A Roll in the Universe

I'm in awe. This man shifts huge blocks of concrete weighing many tons - alone, without fancy tools or machines. He's reconstructing Stonehenge in his backyard. Get a fun physics lesson from Wally Wallington : (Via Boing Boing .) PS: Can somebody please explain the "two small rocks" method? I'm not clear on either where the pebbles are being placed, nor how it's helping him move the block. (Max?) UPDATE: Max came through for me! Check the comments! Thanks, Max!

There's a movie called "Esoteric Agenda" making the rounds. I actually watched the full 126 minutes this movie lasts, and it is, in my opinion, a shining example of how erroneously we can connect the dots and see patterns where there are none, inventing monsters under the bed with no other evidence than an absence of light there. I'm basically saying, don't watch it. So why am I even mentioning this? Because the movie, though it has a feel-good "love is the answer" ending, spends an hour and 45 minutes trying to convince you that "they" are out to get you. No, really. Using the end of the Mayan calendar, some dubious explanations for the word Israel and an even more dubious correlation drawn between paganism and socialism, with the Bush family geneology thrown in - just for starters! - the movie tries to convince the viewer that there is a plot to rid the planet of 5.95 billion of its 6 billion humans. Somebody wants you to starve to death, or...

I have a habit. It is a habit of never having expectations. I do look forward to things, but I don't delight in the looking forward. It is rather an intellectual exercise to put me in the right frame of mind, but I never fantasize about the future event, and I never dwell on the expectation. Until yesterday. On my way home from work yesterday I bought some onion rings at the loca McDonald's (we finally got onion rings!) as a snack to tide me over till dinner. I then relaxed in front of the TV a bit with my onion rings, then started getting myself ready for the party. I managed to shave my legs cleanly and without any nicks. I found a spare pair of shoes in case my feet got too tired in my lovely red ones (with 3" heels). I did my hair and my make-up without frustration or mistakes. My dress fit perfectly and had shrunk a tad in the wash, so it came exactly to the middle of my knees, not right below them, cutting my legs at their narrowest point, which was fla...

The day has arrived! Tonight, in less than two hours, I will be standing with co-workers, holding a glass of champagne, and all because I've managed to stay with the same company for 25 years. I can't believe I actually did that. 25 years. Wow... UPDATE: Drunk as a skunk. But not the drunkest there. In a taxi home, with the last to leave. We danced. Everybody who was there said they had a wonderful time. As the guest of honor and sort of their hostess, that pleased me no end. More later. I'm one of the drunk ones. You have no idea how many times I hit backspace just to type this... That was posted at 2:14 am. I'm just saying...

All of winter has decided to show up after the vernal equinox, apparently. As I left the grocery store this afternoon, it started to snow. Again. It has been gently snowing since (four hours and counting). I looked out my living room window and got rather fascinated by the snow settling on the street lamp outside my building. Those pretty flames in the lower left of the photo are one candle I have lit reflecting in my double-glaze window. An hour after I took this photo, I heard a thump at my kitchen window. Kids had thrown a snowball at it. I then heard a softer whump outside my living room window. The snow had slipped off the street lamp. UPDATE: The snow has stopped. As I go around my living room, turning off lights, I look out the window at a white world, magically lit by the street lamp and the windows of the surrounding apartments.

Check out Robert J. Lang's origami sculptures . That's the best way I have of describing an entire world of figures each made from a single, folded sheet of paper. A couple samples of Lang's stunning work - a carp and a wasp:

I have the day off work tomorrow. I have one Wednesday off a month (by choice), and it is usually the first Wednesday of the month. This time, I'm taking my Wednesday off tomorrow, a week ahead of schedule. My boss is very pleased with my decision, which I made after everyone else but him had gone home for the day, meaning it was a last minute and impulsive change of plans. I told my boss that fortunately, I enjoy looking forward to surprises, so I did not open the file "Keera - song" on his computer, but he could hide such things a bit better. He then told me that his computer (on which he stores a database of all our work) and the departmental coffee breaks - both the 9 am and 1 pm one - were off-limits to me tomorrow and Thursday. I wasn't even to be wandering past the downstairs breakroom since one can hear through the door. I told him he'd have to tie me down because I've never been one to follow orders very well. He laughed in agreement. That...

