2 weeks ago i got a concussion and had to go to hospital. nothing shocking, or suprising or oustanding and extraordinary. i will not bore you with another hospital story, even more since it wasnt the viennese AKH hospital, but the dreadfull mistelbacher one.

last week i got a letter from the WGK (Wiener Gebietskrankenkasse. Health Insurance.) asking me to fill out a form.
usually i like filling out forms. the form at the hospital concerning what food id like to have, or how many medicaments are necessary to keep me calm and happy. you name it, i fill it out. even though i really like to be called at 6am in the morning, answering questions about my sleeping habits by a totally stranger. those are always the best ones. Last time i got a call from a guy asking about my sexual habits. i am still not sure if that call was actually coming from a company, or some old pervert. to be honest, i dont want to know it.

the WGK form is written really nice and i like their choice of questions. per example:

“were you involved into a fist fight?”
for the german speakers: have you ever heard the word “Raufhandel” before? i didnt.
and no, i am not into physical violence.

“were you drunk?”
yes, i am aware there would be a more precise and more awesome way to translate it.
and no, i was not drunk.

“were drugs involved?”
that question is the best! how stupid would one be to say YES? i mean things are not so legal over here, and boy oh boy would i be scared to admit it. in case i did any drugs, of course, which i didnt obviously.
it reminds me of the VISA form i had to fill out each time i went to the US. even though the VISA form still beats my WGK form if it comes to really intelligent questions.

i am still wondering if i can sue my chair for not moving away before my head hit him hard.

did y know bram stokers inspiration for “dracula” was initially not based upon the historical figure vlad tepes, but on a woman doing her evil work also in augustinergasse/vienna? no doubt, vlad tepes must have been crude to the limit but erzebet bathory was the true blood countess and in no way inferior to him.

But if Stoker had wanted evidence of real vampires, he wouldn’t have had to look too far afield. Nearby Hungary boasted Elisabeth Bathory (1560-1614), AKA Erzsebet Bathory, a deranged countess who tortured and killed as many as 610 young women for the purpose, tradition has it, of bathing in their blood. The product of a powerful Hungarian family that produced an inordinate number of epileptics and psychotics, Elisabeth allegedly believed that dousing herself regularly in virgin blood would prolong her beauty.

she was not barbarous but incomarably sadistic and lived (being also a noblewoman from transylvania) in her familys lands in vienna around 1604 where “her obsession with youth would soon grow dark and evil”

when i was shown her vienna base on a zombie tour last summer, they just installed a pizzeria there.

link
wikipedia
vienna reference

do you know siegfried kampl? neither did i. mister kampl is a member of the bundesrat - part of the carinthian delegation of the BZÖ, unsurprisingly. the bundesrat is our second chamber of parliament. technically, it’s an obsolete and pretty powerless group, but it has some influence when it comes to laws that affect the different states - which is, everything but vienna (yes, i was pretty surprised about the fact that there are actually other inhabited places in this country, too - but most of them are too small and boring to even ignore.) anyway, mister kampl is on his way to become president of the bundesrat. why is this interesting? let me quote him:

“after 1945, there was a brutal nazi-hunt in austria“ - he said that like it wasn’t a good thing. well, whoop-e-di-doo, mr. kampl, what the FUCK do you think world war 2 was all about? small tip here, it wasn’t about teaching germans how to build their own furniture out of catfood. it was about crushing the national socialist regime, about freeing the occupied countries, and, yes, about killing as many nazis as humanly possible. because that’s what war is about - killing people. and who started it? another tip, it wasn’t johnny rotten.

in his defense, later on kampl stated that his father was arrested by allied forces shortly after the war and kept prisoner for 2 years, leaving him alone with his 4 siblings. so what? “boo hoo, i had it so hard when i was a kid, now you all have to suffer for it” ? isn’t that the same shit that people who say that they weren’t hugged as a child, and therefore had to kill 17 people with a frying pan use? more importantly, isn’t that the same kind of evasive gibberish that the right wing hates so much?

and now this man is going to be the president of our second chamber of the parliament, the frigging parliament, starting in july. yes yes, his position may be quite tame, yes, he may have less influence there than the guy who delivers my pizza, but what kind of signal does this send to the rest of the world? i can pretty much imagine the headlines of le monde, the new york times and others:

“austria makes another far-far-far-far-far-right nationalist president of sorts - nobody really surprised anymore”

also, although i don’t have a direct quote here, he insulted people who deserted from the wehrmacht and killed nazi soldiers. but i won’t even go into that here.

so, what is the situation? the social democrats are in an uproar, the green party is about to give up on that whole voting shit and restart as a guerilla army, and the conservatives.. well, they don’t talk much. ever. unless it’s about gay marriage. then they have a lot to say. but not here, no no. might insult someone.

i’m so ready to move to iceland. or sealand, or disneyland, i don’t care. anyone got a ticket?

UPDATE: i didn’t believe my eyes at first, but the conservatives CAN talk! wilhelm molterer, chairman of the ÖVP, said that he finds mr. kampl’s statements “unacceptable“, and percieves them as “contrary to historical realities and the opinions of the conservative party“. now the only question is, will actions follow these words? one can only hope.

this is knight carl von ghega, who designed and built the semmeringbahn. also, he was on the old 20-schilling notes, austria’s pre-euro currency.

a few days ago, my girlfriend found an old piggy bank while cleaning her flat, and it was filled with old cash. it was really weird to see this stuff again… when i was a kid, this note had just been replaced by a new 20-schilling-note, but the old one was still around sometimes..

which brings me to the following interesting fact : currently, schilling coins and notes with a combined value of about 850 million euro have not been exchanged into euros and are still somewhere out there. 850 million! hell, that’s a lot of spare change, alright.

Today’s “best private email at work” award goes to a friend of the treasury department!

Subject line: Wiener Linien vs. Kanalarbeiter: 0:1
(Wiener Linien = public transportation dudes. Kanalarbeiter: channel digger)

Channel Diggers: 1 point.
Wiener Linien: none.

They rock.

After i finally escaped the hotline shift, i finally got a chance to get a quick nicotine/cacao break. Along with this nice substances i need sugar, to wake me up. Being hyper at work sure has something interesting about it. I sneaked up to my colleagues stuff to find sugar, and thats what i found:

My sugar is pretty damn smart, eh? I know it is. its just like youre reading your fortune in the rice crsipies!

translation:
“People who want to be alone are sitting in the coffeehouse, but they need company for that.” written by Alfred Polgar

April 23 is “World Book and Copyright Day”. By celebrating this day, UNESCO seeks to “promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright”. Well… here’s our statement on this issue.

The picture is published in today’s issue of “Profil”, a Vienna-based weekly magazine.

Link

By chance I attended yesterdays “60 years of SP

Location: Neubaugasse.

take any random best seller out of the psycho-esoteric corner of any random major bookstore and read about men being from saturn and women being from uranus or some equivalent bullshit. we have also learned, that men are less motivated hand washers and less secure drivers that women are,…

as they say, there may be some truth in every stereotype.
but here’s something that cought my attention: the bathroom door @ kleines cafe. besides all the things we know about differences in male and female bathroom usage we now face the question: do man push doors open violently while women use the handle? at least the observation is better founded than the things about shoes, planets and the way people park their cars.