Tags: flame | letters | Think Magazine

Letters to the Editor, Issue #42

Dear Think,

Allow me to compare your magazine to a pint of Beamish Irish stout. Its hard to digest the first few times, but you start to get used to it after a while, then you realise that when you can't get it you miss it a little, but too much is definitly irritating for the bowels.

I've been meaning to write to you for the past few months. Think Magazine is at times great reading and full marks for your marketing skills, to be able to provide it to the public for free. One drawback, what chemicals do you produce the paper from ? One day on the tram, the combination of the No. 6 tram's motion and the vomit reek of page No. 4 almost brought up my breakfast... please change the smell, I hear depleted uranium is going cheap... try that, please anything.

Why do you consistently indulge in Prague Post bashing? This seems pointless and serves no obvious purpose. Your publication's main niche would appear to be expats who view Prague and the Czech Republic (surprisingly to some, that's what the country is called) as a temporary playground. I suspect the majority of your expat readers (beyond a small number of hardened and aged hippies who will never leave) speak no Czech beyond the usual badly pronounced crap, know next to nothing about local politics, history, geography and culture. This country provides escape from studies, sh*tty jobs, and relationship problems.

The Prague Post provides indepth analysis and mainly balanced opinions about issues affecting the Czech Republic and wider afield. In my humble opinion, it is a vital source of information, and has been improving in quality over the past few months, something I would not equate with your publication. Basically, Think and The Prague Post are incompatible, so don't lower yourselves to gutter level by criticising or endorsing criticism of them.

Your magazine has many unique attributes The Prague Post could never match, including articles in Czech, politically incorrect opinions, quirky news and a continually evolving, soap-opera letters page. Keep it up, the public likes you.

One last bit, if you're still with me, drop the 'Dr.' bullsh*t, the you cannot be serious, Paul Kail trite. Anyone who signs his name Dr., Dr. or not, in a non-scientific magazine, is a self-serving egotistical moron, and the ideas and stories he prints are unoriginal rehashed crap, creamed off equally big nobbers around the world. We eat animals and that's cruel, full stop, get off the soap box you sad b*stard, and give us some indepth views and solutions and not facts and figures. The views you give Paul, are the granny swindling, please sponsor me Big Ben Bear, Dopy dolphin etc., of the 1 year membership con-artist style, we've seen a million times before.

I am all for causes reducing animal cruelty in the world, but not those that suck vast funds into administration and shock poster campaigns. Czechs are less likely to sign up to these type of animal rights campaigns such as banning hunting etc., because they are still unashamed meat eaters and you can find pig heads, feet, sheep stomachs etc. proudly displayed in all the butchers.

The Czechs and are not yet reduced to the clinical supermarket-chain driven, user-friendly packaging that makes a denial of the meat having ever come from a dead animal. Once that happens, society develops a guilt complex, they eat the meat but begin to deny it is meat at all, aided by the cute packaging. To absolve themselves of the guilt they willingly support any cause that prevents animal cruelty, maybe thats good in one way, yet beneath it all is a base hypocrisy because meat production is very cruel indeed. People like Paul Kail are manipulators, not educators.

My rant has ended, Hope it was fun.

- Conor O'Gorman < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >

Mr. O'Gorman,

Thanks for the thoughtful letter. Allow us to address your comments in order:

1) The reason our pages smell funny is because we use vegetable based dye in our inks instead of petrol based ones; which is more eco-friendly. This, together with our McDonald's-tray-paper pages, causes the smell you refer to. But we are looking into the option of using depleted Uranium based paper. As an American-run magazine, we feel a responsibility to help spread the joys of this low-grade radioactive byproduct as widely and efficiently as possible.

2) We do not "consistently indulge in Prague Post bashing." Occasionally the local paper does take a hit, but rarely is it a direct hit, and the sum of these hits hardly constitutes a serious or sustained attack on the publication. But surely you won't deny that an occasional swipe is deserved if a straight-faced news article appears, for example, explaining that "SMS messages are increasingly popular"?

The Post prints some excellent stuff, but it also prints some crap, just as does this magazine, and we have never denied it or begrudged anyone the right to call us on it. And we tend to agree with you that the Post serves an important function in Prague for foreigners.

But occasionally satirizing them doesn't make us ungrateful philistines. The foreigners who read and write for Think are not the ignorant "playground people" you caricature. No doubt such people exist, but not in sufficient numbers as to keep a 10-15,000 print run magazine going strong. Most of our readers know quite a bit about the politics, history and geography of the region, they just don't pick up Think for more of it.

