Magazine

Dominik Feri, photo: archive of TOP 09
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In Magazine: a newly-elected councilor says his political success has resulted in a lot of bad hair days, Czechs like flirting in the workplace, curvy girls strip off in support of the fight against teenage anorexia and the country’s second richest man enjoys a communist-era “retro” lunch on the 25th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.

Dominik Feri,  photo: archive of TOP 09
One of the newly-elected councilors of Teplice has been making headlines around the country. At eighteen, student Dominik Feri is the youngest candidate to be elected to the post and he will be sitting on the town council together with the headmaster of his school and several of his teachers. He moreover stands out in the crowd due to his impressive Afro hairdo. Dominik, who has African roots says “I’m Czech to the core, I just have more hair than you do”. He is full of ideas on how to improve life in the town, is an amateur photographer, loves jazz and wearing suits. He says his hairstyle has suffered due to his success in politics. “This hairdo takes a lot of time to create in the morning and because I am now constantly in a rush I have a lot of bad hair days,” he told journalists who haven’t stopped taking his picture since he got elected.


Photo: archive of Radio Prague
Czechs are not averse to flirting at the work place, and 36 percent of them flirt with their colleagues on a daily basis, according to a survey conducted by the Axe agency. 90 percent of respondents say they have flirted with someone in their workplace and a third of Czechs say flirting is fun, means nothing, makes their day brighter and boosts their self-confidence.


Photo: Lukáš Materna
A dozen curvy young women stripped off for a calendar photo shoot which is to prove that curvy can be beautiful and to help fight anorexia among teenage girls. Photographer Lukáš Materna says he launched the project in order to give curvier girls more self-confidence. We need to change society’s outlook and let Czech women know that female beauty does not end with size 36, the photographer said. With the exception of one, none of the girls are models- they simply reacted to an appeal online and turned up for the photo shoot in order to support the idea.


Andrej Babiš,  photo: CTK
One of several dozen events marking 25 years since the fall of communism was a so-called retro lunch at Albertov college belonging to the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University. Monday’s retro lunch was the kind of fare regularly served to students and indeed at many Czech restaurants before 1989. The day’s menu offered grits soup, pork with rice and “UBS” – a commonly used abbreviation for Universal Brown Sauce and lukewarm tea to wash it down with. Among those who came to sample the lunch was the billionaire entrepreneur and current Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babiš. Clearly, the man’s not picky.


Photo: Public Domain
Do you stop to think about how detectives in movies produce incriminating evidence against the culprit? Most people accept the procedure at face value, but five students from the Jan Neruda secondary school in Prague uncovered a series of mistakes in a Sherlock Holmes movie or the Miami Vice crime series. Five of them picked forensic medicine for a school project and set about following the set procedure in the given crime movie. “We soon realized that some of the stated methods were utter nonsense,” one of the students said later. “In the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie Holmes reads an inked message from a charred slip of paper with the help of a certain acid. The stated acid does not even exist, so we put that down to a mistake in translation and assumed that sulfuric acid would do the trick. But no matter how many times we tried the experiment failed.” the student said. “In one of the Miami vice series the detective puts together a fingerprint from several bits of broken glass. In theory it sounds plausible but it proved impossible to achieve in practice,” he added. The experiments went beyond the requested school project and now the students together with their teacher of forensic medicine are preparing to shoot their own crime movie.