Ta mish beggan skee.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 20:38 0 comments

 
Yes, the singing on Friday went very well — we performed four songs and I only sucked really badly in one of them, and did really well, I think, in another one. The audience was extremely appreciative of the singing and our costumes (yes, for we were dressed up in vaguely Renaissance-type clothing. Very vaguely. My costume was more 14th than 16th century, but nobody appeared to care.) We even got a bit of money, which was more than I knew in advance — enough for a cup of coffee each or so, but still!

The day after I stood up to sing on my own to an audience of people who knew me, which Friday's audience didn't. I think this is going to my head.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 13:09 0 comments

 
I had a weird dream last night, involving me developing a phobia against climbing ladders on fire engines and parasailing down from them. So I thought that maybe I should develop my posting from Thursday a little, to say that I am aware of the fact that lots of people really do suffer from phobias for things that seem quite irrational but are very real to them (as I mentioned a few days ago I'm uncomfortable with ferries, although not to the point where I won't go on them — still, I find it easy to sympathise with sufferes from phobias.) What I was getting at, as those will understand who follow the link and look at the phobia descriptions, was the way the company used the exact same description for all their phobia treatments only changing the name of the phobia, giving us descriptions like this one:

Defined as "a persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of the pope", each year, this common phobia causes millions of people needless distress.

To add insult to an already distressing condition, most fear of the pope therapies take months or years and sometimes even require the patient to be exposed repeatedly to the pope over and over again. We believe this is totally unnecessary, and can even make matters worse, now that fear of the pope can be eliminated with just 24 hours of commitment by the phobic individual.

Known by a number of names Papaphobia and Fear of The Pope being the most common, the problem often significantly impacts the quality of life. It can cause panic attacks and keep people apart from loved ones and business associates.

Change "the pope" to "sex", "parents-in-law", "the walloons" or even "the preference by a phobic for fearful situations" and you get the picture. I hope they treat their patients with greater respect that they treat the visitors to their web site, for they clearly don't credit us with the ability to think.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:15 0 comments

 
Important message to anybody who wants to send me email: the nea.pp.se address does not work at all at the moment, and I know for a fact it's lost messages for me this last week. Please use Linnea.Anglemark (bendy a) engelska.uu.se instead for the time being. I'll kick my email provider guy in the behind and try to make him switch away from home.se as soon as possible.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 11:44 0 comments

 
People occasionally accuse me of not having enough self-confidence. Be that as it may (after all, if I had none I wouldn't put my thoughts up here for the world to see!) there are things I know about myself, for instance, that my singing voice really isn't all that good. I can read music rather well, having had a lot of training; I can remember melodies, parts and texts pretty well also but my voice isn't particularly beautiful. It's certainly no solo voice, but good enough for choirs, or so I've found.

Yet I'm off this afternoon to sing the second alto part in a quartet at an entertainment in southern Stockholm (no, it's not open. You can't come. It's for a society that's celebrating it's anniversary, I think). We'll perform three or four songs I've practiced once — last night — fortunately the other three people know them very well. They have been singing together for some time, but their regular second alto couldn't make it tonight so Sara asked me if I'd like to come instead. As the lowest part in the quartet, I'll be heard. Fortunately I have no nerves. At all.

Excuse me while I run around in circles, panicking.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 12:37 0 comments

 
You just wait, Jukka — in a week I start learning Manx, and then I'll write blog postings you can't understand. So there!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 20:46 0 comments

 
Via Kevan, a list of all phobias that the Phobia Clinic has specially trained staff to deal with. Yes, they would appear to have training to deal with fear of walloons. And gaiety. That Refund phobia is a new one. . . oh, and how much money do you lose every year by being afraid of knees? It affects millions every year!

How unfortunate that they also included their own treatment as one of the phobias to be treated.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 17:20 0 comments

 
I know it is hard to believe, but some people keep their mobile phones for a week, or even longer, before changing to another model! Me, I had a Siemens on Tuesday, a Nokia yesterday, and an Eriksson today.

(Yes, they are still nice and charming at Telia and handing out phones on loan to me. Well, as someone commented, it wasn't my fault the phone didn't work when I got it back from the service, so it's probably only fair.)

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 16:09 0 comments

 
So I went to get my mobile phone back, and instead was given a brand new one as they hadn't been able to repair the old one. Fair enough! Except half the buttons on this one don't work (the right-hand-side ones) and my entire phone book was wiped out (the latter isn't the phone's fault, apparently the phone book isn't stored on the SIM card, so it's just a side effect of changing phones.) So now what do I do? Return to the store yet again and say "Erm, sorry, but I can't press these buttons. . ."??

And home.se is down again. It's the third time in a week, and the previous week was just as bad. How did they ever get to be elected the best free email service? And when will my email master get his act together and point my email at the working service that I pay for??

