Stupid Pet Tricks? or, What, Wait, What Did You Say??

The following is apparently a true story.

I heard it from an online friend yesterday ... it happened to a girl/woman an RL friend of her knows. (Urban legend? Maybe, if it hadn't sounded so very plausible.)

I would like to say, first and foremost, that it should be ILLEGAL to be this fucking stupid. People like this stupid cow are a major part of the reason why reptiles have such a bad rep. It really should be illegal to acquire any animal as a pet unless you can prove that you know what the needs of that species of animal are and you understand the way it thinks and the way it perceives the world.

The woman this happened to, let's call her Ms X ... she was the owner of a pet snake. I don't know what kind exactly, just that it was some kind of boa. (My friend who heard the story doesn't know much about reptiles, so I didn't find out that detail ... but obviously it was one of the more aggressive species. >:-)

Ms X brought her snake to the vet, and explained that she was worried that it might be sick. It had stopped eating, it would eat hardly anything, and refused even foods that up until recently had been fast favorites. She wondered if maybe it was sick ... or of course it might be constipated. (If there is a blockage in a reptile's digestive system, because it's swallowed something indigestible, this may cause it to stop eating.) A valid concern, I'm not suggesting otherwise. BUT. There was also the matter of the snake's strangely altered behavior. It had started to climb up into her bed, but not to curl up and sleep - no, it would stretch out in its full length on her bed. 'It never used to do this before, doctor' ...

The vet apparently 'looked at her' ... yeah, I'll bet!! He was probably thinking WTF?? Is she this stupid or is she just pretending? Apparently she sincerely was that pig ignorant of the behavioral patterns and development of this animal that she had VOLUNTARILY taken into her home. So the vet had to sit her down and explain to her that You see, miss, what's happening here is that your snake is making plans now to eat you.

It's measuring her for size, and it's starving itself. WTF did she think it was doing?!? What else could it be doing??

Ms X went home alone, leaving her so-called pet behind at the vet's office.

People like that really should not be allowed to own animals. We all should really have to prove that we understand the species that our pets belong to, and are fully aware of their needs and their expected behavior. Strictly speaking, Ms X ought to have been eaten ... that would have been the most efficient way to ensure that she wouldn't pollute the gene pool any further with her obviously very strong DUMBASS gene. (The Darwin Award is given out posthumously, so she might have come out ahead.)

The thing about snakes is that they are very, very simple creatures, and they perceive the world in a very simple way. Absolutely everything a snake encounters, it groups into one of two categories: food and nonfood. To a snake, nothing exists that does not belong to one of these two categories. All kinds of 'dead' things, ie things that are not nor have been alive, are of course nonfood. When it comes to living things, it is size, and size alone, that determines which category something ends up in. To a, let's say three month old boa constrictor, a kitten will be food, whereas an adult cat will be nonfood. But the snake will grow and when the same individual is, let's say three years old instead of three months, the adult cat too will have been moved to the food category. (Presumably before then, actually. But ... three and three. It sounded good. :-)

This becomes a problem when STUPID people acquire these animals and don't also acquire the knowledge they need to have in order to understand how their pet perceives the world and them. There are some reptile owners who actually think that their pets 'love' them or similar bullshit ... that the animals miss them when they're away and are sad when they don't see them, etc. Utter crap!! :-) Those types of feelings originate in the forebrain, and reptiles only have hindbrains - end of story.

This stupid snake owner has no doubt deluded herself into thinking that her pet has some kind of feelings for her, that it 'likes' her or whatever ... again, crap. What's happened here is obviously that when this animal was first taken into her home, it was a juvenile and quite small. She, the owner, was then categorized as nonfood, because she was much bigger than the snake was at that time. But since then the snake has grown, whereas Ms X has not grown ... ie, in the snake's perception, the imbalance between predator and prey has been corrected, and it may now be possible to bring down this prey.

Size alone determines category ... big humans are nonfood and small humans are food. And what is big and what is small depends of course 100% on the size of the snake. >:-)

The moral of this story is: maneating predators should not be kept as pets!!!!

(Something people really shouldn't need to be told.)

Raphael the Red Eared Slider: Not As Stupid As Everybody Says

My RES turtle Raphael isn't very clever, but he gets there in the end.

It's taken him a few days to catch on, but this afternoon he finally realized that a soft & comfortable seat cushion lying on the balcony floor isn't just an annoying obstacle that you have to clamber over when you're walking around ...

... it's also a great place to bask!

He does love basking in the sun, when he just settles down to doing it ... there's the rub.

He's so pretty!! :-)

Livet imiterer ... kunsten ... eller noe ...

Ah, the internet! Where men are men, women are men, and 14-year-old girls are federal agents.
Gammelt jungelord ...

Men av og til er det faktisk virkelig sant. Hm.

'Lynet slo ned hos advokat Abid Q. Raja'

Det var skikkelig uvær i Oslo i går kveld, lyn og torden til den store gullmedalje. I dag er det en artikkel på forsiden av Dagbla' på nett som handler om at lynet tydeligvis slo ned i hagen til den allestedsnærværende advokaten og ikke minst politikerspiren Abid Q Raja (sorry, men blæh).

Det er en artikkel på forsiden av en av landet største nettaviser som handler om at lynet har slått ned i hagen til Abid Q Raja.

Jeg må bare spørre ...

HVEM BRYR SEG??!?!

Everyone's an atheist ...

... to every religion except, in some cases, one.

If I was going to get religion, which would I end up with?

They're all equally nonsensical to me. This one makes as much sense as any other ...

The Devil be out to tempt ye ... !!

On the Last Day, the Evil One cometh ...

Beware, for your soul is in peril!!!

But fear not, there is always hope!!

Good will triumph in the end. Cause that's how it always happens.

Right ... ?

Note to self ...

... remember these points the next time an online debate looks tempting.


