Thursday, October 26, 2006

Tesco Bab(i)es

A friend pointed it out to me that Tesco's have developed and marketed a line of educational toys for women to be (say the ages of 3-9). The flagship of their products is the Peekaboo pole Dancing Kit. The box says: "Unleash the sex kitten inside...simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!" and "Soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars".

Now isn't this special? The toddlers not only learn how to dance in a sexy way but also how to use their undeveloped sexuality to earn a little dosh. Why didn't they have this when I was a kid? I used to play with boring stuff like super annoying dolls that peed and cried (no wonder I don't have any kids) and miniture ironing boards (no wonder I only shop wrinkle-free clothes).

The stuff I enjoyed the most were my Playmobil knights and Lego's although I quite often played with Barbie dolls (that was mostly about dressing the blonde bombshells in ridiculous outfits that I designed from mum's strange looking fabrics from the time she actually did some knitting). Bloody hell, my parents should have caught on at that stage and realized that I would never become Betty Homemaker.

Who knows what could have happened had there been a Tesco store in Iceland when I was a kid; you know a store with educational stuff for little women. I might have become an exotic dancer with loads of money in my knickers (or do they come off as well when strippers erm strip?).

Yeah, the ever so friendly folks at Tesco's sure want to help little girls get over silly ideas of becoming academics and such. Academics aren't the right material for swinging their bums round and round while spinning less than dressed on a pole. I mean, in which hand would one hold Foucault and how can one read him while going in circles up and down...

I'm feeling dizzy already.

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Icelanders...Probably the dumbest nation in the world

I am pretty sure that my nation is the dumbest nation in the world. It is a sad fact, I mean we have every means to be great, but we just aren’t. Looking out my window I see majestic mountains and a clear and beautiful sky above a still mirror like ocean.
Our nature is unique and one would have thought that this greedy nation would see the dollar signs in unspoilt nature, but noooooo, we have the need to destroy and then destroy some more.

Recently we sank the largest wilderness in Europe to make electricity for Alcoa. Come on, these guys need energy for their aluminium factory in East Iceland, you know to smelt bauxite and make aluminium for tanks and weapons to kill more Iraqi civilians. The bonus feature of this destruction of nature (which our former minister for the environment said “It doesn’t look that special to me”) is pollution from the factory that equals all the pollution from every single car in the country. Ain’t it cool?

The latest venture in Icelandic stupidity is whaling. Yes, starting at midnight last night commercial whaling started again. The whaling boats are at sea now, waiting for a chance to harpoon these magnificent creatures, drag them ashore, gut them, vacuum pack and ship to Japan. Good luck with finding a market for the meat, according to what I’ve heard the Japanese are having difficulty selling their own products, but what the hell, it’s our god given right to kill and sell or worst case scenario give away or throw away the dead whales!

I am pretty sure the whalers will start with the “tourist whales”. Those are the curious and human friendly finback and minke whales that swim around the whalewatching boats. The whalers will chuckle and say: “No whalewatching this time sucka, it’s harpooning time”.

According to the pro-whaling people, it’s puzzling that the Icelanders have survived the last two decades without every household fridge carrying loads of whale meat. Yes, we sure have missed the fatty meat that we have to soak in milk before cooking to prevent foul smells that just seem to cling to every item of clothing and furniture for days after a whale meat feast! In addition only 1,1 percent of the nation actually eats whale meat, hmm, yup we sure have missed it…

Pro-whalers even say that whaling is an Icelandic aboriginal hunting tradition and that we should get the same treatment as the Inuit of Greenland who hunt seal for home consumption. So what if whaling only creates a handful of jobs and we then try to force the meat on the Japanese! It’s totally the same thing man! Plus, whaling by Icelanders started in 1948, everyone can see that it’s absolutely an aboriginal right to continue commercial whaling!

I suppose I am just as stupid to expect something greater of my fellow countrymen, after all we didn’t invent the wheel until the nineteenth century…

So, what can be done about this travesty? Well, some of the UK chains have said that they will seize selling Icelandic products if Icelanders start commercial whaling again. Why not put that to the test? I know e.g. that Tesco sells Icelandic fish. I am sure chains in the US have the same policy, Let them know that you will not shop at these stores until they cut out Icelandic products. To read more about this matter go to the BBC UK website http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6059564.stm

The Icelandic nation has an inferiority complex and that breaks out in phrases like “Those foreigners in the big countries can’t tell us what to do. We will treat our natural resources as we see fit and screw the rest of the world where the clever people live!”
So what if we have the world’s strongest man (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1994-1996) and the world’s prettiest women (1985, 1988, 2005), all of this is nothing compared to being undefeated long running world champions in immense stupidity. Now there’s a title for ya Iceland!