Grumble snort. To cap things, Sara and I found out yesterday that we have to write another section to the blasted pragmatics paper we handed in weeks ago, and I do need to get it finished today. At least I can watch the cats watching the snow fall, which is a very watchable spectacle.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 14:49 0 comments

 
Oops — that's ~10000 editors, not ~1000 like I said in my previous post. I was being a bit bowled over.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 12:17 0 comments

 
It was almost exactly a year ago that I applied to grad school, was weighed and measured and found worthy, in competition with I'm not sure how many people. Today, I find that I've been weighed and measured again, by people who don't know me at all, and granted new superpowers in the ODP; calling it a competition is not quite correct for you don't apply for this, but I am now one of a few hundred among the ~1000 editors who can edit anywhere in the directory.

I don't mind it at all when people look at my work and think it's sufficiently good. Not even a little bit. But the question remains: If I have managed to attain these positions which not everybody reaches, how come I can't defend my bedcover against a 4-kg cat at night?

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:29 0 comments

 
It's wonderful to be able to stay in touch with people in all kinds of odd corners of the world, such as Helsinki, through the Internet. But it is also frustrating, because sometimes you do want to see people in real life as well, and it feels as if it ought to be simple as the contact is so relatively effortless after all. . . and it isn't that simple, at all. I use Helsinki as an example advisedly; we do want to go and visit Sari and Jukka and I don't see how we'll be able to do that anytime soon. (The travel may be cheap but the ferry takes a day and a night, and apart from my irrational fear of ferries there is the aspect of finding the time. Why is there always so much year left at the end of the vacation time?)

Anyway.

I haven't said anything about Jukka's illness here, which is a bit odd perhaps — at first I wasn't sure how public the knowledge was, and then I've hesitated for other reasons. While it is scary to be sure, cancer in itself is not as immediately terrifying as for instance CJD is, and I am not overly comfortable with writing things about other people's personal lives. (That is probably the self-evident statement of the year, actually.) But I'm Library Babe, and I've read up on NHL and found that the prognosis is good. . . and it is, if I may say so without sounding as if I'm mocking those involved, a comfort to be able to read the good couple's blog and so keep up with what's going on.

So once we get new vacation days maybe we'll try to enter one of those scary ferries after all, to go and see my Finnish twin and her man.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:53 0 comments

 
Hilary Talbot's place is a web site you can explore for a long time. It contains Hil's own art, graphics and pictures of her puppets, and I'm enormously impressed and fascinated by the stuff she has made. I don't visit Pemberley a lot, these days, but the place is a lot poorer for her absence!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:46 0 comments

 
I have found a working outlet for my book- movie- and gadget-shopping needs, that doesn't cost me a fortune: I made a wishlist at Amazon.uk, with the things I want, but (in most cases) wouldn't buy for myself. Adding stuff to that list actually gives me the same kind of satisfaction as buying them would; it does not give me the satisfaction of actually owning and consuming them but that's beside the point.

It annoys me that all items in their data base can't be added to the wish list, though. Books such as Sluggy Freelance can't be added, presumably because they are sold by a third party. Likewise the Liavek and Bloom County books can be found when I search for them but I can't add them, because they are too old I suppose, and not kept in stock. But surely the point of having them there is supplying them to the buyer, and if they happen to be out of stock when a prospective gift-giver looks at the list they can't be bought just then - still, it's having the information there that's interesting, and every item that is in stock will increase the profit for Amazon or else they wouldn't sell it in the first place. So that's definitely a minus side. After all, a lot of the stuff I'm interested in hasn't been published in the last few years.

Still, making the list gave me a nice sense of splurging without spending any money at all, as I heaped DVDs and electronic gadgets onto it. . .

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 16:07 0 comments

 
Notice anything different about Néablog?

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:01 0 comments

 
I read a lot, of course, while I was ill. Martha Wells' Wheel of the Infinite is different from the other Wells book I've read, Death of a Necromancer; above all the settings are very different - in both cases the main character is a not quite respectable person (an outcast former priestess, in this case) and the problem presented is rather vague initially ? no "Take this ring and throw it into the volcano you see there". The main city in Wheel is modelled on the Angor Vat in Cambodia, and religion plays an unusually important part for a fantasy book. Yes, I know there are usually gods around but religion itself is seldom as important as it is in this novel; at least, it is for the main characters, but not necessarily for the people around them.

I am now reading Glen Cook's The Tower of Fear. I've read it before but remember very little of the plot; I do remember that it is an excellently plotted book with some very good characters, and I have always liked Cook's writing. So it is a very good, highly recommended read.

The End of my Tether by Neil Astley, on the other hand, does not appeal to me very much at all. The style is very reliant on special effects such as referrals to peoples' sex lives and their bodily odour; every page is riddled with things like that, it feels as if the author isn't sure of how to get his readers' attention in any other way. The characters fail to interest me, too, and the story hasn't yet really emerged from under the layers of stylistic embellishments and snippets of old mythology and beliefs.