- If you say anything about correlates of race you must hate a race.
- If you say anything about genetic correlates of success you are a social Darwinist.
- Any general claim about human behavior is an absolute law without exception unless it includes qualifiers like "tends" or "often."
- If you quote someone you agree with everything they've said.
- If you say you prefer option A to option B, you also prefer A to any option C.
- If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with a group or person you are presumed to support (or oppose) them overall.
- If you say anything nice (or critical) about anything associated with an idea or claim you are presumed to support (or oppose) it and related ideas overall.
- If you worry that more A will cost too much of B, you don't care about A at all.
- If you dislike a proposed solution to a certain problem, you don't care about that problem.
- If you oppose one end of a continuum, you support the other end.
- If you approve of a decision you approve of the actual outcome, and vice versa.
- If you think A causes B, you think A is necessary for B.
- Any opinion you express is a strongly and confidently held opinion.
- If you criticize someone about something, you say you are immune to such criticism.


Shamelessly stolen from this blog ...

... which I discovered through this blog.

'An Index Expurgatorius'

A nice little poem that I found while browsing around on the BookCrossing site:

The man who marks or leaves with pages bent
The volume that some trusting friend has lent,
Or keeps it over long, or scruples not
To let its due returning be forgot;
The man who guards his books with miser's care,
And does not joy to lend them, and to share;
The man whose shelves are dust begrimed and few,
Who reads when he has nothing else to do;
The man who raves of classic writers, but
Is found to keep them with their leaves uncut;
The man who looks on literature as news,
And gets his culture from the book reviews;
Who loves not fair, clean type, and margins wide --
Or loves these better than the thought inside;
Who buys his books to decorate the shelf,
Or gives a book he has not read himself;
Who reads from priggish motives, or for looks,
Or any reason save the love of books.
Great Lord, who judgest sins of all degrees,
Is there no little private hell for these?


Thanks to BookCrosser reulte, who apparently has found this somewhere on The Secular Web.
Author unknown.

Øverli slår til igjen

Denne var skikkelig morsom. :-)

Har ikke så mye mer å si om det.

Religion, bah humbug!!

It's one thing when people insist on being religious themselves. Personally I don't get where they're coming from. I mean, in this day and age. But to each their own. When they start trying to shove it down my throat, however, I tend to lose my temper.

When I got to the subway station this morning, on my way to work, there were like half a dozen missionary-type women standing just inside the door handing out flyers. (I'm sorry, but when women with long hair and ankle-length skirts want to tell me about Jesus ... sorry, but whatever you have to say, put a sock in it, I don't want to hear it.) They were very actively pushing the things on everyone, and I was partly in a hurry to catch the train (as I always am ;-) and partly not entirely awake yet (I hate getting up in the morning) so basically I took it by reflex. When I saw what it was I crumpled it up and threw it on the floor behind me as I walked towards the tunnel that leads down to the platform. One of the women called out, Du trenger ikke være så sur, da! [You don't have to be so grumpy!] Cue some random giggles from her fellow zealots.

Dumb as shit, much??

When you're out in public with the express purpose of sharing your religious beliefs with random strangers, it's got to be a good idea to make sure that those strangers are in a good mood. That's gotta be like Evangelizing 101. And there is NO more certain way known to man to make sure that people become grumpy than to ask them if they're grumpy OR tell them not to be grumpy! I would in all seriousness have thought that there couldn't be a single person over the age of 14 who didn't know that.

From this, I can only conclude that being really religious makes you kinda stupid.

>:-)

Crazy/Scary Online Weirdness, Part Two

A show on TV tonight that reminded me of something awful ... or actually it was about the something that was awful ... it was called My Fake Baby. It's about the so-called 'reborn' phenomenon. Ooh, I don't want to get into it, it's too creepy. I shudder at the thought.

The first I heard of this was when a friend sent me a link to this blog. 'Nuff said there. I'd recommend reading it, it's a great post, he's a pretty good writer. Funny. Read the comments too, lots of good stuff there. And to get the full experience, definitely follow the eBay link like he says. (If the link's dead, all it'll take is a search for 'reborn' and you'll be set ... if you dare.)

Truth is indeed stranger than fiction. Although, come to think of it, this does remind me of a certain short story F Paul Wilson contributed to one of the Borderlands anthologies ...

Sara Backer: American Fuji

A really good book that I'm reading right now.

A BookCrossing book, naturally. :-) It's a bookring, organized by totoroandmei. I started it on ... Tuesday, I think. I'm really enjoying it. It's an unusual story ... about some Westerners in Japan. Kind of a mystery - one of the two main characters is an American who's come to Japan to find out more about his son's death there one year earlier. (The son was a student at Shizuoka University.) The circumstances surrounding the accident and subsequent fatality are very peculiar and don't seem to quite add up. The father is trying to get to the bottom of it, but that's easier said than done. He's very frustrated by Japanese society, which he doesn't understand and feels anything but welcomed by. The other main character, an American woman who's lived in Japan for about five years, is trying to help him, but she has her own problems too. And she doesn't really want to get involved ... or does she ... ? ;-)

A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum ... a couple of little details that were fun for me personally, which makes the book stand out a little for me. The female gaijin, Gaby, exercises by running every morning, normally about the same route in her neighborhood. When she's running she passes by a - or the? - Tamiya factory. They're the world's top producer of model cars (models as in build-it-yourself kits) and radio control cars. They're like the Mercedes of the model kit world. :-) I used to sell those in my old job ... so it was fun when the factory suddenly popped up like that.

And in another scene, the bereaved father, Alex, is escorted to his hotel by a young Japanese woman. (He is an author and has managed to get to Japan as part of the promotion for his latest book, Why Love Fails. :-) They get to talking about relationships, men and women, love, etc. She's not really that into her boyfriend and from what she tells Alex, he doesn't treat her that well either. Alex thinks she should look for something better. But no, she can't do that, she's so old, 25 already ... at that age a Japanese woman just has to grab on to what she can get. She says. Alex is a little shocked, although to be honest he isn't that interested. (He has only come to Japan to find out about his son, he doesn't care much about the book tour.) But he feels it's really sad the way she sees things ... or the way things are for her. He has this sudden wild idea of taking her back to the States with him, he could be her Henry Higgins ...

So she was twenty years younger; in her culture, that wasn't a barrier. He could whisk her back to Seattle, put her through graduate school if she wanted, give her room to grow. 'What kind of man do you like?'

Her eyes got misty. 'Keanu Reeves.'

On the other hand, twenty years was a big gap.

LOL!! I know how she feels ... !! :-D

Hvordan er det MULIG ...

... for et norsktalende menneske som er oppegående nok til å inneha en betalt stilling i arbeidslivet å se på denne plakaten og tenke at den ser grei ut, ikke noe problem å henge denne på inngangsdøra??