March can't make up its mind. It spent all of Easter Sunday snowing. Gently, consistently. This morning we woke up to smooth, untouched, beautiful, powdery snow, glittering in the sunshine. Said sunshine has been making the apartment warmer than usual. Feels good. Feels like...the end of winter! Oh, yes! The season where we don't turn on all the heat even though the tourists are freezing their nummynums off is soon upon us! (Which means I have to start shaving my legs again. Oh, well, can't win 'em all.) So I'm feeling hopeful and cheerful in spite of a fresh blanket of wintery goodness. As evidence of the sun rising on Easter (or second day thereof) I give you yet another view out my kitchen window: Sorry about the quality. The batteries on my other camera were dead and by the time they were recharged, the light had shifted. And speaking of rechargables, I've read somebody else's blogpost that explains why going for the batteries that with the most m...

As everyone else says who has past this on, watch till the end, and don't assume you know what's coming.

Norwegians make friends the same way porcupines mate: Carefully. In fact, they (the Norwegians, I mean) are so careful about it, I'm still not sure exactly how they do it. That was the short answer to Victoria's bafflement at Norwegian behavior. Victoria says: "[S]ome people are quite friendly and will smile or even chat a bit but I am still so surprised by the number of people who will either look right at you without cracking a smile or uttering a single word or will walk past you as if you don't exist." I'm sorry to say, but that aloofness is quintessentially Norwegian (and shared with the Swedes). The "cold north" isn't just a comment on the weather. Norwegians simply are not in the habit of nodding and smiling and saying hello to perfect strangers, and sometimes not even to anyone they've seen 518 times before. (If I want to shock someone I've passed in the neighborhood 518 times, all I have to do is greet them. They never s...

I am one of those people who loves the Chinese symbol for "crisis": A combination of the symbols for "danger" and "opportuntity". Except that it doesn't exist. Via Hanzi Smatter , a blog "dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in western culture" - sometimes hilariously - I have come across an essay by Victor H. Mair that explains what the Chinese symbol for crisis really means. It's combined of "danger" and "crossroads", not "danger" and "opportunity". Those ancient Chinese weren't such die-hard optimists, after all. Which brings me to another erroneous belief Westerners have of the Chinese: That they believe two women under the same roof means disharmony. Not the case. Hanzi Smatter calls it simply a hoax. Perhaps started as a joke. "If the symbol of one woman under a roof means peace [which it does in Chinese], then what's two women under one roof?" "War!...

Remember my telling you what a dream Easter is in Norway? How the perfect Easter is brilliant white snow and brilliant yellow sun? We have that right now. I wore wool underwear and sunglasses for my walk home from the store, carrying a generic automated coffee machine cappuccino which tasted surprisingly good if not cappuccino-y. I just had to take the long way home, around the pond. The weather outside is too beautiful to ignore, to not want to wander around in for a while. Ice underfoot, and warmth on my face. I did not bring any camera. Of course, with birds out and about, beautiful snow and sunshine, that was a mistake. But I'll take my inspiration from Unphotographable - "a text account of pictures missed". And in that vein, there will also be sound bites. Unphotograph 1: The pussy willow's gray female flowers are larger and plumper now and as the sunlight hits them, they turn into glistening silver eggs, turning the tips of their tree into precious metal....

There are a few photos that make me wish I could trade places with the people in them: (Photo from Tom Dempsey's Antarctica ) Isn't that the coolest thing? (No pun intended.) Curious Gentoo chicks will approach humans and even lie on them for warmth. Can you imagine being the human? I think that would be such a wonderful experience! (Photo from Cute Overload ) This brings back memories of childhood. I would love to be that girl, both because of the cow and because of her age. I am reminded of my first summer in Norway and with it, my first encounter with cows. I was 8 and so a young human female and my grandpa's brother's cows were young bovine females. My first introduction to them, separated by a fence, taught me my first lesson about cows: They have very long and very strong tongues. I found that out because when a heifer decided my flower-print mini-dress (ah, the crazy fashions of the late 60's) was edible and tried to get the whole thing in her mout...

Everyone has heard of Norwegians and their skis. How they invented this mode of transportation by basically noting, "Hey, that was good beer! And I'll bet I can glide down this slope with planks on my feet!" OK, maybe not the beer part. Well, maybe very much the beer part. But the next part was, "Hey, look at what those crazy Sami are doing with planks ! I can do that!" Because it turns out, the Norwegians did not invent skiing; they just made it theirs (much like they did with rose painting and Swiss cheese ) and eventually exported it. I have skied. It is fun. I don't ski any more. It's not that much fun. Really, it depends on where you are and the snow conditions, and I'm not such an enthusiast that I a) enjoy skiing in a crowd or b) waiting to ski in a crowd nor c) struggling with anything but the most perfect powder snow in the most perfect weather. OK, I can handle a bit of a wait in line and some clouds, and for cross country, nicely packed...

