Zombie alert

We recently rented a house in the countryside and we discovered that there was a curious building next door.
It is a small very anonymous brick building with the words Freezer House on a small plate.
Inside it is a bunch of custom built toploading chest freezers that looks like they are 50 years old.
We never see anyone near the building and it looks like it hasn't been used for years.
The freezers however are still RUNNING!
I find this seriously creepy.
Is it some government experiment?
Zombies being kept frozen only to escape the day the electricity goes and they thaw out?
A storage facility for a webring of serial killers?
The other day I saw there was another one a couple of kilometers down the road.
Needless to say, I lock the doors at night....

The generation gap widens

Last week 25.000 people turned up for a concert with dutch DJ Tiësto here in Copenhagen.

A couple of my -much, much younger colleagues went and had a great time I am sure.

The generation gap was pretty obvious since;

1. I had never even heard of the guy


2. Surely no one in their right mind will pay good money to see a DJ?


3. Apparently he is a relic and a throwback to Ibiza and Goa as of 10 years ago which REALLY adds insult to injury when it comes to me being with the times.
   

Anyway, my 40th birthday party is coming up real soon, but don't excpect me to hire a DJ!

CrazyBug!

We just spent a great week in southern Tuscany in a rented villa.
I had ordered a new digital slr camera and it was due to arrive at the shop the day we were actually driving down there.
I was cutting it fine...
Miraculously it was waiting for me along with a macro lens at the shop and my holiday was saved.
Once we arrived at the house I very quickly realised there was a strange animal flying round the lavender bushes.
It sounded like a humming bird. It flew like a humming bird. It looked like a tiny humming bird.
In our guide book there was a picture to solve the mystery;
The mysterious creature was a Humming bird hawk moth.
With my new equipment I decided to take a picture of, what the rest of the family quickly named "The Crazy Bug", due to my many unsuccesful attempts and resulting frustration.
It was difficult to get a shot, not because it took any kind of notice of me, but because it was so damn fast.
Before you managed to focus on it and click the shutter it would have moved on to another plant.
Infuriating stuff.
This shot was actually accomplished around 30 minutes before we had to vacate the house on the last day.
Cutting it fine....

The Toaster Index

In our household we talk about "The Toaster Index", as a yardstick of how our economy is doing.
This basically means what type of toaster we can afford at any given time.
Last time we bought one, we were living in my parents basement on one income and a newly started company.
Needless to say the toaster was a major purchase and the only slightly frivolous spending for months.
That otherwise very sturdy toaster finally croaked this week after 8 years and had to be replaced.
We are certainly not in 300 dollar "Dualit", territory but our new toaster has got a cool blue digital display and a Bagel setting.
I guess things have looked up since last time.

Hungry

After a very calorie intensive christmas period I finally had to admit to myself that keeping reasonably slim no longer was a given for me. Stretchy pants and embarrasment on the beach beckoned.
Okay, I exaggerate but I certainly needed to drop 10 lb.
It actually wasn't very hard.
I cut out sugar in my coffee and soft drinks instead relying on artificial sweeteners, and stopped eating cake, toast and candy either at work or in the evening.
Exercise? that was for wimps.
In less than 8 weeks I had lost more than the 10 lb. This ofcourse made me worry about my health, -had i lost that weight because I was actually ill?
I still do not drink sugary drinks, that was easy to give up, but chocolate and cake?
My aim now is to make the crawl back to the extra 10 lb as slow as possible.
It looks as if Coca Cola will be launching a negative calorie drink.
Now, isn't that just what the decadent western world has waited for?
Way to go Coca Cola, now where did I leave that Toblerone....


ps. thanks to Erik for the Hungry Man picture.

Son of Thor

Last week a curious link: http://www.avikingsaga.com/ began to circulate among the film companies in Copenhagen.
It was for a new film "Son of Thor" that no one had heard about, but with fairly well known Danish actors in the cast.
A look at the trailer caused equal parts laughter and confusion in our office.
Was this an April Fool joke leaked too early or a truly, wonderfully terrible film?
Bad wigs, bad dialogue, bad accents, and I mean really bad!
Several radio shows started looking into it and as the film was pulled from the website only to be posted on YouTube by a fan, it was revealed that the film had been made by a very enthusiastic filmmaker with exceptional persuasive skills but little film making experience.
The films website now carries a disclaimer that the film trailer was indeed an April Fool joke and does not reflect the quality of the final film.
This may or may not be the case, but one thing is certain: "Son of Thor", shows you how incredibly difficult it is to make a film. We only notice the camera angles, the sound, dialogue and the acting when it is done badly.
I once read that the scientists who were posted for months on end to Antarctica, never brought quality movies with them to watch, but the very worst they could find, as they were much better suited for repeated viewing.
Only time will tell if "Son of Thor" will make it to the Antarctic DVD library.

