movie trivia

In Norwegian, the wordplay in the chick movie "Made of Honor" doesn't really translate, so the name was changed to something that translates as either "A True Man" or "A True Husband".

brain

These are profiles and slices of my brain. I believe the last one just barely shows the corpus callosum in the middle, which connects the two halves of the brain. That's what doctors cut to treat really bad epilepsy. (That's just trivia, has nothing to do with me.)

bergen pics

Here they are. They're pretty amateurish, and I got to see only a couple of places in the city, so there's not a wide variety of quality shots. There are a few pics in the bunch that I really like, though.

bergen

I'm in Bergen today through Tuesday for a conference. Bergen is beautiful, and makes Oslo look like crap. Oslo wasn't really pretty before, but after seeing this town, I can say that it's downright unattractive. There was some great night scenery as I took a taxi to the hotel, so even though I got in at 11:30pm, I went out and took some pictures for about half an hour, mainly of the bay. And although I brought my computer with me, I didn't bring the little cord that connects it to my camera, so I can't post any of the results right now.

I took the train here, incidentally, because the airport staff are on strike. It's about a 6-7 hour ride, because Norway doesn't have any high-speed trains. I think the London-Paris bullet train covers the same distance in about an hour.

Click here for a google map of the trip between the two cities.

lillehammer

I went to Lillehammer on Saturday. I didn't care for it. It might've been the holiday on the following Monday, but there was no one around. We went to an open-air museum that showcased replicas of old Norwegian towns, and it was dead. No employees. The replica houses were all locked. The barnyard animals were missing. But, the employees were kind enough to leave the gate open on the odd chance that a passerby might want to go in for a stroll.

The big ski jump might have been interesting to see. It has a ski lift to the top, and inside the tower is a simulator that lets you virtually experience going down the jump. However, it is closed until late May.

The only other thing of interest was the pedestrian shopping strip. That seemed to be where the few city inhabitants were gathered. They all cleared out at about 5.

On another note, I'm hearing the Scandinavian gasping everywhere now (though just from women).

juice and flowers

I'd been wondering why it has been so hard to find vegetable juice (V8 and such) out here. I finally asked someone why that is, and it appears that Europeans don't drink vegetable juice; those I asked indicated distaste at the idea. Weird. Anyway, feel free to send me some low-sodium V8, if you like, and possibly some of those fruit/veggie mixes.

On a different note, here are some quick pics I took with my cell phone today. I've included black-and-white versions, because I'm becoming more interested in that technique.

new blog

I've started a new blog that lists various free online courses that I've found. I'm still in the process of updating it, but feel free to distribute it to interested parties.