Hva??

Er det et krav hos Narvesen på Jernbanetorget at de bare ansetter folk med dysleksi? Jeg kan virkelig ikke for mitt bare liv begripe hvordan dette her er mulig på noen annen måte enn at personen som har godkjent dette må være ordblind.

Det som er det virkelig utrolige er jo at denne feilen i det hele tatt kan oppstå. For altså - bare i tilfelle noen skulle lese dette og begynne å lure - det finnes ikke noe norsk ord som heter 'reåpning'. Det finnes et engelsk ord som heter 'reopening', men det lar seg ikke oversette direkte, rett av ... den norske oversettelsen må nødvendigvis bli 'gjenåpning'. Men man kan vel til nød forstå hvordan en uvitende person kunne klare å finne på det gale norske ordet hvis de kjenner til det korrekte engelske.

Men de har jo ikke engang gjort dét. Hvis det hadde eksistert et slikt ord på vårt språk, så måtte det da i så fall ha hett, som jeg skrev over, 'reåpning'. Men det står jo ikke engang det.

De har tatt et ord som ikke eksisterer ... og så har de skrevet det feil.

Hvordan er det mulig???

Mission accomplished!!

I released ten books around the lobby and the cafe on the ground floor at the Cinematheque. I got some strange looks. :-) It was fun. Here's hoping the books get caught ... !!

I went there directly from work; took the subway to Railway Square station and walked over to the Cinematheque, which is is in Queen Street - how appropriate at the moment. ;-) To get there I had to cross Railway Square which at the moment is basically one giant construction site. I spotted this sign on one of the fences there:

So??

Well, that company is a customer of ours at work. I sell a lot of stuff to guys from that company. So it was kinda fun to suddenly come across their sign like that. :-)

I had ten books with me and I spread them around the ground floor, except in the store. I think they have some books for sale in addition to DVDs, and I don't want to risk anything getting mixed up. I also had some flyers with me, the ones from Wren's Crossing (not quite up to date, but otherwise great - thanks to TexasWren for making them available :-) and some of boirina's beautiful bookmarks (she really deserves thanks for her creativity and generosity!!) - I put these in a stack by the little window where they normally sell tickets.

It'll be so exciting to see how this goes.


Update, Saturday 21st
When lunacia went to release today's stack of books, she looked around for Friday's releases. Only one of the ten were still there, nine were gone. Yay! :-)

BookCrossing mass release project

Today's the day our project begins. :-) I'm so excited. :-) And lunacia is too - she came over on Wednesday to help me label the last of the books, and we talked about how cool this project may turn out to be. If things go well we hope to really spread the word about BookCrossing to lots of new people - get some fun journal entries on the books and hopefully some new members.

We'll be releasing about 90 books over the course of ten days. All titles that are relevant to 'queer culture' in some way. I'm so impressed with the books we've been able to collect! We've gotten 77 donations (OK, quite a few of them have been donated by us ;-) but we have gotten at least 40 books sent from abroad) and we've registered 17 books with the project's shelf as the user. So that's a pretty good number, we thought ... but it's also so impressive that we've been able to amass such a variety of books. There are books in English, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, there's fiction and non-fiction, new contemporary fiction and classics, novels in a number of genres, short stories and poetry, a couple of YA titles, biographies, social commentary, self-help, books on history, movies, World War II ... I mean, wow!!

This afternoon I will be releasing the first ten books at the Cinematheque. I guess in about an hour or so. :-) Then every day till the end of the festival we will be releasing 8-10 more books; while the Oslo Gay & Lesbian Film Festival lasts the releases will be at the Cinematheque, and then for the three days left after that the books will be released in the Pridepark tent on City Hall Square. Altogether about 90 books.

Yay, us!! :-D

Here's hoping that this goes really well and we get a great response. And that a year from now we'll be doing the same thing again. :-)

Frode Øverli er en person ...

... som har en del underlige tanker i hodet sitt.

Men han er ofte inne på noe!!

:-D

A fantastic quote ...

... although also rather depressing. I heard it on The Daily Show tonight.

War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
Ambrose Bierce

A friend sent me this ...

(Not the button, just the link. Here.)

It's something some Republicans in Texas have come up with, apparently. They are/were selling them at the GOP convention there.

'If Obama becomes President' [obviously] [and what's with the ellipsis, it's like an epidemic] 'will we still call it The White House?'

Or will you be reduced to using a lower case t in 'the' [as you should have been doing all along]?

It is a house that is painted white. Personally, I fail entirely to see why any other name than 'White House' should be necessary. Do they think that they can get people to believe that they think ANYONE actually wonders about that name?? Can they?

Nice touch to make the background color on the button black. Subtle.

'Barack Obama - the first affirmative action president'. Seriously, I've heard (ie, seen) people calling him that.

What do you call a person who thinks that no black man can ever achieve anything big & important on his own merit?

Silly post, I know ... but I can't take this seriously enough to write anything that doesn't sound like sarcasm. It is so blatantly racist, and yet it's possible to claim that it isn't racism.

Another day, another reason to be grateful that I'm not American.

'Rettsfølelsen til folk flest' ...

... er en dårlig konstruksjon, men det blir enda verre på den andre måten. Utover det:

Jeg vil anta at det strider mot rettsfølelsen til folk flest hvis en person unnslipper straff, eller får mildere straff, fordi han lider av skader av et eller annet slag som han har påført seg selv.

I denne artikkelen står det følgende (det handler om en mann som i 2003 ble tiltalt og dømt for to voldtekter; nå er han arrestert for flere, en hel serie voldtekter som skal være utført over en periode på 14 år):

[Jeg har ikke rettet grammatiske feil. Har heller ikke lagt til noen. >:-)]

Den domfelte 46-åringen mente på sin side at han ikke husket noe av som skjedde, og at han hadde spist store mengder khat, og at han var psykotisk i gjerningsøyeblikket.
De rettssakkyndige i rettssaken fant ham under tvil ikke psykotisk i gjerningsøyeblikket, men de kom fram til at mannen led av posttraumatisk stress, personlighetsforstyrrelser og hadde psykiske lidelser.

So far, so good. Men:

De rettssakkyndige konkluderte med at mannens lidelser i stor gard skyldtes mannens inntak av det narkotiske stoffet khat.

