29 again?

Mirthful

I just realised it’s that time of year (no, not 29 again, 32 this time, thank you very much) so I suppose it’s time for a wishlist:

1. Dinner at Credo (downstairs, with wine)
2. External flash for Canon EOS 300/350D
3. Non-stop (bag, Amarula tube, packing crate, whatever)
4. Map of Vienna and/or Salzburg
5. Scrapbooking stuff
6. (Good) single malt whisky
7. Champagne
8. Hiking/walking shoes, preferably gore-tex
9. Ladies tees from think geek or similar, preferably not in white – edit: Or from here!
10. The new P.D. James novel and the new Jeffrey Archer novel, preferably in paperback (the Archer so-called hardback that I’ve seen feels like a paperback with hard covers and is therefore an abomination verging on blasphemy, I haven’t checked the James, but I don’t really collect her so I’d rather have something that’s easy to bring on the bus).

All filmed out

Mirthful

Due to some massive self-delusion of the “Yeah, I’ve got lots of free time to spare” kind I volunteered to help out at Kosmorama – Trondheim International Film Festival. It’s a pretty new thing, only in its second year, but, you know, films, right? It’s mostly all good – I’m in the theatre hosting team, which means I stand at the door taking tickets and counting press/industry people. I also have to be present in the theatre during the showing of the film to make sure the machinist gets alerted if there is a problem with the sound or picture. So, yes, I need to see the film. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it… We also get to go to as many shows as we want when we’re not actually “working” ourselves (well, technically there is a limit of 28 shows during the one-week festival, but what with being on duty for three sessions and working full time in my usual job there is no way I could possibly see anywhere near as much). In fact, the only drawbacks I can see are A. uhm, sleep and all that and B. film overload.

I’ve had two stints so far, Sunday “early” (9-4:30) and Monday “late” (4:30-whenever it ends) – Im also on Thursday “late”, and think I’ll go see a film or two tomorrow (Martin’s working tomorrow night, so it’s either a film or two or rattling around in the flat by myself), but I’m having today off. I love movies, but I do have a threshold, and I think I need a break today…

Now to the part I’m sure you’re all waiting for: Which films did I see and what did I think of them?

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
In the original and no sub titles. I love film festivals! I also loved the film. I think it’s probably even better than Ice Age.

Everything is Illuminated
I never got around to reading the book, and I suppose I’m unlikely to now, but the film was great. Better when it was mostly funny than when it was mostly serious, but definitely great.

A State of Mind
A British film crew was given access to follow two North Korean schoolgirls training towards a Mass Games performance. The glimpse into North Korean society is fascinating, as is the whole concept of Mass Games – especially the way it’s tied up to the whole ideology of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il. I was left with very mixed feelings (this is good) as on the one hand I got so wrapped up in the girls and their expectations and exhileration, and their awe at being allowed to perform in honour of their leaders and on the other a part of me is thinking “they’re all brain-washed” for every second sentence uttered. I think it will take a while to digest this one.

Parzania
This one was a bit of a shock, as I’d not read the synopsis properly and although I was expecting the initial idyll to be shattered I wasn’t quite prepared for the thoroughness of the shattering, to put it that way. Bring Kleenex. Also, being supposed to clear the theatre and get it ready for the next show and taking the tickets of the people arriving for the next show with a smile isn’t the best way of following this film. Consider seeing it in your own time… Very good, though.

Pat Garret and Billy the Kid
Brilliant, obviously, though I suppose I ought to have seen a lot more westerns to fully appreciate it, but still, brilliant. This was a newly refurbished version, and getting to see it on the big screen with no subtitles was too good an opportunity to miss (though not everybody thought so, apparently, four of the 30-odd people in the audience left, separately, within the first ten minutes – I thought that very strange, I suppose with a few of the other films at the festival you may realise it’s not the sort of thing you expected at all and decide to leave, but you’d have to be pretty dim to do so with this one, and four dimwitted people is quite a lot for such a small audience).

