MeMag - Me Magazine

this link caught my fancy. It poetically elevates our local common house cats into some wild magnificent beast. Just listen to this:

“Each time you see a Norwegian Forest Cat is a feast for the eyes. Each time you touch their spun-silk soft coats is a delight to the fingertips…

…These are the cats that explored the world with the Vikings, protecting the grain stores on land and sea, and which are believed to have left their progeny on the shores of North America as a legacy to the future…

…These lovely cats are really two for the price of one…

…The inner-ear hair that deflects the wind and snow (and can be three to four inches long, curving out and around the ear like flexible racing stripes) remains all year…”

Ok… even though the description is a bit fanciful, there is a true affection for cats that seems to motivate it. The Cat Fancier’s Association really love cats. And why not. Cats are ok animals.

The photo depicts Truls, the first Norwegian Forest Cat to be accepted internationally as a thoroughbred cat in it’s own right. This grand event in the catosphere took place in 1977.

Link discovered by PVC. Photo possibly from Aftenposten.

This post is dedicated to Bagherah. Mjau!

I’m not sure if I have touched upon this subject before, but the principal task of the press here in Norway is to rewrite history to show that anything good was actually invented by some Norwegian dude.

It has always puzzled me how people here can believe firmly in the idea that we are the envy of everyone worldwide. But that is what people generally think. And say. A childhood friend of mine for example… whenever some great invention is mentioned by someone, or an historic act of bravery, he pauses for a while… he thinks… then it comes: “A Norwegian guy invented that”. “What?”, I say… “The samurai sword?” “Absolutely”, he says. Then he delivers some ludicrous explanation that I cannot possibly puncture without a degree in medieval asian history.

That’s my buddy “S.” He has one of those explanations for anything worthwile… The discovery of a vaccine for sleeping sickness… the invention of the submarine… always things you cannot check there and then. And the papers do the same thing. Constantly.

On September 11th for instance, they started off with the usual shocking headline of hundreds, possibly thousands of Norwegians presumed dead in the WTC. Then, as it slowly became painfully clear that only unimportant foreigners had died, they searched frantically for a Norse news-angle until they came up with something like the brother-in-law of the wife of someone who had been there the day before and could have perished in the collapsing towers. But didn’t. This story then ran for days.

Hollywood is another favourite hunting ground when looking for Norwegian superstars. If you search people’s family trees close enough, you are almost certain to find some Hollywood actress who had a grandfather who was 1/8th Norwegian on his mother’s side. According to the local papers, there wouldn’t have been an entertainment industry anywhere, had it not been for our enormous contribution.

Today it is Lost making the headlines. You know… LOST. The tv series everyone watches thanks to the wonders of online filesharing. Today the newspapers proudly report that the father of some apparently famous soccer coach is seen in a video they are watching on the island. (They have video on that island now?) Yes… in a recently aired episode, there is a film segment where you can briefly see the silhouette of someone who resembles Ivar Normark, former city official on the municipality of the county of Narvik and the father of Ivar Morten Normark, who is the famous soccer coach person. Yes, news doesn’t get much hotter than this.

“There is no doubt that it could be him. The features, profile, the posture and the hair indicate that it may be him”, Ivar Morten Nordmark says to Dagbladet.no

“We think the video clip dates back to the ’80s, due to some scaffolding seen off to the side”, mayor Olav Sigurd Alstad (Labor Party) comments to the same newspaper.

The article then goes on to question where the production company has obtained the old footage. A local tv channel has already contacted Buena Vista television in order to learn the answer.

One could of course also question how the newspaper journalists have obtained an episode of Lost which hasn’t yet aired here in Norway.

Dr. Ståle Fredriksen, MD and Research Fellow at The University of Oslo, who earlier this year earned his doctorate for the thesis Bad luck and the tragedy of modern medicine, (in short saying that bad luck should be an accepted partial cause of accidents and illnesses, and that even lifestyle diseases are to some degree the result of factors beyond our control) has now put forth the idea that school homework violates children’s human rights.

