New Get your War On.
[Via peace dividend]

As you know, we don’t have a television, so we were probably the last people to see images of the flooding here in Austria. We just got back from my wife’s parents’ house where we watched the news.

It’s really bad. Two good things, though: the rain is letting up and there has been a fairly large wave of solidarity throughout Austria, with many people donating money and goods (blankets, refrigerators, etc) to help the people who’ve lost everything, and there are several thousand of them. On the negative side, though, although smaller creeks and rivers are beginning to recede, the Danube is still rising because some smaller dams and dikes that had held up are finally beginning to break, and there is new flooding in Bavaria and the Czech Republic (parts Prague under water, etc). And all that water eventually flows past my house.

But it looks like the worst is over in Austria.

I stayed home from work today in case I would need to pump out my cellar or otherwise perform flood-related activities. I went out in the morning and took some pictures of the creek that flows past my house, it is a tributary of the Danube [ouch, a tortoise is biting my foot]; later in the morning, I went to the bank to pay some bills and took some pictures of the Danube. In the pictures, water levels are way up from normal. Another six feet, about, and we’d have serious flooding. They continued to rise a little during the day, two or three feet, but seem to have stabilized now.

The creek near my home. Same creek.
View of the Danube
(The town of Tulln in the background.)
Another view of the Danube, from the Tulln side.

The Bug comes in second after Coppertone on this search..

It’s not juvenile, it’s funny.

It’s been raining quite heavily in most parts of the country, including mine, and the ground is finally saturated, meaning there is no place for the water to go anymore but into your cellar. We were concerned last night, Gamma most of all, she has a phobia of flooding (when she was younger and telling past-life stories, most of her deaths involved drowning) and couldn’t get to sleep. I read a book, and when I wanted to go to bed saw that Alpha, Beta and Gamma were all sleeping in the big bed, so I went to Beta’s bed and read another 30 minutes before finally going to sleep around 1. Got up at 5.30 and checked water levels in the street etc. Things had, in my area, calmed down overnight and water had never actually come into our cellar, and I never needed to use the pump I bought several years ago when water did actually flood our basement and I swore I’d get a good pump.

It is interesting how a catastrophe brings out the best in people. Yesterday, for example, when the rain was the heaviest, just streaming down, and our back yard was mostly submerged, totally saturated with about an inch of water on top and water was beginning to seep into the drain in front of the cellar door, I noticed our neighbor bailing water out of in front of her door and throwing it into our backyard. Alpha and I went to the fence and asked her wtf she was doing, and to please not be putting even more water onto our property, where it would seep into our house, but into the street where it could drain away.

“I’ve had to buy new furniture three times,” she explained. Good for you, I thought. “Listen,” I said, “I have a pump. You’re welcome to use that until my cellar starts flooding and I need it.” She said, in an irritated tone, no, another neighbor was bringing over a pump. I told her to be sure and let me know if she changed her mind.

I had this idea for a redesign, and D came up with images and a layout and some good ideas of his own. I’m currently tinkering with the code, so if this blog suddenly

Mine is grey.

Supermarkets and I haven’t been on good terms since about 1975 when I was deeply traumatized by a “Safeway” supermarket at the age of 16. It was my first real job. I had harvested various berries before that, which required that I get up totally way too early and moreover paid not by the hour but by flat of berries harvested, which really sucked, and I had worked at my uncle’s pizza parlor, a job I resigned from voluntarily, I remember, after it became obvious even to me that it was going to take me longer to adjust to the concept of “work” than was fair to my uncle.

Safeways was hiring a bunch of boxboys and other people for a new grand opening. Bagging groceries is stupid, and I soon observed that the smartest boxboys gravitated to other tasks, like stocking shelves, or pretending to do so, and straightening cans and bottles in the coolers, etc.

Which left me to bag groceries.

That may not sound like a traumatic job for a sixteen-year-old, but since that year saw the celebration of the sesquicentennial of Washington State, management decided it would be neat if we all wore coonskin caps.

Every shift, I lived in dread of meeting someone I knew.

Then I got let go, for one or both of two possible reasons. Basically they simply had overhired for the initial grand-opening rush, then fired a few. I was probably put on the list either for lack of enthusiasm or because I had declined to join the union. Normally I am pro-union, but they wanted me to pay dues of like $100 for a job that paid about $300 or 400. So I was like, “Do something about this coonskin cap and I’ll join.”

American supermarkets are big and scientifically laid out. Walking through one, for someone not accustomed to them, is not only a brain-busting sensory overload – so many products! Such a wide selection! – you can also hear the psychologists and architects and management consulting about where to put which product, and how best to display it. “We’ll put the pharmacy near the entrance, because that way you don’t have the old people clogging up the aisles with their little electric tricycles, and the bright sugary things near the cash registers, and more bright sugary things at the end of every aisle, etc etc.” Supermarkets are totally brilliant, they are a science and an art.

Since I’d grown up around them, it took Alpha to make me aware of their power to overwhelm. Early in our relationship, we lived in Seattle for a year and she went to a supermarket to buy cinnamon. She unfortunately forgot the word “cinnamon”, and had to go up and down every aisle, past millions of versions of various products, looking for spices, and then once she’d found the spice aisle (about 40 yards long, seven shelves high) she had to look at every can, jar and envelope for a label with a picture of something like cinnamon.

She came home and had to lie down for a few hours with a cool washcloth on her forehead, and never got her cinnamon.

Where she came from, they still have mom-and-pop stores. Our village has one – a “supermarket” that’s been around for about a hundred years, and is still owned by the family of the original owner. Such stores are beginning to die out here, as they died out in the States long ago, but they remain fairly common. If you run out of money, you can run a tab if they know you.

Recently they built a real-live supermarket in a nearby town. You can even get products their to cool pseudo Mexican food and pseudo Asian food, and one flavor of Oreos in small packages and two kinds of peanut butter (chunky and smooth). But the store is maybe one-quarter to half the size of your average American mega-super-market.

And it’s not open 24 hours a day, only from like 8 to 8 or something, and you bag your own groceries (which I do with a professional flair).

And it carries, usually, only one or two versions of each product, usually the generic store brand, and one name brand. Like, you want cornflakes, there is about 15 feet of shelf space with ten different cereals, including generic cornflakes and Kellog’s. On our visit to the relatives, we went looking for cornflakes. The cereal aisle was about 70 yards long, the width of the entire store, anyway, and had sugary cereal products on shelves from floor to ceiling, in various sizes, shapes and colors. Hundreds of options. We finally gave up before locating our plain cornflakes.

[Insert crackpot rant about how a wide selection of a limited range of products is not the same thing as freedom of choice]

At any rate, it was overwhelming, a little sickening in its excess. But I’m just stating the obvious again, aren’t I.