Books I've read in 2011 - August

Kameliadamen by Alexandre Dumas fils
Syden by Are Kalvø - AUDIO

Ridderen fra Mauleon, volume 2 by Alexandre Dumas

Tre sekunder by Roslund & Hellström

Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel - AUDIO

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

Den fredløse by Alexandre Dumas

Kollektivt selvmord by Arto Paasilinna - AUDIO

Den siste gode mann by A.J. Kazinski - AUDIO

Likkisten by Erik Meling Sele

Den tredje politimannen by Flann O'Brien

Den store sammensvergelsen by Øystein Sørensen

Kurt kurér by Erlend Loe - AUDIO

Kameleonens skygge by Minette Walters - AUDIO

The White Bone by Barbara Gowdy

Et stille, umerkelig drap by Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis - AUDIO

Engelsk er vanskelig

Og jaggu meg er ikke norsk nesten like ille. Sitter og ser på Bridget Jones's Diary på TV3 ... det er jo som kjent en engelskspråklig film. Og dét er som sagt skikkelig vanskelig. I en scene sier Hugh Grants rollefigur at han fikk litt hetta da han skulle være med Bridget hjem tidligere på dagen ... fest og greier, meet your parents ... Dette siste har oversetter fått til å bli at han hadde et 'møte i Paris'. Hå hå ja ja.

Men allikevel er ikke dette dagens verste. Sjekk denne artikkelen i Nettavisen. En gæern kjerring som mishandlet ungen sin for å få være med på Dr Phil. Hallo? Men det er ikke det som er ille. Dama straffet gutten blant annet ved å tvinge ham til å drikke tabasco eller noe lignende. Hot sauce, med andre ord. Eller 'varm saus' som det absolutt ikke heter på vårt eget språk.

Film- og TV-oversettere er en egen underart, men man må virkelig spørre seg hva de egentlig lærer bort på journalisthøyskolen i våre dager.

Yes ... excellent ...

o_O

Quote of the Week

Heldigvis forsvant vaktene etterhvert, fordi de hørte festlyder fra opprørsteltene. Stå her og passe på fanger mens de andre fester? No way! tenkte de, heldigvis for Kurt. Og dette er jo på en måte Nord-Norge i et nøtteskall. Og samtidig er det nettopp denne mangelen på disiplin og impulskontroll som gjør at Nord-Norge aldri kommer til å bli et eget land.

Erlend Loe, Kurt kurér

Leser boka på nytt nå og digger den. Disse nordlendingene, dere ... :-D

Back home

I actually got back last night, but I forgot to post anything. Guess I'm out of the habit. :-) I've had a really good time, mostly OK weather so that I've been able to go out hiking every day. A lot of good food and some nice times spent with family ... all in all very relaxing. Just what I needed. :-)

It was great to get away for a while ... especially to somewhere with basically nothing to do but relax. :-) But it was good to be back home too ... and really good to cuddle with Raphael this morning as we often do on weekends, look:

Aw, he's so pretty. Ooh, but I met another reptile on vacation that was almost even more beautiful ... just you wait, I've got pictures. Lots. Of everything. :-)

Yay, vacation!!

It's taken a while, but finally I am getting some vacation time and getting out of the city. Yay! :-) I had to work all of July, so apart from a couple of weekend trips I haven't been away much this summer. Yet. But now I'm finally going. Leaving tomorrow morning and getting back ... well, I'm not entirely sure, but I think probably Thursday next week. Thereabouts. In the meantime you'll have to entertain yourselves - I don't think I will be anywhere near a computer at all till I get back home. I'm already dreading the abstinence ... but that's actually a phantom fear mostly, because I'm going to our cabin - actually to both our cabins, because now we have two! (yes, really) - and when I'm there I usually just phase out all this modern communication malarkey. Actually pretty sweet. :-)

I got an interesting comment on a post I wrote a few days ago ... the one where I said I wouldn't dish out a whole smorgasbord of deeply offensive claims about England. But now it seems that at least one person wants to hear some really offensive things about England. I didn't get around to writing that post yet, and now there's no way I'll have time before I leave. But when I get back, I will probably be offending the English people and their culture. A lot. So we have that to look forward to, at least.

