Blow on it.

Today I had one of those terribly traumatic days. It did not start out that way. I was perhaps a little stressed because of the looming deadlines in my life, which seem to be amassing with ever greater urgency (bear with me, this is relevant to the trauma). 

At any rate, I made it through a day at the library all right. I had a minor setback around lunch time, when I realised I could not remember the pin for my British debit card, and that coffee would therefore not be forthcoming. It may sound like a minor problem but that sort of thing can quite easily puncture a good day. I should have seen the signs.

Despite the forces of destiny obviously conspiring against me and plotting my  eventual downfall, I did manage to change the settings for my computer so that it not only shows a screen saver, but also requires a password to drop it. This is part of my evil plan to annoy anyone who might decide to steal my mac one day while I am having lunch. Little did I know ... but I am getting ahead of myself.

Once I returned home, Tor and I left our computers and headed out for dinner. I do not know whether mine felt lonely or abandoned, jealous because Tor is getting all the attention, or whether it just really hated the new screensaver; when we got back it just clicked at me, told me I ...

Denne artikkelen har ventet i nesten to år (om enn modifisert med jevnte mellomrom). Jeg føler jeg bør ta meg på tak og publisere den før alle youtube-linkene blir tatt ned (og jeg må gjøre alt arbeidet på nytt). Jeg understreker at hvis du er en av dem som ikke trykker på linker vil du ikke få mye ut av dette.

Hugh Dennis er, som jeg bemerket i den første av disse artiklene, enda en av disse Cambridge Footlights-komikerne som Storbritannia nok hadde vært traurig uten. Han er forøvrig en av dem som har vært på radaren min siden jeg bodde i Norge og hadde BBC Prime på hybelen, men det er først de siste par (-tre-fire) årene at jeg har innsett hvor mye bra han faktisk er med i. I likhet med Mitchell & Webb, Armstrong & Miller og Fry & Laurie, er det også her snakk om en duo, nemlig Punt & Dennis.

De var forøvrig begge med i The Mary Whitehouse Experience, og etter hva jeg kan forstå var det der Hugh Dennis' "Mr Strange" først ble introdusert. Her og her er flere. Det var imidlertid ikke Mr Strange som fikk meg til å legge merke til Hugh Dennis (selv om han later til å ha gjort inntrykk på den britiske psyken, om jeg skal basere meg på enkelte av vennene mine her). Det skjedde i forbindelse med enda et av disse panel-programmene det yrer av BBC. Han er nemlig fast deltaker i Mock the Week, hvor ...

There is something about Kazuo Ishiguro. I do not know any other authors whose prose flows so easily while being so complex. It is very seductive. I knew this from other books he had written, and yet Never Let Me Go was a book I was hesitant about starting. The descriptions I had heard, the ``story of Kathy H., who works as a carer, and whose back story and memories of the school Hailsham form the main body of the narrative...'' never really caught my attention. I ought to have known Ishiguro would not write something mundane, banal or boring, but that is what it sounded like. And I have a high tolerance for books about ordinary people and their memories. That is my point.

I suspect these less than promising descriptions were due to a terror of spoiling the plot. I think that is a mistake. The story does not depend on one's ability to keep the true status of the residents of Hailsham a secret. I firmly believe most people will figure out what is going on very quickly. What matters, as I see it, is not that Ishiguro uses a common science fiction trope, but what he does with it. He grounds it in a way of narrating which does not accept it as science fiction, and he goes on to set up a very unpleasant scenario which asks the reader to think about how we define being human. Hiding this behind vague suggestions which portray ...

I love the 1st of April. I hardly ever take it so far as to actually trick anyone, mainly because I have no talent. If I am around people, however, I am frequently the one getting tricked (one way or another), being generally gullible: I once looked out the window after having been told that there was a fun fair on the lawn outside a cabin in the middle of the Norwegian mountains -- hilarity ensued.