Er det bare meg, eller er det noe grunnleggende umoralsk ved det å unnskylde sine kriminelle handlinger (som har påført sakesløse mennesker store lidelser) med noe som man faktisk har skylden for selv??

Han ble dømt til tre års fengsel, og dessuten til å betale litt over 100 000 kroner i erstatning. (Vi har forøvrig hinsides latterlige straffer for sedelighetsforbrytelser her i landet, men det får bli et annet innlegg.)

What kind of person ...

... will actually sit down and take the time and spend the energy to write an email to a virtual stranger (because seriously: 'talking' on an irregular basis with someone on one internet forum over a period of, what, less than a year and a half means that they are still a stranger to you) for the sole purpose of making them feel like shit? What kind of person actively goes out of their way to make other people feel bad? For no reason other than to make them feel bad?

OK, I'm sure there is one other reason: making other people feel like shit makes them feel good about themselves. Really not sure that that makes it better though.

What kind of person is it who does something like that? Is there a word for it?

This really totally boggles my mind. I mean, I'm sure I make people feel bad from time to time myself. But I can honestly say that I never go out of my way, make a conscious effort, to hurt people's feelings. I actually feel bad myself when I realize that I've made others feel that way. (Although I must confess that accidentally hurt feelings or 'offense' (whatever that is) when somone misunderstands an obvious joke, or sarcasm (especially deliberately) does make me feel exasperated first and foremost, at least initially. One of my less appealing character traits?) I don't enjoy hurting people. It doesn't make me feel big and clever.

It takes all kinds, people are different, et cetera. Not a huge comfort to me right now. I'm not used to people being mean to me on purpose, and just to be mean.

It's really sad that some people can only feel big when they make others feel small.

But I'm glad that I'm not one of them, at least.

Crazy/Scary Online Weirdness, Part One

https://www.buytalkingjesus.com/?cid=544908

Don't know quite what to say about this.

What kind of parent is it who feels that this is something that will be beneficial for their kid to play with?

Are they that scared that their religious twaddle won't stand up to scrutiny, that it's acceptable to start brainwashing the kids practically before they can walk?

(I do see, actually, how it's a good idea to get the kids to think that the bible is a nice book with pleasant stories about friendly Jesus before they actually start reading it. But still.)


Thanks to BookCrosser grooble who shared this with the world on the BookCrossing Chit-Chat forum today.

Overskrift-himmel eller -helvete???

Dette var i alle fall en vanvittig kul blogg.

Ordsaus. :-)

Tiltaket applauderes!! Det finnes en tabloid-ordliste på nett også, men denne bloggen er jo enda bedre, den er jo illustrert. Og viser hele overskriften, ikke bare ordet. Flotte saker. Jeg kom over en link til bloggen på Dagbla' på nett, det var sånn jeg fant den. Den som leter, hun skal finne ... og tilogmed den som bare vaser rundt uten mål og mening, hun skal også finne. :-)

Jeg prøvde å legge inn en kommentar på denne saken, men det lyktes ikke ... fikk bare feilmelding hele tida. Sukk. Så kommentaren kommer her. ;-)

Det ALLER dummeste i hele artikkelen er jo det første ordet ... som avslører ikke bare at denne saken i sin helhet er stjålet (selv om det er et stygt ord) fra en engelskspråklig nettavis, men også at journalisten som har stjålet den ikke kan idiomatisk engelsk. Dette kvinnfolket *heter* jo selvsagt ikke 'Beefy', men i den originale artikkelen har hun blitt beskrevet som 'beefy' (hvilket vi normalt begavede forstår skal indikere at hun er tettbygd og ganske svær slik at hun ikke hadde problemer med å passere som mann). Dette har journalisten dessverre ikke forstått. (Der sank min respekt for yrkesgruppen enda et lite hakk. :-) Takk for en god latter, bra liste!! :-)

Dette ser vel aldri ordsauseren, men. Takk allikevel. :-)

Henrik Wergeland 200 år

Jeg har sagt det før, og jeg sier det igjen: Norsk er et vanskelig språk.

I dag er det 200 år siden Henrik Wergeland ble født (eller som det står på oppslag rundt i byen, hos Sporveien o.l.: 'I dag fyller Wergeland 200 år'). I den anledning er det en artikkel i Dagbladet - skrevet av en person som lever av å skrive, faktisk, det var jo litt nedslående. Artikkelen handler om Wergeland, søsteren Camilla, og hvilke forskjellige liv de levde fordi de var av forskjellig kjønn i en tid hvor kjønnsrollene for overklassen var såpass drøyt begrensede.

Jeg siterer: Som ung pike tok faren Camilla med på tur i Europa

Øøh ... eller skjedde dette da Camilla var ung pike?

Ikke for det, det foregikk vel mye rart på 1800-tallet som ikke vi kjenner til, forsåvidt. Men allikevel da.

Gratulerer med dagen, Henrik! :-)

NHF excursion 2008, part four

To conclude the excursion we visited a pond nearby which is known to have salamanders in it. We saw some, both species, but we couldn't catch any of them. And there was no point in taking pictures - certainly not with my camera - as we only saw quite small specimens, which wouldn't have shown up in photographs anyway at that distance.

We did catch a frog though. One of the guys who's really into taxonomy, P, recognized the species and told us about it, but sad to say I don't remember much of that now. (He's the one holding the frog in these pictures.) It was a juvenile, although this species doesn't get a whole lot larger.

We also found a cluster of frog eggs, but they were probably dead :-( or else they would have been much more developed by that time of year.

Finally something that I thought was quite interesting - we caught this by accident when we were going for the frog:

It's a nymph, a juvenile dragonfly. I love dragonflies, so I was rather fascinated to see this. Don't think I'd ever seen one of these in real life before. It's a sight to see how ugly it is ... ! when you know how beautiful it will become. :-)

A good time was had by all!!

NHF excursion 2008, part three

While a couple of the guys and I were busy with the first two stålorm, the others managed to find and catch a hoggorm, Vipera berus, which of course was the main thing we were all interested in seeing. So the three of us missed seeing that up close, which sucked. But towards the end of the hike we did come across another specimen, which was basking on a pile of dry branches and logs. Unfortunately we couldn't get close to it or catch it, because it was in the middle of the pile, which was huge and rickety. But I got some good pictures anyway. This one was the best:

Check out the shed skin in the foreground on this one.

