Ceci n'est pas un blog

I assume you all know by now that Molly Ivins finally passed.

She was a reason for hope that Texas could be so much more than the good old boys who have been in charge of late.

To their credit, Bush and Perry made gracious statements.

''Molly Ivins was a Texas original,'' Bush said in a statement. ''I respected her convictions, her passionate belief in the power of words, and her ability to turn a phrase. She fought her illness with that same passion.''

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whom Ivins had playfully called ''Governor Goodhair,'' praised Ivins for her wit and insight. ''Molly Ivins' clever and colorful perspectives on people and politics gained her national acclaim and admiration that crossed party lines,'' Perry said in a statement.

I don't know who will take on the role of successfully goading the right and pointing out their follies in the nicest and sharpest barbs imaginable. I went looking for a good quote, and there's too many to choose from. Her last column was a call for Americans to not sit idle but to take action every day, to show our outrage with this administration, to make "the ridiculous look ridiculous."

Sounds like good advice at this time of Extraordinary Rendition being called to court in Germany, Gonzalez finally revealing something (anything) about NSA wiretapping, Gitmo detainees finally getting some sort of hearing and potentially being able to challenge the nature of those hearings. And with the '08 race under way, I think we have an opportunity.

I don't know who I will support yet. I hope it's a good debate and that we get a lot of opinions and that we actually get to hear them all.

And I know we'll miss Ivins sniping intelligently and provacatively from her home in south Austin.

On S's birthday we received an offer on our house back in Texas. It wasn't spectacular but even the tiniest profit and getting rid of the mortgage payment we are making on top of our not insignificant Oslo rent would be good.

But the buyers got cold feet when their inspector gave them a frightening and not particularly accurate report. Despite our attempts to put them at ease, they have backed out. So now we re-list and wait some more and scrimp in the mean time.

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H just curled up with me and said, "you have to click the 'H'" so now I have.

This one is from her: H

"I like H, it is my favorite. It is your favorite, too."

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The dogs are loving the smattering of snow we have had; they bite it and roll in it and leap about. It's still warm by Oslo standards but it's good to finally have things at least looking a bit like Winter. Branches are frosted and puppy paw prints are scattered across yesterday's snow like pepper on an empty plate.

Now I have to go because we are making pretend Macaroni and cheese with bread and ketchup followed by cake with strawberry icing with a cherry on top. The pretend tea is a bit too hot but othewise just perfect on a cold and cozy morning. Tea parties are ever so important!

It's been a while since my last update. Having the family here means I don't linger at work to play online as much as I did and, well, we've been busy catching up, playing, exploring, and shopping.

The first few days we sat on the floor and ate picnic style. Even when our unbelievably kind and generous neighbor passed along an old drop leaf table, we only had the one chair I'd been using. As you can see, we now have a big comfy Ikea sofa that came in many small pieces and which we assembled late one night. Ikea is equal parts perfection and frustration. It takes a long time to get to the free bus and to time everything so you get back at a reasonable time (they are a good 25 minutes outside the city). The items range from cheap pressboard to quite expensive and sturdy. And they are specifically designed for you to linger and meander, which can be difficult the first time you are there and all you want is a plate and a pillow.

We also went down to see the Picasso exhibit at the National Gallery where S also got to see some very nice Munchs. The Picasso show was small but tightly focussed on his later drawings, mostly simple single-subject ink line drawings but also a few with classically arranged groups, usually including a minotaur. Our little miss H didn't really respond to these was but very curious about all sculpture (ranging from classical Greek to Degas to Henry Moore). She seemed to think that photos aren't art and wanted to get back to the paintings.

H is a good walker and we have pretty much carried her or let her walk since day one but we come from Texas Car Culture (tm) where distances are measured from the parkinglot or driveway. After carrying her sleeping dead-weight or exhausted fussiness, we finally got her a stroller. It has really saved us on some of our longer walks but is very difficult to manage on the tram/busses and encourages her to be a little less engaged with what's going on around her; she can pull her scarf up to her eyes and her hood down and zone. But on the whole, it's been well worth it and really freed us up to be able to shop and get around without worrying about her little legs or having to carry her + groceries up our flights and flights and flights of stairs.

