Saturday: Erntedankfest

Rural Austrians have their own version of Thanksgiving, called Erntedankfest. Actually it's more of a harvest festival. Traditionally just celebrated in their own villages, about ten years ago they brought the festivities to Vienna where it morphed into a joint harvest fest / fair, where you can watch traditional activities like log-sawing, folk dancing, etc. and sample / purchase some of the stuff the farmers produce----different cheeses, sausages, oils, wines / spirits, breads, etc.

It's a Saturday - Sunday thing and is held at the Heldenplatz, a huge open plaza attached to the Hofburg.

It's Sturm season and I had my first Sturm yesterday at the festival. Two Sturms, actually...but it was a young Sturm and hadn't developed a kick yet. Still quite delicious, though.

There were several displays of veggies like this.

This crown, made of plants, is paraded around.

Just a few of the few hundred thousand folks they expected this weekend.

There were a lot of places to get drinks and food---and hardly any plastic cups. Almost everything was served in actual glasses and on actual plates. The few exceptions were plastic beer cups if you wanted to walk around and drink, and I saw damned few of those (despite all the happy drinking.) You buy your drink and included is a €2 deposit on each glass. Finish up, bring the glass back, and get your deposit back.

This cuts way, way down on trash. WAY down.

We bought some roedeer salami. I like wild game because it tastes good, and the animal has a natural, wild life until the hunter gets him. We also bought some pumpkin seed oil and some delicious bread.

I really enjoyed these fresh homemade potato chips----

Efficient assembly line operation. This guy carves potatoes into spirals with this machine.

These guys fry them up.

This lady takes your money then puts the chips on a plate for you.

Austro-potato goodness....

These folk dancers were called Voigasplattler and they were bad-ass.

There were a lot of people wandering around in the native costumes of their region, and some interesting folk dancing / music. For instance, one trio of guys cracked whips in time to the music, but they were tame compared to the guys above, Voigasplattler, which roughly means "Full Throttle Plattler." A Schuhplattler is a dance that involves a lot of slapping of the hands against the thighs, the shoes, the chest, etc. accompanied by much jumping around and moving in circles and other patterns. But these guys have taken it to the next level, updating it for the 21st Century.

At first, watching them, I thought: "This is going to be kind of corny and lame." But as they got into it, I saw they were pretty athletic.  Most of these guys had legs like oak trees and had cardio to spare, which I guess you would if you danced all the time at high altitude. Plus they had a great sense of humor and showmanship.

The videos below only show parts of the dances they do, but some of these things go on five minutes or so and they have to be one bunch of in-shape mofos to pull this off.

Rome Revisited / Graveyard Hamsters

Last night B and I watched Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn.

Interesting on a number of levels.

Eddie Albert, aka Oliver Wendell Douglas of Green Acres fame, appeared as a bearded hipster photographer. Weird to see him that young and that un-Mr. Douglas.

Interesting also to see how Italy is so different, 57 years later. Hitler and Mussolini managed to fuck Europe up pretty good with their little war, and it took most countries several decades to get back on their feet. An American in Europe in those days could stretch a dollar really far, and live quite well. Not that that's a fair trade-off for the suffering war brings, by any means...I just mean, it would have been very interesting to spend a year or two in Italy in the 50s, is all I'm saying.

Most interesting to me was seeing so many of the things that we'd seen just days earlier, in real life.

For instance, the address of Gregory Peck's apartment, 51 Via Margutta, is on the same street as our hotel. In the scene where Audrey Hepburn leaves Peck's apartment and walks out into the street, she walks toward our hotel and we can plainly see it in the distance----though not covered in ivy as it is now.

Also, when Peck and Hepburn are on the Spanish Steps, I wondered: was I standing in that spot, too? Same when he was at Trevi Fountain.

But, hell---lots of well-known people have walked the streets of Rome through the centuries. It's just weird to see some of them doing it on film where I did it, is all.

Several continuity errors in the film that I won't bore you with. But a note to future filmmakers: don't shoot medium-shot exteriors with a big church clock in the background and expect the audience not to notice how time keeps bopping back and forth.

