Category: Little Voices archive entries

To dissipate some of the reisefeber, I will do the daily double today…

1. Do you have any hidden talents?
Eh? Not that I know of, but then I wouldn’t would I?

2. Do your offline friends know about your website?
Yes, most of them do, and if some don’t it’s not for lack of me telling them about it – I just have a few offline friends who don’t actually use the internet much (weird people), and are therefore not particularly interested. I certainly don’t try to hide the fact that I have a website, or that I blog.

Voices on the stereo: The Bee Gees – You Win Again (hence, additional voice in the room: My own, singing along)

One of my new rules of travel seems to be: Before visiting a country make sure to read up on blogs written by its inhabitants.

So that’s what I’ve been doing on and off for a few months, though it’s obviously somewhat pointless. What I’m looking for is “local colour”, you know, names of venues, descriptions of local attractions and so on. But expecting to find that in a “local” blog is just silly – I mean, how useful would my own blog be as a guide to anyone visiting Norway (answer: Not very). Still, I ‘ve been reading some, so I thought I’d mention a couple that I’ve enjoyed in any case.

The leptard, whatever that is, is also a fan of Joyce, which has to be good, and also, incidentally, has a completely non-blog-related link to a friend of mine, which is always interesting.

Stunned.org does actually throw up some localised stuff every now and again.

Heart of a poet – currently resposible for most of my Moon River humming.

Last day of work (yay!) before the holidays, and the Friday Five comes up trumps:

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?
Well, in 52 hours I’ll be leaving for the airport to embark on “Linda and Robin’s great Irish (and some English and Scottish, too) Adventure”. That’ll cover the next two weeks. After that it’s nose back to the grindstone – working the rest of the summer (I will need some time off again in September). There will be interruptions in the form of weekends, obviously. Hopefully we will manage a long-talked-about weekend in Arvika and I really need to go to Bergen at some point.

2. What was your first summer job?
You know, I can’t remember… Probably the girl-of-all-jobs at my dad’s place of work, because I worked there for several summers on and off. I did all sorts of odd stuff – it’s a research institute of the biological persuasion – numbering all the lakes in Finnmark, catching butterflies, sorting through riverbed samples for anything resembling animal life while breathing in the fumes from the alchohol used to preserve them (which left me rather light-headed), sticking errata notes into 1000 newly printed conference proceedings. You know, the usual stuff…

3. If you could go anywhere this summer, where would you go?
Uhm. Ireland? It’s not as if someone pointed a gun at our heads and said “I know you’re just dying to go to Bali/Yukon/Patagonia/Uzbekistan, but you will go to Ireland and have a miserable time instead!” If money was no object, I’d quite like to go to Bali, Yukon, Patagonia and Uzbekistan as well, but Ireland is actually the first choice this year.

4. What was your worst vacation ever?
I don’t think I’ve had any “worst” holidays. I know this is not logically possible, that one or two of them must have been less brilliant than the others, and that that would make them “worst” by default, but I can’t remember any holidays that I haven’t enjoyed. There was the one year when I was at a camp in Sunne, Sweden and we were assigned a space for our tent which was in – well, no other way to accurately describe it – a hole in the ground, so that after the first rainfall we had 20 cm of water in our tent. That could have been miserable, but in fact we had a great time and laughed about it even then, not just in rettrospect. The closest I’ve come to “bad times” while on holiday has been towards the end of a stay when my travelling companions have been getting on my nerves because I haven’t been allowed enough time on my own to recouperate from all the company.

Oh, and there was that long weekend in Senegal. We drove down from the Banjul area across the border into Senegal and stayed at a hotel where the food was terrible (there was fish – I didn’t like fish – and potatoes – I didn’t like potatoes – but in my defence my parents like both and they thought the food was terrible, too) and we couldn’t swim in the sea because there had been an upsurge or something of portugese men-of-war. Parts of that one were terrible, but I had a pretty good time anyway, enjoying the novelty of replying appropriately to the greetings of “Salam maleikum” and then have people jabber at me in French to which the best I could do was shrug my shoulders (I had had a little French at school, but the only thing I could remember clearly was “Ou est la chatte?” and I figured this would not get me very far in conversation) and say “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French” as clearly as I could in English.

