Prague City Beat

In Margot Buff’s 2005 “mini-documentary,” recently added to YouTube, Anti Anti Fest organizers Marika Ley and Pamela Moye explain the concept behind their annual Prague-based underground film festival.

Bored with traffic duty, two of the Czech Republic’s finest find an entertaining new use for those dinky little paddles they carry.

Batten down the hatches!
The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute is warning that the wind — already pretty fierce in Prague — could reach hurricane-strength speeds of up to 125 kilometers per hour (78 mph) this evening.
In mountainous areas of the Czech Republic, meanwhile, wind speeds could reach 145 km/h.
According to iDnes.cz, trees have already fallen in western [...]

What’s the point of the Airport Express?
Launched in December 2005, the bus service was designed to link the Nádraží Holešovice railway station with the airport.
In theory, this makes it easier for people travelling into the capital, on high-speed Pendolino trains from Ostrava, to make their flights in Prague.
Although it looks like a regular city bus, [...]

Is the future of peer-to-peer file-sharing taking shape right here in Prague?
That’s the hope of AllPeers, an Anglo-French company whose enterprise center is based in the Czech capital.
Compared to other P2P systems, AllPeers’s big selling point is that it’s a Firefox extension rather than a standalone program, and operates within your web browser.
For those bad, [...]

Originally posted on Stumpy Moose:
Shameless consumerism has finally reached our corner of Prague.
The Sestka shopping centre opened in November, on the road out to the airport, and we’ve been there several times since.
In a few short weeks, I’ve bought new trainers, a computer monitor, a digital dictaphone, an artificial Christmas tree, a CD of Indian [...]

Mmmm… Tramp… I bought this in a Delvita a few years ago but, for some reason, I never got round to eating it.

Following on from last year’s Monster Ball IV charity Halloween party, we’ve received this “thank you” letter from Andrey, one of the refugees we were able to help out:
Dear Ladies’n’Gentlemen,
First of all do accept my apologies for the mistakes that might appear in this letter and congratulations on the Christmas and New Year celebrations [...]

Could there finally be a truce in the century-long legal battle over the Budweiser trademark?
The news that Anheuser-Busch are to become the US importer of “Czechvar” – the name under which Budvar is marketed in North America – suggests that relationships between the two sides aren’t as frosty as they seem.
Call me crazy, call me [...]

Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolánek (center) is clearly a man who can handle a lot of stress.
As well as trying to put together a workable government, and survive political infighting within his own ODS party, the 50-year-old politician announced on Friday that’s he’s leaving his wife and moving in with his mistress.
Out goes 51-year-old [...]

Love it or (more likely) hate it, the Tesco department store on Národní is now a protected building, and officially listed as part of the Czech Republic’s cultural heritage.
It emerged yesterday that outgoing Culture Minister Martin Štěpánek has rejected Tesco’s appeal against listing the building.
The British chain was supposedly frustrated with the positioning of the [...]

Today’s edition of the Prague Daily Monitor features a Ä?TK story about British feminist Annette Lawson, who, on a recent visit to Prague, “was shocked by nude women’s pictures in cabs and billboards advertising Thai massage…”

So is the Monitor’s decision to run an ad for a (presumably different) Thai massage parlor on that page an [...]

…is the title of a Mladá fronta Dnes story from last week, detailing some of the changes we can expect over the next 12 months.
First, the bad news…
• The deregulation of council-owned homes could see rent rise by several thousand crowns per year (Related Discussion Forum Thread)
• Water bills will rise by 12 percent
• Taxi [...]