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The gallery is here: https://chomikuj.pl/NarodoweArchiwumPapieskie
Praise the guy with too much time on his hands and a great deal of memetic verve.
So...
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CENZODUDA AFTER FIVE YEARS, OR, EITHER YOU DIE A HERO...
In one of the previous entries, I have described how the President (with guest appearances by his family) became a meme. This is going to be a short update intended to cover what's changed since his election. Needless to say, this is going to involve politics a bit.
Although many have speculated that the Prezzie will grow to be independent of his party - the office of the president is little beholden to party politics, save for reelection - Duda has not made much of an impression. While nobody really expected any Sarajevos, umbrella openings, or extrajudicial killings of posters of cenzodudas, he rather failed to build up an independent power base or pretty much any image of an active politician. As time passed, this impression only strengthened - his overall reputation on the internet (barring places that are specifically supportive of the ruling party) is that of a guy who only ever skis and signs whatever's passed to him, and he's became known by nicknames such as "the ballpen", or by the name "Adrian", which appeared in a satirical show and was intended to show that not even his own party cares about him (hint: his name is Andrzej).
This has had an impact on his memetic depictions. For one, it's been a long time since I have seen any Sarajevo meme. While they are deliberately absurd, not to mention, depict him as a war criminal, they also assign a measure of agency to him (you need to have some to be a genocidal warlord). Also, his daughter, whose looks earned him some points by association among the young male memester population, went under the radar a few years ago. Technically, that should still leave his depiction as a rambunctious schoolboy, but even that seems to have mostly vanished from the internet. So, what's left? Well, I have seen a photoshopped image of him as a "gigachad", but for the most part, the newer memes show him as a happy-go-lucky, clueless guy showing up in various random places, sort of Mr. Bean of politics, using some of the older memetic images now repurposed for less flattering depictions.
In fact, the role of the memetic bad guy was taken over by the prime minister. A banker by trade, he's somewhat ill-fitting to the rest of the Party, a big city technocrat kind of guy in the company of ideological crusaders and lifelong apparatchiks who nonetheless seems to carry the favour of the Supreme Leader. Unlike the Dudie, who's nothing like the way he was depicted at first, memesters generally build upon the Mattie's background as a money man, depicting him as a bankster, or more often, a harsh tax man who will tax even the taxes you are taxed with just for the sadistic pleasure of having driven your small business into the ground. This is still silly ("two bourgeois exploiters broke into the house of H U G E prime minister, who held them for two days and taxed many times"), but at least, as a prime minister he has more to do with taxes than Dudie ever had with Sarajevo.
POLISH URBAN LEGENDS
First things first, while I may update this post or otherwise continue when I come up with new entries, this is all based on what I can come up with. Since I write for the most part from memory and don't quite go out of my way to piece together a bibliography section, then unless I specifically stumble upon a good source, there might be some that have eluded me. Also, I would prefer to omit explicitly political conspiracy theories. They're less fun to read, except when particularly loony, but even then you don't quite have the notion of harmless fun.
The order is more-or-less based on what I find, at the moment, dramatically appropriate. I guess I could put it on the basis of, like, chronology or whatever, but then we're back to whether or not it makes for more enjoyable reading. Oh, and I think what will actually make it better is to compare it to urban legends from abroad, so I'll do that.
So.
1) FOXBIT, or THE RABBOX, and the related phantom creatures
In Polish: królis, a portmanteau of królik, "bunny" or "rabbit", and lis, "a fox". Allegedly, it was a mutated creature from Chernobyl that found its way into Polish forests (mostly a specific forest complex/national park near Warsaw), looking like the cross between exactly the creatures you expect.
The "rabbox", if I may call it so, was supposed to scare those who took a walk in a forest, chew through car wiring and rubber parts, and so on. Decidedly unlike a bunny, and probably unlike a fox either. I am told there even were media warnings about the creature, along with reports by terrified citizens.
It's my speculation only, but I believe the rabies scare might have been a factor in the legend. Admittedly I'm not sure when the scare started, or even if it had a specific beginning point, but I remember from my childhood the warnings to stay away from stray animals, and the public service announcements about the immunisation efforts. The latter mostly worked in such a way: bits of bait containing doses of rabies vaccine were spread, by airplane IIRC, so that animals would eat them. And by "animals", I mean predominantly foxes, which brings us back to them. Like I said, I don't know, but this seems like a clue.
