Bass, Treble and Woofers

Have been waiting and waiting on this post... because the local government hasn't been the swiftest in providing us plebes with what they are doing behind closed doors... or wasn't till about three days ago. A friday news dump where everyone has the weekend to figure out how to respond to it. Instead of immediately going into woofer mode if it had been the middle of the week and it would take days till all the initial misconceptions get corrected.

We used to have a tee-vee twenty years ago that was state of the art and ahead of its' time. It did things that were amazing. But as with pc's, no one used it to its' full potential, they just watched the programme they wanted to see and didn't bother with the fancy stuff, which was a bit complicated anyway.

One thing that was cool about it was that sometimes the stations would have shows on, and you could switch to the left speaker and and hear the original version. Or the right and hear the synchronised version. And for chuckles, you could get both and hear babylon. And sometimes discern that the right speakers weren't exactly giving the exact same thing as the left ones.

Speakers hell, they were towers of power.

So why would I dwell on that, you ask, as it was long ago? I see it as a perfect metaphor. Since I have been listening to a lot of radio lately when not chatting with people playing at my game. And got caught up with a lot of local things I'd just ignored.

But basically... what I see from the right speaker, metaphorically, on the intertubes is being echoed on the left speaker here, so the roles get reversed, the original and the translation. But it amounts to the same thing.

Locally, the govt. here got shaken up over the Moody's rating, and how the economic picture looks here in the EU, so they went into closed sessions, and thought up an austerity package so as not to lose their triple A ratings.

Now... we have a coalition government, socialist and (catholic) conservative. And they are sort of like the rethugs and the dems in their attitudes toward one another, but if things get tetchy, they actually comprimise.... except any time they've done it... no one likes the outcome at-all.

They were gonna 'streamline' the government, uh-huh... did the signals from the right speaker jump to the left one with a bit of distortion and static?

The result that has come out is sort of a rethugs' wet dream. Big gradual decrease in federal employees, and socking it to the pensioners. Not so much the range I'm in... I could hardly see how much less they could give and expect you to live on it... but the middle and higher range ones. With a freeze in increases to adjust for inflation for the next two years on the latter two if I understood it correctly.

And as to the federal jobs... well, the posts of people in that range who retire will not be replaced by new people, and their job loads will get dumped on the ones still working. Uh-huh...

The right speaker doing the original is sort of getting distortion signals and comes out diluted in the left one, but hell, the results are sort of the same.....

So all is reavealed in the finale, so to speak, and as the credits are rolling the left hand speaker starts going a bit off... the bass begins to boom too much, the treble becomes querulous and the woofers squeak. The bass being the right hand parties, the treble being the greens, and the woofers the progressives in the country. And we get the poor and middle class slammed, the rich paying lip service to solidarity sacrifice, but already wanting to wiggle out of that commitment, and the whole thing ends in babylonian cacophony.

I sort of like that metaphor.

Otherwise? Not much else to talk about, other than we had our usual siberian cold front, which is two weeks of what is severely cold weather for these parts. My heating system sort of can handle it, but some parts of the day it gets chilly, so hot soup and a warm bed are nice remedies for that.

Today they reported the worst is over.

My game site finally did it... kept tinkering with the programme till it crashed, and I re-installed it on Friday, but still can't get in, so am missing my daily chats with several people I have come to know and like. And it burns me, because we don't have e-mail exchange, you just assume you meet at the market place and catch up on daily stuff. That burned me. Had to switch to the US/EU version of another company, and begin all over, but turns out they have tons more features than the stingy germans did. They had stripped it down and made it five times more difficult to advance than the original... and no goodies, you either had to buy from their shop or go without. So now I can wait around a while till I can make some new acquaintances.

And oh yes... if you go into a depression and don't open your snail mail post box for 11 months in this electronic age... turns out you might miss something very important indeed. Seems I did.

I got executed and never noticed a thing.

In the form of a letter from the justice department, giving me a final court decision that I am to be executed, yup. To the tune of 516 Euros, no lawyers' costs. Which seemingly will be taken out of my bank account. Wish 'em good luck with that, hey.... I assume they'll attach my next 'double' pension payment.

So that was really 'heftig', as a friend of mine from Hannover would put it. Heavy. However, it is friggin' embarassing. Because I have no idea what I got executed FOR... I really haven't. And obviously it would be even more embarassing to call the listed lawyer and ask, 'errm... you know that court thing you filed against me? Could ya tell me what that was really about?' Riiight. No one would believe me anyway, let's face it.

The one thing I have always, always been stringent about is having all my monthly payments up to date and automatically sent where they are supposed to go every month, just to avoid that, so I can't figure what in the world was extra. Didn't buy anything, can't afford anything, so it's a mystery to me.

So my first reaction was booming bass, then sorta treble, and ended with a squeaky woofer. Watcha gonna do, hey. I'm too tired for any drama. And insomniac at present.

Whatever. The metaphor tells a story. Even if you have the two mono channels running, it's the same programme with variations. But the same programme.

Elsewise, the pop station amuses and irritates me. They have the weirdest stories of the day. I loved the one where a granfather and grandson hit nine cars in an alcoholic version of nascar and when the police caught them, both were drunk, but there was no way of telling who was driving. And as to salzburg and salzburg province... there are a mess of people driving without a license. No wonder there are always 'ghost' driver alerts on the radio. A ghost driver is one who enters the highway on an exit ramp and is thus driving the wrong way, endengering all oncoming traffic. And there is the new law requiring that if there is an accident and a traffic jam, drivers have to form a safety lane for the fire trucks police and ambulance... so the ones on the left pull left, all others pull to the right, and the emergency vehicles can get to the accident and maybe save a life. If you do not adhere to the new law... the fine is a draconian four thousand euros. So they aren't messing around. It is something new since the beginning of the year, but I find it sensible.

And otherwise... it was just too damned cold to go out. One lady did her daily constitutional walk anyway in the snow, fell, couldn't get up, and froze to death before they found her on a wooded path. She was seventy six. And so it goes. Tend to your speakers.