From our bedroom window we have a good view of the Bella Center convention center, where the largest hotel in Scandinavia is nearing completion, and opens in May. (It apparently goes by the name Bella Sky Comwell hotel, a name that only a board of directors would approve.) And although it may appear that I’ve photo-shopped these pictures, I have not. Colored lights illuminate the hotel, alternating every 20 seconds or so.
Ellen turns two today. This sounds like a good thing, but in reality it’s the start of a long, tough spell. This means that she’s officially in the “terrible twos,” a year of legendary tantrums and fits.
But in our case it’s worse than that because in Denmark, it’s the third year that is terrible. It’s called “trods alderen” and it’s just like the American terrible twos, except that it occurs a year later and it’s required by Danish law.
So, unfortunately we’ll spend the next two years scurrying about, trying to give Ellen whatever she wants in a pathetic attempt to avoid her terrible wrath.
I recently realized that I’d better write some of these things down before I get completely used to them.
There are a number of things that were surprising to me about Danish TV when I moved here. Probably the most surprising is the porn. Its not like it’s on every channel, but some channels simply play porn. And I’m not talking about soft-focus Penthouse stuff — this is full-on porn. Only between the hours of midnight and six, but still… porn.
We’re talking about perfectly ordinary channels here. Channels you can get with just an antenna. They play porn, instead of say, infomercials. So the porn is accompanied by ads for car lots and the like. So one minute you’re watching porn and the next minute you’re watching a used car salesman.
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Ellen doesn’t actually turn two for another week (the 16th) but this last weekend was the only time Lisbeth’s family was free to get together to celebrate. So we took the train to Vejle and spent a quiet weekend with Lisbeth’s family.
It was November when I was last in Vejle, so I was really looking forward to going. It’s always relaxing and it’s a lot of fun to see Ellen with her cousins and her grandparents. (And Karen’s cooking is no small benefit.) Unfortunately I was still recovering from a bout with pneumonia, so although it was relaxing, I wasn’t very good company. Read More →
This year we spent Christmas in New Mexico. If we’d had some way to know in advance about the extreme weather, closed airports, and chronic delays, we certainly wouldn’t have made this trip. But it’s a good thing we didn’t know because our plans were only slightly modified by the chaos. We were very lucky. On the way over we saw many cancelled flights on the departure boards, but our flights were largely on time.
We worried about Ellen before the trip, but it turned out to be fine. She slept during most of the flights, and was easy to entertain when she was awake. Plus we’ve learned to take longer lay-overs so we had ample time to run her around and wear her out before each flight.
We spent the first full day in Albuquerque, resting up and visiting with my brother Ben and his wife Heather. As usual we’d postponed quite a bit of shopping knowing that we’d be in the US, so we did a lot of shopping. (We became iPad owners, and almost immediately found our laptop to be unbearably heavy and cumbersome.)
For the second winter in a row, we’re getting clobbered. It hasn’t been particularly cold, but there’s been plenty of snow, and every time it looks like it’s going to melt, we get a fresh layer.
This may sound bad, particularly considering that we don’t own a car, but in fact it’s great. It’s great because the two biggest problems with Danish winters are that they are wet and dark. Snow may be wet, but it’s not nearly as wet as rain.
And the sun may still sets at 4:00pm, the snow magnifies whatever light is available, from the sun in the day, and from streetlights at night. Snow definitely helps make winter less depressing. There are advantages to cyclists as well. For example, when is snows there are far fewer bikes on the bike lanes. Apparently a lot of people switch from bike to train, bus, or car.
But of course there are drawbacks. There may be more space on the bike lanes, but that extra space is often risky to use. Especially in the mornings, there is often a layer of ice beneath the snow. Read More →
Lisbeth’s family takes birthdays pretty seriously. My family does not. And so, Lisbeth’s first birthday with me was disappointing. I didn’t forget — I had gifts and plans in place. But to Lisbeth it’s important that the first thing out of my mouth is “Happy Birthday!” This is first thing in the morning — the instant I wake up. But the first thing out of my mouth that first morning was not “Happy Birthday!” It was something more like “I need to pee.”
