What a very strange Sunday, hey....

It is Peter's name day, so you do something like on a birthday. Make them something they like, in this case Wiener Schnitzeln, and potatoe salad, and have a glass of sparkling wine and drink their health. It is a tradition, you know?

Nothing spectacular, in other words, just the regular....

BUT.... Today is the finals of the European soccer championships. Germany vs. Spain. (Ja, the ASSHOLES beat the Turks and got into the finals.... Spew alert.) But there is hope, hey. The bloody 'calf of the nation' went and did it again, oh joy. The team captain, not an animal, even if I'm not so sure about that.... His leg, the calf. He got damaged two years ago and everyone in the media was talking about the calf of the nation. So now we get the re-run. And oh BOY, you wanna talk about a nation of whiney assed titty babies, as Atrios calls them, you have to see the German media in action, hey. Waschlappen, hey. (Wet dish towels.) We in Austria go off the charts for Schadenfreude when they go bonkers.

It sort of reinforces our fratricidal instincts, yup. Whine sob, it's gonna ruin their 'Sommermärchen' their fairy tale happy ending. Well hell's bells, that's the way the fucking cookie crumbles, and they should just get a grip. And no, I don't want them to win. It would make them even more insufferable than they already are.

The other thing was that we watched a live concert from Vienna that took place a couple of weeks ago. Right on that huge square in front of City Hall. The place was PACKED. It was a competition of young virtuoso musicians from all over Europe, between 15 and 19 years old. Accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic orchestra. They freaked me out, really. Such talent, and such very difficult pieces. There was an eighteen year old young man from Corfu who did a clarinet piece for orchestra. I know a little about clarinet, because I got one as a kid. (I wanted to learn piano, but tja, that was all my 'rents could afford....) So I KNOW what a difficult instrument it can be.

And this KID comes out, and from the first phrases, my mouth dropped, and I didn't get it closed again. And by about the fourth phrase, I said to Peter, 'MY GAWWD! I had no IDEA it could sound like that! Every note so clear... knock me over with a feather, hey.!' It was just honest admiration. The piece was so difficult, and none of them had notes to look at, they fucking played. I was just spitless.

And I wish you could have seen the audience, they went nuts. The kid with the clarinet won, and he was so stunned, you could tell he was nearly crying for joy. And the others were hardly less good, but that was so stunning, he earned it.

While the jury was out deliberating, opera singer Angelika Kirchshläger did some numbers. Kurt Weill, for instance. She is the daughter of one of our former presidents, a good one. I last saw her in the Vienna opera about fifteen years ago. Like good wine, her voice has improved with age. And then they got the entire Vienna Boy's Choir out with her, and noooo.... nothing kitschy. They did this astounding thing with different languages, from Latin to god knows what, and it was about friendship, and the rhythms kept changing from Oriental to Latin to Austrian traditional, but it made up a whole somehow.... Blew the audience away.


Tja, I guess that sort of sums up the difference between Austrians and Germans. The lattter have the big lip. We seem to get off on good music.

Whatever....