Weil mich einige Personen gefragt haben: Hier ist ein Link zur Website von Mag. Nicole Hornstein-Kinzl, Sportwissenschafterin und Ortho-Bionomy-Practitioner in Wien: www.hornsteinkinzl.at.

Dienstleistungen:
ORTHOBIONOMY®
CRANIOSACRAL-OSTEOPATHIE
Transcranialtherapie Tyschenko®
SPORTWISSENSCHAFTLICHE TRAININGSBERATUNG
PERSONAL TRAINING

Note: This is NOT a comedian. It’s Thomas G. Hornauer, an entrepreneur who earned billions with phone sex lines. This documents his motivational speech after he took over an Austrian (?) TV station. He’s Suebian (German) though.

No photo opportunity this morning for visitors of the Johann Strauss monument

Just in case you didn’t know. Btw, Last.fm have announced to be now playing full-length songs and albums. The only hitch:

Full-length tracks are now available in the US, UK, and Germany, and we’re hard at work broadening our coverage into other countries. During this initial public beta period, each track can be played up to 3 times for free before a notice appears telling you about our upcoming subscription service. The soon-to-be announced subscription service will give you unlimited plays and some other useful things.

Even if this means to favorably mention a conservative politician. People just can’t get enough of shots featuring Austrian Minister for European and International Affairs, Ursula Plassnik, in the company of other politicians. How’s that you wonder?

And here is the thing I like about her as a public personality: She never tries to make herself appear smaller than she is – a quality rarely found in very tall women. I think tall women are gorgeous (like my bestest friend J. in Cologne)!

Brought to you courtesy of Hansi Hinterseer, former alpine skier turned entertainer: Wandern durch den weißen Winterwald.

Btw: This English Wikipedia entry was first created by a student of mine back in 2004. The stub was no longer than two lines, but has grown considerably in the meantime. Nice!

Yesterday I tore apart an entire bloody futon with a Korean kitchen knife (which worked excellently, thanks to the Austrio-Koreans!) and managed to squeeze the debris in three separate trash bags. Recycling in Austria is an often chosen essay topic for learners of German in London, I was told, and they do indeed go to great lengths when it comes to recycling here in Austria.

I used to have brown paper bags for organic waste which were collected weekly, yellow ones for packaging (excluding metal, collected every fortnight) and black ones for all the rest (collected every fortnight). Paper, metal and glass you have to take to a public garbage skip yourself.

For your garbage taxes you get six yellow bags which are always free, and three black 60l bags a year, and if you need more of those you have to pay for each of them (for the paper bags you have to pay anyway). I actually never used my black bags, and instead disposed of my ‘residual garbage’ (Restmüll) at work. There was no communal garbage collecting place in the house in which I lived, so the garbage (also the organic one!) would have had to live with me for one or two weeks. Right.

So now I had a total of twelve black bags on my hands – for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 – and it looks as if I am going to need ALL of them. You may stick ANYTHING into these bags for as long as you manage to squeeze it in. And as I would have had to pay a whopping € 21,00 for any cubic meter of garbage that I brought to the municipality’s garbage dump myself (does not seem to make sense, does it?), I thought I better put my black bags to some use. Hence the futon had to be shredded.

Btw, if you have ever tried to carry a futon someplace, then you will now it feels like it is filled with mud. Trying carrying around a wet mud mattress for a while – it’s impossible. I used to think that it is the cotton that makes it so soggy – now I know better. A futon’s innards consist of both cotton AND rubber. Mine had an approximately 5 cm thick rubber mattress that looked like an oatcake and was the wobbliest thing I have ever tried to lift – so _that’s_ where the muddy texture comes from. And this precise rubbery thing is wedged between layers and layers of natural cotton – which is fun to tear apart, only that you end up looking teared and feathered, as the cotton rubs off easily. And you breathe it, too, which was not so agreeable.

I tried recycling some of the rubber and cotton myself and use it as a cleaning cloth, e.g. for windows and floors. Not recommended. If you ever cut up your futon, just throw its content away as is.

Tonight at ten to ten I’ll hop on the night train to Vienna – just got a call that I could sign the lease agreement tomorrow late afternoon. At half past seven in the morning I’ll be in Vienna – but I doubt that I’ll be able to get any sleep on the train. I’m taking the final twelve assignments with me in order to grade them – more than enough time on the train. And tomorrow night at 20 past ten, I’ll be back on the next train home. That’s about 1500 km in 36 hours – good thing about Austrian train services is that they are not even half as expensive as the German ones: € 60 for a return ticket is quite alright, isn’t it?

Check out the map: I’ll be going from 10km south of Bregenz via Innsbruck via Innsbruck, Salzburg and Linz to Vienna – and it is indeed going to have 38° in Vienna, both today and tomorrow. HOT!!!

I canceled the contract with my ISP because I am moving to Vienna. I wasn’t sure whether the cancellation was effective or not, because my internet was always buggy – it didn’t work anymore, but that could still have been just a temporary flaw, in particular because my email address was still working. I sent one last email to them trying to find out why that was the case. Here is the reply I got (in translation) – what’s going on with Austrians and exclamation marks?:

Dear Ms. Master Anaj Jones! *

The cancellation has already been done!

The email address is going to continue to exist!

We hope to have been of service to you with this message.)**

*) Austrians are obsessed with titles. If you have a master’s degree (“Magister”), they’ll address you as such.

)** Original:

Sehr geehrte Frau Mag. Anaj Jones!

Die Kündigung ist bereits erledigt!

Die Mailadresse bleibt weiterhin bestehen!

Wir hoffen, Ihnen mit dieser Mitteilung gedient zu haben.

That’s one thing that is worth being said over and over again: Americans, Aussies, Brits, when you come to Austria, don’t expect anyone to greet you with a tune from The Sound Of Music on their lips. We don’t know that film or musical over here. There were a couple of German Movies in the 1950s which dealt with the same topic, the adventures of the Trapp family: Die Trapp-Familie with Ruth Leuwerik and Hans Holt (1956, directed by Wolfgang Liebeneiner), as well as Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (same principals, 1958) and the creators of the The Sound of music admitted that this was where they got their inspiration film. The films were incredibly successful in their times, but today, as virtually all Heimatfilme, are experienced as unbearable by most viewers below 60 today. Neither the films nor the musical is true anyway.

This just as addendum – I only learned yesterday that the song My favorite things in the Skoda ad was taken out of the musical.