Monday, October 16, 2006

Art-land


This wonderful peace of art by my favourite Icelandic artist Jón Stefánsson is now on the wall in my office. I meant to put something else up there but my purse said no. You see, eons and eons ago when I was a little girl growing up in Cambridge, my mum (then a bored professor's wife)had a strange little hobby. She went to cemeteries with some American professors' wives and put black and golden paper on the graves of some long dead knights and bishops. The result was eerily fascinating pictures of these tombstones, knights in full armour and ladies in medieval dresses. Yes, mums get up to strange the things when the housework seizes to be fulfilling.
Some years back I persuaded mum to hand over her ever so morbid artwork. I planned to have the pictures framed and then put on the walls of my house. When the push came to shove, I couldn't do it, I mean seriously who wants to have their walls covered in Cambridgean tombstones?
Then last week the unthinkable happened, I cleaned and rearranged my office. All of a sudden, while sitting in an Ajax smelling, shiny and just wonderful office, I noticed that something was missing...decorations. I instantly thought of my dead knights and Eureka! Although they seem morbid in a home, they would be perfect in an historian's office. Who knows, I might even become inspired to do great things on the playing field of historical research...you never know.
So off I went to the new IKEA to look for frames, but of course the Swedes only had standardized social-democratically approved frames. Never trust the Swedes!
A friend of mine then saved the day like a knightess on a shiny horse and bought me the above picture for a whopping 1000 krónur which equals around 8 quid. So, it's not an original, but it's lovely and the frame is a beauty from the 50s.
I am sure this picture made somebody happy about 50 years ago until somebody gave it to the Red Cross market from whence it came to me. I know it will make me happy and possibly inspire me too...
So enough of blogging for one day, work awaits in an upliftingly homely office!(meaning staring at the picture while eating peppercakes=ginger cookies and thinking about working...a lot)

Friday, October 13, 2006

Peace-land

A certain Mr. Gorbachev is visiting my rock this week. This is the man responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union and for that I will never forgive him. The reason is quite simple; After the fall of the iron curtain the former USSR became way too many states and all of them desperately wanted to become western capitalist bastards like the rest of us. That alone is ok, although I despise the capitalization of the world, greed is disgusting!
Anyway, these Farawayistans all want to join the EU- again fine by me, but they have also joined the Eurovision Song Contest. Now this is really bad! This means that strange songs ruled by ethnic drums (gag) are year after year kicking butt in the Grand Prix, not cool at all. God, give us back the good old days when Swedes ruled Europe through Abba and the Herrey brothers. Where's Nicole with her anti Cold War hymn "Ein bisschen Frieden" and Bucks Fizz with their fancy matching outfits? What is the world coming to?
Yes, I blame Gorbi for all of this. He came here 20 years ago with his bottle of Stoli and ambitions toward peace and wooed the veteran cowboy Ronbo with promises of "All kinds of everything". Ronbo said "Get rid of all our nukes? No deal you baby-eating commie" (well he didn't really remember a word Gorbi said, you know the Alzheimer thing), but Gorbi still wanted peace. The Reykjavik summit of 1986 in the long run ruined Eurovision and Gorbi brought peace, which only led to the US having to find a new Evil Empire to fight. This they found in the Middle East--where the enemy didn't have the Bomb, but a lot of oil instead, yippee said the oil companies "these new kind of commies are definately evil and they also dress funny--war it is".
Gorbi ruined more things, he even ruined my dad's christmas the following year, how mean is that? I had always bought my dad a handkerchief and socks for christmas, but as a fresh-faced 12 year old under the influence of the new face of communism I decided to use my allowance to buy my dad, who I thought was a real socialist, the book Perestroika-A new dawn. Needless to say, my dad thought the book was boooooring and didn't come clean until years later when I asked him how he had liked the book. He replied "I wish you would have given me some socks and a handkerchief".
The whole idea of peace back in the Eighties was as odd as pizza with peperoni and bananas and I grew up fearing the Bomb. I remember having the same dream over and over again, where I was in the livingroom with my gran and when I looked out the window, the mushroom cloud could be seen on the horizon. Movies like "The Day After" (a nuclear war) were the topic in my elementary school. Yup those were scary days, but funnily enough in my immediate family we always thought it would be the Yanks who would drop the first bomb. They just seemed a wee bit looney to us, especially judging from the American TV programs shown on the only TV channel in the country. Gosh, if all Yanks were like that JR Ewing person, we sure were in trouble and then there was that wacky president from "Bedtime for Bonzo". A lethal combo brought to you by the USA!
Well now the Cold War's over, Ronbo's gone the way of the Dodo and so is my gran and my dad. I don't have reaccurring dreams about the Bomb anymore, no sir, now it's all about that nice bus driver who suddenly turns out to be a suicide bomber...
Gorbi baby, you got a lot to answer for...

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Multi-land

This rock keeps surprising me. This morning the bus took me to Germany... You see the stanzar sign now said Wagen Hält. Even the busdriver looked German. After a while I noticed that the poor man didn't speak a word of Icelandic but a whole lot of Polish. This became clear when somebody asked him to stop and the Wagen Hält button didn't work. He just shook his head, mumbled something in a Slavic language and kept on driving.
Actually, it seems everybody on the bus was speaking either Thai, Vietnamese or Polish. I must admit that made me feel sad, because I don't know any of these languages, so I guess the aspect of pulling somebody on the bus is out of the question...unless- yes-it will be in the unspoken language of luv. I am thinking about pitching this idea to the bus company; to hell with ads about the earth friendly bus- now it's a logo like: "I met my husband on the bus", "The socialites take the bus" or simply "Das Bus ist uber kool".
Who cares whether the bus driver stops or not, it's healthier to walk a wee bit anyway!
Btw. I wrote a little article on climate changes and fun things on a web journal if anyone's interested in doomesday predictions muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ('tis in Icelandic) http://hugsandi.is/article/106/loftslag-breytinganna
Back to work for me now

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