I won't blog too much today because I don't like to whine. But if there are any good accountants out there who understand the rules of the Norwegian academic economic-administrative systems, your services would be appreciated.

A new mouse AND a new chair both in the same day!

Since you all never knew, you couldn't worry...
But the previously blogged cat by name of Susanna Leonora Løvenurket (Lionbaby), popularly known as Pusi, returned home this morning after having been missing since last Monday. She looked as good as ever, clean and healthy, sporting her customary ravenous appetite. Despite several attempts at persuasion and/or interrogation, she didn't say a word about where she has been, and since it's been snowing tonight, following her tracks was useless. She didn't smell of cows or pigs, so she hasn't been hiding out in any of the barns which are still in use around here. There was also no tell-tale smell of tobacco or perfume, which she often smelled from when she had been gone a day or two in the old house - she had some mystery family she would visit there. But she's home, and oddly enough the return of that annoying little ball of fur made our day before it had even properly begun.

Astrid Lindgren is dead. But we all know she's in the Valley of Cherries, where the Lionheart brothers went. And when she has given dreams and hopes and visions to the children and adults of Nangiyala, she will go on... to Nangilima.

Barbara Gentikow writes about media panics in an introduction to a chapter on uses and gratifications research. The book is in Norwegian: Larsen & Hausken (red) (1999): Medievitenskap 3 , and Gentikow is author and editor of this book in a series of four. What she says about media panics is however interesting enough to translate the main points for this blog. Media Panic is the fear of what the media might do to people. From page 122:
1) It has to do with new technology. Media panics have strong anti-modern traits.
2) It's concerned with popular culture. The anxiety is often generated among users of the "high culture".
3) The use of a cultural product is out of control (for authorities, particularly parents and teachers).
4) There's a general concern on behalf of the weakest: people with little education and children.
5) People make money on cultural products. There's a conflict between the idea that culture is a value to itself, and should have no price, and the fact that it's possible to make money on it.

This was about the introduction of film in Norway, around 1910. It feels kind of familiar...

By way of distantsun, an irish curse generator.

Go gcreime maorlathaí míthrócaireach do chuid airgid caim.
(May a pitiless bureaucrat gnaw at your ill-gotten wealth.)

Now all I need to do is to work a little at the pitch...

Topic if the week: Media influence.
I am giving three lectures on this topic this week.
Tuesday: The powerful media: stimulus-response-theories
Thursday: The power-less media: two-step and multi-step theories
Friday: The somewhat empowered media: uses and gratifications and cultural theories.

At the moment I am looking for an angle for the lectures, a way to illustrate these classic topics of media studies without using the all-too-classic examples of Nazi Germany and Leni Riefenstahl. Her films are powerful expressions of Nazi rhetoric, and scary in the glorification of their ideals. But at the same time using such examples can hide the fact that propaganda didn't end with Hitler - and propaganda alone didn't put him into power.

from Triumph des Willens

Mark Bernstein refers to peterme.com and asks about blog readers.

I think it's wrong to talk about blog readers and blog writers. In my opinion it's blog conversations. If it has to be compared to non-digital media, I'd say it's more like letters to the editor - without an editor. They are parts of conversations. Some of us talk to ourselves, others talk to a much larger audience, but there is a stream of comments, cross-references and opinions which indicate readership - but readership coupled with writership. No, I won't use authors. That's a different animal all together.

Francis answers the question "Why he married in a church". My main problem was why did I marry at all? I don't believe in marriage, I think it's much too restrictive and charged with misleading expectations. I am however still married and live with the same man I have lived with for the last 20 years. We are the best of friends, and share bed and table in comfort.

I think some rituals are not about the very pietistic idea of a personal relationship to God, but about creating events. We had a big wedding so that my father could preside over the wedding of at least one of his five daughters. The entire family fought for days before, during and after, one of my older sisters is still telling me what a waste of money it was, and it all got out of hand due to my father's enthusiastic pursuit of formality, something he never handled well. An example: he fainted and had to be fetched with an ambulance in the middle of the speech, which was all about my brother-in-law anyway, and had nothing to do with me and my husband. In an heroic attempt to save the occasion, he gave the manuscript to my husband, and told him to finish. The ambulance took him away, he was rewived, his doctor through many years and crises had a chat with him, and sent him back to the party, diagnosing it to lack of sleep due to nerves for the delivery of the same speech. My father's great moment, and he faints in my lap.

Now, after his death, I don't regret a single tense minute of the wedding-from-hell, I wouldn't have been without any thrown tomato or tempter-tantrum: he loved each wild second. He loved the musician who got so drunk we needed two men to keep him and his instrument from falling into the fire, he loved driving around from farm to farm around the summer-house the day after gathering all the still living people who had been to his wedding for a party in the boathouse, he loved the breakfast the third day of the wedding consisting of cakes marinated in the rest of the cognac (nobody were up to actually cutting a slice of bread or thinking about getting sober), and he loved returning to the daily routines in a house still filled with friends and relatives who were late to depart, presents and left-overs (yes, cakes: a norwegian wedding is an orgy of cakes).

As a family, we are good at parties, but not at rituals. We prefer to choose our own way of doing things, trying to fit the norm ends in disaster. But I still don't regret letting my father have the party with the formal invitations, the cook (who was an old friend of the family and made a wonderful meal), the guests travelling from all over the country to join, the presents (we got them, he opened them!), the music and dancing and silly party games.

In tense familiar moments (third day of Christmas visits, for instance), I get blamed for not taking firmer control: for the wedding of an older sister four years later ( fun, but very informal thing) I was a toast-master and limited all speeches to 2 minutes. An other sister, the gym-teacher, had her whistle and clock at hand: at 2 minutes she'd blow and the time would be out. This turned out to be a brilliant idea, everybody dared to say something because they knew they'd be cut off when it got embarassing. So the meal lasted as long as if we had had 3-4 longer speeches. Two cousins and one in-law allied to be able to tell one particularly long joke: when one of them was cut off, the next stood up and continued. It ended up hilariously funny.

