Birthday card featuring possibly unintentional math puzzler

Green food?

This is a pretty standard liquor-and-junk-food store at the end of a low-rent strip mall.  The first picture is from 2011; it shows the owner angling for the SWPL market, perhaps.  The second picture is from 2012.  It indicates further refinement of the same marketing strategy.

A story with a happy ending

Impossible instruction, seen at Starbucks mensroom

Step 6 (in case it's not legible in this picture) is "Turn off water with a paper towel."  This is in a bathroom with an electric hand dryer but no paper towel dispenser of any kind.

Albert Juszczak, Mastering Polish

I like this book. Though it does throw a bit much at you in the first chapter, it slows down and gets more methodical after that. And contrary to what one of the other reviewers says, the grammar *is* explained, indeed with great care and in small chewable pieces. The back of the book helpfully contains an answer key to the exercises. And the choice of vocabulary and dialogue situations is well-thought-out. I hate to say it, but the negative reviews here seem to have been written by people who gave up too soon, or had no idea that Polish is (for Americans anyway) alot harder than Spanish or French.

I have only two criticisms. One is that there is no unified grammar-reference section; if you forget a detail, you need to find the chapter where that point of grammar was introduced. My second criticism is really just a quibble but on the CDs only two different voices are ever heard -- one man, one woman. It's not a big deal really, it's more comical than confusing, for example at the auto mechanic's shop it sounds like one guy is arguing with himself (over the "straszny" price of getting his rear axle repaired)! Surely, even on a low budget, Juszczak could have roped a few family and friends to do extra voices. Or maybe it's just a Polish thing, the way Polish TV's dubbed versions of foreign programs will use just one voice throughout.

So all in all, a good book. If, however, you already know Russian, a more appropriate book (if you can find it -- it's been out of print for ten years and I was lucky to find one in Armenia) is Uchebnik Pol'skogo Iazyka . It'll leverage what you already know and focus on the specific points where Polish is different from Russian, like cool little diagrams comparing the semantic ranges of cognate words. It's also a bigger book with far more vocabulary, and readings that take you all the way to real, unedited, Polish. But even so, it's worth buying Juszczak's book just to listen to the CDs.