I caught a mouse (in the house) the other day. I saw where it was headed, and placed an empty water jug on its side in the mouse’s path and stood perfectly still. The mouse encountered the jug, sniffed at it and climbed into the hole and so I scooped up the jug. It was a baby mouse. One of the residents got to keep it as a pet. We don’t have the hanta virus here. I don’t think we do, anyway.
Author: Nic Page 12 of 13
Can’t breathe… need… more… idols.
Oh hello, I just happened by here. This blog was mostly an experiment, as stated from the beginning. Hence no “Sorry, I haven’t posted lately” excuses from me. Nonetheless, one of these days I will decide what to do with this thing. I’m considering turning it into a more specific type of blog, or deleting it altogether. We’ll see. Either way, whatever my decision will be hopefully I’ll stick by it. :)
On a musical note, I’ve been playing piano every day for twenty days now and it sure feels great, bubba. Also, in six days time I’m to hand in this huge orchestral arrangement (biggest on in four counties) only containing music by your truly. This is by far the biggest arrangement I’ve done so far and at the moment it’s a mix of serene melodies mated with some psychotic medieval flute and percussion madness. Perhaps I’ll post it here if I deem it worthy. All right… back to work.
At this very moment I am working on, or supposed to be working on, at any rate, a jazzy horn and woodwind version of Crazy by Willie Nelson. A situation I would not have seen coming a few years ago. Hooray for life.
Haven’t been in here for quite a long time. A lot has changed. I’m living on the Faroe Islands now. Yes sir.
Anyway, just wanted to say hi. Not sure I’ll continue blogging as it was an experiment. But who can tell. Someday I might feel the urge.
Hmm, September 14. This day has meaning to about half the Faroese population.
IT STARTS with a painful blister – a very painful blister. It feels, people say, like being stabbed with a red-hot needle. When the blister bursts, the head of a worm pops out, thin, white and very much alive.
The rest of the worm, about a metre long, remains inside your body. It can take up to two months to pull it out, inch by agonising inch, during which time it may be impossible to walk. In extreme cases, you may host up to sixty of them, anywhere on your body. The worms can cause paralysis or lethal bacterial infections, and even if you survive mostly unscathed, next year it can happen all over again.
Good lord.
Other than that… well not much has been happening. Too busy for blogging, that’s for sure. That won’t change until I go part time or get another job with less travel time. And then I might actually decide to take this blog more seriously. But not at the moment, I’m afraid.
See you in a month or so…
Neil Gaiman recently wrote the following on his blog:
I went to Alabama, to Tuscaloosa.
Before I left, I was interviewed by Tuscaloosa newspapers. “What do you expect of Alabama?” they asked “What do you know of Alabama?” I was a bit puzzled by that. It’s the kind of question you usually get asked by small, nervous countries who don’t get many visitors. (“Have you heard anything about Ruritania?” they ask, and you tell them that you’ve heard that the strudel in Strelsau is excellent and you’re glad that Jews can now own land there again, and everyone’s happy.) It’s not something I’d expected to be asked coming to a state. But then, I’d visited (if not actually signed books in) 47 states and I’d not yet been to Alabama, so they sort of had a point. I told them no, I had no expectations.
The same thing usually happens on the Faroe Islands. Every tourist or visiting artist is subjected to the same line of questioning. What did you know about the Faroes before coming here? Are the Faroes known in your country? How do you like our local food and beer? And if the tourist is male: What do you think of Faroese girls? It doesn’t just happen in pubs, on the street or at concerts, but invariably in radio and television interviews.
Thus, we are one of the “small, nervous countries”. Now, I love the Faroes and it’s people but it is odd that that so many of us come preprogrammed with the same set of engagement rules as soon as we meet a foreigner steps ashore. There is an undercurrent of low self-esteem. Hmm, can a country have low self-esteem? Yes, yes it can.
Of course, not every Faroese person behaves this way, but any visitor is bound to run into a few of these mindless faroese automatons during his stay.
All righty then, I’ll be off again. Incidentally, have you ever heard anything about the Faroe Islands?
It would appear that renowned Faroese blogger and country music aficionado, Birgir Kruse, has turned one of our Reverends songs into an essay assignment for high school students. The song is all about drinking and debauchery and thus a fitting warning to high school students on how not to behave. We, The Reverends, are very proud of it and think it will suppress any anti-social tendencies.
I’ve been playing Starflight lately on an awesome piece of software called WinUAE. It’s an Amiga emulator and it works flawlessly.
So if you used to play Amiga games in the before time and regularly feel those waves of nostalgia crashing down on the present moment, why not satisfy your volatile mind with a bit of retro-gaming? Hey!
Hmm, I don’t have enough time to write anything sensible about this topic, so I shall return to it at a later date. I will leave you with a screen dump of Starflight, which I used to play endlessly about 20 years ago. I used to find that statement with “many dirty joke” enormously funny when I was a teenager. Still do, I’m afraid.
See you later, me hearties.
Found these amazing images of the Martian surface taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Apart from that, I’ve been ill for the entire weekend, so I haven’t really been up to much of anything. The majority of my time has been spent on the couch reading, surfing and playing poker. Right now I’m reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’m such a slave to popular culture (actually, I’ve always been quite anti-pop which is just as bad).
Hmm, I have to head to bed now. Gotta get up stinking early for a crazy Monday. Yup… Oh, the apartment has been shown again today. The real estate agent is hopeful. Me too.
Goodnight.