According to my sources this legend became popular, you guessed it, in late Eighties and early Nineties, to die down as time (and memories of Chernobyl) passed. I haven't ever heard of it, until I've read some sort of press article. Having read about it again in a book about the mindsets during the circa-'89 transition period, it became kind of an inspiration to write this post.
Now, on to the similarities to other legends. This is not really a cryptid story in my opinion; it might fit the definition, but it doesn't seem quite there. Cryptid legends seem to stay for a longer time than this one. Perhaps we missed the mark: it failed to reach the threshold of popularity to become a cryptid story, like some sort of a folkloric brown dwarf. Did not stay for long enough, or was not tied strongly enough to a specific place, so it waned from popular memory instead, to be remembered only in the context of the chaotic period of political and economic transition, as a crazy story people told each other against the backdrop of all the other crazy things that were happening around them.
So anyway, instead of among cryptids, I'd place it in the same context as the Phantom Cats.
Do you know about the Phantom Cats? It's a popular British urban legend, but also an Australian one, and propping up in other places as well. Including, you guessed it, Poland, but I'll get back to that in a while.
The British version is about big cats - think panthers, not bobcats - appearing in the British countryside, supposedly as a result of being let loose from some illegal private zoo. It's quite an old one, and much ink has been spilled, including the supposed links to Celtic mythology, folklore, and the assorted stuff. Sometimes it's mixed with conspiratorial thinking along the lines of "government denies knowledge (of big cats), doo dee doo dee dee doo", but that's rather tangential to the core story.
Like I said, in Poland, we had a case a few years ago. There was a sighting, media reported on it, and people from various parts of the country began to claim they have seen one. The fact that media reported every of these supposed cases probably explains a lot. For what it matters, the issue was officially settled with a claim that these people just saw a bobcat and/or a lynx and drew associations with the media craze rather than with a rare, but perfectly mundane, animal.
But you know, we also recently had a case of a guy who lived in a forest with a pet cougar. Had this cougar escaped, we might've had a genuine case. And in this light, the Phantom Cat story becomes slightly less silly. Now, does this tell us something about the rabbox? Well, who knows? Perhaps somebody was bit by a rabid fox, and the story grew in the telling.
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Whoa, it's longer than I expected. I guess I'll be adding new entries in separate posts after all.
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minor edit: I've decided to add a few links that may count as sources. Most are in Polish, so this is more-or-less an exercise in thoroughness, but here they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_cat
https://www.antyradio.pl/News/Legendy-Czarnobyla-Mutanty-z-Czerwonego-Lasu-31257
https://dziennikpolski24.pl/plotka-konca-wieku/ar/2237192
https://e-teatr.pl/nieboskie-stworzenie-r56441 - a televised play about the rabbox
Also, the period sources elude me, but what I can reach agrees that without a media craze, there might have been no rabbox legend. I've mentioned that media had a hand in spreading this story, but perhaps I should have placed more of an emphasis on their role.
it's not like urban legends are properly sourced anywaySo, have you heard about the Amber Room? In short, it was a full rooms' worth of decorations of Baltic amber - it's described as a whole room, so I guess, it's everything, from wall panels to furniture to decorations. I always mess up the details, so the minimal amount of history is that it was constructed in 18th Century for Frederick I of Prussia, and vanished during evacuation of Prussia in late stages of Second World War. In my parts of the world, it's considered exactly the kind of lost treasure that Indiana Jones would search for.
(Podlasie Nowak? Khokhloma Ivanov? Pripyat Kravchuk?)
Part of the mythos, as you may have guessed, is that nobody knows where it is. As in, it was never confirmed to have been destroyed in any unquestionable manner. (It is presumed to have been destroyed, since that's the most sensible option, but it's not, like, sure.) So, there always are some folks who dig up some oblique reports that may imply it was hidden somewhere in an old mine shaft, or something of that sort. You know how it works, it's kinda like proofs of conspiracies or existence of aliens, you never get any good quality photos or reliable witnesses, the supposed proofs are more like some vague hint and a bucketload of wishful thinking, and it's rare when in the end it does not boil down to the word of the guy who tells the story.
On an intersection of "destroyed" and "just somewhere out there" lies the possibility that it sunk along with a ship and lies somewhere on the Baltic sea floor. Can't deny it, it's probably the most sensible claim of its survival. (Well, "survival" as in "there's a chance some of it survived in any recognizable shape".) As for me, I always kinda wish the crazy claim is proven true just for the coolness factor, but never get my hopes high. And anyways, an exact copy of the Amber Room has since been made, so you don't have to wish for whip-wielding archaeologists to see it.