What I love about today is that it forces me to be critical of what I read in the papers. It is something I should be doing every day, of course; but like most people (I think) I tend to accept things at face value unless there is something glaringly wrong about how it is reported. I trust that nobody will actually set out to deceive me (unless, you know, Rupert Murdoch is in there somewhere). I am well aware that this is a naïve way of approaching the world. And I do try to keep my wits about me when I read the papers. But the heightened scepticism on April's Fool's highlights my credulity the rest of the year.

Here are a selection of NRK's jokes through history. Here is the Guardian's list of today's crop. Jessop's sent me an e-mail trying to convince me to buy their "scent camera". And I am fairly sure Geoffrey K. Pullum has been inventing stuff about the New Yorker.

Wikipedia has an interesting article on the subject. Apparently Britain only serves up untruths until midday. Do we have that rule in Norway?

I have been reading Private Eye on and off since I moved to Edinburgh the first time. I had heard rumours of it before then, but all I knew was that it was supposed to be funny. I remember picking it up for the first time and taking it back to the Bed and Breakfast where we lived at the time, glancing through it and not understanding a thing. Except the occasional cartoon.

I had expected something along the lines of The Onion, which I had already been reading for some years and never found particularly hard to follow. What I got instead was a slightly disorienting mix of the serious, factual minutiae of British politics and the absurdist satire that I had originally expected (as a result I found it quite hard to separate fact from satire). Not to mention a number of in-jokes which made it quite difficult to to know who and what they were talking about at times. Wikipedia has a separate article on the recurring in-jokes. As you can imagine, it can take a while to get into it (please don't be put off by the list, however: I think most of the jokes have been retired by now). But, as anyone who knows me will be aware, I take great pleasure in this sort of code once I have figured it out. Probably because I am short and need ways to compensate. Possibly just because of some academic tendency. It all depends on ...

Today every household in the UK is supposed to fill in a census form. I find this wildly exciting. Everyone else seems to be grumbling. Norway has a boring census which does not even include sending out forms anymore (all it cares about are housing statistics). The British one, according to Jimmy Carr on Thursday's 10 O'Clock Live, could only be more intrusive if it were administered anally. A couple of weeks ago David Mitchell (on the same programme -- it may be that these two links are only available in the UK) had a rant centered around the Lockheed Martin controversy. Yes, that Lockheed Martin. The evil arms manufacturer is now doing the job of civil servants. I don't know how it happened, and I am not sure I want to know. It is disturbing, somewhat absurd, terribly annoying and bad.

Here is one highlight from Mitchell's rant, regarding the controversy:

This has provoked outrage from easily outraged people, and they have called for a boycott of the census. Good call! Give Lockheed Martin less data to process for their money, and then they'll be sorry. They are going to have to go off and make an a-bomb to cheer themselves up. There is no better way to hurt a multi-million dollar arms manufacturer than by inconveniencing the social history PhD students of a hundred years' time.

Which is the problem, of course. It is annoying to contribute to Lockheed Martin in any way, but ...

En fobi er en intens, irrasjonell frykt. Jeg har mange. Ingen er imidlertid mer intense enn fobien for små ting som kryper. Edderkopper, for eksempel. Og kaffedyr.

Jeg har så lenge jeg kan huske vært klar over at edderkopper er dypt, dypt unaturlige vesener. Jeg år frysninger bare av å tenke på dem. Jeg kjenner faktisk hvordan det kryper og kravler ting på meg mens jeg skriver dette. Bare innbildning, selvsagt; men veldig, veldig ekkelt. Det er verre jo mindre de er. Mange av mine mer rasjonelle venner blir overrasket over det. Nesten alle føler visst et slags ubehag når de ser store edderkopper med hårete ben. Men dem har jeg egentlig aldri hatt noe imot. Når det er stort nok til å bli hårete havner det i kategorien "dyr", og de skremmer meg omtrent like mye som en rotte.

