My Blackbird

It's a female — not black but more black-brown with a speckled front. She was gone for several months, and came back 2 days ago to sit quietly in the ground, sometimes under the evergreen tree. By design or accident, I don't know, but she sits right where she can see into the kitchen — and I have found bird footprints in the snow coming right up to the glass door. When I open the door to throw out some seed or fruit for her, she flies away.
Is this what blackbirds normally do? It's winter, so brooding is out of the question. Is she returning to where her mate died? (If it was her mate — I found him, after returning from vacation, drowned in a bucket of rain water.) Then again, Wikipedia says this about blackbirds: As long as winter food is available, both the male and female will remain in the territory throughout the year, although occupying different areas.

OK, so maybe she's just found her own space for a while.

Werner who?

Austria has a new Chancellor — Werner Faymann. If you've never heard of him, don't worry, neither have I. This, you see, is the big difference between electoral politics in America and in countries with Parliaments — in America, an individual person is set up as candidate for a party, and a lot hangs on that person's personality, intelligence, management skills, and (sadly yes) charisma and looks. In Austria, one votes for the party, and the party puts a new leader in. And can take one out too —Faymann was the transportation minister to incumbent Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, and stepped in to replace him as head of the Social Democrats after bitter infighting last summer.
Bickering and insecurities about the SPÖ's future led to early elections, which resulted in the far right parties making large gains (but not enough to take control of the government.) However, the sudden death of Jörg Haider in October, and the scandal which followed (it seems to have been an open secret that Haider was having some sort of affair with his 27-yr-old protegé, Stefan Petzner) kind of took the wind out of their sails.
And so the SPÖ (Social Democrats) and the ÖVP (moderately-conservative People's Party) will once again form a Grand Coalition, with Faymann at the helm. I can't tell you much more than that, except that he's youngish (48) and not a bad-looking guy, and from the party I would vote for (if I could, that is.)

Weekend Mountain Blogging: Frau Hitt

That jagged tooth-like rock jutting out of the middle of the North Ridge is known locally as Frau Hitt, the subject of an old tale. Frau Hitt was a giantess who, not being the generous sort, gave a beggar-woman only a stone to eat. The beggar turned out to be a witch, and promptly turned Frau Hitt and the horse she rode on into stone, and her farmlands into barren, rocky peaks.
She's a favorite destination of mountain climbers looking for an afternoon climb.

catalexis, R.I.P.

A fellow Atriot and Practice Room reader passed away this week at age 50. I didn't know him well but always enjoyed his intelligent, off-beat comments. Last month he had even joined the network for this blog on facebook.
The infuriating thing about his death, however, is this: he was online and commenting at Eschaton, and said that he felt he might be having a heart attack. He even joked about it; I hope this isn't a heart attack I'm having right now. I can't afford one. I guess I need to go lie down for a bit. Lich King comes out tomorrow and I am not going to kick it before getting my hands on that puppy. Fellow posters urged to go to the hospital Right Away, but at some point he decided it might not be serious.

There was also this beautiful, quirky post:
The ability to speak in coherent sentences is now presented as an elitist anachronism that denies the authenticity of the id driven avatar of the American heartland. A nation that is driving itself to manifest Loki, Manabozho, Satan, the Trickster. Not as the smooth spoken deceiver of the intellectually proud as in the histories we have but as a stirring, dismissive, and divisive populist deceiver of the proud anti-intellectual patriot of today's America, the cautionary tales for tomorrow...if there is a tomorrow.

For Geoffrey there was only part of a tomorrow, as he died the next day. Peace to his family and friends. He will be missed.

Finally, a magazine for the Eschaton trolls!

Some things still make me smile.

Innsbruck Chamber of Horrors

One of the last wishes of a dying 68-year-old woman in Tirol was that her partner get rid of four glass jars she'd kept hidden in her apartment. When he found the mysterious jars after her death, he saw what was in them — four human embryos — and called the police instead. DNA tests are currently underway, but it remains to be seen whether the embryos can give up any DNA at all, given that they were kept in embalming fluid. It was unknown how long they had been kept that way, if they were her own issue, and how they had ended up that way in the first place, as they are from the 10th to the 16th week in their development.

This is getting to be a familiar story. In the summer of 2007, renovations on a building in Innsbruck uncovered the corpses of three newborns hidden under the basement floor. Investigations led to a former tenant, who maintains that each baby died shortly after birth. Since so much time had passed (late 1970s) and so little evidence could be gleaned from the corpses, the case was determined to be manslaughter, and the woman was never prosecuted.

No such luck for a woman in Styria (on the other side of the country), who killed four of her newborn babies and then hid them in her freezer and in concrete buckets. She was in a long-term relationship with a man who said he didn't want any more children (he was married and already had children with his wife). Somehow she was able to hide each pregnancy from him and everyone else, give birth at home alone, and do away with the child. Four times. She's serving a life sentence in prison now.