Cavite
Uhm. No. I’m sorry, but this completely failed to push any buttons with me whatsoever. My main problem was that there was no real lead-up to the “thriller” part – you are thrown into a conversation between a man and a woman (actually, it’s more of a monologue by the woman) about how she intends to have an abortion and he’s obviously not very happy about it (which is understandable, but not terribly engaging without a bit more backstory) and then you see the guy walking around being a security guard (which is supposed to be ironic, I bet), eating some fast food and pointing his flashlight at things. Then flashback to a few days (or is it weeks?) earlier he’s in the airport (more conversations with his (ex)girlfriend over the phone here), apparently on his way to the Phillipines. He arrives in the Phillipines and five minutes into the film Wham! the action begins – his sister and mother have been kidnapped and he is led a not-so-merry dance through Manila and Cavite, all cumulating in… well, now, that would be telling, but I must say, though who can tell what we’d do if pressed, that I don’t think I’d have, but, anyhow, back to the point: I was given no time (or reason) to feel empathy for the guy before being expected to feel tense on his behalf, and so I didn’t. What little backstory we got suggested to me that he was likely to be fundamentally miserable no matter what the kidnappers did, so I really didn’t care. I felt somewhat sorry for his mother and sister in a detached sort of way, but less so for their fictional plight than for the very real plight of the thousands of random “extras” we get a glimpse of in the slums and streets. To top it off there were things I didn’t much care for in the way Cavite was filmed, too (too much fancy camerawork that just annoyed me), but I don’t think that would have bothered me if I had appreciated the plot, so I’m not going to quibble much with that. My advice, though, is pretty clear: Go see something else.

Off to the south

Mirthful

Not far enough south, though, unfortunately. Message from the husband this morning “Looks like the weather gods have caught on to the fact that you’re coming to Oslo – it’s snowing again” (he’s already in Oslo, teaching his colleagues to drink wine – or something like that). Drat.

Anyway, a weekend in Oslo comprising, among other things, a calvados tasting, Waiting for Godot at the national theatre (though in Norwegian) and dinner with good friends can’t be bad, even with snow.

Some words

Mirthful 3 Comments

I’ve been chastisised for not writing much lately. The problem, dear fictional readers, with real readers, is that they talk back. Some of them even pout at you through msn messenger for not diverting them sufficiently frequently…

So. Some words.

Last weekend there was an article in Dagbladet (I remembered today because a letter to the editor in this weekend’s paper – which I only looked through today due to the fact that we don’t buy papers and my parents do and I visited my mum this afternoon and the paper was lying around so I looked through it – referred to it *phew* sorry about that sentence, hope you’re still breathing) about a bus driver in Oslo who is known as “kj

Could someone please explain

Mirthful

I mean, I see the point of blog-spam, sort of, to the extent that I see the point of spam at all – you have product, you want to sell it, in order to sell it you need to have people visiting your webpage and so you spread the url of your webpage by any means possible. It sort of makes sense.

Then we had the spate of junk comments that linked to legitimate sites, which confused me for a bit. I suppose it was done in the hope that it would confuse spam-detectors. Well, sorry to disappoint, but we don’t need to blacklist everything, you know, there is such a thing as a “delete” button, too. Anyway, after having thought about it, these attempts sort of made sense (in a twisted kind of way, but still).

But this morning I found someone calling herself (or should I say “itself”) Betsy Markum had left a comment on this entry to tell me that her (its) coworker has bought a car (I’ve okayed it, since it’s not doing any harm apart from confusing and amusing me). Why? The entry is old hat and does not mention cars. The comment does not contain any links. Does (the bing that calls itself) Betsy want me to e-mail her and say “Wow! Where do you get such cars?” or “Wow! Where do you work since you can afford to buy such cars?” (it seems a hefty price for a car, though I really have no idea of realistic car prices).

Could someone please explain?

Young people nowadays

Mirthful 1 Comment

I had a “what’s wrong with young people nowadays?” moment yesterday. I’ll get to that eventually, first an update:

Because I obviously have too much spare time on my hands (ha!) I’ve signed up for a couple of subject – one at the department where I work and one in English studies. The former promises to be both interesting and useful if I can manage to get enough work done on it to actually pass the exam. The latter was the only class this semester at my old department that looked vaguely interesting, and I thought it would be nice to get back to English literature and to possibly get in touch with the department again in case I ever manage to do something about this doctoral thesis I’ve been contemplating for the last 8 years. (Phew, long sentence.)

