I went a couple of hours without powering up the computer because our juice had flickered a couple of times, but we're in the culmination of the storm right now—the peak, I guess—so from this point forward the wind should only be subsiding.

TV2 is running amok with reporters all over the nation breathlessly reporting on the high seas, closed bridges, and nervous elderly women at bus-stops. I'm genetically inclined to favor hyperbolic weather stories, but this seems a little over the top. "DO NOT GO OUT" was one of the headlines on Text TV. Indeed, the anchors on TV2 and elsewhere (hm... lights just blinked again... and again... am I jinxing myself?) -- the news people on TV, as I was saying, were parroting the same kinds of stuff: stay indoors, don't go outside. The metro and S-trains had stopped running and the airport was closed, though they may have reopened by now. I don't know. It's just very windy. Every once in a while a gust roars by and it sounds and feels like a train rumbling by, but that's about the extent of it.

More importantly, they just featured an interview with the owner of our local kiosk on whatever news channel Trine's watching as I write this. It was pitched as an interview about his being such a young entrepreneur or something, but the bastards from the television station were setting him up! In the middle of the feature, coincidence of coincidences, a couple of goons from the tax authority came in and started inventorying the guy's cola selection. A lot of little kiosk owners (the adjective is intended to modify the stores, not the owners, especially in this case) stock 2-liter, deposit-free bottles of Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi from Poland, which they then sell at prices considerably lower than Danish cola-pricing laws permit. The goons pretty much raided our boy for the cameras, but didn't manage to turn anything up. Good for him. He proudly asserted his innocence to the skeptical camera crew.

I myself buy an embarrassing amount of bootleg Polish diet cola, but I'm not saying where. Power to the people! Don't let The Man decaffeinate you!

I should have done this in the previous post: here's the link to a Politiken article about the storm.

I'll translate/paraphrase/condense: "Denmark is in the midst of a genuine winter storm..."

Oops!

No I won't... our electricity just browned out and I'm saving and closing before we lose it all... (Sweden just lost theirs...)

This morning Trine told me there was a storm warning in effect for Denmark, especially western Jylland (Jutland). I didn't pay much attention. But the winds have been picking up all day here in Frederiksberg (slash-Copenhagen), and are now getting serious. The death toll is apparently one at this point (someone out in Jylland was killed by a windblown tree), they're evacuating parts of the Jylland coast, and major bridges throughout the country, including those over "Big Belt" and "Little Belt," and presumably the monstrosity that stretches to Sweden, have been shut down. There are gale force winds across the country, with hurricane-strength gusts. They're advising the whole country to stay indoors.

If Danes are actually thinking about staying indoors, something scary is going on.

I realize I said (on the Almanac) that I was going to shut this site down, so probably no one's reading this, but if this storm is at all interesting I'll continue to post here.

And after the storm I'll shut it down...