Oslo is warm and bright. It is above freezing for the first time in about a week, maybe 5C. We are past the longest night of the year and the daylight should be getting longer by several minutes a day until 6 months from now when we will be spray painting our windows black in the hopes of getting any sleep. One of the really nice things about the short days we've been having is that I have seen so many sunrises. I had always preferred sunset to sunrise but lately the dogs and I have been able to stand on the frost covered hill and watch the sky turn from dark navy blues to deep pinks to yellow highlighted clouds against pale blue sky, the fjord beneath us turning from slate to shining mirror. It's strange to me that with just the humidity and fog we accumulate well over a quarter inch of frost on the ground and cars. With no rain or snow, the park is flocked in white and windows must be scraped. Tosca loves to run on the frozen leaves, the crunching under foot. The colder the day, the more excited the dogs are to be outside.

Did I mention that our neighbor is amazing? She is a professional Bohemian making her living from decoupage, sewn paper art, and renting booth space to other vendors at the weekly market in Blå, a local jazz club. She has loaned us not just the table but a kilim rug, two stools, a small bookshelf. She has allowed the dogs into her flat, which her 13 year old daughter loves, and been friendly and helpful. As S put it, she seems to be single handedly trying to tear down the stereotype of cold introverted Norwegians who are difficult to get to know.

The holidays are upon us. While we are glad to be together and looking forward to our first Oslo Christmas, our 5th anniversary, and S's birthday, we are really going to miss our family and friends and our traditions with them. With everything move realted so pushed back and the house not having sold yet, I will be missing not just any vacation to see relatives but my sister's long awaited wedding. I have known her fiancee since he was a little boy and our families have long been fast friends and intertwined. The happy couple have been together a long time, built a house together, worked together, travelled, moved to Hawaii and back. So this event is more of a public acknowledgement and celebration than the transition it can be for so many people. But that doesn't make it any less important. We will climb the hill, watch the fireworks erupt all over the city from every backyard and street corner and toast the new year and the celebration 5000 miles away.

There's so much more to chat about: the different way Norwegians decorate their trees, the choice they are given as a teenager between Confirmation in the church or Ethical Humanism, about seeing a crate of clementines for the tiny sum of 25 kroner just after reading about illegal migrant workers being exploited to pick clementines in Italy. But it's time to wake the family, make breakfast, and do a bit a shopping before the stores close for the next 3 days. A lady at work was talking about that special sense of calm and relief that a Norwegian gets when they know there's enough cream in the house. That's our goal for the day, to achieve the contentment of a full larder before a holiday.

God Jul Y'all!

Every year the Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm in a variety of fields from literature to economics. All but one. When Afred Nobel set up the awards given in his name, he specifically asked Norway to select and deliver the Nobel Peace Prize even though all the others are granted by a deliberative body in Sweden. He was not explicit about why he made this choice but one theory is that it was the Swedes who made cannons using his dynamite technology and he was making a statement that this was not acceptable and he would not entrust the Peace Prize to his countrymen.

This year the Peace Prize went to Muhammad Yunus and the organization he founded, The Grameen Bank. This is an excellent organization who pioneered micro credit. Their model has been adopted by micro-credit banks around the world. Grameen initially and primarily funds women who make less than $100 per year with unsecured loans to start a small business. They have to report regularly and are given some coaching in the management of their money. Many of the women, who primarily come from rural villages, found that simply buying a cell phone and renting time on it to other villagers without access to a phone has been a successful enterprise. Interestingly it has also helped village commerce since farmers are now able to find out the price of their commodities in other areas in real time.

As one woman explained to a Bangladeshi reporter, every year the people of Oslo hold a torch-light procession and gather in front of the Grand Hotel to let the winner know that the people support the choice and support the winner. Sometimes, she said, not everyone agrees and the people will gather somewhere else to protest the committee's decision. Karla pointed out that this can be a lot of fun. And so Sunday night, I ambled down to the Grand to get a glimpse of the action. I've put up a new album of pics from the experience.

