Hoodoo

The people of Haiti are in trouble.  Please send help if you can.  Artze ohne Grenze.

baden baden

On these cold winter weekends, nothing could be finer than an afternoon spent at the spas.  Bad Kissingen, Bad Neustadt, Bad Bocklet, Bad Karma.  For the brave or the fool-hardy, some even have a chute from the inside to the outside pool, thick with a bank of lazy steam tampt down by the cold, cold air.  From the envelope of warmth, the fragile currents above the waters look deceptively inviting.

nomenclature

The wintery storm was not a total bust, as we await early dismissal, but the Germans seem to have developed a sort of naming-envy, American-style.  The weather men have called this depression Daisy, as one would name hurricanes or cyclones.  H says they used to just call it winter.  I am afraid they might take it to a further extreme and pop the suffix -gate on it, like the US has done with every political scandal or hissy-fit since Watergate.  Monica-gate, Finance-gate, Climate-gate.  Giving something a name has become more than just short-hand for the weather system that made a mess of the roads during a certain time, it gives it a personality like El Nino or La Nina, which one does not hear so much about these days--possibly non-compliant with global warming.

pnw'd

The creation of the US Department of Homeland Security and other various agencies of angst have succeeded in deputizing an army of untrained goons with a dangerous sense of authority.  Such organizations too have dismal track records when it comes to implementing new technologies that mean to keep us safe.  I am sick to death of seeing pervy and gross pictures of people in x-ray vision.  The unlucky models for the body-scanners all look like that creature from Pan's Labyrinth.  I wonder what fly-by-night contractor threw these together and stand to make a tidy profit.  It is like the electronic voting machines that supposedly make democracy better or taking away our USB drives at work and giving us something called "data armour" that seizes up at random and requires eight minutes to open an email--or the $2 500 toliet seats that the Pentagon is wont to purchase.  What is worse is that some believe that such flashy contraptions are more than show and could actually prevent an attack.  Nothing's gained, expect maybe a false sense of safety, and we'll never get back are thumb-drives, cigarette lights, paper chads, potable water.