The last municipality in Norway to get electricity was Røldal , on March 22, 1958. Our local radio station interviewed a number of elderly Røldal residents about what it was like to get "current" ("strøm"), which is the colloquial Norwegian for electricity. One woman described trying to get used to cooking with an electric stove. Baking bread certainly became easier with the stable heat of an electric oven. Fresh food became a first for them. They could get refrigerators and a long era of salting, drying, pickling or canning everything came to an end. Another woman's story of not trusting herself around with an electric washing machine reminded me of my grandma who preferred all of her contraptions to have just an on/off button. No such luck when it comes to washing machines. But Grandma figured out how to do laundry, and when the ladies of Røldal were asked if they'd ever go back to heating water, boiling clothes, rinsing, scrubbing and spending all day...

Not my mood swings, but the weather's. It is typical of March to not be able to make up its mind about the weather. Storm? Calm? Winter? Spring? About all at the same time? Which is pretty much what we had this past weekend, leaving me to walk home from work Friday on clear paths, in warming sunshine and with plants budding, and walk back to work yesterday morning in a freezing north wind on treacherously icy sidewalks with an inch of snow on the ground. Today it was cold but clear and sunny, warmly so - except for the part where it snowed a bit. Just a bit. But this moodiness does make for some lovely moments: Sunday morning, I looked out my kitchen window, and sunbeams through the trees were making stripes on a frosted lawn.

I saw my acupuncturist today. I knew I had to give her bad news and make a decision about whether or not to keep trusting her. You have to wonder at the "signs" one can get: I opened the same door as the last time I was there, and walked into a room I didn't recognize. I actually backed up a step to re-read the sign on the door. Yep, same sign as before. But things were definitely different, and I was desoriented. I recognized the corner bookshelf where the herbs were, and the two cash registers. I distinctly remembered a coat rack last time I was there. This time there was no place to put my wet umbrella or hang my coat. I asked my acupuncturist about the look of the room and she laughed and said they were constantly remodeling. Well, I told her that the herbal treatment sucked. She was a bit surprised at my reaction to the treatment; I was the first patient she'd had that had such problems with the herbs. I admitted that perhaps I should have told her I'm not ...

Her expression was always the same. It was always pleasant. It was always smiling. Not a big smile, just a little pull on the corners of the mouth, sometimes a little parting of the lips. The apartment was perfect for a retired couple. Conveniently located near a bus line and a grocery store. Good neighbors, many their own age. Peaceful neighborhood with some younger families. One had a troubled son, now a young adult. A drug addict. He'd come around a few times, asking for money. They had given a bit. They knew his mother. When he came around again in the middle of a sunny afternoon, he didn't wait at the door as the old woman went for her purse. He came in. He pushed her over. Her husband couldn't stop him, stop what was happening. He grabbed what he could and ran. Neighbors saw him. Neighbors went to the couple to see if they were all right. They weren't. Neighbors called ambulance, police. It was so unexpected, so unusual still, that it made the news. People...

I was amused by the following comment in a Treehugger report on using SMS: "The SMS (short message service) is an institution in Scandinavia[…] You can even file your taxes in Sweden by SMS." Well, you can do the same in Norway, too. I know. I did it that way for the first time last year. It is true that the use of SMS ("smess" as the youngsters say) is ubiquitous in Scandinavia. Norway has one of the highest numbers of cell phones per capita in the world. That's one reason for all the texting. Another reason is that an SMS is less intrusive - and cheaper - than a phone call. Telephoning has always been prohibitively expensive in Norway, so the much cheaper SMS (less than NOK 1.00 per message for basic texting) as a way of giving a quick message really caught on in the early days of the cell phone. For many, including myself, it is one deciding factor for adding a cell phone to the household. Using SMS can even be more reliable: In areas where you may have on...

We finally got a break from the wet, the gloom, the gray, the chilling. Today we got a break from winter, and a sneak peak at spring. So I took a walk, a slow walk around the local pond. Delighting in the fact that I actually needed my sunglasses, and in all the little signs of winter's hold loosening. This plastic mesh once contained a ball of suet someone hung up for the local tit birds to help them through the winter. The most common one is the great tit, and it usually sings tee-too. But there is one in my neighborhood that sings tee-tee-too. The way the sound carries is rather strange. Although my ears can localize the source (to some local tree), it still sounds like I'm surrounded by the chirping. The tits stay all year round and love suet. The great tit's name in Norwegian is "kjøttmeis". "Kjøtt" means meat or flesh. Beneath the tree the suet net hung in was a spot of bright green, attracting me with its message of the fresh and new. It was...