Hope you'll all have a good couple of weeks. :-)

All the things

If you spend too much time at ICHC and Memebase and so on, you can easily get a little confused ... you tend to start thinking that everybody knows what goes on there, everybody recognizes the memes and so on. This is not the case. Yesterday it turned out that Anne Ida and Tanumine absolutely don't recognize ALL THE THINGS. Alas. My bad, really ... I've been planning to blog about Hyperbole And A Half since forever, just never got around to it. I will soon, I promise. ;-)

In the meantime, I've made my own LOL based on that very meme, using a picture which is absolutely perfect. Those of you who know Raphael will see what I mean instantly. ;-)

I swear on Isaac Newton's grave that he got up there on his own.

Quote of the Week

Words are cheap. The biggest thing you can say is 'elephant'.
Charlie Chaplin

Sleeping turtle FTW!!

I love my turtles. I can hardly say this enough: They are SO CUTE. They do SO many adorable things. Their little faces!! Or lack thereof. Check this out. Right now, Herman is sleeping ... well, both of the little guys are sleeping, the light in their tank goes off at a quarter to eleven and they usually go to sleep pretty soon after that. Henrik is on the turtle dock, ie in a very dark corner, so he's all set. Herman on the other hand is lying on their bark island tonight - this isn't attached to anything and so floats around the tank. It's often next to the turtle dock, but right now it's sort of in the middle and more towards the 'outside corner', ie, in the lightest part of the tank. Which is still pretty dark, but, you know. I'm sitting in my chair with my reading light on. The tank is to my immediate right, I can reach out and touch it. Herman is sort of at my right shoulder, just a couple of feet up. And he's lying so that he's facing the room, not the back of the tank, which might have been smarter. The way he's positioned himself right now, the light from my lamp gets right in his eyes.

Well, that's what you think!! Ha! NO light is going to get into these eyes tonight!! :-D

The picture's blurry, sorry, it was hard to avoid. This was taken inside the tank just now. Is he the cutest thing ever or what. :-) Look at his tiny little nose there sticking out. This is hardcore R&R. :-D

I knew it

Got a letter from Dr Zahid today, with my test results from last week. I knew I had to have some kind of anemia. I am severely low in iron and he wants me to take some kind of medication for it. 'See enclosed prescription'. I suppose it's a supplement, but seeing as it's on prescription, it's got to be pretty strong stuff. Well, good. Hopefully I'll get my iron level up to normal and will then no longer catch every little bug that's going around. Fingers crossed. :-)

Oh, how I wish ...

... that I could write down my opinions about the London riots. I have several thoughts that I could, theoretically, share with the world. But no. I'm sorry to say this ... and this is nothing personal against any Brits reading this, England is a wonderful place in many ways, and what little I have seen of Scotland is cool too, and you, my potential British reader, may well be a fine upstanding citizen. I have friends who are English, I don't mean to hurt anyone's feelings. Well, that's kind of true. There's no way I could say half of what I really think about this issue without being - not to put too fine a point on it - extremely offensive. My opinions on British society are so very very far from being politically correct that I myself balk at putting them in print. You know that's got to be a bad sign.

Augh, biting my tongue ... ! I SO want to say something. But I won't. La la la. Move it along, nothing to see here.

Kongekommentar

Den temmelig utrolige Amal Aden sto frem som lesbisk i et intervju med Aftenposten for et par dager siden. Kudos til henne - hun er en viktig trailblazer og kan forhåpentligvis bidra til å gjøre livet litt lettere for andre innvandrere som ikke finner seg til rette i en monolittisk kultur. Av en eller annen grunn var det lagt kommentarfelt under artikkelen. Pussig. Men der hadde folk i hvert fall både det ene og det andre de ville dele med verden. En anonym kommentator som kaller seg JanGoesBananas hadde ukas beste. Si hva dere vil, jeg digger denne. Humor på høyt nivå.

Han skriver:

Jeg har sansen for og synes hun er tøff jeg. Og jeg synes veldig synd på hennes legning. Ikke fordi hun er homofil i seg selv, men fordi hun er nødt til å bo sammen med ei annen kvinne for å leve ut legningen sin. Hun vil fort finne ut hvor vanskelig det er og hvor jævlig vi menn har det med mas og tjas daglig. Begynn å drikk, Amal, det hjelper noe. Lykke til!

