Snowy Friday

We had more snow today, and this time it actually stuck around. It also got really cold. At the moment, we’re having six degrees below freezing according to the Firefox weather widget and minus 7.6° C according to the indoor/outdoor thermometer. Looks like winter is coming just in time for the Christmas season.

Of course it had to start snowing just as I was going on my weekly grocery run. I usually do my grocery shopping on Friday morning, but since I was waiting for a delivery (which didn’t even come), I postponed the shopping until the afternoon, exactly at around the time it started snowing.

Yes, I did violate Buy Nothing Day, but then Friday is always my grocery shopping day. Never mind that since Germany doesn’t have Thanksgiving, we don’t have Black Friday as a busy shopping day either. Over here, the busiest days of the Christmas shopping season are the four advent Saturdays as well as December 23rd for the really late shoppers. Besides, I’m not a big fan of Buy Nothing Day anyway, because nothing makes me want to do something more than being told not to do it for some social activist cause or other. If I were in the US, I probably wouldn’t go shopping on Black Friday, but that’s because I hate crowds (same reason I avoid the advent Saturdays like the plague) and not because Adbusters says so.

By the way, I see that they’ve changed the international Buy Nothing Day date to Saturday. I guess someone realized that getting people to stop shopping on a day on which they wouldn’t be overly inclined to shop anyway (beyond “It’s Friday and many folks just got paid”) isn’t much of a victory. Getting them to stop on a Saturday, one of the busy advent Saturdays at that, is more of a challenge.

Finally, Ingrid Pitt, everybody’s favourite sexy vampire, has died aged 73. Though I’ve seen many of her films, I knew very little about her personal life. For example, I had no idea that she began her acting career at the Berliner Ensemble under Berthold Brecht. It’s certainly a long way from Brecht to Hammer horror.