Forstå meg rett: rotter er ekle, jeg vil ikke bo sammen med dem, og hvis jeg mot formodning skulle finne en på soverommet ville jeg pakke sakene og flytte på dagen. Men jeg får ikke den hysteriske fornemmelsen som små, eller mellomstore edderkopper gir. De beveger seg med intensjon selv om alle kan se at de er for små til å ha en hjerne. Jeg klarer ikke engang å støvsuge dem, for ikke å snakke om å slå dem ihjel med en sko. Kroppen lystrer ganske enkelt ikke.

Dette er ikke nytt. Og araknofobi er en rimelig anerkjent fobi. Ingen leer et øyelokk, selv om jeg tror mange undervurderer hvor ...

I will confess I had not heard of Rochester until I got well into my University career. In retrospect, I find this rather surprising, as I am quite sure teaching Rochester in high school would do away with poetry's unfair reputation of being boring in one fell swoop. I am not sure whether his absence is due to embarrassment on the teachers' part or a fear of irate parents accusing them of corrupting their young.

Rochester himself is said to have been corrupted at Oxford (which he started at 12 and left at 14 with an MA and a number of new and exciting interests). He belongs to the box labelled Restoration literature, and I think I should probably get into some particulars on that score before I go on.

There is a tendency, I think, to see the 20th century as a steady breaking away from the repression of the past. It starts around the fin de siècle, one might imagine, and moves via the Edwardians through the 20s, and then storms towards the finish line of total freedom from the 60s onwards. And before that, in this narrative of steady progression, the Victorians were repressed, only to be outdone by the people before them, and the people before them until you get back to the Middle Ages, when everyone wore chastity belts and prayed all the time in order to completely suppress their sinful flesh.

The error will of ...

Criticising James Bond for being sexist is a bit like complaining the sea is wet, I suppose. But he is. I have always known that was one of his defining characteristics, but I was still surprised to find how true it was. The character then, is much the same as the character I have to a much greater extent been exposed to through the films (although I suppose the later films have taken on a tinge of political correctness and toned down the overt sexism somewhat). The sexist, cynical hedonist hero.

I suppose, on the whole, this is the book that justifies Bond's world view. It is the book where his masculinity is (very directly) attacked, he momentarily drops his cynicism and misogyny and allows himself to fall in love. It is perhaps not surprising that this is something James Bond can only do when his testicles have been damaged. Crude, yes I know; but it is all there in the book.

I am sure the story is familiar, certainly since the film came out. The key difference, of course, is that Le Chiffre is an evil communist rather than an evil terrorist. And Vesper appears rather more vapid. For those who have been living under a rock, however: the evil Le Chiffre raises money for communism through prostitution and other evil pursuits. But he has overreached, and if his evil communist bosses find out they will kill him. He is therefore trying to win the money back on ...

I 1910 bestemte den andre internasjonalen, godt hjulpet av folk som Rosa Luxemburg og Clara Zetkin at man burde ha en internasjonal kvinnedag, akkurat som man hadde en internasjonal arbeiderdag. Den første kvinnedagen ble så feiret 19. mars året etter. Siden både 1911 og 2011 slutter på 11 regner jeg det som 100 år. FN kom noe senere på banen, i 1975.

Målet i 1910 var å jobbe for allmen stemmerett for kvinner. I det store og hele må man vel si at slik sett har det vært en suksess -- i alle fall i Vesten. Man ønsket også retten til å holde offentlige verv, retten til å jobbe og, ikke minst, retten til å ikke bli diskriminert i arbeidslivet. Tor har sagt at han skal skrive en artikkel om det der med kvinner og lønninger, og det er mye som kunne være sagt om kvinner som ledere og skjult diskriminering; men i det store og hele har vi kommet langt de siste hundre årene.

Hurra for oss!

Jeg antar det er derfor så mange føler at nok er nok. Vi har stemmerett. Vi får jobbe. Norge går jo helt av skaftet og lar oss være hjemme med nyfødte barn en stund uten at vi mister jobben! Høyere utdanning tar vi også, og om jeg ikke tar feil har vi hatt minst én kvinnelig statsminister (og vi er bare to tronskifter unna en kvinne som statsoverhode). Jobben er tydelig gjort, og vi kan nå lene oss tilbake med et glass med ...