to remain closed on Monday.

Mothers who can’t ask “grandmas” to babysit have to waste one day of their paid vacation to stay home with their children. Of course, a regulation orders that at least one kindergarten be open in every borough of Brno, but there are more angry moms with no babysitting than “free beds” in that particular kindergarten.

Strange. You would have thought that a facility that is owned and operated by the city would remain open even for three children, given that one-day shutdown would not save much. Plus, the municipality shall pay more attention to the number of parents who want to have their kid in kindergarten on Monday, not to the number of parents who do not. There is a big difference…

The worst case of child abuse and sex torture in history: verdict expected on Friday

The worst case of child abuse and the related sexual torture in history (of this country) is expected to end on Friday before the District Court in Brno. The judge shall deliver his verdict. Five defendants can spend eight to ten years in prison.

The case is extremely complicated to explain, and TCDW will review the whole story with the verdict itself, and I have been following the case since it started, so just a reminder:

• mother of two boys was locking at least one of them in a basement. He was naked, he had limited bathroom access,
• the woman says she had been manipulated by her sister (also on trial) to do “bad things” to the boys, which included eating their own flesh,
• another female defendant first posed as a 13 year-old girl, a family member. This M.A. graduate was involved in a sect, underwent a breast reduction surgery and later even escaped from an orphanage where she had posed as a girl. She was later found in Norway where she posed as a boy.
• turns out several members of a mysterious sect took turns in the torture process

etc. etc.

Tragedy in Czech regional elections: Social Democrats are winning in all 13 districts

As of tomorrow 13 Czech districts will have new regional councilors. So far (Saturday, 5:20 p.m. CET) it looks like social democrats won in all 13 districts, although they did not get more than 50 percent anywhere, so they will have to start coalition talks. The “voter attendance” was 40.25 percent.

Author: (c) iDNES.cz news server

The victory of the “orange party” is a huge tragedy for his country. And it says a lot about its people, unfortunately. This is a victory of a party that “protects people from what it thinks are bad things”. And like I said before, many voters of Social Democrats are lazy and incompetent people who have no life and who fail to take any responsibility for their own actions. They have a lousy job but they will not do anything to find a new one. They think income tax shall not be a flat-rate tax, but it should be based on how much a person makes.

Czech Social Democrats think that people should have equally less.

The Civic Democrats, on the other hand, lost heavily in these elections. This is a party that sets some conditions and lets people do their best under these conditions. However, apparently not enough people appreciate it, or are capable to do so.

Michal Hasek, Jiri Paroubek and other leading social democrats are the biggest danger to this country. They know shit about advanced social state systems, like the Swedish one. What they know is that many people still know how “easy” life was for them during the communist era (in other words: they were surviving quite well doing nothing, because “we all had nothing”), and they turned this nostalgia into campaign.

According to Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg, it is normal for a party that runs the country (the governing Civic Democrats) to lose regional election. It is a revenge of the opposition and its voters for the reforms the governing party has implemented. The current government introduced one-off CZK 30 fees that patients pay upon visiting their doctors’ offices and for every prescription they are issued. Although it ended wasting, Social Democrats maintain the fee is “antisocial”. That is a lie. The fee taught Czechs to behave economically, when it comes to medication(s). The measure reportedly saved hundreds of millions this year.

Czech regional district elections: Social Democrats are damn manipulators

Czechs will elect their regional/district councilors this weekend. The Czech Republic is divided into 14 districts/regions in which the winner gets to appoint its governor.

Unfortunately, many Czechs are stupid.

Unfortunately, many voters of Social Democrats are stupid.

They are people who need politicians to do things for them that they should attempt to do themselves. Their attitude can be easily described as Gimme gimme gimme.

And the Social Democrats, in order to win these elections, decided to manipulate and lie.

They promise things that have NOTHING TO DO WITH REGIONAL GOVERNMENT AUTHORITIES. They promise things that can only be decided on the Parliamentary level.

They promise things that POLITICIANS CAN NOT AFFECT, like prices of foodstuffs. These prices are determined by the free MARKET. Social Democrats claim that it is the current government that is to blame for the increasing prices.

And the simple people who often vote for Social Democrats are buying it.

I know everyone is entitled to their political beliefs. But many Czechs who vote for Social Democrats have NO political beliefs. They have no life. They often think their life sucks. They want politicians to improve it. They will do nothing themselves.

Czech Social Democrats are fucking manipulators and liars. And if they win these elections, it will mean that most Czechs have given up personal responsibility in exchange for we-will-take-care-of-you cheap promises.

If you are familiar with “social democrats” in Western Europe, or in such advanced democracies like Sweden, etc. this argument is no good here. Czech social democrats have almost nothing in common with them, especially in terms of their promises and the social system we live in…. or the one they are promising…

Czech college life: not enough dorms

It is the same every year. Thousands of students apply for college dorm rooms, thousands receive an “application rejected”. Czech colleges have a system according to which rooms are assigned. Several years ago the system was based mainly on the distance between the town and the applicant’s home.

Hundreds of students would rather cheat and they registered their permanent address let’s say at their aunt and uncle’s in a town further away, in order to qualify for a dorm room.

Later somebody realized that the system was not fair: a student who is from Prague [200 kilometers from Brno] can TECHNICALLY get to school easier than a student from a town that is just 100 kilometers away, just because there are buses going every 20 minutes. But you can not commute 400 kilometers a day anyway, so this argument was nonsense either way.

And so now Czech colleges and universities have more sophisticated systems. But that is no good if the number of dorm rooms is insufficient, AND if the prices are so high that if three students get together and lease a two-bedroom apartment, they pay almost the same price. With a great advantage: no damn rules.

On the other hand, it should be noted that THERE IS NO TUITION AT PUBLIC COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES HERE. Yep. We study for free…

Czech version of YouTube launched. And it’s crap. It sucks.

Well, what do you know. Somebody in the Google company thought Czechs don’t speak English good enough to use YouTube. An application from which 99 percent of Czechs (my educated guess) use only the “key word field” and the search button. So they launched the Czech version, along with the appropriate domain.

I have three major problems with the “new YouTube”.

One, I did not ask for it and I want to use the English version. But whenever I open the page its system finds out I am logging in from the Czech Republic and it automatically offers the Czech version. Plus, some of the terms were not translated in the most appropriate way. The Czech terms simply do not match the original English use.

Two, the system offers  the “you might be interested in these” videos. Yep, Czech videos. It seems like the system offers them just because they have been posted from the Czech Republic, or by a user who declared he or she was Czech. Useless shit.

And three, also very important: the Czech system picks up some tools from the original “American system”, like flagging. The flagging tool fails to reflect national and cultural differences. Example: there is an innocent home video of three girls on a beach in Brazil. Bikinis, no nudity. But of course there are uptight American YouTube users who keep flagging these videos as “not suitable for minors” [why the fuck not? what is inappropriate about bikini?]. The same disclaimer “this video is NOT SUITABLE FOR MINORS” appears in the Czech version. Czech Republic [and Czechs in general] have very different boundaries in terms of “inappropriate content”.

So to sum up: Czech version of YouTube sucks.