When looking through the web stats, I got to wondering why, outside of North America, Holland would be the hotbed of the greatest number of my readers when I realized it is the Google effect. Having used the word Nederlands and therefore been linked by a few Dutch blog trolling spiders or bots or whatever they are, I get a bit of a boost on Dutch Google and, bob’s your uncle, I stand tall in the low countries. So…can this be manufacturered?
My wife and I met in Kołobrzeg, a resort city on the Baltic Coast of Poland where the Nazis met a well-deserved, nasty fate at the hands of the Red Army on the beaches after running out of both land and options in the spring of ’45. The ever patient Ellen and I both taught ESL there and, unlike most others who travelled to Eastern Europe to teach a decade or so ago, briefly enjoyed a rather splendid if corney luxury lifestyle – Bulgarian wines, tinned elk and boar, first walkman in the province, at $400 a month an income 3 times that of a doctor. A sense of the place can be seen in some of its websites for a sanitorium/spa, a hotel/spa, spa-tourism, spa-fishing-poets, spa-investment, yacht-spa, people at the spa town…I suppose I could go on…Anyway, this is an open invite for discussion of all things Kołobrzeg. What the hell.
PS – if your computer shows a small raised “3” between the two o’s of the name, it is spelled Kolobrzeg with a little bar across the “L” kinda pronounced “e-u”: “Ł” or “ł”
[Update in 2016: proof of the finding of Kay…]
The good lads at 
Suffered in having us from time to time creeping in, lifting the bed where he lay between drunk and hung to two feet off the floor, dropping it as we screamed “wake up”. Rather than wallowing in glory days, we we toured the downtown pubs 
That danged 14th page. I haven’t read that passage for 20 years and that is to me that has always been the little, dangerous knowledge. I learned about Gogol from Yuri Glazov who, along with George Grant, were the first really bright old guys I ever met. Both taught me a few courses at Kings and Dal in the early 1980’s and, for all their depth of understanding, could still spare the time: laughing with the ideas of a far too drunk kid over a cheese tray, Glazov holding his night’s one Ten Penny in his slavic mitt, me holding eight in my gut; Grant stopping when walking the dog to ask about a cold fall soccer practice, ciggie ash trailing down his sweatered belly.
They were too bright to be interested in any kind of heated discussion with me – they were happy to listen to kids who get B’s, make small talk at the Capital Store. I recall each man laughing a lot, which was good. Not only as they really weren’t part of the mild, shallow elitism there at King’s then, though some fawned, but as each had suffered to some real degree personally and professionally for their thoughts – Glazov in the Soviet Union when rejecting his faith in Communism, Grant for standing by his deep but somewhat homey understanding conservativism and Christian faith devoid of what we would call conservative Christianity today.