An Iranian boy found a Syrian brown bear cub in 1942, and sold it to the 22nd Artillery Supply Company of the Polish II Corps for canned meat. That's how the story of the most famous military animal started.

Business is good in Poland for priests who are skilled in the arts of demonic extrication. The country is in the midst of an exorcism epidemic (or boom, depending on how you feel about it.) And this has inspired Catholic priests to join forces with a publisher, and launch the world's first monthly magazine devoted to…

I'm not entirely certain what's going on here, but this is a clip from Akademia Pana Kleksa (English: Mr. Blot's Academy), a 1984 Polish-Soviet fantasy film about a magical school and its famous denizens. Such as Doctor Dolittle, Pippi Longstockings, uh, Hysterical Chicken Matron, and Bootleg Mickey Mouse and Donald…

Back in the day, Eastern European posters for English-language science fiction films sometimes rearranged the movies' plots, jigsaw-style. For example, the Hungarian posters for the Star Wars trilogy transformed Darth Vader's helmet into an unusually nefarious bundt cake pan.

This is O (Omicron), a projection-mapping installation directed by Romain Tardy and Thomas Vaquié at the Hala Stulecia in Wrocław, Poland. Completed by architect Max Berg in 1913 to commemorate the centennial of the defeat of Napoleon, this memorial — with the aid of some well-placed lighting — becomes a pulsing…

While some architects are out to create lofty skyscrapers, Polish firm Centrala is shooting for the world's narrowest home. The house will be wedged between two larger buildings, and will sit just 133 centimeters at its widest spot.

We've featured some wonderfully befuddling Polish movie posters before, but Andrzej Pagowski's design for Close Encounters of the Third Kind transforms the movie into a dreadful family comedy with McDonald's dance-offs. It's on eBay if you're in need of a conversation piece. And for more movies lost in translation, see …

They play glowing, futuristic instruments in space, where asymmetrical hair is totally awesome. They're . . . Ambulans, a Polish band from Kielce, whose new song "Wiem Że" will remind you that Italo disco never died. [via Europopped]

The Warsaw videographer Velour has taken the Silesian city of Katowice and transformed it into a teeming clockwork village using time-lapse video — watch factories, neighborhoods, roads, and bus terminals morph into toy houses teeming with super-fast microscopic humans.

20th century Polish movie posters could be highly surrealist, as the placards for these Godzilla films demonstrate. Check out Japan's most famous monster in a series of quirky paintings.