5. What was your best vacation ever?
As you’ll gather from the previous answer, I think most of my holidays have been pretty amazing, so it’s hardly to single out one in particular. In honour of this year’s choice, I am going to settle on the previous holiday Linda and I had, when we went to Wales for a little over a week. We travelled down from Telford (where I was living at the time) to Hay-on-Wye (which was brilliant, but unwise, because it meant our backpacks were unecessarily heavy for the rest of the trip). We then stoppen over one night in Cardiff before heading out along the south coast. Memorable moments include:

– the B&B we booked in Carmarthen, only it turned out it was quite a way outside Carmarthen… No poblem, “Let me know which bus you’re on and I’ll come and pick you up” says the landlord. We arrived and were treated to scones and tea and then announced our intention to walk to the nearest pub for the evening meal. We were given directions and the startling instruction – from the landlady – “Now, girls, if you get too drunk to walk home, give us a call and we’ll come and pick you up.” Maybe they just liked driving? On the way to the pub we passed a field full of sheep, not an unusual occurrence in Wales, it must be said, what followed was more unusual, though… Along the field we were hidden from view for the sheep (and they from us) by a hedge. We got to the far corner and the gate and the sheep saw us and – as one – charged at the gate. We both jumped several feet back. We’re used to Norwegian sheep whose utmost reaction upon seeing you is a half-hearted bleat, and here sheep were actually running…

– the truck driver who picked us up when we tried our hand (no pun intended) at hitch-hiking and insisted on driving into – I think – Haverfordwest, where he had no business, to drop us at the bus station, because “Hitch-hiking is very dangerous!” (to be honest I’d be more afraid of the tourists than of the inhabitants in that part – if a car with foreign license plates had come along we’d have pretended to be enjoying the view and pointedly not be looking for lifts, I think)

– the local pub we fell into in St. David’s, which had a very grand name (The Empire Hotel or something), but was rather shabby, where we spent a long time in the lounge – which had comfy, plush-covered sofas – not getting served much as the barman was in the other section chatting to his regulars, and we finally realised we had much better move into the bar, where we found uncomfortable stools but genial company, including a guy who did boat trips out to the bird-covered island just outside St. David’s (can’t for the life of me remember what it’s called), which we were persuaded to join the next day (though somewhat sceptical as to his ability to get up in time considering the state he was in by the time the pub closed).

Ah, memories.

(Link from Anything but Ordinary)

(Found here, though I can’t figure the rest of the site out.) Not so sure about the “without egoism”, but otherwise seems pretty acceptable. What is a tree type anyway? (Btw. the first two lines of the result, tree type and heading, are white text on white background, so you’ll need to highlight to see it…)

The Guardian has had a poll to determine the worst sex scenes ever on film, which is an excellent idea, as much of a priceworthy thing to do as the Literary Review’s worst sex award for novels. Nothing spoils a good plotline more than inappropriate/ridiculous/interminable sex scenes. Out of the Guardian’s top five I’ve actually only seen The Titanic, and can confirm that yes, the “hand on window” is pretty stupid. My own personal “favourite” is not even among those that have received honourable mention; I’m referring to The Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, where they have sex on the marble staircase. No comment, except: “Ouch”.

Excellent!
You’ve clearly been spending some time at the bookstore.
You got 12/13 correct.

My results for the Famous First Words quiz at msn. Am especially pleased as I have only actually read 3 of the correct answers (and only 18 of the 52 alternatives altogether) and so my powers of deduction (and my ability to pretend to knowledge I don’t actually have) has obviously not decreased much since my days of lectures and exams.

(Found the quiz via What kind of sick weirdo are you? – which is a great name for a blog.)

Couldn’t resist the thursday thumb twiddler today…

1. Granville Hicks said that a censor was “a man who knows more things than he thinks you ought to.” Are there times when government censorship is necessary, beyond, perhaps, “top secret” spy stuff? Why do so many folks want to censor stuff?
There should be official boards to set age limits for movies and such, definitely, but other than that I hate censorship with a passion. Waterstones ran a wonderful series of ads for books a few years ago where one of the captions was “Nothing can be more offensive in a book than censorship” and I agree wholeheartedly. If you don’t like it shut the book/turn off the television/walk out of the theatre. The reason so many people want to censor stuff is either that they haven’t realised that there is such a thing as an “off” button on their TV or that they have problems accepting that other people think differently. Neither of which is very sympathetic, and neither of which should be encouraged by giving in.

2. Ashleigh Brilliant said, “If you can’t learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.” What do you do badly that you nonetheless enjoy doing?
I like singing at the top of my voice. I normally only do this when I’m home alone, but sometimes I decide I don’t care what it sounds like and sing in company too.

3. Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long suggested, “Don’t ever become a pessimist; a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun — and neither can stop the march of events.” Would you consider yourself a pessimist or an optimist? And does that ever bother you or cause you problems?
I’m an optimist. The (mostly) rational part of my brain worries, but the overall conclusion is always that “it’ll be allright”. It certainly doesn’t bother me, I agree that optimists have more fun. It doesn’t normally cause any major problems either, apart from suddenly realising at the end of the month that I have optimistically left a bill or two a bit late and now I really don’t have any money to pay them with.

