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Thursday, May 20, 2010

Avoid the killer 48A tram!


I have been getting a lot of Migraines lately and have worked out that most of them appear to be related to food allergies.

I have always been allergic to many things but lately I have been getting very bad reactions to bread and a few other foods.

Kristin has had a lot of success with her program so I thought it was time I made a serious attempt to nail my Migraines for all time.

I saw Doctor Mordor and told him of my diagnosis and he seemed to think it was a good idea to have tests. I find it is always best to go to Doctor Mordor with my own diagnosis ready otherwise he is usually completely nonplussed and at a loss for the next step. He seems to be uncomfortable around sick people.

So on Friday I will go the Allergie Ambulatorium in the Rennweg where they will discover that I am allergic to many thing including many foods, reality TV and Republicans. I will then plan a course of action and bounce this off the Doctor.

Muffin has also been to the vet for a checkup. She started peeing on the bathroom floor and we thought it may have been a sign that she was on the way out. This is what happened to Karl Rove so we are always on the lookout for the signs.

She is, however, in excellent condition (for an 18 year old cat) and requires no treatment - other than the payment of an extraordinary amount of money for her blood tests and X-rays.

And the peeing on the floor? I think she was unhappy that we left her for a long weekend and she could not sleep on my head for three days. She often thinks of novel punishments for us when we go away and this was just a very mild one in the long string of atrocities she has perpetrated throughout the years.

Apparently the payment of money to the vet cured her and she is fully recovered.

I checked the speed of my Internet connection.I have a download speed of about 25 Mps and an upload speed of about 1.3 Mps. This is pretty good compared to what I had in Sydney - and in Sydney I had a very restrictive download limit. My costs here are less - and I have unlimited downloads.

I was prompted to check by the news that if the Liberal Coalition if elected to government they say they will cancel the proposed national Broadband rollout. This was the only chance that we ever had of getting cost effective high speed Internet in Australia - which lags far, far behind many Asian and European countries.

We will instead - as we have done for very many years - be held to ransom by Telstra which is the Gorilla in the market place, owns the infrastructure and is entirely focused on screwing the asses off its customers - and does so with a high degree of success.

This will not bother the Liberal party as all their policies come from the pre-Internet era and they are more than happy with pens and ink or - for the girls outside - an IBM Selectric.

And incidentally, I see with some degree of amusement and alarm that our current crop of god bothering friends in Parliament have changed the regulations for incoming passengers to Australia. You now have to say if you are carrying pornography and the customs people have the power to search you and all your electronic devices for evidence.

Cunningly - they do not define what pornography is so you have to guess. Hm....are the pics from the office Christmas party pornography? What about the photo of Auntie Madge with Fang the Doberman?

WTF?

It is particular interesting because the people searching you are the ones who decide whether or not what you have is pornography - and they have no rules so make it up as they go along. This should make for some interesting encounters at the airport in in the courts.

This is really weird. I mean - I understand this behavior from any government that is stupid enough to think it can censor the Internet - but where did this bizarre notion come from?

Do they really think in this day and age that people who have illicit material - are going to carry it with them? Perhaps they do - they certainly to date have shown no understanding of how the Internet works.

I have not brought you up to date recently with what’s happening in our town. Well -it has been a big week as this story from the Austrian Independent will show: (OK it’s not Bangkok but we work with what we’ve got).

“A rowdy woman kicked a Vienna policeman several times after he responded to a call for help from a passenger on a line 48A tram she was riding on.


The caller said the woman, 25, had been molesting and insulting passengers.


Police arrested the woman after her attack. The policeman she kicked took the rest of the day off to nurse his injuries”.


I sure am going to avoid that 48A tram! It’s a death trap!



8 comments:

  1. WTF is happening to Australia? Seriously. Stop becoming so effing Americanized.

    So does carrying pornography extend to laptops, mp3 players, iPads, etc? Are they going to check hard drives? Do they have the authority to check my files? Because, wow.

    On the headaches, I'm thinking sugar is the big culprit for me. Maybe refined wheat products? Still trying to narrow it down. I may post on it next week. Curious to see what your experience will be with diet.

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  2. Oh, and thanks for giving me something to blog on today:

    http://www.wanderlustlust.com/2010/05/wtf-australia.html

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  3. "So does carrying pornography extend to laptops, mp3 players, iPads, etc? Are they going to check hard drives"

    Yes to that. And don't try to conceal any flash drives in bodily crevices because they can look there too.

    Wheat is certainly a problem and I have cut most of this out.

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  4. Badger, you evoke wheat. Do you have a gluten problem? Have you been tested explicitly for celiac (coeliac) disease? My neighbor Madeleine has this affliction, and I've become involved in trying to find solutions for her.

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  5. The 48A is a bus, not a tram - 2 digits plus A or B and three digits always signifies a bus. They must have meant the 48. I lack the inclination to kvetch more because typographical errors are the least of the AT's journalistic problems.

    Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the trams. Only the occasional moron and harmless drunk nowadays, of whose presence we shouldn't complain because Wiener Linien & the Polizei seem to be doing a good job of renditioning them off to Gitmo or wherever. Gone are the days of the foul-smelling vomiting drunk in every carriage. It's certainly nothing like New York, where 90% of subway journeys I've taken have featured crack-addled crazies wandering from carriage to carriage proclaiming the 'gospel of Jesus' - don't you just love it when those who would presume to lecture us about religion don't get that Jesus was NOT an evangelist - and thrusting the grubby narcotics fund styrofoam cup in your face, where it remains until you cough up. Schön.

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  6. Reading Parsifal's comment, I checked Wienerlinien.at: There's no Tram 48, but a Bus 48A which runs from Dr. Karl-Renner-Ring (must be near the Parliament) up to Baumhartner Höhe (where the Psychiatric Hospital is located). Food for thought.

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  7. I am familiar with that 48A bus, because I lived on Neustiftgasse for a while & therefore used it regularly. The irony of the the Psychiatric Hospital end station was not lost on me, given this news story, but I didn't mention it for some reason.

    The Otto-Wagner-Spital itself is well worth a visit. I've been there many times - not as a patient I must add - and the humanitarianism of the place never fails to move me. It's about as far from a lunatic asylum as you can get, which is astonishing given that it was built at a time when sterilisation was still seen as acceptable, and also because many more 'modern' facilities have failed to absorb the lessons Wagner showed us, and have in many cases have only reinforced old prejudices.

    There is also an excellent museum at Steinhof which charts the history of the hospital under the Nazis, who trampled over Wagner's vision and turned it into a place of horror. From there I recommend stopping by the Patientiencafe - incidentally run by the patients - and where the cakes are hausgemacht and delicious.

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  8. Parsifal,
    have you read Thomas Bernhard's "Wittgenstein's Nephew"?
    It was one of my first literary "guides" to Vienna, took me right there to Baumgartner Höhe. I have not been at the Patientencafé, thank you for the tip! Do you know the Jugendstiltheater up there? I attended a performance of Stockhausen's "Michaels Reise um die Erde" there, during last year's Festwochen.

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