Final Word from Tuesday, January 4, 2022
In an old Soviet joke, a disillusioned citizen complains to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev that the USSR is on the road to communism but that there's nothing to eat. "No one ever promised to feed you along the way," Brezhnev responds. Europeans are learning the gory details of their own road to greendom, and no one is promising to keep them warm along the way. One of the buzzwords is "temporary," and in this respect the Czechs are perhaps in better shape than some others. If they hog their nuclear power when the lights go out in Europe, they might be okay. One of the biggest complaints of energy experts is that the EU Commission is basing its grand plans on technology that doesn't yet exist. As Petr Otava of MTX put it, someone forgot to tell the Germans that the sun doesn't shine at night. It's like that other Soviet joke about how Brezhnev wanted to top the Americans by sending cosmonauts to the sun. Their spaceship wouldn't burn up, because the Party decided to send them at night. [ Czech Republic Soviet Union U.S.S.R. USA U.S. moon Communist ]
Glossary of difficult words
greendom - (not a real word) denoting a state of being green;
gory details - the explicit details of something;
buzzword - a word or phrase, often an item of jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context;
to hog something - to take or use most or all of something in an unfair or selfish way;
to top someone - to surpass (a person or previous achievement); to outdo.