You see a lot of strange things from the bus in the morning:

– a man walks towards the tram stop, opening a plastic bottle of juice, smells it and then takes a sip, as if he’d just been poured a sample of wine in a restaurant to approve the bottle. I tell myself that he probably smelt it just to check that it was ok, I mean, juice can go off, but then he does this odd little nod to himself, exactly the sort of gesture you see in someone who is telling the waiter that the wine is ok and he can get on with the pouring.

– a seagull comes in for landing on top of a lamppost, but misses it by about 5 centimetres and comes off looking very confused and flustered

– a man in a suit with a briefcase walks in the tall grass along the motorway, somewhere you’re certainly not supposed to walk, though it’s obviously possible. Problem is, about 20 metres further up the grassed ledge disappears and there’s a stretch of motorway where there are concrete barriers along the side and he will either have to turn back or walk in the rightmost lane. That’s going to be popular.

Voice in my head: Macy Gray – Relating to a Psychopath

Ooh, more lists… If anyone knows the origin of this one, please let me know.

100 movies. Bold the ones that you’ve seen.

Godfather, The (1972)
Shawshank Redemption, The (1994)
Read More

(Via Anja and Spray:) The BBC investigates the differences between men and women. Scientists have discovered only 78 genes separate us, and the public have suggested which ones. Anja concludes that she must be male, I’m not entirely sure myself, but something like this really cannot go uncommented…

– Men like to have all their stuff (DVDs, CDs, etc) on show to impress their mates. Women like to hide things in cupboards.
Whenever I hide things in cupboards I can never find it when I need it. Well, my cds are “hidden”, but that’s mainly to make space for more books.
– On being told that someone has bought a new car women usually ask what colour it is – men ask what sort is it.
I ask what sort, then what colour. What does that make me?
– Women put things on the bottom stair to take up next time she has to go upstairs. Men just step over them until told to pick them up.
Definitely male in this respect. I do eventually pick stuff up, but that’s only because there is no one else around to do it for me, and I can leave it for weeks or even months before I get around to it. In fact, I have this cd-rack thing by my door which I meant to bring down to the basement, I think it’s been there since February.
– A multi-tasking gene is clearly only owned by women – men can never prepare dinner so that everything is ready at the same time.
Neither can I, but I suspect that’s mainly because I can never remember how long the separate bits of preparation and cooking will take. I know men who can, though. However, I do not know many men who can also do something quite unrelated (like keeping up a conversation) or even somewhat related (setting the table) while still getting the food on the table.
– Men can store useless information. Like the top speed of a car they are never going to drive, let alone own.
And “Coke was invented 8 May 1886” is classified as useful information, I take it?
– Men can balance an infinite amount of rubbish in the bin, without noticing it is full.
Oh, I notice it’s full, all right. That does not mean I do anything about it.
– Men use I or me when they should use we or us. Women use we or us when they should use I or me.
I use I and me, but that might have more to do with not being in a relationship thatn anything else.
– Men refuse to pay more than £5.00 for a hair cut as it is not that important.
The three last haircuts I’ve had were done by – uhm – me. Before that, Linda cut my hair twice, for free. This is not because a haircut isn’t important, but because I can’t see any reason to pay good money for a haircut that I’m probably not going to be happy with (of all the haircuts I’ve ever paid for I can only remember to have been completely happy with 1), and this way I have at least the satisfaction of knowing it’s completely free.
– Men know that common house spiders are far less dangerous than scorpions.
Unless they have arachnophobia, that is.
– Women are the only ones with the noticing gene – we notice when something is dirty/nearly empty/out of place and then we bring into play the doing something about it now gene!
As with the rubbish – I have the noticing gene, unfortunately I seem to lack the “doing something about it now gene”.
– Men can watch an entire film without having to ask who is that, what does he do?
I’m normally the one answering those questions – if I can be bothered.
– Women know what to do when someone starts to cry. Men tend to shuffle out of the room mumbling something about doing the grouting.
I don’t shuffle out of the room, though I usually wish I could. I sit around making sympathetic noises, hoping this might help but suspecting it probably won’t.
– Girls cannot climb trees.
Now that is rubbish.
– Men have the empathy with computers gene. This means they are more likely to be found fiddling about with one rather than doing something useful.
Well…
– Women think that a good place to keep the TV controller is on top of the TV.
Do we? What would be the point in that? I mean, you’d have to get up in order to reach it, which would completely negate the point of having a remote in the first place.
– Women can get by with 10 or 20 CDs. Men need 200 plus.
I don’t think so. I haven’t counted my CDs, but there are rather a lot more than 20.

Which all just makes me want to quote Valerie Solanas, I’m obviously in that sort of mood today (or maybe I just like the quote):

The male chromosome is an incomplete female chromosome. In other words the male is a walking abortion; aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.