The deadline that wasn't dead

I was sure I had a deadline tomorrow. I have around 3000 words to translate from Danish to Norwegian, which is hardly a daunting task. I nevertheless started working already yesterday, finishing about half.

Now it turns out the deadline isn't until Wednesday. The motivation for a decent day's work thus vanished faster than the wine I drank last Monday.

This is why I can never become a documentary film maker or, much less, a novelist. Give me rock-hard news and a deadline less than 12 hours away. It's the only way of getting the job done.

Start me up

Photo lifted from unofficial site of "The West Wing"

I've always prided myself that I'm not addicted to particular television shows. I have little patience for "Desperate Housewives", "Lost" or "The King of Queens" as an excuse for not playing games or going out to have a beer.

While deriding mediocre shows, I'm more than willing to admit I have an unhealthy relationship with quality TV such as "Seinfeld" or "The West Wing". Alcoholic and White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry (R.I.P. John Spencer) says "I can't have only one drink". Watching an episode of "The West Wing" usually fucks up my schedule, not matter what lies ahead.

Appetite for destruction

Christmas doesn't last until Easter. At least the ginger bread house from mid-December didn't. Janne (left), Kaja and Camilla watch Geir unleash his fury upon the construction of sugar and wheat.



In a spirit of recycling, Janne and Kaja decided to eat the remains of the poor house. If the solidity of the walls didn't ruin their teeth, the sugar will.

Would you fly with these men?

Photo by Kjell Wormdahl

Neither would most Norwegians, especially after having read Dagens Næringslivs story Trønders are the bullies of the sky. Investigative reporters have discovered that four out of five airplane-drunk Norwegians are from the Trøndelag region.

No matter that the statistics only include five cases, the source is newspapers and the period surveyed is only 18 months. The generalisation will appear valid to all Norwegians who've read the title "Full trønder amok på fly" in a tabloid newspaper.

I'm all for bias and prejudice, but only when credible statistics or common sense support it. DN's article is a mean attack on a charachter-rich ethnic group whose intentions and behaviour is misunderstood by most other Norwegians. As always, the pusher of prejudice and misrepresentation is the Oslo press.

I'm boycotting DN from now on, and encourage other honest Norwegians to do the same.

Out with the old

Since I'm officially forbidden to enjoy a drink, the New Year's party was just almost as fun as usual. It had all the ingredients though: a rock solid meal (grouse), high school friends slightly more drunk than usual and the unsurprisingly boring but still expensive fireworks.

The first night of the new year was spent on a sofa bed, between an overtly drunk chap who claimed the entire blanket as his property and a bozo who had passed out around 1 AM but was now wide awake and had to call all his friends and sexually harrass them before falling asleep.

There's no worries about hangover for the time being, so the new year still started off fairly well. The only promise for the following 364 days is to write shorter sentences.