The latest book we got hold of by Bang, however, was no disappointment. This was the 1963 book, Där skon klämmer; I'm a very big fan of Bang (Barbro Alving, her name was) and have a rather respectable collection of her works, although several are still missing. It very quickly made me laugh so hard I completely forgot I was ill. The really weird thing, though, was that it was only opened half-way ? the second part of it was unopened (see the bottom of the linked page) and I can't for the life of me imagine what kind of person would buy a Bang book and then only read half of it. Johan suggested that perhaps they died before opening the rest of it, and that sounds rather more plausible than the alternative.

Finally, I also watched Pride and Prejudice, the BBC version, in its entirety, which I hadn't done for some time. Not all of it, that is.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:48 0 comments

 
Oh, the dinner game disappeared. Bother. Well, it seems to be a server load thing so hopefully it will reappear. I found another game at MCiOS, though (via CdM) : this one is not recommended for the faint of heart or people with high blood pressure. It's Asteroid Lander, where you try to land a small spaceship on an asteroid, taking the gravity into account and ducking the small pieces of debris flying around. I just managed to land on the first level. Go me!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 13:49 0 comments

 
The degree confluence project is very nifty; a degree confluence is a longitude/latitude crossing, and generally they don't really look like they do in The Pirates in the Deep Green Sea — although the confluence project only deals with confluences on land, so who can tell, really?

In any case, the web site collects reports about trips to confluences, with pictures and facts about the immediate surroundings. In Sweden, all confluences have been visited at least once (though there is nothing to stop anybody from making a second visit, of course.) The one closest to us seems rather interesting: according to the information on the page it has a "fur [sic] tree"! (Link via Watty)

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 20:17 0 comments

 
I would have made a birthday card here, but am too tired and it didn't come out very well. Still, Happy Birthday, Ulrika.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:43 0 comments

 
[Edited for more coherence]

Games and stuff for the bored bedridden:

RSVP, a Domino-type game where you need to make your dinner guests happy. It ain't easy. (via Watty)

A very cool little clicky game in Czech (no, actually, what little text there is is in English, but it's from the Czech Republic) and it's of the problem-solving variety. Very fun and different, rather slow-moving, includes weird little oddities. (For instance, what are the goats good for? Do they actually do anything?) (via various people at MCiOS)

And HomeStar Runner. I've mentioned this site before but never got into detail about why I like it so much.. It is a kind of online cartoon (using Flash) in many episodes, about a group of, um, people (for want of a better word) such as the Brothers Strong (Strong Bad, Strong Sad and Strong Mad) ; the King, who does nothing much except eat, the Cheat and HomeStar Runner. It was hard to grasp the plots in the various episodes at first, because they are so intervowen, but after a short time you get into the setting and start getting the in-jokes. And clicking around in the cartoons (such as the seventy-odd Strong Bad Email) almost always makes something rewarding happen. It's obvious - to me - that the creators of the Homestar Runner site are having a LOT of fun with it; they keep adding silly stuff, and the number of different designs for the index page alone is mind-boggling. Anyway; starting points could be the Trogdor email, the character guide, the English Paper email or even the welcome speech for new viewers.


  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 23:08 0 comments

 
Today I got a new favourite. Not a favourite food, nor a favourite relative, not even a favourite colour. No, my favouritism is more advanced than this. I now have something I believe few people share: a favourite government agency.

And I'm ill. Again. I don't have time to be ill, I don't want to be ill, I'm aching everywhere, running an impressive temperature and am completely exhausted. I don't wanna!!

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 22:57 0 comments

 
At work, I live in the Enclave. The Enclave consists of seven offices grouped around a hallway; and it houses 13 doctoral students. We have lived here for about two weeks by now, but it feels as if we've never been anywhere else. The Enclave is protected by a door to the corridor outside; the door is only locked after 6pm but it still gives us a feeling of being a little secluded. And we have decided to celebrate each others' birthdays. Sara's was this Monday and Peter's yesterday. And today is the big house warming for the Enclave. We have invited the rest of the department to five o'clock - we'll see how many show up.

It's a nice group of people; we're not exactly in and out of each other's rooms all day long - we do work, too! - but it's definitely a community feel to it.

Oh, and I share a room with the Supreme Ruler of the Enclave, who has appointed me, for some obscure reason, High Priestess. Peter is the Minister of Finance because he's writing his dissertation on an alchemical treatise, so he can turn lead into gold... and Kicki of course is Minister of Refreshments and Joy, so she's taken charge of tonight's party. The rest of people at the department are partly sceptical, partly slightly jealous.

  posted by Linnéa Anglemark at 15:45 0 comments