Here is another shed skin, we saw several of these.

NHF excursion 2008, part two

The next thing was a couple of stålorm, Anguis fragilis. Actually three, but one got away before we managed to catch it. These animals can throw their tails to confuse predators, and one of 'ours' did. They both played dead when we'd caught them, which this species tends to do.

In this shot I think it really shows that they are actually lizards and not snakes. Look at that head. (And see the piece of tail in P's right hand ... !)

Because they were so passive we were able to pose them a little and get some shots that really showed their coloring and scales.

A while later we found a couple more of these critters. Interesting, as it really let us see the variety of color morphs within this species.

NHF excursion 2008, part one

This year's excursion was on Sunday, May 4th. This year we were luckier; we saw six of the eleven species. All three snakes, both salamanders and one frog. The salamanders we didn't manage to catch, though ... we didn't have the right equipment with us to catch any and the ones we saw were too small to be caught without it. But we saw them, anyway. :-) We just can't prove it. ;-)

The first thing we came across was a buorm, Natrix natrix. A fine specimen, a male, which made no bones about resenting our intrusion. I got some really nice pictures, if I do say so myself.

When these last two were taken, the snake was being held by its tail off camera ... so this is a little less impressive than it may look. :-)

NHF excursion 2007

I'm a member of Norsk Herpetologisk Forening - NHF - the organization for reptile enthusiasts in Norway. We go on an excursion every spring, to look for herptiles in the wild. There are eleven species of herptiles and amphibians that are native to this country.

(This post is obviously related to my wish to photograph turtles in the wild (or semi-wild) as expressed in the previous post. :-)

Last year we didn't get to see very many of the different species - the weather wasn't too great - but I did take a few good pictures.

We came across one hoggorm - Vipera berus, the one poisonous viper we have in this country - which was attempting to bask in such sun as there was that day.

She was a female and one of the guys, P, who knows a lot about the native Norwegian snakes, palpated her for eggs, which it turned out she was in fact carrying. Cool. :-)

She wasn't too thrilled to have us there and did her best to to chase us off.

We also saw a stålorm - Anguis fragilis - which is not a snake, but a legless lizard. But I didn't get any pictures of that which were good enough to post here, to be honest. (It wasn't a very impressive specimen anyway. ;-)

However ...

... one of our esteemed members had had the foresight to bring another snake with him! LOL! He had caught it in his neighborhood earlier and brought it with him (in a sock!) to release it during the excursion. Just because. :-)

This was a buorm - Natrix natrix - an entirely harmless and very pretty snake. A juvenile specimen.

Still trying ...

... to post that turtle picture here. I've tried to do it in several different ways and nothing works. Sigh. :-( It's posted on flickr - maybe I need to be registered there?

Anyway ... there are two very similar pictures, I want to post the links here so I don't lose them.

This one shows the baby rather close up, and part of the adult's side and rear.
This one shows both the baby and the adult fully.

Great shots!! I would love to be able to take some pictures like that myself one day. Hm, that reminds me ...

BookCrossing project going on ...

Findabair was here this afternoon (ie Sunday afternoon, obviously :-), we spent several hours labelling BookCrossing books. Sixty of them! Yay, us. :-) The books are for a project I cooked up ... almost a year ago, I guess. Scary - time flies.

My idea was for us (ie, the 'hard core' of Oslo BookCrossers) to do a mass release, that is, release a lot of books all at the same time, during Skeive Filmer, the Oslo Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. If the books were 'queer interest' ones I figured we'd have a much better chance than with 'normal' wild releases of the books finding - oh, OK, being found by - readers with an interest in just that subject matter. The others thought the idea was good and we've been collecting suitable books for months now. We've also been getting lots of books donated by other BookCrossers from the US and a number of places in Europe. Kewl. Now the project is only a week away. I'm really psyched about seeing how it turns out.

What's the point of blogging?

Really, what is the point? Isn't that up to each individual blogger to decide for themselves? Is it like ... this is the point, and that's why we all do it, and if you don't get that right then you're missing the point? Some guy who doesn't like me (and doesn't know me) assumes I can't be happy with my blog because it doesn't have very many comments. (Is it supposed to have a lot of comments when I haven't even had it two months? I figured it would take a little time.) Isn't that a ... narrow way to look at it?

Personally I feel like this is for my own enjoyment more than anything else. Yesterday's entry is a good example. The one about the turtles, I mean. :-) I could have just as well done that on paper, in a photo album - printed the pictures, pasted them in some album and written my comments alongside them on the page. And then kept that album just for myself to look at. To be honest that would probably have had almost exactly the same effect as doing it here. :-) But I did it here, online, because it's much simpler and rather more accessible. And then it does have the added advantage that on the chance that someone else should be interested (say for instance Anne Ida ;-), it's easily available to them too.

But does it really have to be a prerequisite that someone else is interested? I rather assume that they aren't. But I enjoy having this blog regardless. I think that for my own sake it will be rewarding to have it, just for me. For instance, I hope I still have it, say, five years from now. Because in some ways, my memory isn't the greatest. :-) But having this, I can go back and look at entries filed under June 2008 and see that Oh look, that Saturday in June five years ago Anne Ida was here and we took the turtles out ... and Raphael peed on my arm when we tried to take his picture, I remember now! :-D Because to be honest I wouldn't expect to remember a detail like that without something to jog my memory. But this is such a great way to gather memories like that. To gather things I want to remember. Like this:

I was surfing around the net earlier and I found a great picture - this one. I wanted to post it here, but for some reason I can't manage it. It seems to be stored to my computer alright, but when I look at it there's nothing there, just a blank. So I'll just have to use the link. What a great shot. I can't remember ever seeing a picture before of a water turtle in the wild that's still soft. So cool to get to see that. If that is in fact what I'm seeing - the baby, or should I say juvenile, seems surprisingly big (and algae-encrusted) to still be soft. But I don't really know. It's a wonderful shot, either way. But it's not an RES though. No way. The post says two different things - RES in the post itself and painted in the title, and it's definitely painted that's correct. The baby is a painted turtle, I mean. (The adult is an RES, or some closely related species.) I love this picture. Look at those hind feet. Amazing. :-)

Something like that is soo worth keeping, to me. But I didn't quite know how to keep track of these things, before. Not in a way that worked. This is the perfect way, though. It's wonderful. If someone else likes it too, that's great ... but it really is first and foremost and more than anything just for me. :-)

Another outing for the turtles

My friend Anne Ida and I took the turtles out on the lawn again today. The weather was good (but unfortunately it's pretty windy) but it's not extremely hot like it was last week. Just as well. :-) We took some pretty good photos of the little guys ...

