Important News

For some people, Christmastime means one thing: Last Christmas by Wham!. Fortunately, and because Your Man in Brno is a rather polite person on this site, we will not say what kind of people these are. But Whamfans! were horrified to hear about George Michael's sudden onset of pneumonia and subsequent hospitalization just in time to dampen their holiday spirits. According to this report, however, it's only because of Czech chronic and not anything more serious.
 
Readers may now go back to whatever less important things they were doing.

Required Reading for the Day....

is this piece by one Paul Goodman.

An interesting story....

This little tidbit came across the wire today... turns out Czech Republic and Austria are going to redraw their borders a little bit.

There's about 60 acres of land on either side of the border the two countries want to swap, so that it's easier to control flooding. The Czech part is owned by three semi-independent state agencies (neither the article on the Czech side nor another article from ÖRF here says anything about who owns the Austrian part), and it appears that getting all the signatures on both sides of the border are mostly a formality. Still, while it's not so common to see European borders shift, we should keep in mind that anything can happen.