I bring you a culinary guide to my breakfasts, lunches, and some of my snacks growing up. This is not quite complete, as the pictures include only one trip to the local grocery store in the middle of some kind of strike. As you can see, it is a very balanced and healthy diet – providing about equal servings of both categories of the food pyramid: grains and dairy products.
Movable Type Update
Movable Type has updated to 3.0. This blog, as well as about a dozen other blogs I manage and host for friends runs Movable Type. Another dozen or so blogs I manage and host for friends runs WordPress. Following the new licensing restrictions of Movable Type, I regret to say that I will no longer be installing or updating any of the Movable Type blogs. Any future projects I will be doing involving blogs will be using WordPress or other open source software like it. Furthermore, I have donated $20 to WordPress and hope its developers continue to add features and further support for international and multi-lingual blogs. And if they don’t, being open source, anyone else can come along and add these features themselves. I encourage others to donate to them, especially those among my friends who I have installed the program for.
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Barne TV
Monday is 17th May, big nationalist holiday in Norway. Lots of flag waving, hot dog eating, song singing, band playing, people marching, and occasional Sweden bashing. I’ll be following my cousins Alex and Frida around and will do whatever they do. I saw something interesting on “children’s TV” this morning, which I was glued to with Frida. They were doing lots of 17th of May stuff, and being patriotic and all when suddenly one of the announcers jumps out in a Sami costume and says to the kids, “Norway has two national days, the 17th of May and February 6th. February 6th is when we celebrate the Sami people.” Then things got even more interesting. A line of kids made a dragon thingy, lining up under a green dragon outfit and the show cut to an explanation of Chinese dragon dances. Then some other kids come out wearing costumes from other cultures. “Hey, how about if we have a 17th of May parade combining all the cultures together!” The band then tried play a dozen different tunes at once. After it was over, the announcer adds, “Wow, this was sooo cool!” before going on to the next activity. Interesting…I don’t know where to start on this one…
Nostalgia
I finished my second full day back in Stavanger, and it has been marked by almost continuous nostalgia. I have been away this time five years, but this city, where I have spent a decade of my life, is the closest thing I have to a home. I have been “watching” myself and my reactions to things very closely and I have also tried to look around me with a much more critical eye. Overall, however, it feels great and very natural to be back here.
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News on Norway’s NRK
Watched the news tonight on the national TV channel here. A 30 minute show giving us a summary of the news we need to know. Of this 19 minutes was used for domestic news. The dominating top headline was the marriage of Denmark’s crown prince Frederick (around 10 minutes but it seemed to last forever). The top international news item was the release of detainees in Iraq.
Just a few more links
Ok, this procrastination has to stop. A few more links:
- Who’s the master? – Simon at Kikuchiyo talks about his PhD cumulative exams. Two years from now, if I survive, I’ll have to undergo a similar process.
- Timothy Burke has an strongly worded posting on the torture issue and the dangers of abstraction. Together with John Quiggin in this posting at Crooked Timber (as always with Crooked Timber, read the lively exchange of comments attached to the posting), I think we are starting to see the blogosphere get interested in the broader debate over torture in intelligence gathering that I think we all need to think about.
- At the Movies, at Least, Good Vanquishes Evil
- Joel at Far Outliers has an interesting posting about an article in Korean Studies on the Aso Coal Strike. Far Outlers is a great blog in that there is a lot of mention of good academic articles or tidbits on the web on a range of interesting issues. The blog is a good example of how this medium is supposed to work not only for commentary or web links, but to share good sources of interesting information that may exist offline as well.
- Antti Leppänen has an interesting posting on Paeksu, a Korean term for those not engaged in productive work or study.
Claire: Stress types
Claire has a fun posting on different kinds of people as they approach deadlines. She included my own type:
The Avoider: Suddenly becomes very sociable and good at running errands when he/she should be working.
Hmm, I need to get a conference paper out by tomorrow, perhaps that explains all the short postings I’m making to this blog this morning.
Kerim: 撒嬌
Untermenschen
Media Matters, a great source for a little breakfast rage against conservative media madness.
Today, there was an entry about the whack Michael Savage’s comment about the Nick Berg incident,
“Nick Berg, an American, not military, over there building transmission towers, was captured by the Untermenschen the sub-humans, who wrap themselves in a religion. He is seen saying his mother’s name, his father’s name, sister’s name, his brother’s name and then the smiling Arabs cut a living human beings head off as he screams. It’s a blood-curdling scream that you’ll ever hear again. You’ll never get it out of your mind if you’re a normal person, or you’re not given to murder or you’ve never been around murder. Uh, it’s something you’ll never forget, not should you ever forget it and you can thank the Democrats, you can thank the Senate Arms Services Committee for their hysterical hearings. You can thank John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Biden, The New York Times, the alphabet channels and The Washington Post for this atrocity because they caused it.”
(My bold) My jaw dropped. Untermenschen – is he actually using that term for Iraqis? It has certainly appeared a lot in the media lately, but did he miss the fact that it was popular in Nazi propaganda? It would be the ultimate irony if this term caught on amongst commentators in the US as the term for Iraqis.
Back in Europe
I’m sitting in the airport in Amsterdam, on my way to my hometown, Stavanger, Norway. I haven’t been back in Europe in five years and it feels great. Amsterdam’s airport looks pretty much the same I remember it as last time I passed through on my way back from Japan/Kuala Lumpur with my uncle Thomas.
This afternoon, I hadn’t been on the continent for more than ten minutes before I managed to make an ass of myself. I went to change a few dollars I had at the foreign exchange. I asked the exchange attendant, “Can I get Dutch Gilders or whatever they are called?” (Guilders — Thanks Kerim!)
She tilted her head slightly and gave me a warm smile, she was giving me that unmistakable, “What a cute stupid American,” look. She said, “We don’t have Dutch Gilders here.”
I was about to continue playing my part as the stupid American by responding, “What do you mean you don’t have Dutch Gilders? I’m in Dutchland, ain’t I?” Fortunately, however, she preemptively added, “Here in Europe we use Euros, would you like Euros?”
Doh! I knew that, really I did. Quick, I thought, is there any way I can change this from the “stupid American” routine to the, “smart and sassy, great sense of humor American who was really just joking” routine but nothing appropriate came to mind. As I stood there blushing, the beautiful south Asian bank clerk tried to console me in her flawless, but slightly Dutch accented English, “Hey, at least you know what country you’re in.”
I hope this is my last embarrassing experience for today. Prices seem higher than I remember, or perhaps it is just that dollars aren’t what they used to be. All the prices are more expensive than an equal number of dollars, even though dollars are worth less than a Euro. I paid the equivalent of $10 for a Chicken salad and a small sprite at McDonalds. That is more than even Japan.