So, you might have noticed there's been no mention of any trains so far. That's because I began with the Amber Room story to set the mood.
Like, a few years ago, there erupted a craze revolving around a supposed train full of Nazi gold that was to be located somewhere in Silesia. (A part of Poland that used to be a part of Germany till 1945.) Supposedly, they hid it somewhere there. Supposedly, it was underground. Supposedly, somebody located it with a ground-penetrating radar. Supposedly, it was found or tracked down to an abandoned mine shaft. Yeah, it's a lot of supposedlies. It was a pretty crazy summer, you know. (Have you noticed these stories erupt in the summer, when everyone is on holidays and there's little business or politics going on?) Lots of people took to roaming the countryside in search of it and even the official authorities got in on the fun, but somehow (yet unsurprisingly), nothing has been found so far, and the story remains a fun way to pass the time for urbex fans.
As it often happens, the two stories got at some point mixed and there was some speculation that the Golden Train contained fragments of the Amber Room.
So, what does this say about us? Well, first, everyone loves a good treasure hunt, and both of these stories offer exactly that. Probably less on the beating up Nazis along the way part, though. (These days, any actual Nazis would be like nonagenarians, and as for beating up neo-Nazis, you're more likely to end up prosecuted than them.) But then, there is a third story to it.
Like, there's an urban legend that somebody meets an old German, the old German tells him he used to live in his house and asks for a specific room to be rented to him for a night, and in the morning there's no German and a hole in the wall in just the right size and shape for a container filled with valuables. In the Polish folklore, when it's not a Jew who has the money (the old school), it's the German (the modern staple), and the Germans have the advantage that they're still around just west o' the border and you can safely diss them.
The Germans also hate Poland, so they deliberately sell us low-quality domestic chemistry. (Yeah, people really believe in it.)
So, the Golden Train is like a cool treasure hunt in a Nazi dungeon spiced with the Evil German meme. What's not to like there?
But wait, there's more! My sources 3 and 4 also say it goes even deeper; apparently there is a whole community of treasure hunters and conspiracy theorists who have linked the Golden Train with even out-there stories of Nazi UFOs and the like. That's an entirely different and less specifically Polish story, so I'l say little of it, although wikipedia claims at least some strains of the story were invented in Poland. What's a bit more specifically Polish, though, is the mindset professed by some of the treasure hunters described in one of my sources, who apparently believe in a sort of government-denies-knowledge interference from officials and foreign companies towards their supposed finds. You see, in America, it's your own government that denies knowledge. In Poland, the Polish government is itself a pawn of some higher-level forces, though a willing and sycophantic one. (Do you know a conspiracy theorist that has a positive opinion on their own government? Not on a supposed heroic figure, but on the whole machine in general? Yeah.) In other words, if Mulder was Polish, chances are the Cigarette-Smoking Man would have still been an American. (Though presumably a Jew.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Room
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gold_train
http://mitologiawspolczesna.pl/rodzinnych-kosztownosci-globalny-spisek/
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/zloty-pociag-przejechal-159831
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Glocke
Though I misunderstood something along the way, I thought the event of it being ransacked by Nazis was real-real, not conspiracy-real.
Also, this makes me curious: did you guys get any Nazis, or did they all go to Argentine?
I know one of the conspiracy theories about metaphorically Hitler not commiting suicide is about him escaping here instead (as in, Maracaibo). Other than that, nope, even before WWII Venezuela was an unwelcoming place for Nazis.
As in, concentration-camp-unwelcomingI just looked it up and it was built during WWII, but still.I guess this is in Poland
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minor edit: turns out the city where the train is supposed (at least in the initial version of the story) to be located, had since capitalized on it to bolster local tourism. Here's the ad:
Namely, the article makes a point that the Golden Train is particularly important to the local identity. See, so far it's been a rather unimportant local city. The most common reason for it to appear in nation-wide media have been, for long, the "poor-shafts", illegal coal mining operations. It's like some sort of West Virginia of Poland. And suddenly, bam! The locals brag, because that's the best word to describe it, that for a moment, their city was a worldwide sensation, the tourism boosted by like a factor of two since then, so on. So, the Golden Train has become an unexpected rallying point for local identity and local patriotism. No wonder they use it in advertising.
3) THE INFAMOUS BLACK VOLGA
Because just try to tell me this car does not look evil.
