Not feeling very Olympic

I have a confession to make. I’ve been living in Norway, the most successful country in Winter Olympic history, for ages now but I have never, ever been able to get into these sports. Of course the hysteria about the games has monopolized headlines, both sports and news, and pushed almost everything else off the agenda for a while. And now things have got even worse.

Anette Sagen - (Photo - Manuguf)

Catching up

Normal service will resume when I finally kill off my annual nightmare, tax paperwork.  Accounting/bookkeeping and I get along like vampires and garlic, Superman and kryptonite, and similar fictive cliché comparisons. But that doesn’t make the pain and fear any less real. On the up side, the sun has reappeared, which really is big news here. What a relief.

In the meantime, let’s play a little game. This works better if one steals photographs, but being a stickler for intellectual property, we will have to make do with links.

Odd jobs

I had never come across a particularly strange winter job before. For some reason, they either seem to be non-seasonal, or common in the summer, when there are plenty of students to be enticed into doing something bizarre. In fact, one of my favorite stories from the old Aftenposten News in English service was precisely this, a look at the weirdest summer job in the country.

Then a few days ago, I spotted something I had never seen before; an icicle assassin. Even better, the story came with video.

Reality bites

Moose. The real thing. In Norway, they’re called the King of the Forest. While they may make news for odd reasons, like when getting drunk on fermenting fallen apples in the fall, a close encounter is usually very dramatic. The most common moose and man meeting is an animal versus car collision; in face-to-face meetings their imposing size is awesome.

The most recent headline moose tale is not for the faint of heart. The reports in today’s links include video and photo coverage in unusually graphic detail,

I am feeling very Iditarod today

The Jamaican bobsledding team made a grand story. But this is an even more extreme example. It’s not Olympic, it is the kind of gruelling challenge that must boil down to a profound curiosity about how far you can push yourself, and about the basic question of survival. Newton Marshall is part of the Jamaican Dogsled Team.

A frosty-lashed Newton Marshall before the start of the 2009 Yukon Quest.
Photo: http://www.jamaicadogsled.com

When I saw this feature story in tabloid VG’s online edition,

Norway’s high-energy beam from hell

The weather. Reliable ingredient for your conversational starter, and when it’s been unusual, like it has this winter, then it also qualifies as reliable news fodder. But some days it is the stuff of conspiratorial global catastrophe. Today is one of those days.

I’m not a regular reader of the Pakistan Daily, but maybe that will change, because they seem to be keeping an eye on Norway. Their January 8th headline – Norway Time Hole ‘Leak’ Plunges Northern Hemisphere Into Chaos –

If I remember correctly

Well, chances are I don’t any more. I was sure that one of the assorted headlines today was a follow-up to something I had blogged about, but I can’t find it here, so I am either having serious memory problems, or need to index things better.

There is a mildly amusing Norwegian TV commercial, for house paint I believe (see memory disclaimer above if you have forgotten), where two men

Winter wonderland

Norway’s best-selling daily newspaper, the tabloid VG, provided much cold-related amusement today. First, they had a panel of experts online fielding reader questions about coping with the widest assortment of freezing weather problems imaginable. Then they had one of the most ridiculous articles plus poll I have seen in ages.

As temperatures continue to supply baffled readers with worries about how to handle -20C, -30C and -40C chills, the weather got so cold in Røros,

Something old, something new

Or to put it into the context of today’s headlines, the weather and market prices of modern media. The weather will always be the fallback subject for small talk, and if it isn’t global warming, then it’s freezing for some reason.

Of course things have gotten strange when cold winters are a big story in Norway.