It may be perimenopause, it may be something else, but whatever it is, my constipation - which has been a part of my life since I was little - has actually managed to get worse since the summer. The acupuncturist gave me some herbs to take to clean out my gut. Big mistake. The herbs worked, sure, but the days of diarrhea weren't any better than the constipation. After hunting around on the internet, I found some more information, and quit taking the pills. I was discussing this with a US friend who is also an acupuncturist and she clarified a few things for me as well as gave me some advice. (Digression: I helped her design her website so go look, at least. Thanks!) I lay in bed, musing on what the heck had happened. How had I let myself treat my own stomach so badly? Why was I letting a stranger who didn't know me well enough to realize that my gut wasn't just constipated but also sensitive put me through a rather rough treatment? And that's when it hit me: I w...

Victoria is a fellow expatriate who has just gotten a new puppy and is about to experience her first Easter in Norway. She posted about that and since I know something about the matter(s), chose to reply here, rather than fill up her comments. I am fairly familiar with the weirdness that is the Norwegian attitude to spaying and neutering. Up until 1995 or thereabouts, the rule was not to neuter a pet because that would infringe on its right to choose. I kid you not. They made birth control pills for the cats (bitches don't go into heat just because it's a Tuesday and a tom is yowling) and I remember giving those weekly to a cat we had when I was a young teen. But those things caused cancers so the powers that be finally decided to encourage spaying cats. The aforementioned cat probably died of something like that because she didn't make it past her third year due to "tummy trouble". Because cats are more likely to stray/become strays, neutering and spaying of c...

I'm not necessarily in touch with everyone else so I did not pick all the winners . I did pick some winners, though: best web application for weblogs Blogger. best canadian weblog - The Redneck Mommy I enjoy this blog so it'll continue to be a regular read. best photography of a weblog - I Can Has Cheezburger This has become a "Why didn't I check this out before???" because it makes me laugh. Out loud. For real. I Can Has A Noo Addikshun. best art or craft weblog - Post Secret It's as fascinating as a train wreck so I still read it. best fashion weblog - Go Fug Yourself Yeah, I got hooked looking at the people who have stylists look no better than I do. I still read. best gossip weblog - Dlisted So I picked a winner. I gave up reading it after a couple of weeks. best teen weblog - Sarcastica I'm losing interest, but blame my age, not her writing. best writing of a weblog - Confessions of a Pioneer Woman This one has become one of m...

Hrmph 1: I had an upset tummy all weekend, and diarrhea. I felt weak from it and called in sick today. I searched the 'net for information about the herbal supplements, was relieved to discover that they truly are harmless but that it may be necessary to cut the dose if one gets diarrhea. The pills are for cleansing the gut and moving any constipation, but surely my gut is cleaned out by now. I cut my dosage today, from 6 daily pills to 4, and ran to the bathroom only once. The 'net also said I should stick to a vegetarian diet and avoid sugar as well as milk. However, my acupuncturist never told me any of that (except for the avoid milk part). Not a confidence builder, that. I'll see her again on Monday, and decide then if I should continue seeing her. Hrmph 2: I don't like criticizing people. Bringing up my dissatisfaction with my acupuncturist's lack of information is not something I look forward to. But, it may very well be that we do not communicate well, tha...

There was a party Friday night at work. In a world where all the workers who never get anything extra are expected to cut costs, er, in a world where we delight in helping our employer earn a bigger and bigger profit, the section my department belongs to managed to save NOK 6 million in 2007. And for that, we got an unscheduled (as in, not on the budget) party. I wasn't really in a party mood, being more in the mood for staying at home in comfy clothes front of the TV, but affirmed on my way to the party that I would be delightful. I knew that if others enjoyed my company, I would enjoy theirs. I was right. My boss commented on it. Said I was "holding up well". Dancing. Socializing. Staying. To my surprise, I was among the last to leave. I left at 1:20-ish AM, after assuming I'd be out of there by 10 PM-ish. Many of the people at the party were the same people who had been invited to my anniversary party. The RSVP date was Friday. I wondered if I should "se...

I did go to the party last night and my stomach is not entirely cooperative, but I nevertheless enjoyed the pizza and beer, the cake and coffee, and our take on "Dancing with the Stars" as well as all the beer. Since I didn't get home until well past 1:30 am, I'm not feeling spunky today, so I offer you pizza and beer as personalities: Cheese Pizza Traditional and comforting. You focus on living a quality life. You're not easily impressed with novelty. Yet, you easily impress others. What's Your Pizza Personality? You Are Guinness You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around. What's Your Beer Personality? For the record: I did imp...

