2002-11-01 20:39

421 words?

Is that all? Oh dear.

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2002-11-01 14:08 (UTC)

Is Moli�re really that terrific, anyway?

So I was reading Le Point, which somehow managed to miss out on last week's Hebdo Sweep, and there's an article on l'IH�S, France's answer to the IAS at Princeton, and since this is all Frenchy French-French-French, on ne faut pas attendre trop longtemps:

[(2002 Fields Medallist) Laurent Lafforgue] est le pur produit de la grande �cole fran�ais des math�matiques. Ce qu'il revendique haut en fort au point de r�diger tous ces articles dans la langue de Moli�re. �Ce n'est pas du chauvinisme, se justifie-t-il, mais pourquoi s'exprimer en anglais alors que la France est en pointe dans cette discipline?�

But here's the twist: for once I don't disagree at all. Not only is there an important French school [in the sense of fish, here, rather than college] in mathematics, which very much has its own style and history, but studying serious maths is sufficiently hard that the language it happens to be written in is a detail by comparison. I was thinking of trying to persuade my sister to get me some maths books by Kolmogorov and Arnol'd from Russia for Christmas (I find the Russian school more congenial than the French, I freely admit) despite the fact I don't know any significant amount of Russian.

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2002-11-01 10:17 (UTC)

S�popera

Yes, really. Oh, how I love Swedish!

Anyway, it's Vickan igen, who is on a major and very welcome roll. Again also, we are discussing yet another of the Pensive Princess's life crises; this time it's the one where she broke with all her friends and ran off to study German at a Catholic university in Germany. We've all done that, though, haven't we? I know I have!

Fences, you will be relieved to hear, have since mostly been mended. The forthcoming book Victoria, Victoria! based on interviews with Alice Bah, contains a whole chapter by the one and only Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg! (And probably no further shocking revelations about Vickan, because really!)

7th of November, people. I'll see you in the queue!

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2002-10-31 16:06

Nyah Nyah Nyah

Well, have you got an Artist In Residence? Zackly. We have, and it's his introductory talk in a bit.

Since blogging is going to be pants for a while while I write my novel (I'm opening with "A whimpering came across the sea..." and you can't stop me), have this translatifier to mock instead. More flavours than Babelfish, but of comparable hilarity quality, and spits by ground.

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2002-10-31 12:18 (UTC)

I morgon,

ska jag b�rjar skriva en roman. Med rymdpingviner! (Men ju p� engelska.)

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2002-10-31 09:53 (UTC)

Vickan igen

Having revealed a while ago that she had suffered from dyslexia, Vickan now talks frankly about her struggle with eating disorders.

(Last night I read in Live and Work in Scandiwegia (well worth avoiding, BTW - the research is shoddy and the writing worse) that, in the unlikely event you manage crack through the social reserve of Danish persons, you should on no account make jokes about their Royal Family. Oh dear. It wasn't me that did all that Kronsprinsfred and Knudlet material, Danish persons, you're thinking of some other Desbladet. Honest!

There's no comparable warning about Sweden, although I think that's largely because cracking the social reserve of Swedish persons is considered strictly a hypothetical situation. But you can't be too careful, can you?)

Eating disorders are no laughing matter, of course, and Vickan is to be commended for her bravery in showing her vulnerable side in this manner. Truly, she is an inspiring example to young persons, even those who don't get sent to posh American clinics while Elisabeth Tarras-Wahlberg (for it is she!) makes excuses for them.

(Gah! Must try harder!)

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2002-10-30 17:07

Worst. Joke. Ever.

My kuljakson's got no nose

Altogether now: "How does he smell?"

Awful!

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2002-10-30 16:48

Road Humps

Even if you don't read Swedish, don't miss this Expressen story - the picture is the whole point, and it speaks the Universal Language of Moose Love.

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2002-10-30 16:17

Harrumph!

In Live and Work in Scandiwegia, Expressen is listed as Top Daily Newspaper, followed by la-di-dah DN and Svenska Dagbladet.

Ahem? Research much? (They don't have a separate evening paper section, either, so think on.)

In partial redemption, they mention Computer Sweden as Top Source of computer jobs, and it does look OK. I can already tell that it won't help that my entire formal computing education was a first year course in Pascal.