My wife is a practical woman, and she’d rather be married to a man that treats her well all year and then forgets her birthday than a man that delivers magical birthdays but neglects her for the rest of the year. Nevertheless, it seems that she was a bit traumatized by that birthday because ever since then she very carefully reminds me that she has a birthday coming up, and what her minimal expectations are for that birthday.
This works fine for me. I don’t mind being reminded, even when I am aware that her birthday is coming up. This way she is assured she won’t be horribly disappointed, and I have a few warnings in advance.
And so the last two birthdays have gone pretty smoothly, but saying Happy Birthday as soon as I gain conscienceless seems to be harder than it sounds. This year I was fully prepared. I went to sleep repeating in my mind “Happy Birthday, happy birthday — first thing when you wake up, say happy birthday.” But I think Lisbeth has given up on me. In the morning she shook me awake and said, “It’s my birthday!” Apparently she figures that as long as one of us is surprised when we wake up, we’ll be okay.
Happy birthday baby. One of these years I’ll wake up before you do, but until then, keep reminding me.
I am a tea partier. I believe in America. I believe in liberty. I believe in freedom. And I believe that these things are being taken away by sinister forces working to destroy American from within.
I am a tea partier. I believe in paying virtually no taxes, and yet somehow maintaining the greatest country in the world.
I believe it was fine to spend a trillion taxpayer dollars to invade and occupy a foreign country for bogus reasons, but I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for a trillion dollars being spent to stabilize the American economy or create American jobs. I’d rather see the American economy collapse than see my taxes go up.
I believe that living with laws that induce businesses to reduce how much energy they use or how much pollution they produce is exactly like living in a totalitarian regime.
I believe in liberty and freedom. Except the freedom to decide if or when to become a parent. Or the freedom to decide when and how to die. Or the freedom to marry the person who you love if I don’t like your preferences. Or the freedoms of Muslims to build places of worship. Or the freedoms of dark-skinned people to move around freely without having to show their immigration papers. All those things should be forbidden. But otherwise I believe in liberty and freedom.
I believe that “the environment†is an imaginary invention of radical leftists and therefore affects me in no way whatsoever, and never will. Read More →
Up until a few years ago, I figured the Wall Street Journal was merely a boring business paper — a publication by and for business people, covering money issues. I assumed that if it did cover politics, it did so only in the context of how a party or policy might affect a certain business sector.
It turns out I was very naive.
I started reading the WSJ opinion pages a few years ago, having been inspired by a piece in the New York Times about the dangers of seeking out information that merely echoes one’s own opinion. I was quite surprised to find not drab businessmen writing for the WSJ, but instead fervent believers, preaching and worshiping.
The opinion page at the WSJ doesn’t actually have much in the way of business specifics. Instead readers find two types of pieces, those comdeming the Obama administration as the worse thing to happen in the history of mankind, and those praising the magically benevolent powers of free-market capitalism.
Naturally a business paper is bound to find some faults with a democratic policy, so the pieces criticizing the Obama administration are remarkable only for their hysterical pitch. What surprised me are the soaring tributes. It surprised me because I thought that the lesson of the last few years is that strong government regulation is an essential part of a successful capitalistic society. After all, the largest economy on earth was almost taken down because Wall Street was furiously selling toxic mortgage dept to itself. Critics of laissez-faire economics could not ask for a better demonstration of the dangers of unregulated capitalism. Read More →
For the duration of 2006 I kept all the spam I received in a folder. At the end of the year it added up to about 42,000 pieces — one every 9.4 minutes. At the time I thought that was a lot of spam.
Currently I get far too much spam to bother storing it for a year, so I used a shorter period of time: 24 hours. In that time I got 986 pieces of spam. That’ s one every 86 seconds, and that’s pretty typical recently. That works out to 359,890 per year — eight times what I got four years ago.
The vast majority is for Viagra. The word Viagra appears in 672 of the messages. Interestingly, back in 2006 the word mortgage was one of the most popular words. Mortgage appears in only 1 of the recent 986 messages.
Luckily my spam filter works pretty well. Otherwise this volume of spam would make my account virtually unusable. But it’s still a pain in the ass. Of course I could change my email address, but why should I? I like my email address.
Things will have to get worse before I’ll seriously consider changing the address I’ve had since 1995. And yet, at this rate, I’ll soon be getting a million spam messages a year.
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