Hello hello,

Three short thingies for you today. Hope you enjoy them - if you do, consider forwarding this email to a friend. They will definitely love you forever.

Taking a wok to Poland

A friend brought this story to my attention last week and I am ever so grateful.

It turns out that there is a very popular hip-hop song doing the rounds at the moment with the title Poland. It's by Lil Yachty.

Mr Yachty is part of a subgenre called "cloud rap". Unfortunately it has nothing to do with the pioneering cLOUDDEAD from over 20 years ago. Instead these rappers pepper their faces with tattoos, get high by drinking cough syrup, and mumble lazily into an auto-tune filter instead of rapping. Much of it is a bit boring, but some is entertaining, especially if you're in an ironic mood. And Poland seems to have hit that perfect pitch with listeners.

Maybe it's the influence of TikTok on the music industry, but the song is not even a minute and a half long, so you might as well watch the full music video:

Watching it myself, I got excited there actually was a subway station somewhere called Poland, which would explain the song a bit. But no, they added the Poland sign just for the music video. It seems Lil Yachty is indeed singing about the country.

Listening to it, it sounds like he's talking about "taking a walk" to Poland. But also like he's "taking a wok" to Poland. Many viewers (including my friend) were quick to assure him that woks are readily available in Poland, and there was no need to bring his own:

("Mr Boat, here in Poland you can buy every type of kitchenware")

There was even a mock music video about taking a wok to Poland. But Lil Yachty is actually singing about, surprise surprise, a brand of cough syrup he likes to get high off.

Either way, it's been a bit of a viral hit (with 16 million views on YouTube alone), so much so that the rapper's agent claims to have been in touch with Poland's Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki. He sent these screenshots to news site HipHopDX as proof:

Unsurprisingly, Lil Yachty had never heard of Morawiecki.

Why Morawiecki would want Lil Yachty to actually bring codeine-enriched cough syrup to Poland is anybody's guess. I suppose he needs to relax too, and it is cough season.

Translating Marek old ebook almost available again

I finally got round to putting the old ebook In the Shadow of the Mechanised Apocalypse: Warsaw 1946 onto the Internet again. This time it should actually be easily findable. I remade the cover and gave it a fresh proofing (I realised the original version didn't have Polish characters in any of the place names, which I felt needed changing).

It's in a series of approval phases I have no control over at the moment, but it should appear over the next few days and weeks on Amazon, Google Play, Apple iBooks, Kobo, Scribd, Barnes & Noble, and even Empik if you're in Poland. It might even appear in Chinese e-libraries next year.

I'm not expecting to make much off it, but it has made me think about what else Marek-related I might publish, especially in the run-up to the new Marek exhibition next year in Toruń. We shall see!

Water filter of the week

Tom Scott, a popular British Youtuber who usually makes science videos (and many about London), visited Warsaw recently to make a video about its sewerage system. Why? Because Warsaw famously uses clams to clean its tap water, and he wanted to see for himself.

Yes, clams. Like the shellfish. See for yourself:

Ok, we're done, you can go get on with your life now. Buy yourself a chocolate bar maybe? Until next time, thanks for reading!

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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