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2002-10-30 11:51 (UTC)

Ge mig ett jobb!

Presumably state-run job agencies don't evoke quite the kind of horrified shudder in Centralised Scandiwegia that they do in Great Britain. So here are some for your collection, should you also be making one:

• Denmark
• Norway
• Sverige
• Norway again (not state-run, but wotthehell wotthehell)

(<ul> tags were cutting edge when I learned web-design, I'll have you know. So that's one skill I'm not going to get hired for, and none the worse for that.)

And thanks to Birgitte and Laurel for doing all the work on this one.

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2002-10-30 11:30 (UTC)

In Berlin, by the wall

Is Vickan five foot ten inches tall? I probably ought to know. Anyway.

Expressen observes that the paperazzi really did leave her alone, as requested:

Kronprinsessan Victoria har blivit positivt �verraskad av att hon i stort sett f�tt vara i fred f�r n�rg�ngna paparazzi-fotografer i Berlin.

So much for the German skvallerbladen, then. I don't think asking nicely would get you very far in the UK. (Somebody must have tried this, surely?) To pass the time she appears to have invented the alcohol-free Bloody Mary:

Och p� Tres Pesos har hon givit namn �r en ny drink. Royal. Den best�r av tomatjuice, peppar, salt, ett st�nk tabasco och worchestershires�s, blandat med is och ordentligt skakad.

Astonishing. I had a Bloody Mary (exactly) once, when the sensible ways of drinking vodka had been exhausted. The vodka was the one good thing about it, as I recall.

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2002-10-29 15:19 (UTC)

Just when

you think you're getting the hang of Swedish, along comes la-di-dah DN to put you straight. (I was only there for the jobs section, honest.)

Anyway, I got distracted - an Aftonbladet journalist is suing it for mucking about with her stories, including one on Princess Madeleine which I would be reading right now if it hadn't been pulled from the archives. (Dags att sluta fest? Are you sure you've got the right Madeleine?)

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2002-10-29 11:57 (UTC)

Oh, the hilarity

The power glitched, the swerver swerved, the sysadmin denied everything.

I'm not amused; if I wanted to reboot at random intervals I could just use Windows.

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2002-10-29 09:45 (UTC)

Ny tema: arbete

Not surprisingly, perhaps, each of the invandrare-targetted Swedish books I have available devotes a full chapter to work and jobs. I feel sufficiently well-informed about the subject now to at least play at prospective immigrant, although I'm not expecting to actually act on anything I discover: I'm adapted for very obscure niches in the ecology of post-industrial capitalism, and I'm expecting to encounter a diverse assortment of conscious and less-conscious forms of job-market protectionism.

And guess what!? By the magic of InterWebNetHoodNess, you too can share the fun!

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2002-10-28 15:33 (UTC)

Anarchy in the UK

The University has a centralised system to set all the clocks in our offices to Approved University Time, but when the ceremony of the going back of the clocks took place last night the centralised system ignored it.

This is completely typical behaviour, of course. Now the clocks are showing a completely random time that isn't even an integer number of hours away from the truth which is slightly less typical, thankfully.

Also, when I came in on Saturday the network was completely b0rked so that I could neither work nor play. Apparently it went down on Friday night and wasn't fixed till this morning - they don't bother with 24/7 coverage, because who cares about evenings and weekends?

At some point in December, they're going to turn all the power off for the entire fricking campus for a weekend to fix some electric switch. There'll be minimal cover for fridges and freezers and stuff, but everything else is going down. I bet the biology and chemistry departments are apoplectic - I certainly wouldn't blame them.

What's more, the heating in this building hasn't been working today. (As it happens it's a sunny day, so my office is toasty despite the time of year. It's a total sun-trap, here.)

This is just completely pathetic, frankly; what's Scandiwegian for "Situations Vacant"?

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2002-10-28 11:45 (UTC)

Permalinkage possibilities.

I'm fed up of not having permalinks.
All the cool kids have permalinks and Lord knows I want to be just like the cool kids.
But I also love and cherish my space on Diaryland, so I'm trying out this hand-hacked solution.

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