This latter class is entitled “Working class fiction” and is supposed to deal both with social history and literature. Sounds promising, no? Actually, it was one of only two classes where I hadn’t read most of the set texts already, and the other was on Native American fiction, and while that might be very well it’s A: way off my chosen field hypothetical-thesis-wise and B: twice the workload (and I really didn’t need that). A brush-up on D.H. Lawrence and an introduction to Walter Greenwood, Alan Sillitoe, Arnold Wesker, Willy Russell and Mary Beckett can’t be all bad, though.

There are two problems. One is time. Getting the reading done ought to be doable, after all, I do read quite a lot, I just need to make sure I read the right things rather than whatever takes my fancy. The main problem, time-wise, is lectures. They are all during working hours, which means I have to make up the time (which is doable), but if we are busy or something needs doing yesterday I can’t just disappear for a couple of hours. So I will probably only be able to attend a fraction of the lectures.

The other problem is my fellow students. This course is bachelor level, which means my fellow students are mostly in their early twenties. It also means a lot of them have no idea why they’re taking this course, they are there because they couldn’t think of anything better to do. There will, I assume (or hope), be exceptions.

Hence we come to our “young people nowadays” moment. The first lecture was yesterday. We were supposed to have an introduction to the social history and then to look at two short-stories by D.H. Lawrence – The Odour of Chrysantemums and Fanny and Annie. These two stories we’d been told (via the university’s “community” boards) would be available in a compendium. However, the compendium was only available as of yesterday. First I figured I’d let the students who were actually students rather than just joyriders like me get the chance to check out any Lawrence than the library might have, and that I’d wait for the compendium to arrive. Wednesday, however, when it (the compendium) still hadn’t (arrived), I popped in at the library to check if they might, on the off chance, still have a Lawrence collection. They did, I checked it out and read the two stories Wednesday evening. I did wonder, because as far as I could see the library was only supposed to have one copy of Lawrence’s collected short-stories, and I thought it was a bit odd that it was still available. Then, yesterday in the one hour of lectures I managed to sneak in between the chaos that is work, the lecturer asked if anyone had managed to find the stories anywhere else, seeing as the compendium had been delayed. Two people put their hand up. Me, that’s one. Another girl, that’s two. And the other girl had only managed to find Fanny and Annie. Which is when I thought: “Young people nowadays!” And then realised they were just the same back when I was a bachelor student, I remember being vaguely shocked at how little initiative the average student managed to show back then as well.

Don’t people realise that it’s a good idea to have read the text before hearing a lecture on it?

Don’t people realise there are such a things as libraries?

Apparently not.

Still, what little I managed to catch of the lecture was interesting enough. Unfortunately, I only managed one hour. And since the lecturer is from Bergen, this course is “condenced” with lectures only in weeks 4, 9 and 13 – and long lectures in those weeks. And I didn’t manage to get away today. Which means I missed a grand total of 9 hours this week. Pity. Still, there’s a chance things at work will be slightly less hectic in week 9, so there is hope.

We’ll see.

Wordwise

Mirthful 1 Comment

So it turns out aardvark is not the first word in the dictionary. Not by a long shot. Not THE dictionary, anyway. The OED has several entries preceeding aardvark. I assume most other dictionaries would also have “a”, as in “a word”, as an entry, but the OED has other stuff also, some obsolete, being the OED. Anyhoo, I’ll let the aardvark keep the honour of being top of the list for the time being, since it’s the first creature – South African, in case you didn’t know – in the dictionary (also THE dictionary). Following hot on its heels (possibly also literally, though you’d have to check with a zoologist) is “aardwolf”, also South African (blame the Dutch). So now we know.

Voice in my head: Vera Lynne singing We’ll meet again (blame the husband, it was his farewell tune this morning, except he sang “We’ll meet again, got-a-clue where, got-a-clue when”, whereas Vera is sticking to “don’t know”. She is, however, singing “You’ll muddle through just like you always do”, rather than the more conventional “Keep shining through”, and, if you think about it, it actually makes a lot more sense that way, though it sounds less heroic, I suppose.)