I've seen some hints that the legend began in Soviet Union, or that it otherwise is well-known there. (For sure, that it's well-known in multiple countries is sourced by actual research, but as of writing this entry I don't quite know where it first appeared and if it spread from there.) This would certainly make sense - Volga, the car, kind of speaks to it, as well as the rather straightforward genesis of the myth. But more of that later.
In the "classic" take, the story involved a black car, usually with white rims and/or curtains, the mysterious drivers of which abducted people never to be seen again, mostly children. From that point on, the legend usually developed into a claim that the abductions were for the purpose of illegal organ trade or to collect blood for transfusions, but seriously, the more I say the likelier it is there were multiple versions in circulation. The blood and organs were usually said to be used for the benefit of rich foreigners, whether in some sort of rejuvenation or comparatively mundane leukemia therapy. In Poland, this meant Germans or Arab sheiks; in Mongolia, the Chinese.
This is about the furthest I can go without the story splitting.
Now, since I have said that, I might as well say who was supposed to drive it: local secret police, local criminals, foreign spies, foreign criminals, priests, nuns, Jews (because duh), satanists, vampires, or Satan himself. Note this probably fails to cover all versions. (You might note no witches on the list. You see, literal witch-hunts aren't really a part of Polish cultural memory, even if an occasional witch is. But it might be different in the other countries the legend is known in.)
Wikipedia also says that Czechoslovakian version of the 70's involved a black ambulance, while Romanian had the Volgas replaced with Dacias.
But let's now try to ascertain the genesis of the myth, like I said. A Volga was what passed for a high-end car in the early Soviet bloc, you see. This was the car that the secret police would have driven. And Lavrentiy Beria, chief of NKVD and Stalin's right-hand man, would by all means abduct people off the streets, because the dude was a fucking serial rapist and a part-time serial killer on top of being, you know, chief of the NKVD. So the association of the car with people disappearing had a very good grounding in fact.
But, is it where the legend comes from? Hard to say. An article I link to (in Polish, sorry) offers an interesting story about a mid-Sixties attempted abduction case involving a black Volga cab. Two women hatched a plot to kidnap a child, out of a desire to have a healthy baby after one of them bore a blind girl, and were seen using the cab in their getaway. The car's driver never came forward and it could be that the tale, after a few rounds of pass-the-message too many, focused on the car rather than the women's motivation and evolved into the story we know and love.
That this offered parents a cheap way to scare their children straight no doubt helped, as did the fact that the secret police surely enjoyed the spike in fear.
So, was it where it started? I dunno. This would require the story of a simple abduction case to spread from Poland to Mongolia, in the span reduced to some twenty years at most. I am told that in Mongolia it even warranted an official investigation. At most, I would guess that the 60's abduction case cross-pollinated with the already present fear of the secret police, rather than assume it had a single starting point there, or that local, originally separate legends were subsumed into a wider stream. At some point, the story must have been mixed with an inferiority complex involving rich people and/or powerful neighbours, too. But the basis, after all else is said, is rather straightforward: "black car abducts people". Even Americans have their Men in Black and black helicopters.
Now, does this say everything there's to be said? Turns out the answer is "no".
Well, first, I will note I have no idea why members of the clergy would have driven it. But it nicely fits into the next, explicitely supernatural phase of the legend. You see, at some point the Volga began to exhibit explicitly demonic features, such as the number "666" on the license plate, or horns in place of wing mirrors. Some versions also held the car red. I am not sure about the time when these features appeared; what I am loosely sure, is that in the 90's, after the fall of the Soviet bloc, the story resurfaced with black German cars in place of the Volgas. By that time, a Volga would have been an old-timey car driven by a decrepit old man; a high-end German one, though, would make about the same impression as Volga did these thirty years earlier, with perhaps the difference lying in that the driver would have been assumed to be a thug of free (criminal) enterprise rather than a thug of the state.
But, I told you there was a supernatural element. Well, here it is. The Volgas only kidnapped people; the horned black BMWs and horned black Mercedeses often pulled off this trick: they would drive up to a pedestrian, lower the (darkened) window a little, and the unseen driver would ask, "which time is it?" - the pedestrian, or rather the victim, would die this very minute on the next day.
And here the fun comes: if you sassed, told them "your last" or "it is God's time", they would leave you at peace. The "your last" - in Polish, you ask for time "which hour it is?" (EDIT: a linguistic note: "your last" = "your last [one]" = "your final [hour]") - is exactly the kind of rude schoolboy's lame comeback that you think it is. It's pretty much "yo momma" or "no, you!" of telling the time.
