My Old (The Státní Bezpečnost or StB) Intel Service’s 15 minutes of fame starts now …
The secret service of
communist-era Czechoslovakia
spied extensively on Donald Trump, it has emerged, with one informant alleging in 1977 that the future US
president-elect “is completely tax-exempt for the next 30 years”.
Czechoslovakia
spied on Donald and Ivana Trump, communist-era files show
Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, John Updike’s protagonist in Rabbit, Run, isn’t a freedom fighter or an intellectual. He’s not even particularly oppressed. What he is fighting back against is at once mundane and relatable: middle-class society. A former high-school basketball star, Rabbit is used to adoration, exhilaration and adrenaline. But, just 26, he works in a sales job that he doesn’t like, saddled with a two-year-old son and a pregnant wife who drinks and smokes too much. He yearns for freedom and questions the choices he has made. He wants out.
Updike said that he conceived of the novel, written in 1959, as a riposte to Jack Kerouac’s 1957 beatnik classic On the Road. Rabbit, Run was, he said, “meant to be a realistic
demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt”...
“Everybody who tells you how to act has whisky on their breath.”demonstration of what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt”...
Vaclav Havel and his secret messages to the world (RIP Dec 2011)
Maybe the Internet Isn't a Tool for Democracy After All
Maybe the Internet Isn't a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All ... were attempting to coordinate efforts outside the watchful eye of Czechoslovakstate security. ... Were free modems the catalyst for the Velvet Revolution?
I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen is a 1969 Czechoslovak science fiction comedy film directed by Oldřich Lipský. Wikipedia says "it became known for the scene showing the first selfie stick."
Here's the full movie. The opening seconds probably raised some eyebrows at the time:
Selfie stick in 1969 Czechoslovak science fiction movie Boing Boing