And basically, the sex angle always works.

‘Techno-doo-hickeys mean less sex‘ the always populist tabloid VG could reveal on its web site. After setting the rigorous scientific bar with the very first ‘word’, the second impression is that this really isn’t news, is it? I mean, as in not at all?

The core of the story behind this headline was that a British study carried out by pharmaceutical giant Bayer had found that ‘technology‘ was cited by 28 percent of the women polled for them having less sex. And ‘doo-hickeys’ are especially to blame, technologically speaking.

Email and the Internet were killing the urge, with iPhones and smartphones pointed out as the most unromantic gewgaws. VG quickly responded by ringing up Norwegian sexologist Gro Isachsen to map the state of the nation’s preference for thingamajigs to sex. And, yes, it’s happening here as well.

Isachsen said she often had clients that complained that ‘they were so obsessed with their doo-hickeys’ that it was interfering with their libido, and that this was not exclusively a male problem. Mobile phones, and the link they could provide to make social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter more accessible, often meant less time to spend with their partner, female or male.

With so many opportunities for extroversion thanks to these ‘thingies’*, their playthings instead become a source of distraction and stress. But men were singled out as being especially distracted by Internet porn – another shocker to the online news audience, I’m sure.

What to do when the very fabric of modern social life means the unraveling of personal relationships as we once knew them? In Norway, the answer is to make fun of the Swedes.

In a short but surprisingly joint news item from Norway and Sweden’s main news wires, we also learned that there is ‘More impotence under non-Socialist governments‘.

The number of Swedes who have ‘fallen ill and impotent’ has gone up since Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt has taken office. Besides a rise (?) in impotence, Swedes are also suffering from more ulcers, migraines, depression and high blood pressure since their change in government.

This short but somewhat demented article went on to note that divorce is up 9 percent under the current Swedish government, and abortions are up five percent. The piece ends with a nearly ironic bit of ‘the other side of the story’ by noting that ‘Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt would not go along with the idea that Swedes had become less happy under a non-Socialist government.’

Oh, and in case you were wondering, Norway has a left-wing government coalition, thank you very much.

* I am not exaggerating the number of times electronic or technological devices were referred to in such terms.

A bit like what moose news hunters feel like year round. So for me, this is in fact the high season for weird and wonderful news, and my files are filled to bursting for a change. But what I like absolutely best about this time of year is when the guys on duty on the news desks play with the entire concept of cucumber news. This blog entry pays tribute to them.

When the summer news hits its stride, a typical trawl of the top site headlines can read something like this:

Now you can train your face with a Nintendo DS
Steal the styles of the vampire star
Now the USA and South Korea are going to scare their northern neighbor

Typically easy, crazy stuff, lifted quickly from the international wires and gossip sites, and given a little twist to tempt people in. Though the last one there scared me a bit, I was worried that Canada was going to get some rough treatment for no particular reason.

But some Norwegian news people out there rise to the seasonal challenge. Take this headline: This is not cucumber news -  shouts the Norwegian news wire ANB. And it’s true, and what a way to get people to look in and read a gripping tale of … broccoli.

The whole story was that while this summer’s weather might not be great for us, it is absolutely ideal for broccoli, and had a few comments from broccoli farmer Per Arne Hoppestad who is looking forward to growing 300,000 of George Bush’s least favorite vegetable and helping to meet the growing Norwegian taste for the brassica.

This story was only topped by the lurid: Cucumbers attacked – which sadly did not have an exclamation mark at the end. This was in fact an even more serious agricultural item, about a fungus-like threat to Norway’s favorite summer salad green.

The story details the development of a novel, three-legged, wandering box that follows the wind direction in order to suck in spore samples and act as an early warning system for the cucumber threat.

I can’t help loving it – serious stories with a cucumber angle, while bigger news gets mangled with silly tabloid headlines – that’s summer in Norway.

Crown Princess Mette-Marit in more formal greeting mode. (Photo: Jarle Vines (Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0))

Even ‘suburb’ sounds too urban. Even though it is just 20 minutes drive from Oslo, little Asker has more of a village feel to it, and this Saturday my newly turned 11-year-old son and I were relaxing outside a bakery café after the weekend shopping, the kind of posh, modern version of making the trek to the general store. It was 4 in the afternoon, and the café was shutting down, because the weekend hubbub of village life was winding down as well.