Herman was bizarrely preoccupied with Anne Ida's hand today ... he climbed around on her and spent a lot of time lying in the sun in her hand. Like this. :-) He also chewed on her a little - she must have touched something interesting ...

But of course there were interesting things on the ground too, which he did spend some time checking out.

I didn't get any pictures quite as good of Henrik, he was a little less willing to pose. As usual. This was the best shot. Anne Ida's holding him.

Raphael looks well-behaved and friendly in this photo, but ...

... about seven seconds after this was taken, he peed all over my arm. >:-) After which of course he immediately started to kick and squirm around to be let down. :-D

He is a villain I tell you, a most damnable villain!! :-D

Fantastisk innlegg ... !!

... i denne debatten på Dagbla' på nett.

Han kaller seg 'GordonBlixt' han som har skrevet det.

Overskrift: Lær dere statistikk!

Men i svarte helvete, kan ikke mediene i dette landet slutte å behandle punktestimater uten konfidensintervall som garanterte verdier?
Kan tenke meg feilmarginen for denne undersøkelsen er minst to prosentpoeng +/-.
Manglende feilmargin er fordummende. I Frankrike er det lovpålagt å ha med feilmargin i meningsmålinger. Noe for Norge?

Så vanvittig bra!! :-D

What a beautiful photo!!

Look at this! How beautiful!

I was browsing around blogspot.com and came across this almost brand new blog (not that mine is so old :-) - The Corporate Cog - where the owner's shared this picture of some felt she ordered on etsy.com recently. I love this photo! It's just a detail of something pretty insignificant - and yet, it's so beautiful ... ! :-)

It's important to remember the details in life ... :-)

A., if you see this: Thanks for sharing!!

ihasahotdog.com

This was on ihasahotdog.com recently. LOL!! What a fantastic picture, and what a perfect caption!! I can't explain it when it happens, but these pictures 'hit me' in varying degrees somehow. Some are funny, some are very funny, and some are just ... instant favorites. This one I would love to have a poster of.

My Norwegian translation: Brødsaksa di ... Lukk den

LOL!! :-D

Things Only Idiots Believe, Part Four.

The new Marriage Act will lead to huge and fundamental changes in Norwegian society.

Come on. We all know it won't.

This is Norway. Nothing major ever really changes here. It takes an armed invasion for things to change here. This time, like always, there'll be some discussions and some arguments (and some weddings :-) and we'll all go on with our humdrum lives just as we've always done.

(Anyone remember the huge and fundamental changes we were supposed to get as a result of the Partnership Act back in -93 ... ? Ho hum ...)

Should June 11th be our official Anti-Discrimination Day??

Why the hell not?? :-D

On June 11th, 1913, Parliament gave the right to vote to all Norwegian women.

On June 11th, 2008, Parliament made the right to marry the same for all Norwegian citizens, straight and gay.

Congratulations to every gay person in this country ... !! and to every straight person too, because despite what some insecure & ignorant losers may believe (and how many of those are closet cases, I wonder?? ;-) this is in fact a sign that the world does move forward and that - fortunately - the delusional fairy tales known as religion are being squished out of existence at least in this part of the world.

I just wish that Norway wasn't the sixth country in the world to get a law like this - we should have been the first!! :-)

One of my absolutely favorite movies ...

... was on TV yesterday. I've seen it probably 15 or 20 times before - at least - but I just had to watch it again. I lurve it! :-)

It's weird how some movies are just so ... magical, or whatever ... so perfect ... that you never get tired of them. No matter how many times you've seen them or how well you know them, no matter that you remember every single line down to the actors' intonations in every single scene ... some movies are just never boring anyway. This one is one of those, for me.

The first time I saw it I was six years old. It was at somebody's birthday party ... a 7th birthday, I think. I came home and my mother asked me if I'd had fun at the party. Sure! She asked me what we'd done. Oh, we'd eaten such and such cake and hot dogs and whatnot, and we'd played this and that game, and we'd watched a movie. My mother said that that sounded like fun, and what movie had we watched? I said - 6 years old! - Jaws!

:-D

Things Only Idiots Believe, Part Three.

A turtle can get out of its shell.

No, it cannot. And even the most cursory examination of one of these animals should be enough to tell anyone that.

If you remove a turtle from its shell, you'll be torturing it to an agonizing death.

Can your spine safely be removed from your body??

icanhascheezburger.com

Since I got started with Failblog yesterday, I got into the spirit of sharing. ;-)

Here's my favorite lol ever from icanhascheezburger.com.

The first time I saw this I was at work. (I know, shame on me.) I couldn't stop laughing. It was really embarrassing.

Failblog.org

Another hilarious one ... but I actually didn't realize what I was looking at at first. Mmm ... fresh and washed salad ...

Poor little guy!! I hope he made it out of there safely! :-D

(He does look alive in there, doesn't he? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part? ;-)

Failblog.org

I spent an hour looking through Failblog this afternoon. Soo many funny lols. :-) This one was the funniest. I literally laughed till I cried. I so hope that it's just a joke.

It is SO hot out ... !!

It is so hot in the sun today ...

... that when I took the turtles out for an hour's exercise on the lawn next to the building, Herman (front) and Henrik gave up their explorations after about forty minutes and took shelter in this very meager shade.

Sheesh!

Hit me, baby, one more time ...

Third time's the charm ...

9:10 PM at Eldorado ... ;-)

Sad story

During my lunch hour just now I read an article in today's A-magasinet, a feature about Jonas Gardell who's just been awarded an honorary doctorate at the university in Lund. (A very prestigious institution.) He's my favorite comedian, I think he's pretty fantastic. :-) I've read almost all his books, I've got his shows on DVD, a certain movie he scripted is on my top five ever list and I've seen him live ... I think five times.