Which kind of neatly fits with all the folk tales about a smart peasant having a victory over Devil himself, or even more, since they rarely literally sassed the Old Scratch back to Hell as this story posits. Which is surprisingly optimistic: for one, you never sassed back when it was still the Volga.
The Devil is less scary than secret police, it would appear.
A few links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Volga
https://monster.fandom.com/wiki/Black_Volga
https://www.thefoundrycast.com/single-post/2019/08/30/Black-Volga-The-True-Story
https://dziennikpolski24.pl/plotka-konca-wieku/ar/2237192
https://polskatimes.pl/prawdziwa-historia-czarnej-wolgi-ktora-siala-przerazenie/ar/827185
Perhaps it is a testament to modern-day travel and communication. Well, pre-internet.
Nowadays, urban legends are called internet memes. =P
You know, this reminds me of what was likely my first "I don't get the younger generation" moment. Like, on a students' trip, I listened to freshman students telling each other creepypastas as part of telling spooky stories around a bonfire. (Well, not around a bonfire but on the trail, but I wanted to convey the mood.) And they treated them as any other spooky story to tell. I was like, for me, "spooky story" and "spooky story on the Internet" formed at least partially separate categories. But for them, they were apparently equal to each other.
Also: I'm thinking right now S. King's From a Buick 8 might be actually compared to this legend. An apparently supernatural car in a horror story. Christine also fits the premise, sure, but Buick 8 kinda plays up the mysteriousness, so I'm going with this one rather.
But that's not quite what you ask about. So. When you want to scare your child into behaving, the stereotypical thing is "a man will come and take you away" or something dumb like that that will send the kid into psychotherapy some fifteen years down the line. Or "a policeman will come and take you away". Which I was inclined to say, was even dumber, since this undermined any sort of healthy trust in authority the child might have had, but then I've read all these Slate and Vice articles about not letting your kid watch Paw Patrol because there's a positive cop dog character in it, so I'm guessing you guys might have a different opinion.
tl;dr Baba Jaga is not a typical scare-'em-straight character, but sure, if it works, it works.
It's fine, I was born a grumpy old man. An immature grumpy old man.
Turns out the janusz meme isn't completely over. Like, it's not about a monkey, more like the poor cop stuff, but it's a new development, so I'm posting about it.
So, there's a local political figure, a man with, ahem, a wide face and likewise a wide form, and a mustache to boot. Kind of like that cop, except wider. Some netizen swiped his face to serve as the image of the janusz-as-an-enterpreneur and he called it "janusz alpha".
As far as I can say, the guy's doing better than the cop from that meme, since he was already a person of some local importance and hence probably used to people saying shizzle about him on the Internet. It's a bit of relief.
Anyways, the janusz alpha is the stereotypical bad boss. You know, the one for whom labor law is more like a set of guidelines. He's usually presented as addressing some "Areczek", which is a double diminutive of the male name "Arkadiusz". "Areczek" in these memes is implied to be a young man who enters the labor market on terms decidedly to his disadvantage. "Janusz alpha" is the kind of boss who monitors how often "Areczek" pees, for one.
Yes, allusions to Amazon practices are common. Some memes actually turn the joke around, all but stating that companies like Amazon act like they were run by some boor from the ass-end of Poland rather than a "sophisticated" man from "civilized" urban America. (I'm not implying America isn't civilized, this is rather about what the US still feels like to an average Pole.)
Although they're also filtered through the daily life of the Polish countryside. Consider this meme an expression of disillusionment of the young male who recognizes the game is rigged against him yet nonetheless still clings to the ideals of the free market. (The young male who is willing to ditch them in favour of socialist ideals probably wouldn't settle down for venting off by posting memes; also, he's rather more likely to live in a big city and work in creative industry or big tech rather than in the countryside and work for a small-to-mid-level enterpreneur.)
Janusz alpha has a female secretary, "Anetka" (diminutive of "Aneta", Anette), who, in more absurd versions of the meme, apparently keeps a paralyzer and uses it on any employee that the boss finds slacking off. In some newer varieties, "Areczek" too gets in on the fun, being told to grab the paralyzer and fetch some of the illegal immigrants from Belarus.
(It's getting late, so I will look over this entry tomorrow, and also add sources when I get to it.)