I agree. The maximum work week (without overtime and extra pay) in Norway is set to 37.5 hrs. And yet children and teenagers are expected to stay in school for up to 45 hrs. a week and in addition spend an hour or two each evening, the majority of their spare time, doing homework.

Article 24 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights state that “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay”. And in truth, no adult (outside of Japan) would accept it if the boss demanded that he took his work home every single day. Yet this is demanded of our young for no apparent reason except “because”.

Dr. Fredriksen claims that research show that students are getting little actual benefit from their homework. This is simply because you need to be alert and motivated in order to learn efficiently, and no one is at their mental best late in the evening at the end of a long work day. (The article however, doesn’t offer any reference to this research. I wish it did).

The tradition of homework is a remnant of the past. The notion of full days in school five days a week is relatively recent in our culture. Fifty years ago the majority of kids in Norway only went to school every other day. And yet the same workload of homework is taken for granted today. Not only that, -children are usually blamed by their parents for not having gotten their homework out of the way the minute they came home, as if they themselves would have gone on working without a break after a work day of that length.

Parliamentary Secretary Helge Ole Bergesen in the ministry of education and research has stated that he does not agree.

Covered in the following Norwegian newspaper article. No english versions of this seem to have been published online so far, but you can read more about Bad luck and the tragedy of modern medicine here.
Dr. Fredriksen will answer posted questions on this subject on Tuesday October 4th at 12:00 local time.

This article in the Daily Mail is an amusing read. As always when a foreign newspaper, magazine or tv program says anything slightly critical about Norway, it causes great headlines in our local newspapers. Which is where I found this article as well.

While hitting the nail on the head in several paragraphs, they did get some of the facts wrong. What puzzles me the most about this piece, is that it refers to Norway as being “the best place in the world to live” in terms of health and personal economy, referring to a United Nations survey ranking us first among 177 countries for the fifth year running. This mirrors what people here love to describe their country as; “The wealthiest country in the world”.

This of course, is just propaganda. We have been told so many times that we are rich that most of us accept it without even thinking about it. While in fact, hardly anyone I know can afford a hot meal every day of the month. This article (which is sadly now a pay-for-read item) in The New York Times reaches a different conclusion in regards to our economy. It refers to a different statistic which says that we have one of the lowest living standards in Europe.

Another interesting “fact” in the Daily Mail article is that we apparently have the worlds lowest unemployment at 3.7%. This is just wrong. I might not have the most industrious group of friends, but since only a couple of people I know have regular (low paying) jobs, this cannot be right. The government have designed fool-proof schemes intended to hide the true numbers. The process of registring and maintaining status as unemplyed is so complicated and faulty here that most people give up. Their status then automatically reverts back to one of employment after a few weeks.

The high unemployment also leads to academic over-education within useless fields. People who have no work often enrolls in various university courses because this entitles them to a student loan. They end up with a few trophy degrees but as a result, the labor market is flooded with people with impressive educations and huge personal debt. You more or less need a university degree now adays to get a job delivering pizza.

There is a similar government scheem regarding religion. Very few Norwegians attend church at all, except for the occasional funeral. And hardly anyone declare themselves openly as christians. Yet when you are born you are automatically entered into the church and few people bother to take the steps to cancel their memberships. Everyone is a registered church member. Yet no one believes in anything. It is normal. And it looks great in the statistics. In reality we are a bunch of heathens.

The truth is that while Norway has great national wealth due to it’s oil resources, the money just don’t belong to the people. We aren’t getting any of it. And we never will. Meanwhile, our mythical fortunes seems to justify absurdly high taxes on just about anything. Saving money is impossible. The only way young people can get out of their debt these days, is to inherit their parents.

“Norway has much going for it and the Norwegians are, on the whole, beautiful, prosperous and healthy. Millions of people would love to have what they have.

But I’ve seen more joy and laughter in desperately impoverished villages in Africa than I did in Oslo.”