Clever KeanuLOL

I like this. It's clever. And Keanu is in it. :-)

Feeling better

Yes, feeling better now. Morphine is a good thing. :-) I had an absolutely crazy coughing fit on Friday night - if you could have heard me you would have thought that my lungs were on the way out - but I think it cleared up a few things, I've felt decidedly better since. And I've been sleeping like a log since I got the morphine thing. ;-) I'm doing better with the throat meds too ... well, kind of, I cut down to single doses like two days before I was supposed to. It was just driving me crazy in such huge amounts. Now I'm taking three single doses and mixing them smaller, if that makes sense. Not so much water, so, stronger. For the first few days it just ruined my appetite, I hardly ate for three days. Partly because that shit was making me nauseous ... and partly because I didn't have room for food, my stomach was constantly full of that muck. Ick. Better now. Except that I'm using up all my lemonade mix on this. >:-(

My brain is working better too. It was very slow for the first few days, but now it's getting back to its normal speed. Like this: We went shopping in Sweden last weekend, and I bought a whole selection of various ciders at Systembolaget. I love Swedish cider. Now I have about seven different ones in the fridge. Yum. On Friday night I really wanted some of it ... and it only took me about twenty minutes to realize that alcohol and morphine probably don't mix too well. Yay me. :-)

Quote of the Week

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.
Konrad Adenauer

Pandas at the Nordic Ark

I got a request from a Youtube viewer about pictures of the red pandas at the Ark. I've posted some from previous years, but this year the animals are new. The Ark's previous panda, a female who had produced several cubs there, had gotten too old to breed last year when we were there, and they were getting ready to put her out to pasture, so to speak ... she was going to be sent to another European zoo, I don't remember which one, that doesn't participate in the breeding program so she could live out her last years in peace and quiet.

Earlier this year, in late spring/early summer, two new pandas arrived to begin their lives together at the Ark. They are still young, but hopefully they will get along well and will produce new cubs in their new home. Like the giant panda, the red panda is a difficult species to breed in captivity, and not all zoos manage it ... but the Ark have been successful 13 times in the past, so I for one have every confidence that they will manage it again with these two. The male came from somewhere in Finland, and the female came from Chester Zoo in the UK.

This is where my fellow Youtuber comes into the picture. She is apparently mad about red pandas and she lives close to Chester Zoo, so she visits there often and has seen the female panda - her name is Lily - many times. You can see some wonderful footage on her Youtube channel, here. She was interested in seeing pictures of Lily in her new home and wondered if I could help. Yees ... well, yes and no.

I do have some pictures of the panda enclosure from this year's visit, but not really any good ones. Last weekend was very hot in that part of Sweden - like 27 in the shade - so the pandas were, like most of the other animals, very lethargic and quiet. They kept to the shadowy treetops. I got some shots, but I think my correspondent will be disappointed, I'm sorry to say. I can't even tell which of them is Lily. She seems to have unusually pale facial markings, so if we had seen them up close we'd probably have been able to tell. But as it is, well ... You take a look.

Spot the panda ... :-)

Tanumine, Anne Ida, KAS: Do you have any better pictures? I know I probably had the best camera, but you spent a little more time at the panda enclosure than me, so ... maybe? I remember that someone showed me a couple of shots where at least one of the animals' faces was very clearly visible. Can you post those somewhere - whichever one of you has them :-) - so our panda fan can see? :-)

And seriously: Next time we will have to go sometime a little later in the year.

I love doctors

Went in to my local doctors' office today ... my regular doctor, who I've only seen once since moving here five years ago, is away on vacation, so I saw one of her colleagues instead, the rather dashing Dr Zahid. He took enough blood to test for about twenty different things, wanted to put me on sick leave through next Friday (though I talked him down to Wednesday) and then prescribed me with morphine.

I love doctors. :-D

TMI

I started taking a new medication today that's supposed to help my throat. Which really needs it. I'm hoping it will help, but in the meantime, it's GROSS. Advertising lies - you have to dissolve it in water and then drink it, and it says on the package that it has a refreshing lemon flavor, but that is total BS. It's revolting. I can hardly force it down. And I have to take it three times a day! For like ten days. The first half of the cure I have to take double doses. Maybe that's where I've been going wrong so far ...

I've been wanting to get it over with so I've been mixing one double dose instead of two single ones. Maybe that's what's been making it so unbearable. It took me well over an hour to force today's second dose down.

Here's the TMI part: it was much quicker on the way up again.

I'm going to break it up into single doses from now on. And dump in crazy amounts of my favorite pink lemonade mix, from Whittard. It can't make it any worse.

Tiger pictures coming up ...

... but not today. Pity me, I am sick. Again. >:-( I really need to get a checkup. I feel like it's November ... because that's when I'd normally expect to be feeling like this. It's a summer cold, obviously. Growl. At least I didn't have it this weekend.

'47 Ronin' on set

Looking good ...