My father loved these events, but my wedding was the kind of party he wanted, where he could be the host and show off to his friends and family. It was his day, and I only regret not having been able to give him more such days

I just put in that link so I'd know where to find it Thursday if I have a chance to get a computer connected to the net and a projector at the presentation. Those who read norwegian probably know that article already, it's the one I wrote for net-art, the issue which Jill edited.

localmotives #5 nettkunst - ://Estetikk til å leke med, eller: å jage drager - Torill Mortensen

Post-lectural lobotomy. A very suitable way to describe how I feel right now, coined by Trine Syvertsen in a rather informal context several years ago. It's the feeling after a lecture when your brain refuses to function, as if some synapses have been cut.

But at least a student came down to me and thanked me for the lecture, saying it was very interesting to listen to somebody who knows what they are talking about. It's years since I had a student say that to me. Almost four years. Can there be a connection between almost four years of no lecturing and almost four years of no nice students telling me they liked the lecture?

Remember Lane and Stu? The two lovers who cursed the Pacific? Well, I checked in on them, they are together at Lane's place (I'd have met up in Melbourne, particularly this time of the year, but that's just me...) and are happier than ever. Stu has to leave soon, and the blogging has been slow the last weeks. Let's assume they are busy living that sweet love-story we all like to hope can be real.

Sometimes the little things become very important. I am writing a lecture on narratology, attempting to make it fun - I am boring myself to death writing it, I can't imagine what it will be like listening - and I use Asterix as an example of the different concepts of narratology, refering to Greimas and Bordwell. Comics are such very good examples because they are both written and verbal and act like books, while at the same time the drawings often use typical techniques from films.

And do you know what Asterix and his friend Obelix do over and over and over again in all the albums? They eat. I get too hungry reading them, so I have to go get lunch and gain strength.

Like words? Get out your dictionary, and look at dupe - a partial compendium of everyday delusions by jeff gibson.

It's just past midnight, and I am kind of lonely here in the blog world. Lisbeth is on sick-leave, Jill is in Australia on a vacation (that's scary), Adrian is vacationing with Jill (scary twice!), Hilde is in love and just smiles happily every time she comes up from her work for a breath of air (she still blogs though, and I am grateful), Mark is just quiet, last heard of as he left for lunch in Singapore, Laurel is happy - but Gonzalo is around...

So what do I do. Well, I have a few more distant bloggers to follow - not less interesting, just not quite as directly useful in my work. Not that I have done much of that lately anyway. One which I really like is the blog of francis, who lives in Stockholm with his Sweedish husband: How to learn sweedish in 1000 difficult lessons. I often feel like a foreigner right here, in my own country, and then it's kind of reassuring that the things I find odd about Scandinavia aren't necessarily commonplace to others either.

Teddy goes travelling
A blog about the journey of a Teddy bear being sent around the world by way of postal office workers. Cute!

I quote from Brian Sutton Smith,The Ambiguity of Play:
Huizinga's thesis is also a particularly agonistic and machismo view of play history. His definition of play primarily as contest reflect the widespread male rhetoric that favors the exaltation of combative power instead of speaking comprehensively about play itself.

A thought for the future: A Women's History of Play.

This book is newly printed and finally available through other means than scouring library basements:Man, Play and Games

Who's that chicken?
A man-sized chicken disturbed the news-cast for the Norwegian TV2 last night. News-teams from most of the norwegian media were outside the largest Norwegian hospital in Oslo, covering the collapse of Torbjørn Jagland, leader of the Labour Party. Jagland collapsed in the middle of an internal battle for control of the Labour Party between him and the younger Jens Stoltenberg. The collapse was not particularly serious, according to the reports from the hospital, but it was a clear warning that Jagland had been under too much stress and needed rest.

The media had been chasing Jagland for comments on the internal dissent, and over the last weeks the papers and news have been filled with details about the potential change of leadership. This has not been a nice and polite discussion within the party, but one where the media have been skillfully manouvered by interests on both sides of the conflict. And the journalists have happily kept the story alive, under the excuse that this is important, critical journalism.

Now that Torbjørn Jagland is in hospital, the entire set of journalists drop their pretense of trying to cover a debate which might have consequences for Norwegian politics for years to come, and start sending pictures of the outside of the hospital Jagland is in instead. With soft voices and greedy cameras they now chase Jagland's family as they visit him in the hospital, rather than doing what the doctors were recommending: Leave the man to recover so he can get back to the decisions the same journalists have been telling us are so important.

This is the situation Bård Tufte Johansen comments on when he shows up in the picture of a news-cast from utside the hospital. Wearing a yellow chicken-outfit he squeeks and makes barbed comments to the journalist. The satire failed, however. Aimed at the media, the media refused to get the joke, and accused Johansen of harassing Torbjørn Jagland and his family. But Johansen did score one point. That evening the discussions on Norwegian television were less about the health of Jagland, and more about the role of the media. Although the Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) was forced to excuse the behavior of Johansen, who's a host of a satirical program on NRK 1, he did make a point which is slowly getting through the angry protests against his tasteless act.

"Don't criticize. This is the time to be nice." was the message Bård Tufte Johansen was giving to the journalists while they were interviewing people with the hospital as a back-drop. This comment was aimed at the sudden change in the mood of the journalists from one day to the other: from claiming that they were not a mindless pack chasing a good story but doing their job as watch-dogs of the democracy the one day, to claiming that they were not chasing a good story but doing... what exactly, when filming the wife and children of an exhausted man?