My parents once met his mother on a trip down the Swedish coast. But that's another story. She seemed like a real character when they met her, quite uninhibited, which I now think may have been due to early senile dementia. It was about four years ago that they met her. In this article it says that she's completely senile now and doesn't remember anything whatsoever.

There's a story in the article about how Gardell went to visit her recently - she's in a home - and brought one of his kids with him. When she saw her grandson, Mrs Gardell exclaimed, What an adorable child! Then she continued, Such a shame that I never had any children of my own.

Gardell has three siblings.

That is so sad.

My grandmother's not doing too great either, but at least she knows who I am.

Perspective ...

People are SO STUPID ... !!!!

I went to the BookCrossing meetup here in Oslo yesterday, and afterwards I went to a couple of bookstores with my friends Findabair and NyxRo. We went to Norli in University Street and then around the corner to Tanum in Paleet. The following happened in the latter store.

We went in via the main entrance (ie the one closest to the street corner). Findabair went to the foreign section to look for a Stieg Larsson book in Swedish, and NyxRo wandered off ... to the psychology section, I think. I stopped to browse the rack of Paperblanks just inside the entrance (I just love Paperblanks, they are the most beautiful journals around - and what a selection).

As I was standing there, this couple - kind of chubby and fortyish, I'd say - came up to the entrance. Which is a door that you have to physically open which then closes behind you (not automatically, it's just weighted). On the other side of the door, in the entrance area, was this other chubby fortyish guy ... he was their friend apparently, he was waiting for them. The man went for the door, but the woman said No, look, it's No Exit. (There's a sign on the inside of the door that indicates this.) The man stopped and then stood there and looked dumbly at the sign for a couple of moments. Then they started talking to each other, saying Oh no, that's too bad, we'll have to go around the other side.

WTF?? I mean, I appreciate a law-abiding citizen as much as the next person, but hello!

Then they waved to their friend outside and the man made some weird hand signals that I think were supposed to indicate that they would go around and use the exit doors. Their friend looked confused but remained standing there. Then, and here's the clincher - as they were starting to leave, the man suddenly turned back, grabbed the door handle and pulled. The door wouldn't budge. The man turned around again, back to the woman, shoulders slumping in a defeated way - obviously thinking Yeah, it really is No Exit.

What I wanted to do was to smack the idiot upside the head and shout, oh, I don't know, THE DOOR OPENS OUTWARDS, DUMBASS!!!

But being a well brought up young person from a properly furnished home I of course did no such thing.

Alas.

Some friends that guy has got, too, who won't so much as open a door to help him, but just stands there gawking like an idiot. The big lug.

Things Only Idiots Believe, Part Two.

Russia won the 2008 ESC only because of bloc voting.
Their song didn't matter, they just got lots of votes because everybody in Eastern Europe likes them so much.

This couldn't possibly be a bigger distortion of the truth.

Get with the program. Eastern Europeans don't like Russia. Nobody likes Russia.

Awww ... !!

The weather's turned fantastic here over the past few days, really unbelievably hot - I've been sleeping on the balcony - and nothing but sun all day long. Time to move my biggest turtle Raphael out of doors for the summer. :-)

Isn't he beautiful? :-)

He doesn't get along with the little ones (Herman and Henrik) so for their safety he can't live in the tank with them. He's got a sort of portable pond to live in which since late August and up till yesterday has been set up in the guest room. This arrangement does have an advantage to it in terms of Raphael's wellbeing ... he does tend to get incredibly frustrated in the tank, from not being able to get out of it even though it seems obvious to him that he should be able to do so (the tank is made of glass :-). Living in the pond, he can get in and out whenever he wants.

Anyway ... yesterday I moved the pond out onto the balcony. It's more than warm enough for him and obviously the natural sunlight is much better for him than his basking lamp which he has indoors. I moved the pond and then the turtle. :-) He seemed to settle down OK. But just now he climbed out of the pond and because I hadn't put the 'gate' on the door (a board in the doorway to the balcony, keeping chelonians out :-) he went into the apartment. And guess where he went. Yup - straight into the guest room to the spot where his pond has been for ten months. Now he's wandering around in there, around the area now vacated by the pond. Awww ... !!

Looks like he's planning to hide in the throw blanket that's still lying in a pile on the floor there, to take a nap. (They normally can't sleep in the light.) My little four-legged friend. :-) I'm going to let him have his nap for a couple of hours. It's a feeding day today, but if he wants to sleep now I'll give him an extra late dinner tonight ...

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die is a book edited by a man called Peter Boxall. It's basically a list of one thousand and one books that are supposed to be fantastic and that everyone should read. :-) The selection is clearly based only in part on quality; the impact the books have had on literature and on the world as a whole has obviously been at least as important.

You can see the complete list here, or you can go here to get an interactive checklist of all the books on the list.

A lot of BookCrossers are really into this list and have set themselves the challenge of reading everything on the list. I'm one of them. This is obviously what you'd call a 'lifetime challenge'. ;-)

These are the titles that I've read:

19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates
73. As If I Am Not There – Slavenka Drakulic
85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
89. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
90. Veronika Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
93. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
101. Silk – Alessandro Baricco
122. Whatever – Michel Houellebecq
143. The Virgin Suicides – Jeffrey Eugenides
166. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis
190. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
195. Like Water for Chocolate - Laura Esquivel
237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
238. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
243. Perfume – Patrick Süskind
252. The Lover – Marguerite Duras
272. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
293. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
300. If On A Winter's Night A Traveller - Italo Calvino
301. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
302. The Cement Garden - Ian McEwan
312. The Shining – Stephen King
320. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
329. Fateless – Imre Kertész
335. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
338. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum – Heinrich Böll
390. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
408. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
413. The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
456. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
473. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe
475. Borstal Boy - Brendan Behan
477. The Once and Future King – T.H. White
478. The Bell – Iris Murdoch
489. Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
494. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
508. The Lord of the Flies – William Golding
521. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
526. The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
537. Gormenghast – Mervyn Peake
547. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
561. Titus Groan – Mervyn Peake
563. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
564. Animal Farm – George Orwell
565. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
579. The Outsider – Albert Camus
599. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
603. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
619. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
623. At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
650. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
675. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
677. The Well of Loneliness - Radclyffe Hall
699. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
734. Growth of the Soil – Knut Hamsun
749. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
789. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
791. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
794. Dracula – Bram Stoker
797. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
808. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
809. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
813. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
820. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
825. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
831. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
848. Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
866. Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne
879. The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot
893. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
898. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
902. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
905. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
906. The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas
907. La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
908. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
913. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
918. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
922. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
931. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
932. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
933. Persuasion – Jane Austen
936. Emma – Jane Austen
937. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
938. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
940. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
987. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
996. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous

This will be updated, naturally. ;-) I do plan to read the whole list. And I'll also be adding links to my BookCrossing shelf for some more of the books.