Perhaps you spend your days hacking through Dnes, studying the history of Czech theatre and practicing your declensions, but most foreigners here lead a respectful and (moderately) informed English-based existence that puts about as much stress on Czech politics and culture as it deserves; which is to say, a minor stress.

If we started running articles about the center-right Coalition of Four or the history of mushroom picking in Moravia, would you still read us? Maybe; but we'd all rather go back to teaching English than write that sh*t. Which is why we have the Post. See how neat and circular it all is, Conor?

3) As for Doc Paul Kail, we may start signing his articles "Professor Kail." That has a nicer ring to it. But please know that Paul is not responsible for any "money sucking bureaucracy" and is very dedicated to his causes, which, yes, do involve a certain amount of guilt-tripping. In any case enjoy his work while you can; he may be leaving staff (and Prague) soon to begin work full-time on a book about Mad Cow Disease.

Jeffree adds:

We owe our existence to The Prague Post. If it and Pozor and Velvet hadn't sucked so hard, I wouldn't have re-entered the rag trade by starting Think. And did you know we share the same anniversary date? Came out on the same day as their 5th year party!

Dear Think,

I am an American living and working in Prague. I've been here 2 months but I've decided to go back to New York. Before my departure I would like to give you my opinions about my fellow Americans who are living here in Prague. Well, unfortunately I have to admit that 98 per cent of them are complete idiots and liars. I am embarrassed by them.

They go around telling Czech people that they are actors, poets, artists, etc. Really they are just failures who are unable to get any respect in our country. If they werein Berlin, Paris, Dublin, London, etc,it would be impossible for them to live there because the people would immediately recognize that they are just phoneys. Also they constantly go on and on about how rude and ignorant the Czech people are. Why are they living here if they don't like the Czechs?

Lets hope that these people don't teach English here. I've heard that such people can get teaching qualifications by only attending an 8 hour course. Lastly, I noticed in Tesco a dictionary called Americko-Cesky. I must inform whoever published this dictionary that English is a European language which us Americans speak. Although I wish that our people did invent this language, we didn't. At least I'm not as Politically Incorrect as these idiots. Good luck.

- Larry < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >

P. S. Thanks to everyone in Vinohrady. You know who I mean! ! Cheers! !

Dear Larry

Everyone on staff read your letter and we all think that you are kind of a pud, but a pud with good points. Good luck keeping it real back in the states. With people like you writing letters to the editor, the Democracy is in safe hands. Bye-bye Larry.

And from the 'readers with attention spans of gnats' file:

Subject: feminism

What aspects of feminism do you have problems with?

-d m < This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >

Subject: Holditch

Get off your ass and do something!

< This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it >

In our last issue, Christopher Lord received a couple of rather intemperate messages in the post about his goodbye letter to the city of Prague. Here is his response from the beaches of Portugal:

Dear Think,

Thank you so much for printing a selection of my fan mail in your last issue. One thing about being a writer is that you can't control who reads what you write. While most Think readers are naturally in the upper intelligence bracket, unfortunately there seem to be one or two morons in the mix.

The letter from Martha Damncat, at least, is clearly the work of an idiot. The proof is that the bulk of her letter completely misses one of the main points I was making in the article she responds to. She goes on about how great Radost, the Globe and Glen's are, as if the purpose of my article was to attack them.

In fact, as I am sure the majority of readers understood, the point I was making is that there should have been more than this. I have nothing against any of these places (or others I mentioned, like the old Thirsty Dog): but we all had the opportunity to do something outstanding, and the results were disappointing. Unfortunately, a lot of ex-pats (like the divine Martha?) have no horizons beyond cheap absinthe and cous-cous. Well, she can't help being a loser I suppose.

No doubt sooner or later she will give up being a useless nobody in Prague and f*ck off back to America to take up where she left off with the dead-end life she deserves. (Anyone who is actually interested in Eastern Europe and its cultures, by the way, might want to look out for my next book, Parallel Cultures, out all over the world this year with Ashgate Press (London, New York, Canberra, etc.), and with a foreword by Sir Peter Ustinov - another 'desperate, fat, old man', I suppose.)

The next letter from Clay Broadfoot starts out more intelligently by asking 'Was it a joke?' but then unfortunately goes downhill by concluding that it wasn't.

Oh well.

But there is one reasonable criticism. Of course the beer ad is for Budvar. I had specifically asked the Think staff to check that, twice in fact, and was told (I quote) 'C'mon man, it's Think'. Oh well again. At least it's free.

A final point of fact for Ms Damncat. I did mention in my farewell article that there would be no more gypsy girls offering me sex in the street now. Regrettably, I never took them up on their kind offers to suck my cock.

Martha, though, is quite welcome to kiss my arse.

- Christopher Lord