Olympic medals become more expensive, fake corpses in plastic bags along major roads, English films with no voiceovers on television and the Lotto craze in Poland!
Presented by Slawek Szefs
Olympic medals become more expensive, writes RZECZPOSPOLITA in a frontpage article looking at what it calls the Beijing operation. Poland’s preparations to the current Olympic Games have required state budget outlays to the tune of 274 million zlotys, roughly 137 million US dollars. Statistically, this translates into some half a million dollars per national team representative. Never before has Poland spent so much on shaping up its Olympic squad. But the mathematics of such policy are simple and evident, says Zbigniew Pacelt, from the Sports Ministry, himself a former pentathlon champion. The number of medals won is always directly proportional to the funds secured for widely perceived training. Poland found out about this golden rule the hard way four years ago in Athens when its representatives brought back barely ten Olympic medals, the lowest record in five decades. This philosophy has, of course, little in common with the noble idea of fair and square sports competition. But as another old-time and tested rule says: if you can’t beat them, join them!
GAZETA WYBORCZA devotes one of its articles to a recently launched campaign to increase driver awareness to road safety issues. Poland is the absolute record holder in terms of deaths per one hundred traffic accidents, the average number of 11.2 fatalities being twice as high as in France, almost four times greater than in Holland or seven times that of German statistics in this respect. The so-called black spots put up in places with a drastic death toll due to reckless driving have not sobered many to the extent of applying lesser pressure on the accelerator. That’s why organisers of the Trustworthy Road action have decided to boost the imagination of speeders. They put up along roadsides of the more dangerous routes stuffed black plastic bags resembling those used by police coroners. Shocking, but any method is good as long as it produces the much desired effects in this – literally – killing problem, a spokesman for Warsaw’s traffic police department told the newspaper.
And speaking of actions targeted at wide social strata… DZIENNIK is happy and proud to inform readers that its English First campaign of popularising active use of the language among Polish society has already gained the response of the national education authorities by including it on the list of mandatory subjects for all schools in the country. Another way of improving English language skills of Poles would be to rid films shown on television of voice translations limiting them to subtitles, so viewers could hear the original soundtrack without distortion. However, most stations remain skeptical about the proposition claiming that similar experiments in the past have shown audience preferences running counter to such solutions advocated by experts in foreign language teaching who cite the example of Sweden and its programmes initiated back almost 30 years ago. Now, the results are there to be seen, or rather heard, argues the persistent and untiring media crusader.
And the SUPEREXPRESS tabloid succumbs to the nationwide craze in anticipation to the record purse in the grand Toto lottery draw which envisages a potential 35-million-zloty win, the equivalent of over 17 million dollars! An almost scientific calculation for picking the six lucky numbers is supplemented with a list of luxury goods the jackpot money could buy, among them a small two-engine passenger jet, three tons of pure gold or 223 litres of elegant French perfume or, if you are interested in still greater quantity, 2,333 Arabian-bred horses. So, take your pick. But to make your dreams come true, don’t forget to purchase the lottery coupon first.