News and Comment

I've been surfing the news. I don't think it's macabre or sick to do it when we have these intense human interest cases. I think it's a researching desire to find out why humans act so terribly.

The best comment so far came yesterday from a couple of really intelligent writers in the The Times: http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article3834569.ece

Someone mentions an interesting book: Turmalin, by one Adalbert Stifter (mid-19th century Austrian author) in which a girl is kept in a cellar by her father: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adalbert_Stifter . So far I don't see that it's translated into English.

You can get a copy in German at http://www.justbooks.co.uk/dir/i/Turmalin/3888491150/

I am tempted. I could exercise my school German, for which I got O-level Grade 6, even though my father was Austrian. I have just got £300.00 from the Austrian government for the loss of all my family out there in the 1940s. Sixty-five years after the event they gave us a wee window of opportunity in which to apply. I spent it on my 60th birthday party (which cost me £500.00). I was going to give it to charity, but I thought, gemuttlich-like, that family was everything and had a party.

Someone writes well on Hanneke's House of Horrors: http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/04/hanekes_house_of_horrors.html

And to top off the day, a link to a funny site on Austria's projected clean-up-our-image:
http://ideafix7.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/sunny-austria-land-of-incest/