A young man in a T-shirt walked past us towards the door of the café, smiling slightly, and I was struck by his remarkable resemblance to Crown Prince Haakon Magnus. When a woman emerged from a dark van and walked the same way, I confess to staring wide-eyed, because she looked exactly like Crown Princess Mette-Marit, so this could be no coincidence.  She gave us a friendly hello to defuse my startled look, and followed her husband inside the bakery.

I told my oblivious son what had just happened, and he took it calmly. After all, Asker schoolchildren march past the royal residence in Skaugum on Constitution Day every May 17th, and greet the crown couple before the day’s business (regal waving with the whole royal family from the palace balcony in Oslo).  He sensibly observed that they were probably nipping in for their baked goods at closing time to minimize their exposure to the masses. What amused us was that they departed almost immediately – empty-handed!

There is something quintessentially Norwegian about the royal couple being sent to the door because they arrived a few minutes after closing time, and on a weekend no less. You don’t have to be a republican to put the rights of the working stiff ahead of a royal whim for pastries.

Poor Håkon Magnus is regularly jabbed in the press for his poor or absent boating safety habits after chronic mishaps, and when I returned home I found out that this trip to the bakery must have been motivated by a desire to relax with a treat after another hard day in the public focus.

Crown Prince Haakon Magnus - respected and teased. (Photo: Jarle Vines (Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0))

The royal couple had decided, under quite some criticism from local farmers, to give up dairy activities on their farm, and either sell or slaughter their stock – a decision that was called a poor advertisement for both agriculture and the royal family.

This Saturday in fact, had been auction day, and Aftenposten reported, with an angle typical of the easy-going relationship with the monarchy here, that farmer Torstein Alm, who had won one of the cows on offer, had already decided its impending calf will be called either Mette or Mette-Marit.

And so, a day in the life of the Norwegian royal family. No sign of fussy bodyguards, no special treatment in shops, and dubious honors related by a sardonic press. Still, I bet it will be good to be king.

The best moose tale of the summer so far was a mid-July Kongsvinger visit from a youngster, apparently a year-old calf.

‘I couldn’t believe my own eyes,’ a stunned Nina Haugland told national tabloid Dagbladet after the animal entered a Kiwi brand grocery store – via a florist’s.

“It was a calf that must have been confused by the thunderstorm,” Nina told the newspaper. “It came in through the flower shop door. Maybe he saw the green plants and thought it was the forest,” she said, apparently unimpressed by the animal’s knack for nature cues.

Noting his error, the calf in a flower shop quickly made way to the grocery next door, smashing as much as possible in its path. Haugland reported that the moose  vaulted the entrance port to the Kiwi shop, and laid waste to both the grocery and an adjacent cafeteria.

“I didn’t see that it had come in at first. But then people started to scream, and there was quite an uproar, so I had to go and find out what was going on,” Nina said calmly, and she pulled out her mobile phone and started filming.

She said that it was funny looking back on it now, and since no one was hurt. But she added that she had seen similar things on TV before – so perhaps moose shopping trips are not as rare as I thought.

Video footage of the event can be seen on Dagbladet’s web site.

Moose related posts: http://jtisdall.wordpress.com/tag/moose/

These are all the things about Norway this little commercial says to me;

First, it’s a green-thinking environmentally concerned place, and it will make commercials with Norwegian rappers to get that message across, presumably to the youngsters, even though I would hope they are more aware than the rest of the population. But you never know, this is an oil country, and the younger generation has it way too easy, and now that you mention it, everyone has far too much money. Have you seen what things cost here? Wouldn’t surprise me if no one had the time or inclination to worry about the environment.

Now that we’re going to get that recycling message out to the public via the medium of rap, let’s get it done with  immigrant rappers. The band, Karpe Diem, are made up of Magdi Omar Ytreeide Abdelmaguid, Chirag Rashmikant Patel and DJ Marius Thingvald, who sounds like the Norwegian element.

And once we have a feel good catchy tune delivering the green rap message, let’s get some good old fashioned Norwegian clichés into the mix. So, the country cabin life, some trumpet tooting pseudo Tyroleans, and even a dancing moose get into the act. That’s a lot for half a minute.

The message -  do something itty bitty, for something really big. Recycle those cans and bottles. It may be a fast and cartoony attempt to cover ‘Norway’, but it’s cute and catchy, and says a lot about how many things make up the country today.

A dealfish. Ick. (Photo: Sven O Kullander)

The youngster from Fredrikstad was on a fishing trip in scenic Vesterøy in Hvaler, when she spotted something odd in the water, newspaper Fredriksstad Blad’s web site f-b.no reports.

