Nordic Wake Party Lingo

Learning Words of Sorrow and Solace 

At college, I was friends with an oddball ‘beer addicted’ trio who were crazy about everything and anything Nordic - Norway especially. They frequently spoke Norwegian, loved Norwegian movies, Norwegian bands and even Norwegian beer - Ringnes!! In fact, during the summer, they went on a 30 day backpacking trip across the Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden. 

Their rented house was also called the Norse House. They claimed, it was "devoted" to the culture and lifestyle of the Nordic countries. When someone sent them an email that King Harald V of Norway died, they wanted to hold a wake party. They were too sloshed to even realize that it was a joke!! (By the way, Harald V still lives).

The joke notwithstanding, the Wake party was too good an idea so they wanted to do it anyway! It was decided that the people attending the party should express their grief and console other mourners in Norwegian. However, very few people at the party (in fact, none) would be able to speak Norwegian. neither do I. 

Crazy as it sound, I was hooked though. So, I went home, I went home, locked myself in my room, switched the net and emerged 3 hours hour later with the Norwegian Terms of Sorrow and Solace – a sample of which you see below that came quite handy at the Wake party!! 

Words for Sorrow and Grief 

Jeg er bedrøvet. 

I am sad. 

Jeg stal har dø. 

I should have died. 

Vi gikk å se "Min Liv Som Et Hund." 

Let's go see "My Life as a Dog." 

Mit bekken banket. 

My pelvis is throbbing. 

Min magesekk har stukket mod en Skjødpersons spyd. 

My stomach has been stabbed with a Laplander's spear. 

Words for Solace and Consolation

Jeg smører min sko. 

I am greasing my shoes. 

NÂ det omveltnig begînte! 

Now the revolution begins! 

Det Svenske som suge mose gjøret det!

The scum-sucking Swedes did it! 

Ham var et adelig mann. Ham manget å tilføyelse Island. 

He was a noble man. He wanted to annex Iceland. 

Du er aller tiltrekkende. Behage trøst meg. 

You are very attractive. Please comfort me. 

Learn them by heart, and you will never again feel at a loss when you are at a crazy Norwegian wake party, or in Norway or need to express your sadness or comfort an other Norwegian.

Big is Beautiful or Is It ?

NOT what YOU Think !!

Bad Girls (1981) - Ron Jeremy & the Babes !!

Vintage Soft Core Bad Babes Romp in the Woods !

4 hot-looking, centerfold models including Penthouse Pet of those days Michelle Bauer go on a rafting holiday in a woodsy paradise, where they spend a lot of time sunbathing, taking nude pictures of one another and experimenting with (you guessed it right) - lesbian sex. They are so busy with themselves, they appear to have forgotten to bring their raft. 

One of them, I think her name was Bo, happens across the outrageously virile Thomas (John Leslie) chopping wood and they do an impromptu nasty in the forest. All this time the big boy of porndom – a young Ron Jeremy, wearing a hilarious Boy Scout uniform peers voyeurously at the four (silicon free) hot bodes unawares. 

Later, they discover that an old gothic dungeon stands nearby and go to take pictures of it. Unluckily for them the dungeon is apparently still in operation, run by a man aptly named "Judge" with a secret cult of well-endowed studs and insatiable voracious nymphs. The "bad girls" are held guilty for trespassing, taken prisoner and indoctrinated into a polite sort of sexual S & M servitude. 

Ron Jeremy, it turns out, is a member of the same cult – he then has his way with one of the women before she has been "conditioned," and for this carnal offense he is put into exile. He gets his vengeance, though. He sneaks some aphrodisiac incense into the dungeon which has the effect of compelling everyone to have sex continuously - as opposed to before, when everyone was constantly having sex. 

After a very long, moist and slobbery orgy (that would put Osho to shame) everyone falls asleep and Ron steals into the dungeon, wakes the "bad girls" and helps them escape. In the end Ron, a bearded stud and the four nude women row off into the sunset in their raft - actually they didn’t forget it after all. 

You know, I really shouldn’t watch these things but this was on the Hotel VOD. With a free credit in my tab, I was curious (ok, I’ll admit) tempted to watch it though it’s almost 21 years vintage!! Apparently, when this movie was released in 1981, it was considered too adult in a few states across the US and went chop, chop, chop before the populace could savor the action! 

As a subject matter though, it’s hard enough to cultivate healthy attitudes about sex and intimacy and the significance of conciliation and communication in the context of a caring loving relationship, without distracting myself with immature amorous visions of a titillating pubescent fantasy. 

What’s more, many people I know find these films (whether softcore or hardcore) to be intensely offensive. There. That’s the hypocrisy. Sex wouldn't sell so well if it was indeed so bad, would it? 