Sources: mostly "Januszex" by BądźmyPoważni -
So, I had this thought that at this point I should probably make a separate entry to list all the names to appear in Polish memesphere, or at the very least the names that appear with any notable frequency. I will edit this entry and add more in case I have forgot something; if a new memetic name breaks into the memesphere I will probably add it here as well as make a separate entry with a broader description.
An arguable point to be made is that these characters can be compared to popular wojak evolutions such as the -mers, but as you will see it's rarely 1:1.
In general, the names assigned to the character are stereotypical of the age cohort the character belongs to.
So:
The classics:
Woah, now that I spelled it out, it turns out to be a lot more classist and male-centric than I had thought of it before.
Some minor characters:
There's also the loose adaptations of "chads" and "stacies", but with a significant local twist:
Because I realized it deserves an entry.
And so, the number 2137 found unexpected popularity. There are threads where people post photos of encountering it in the wild, it's halfway to becoming the stand-in number for "very many", and so on and so forth. Where other nations may have 69 or 420 or some other, Poland has 2137.
Also, as a were-cheetah. I have no idea where did that come from or what was in the mind of whichever mad genius who came up with it. War criminals and Nazis at least make some rudimentary sense when you want to be insulting, but this? The least I can say is that I don't mind it one bit.
"Slandering the pope" is a good translation. I've been using "insulting", but I guess I've got a better one from now on. It's become a go-to term, too, the term "slandering" goes in hand with "pope" like, I dunno, some other two things that are just natural to go together.
Yeah, "the papal hour" (papieska) or "the pope hour" (papieżowa). Note that papieżowa is grammatically correct, but the proper form, the one to be found in a dictionary, is papieska. Another common name is "the W-hour", after the pope's family name, Wojtyła, and also an allusion to Polish wartime anti-Nazi resistance so you could have twice the irreverence for the price of one.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=2137
I've just found an article that serves as an interesting corollary to the story of patostreaming. It's not really about the phenomenon of patostreaming at its core, but it touches their story in a sort of "where are they now" epilogue. Here it is, in my translation:
Just so you know what you're getting into.
Yeah, we know the guy already. Also, the word I translate as "co-habitant" carries the connotations of "kinda like boyfriend, except they're long past the age this term applies without cringe, and their relationship is implicitly pathological".
"Convicted" and "supporting", though I don't know the details, implies the attorneys got him for expressing support for violent murder. Not a violent crime itself, but the kind of disorderly verbal conduct that can end in problems with law enforcement. Which is what happened.
Fun fact: the word "troublemaker" can also be translated as "adventurer". Despite all the colourful past though, I'm sure he never raided a dungeon.
I think Kruszwil was mentioned in previous entry.
To keep it consistent, I'm using the same word as I did before, to translate the word used to describe the antics of patho-celebrities. "Mess". (The word literally means "smoke", if you were curious.) There probably is a better translation, but I guess I don't know my gutter-English well enough. "Whoop-ass". "Woohoo". Something like that? I dunno. You gotta let me know if you come up with something.
It's a legit Polish MMA federation.
So, you know. When you can't beat them, join them. Except in this case, you can beat them, but that's exactly their point, so you can't really. The fact that you can beat them simultaneously means that you can't. It only makes them stronger. It's like a comicbook supervillain.
There then follows a list of legit fighters who took part in patho-league fights under more-or-less legit rules, which I don't find interesting enough to translate, save for this gem:
The legit guy lost against a freak and was kicked out for it, only to be replaced by the freak himself. Talk about insult to injury.
The article then goes on to describe that the patho-guy is perfectly aware of his disadvantage in fights against more experienced and skilled legit sportsmen, so he consciously chooses to fight under rulesets that grant him greater chances of success. I don't know MMA rulesets well enough to say much about it.
Then it goes on about one of the legit fighters:
Yeah, I can relate. You can get into or get nudged towards stuff for stupidest reasons.
The article then goes on about the plans of the no-longer-patho-gala organizers, which are quite ambitious, and in general about the contenders taking part in the fights organized under their umbrella.
It's kinda like that story about a mafia front pizza restaurant that made good enough pizza, that the gangsters just dropped doing crime altogether since pizza made better money anyway.
Here's the link if you want to run it through a translator or whatever: https://www.sport.pl/inne/7,102005,27891372,uprawiala-seks-z-trzema-raperami-malo-bil-matke-teraz-sa.html#s=BoxOpMT