Outrageous

Would you like some house music and beer on your commute?

How about some full-frontal nudity along with your Internet newscast?

I'm cheating a little bit here, since the tram party is only once a month and the naked newscasters are "not real news, just fun for men" as Lucie says. But still they're two things you wouldn't see in Seattle!

Here are two more things you wouldn't:

The first openly gay man running for Senate is called a "homosexual deviant" by his peers, among worse things. “Next we’ll see pedophiles and zoophiles claiming their place in society.” -Michal Ševčík, spokesman for the National Party.

[In 2008?!]

[Jiří] Hromada lightly dismisses such comments. “Uninformed stupidity cannot be weeded out,” he said, pointing out that, despite such sentiments, “There is no rise in homophobic feelings. That illusion is caused by the tabloidization of the press, which gives unwarranted coverage to extremists.” He also added his belief that the loudest opponents are usually latent homosexuals who are afraid to admit the truth. “They are the most aggressive toward our community, because they envy our freedom.”
-from the Post

Balls of steel!

And nearby--

"Slovak print media have a well-tested method for drawing the eyes of the public. In tense political moments when scathing critiques become so common they fail to even raise eyebrows, newspapers voice their protest through a last resort: the blank front page. During the recent debate over a bill limiting the freedom of Slovakia’s press, the editors-in-chief of the country’s leading dailies have undertaken such measures all too frequently.

Championed by Prime Minister Robert Fico, the bill, which Slovak Parliament approved April 9, seeks to amend the current press law through a “right of correction and response” clause described by international watchdog groups as “severely restrictive of editorial independence.”

To voice their opposition to the bill, a majority of the country’s daily newspapers responded by removing all routine copy from their March 27 and April 11 front pages, replacing it with a proclamation describing the press bill’s “seven capital sins.”
“How would you like it if your favorite newspaper was not written by reporters, but by someone else? This could be the result of a press bill from the smithy of the governing coalition,” the statement read.

Czech media have also gotten involved. Sympathizing with their Slovak counterparts, the editors of five leading local periodicals printed an open letter April 15 urging Slovak President Ivan Gašparovič to veto the bill.

In Slovakia’s young history, March 27 and April 11 represented the third and fourth dates on which newspapers printed blank front pages in protest of the government’s attempts to limit press freedom.

During the reign of often-controversial former President Vladimír Mečiar, dailies twice printed blank front pages in 1995 and 1997, protesting against a proposed bill raising tax for print publications. However, the row over the current press bill is unprecedented in that the blank front pages appeared just weeks apart."

I love the concept of the blank front page as protest. Unfortunately, the President signed the bill into law last week anyway. It essentially means that anyone who has a problem with what you write can dictate where, when, and how you correct it in print. Scary. The follow-up is that "the national journalists' syndicate and publishers' association are turning to the Constitutional Court to repeal the law, which goes into effect June 1."