Pending travels and a new friend

Thought I’d better say something after such a long absence from these pages (or some other bloggers might start to beat me up - you know who you are).

Looking forward to my trip to Chicago later this week. But, yikes, looks like its going to be damn cold….even colder than here. Temperatures down to -17C. Forecast predicting cloudy and sunny. So hopefully clear skies and no fog - one thing I hate is freezing fox. Rich, Karla’s other half, has been insisting that I just have to go visit the Natural HistoryMuseum. He probably wants me to have a date with “Sue” …. that’s T-Rex “Sue“. You see, Rich is such a “Ross”like dino-guru

Been filling up my Archos vid player with movies and TV shows just incase the inflight movies aren’t up to much. Lots of CSI episodes from Season 5, which I haven’t got round to watching at home yet, and a good helping of Simpsons episodes. On the movie front, A Simple Plan (such a good movie), Cars (been sitting in the shelf and not got round to watching it yet), Hidden (Heneke’s latest - no idea about this one) and The Wedding Crashers (just heard that this one was a hoot).

Recently made another really great friend The Cable TV company have just released a new decoder with an inbuilt Personal Video Recorder. That means the box contains a 160GB hard drive which can be used for recording TV and claims to hold up to 80 hrs. The other really cool thing is being able to pause and rewind live TV. Even more cool is that the Cable TV operator seem to have made a bit of a screw up when they sent me the box. Included was a new smart card which appeared to unlock ALL TV channels.

Being the honest person that I am (and also not wanting to have to pay for it all) I called up to ask about the new card. It turns out that some kind of mistake had been made and my subscription details hadn’t been transferred properly to the new card. Anyway, I was told that it was now fixed and should reset the box ASAP. Thought I would see how long I could keep all the channels for. That was over a week ago and I’ve filling up the hard drive with lots of premium movie content The box will be powered off whileI’m away, which mean that I’ll probably end up back with my normal channels after I get back.

Talking of movies, recently went and say Blood Diamond and Last King of Scotland. Forest Whitaker gives a power house performance in an amazing movie, but there was one excruciatingly gruesome scene in a very Man Called Horse sort of way. Blood Diamond was also pretty damn good, but let down by a lousy feel good ending.

Those two movies tooks my kinosonen membership up to the Hovedrolle level. Fat lot of good that appears to have done. Made a concerted effeort to get the required number of points and then……..nada. Oh well, its only been a week. Maybe somebody could let me know if I should expect any goodies in the near future.

Junk Mail

Just recently got back after being away for about a week on business and was met by something which really gets ma goat. A mail box chock full of and literally spewing out junk mail. Yes, I now, junk mail is a fact of modern life. Its not the junk mail so much, but the stupid (and I’m gonna swear now) fuckwits who deliver it. When the box is quite clearly full, they keep trying to jam more and more in. Its amazing how much they manage to get into what is really quite a small box. The problem is that scrunched in there amongst all the Skeidar catalogues and local window washer flyers is real mail.

I keeping thinking of puting one of those “uadressert reklame nei takk” stickers on my post box, but given the stupidity on display, it would be no surprise if the people hired to deliver this junk can’t even read!! Even contemplated collecting a black bin bag of the stuff, marching into he post office and dumping it on the counter with a return to sender note. Probably wouldn’t go down too well…visions of being dragged off to the police station by the post office ladies and ending up in gaol.

I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!

Ok….happy thoughts….happy thoughts.

Talking of happy thoughts….Just discovered from the TV guide that I am now supposed to have some more TV channels. Yippeee….a proper welcome home present. Grabbed that remote and did the cable TV box update….more sports…ESPN and NASN, AlJazzera International, some kiddies TV music channel. Whooppeee doo!! Also getting CNN soon…at least its not Fox “fair and balanced Gorbels propaganda” News. Ok….sort of good news.

LMAO…just seen a TV ad for David Beckam’s aftershave now beng sold in a gift set at Cubus…..Does this mean Beckham now reached Brut by Faberge celebrity hell?

The weird and wonderful world of Norsk TV

One of the great things about being a native English speaking (note to those who don’t think I do - I’m one of those with the more refined Scottish accent) expat living in Norway is that you don’t have to suffer badly dubbed TV shows, or even well dubbed ones for that matter. Assuming that you have a semi decent cable or satellite TV package, anytime you switch on the box you should be able to find something understandable to watch. The exception is normally when you can’t. This isn’t to say that Norwegian TV isn’t without its challenges.

The first thing to figure out is the scheduling. Let me try to explain.

You may have the first run of a TV show in a prime time slot on one Norwegian channel, a later showing of the same episode at a later time the same week (usually on the same channel), and reruns of previous seasons at various times on other channels. That’s only on Norwegian TV. When you bring in Swedish TV, it gets a little more confusing. They can be showing the same first run of a TV show, but with episodes out of synch and on different nights.

Take for example, The West Wing. Here we are currently mid season 7, and the latest episode is on tonight, Monday, at 20.05 on NRK 2. Then there is the rerun at 23.45 on Thursdays on NRK 1. NRK1 and NRK2 are the state owned channels, similar to the BBC in the UK. Currently there are also reruns of some much older season over on Hallmark. Yeah I know, what does Hallmark think it’s playing at, actually showing some half decent TV. Anyways, I digress…until recently SVT1 (Swedish TV) was also showing season 7. Its run has now finished.

Now you might say, just make sure you study the TV listings. That would make things too easy. On NRK the show is called Presidenten (The President), on SVT its Vita Huset (The White House), and on Hallmark, The West Wing. So even with some basic Norwegian, its still easy to get confused. This brings me on to the second challenge.

There appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the naming of foreign TV shows, at least for the British/American ones. Sometimes we get the original English name, sometimes a Norwegian translation of the original name, and then there’s the Norwegian translation of some other show name??? “Everyone Loves Raymond” becomes “Alle elsker Raymond” and “King of Queens” becomes “Kongen av Queens“. Those you easily get. But when “Home Improvements” translates to “Ti Tommeltotter“, literally “10 Thumbs“, you soon realise that some lateral thinking is also required when translating the TV guide.

Of course, the icing on the cake is when all these TV shows come out on DVD. The titles always seem to revert to English…..to coin an Americanism…..go figure!!