Sunday I was in the city, and while waiting for the bus outside our bus station, snapped a few pictures. You are looking at one of the main roads in and out of town. The big structure is a parking garage (cheapest in town) and if you look behind it, you can just make out the top of our city's tallest mountain, Ulriken, covered in snow. It's the white pointy thing with the TV mast on top, to the left of the blue structure (which is an elevator shaft) on the parking garage. As you can see, with the exception of Ulriken, we didn't have chaotic snow. We were actually experimenting with spring. The national differences in road design and marking fascinate me. There are so many different ways to do signs and dividing lines. Signs that tell you which lane to be in for a certain destination are green with white lettering where I come from (California) and gold with black lettering in Norway. Here, a solid line to show no passing is allowed is actually a dashed line with a very ...

All that snow-drama I experienced yesterday turned out to be peanuts compared to what happened to some other people. Today's newspapers could tell us that yesterday's meteorological chaos was the worst since the 1970's. Well, no wonder some busses never came, and some people were forced to walk home, and some parents never got to deliver their kids to the daycare center (which may explain yesterday's cold and wet father and son). So I was truly one of the lucky ones. My move through life and traffic flowed easily and quickly - relatively speaking. In other news, I've started taking the nasty-tasting pills my acupuncturist gave me. Aspirin is bitter but this stuff is worse than bitter and it doesn't matter where I place the pills on my tongue - this incredibly nasty taste spreads through my whole mouth. But it's having an effect. The acupuncturist said that I would probably re-visit earlier physical problems in reverse order (like last in, first out). Sh...

Today's schedule was supposed to look like this: 14:23 (That's 2:23 pm to you 24-hour clock challenged people) Bus leaves for town 14:45 Arrive in town 14:55 Arrive for 3 pm acupuncture session 15:00 Needleless acupuncture 15:55 Acupuncture over 16:00 A bit of shopping 16:25 Bus home 16:50 Arrive home What actually happened was that we got all of our missing winter in one day. I was on time for the 14:23 bus, having first slogged my way over unplowed sidewalks covered in heavy 6 inch snow. On my way, I passed by our co-op's janitor, who was helping to tow the maintainance crew's van to the road. Their tires simply had no bite in the thick, loose snow. At the bus stop, the wait for the bus got longer and longer. We theorized that our bus was stuck at the stop before ours which is halfway up a long slope that can be quite slippery in winter. While I was waiting, a small plow machine showed up and cleared the sidewalk in front of our bus stop. We were three passenge...

People who want to make a positive difference in the world try to do what they can to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. But they're being made to pay for their choices. Literally. Currently, we in the west are being told all about global warming, carbon footprints and the need to think green. I spent my teen years in Los Angeles, right after the catalytic converter was made mandatory, and during the oil crunch of '79, where it actually got to be a game to see just how far we really could make a car go on one gallon of gas, both to offset the rising price of fuel, and to reduce emissions. And I was already aware of the advantages of organic farming. It's 30 years later, and apparently, neither Detroit nor the west at large has learned a thing. The powers that be have nevertheless managed to prey on our individual consciences (ignoring their own role in the current state of affairs), and encourage each of us to do things like avoid plastic bags and use, sa...

Back in the day when England was less expensive and Norwegians less exposed to the good things in life (like more than one kind of toilet paper), we girls were thrilled to find a Boots store when on the opposite side of the North Sea because that meant stocking up on items not easily available in Norway (at the time) or that cost more. A few weeks ago, I had seen a sign advertising for the familiar British "chemist's", and the thought that Boots was finally coming to someplace near me wandered idly and a bit happily through my brain only to get dislodged by the regular trivia that dwells there and forgotten. For my acupuncture date on Wednesday I have decided to make my feet more presentable because they have said they will ask me to take my shoes off and that meant getting a hard-working foot cream. Since I also wanted more fluoride to rinse with I decided to stop at our local drugstore, AKA the apothecary or chemist's. And that's when I discovered exactl...

One thing that has been is consistently popular since 1996, is the new age fair (or "alternative convention", as it is actually called). Several major cities in Norway hold one each year, and this time of year is when Bergen's has its fair. It is always popular. A former co-worker had a gift for sensing things her five senses couldn't sense and eventually took a daring step and turned her ability into a business. She tested the waters about 10 years ago at our new age fair, giving Tarot card readings at a friend's booth. A couple of years later, I got to give astrology readings at the same booth . Heady fun! But I gave it up. I don't have the mindset for that sort of thing; I get bored when three different people ask me the exact same question. My friend, however, finds it thrilling, and turned her Tarot card reading into a full-time job, quitting her nine-to-five for good. I ran into my Tarot-reading friend, who has legally changed her name to Hope, ea...