A Roll in the Universe

No, this is not the usual cheer roared by Norwegians, but a sentiment stated by US republicans. Today's dead-tree edition of my local paper, Bergens Tidende , has a hilarious editorial on the GOP panic in the US that America is turning into Sweden. Illustrated with a photo from the opening of an IKEA store in Brooklyn. (All quotes are my translation from the printed article. No online version yet.) "There are terrible rumors about president Barack Obama and his family these days. They are so bad that we really shouldn't repeat them here […]. But, what the hey, we have a duty to inform: […] According to the internet, […] the president and his family are actually - Swedish. Apparently, the Obamas are trying to Swedify the US. According to the editorial, Mitt Romney wants the US to fight against becoming European. Mike Huckabee thinks Lenin and Stalin would have loved this latest development (i.e. Obama). Mark Steyn warns against a Scandinavian armageddon (says my paper)

I participated . I tunred off my lights, lit some candles and sat in my darkened living room for an hour, listening to a podcast. I'm sorry to say that I did not sit in a darkened neighborhood although my city was an official participant.

Wordless Wednesday (Taken with equally new office cell phone.)

I'm kind of having a blast from the past these days. I remember reading time management books and a lot of other management books some 25 years ago when I was a lowly secretary. While other women's hearts get all aflutter at the idea of a bouquet of red roses or a sweet note left for them on their mirror, mine beats faster standing in line at the local McDonald's watching employees helping each other fill orders, watch the fries, responding to empty dispensers. Or working in an inspiring and efficient work place as outlined in umpteen management books. Back then, I so longed for the power to try some of the suggestions but I had no one to boss around. Well, at some point I knew that I would never use the management skills offered in the books because I wasn't going to become a manager. Years later, however, a system appears that doesn't target people in management, but anybody who has to make a lot of decisions and work on a lot of projects. Listening to Merlin Ma

I enjoy Oprah's Soul Series radio podcasts and have just listened to her interview with actor Rainn Wilson . At one point during the interview, Rainn gave a good list of "life's big questions", and I feel like trying to answer them: What does your soul look like? I love Oprah's answer in the interview: "My soul […] looks like everybody I see." As for me, I find I am stumped by the question. It leads me to another question: Why does my soul have to look like anything? But you know, Oprah's answer is a good one because it echoes the truth that the world that we experience is a reflection of who we are. But the soul is beyond our everyday lives and our bodies; it is who we are when we aren't humans, inhabiting these bodies. It is what keeps us alive, even when mind and body fail us. It is the spiritual equivalent of a heart beat. And that has lead me to my answer: My soul looks like a breath. What do you miss most about being five years old? Dur

Once again I was lured into some Web 2.0 way of communicating with friends, and once again, it just doesn't suit me. I am not interested in telling you the minutiae of my day. I have no gene for exhibitionism. I am speaking of Twitter : It gives me the opportunity to tell you I'm at home or at work or bored or happy. And although I haven't found my friends' tweets boring or redundant, I also haven't found them, well, useful. (Nothing personal, my dears; it's just that the important stuff is on your blogs or in your e-mails, anyway.) Twitter is for me the cyber-space version of small talk at a party. The superficial hellos, how-are-yous, with questions about who you know here, do you like this song, have you tried that green dip. Better conversation is impossible because of the din of the music and all the others shouting their "ice-breakers". I can't do small talk. I want real conversation, some bona fide story-telling and some laughs. If there&#

Wordless Wednesday

My friend Alice has gone on a rant about her experiences with health care in her neck of the woods (and her desire for socialized medicine that we living in other countries enjoy). The same day she ranted, I had been to see my doctor. Here is my comment on Alice's blog about that: Contrast what you say with what I experienced today (as one of those people living in another country - thanks for the linkage!): I’ve been feeling overwhelmed at work and took a sick day off yesterday to see if that would help. It didn’t (bad sign: wanting to cry today because someone asked me a question). So around 9:30 AM I went down to my doc’s office and asked if my doc could see me at all today. Oh, joy, he could, at 1 PM (he was on time, too!). They set up their day in such a way as to leave about an hour free for emergency consultations. For like when you throw your back out. Anyway, left his office with a 100% sick-leave for what’s left of this week, and 50% sick-leave for all of next week

Sparkling Red has tagged me with a meme about what I would take if I were on a deserted island. At least its deserted. Drives me batty when people say "desert island". Hey, that'd be Catalina off Los Angeles, and there's people and mini-golf and boats and hotels and bars there! No such luck this time. I'm on a deserted island. "Your ship has sunk. You have, of course, been stranded on a deserted island. You have salvaged a copy of the King James Version of the Bible and a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare. Nothing else. “The very next day you find one of those Arabian Lamps in the sand. Of course, you rub it and, of course, a rather grumpy Genie appears. “‘Let’s get this straight - there is a recession going on. There are restrictions on the three wishes now. I don’t do water or air transport now so no boats, planes or magic carpets. As for electronics, forget it. There isn’t the infrastructure on this island. “‘I can let you have one book and

Wordless Wednesday

I have participated in NicoleB's scavenger hunt . My finds can be seen here . Whee!

Heard at work: The Finns invent things, the Swedes manufacture them, the Danes sell them, and the Norwegians buy them.

My evening outing to Bergen's cultural history museum to hear a lecture about its collection of mummies and the recent CT-scans taken of two of them, prompted yesterday's Wordless Wednesday and a reminder about an interest I once had: Archaeology. I don't get the fascination with antiques. But make whatever the object is old enough - like a couple of millennia - and I am definitely curious. So when the museum offered a lecture on a 3,500-year-old man and a 2,000-year-old woman and their respective X-rays and CT-scans, I was there. (The photo shows the woman's mummy and her sarcophagus lid; the writing tells us her name was Teshemmin and she was a priest's daughter.) The interest has faded but not entirely gone, and at one point I considered majoring in archaeology. I happily took Archaeology 101 in college and enjoyed all the knowledge being stuffed into my head - until I realized that if I really wanted to pursue this subject, I'd have to do field work.

Wordless Wednesday More about whose X-rays these are here and here .