Arriving early, I saw Mr. Yunus arrive by police escorted limo and take time to shake hands with the well wishers clustered around the doors. As the procession was not due for some time, I ambled over to the open air ice skating and along the main pedestrian street, half hoping to find the parade at it's start. I did manage to catch it en route and joined the crowd for the walk and in applauding the laureate and his wife when they emerged onto the lower balconey of the hotel. He was visibly moved by the tribute. Since the Grameen Bank is run by the very people it helps, several of the so-called phone ladies are on the board and I believe it was these women who joined him on the terrace, waving and smiling at the crowd who cheered him and sang songs.

Like the woman interviewed for Bangladeshi TV said, "this year, everyone agrees it was a good choice."

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On a radically different note, although not a discordant one, I am thrilled and nervous and as happy as a Hokkaido snow monkey in a thermal spring. Tomorrow is Family Reunification Day! My wife and kidlet arrive in Norway at long last and I am just bursting to see them. It's been over 10 weeks since I left little miss H. crying at the Houston airport. She is growing up and understands that we will see eachother soon but she has been worried that Santa may not be able to find her because of the move. We will surely convince her otherwise :). I'm taking Thursday away from the office in order to orient them in the town. Hopefully the sunshine will hold and they will be able to see their sparkling new home in its best light.

The old house is just about completely vacated, our belongings are either stored, sold, or on their way by land and by sea. Once we sell the old casita in Texas, the move will truly be complete.

It's been great having the dogs here. Even with the constant rain and the muddy paws/dirty floors that result. We walk to the center of the park which is only a couple blocks away but maybe the equivalent of 8 to 10 stories up. Everytime they see a duck they want to give chase. They met a black chow mix and exchanged business cards. An American colleague is headed back to Seattle this weekend and will return in January with his dog - hopefully we can arrange some play dates.

In between all this excitement, I managed to finish Transmission by Hari Kunzru whose first book, The Impressionist, was well received.

This book is an easy read, quick and clever. It's about an Indian IT worker in America, a Bollywood rising starlet on location in Scotland, and a marketing executive who talks in a sort of extreme bullshit bingo version of marketing-speak. It's about a computer virus unleashed to do a small but perceptable amount of damage that ends up affecting the lives not just of these characters but of the businesses and services and more all around the world.

What's good about this book is that is a quick read, moving back and forth among an increasingly large cast of characters fluidly. There is a lot of humor and satire and I think does a decent job of talking about the software issues with enough detail to be credible but not so much that it's dated or anyone in the industry would just laugh at the technobabble. One thing I particularly liked was that all sorts of ancillary characters get their own story and point of view across. The marketing exec's attractive but cold girlfriend with a job in PR becomes a major character about whom we end up knowing more than Leela, the actress at the center of the book.

What's frustrating about the book is that he doesn't really commit to it being a humor/satire piece and so the more charicatured people end up not quite fitting in with the more realistic people. Arjun's boss at a Redmond anti-virus company is clearly overblown for comic effect but his tattooed, bi-sexual, casual drug user colleague, Christine, is actually not so far off the mark from some people I've known. I found myself wishing he had gone all-out extreme satire or reined in these fringe characters to a slightly more real-world plausibility. The other problem is that the IT culture is a tad out of date. In 1998, I think this would have really rung true. It seems to be taking place right at that moment when opportunities started to change from "we'll fund anything" to "you ought to go start generating some revenue before calling a venture capital company". Things haven't quite gone bust across the board but there's an nasty sucking sound approaching and lots of people are caught along the way that might have felt more convincing if he had just explicitly set the book a few years earlier.

Overall: a fun quick read with some genuinely great moments and a fair amount of humor (mostly at the expense of the all-spin-and-no-substance global brand imagineers) and some real pathos in the plight of a high-tech immigrant worker whose dreams of silicon valley riches are dashed on the jagged rocks of visa requirements and the near indentured servitude of the body-shop who brings him to the States. At his best Kunzru captures these disparate worlds and the vast context differences between them in a quick witty sketches and clever turns of phrase. At it's weakest, he goes for the easy charicature instead of shading in the personalities with more unique detail and ambiguity. I genuinely liked how the cast seemed to grow and minor characters that I expected to learn nothing about suddenly had a backstory and a motivation and a connection to someone else.