Anyway, taking that out of the way – just think? Why can’t real life be more like this movie ? Who cares about intimacy and communication, dating and nuptials when we could all agree to live in a world liberally peppered with nubile, bikini-clad nymphomaniacs single-mindedly driven in the pursuit of relentless carnal pleasure? Tempting isn’t it?? Okay, never mind. We’ll save this discussion for an other day!!

Nunsllusion!!!

Earthquake Scares !!

Surviving A Quake!!

Well, this post is quite late!! I was supposed to get this turned in on time along with 3 reviews for a magazine last month, honest, but then we had this little, creepy earthquake off the coast in Indonesia and then the subsequent Tsunami scares (especially about Japan) on the net and TV, countless twitter warnings, radio announcements,…maybe you read about it...

I was stuck in my beach front hotel room – momentarily feeling dizzy when it happened!! Seconds later, the alarms and car horns go wild, the phones start ringing, the road below is an explosion of worried people and I have this crazy neighbor – a harried American expat in my adjoining room banging my door – wanting to know if it indeed was a Bin Laden quake in action !! Apparently someone had tweeted him this!!

Anyway, apart from the typical “world spinning around you” feeling and “things falling down all over” picture, I was very lucky in that none of my stuff was damaged nor did I get hurt but it did knock me off my stride for not just that day but for about a full week. It was the first time I had felt an earthquake in full glory!! C’mon, a 6.9 on the Richter scale followed by constant tremors & aftershocks (both terrifying) puts a lot of things into a new perspective - more so especially when you are on the 38^rd floor with no electricity, alone, confused and they also switch off the lifts for I am told precautionary reasons (probably, they don't want you to run away without paying the bills! )

Well, it hasn’t changed my mind about travelling to quake prone countries or staying in beach front high rise hotels or on very high floors (a personal choice), but it did make me think some more about the role the Internet and the Media plays in my life, and how I, (and all of us) use it to help make sense of ourselves and our lives..in our own different ways. The incessant chatter on the net and on the Telly immediately after the quake was an insightful episode but that's the sort of reflective essay that's better suited for an other time or another blog...for now, let's say that it was pretty ‘nightmare of the elm street’ like scary and I am happy to be alive to tell you this story!! 

Driving Across Oblivion !

Driving Solo on the Surreal Highway to Nowhere

I am on the highway to nowhere on a lousy rental car but thank god, at least its big, the AC works and it doesn’t stutter. And the CD deck is belting out Thom Yorke’s 'Clocks' with pristine clarity!! Or maybe I am hearing it inside my head!! 

The road is wide and seemingly nice but I can’t find any car or truck for company, I probably should have covered more than 250 miles! That has been my feeling for the whole 3 hours I have driven through it. It is not a place you want to break down after dark. 

Small derelict houses and burnt trucks tucked in by the side of the road. The scenery seems like a scrawny sick patient that sticks up into the mountains and it's nothing but crumbling, old coal mines. Most of them are practically ghost relics and there's nothing in between them but this empty highway, twisting through the hills with only enough light to keep you on the road. Sinister and weirdly disheartening. 

And the hills do look like a brown green wall from a distance, covered in some sort of pine or eucalyptus so dark-needled that it looks like the folds of land are sheathed in a dark gloomy mantle, it's an uninhabited plateau all around. But that's not all. 

I have been driving across this sort of strange, empty plateau until I came closer to the brown wall. If you drive from the East you will cross the weird, alkalai, patchwork desert terrain first, it looks endless and awful and then there's this strange, dark line on the Western horizon, miles after you've left the last gas station. It grows and grows into this massive wall that stretches across the entire horizon. It looks like a curtain of brown impassable stone. I can see nothing ahead. Just this doom and gloom wall and me. If you were lost here, you would probably fall down and cry, sure that you would die here. 

It’s really leaving an impression on me. I didn't have any idea there were place like this in real life, just in movies. Driving solo and long distance in a foreign country can be a surreal experience..this seems exactly like the one!! Like the truck accident I saw in the morning. Something really bizarre about watching the rising trail of burning oil and molten metal from the middle of the endless hills and a long, winding road.... It really did seem like a movie. 

Considering the amount of sleep I got last night, is this a dream....I am really astonished at how extraordinary outback country is. I never thought I'd say this, but I think driving across tany cavernous highway is a dreamlike trip all of you should take sometime. Ok..let me get back on the road..again!! The Journey is not yet over!!!

Draize Test for Homo Sapiens!

If this is scary, imagine the poor plight of lab animals who still routinely suffer across cosmetic and pharma labs around the world!

Destination Moonbase Alpha (1978)

Cheesy Lunar Thrills from the 70s ! 

Destination Moonbase - Alpha was the pilot for Space: 1999 and a Gerry Anderson (Thunderbirds) production - perhaps the cheesiest sci-fi TV series that ever was. And I watched them all last week on a DVD induced trip to 70s-80s Sci-fi nostalgia. 