What she spotted was longer than she was tall – a 1.7 meter sølvkveite  (‘silver halibut’, or dealfish) – which is not a pretty sight. It is also not a common sight, being a deep water fish and tending to stay between 200 and 900 meters below the surface. The dealfish can grow to a length of three meters – just under ten feet long.

“It didn’t look like a fish, I thought it was just something floating in the water,” Nathalie told newspaper VG’s web site. “It’s body was so wide it was almost like seeing a bathtub floating out there,” added father Jøran.

The injured beast swam towards land, which father Jøran called a ‘shocking, surrealistic sight’, and ended up on the pebbled shore, where the Saxegårds and a few passersby managed to haul the massive creature out of the water.

The family’s first thought, like most Norwegians in summer time, was to fire up the barbecue and feast, but they quickly changed their minds.

“Our neighbor tried to fry a piece, but it just turned into a sticky mess. So we divided it up and gave the seagulls a real party,” Jøran said.

The VG article on the event has a neat picture showing how large the fish was compared to young Nathalie, and ‘Fiskipedia’ has some nice dealfish pictures and detailed information about the creature in Norwegian.

And for a lively English language blog from the Fredrikstad area, follow Elusive Moose!

I was cultivating a theory that the volcanic eruptions were linked to hailstorms here, as what was supposed to be spring was regularly punctuated by icy balls of precipitation every time flights were disrupted. But then ash bursts started coinciding with beautiful weather, and now summer appears to have broken out directly from winter.

While reeling with sudden sweltering temperatures, I was struck by an odd local headline – ‘Blue-green snow can be lethal’ screamed tabloid VG. A lot has happened since my last blog entry. For one thing, Aftenposten has become Norway’s most popular newspaper for the first time in decades, so VG needs an extra injection of hysterics. Not too big an injection, both papers are owned by a single media giant.

The other change was, as mentioned, it has gotten hot in Norway. Why was funny colored snow suddenly a scary headline?

Well, there is a connection. As weather warms up, the urge to ramble in the mountains awakens in the Norwegian spirit, and fallen snow begins to become saturated with water. This results in the snow taking on an eerie blueish glow, and a growing danger of slush-slides, which pose a terrifying danger.

Hikers are urged to exercise extreme caution, and four people were killed after a sudden slide in Jamtfjelltinden. The sudden transition from winter to summer plays a role in this condition, a source at the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute told VG.

The saturated snow can accumulate in various features of the terrain, and turns into a racing, flowing avalanche of snow, earth and rock once a tipping point is reached. Unlike an avalanche of snow which is often set off by careless skiers, a slush-slide is not influenced by human behavior.

“A slush-slide moves like a liquid, which gives great speed and energy. It takes all available material with it on the way downhill,” NGI representative Anders Solheim told VG. These slides are more dangerous than snow-slides; they are faster, offer no air pockets to hide in and can pack over three times the density of material per cubic meter.

“There is little to be done except try to avoid the danger as much as possible,” says Solheim. So beware of blue-green snow.

A photo of blueing snow can be seen here.

And by interesting I mean terrifying.

A scary career in the making is taking place in the very rare niche of Norwegian boxing. I really don’t have too much to say about Arild ‘The Hulk’ Haugen except that it took no imagination to come up with his name. None. Except noticing he isn’t green.

As proof of this I will insert his Facebook profile pic here, but if he complains you can bet I will be taking it down quickly.

Non-green Norwegian Hulk.

Mr. Haugen has left the world strongman circuit, where he was very highly regarded,  in favor of fisticuffs, and is off to three straight victories. He is clearly aiming to gain experience and momentum slowly and has yet to fight anyone much more ringwise than himself. There is a fascinating contrast between his nascent skills and his absolutely panic-inducing physique and strength.

The 1.89 meter (6’-2.5”), and 135kg (300-lb) ‘Hulk’ won his first fight in 45 seconds, and his second ended just before the bell halted round one. On Easter he fought Jean Vidal Yemou from the Ivory Coast. Yemou, who only had amateur experience before the bout – though this doesn’t mean he has necessarily less boxing mileage than Haugen – lost by TKO in the fourth round. It was claimed that Yemou had suffered a broken rib, but I have not seen this confirmed anywhere. He was in pain and didn’t want to continue.

