I really can’t believe that the press doesn’t have more important issues to broadcast and write about. Both NRK, and Aftenposten, most commonly perceived as Norway’s ‘most serious’ (although one may wonder) television channel/newspaper respectively, had the royal family’s visit to church amongst their headlines. I have begun to realise that — even in Norway, most commonly thought of as quite secular — religion has an (inappropriately and undeserved) unprecedented hold over the population at large, but to have this as one of three main headlines on the afternoon news is a bit much, especially when war rages in the rest of the world — wars that have their origins in the same reason the royal family went to that church: religion.

As has the general curriculum of the Norwegian School. Read this; it is appaling. That this has gone unnoticed and without protests and consequences is simply awful; part of that child indoctrination of religion, and the — completely unfounded and ridiculous — notion that you cannot have morals if you are not religious, in this particular instance Christian. If this is so, how are most religious people able to go pick and choose among the preachings of the Bible, if their morals are installed in them by that same book!? How, indeed, if not because they have got their morals from some secular source, such as evolution.

‘Christian morals’ indeed!

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself;

You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues
-Richard Dawkins

My, it’s been long. I’ve found - as I always have, really, whenever in the past I’ve taken up keeping a journal or a blog – that long mental conversations with oneself eradicates much of the need for writing one’s thoughts and feelings. Or whatever. So, an update:

• If I were an American, I’d vote for Barack Obama (not a very big surprise)
• I hate Sarah Palin
• In fact I rather violently dislike fundamentalist religion
• I vehemently dislike – and scoff at – creationism and intelligent design, which means I believe in the fact of evolution
• I’m an atheist with a professed fondness and admiration for Professor Richard Dawkins (who’s far from arrogant, by the way)
• I really rather like the book The God Delusion
• I have NOTHING against most religious people, nor do I critisise them. I am not, however, overly fond of their beliefs
• Atheists most certainly do have morals
• If you’re wondering what I really think about Sarah Palin … I think she is a pro-life (and from me that’s an insult), anti-science, deluded, delusioned, irrational, creationist, eucaryot-cells-worth-more-than-living-life, terribly awful, moose-killing, rifle-fetished, fundamentalist Evangelical Christian arrogant arse. The same goes for many other people, like Ted Haggard, George W. Bush and others like them
• Evolution is not accidental
• “Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators” – Richard Dawkins
• I’ll be studying English literature next year
• There almost certainly is no God

And that, I believe, is it! =)

I couldn’t help but post this. It’s Ireland’s Eurovision Song Contest entry.

Oh, I come from a nation
What knows how to write a song
Oh Europe, where oh where did it all go wrong?
Come on!

Irlande douze points

Drag acts and bad acts and Terry Wogan’s wig
Mad acts and sad acts, it was Johnny Logan’s gig

Shake your feathers and bop your beak
Shake ‘em to the west and to the east
Wave euro hands and euro feet
Wiggle in the air to the turkey beat

Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points
Do the funky beat
Come on

D O B double B L E, yeah…

Hello Abba, hello Bono, hello Helsinki
Ola Prague, hello sailor, c’est la vie
Auf Wiedersehen, Mama Mia, and God save the Queen
Bonjour Serbia, good day Austria
You know what I mean

Shake your feathers and bop your beak
Shake ‘em to the west and to the east
Wave euro hands and euro feet
Wiggle in the air to the turkey beat

Shake your feathers and bop your beak
Shake ‘em to the west and to the east
Wave euro hands and euro feet
Wiggle in the air to the turkey beat

Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points

Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points
Do the funky beat
Come on

Give us another chance, we’re sorry for riverdance
Sure Flately, he’s a yank
And the Danube flows through France
Block vote, shock vote
Give your twelve today
You’re all invited to Dublin, Ireland
And we’ll party the Shamrock way

Irlande douze points – Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points – Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points – Irlande douze points
Irlande douze points – do the funky beat
Come on

Irlande douze points, Irlande douze points

Eastern Europe, we love you
Do you like Irish stew?
Or goulash as it is to you?
(Irlande douze points, Irlande douze points)

Listen Bulgaria, we love you
Belarus, Georgia, Montenegro
Moldovia, Albania, Croatia
Poland, Russia, Ukraine
Macedonia, love you Turkey
Hungary, Estonia, Slovakia
Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegova
And don’t forget the Swiss

There’s a fire in the city of Oslo, right now, but it’s not on the news yet, nor on the Internet. Which, of course, leads me to wonder what it can be.

I was going to post something quite different, but thought better of it; not yet. As for now, I haven’t really got anything else to add. No overly philosophic ramblings today, I think…

Or maybe that was naïve of me. After all, I’ve always got something to express my prolixity about. I just hope it isn’t too soporific.

Perhaps not. Another day, when I’m not continually veering off on caprices.

I recently had to jot down my five most important factors for achieving success for an English assignment (I still don’t know why we’re doing it). In any case, here are mine (in no particular order):

I.   Determination, 1.0L

II.  Ambition, 1.0L

III. Social network, 5.0dL

IV. Cunning, 2.0dL

V.  Education, 3.0dL

“The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.” – Robert Frost

“On a lazy Saturday morning when you’re lying in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, there is a space where fantasy and reality become one. Are you awake, or are you dreaming? You see people and things; some are familiar; some are strange. You talk, you feel, but you move without walking; you fly without wings. Your mind and your body exist, but on separate planes. Time stands still. For me, this is the feeling I have when ideas come.” - Lynn Johnston

“When late morning rolls around and you’re feeling a bit out of sorts, don’t worry; you’re probably just a little eleven o’clockish.” - Pooh’s Little Instruction Book 

I felt like posting this under a different heading…

First, men and irony:

• Is it just me, or are many men incapable of understanding a woman’s sense of irony?
• Or knowing when she is using it, for that matter?

Maybe it’s just me. I did, after all, almost convince one of my (very talented) entraineurs de biathlon that I was a spy sent from a “rivalling” club to gather vital information on “how to produce Norwegian Champions”, and all because I didn’t laugh when I told the tale. But I really didn’t think that laughing was a requirement for joking.

There are, of course, many exceptions here, which explains why this part of the post is more my uttering some pent-up frustration (not of the sexual kind), more a conjecture-jest than any serious hypothesis.

Irony and men:

Men I like for their looks (and, I suppose, their personality), include Christian Coulson (at least at most times), Toby Stephens (when dark-haired; not much into gingers), and a younger Jason Isaacs (preferably with long hair). They look like this: (Notice Jason Isaacs’s dashing baddie Luscious Lucius hairstyle; picture of Mr Coulson is a bit disproportionate.)

Apart from dear Lucius – who is obviously blond – all of the above are dark-haired. Jason Isaacs (who portrays Lucius, for those dimwits who either didn’t know or didn’t guess), too, is dark-haired. So we’ve evidently got a tendency towards fancying dark-haired, tall (I know neither of them are very tall in reality, but they look tall on-screen), lean, blue/grey-eyed men. Why, then, is this predisposition not more prominent in “real life”? It’s almost ironic, isn’t it? That on the one hand I’m so persistent, but on the other… Ironic.

Au revoir.