Watch this space ... :-)

Books I've read in 2008 - June

Strange Boy by Paul Magrs
Significant Others by Armistead Maupin
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Teaterdrømmer by Disa Netterstrøm-Jonsson
Pocket Planet Earth Factfile
Behind the Screen by William J Mann
White Collar Zoo by Clare Barnes, Jr
The Crimes of Charlotte Brontë by James Tully
Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling
Falska förespeglingar by Leena Lehtolainen
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent
American Fuji by Sara Backer
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynne Truss

Things Only Idiots Believe, Part One.

Norway is the last Soviet state.

When I stop to consider the fact that there are supposedly normal adults in this country who genuinely believe this ... I just want to kick someone in the face.

Nobel laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn once said the following:

If you think that this is a dictatorship, you don't know what dictatorship is.

Guess what he was talking about when he said that?

Spain under General Franco.

Comparing wealthy, liberal Norway with its enormous freedoms for each individual citizen, its unarmed police and its transparent democracy (I could go on ad nauseam!) in ANY way to a USSR-style dictatorship is an insult of the gravest kind to the many persons who have lived and are now living under the yoke of this form of tyranny.

My weekend at my grandmother's house ...

... was pretty sad. :-(

We drove up on Friday, got there at around nine. We stopped off at the old folks' home to see how my grandmother was, but only saw her briefly as she had already gone to bed and was very tired. So we just said hello and told her we'd be back the next day. She was happy to see us, although she can't really smile properly ... :-(

We stayed in her house ('we' = my mother and my father and me) - it was so weird to be there without her. It's just one of those places that are never supposed to change. A place I remember from my childhood as always the same. Whenever we went there, my grandmother would be waiting with fresh waffles when we arrived. No waffles this time. :-(

My mother wanted me to sleep in my grandmother's bed since it was already made. (She and my father slept in her old room which is normally theirs when they're there.) As if!! It may be just me being weird but that would have felt seriously disrespectful to me. I slept in my uncle's old room where I normally always sleep when I'm there. It's the guest room now ... and for my money I'm still just a guest in that house. It's still my grandmother's house, even if she can't live in it anymore.

We went to see her again on Saturday. Twice ... because she gets tired so easily, so nobody can stay with her for very long when they visit. It doesn't take long at all - say 30-40 minutes - before she's so tired from being up and being with company that she wants to lie down and rest. Inbetween visits we went to see my grandmother's sister and her husband and son on their farm ... her sister has Parkinson's, and although she was significantly better now than the last time I saw her (her meds have been altered) it still is hard to believe that she's 10 years younger than my grandmother. Looking at them you'd almost think they were the same age or pretty close. Her husband is pretty senile and needs to be looked after almost constantly ... he forgot who my mother was in the middle of the conversation, and when she reminded him that she was his niece he was like Oh, that's right, you're Agnes' daughter! ... which he'd already 'remembered' once about ten minutes earlier. But things just slip his mind. When we saw him again the next day she had to remind him again.

Anyway ... we also went for a drive around the area, to see the new football arena and a new housing development, we visited my grandfather's grave in the local churchyard, and we checked in on the Secret ... the weather was fantastic so it was nice to be there, just so sad that things had to be like that. On the Sunday we went to see my grandmother again, then went back to her house to pack and then on our way home stopped by to say goodbye to her. My mother kind of wanted to stay. She knew she couldn't, but ... she's having a really hard time with this.

It was so sad to see my grandmother like that. Partly because she's so weak, and she's always been so energetic and capable. (She gets confused now about some things - if you call on a Sunday she'll ask if you're at work, and if my mother says she's at home she (grandma) thinks she's in her house ... etc.) And partly because she needs help with pretty much everything, which is just so sad. Undignified is what it is. :-( She's optimistic in this weird way that she thinks she'll recover and be able to move back home ... but like I said before, it's good that she's able to stay positive. Just weird to hear her say it when it's so obvious to us that it's not going to happen. But faith can move mountains, I guess ...

... I hope ... or do I?

:-(

Inspiration strikes ...

... or rather it did on Thursday.

On Wednesday Anéa and I went to the movies. The movie was pretty good, but the subtitles were abysmal. As usual when they're done by a certain someone - Mr Ole H.P. Disen, the worst translator in Norwegian history. That guy ... !! He's like the reverse King Midas, everything he touches turns to shit.

We were both in total agreement about how awful this man is ... OK, his work, then. He sucks. And now ... we've had enough.

Here is our joint blog which will be dedicated to spewing our bitterness about all the movies that this loser has ruined for us up till now and no doubt will ruin for us in the future.

http://olehpdisenmustdie.blogspot.com/

Norsk er et vanskelig språk ...

... det er ikke lett å finne den rette formuleringen!!

En forferdelig historie i Dagbladet i dag. Virkelig grusomt, jeg orker nesten ikke å tenke på det. Håper idioten blir fradømt retten til dyrehold for resten av livet. Men noe å trekke på smilebåndet av i kommentarene:

I noen land spiser man hunder, dreper de levende. I andre land koker man dem i en bil en sjelden gang, la oss si 1 av 3.000.000 tilfeller. Shit happens;)

... skrev 'Tony'. Haha!! Lurt å lese gjennom før man trykker på 'lagre kommentar'! :-D (Men det er dessverre ikke alltid det hjelper det heller, antar jeg ... ;-)

HÆ??
Dreper de hundene mens de fortsatt lever?
Det er jo forferdelig!
Hvorfor kan de ikke vente med å drepe dem til de er døde?

... svarte 'DusteTony'. Hahaha!!

Lykke ... !!!

Nå kan jeg spise så mye vaniljesaus jeg bare vil og aldri få dårlig samvittighet - det er jo medisin!!

Det må det jo være, når det er laget etter resept ... !!