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B was getting her hair done this afternoon. I wandered around during this ritual. Stumbled upon an Army surplus store I'd visited a few years ago, and thought I'd drop in and look at a backpack. (Now that my obsession with man-bags has cured itself, I'm obsessed with backpacks. Truly a sickness.)

Last time I was in the store I made the really bad mistake of asking the clerk if they had any Wehrmacht stuff. A no-no, because that's the word used for the German army during WW II. The lady must have thought I wanted Nazi memorabilia instead of ordinary modern-day surplus. Trading in any Nazi stuff is against the fucking law here----you can go to jail for it. It's like walking into a store and asking for child porn. The current, politically correct term for the army is Bundeswehr. But I don't think the clerk remembered me from last time. We had a friendly chat about the advantages of each of the backpacks she had available.

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We went to Vienna's huge Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) to put some candles and flowers on the graves of B's grandparents. Walking through the place, we spotted a rodent. At first I thought it was a rat, but then I saw it was a hamster! About 50% longer and bigger than the hamsters you find at the pet store in the States. It's cheeks were full, and we saw several more of the shy creatures as we walked back to the car. They don't let you get too close. Too bad, because I really want a picture. I've never seen a wild hamster before...

The Menu Is Not The Meal

Many years ago, famous bald-headed Irish singer Sinead O'Connor tore up a photo of the Pope on TV.

The gesture seemed pointless to me, but the reaction to the gesture seemed more pointless and completely baffling, because you'd have thunk she tore the actual Pope in half, instead of just a photographic representation of him.

"But how would you feel if that was a picture of your girlfriend?" someone asked me at the time.

"There's a big difference between my girlfriend and a picture of my girlfriend. My girlfriend has nicer tits."

So now we have some shithead in Florida who's even managed to get the fucking President of the United States, who ought to be thinking about important things, to comment on his proposed burning of the Koran. And while I tend to feel a bit ookie inside when book-burning happens, I get even more ookie inside when I think about people confusing a symbol of a thing for the thing itself. The menu is not the meal, a voodoo doll is not a person, and the flag is not a country. Quit. Confusing. Them. You. Unspeakably. Stupid. Assholes!

Bill Hicks did a fantastic "joke" about the US flag once. I put joke in quotes because to me, Hicks was more of a philosopher-comedian toward the end (in the mold of George Carlin) than a mere comedian.

From billhicks.com----[underlined emphasis mine]

Did you watch the flag-burning thing? Wasn't that great? Boy, everyone showed their true colors then, didn't they? Retarded nation that we are. Scary. People just - people acted as though the Supreme Court approved of flag-burning, you know what I mean? . . . People were just: "Hey, buddy. Let me tell you something. My daddy died for that flag." Really? Wow, I bought mine. Yeah, they sell 'em, you know, at K-Mart and shit, yeah. "Yeah? He died in the Korean War for that flag!" Oh! What a coincidence. Mine was from Korea. Wow, the world is that big.

. . . I don't approve of flag-burning. I don't wanna burn a flag, but if somebody wants to burn a flag, what business is it of mine? Is it my business if somebody wants to burn a flag? Is it? No. No, it's not. Is it my business what other people read or watch on TV? NO, IT'S NOT! Thank you! You see, when you talk these things out they come a little clearer, don't they? They do. That's called logic and it'll help us all evolve and get on the fuckin' spaceships and GET OUTTA HERE! Let's go!

They say the Koran burning (which, again, remember, I said is an empty gesture) will put US troops in danger. What, as opposed to the kind of safety they'd enjoy if they were merely in Iraq and Afghanistan getting shot at and blown up without a Koran burning? If you don't want them to be in danger, don't send them to a fucking war!

See, there's plenty of stupidity to go around, folks---no need to push and shove. You can get your share.

I'm going to write my own Holy Book. Here are my Three Suggestions:

1) Be nice to each other

2) Don't be so fucking scared of everything all the time.

3) Don't be stupid.