To learn more about Hulk Haugen, visit his personal web site, which is full of video fight clips and all breaking news. It also gives a good indication of his sheer physical power, and the impression that this really is a guy who only needs to get half lucky once a fight to produce bone-shattering results.

But Hulk wasn’t actually the recent sports item that scared me most. It was the news that cross-country skier Astrid Uhrenholdt Jacobsen is going to compete in the Norwegian biathlon championship this weekend after one training session.

Now biathletes often hone their physical condition and even win cross-country events. I know very little about this, but I would imagine that the opposite migration, which Uhrenholdt Jacobsen is planning, must be very rare. Because biathletes FIRE GUNS.

Astrid’s one practice session with rifle was her first since last year, when she also took part and helped lead her team to last place.

“I hope to avoid last place on Friday and Sunday, and not to miss too much. But I’m not going to hide if I do badly either, I’m not expecting to do well,” she told newspaper VG.

I’m sure she’s reasonably good at it, but I can’t think of an event I am less motivated to watch live than untrained rifle shooting.

Maybe sport is the way to popularize this blog. I couldn’t help but notice that covering the National Topless Sledding Championships last time led to record traffic. But that might have a lot to do with having the word topless in it. This will be the only time I repeat it purely on cynical traffic promoting grounds.

OK, so maybe topless sledding isn’t yet the tradition that murder and quizzes are for Easter here, it certainly has potential. And the day before Easter is

the Norwegian Topless Sledding Championship, at least it was this year, in the fishing village of Laukvik, in Lofoten in Nordland County.

According to VG, the event began as a Facebook joke after the organizer read about topless sledding in Germany. But when real interest in a ‘competition’ was generated, Sten Hansen decided to make his joke a reality.

About 500 spectators turned up – more than the number of Laukvik residents. The competition was more than an excuse to get half naked and crash into the snow. Sure, the main competition was about speed, with separate events for men and women – though a few of the photos definitely show mixed sleds, with a male sitting behind and doing his best to use his hands to cover his mate’s modesty. At least I think that’s what he was doing. I assume this was an entry in the open/creative class, which allowed teams.

Adding to the fun was a prize for most creative sledding performance. This was won by an arguably half insane team where one man acted as the sled, with a driver on his back. A fourth prize category was announced, for “Best Winter Body”, awarded to the palest participant.

An extremely content Hansen told VG that 27 people had taken part in the competition, some travelling from Oslo and Lillestrøm in the southeast for the pleasure. The total prize fund for they event was an impressive NOK 12,000 (USD 2,000).

Collections of photos from the odd day out can be seen at the organizers site: http://www.topplosaking.com/32957251 and
http://www.topplosaking.com/32957252. The photos, rather surprisingly, are nearly all ‘safe for work’.

Where sports are concerned the one-upmanship rapidly reaches ludicrous proportions, but no occasion is too small to consider a poke in the other’s direction.

When I was reading the articles about Norway’s penchant for bloodthirsty literary thrills at Easter, I noticed with some bemusement that one journo had felt it necessary to insert that this tradition was something the Swedes could not match.

Now, I found this odd at the time because I couldn’t really see making a seasonal quest for crime and murder books something to lord over one’s neighbors. But later it struck me as childish for a more compelling reason – the Swedes are brilliant at writing crime lit. Chances are high that Norwegians are reading them for Easter, and that they are being read in general around the world.

And Swedish crime is if anything even hotter than usual. Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander are bigger than ever on the international scene, and to my mind no one has yet to surpass the sublime Martin Beck novels of Sjöwall and Wahlöö.

Norway doesn’t have much to put up against these heavyweights, despite the obsession here with crime, and even less has been translated and exported on an international scale. But there is one who has enjoyed deserved success, and who is almost certainly translated in a bookshop near you. OK, even nearer if you buy online.

Jo Nesbø is a master of the genre, and his depressive, often alcoholic detective anti-hero Harry Hole is a surprisingly engaging character. It wouldn’t be Scandinavian lit without a good dose of gloom. Nesbø’s children books are also top notch subversive adventures for kids.

I also found out that another staple of hard-boiled Norwegian detective fiction, private eye Varg Veum, has been translated into English, and the only danger with following that lead is possible frustration at not being able to get more without resorting to learning Norwegian.

For those with an interest in Scandinavian literature, the following sites are a good place to get acquainted with either news or classics.

http://bookblog.scandinavianbooks.com/

http://www.scandinavianbooks.com/index.html