Anyway, we all know the premise, right? A celestial catastrophe knocks the moon out of orbit and Moonbase Alpha’s 311 crew are cast drifting in the "dark galaxy of the universe" for four or five seasons. The first episode already dangles a frustrated hope of salvage for the rundown moondwellers - a spacecraft called a "swift" filled with the crew’s friends, family and lovers visits the base, and the castaways are told that a contingent of rescue spacecraft is on the way to fly them back to Earth at speeds exceeding that of light. But everything is not as rose-colored as it seems. 

Commander Koenig (a miscast Martin Landau), having received a "brain scan" to get him back up and running after he went a little silly earlier, sees not friends and family but hideous latex monsters when he sets eyes on the visitors from the "swift." Try as he might to convince Helena (Barbara Bain) and the other Alpha crew members that the visitors are invading aliens and not saviors from Earth, he can’t get anyone to believe him. Finally he manages to talk his shapeshifter friend Maya into undergoing the "brain scan," which gets her seeing the monsters, too. She assumes the form of one and tries to infiltrate them - fruitlessly, it turns out, but she does learn that they are a species who feed on radiation. 

In the interest of rustling up some fare the aliens have fiddled with the Alpha crews’ minds to scam them into setting off a nuclear explosion. Commander Koenig quashes the aliens with a few well-selected fistfights and in the end the moon is free to zigzag through space unmolested. 

My view of the 70s has changed fundamentally since I revisited Space: 1999. Its forecast of the future are astoundingly clunky and primordial: the moonbase ís state-of-the-art medical wing looks like a silly Jiffy Lube, peppered with oscilloscopes and blinky, buttony science fair school projects, and the bases intercom is a black-and-white, closed-circuit video network much like the anti-shoplifting surveillance systems you still find in small liquor stores and pawnshops. They do have something that looks a bit like 3 1/4-inch floppy disks - which puts them above Rollerball (one cheesier classic of those days) in terms of accurateness, the latter film prognosticating reams of punch cards for the 21st century. 

Outside of this, though, Destination Moonbase - Alpha provides more hysterical than prophetic insight for the viewer in the late 90s or the current 2000s. The show’s closing point - that real life, no matter how mind-numbing, is preferable to fantasy, no matter how heavenly - is particularly old-world. 

In an era of creative revelation, it must have seemed natural to imagine that a future utopia would give supreme value to objective reality. Little did those TV writers of the 70s know that these out of date notions, far from enjoying a comeback, would be further damaged in the succeeding thirty years by social construction, deconstruction, and assorted other theories holding everyday reality to be just as fragile as the nice dreams the aliens offer the Alpha crew. But then again, it is easy enough for me to say this - retrospection, after all, is twenty-twenty. 

Besides, Destination Moonbase-Alpha’s opening Star Wars like homage actually sets the film in the year 2100 , so maybe there is still a little time for impartiality to come back into favor and vindicate Space: 1999’s currently out-of-vogue traditionalist loyalties. Gentlemen (and ladies): place your bets now! 

Free Streaming/Movie Download - Video Link: VeeHD

Fighting Internet Paralysis

Getting Back Online!

All right, so, erm, here I am, back again. This feels exceeding weird after such a long absence and I'm not quite sure I remember all the things to do...

I had a lot of travel to do – mostly work, very little leisure besides a very complex functional portal re-design for a client that was all ready to go up, but as usual, I'm not as satisfied with it as I was nearly three months ago. And I need to bring all the other things at office into line.... Sheesh, so much to do. 

With almost all my Music uploads now dead and all the SOPA talk, I was also planning on moving the blog to Tumblr or on my own company server (as a pal strongly recommended), but I'm not sure about that at the moment, either. I wasn't even sure it was a good idea to throw myself back into the internet, considering some of the recent problems which have come out of it, seductive, nasty thing that it can be. Don’t ask me what?

And I would have been here a lot sooner if not for the problems with my internet provider - perpetual buffering, intermittent connectivity and long periods of complete internet paralysis! Those lovely and stupid folks. It took them a long 20 days to get my 2 MBPS net line working after their so called upgrade, which could not be scheduled until yesterday (because of some more bull shit antivirus upgrade and all that). 

It seems to me that it's simply not that complex a thing to attach a waveform meter to a live line and see what it says is non-functional. I mean, seriously, I'm no hardcore tech and I could do it if someone gave me the meter!  

So, after maybe some 30 increasingly irate phone calls and maybe 3 lawsuit inspiring emails, and two specific angry phone calls to their local head, much threatening and subdued yowling, someone finally sent a freakin' web technician out here this morning and tested my freakin' internet line. "Ah, bad filter. I have one. No problem." Arrrgghh! I now join the ranks of those who loudly proclaim: my net provider sucks! So much for all the 21st century modern technology talk…

Dirty Minds!

If You've Got One, You'll See It!!!