These stories are, of course, extreme cases. Creepy things like this happen in every country. But viewed together with the Fritzl case (the man who kept his own daughter locked in a sub-basement below his home and forced her to have sex with him, leading to — you guessed it, more children, living and dead) one starts to wonder what it is that leads Austrians to confine their domestic criminal activities to their homes and hide the evidence there. In America, the dead newborns are found in dumpsters. In other countries, (and out in rural areas) it's probably easier to make a late-night trip to a field or the woods to dispose of the body. (Wild animals will do the rest.)

One wonders also about the shame factor here. The Austrian government gives a lot of support to single mothers, and these days the arrival of a baby before the wedding is less of a deal than it used to be (I've even sung at a few church weddings where the baby was christened at the same time) so it can't be the state's fault. Abortions are legal and the Plan B Pill is available (with a prescription.) What leads a woman to hide a pregnancy from everyone, possibly even from herself, to the point where the newborns are stuffed away in the house, out of sight?

Weekend Mountain Blogging: Sellrain

Went to sing that gig where the rehearsal was last week, this time in daylight. The village of Sellrain lies at 900 meters above sea level, in a steep valley. It's beautiful, but I couldn't imagine living here and not feeling claustrophobic, with these mountainsides closing in on me. Plus, how the hell do they get up these hills in the winter, even with chains?

Looking north, to the Karwendel mountains.

This is the first time I've noticed a church clock like this — the upper dial points to the hour, the lower dial to the minutes (the markings are for the quarter-hours, for when the bells chime.) So, this clock says it's 5 minutes past 4.

Today is, incidentally, St. Cecelia's Day, loved by musicians everywhere for the increased chances of landing a paying outside gig (she's the patron saint of music.) We performed a mass, accompanied by the village band decked out in their traditional costume (Lederhosen.) The villagers filled the church to capacity, even though they'd been there earlier in the day for the funeral of a teenage neighbor. You got a real sense of village life and important roles played by the church and music in their daily lives.

Yes We Have!!

America's next First Family.

It was downright frustrating, not being able to stay awake for the crucial hours as the vote tallies were coming in to CNN. (Due to an important rehearsal the following morning and a performance tonight, it just wasn't going to happen.) When I turned off the TV, Pennsylvania still hadn't been called, nor Virginia. When I woke up in the early morning (like a kid on Christmas morning, not really being able to sleep!), I switched it back on briefly to see the results, and then drifted back off in bliss.
Am I proud? Oh yes. For President-elect Obama, and especially proud of all the volunteers who spent the better part of the last few months working so hard for him. The ones like the woman I know from over at Eschaton, who worked the campaign in deepest-red western Pennsylvania, and came home more than once practically in tears, after hearing expressions of racism and ignorance thrown her way — for supporting a black man, a terrorist, a socialist (?!), marxist elite who would not only raise taxes but order mandatory gay marriage for everyone! One day she reported to us that a fellow Democrat told her that the pastor at the local Baptist church was warning his flock, that a vote for Obama was a vote for the Antichrist, since it was written, in Revelations no less, that the Antichrist will have been born in Hawaii!
What I really want is for the hysteria to be over. We've elected the best man for the job, not only the best-qualified but one able to lift us a little higher, or motivate us to lift ourselves higher, and to help America re-join the modern world. Let the work begin, we're ready now.

Osteuropa

My Mom send pictures from her recent trip through eastern Europe — they flew to Bucharest, went on to the Black Sea coast and boarded a cruise boat which took them up the Danube through Romania and Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary to Budapest. There were some difficulties with the boat and unfortunately they had to go the last part by bus, bypassing Croatia entirely, but that just augments the Balkan experience — things go awry!


Mom writes, "The horses are Lippizzaners and the horse men are Hungarian bareback riders similar to the Cossacks or Tatars in medieval times. They rode the horses standing up on their backs and cracked long whips to signal the horses in turning, going faster, whatever. The whips never touched the horses, they just responded to the sound. One rider gathered 5 horses together, 3 in front and 2 right behind them and then he stood up and balance himself on the rear two, one foot on each. He then took them around the field for about 6 or 7 laps to get their gaits synchronized, and when he had the rhythm he wanted, he cracked the whip and yelled something and the five took off in an incredible speed... It was like watching hordes of barbarians flying across the Steppes of Russia."

The Black Sea, on the Romanian coast. Growing up during the cold war, I was surely not alone in being led to view all those Iron Curtain countries as dismal, gray, concrete wastelands. One look a those grim Romanian gymnasts at the Olympics confirmed our suspicions. In the movie "The Four Seasons", Sandy Dennis, seeing her friends again after her husband has left her for a much younger woman and clearly in a depression, says she might to Czechoslovakia. Why? "Because I never wanted to go to Czechoslovakia." Never mind that it's a beautiful country (now two countries), historically fascinating and full of culture, we immediately think drab, brown, poor.
It doesn't immediately occur to us that Romanians might have their own seaside vacation spots, where they can soak up some sun and sea air.