Road trips

When I was a child our car was a red 1952 MG TD.
It was only used sporadically in the summer and I distinctly remember driving with my parents to the beach. 3 children sitting on the wooden bench in the back, clutching our swimming gear and my sisters long hair being whipped around by the wind, battering my face the whole trip.
During the oil crisis in the mid seventies it was stored away until one day my brother and his equally mechanically minded friends got it started and drove round the neighbourhood till my dad found out and blew a gasket.
Shortly after my brother passed away from leukaemia.
My parents later found the money to have the car restored and after I got my drivers license I would occasionally take it out for a drive, filled with equal measures of exhilaration and absolute terror that it would break down somewhere awkward, as it was prone to do.
The car has now been sold to my much older cousin who owns a handful of them already as a result of childhood event involving my dad, the MG and being dropped off in the middle of nowhere for being very obnoxious.
To this day I love car trips and as my wife shares my enthusiasm our holidays are often based around driving somewhere.
Our cars, are if nowhere as charming and unique, a lot more comfortable and reliable.
But, whenever I see an old MG TD on the road, usually driven by a retired engineer type, I always feel a twinge of envy of the wonderful feeling it gives you, embarassment over being mechanically talentless and unworthy of such a car, and pure relief that I am not behind the wheel of it.

Feature overload

Seduced by the adverts and the prospect of adding yet another shiny object to my collection of gadgets, I recently invested in a GPS device for my car.
It contains all of Europe, North America and the Canary Islands, as well as bluetooth capability, a 20gig harddrive, slideshow capability, mp3 playback and god knows what else.
If however i want to use my phone with it, I need to attach an external mike to the device.
I found this out the hard way when an important phonecall ticked in and the person at the other end could hear nothing despite my desperate shouting.
Secondly if I want to hear the music stored on it on the stereo, I need to run a cable from the device to the line in socket.
Adding the absolutely essential power cable means i need to have no less than 3 cables running from my windscreen if i want to use these fancy features.
Imagine the setup time, as the device absolutely needs to be put away when you leave the car for more than 5 minutes.
Needless to say I do not use it as an mp3 player or handsfree.
My wife has laughingly suggested a man-bag for my Ipod, mobile and gps.
I fear she will buy me one for christmas and force me to use it!

I do however hope to go to North America in the new year, to justify the Gigantic America map installed. Failing that the Canary Islands.
Or, at least Southern Sweden 30 miles away.....

The Death of Cinema?

Before I became a parent, I would go to the cinema at least once a week.
These days it is once every three months.
I am aware that this is a natural progression as you enter the dreaded middle age, but you don't quite have the sense of sacrifice my parents generation had.
I am actually pretty happy to spend my evenings at home in front of my 42" plasma and watch movies or boxsets of TV-shows on DVD.
There are definite advantages;
You can stop the film if you miss something, you can lie down on a comfortable couch, wife and cat permitting and there is no chance of a 7 foot guy with a hat sitting in front of you.

The cinemas have ofcourse always provided the "shared experience", and the better picture but the gap is narrowing fast, at least when it comes to the picture quality.
1080p content is now commercially available for the early adapter, and as this is the format most movies are actually post'ed in, the movie will soon look as good in your own home as in the cinema.
Where does that leave the teenager of the future?
Apart from enabling me to watch James Bond doing incredibly cool things with beautiful women
the cinema was perfect for me as a teenager when I wanted to get out of the house without my parents giving me a hard a time about where I was heading.
The shared experience will probably not be enough for tomorrows teenager.
Maybe the cinemas could be converted into cool "living rooms" they rented for a couple of hours to play videogames in or watch movies.
You could order pizza in and make popcorn.
Ofcourse the rooms would have to be monitored to ensure illegal activities did not take place.
This would in turn make all the young people stay away, since they leave their houses to escape the control of the adults in the first place.
Hmmm, another billion dollar business idea down the drain....

Not so lucid

Last night I had another apocalyptic dream.
They are infrequent but they always carry a sense of doom and deep loss with them, that is hard to shake off afterwards.
In this one either the Norwegians or the Germans, -the details are a bit fuzzy now, decided to start WW3.
The moment that stays in my head is watching the city from a top of a hill while a towering skyscraper crumbles as if it was made of melting styrofoam.
Once in a while I manage to realize I am dreaming and immediately try and control the outcome of the dream.
Mostly my subconscious takes over the wheel again after a a minute or less and the beautiful beach hut i had just created in my head is overrun by zombies or catches fire....
God knows what a good shrink could make of that, or a bad one for that matter.

Please have a seat...

Now, this is just plain weird.
This bench has appeared outside a laundrette on the street where I work.
At first I thought some vandals had jumped on it, but on closer inspection it appears it has been made this way.
Now, Outer Nørrebro is not exactly a centre of installation art, but it seems like someone went to all the trouble to have this bench custom made in metal, spray painted and bolted to the ground.
-And, most likely filled out tons of forms to get permission.
If someone has a good explanation for this apparent waste of time, resources and money I would love to hear it.

The seriously weird lady

This summer my dad passed away.
The service was held in his favourite church where he had been doing research, before he retired as an architect.
After the service my sister had arranged lunch for friends and family at her house a 10 mile drive from the church.
My good friend and his dad offered a lift to a middle aged lady from the service.
They thought it was a tiny bit weird that she read Donald Duck comics during the drive, but for all they knew she could be a distant relative or more likely an artist fallen on hard times.
After maybe an hour at my sister's house, it was obvious that she had never met my my dad or anybody else in the house before for that matter.
That didn't stop her from happily trying to bluff her way through the increasingly embarassing situation.
She was taken to the nearest bus stop where the buses run once every three hours.
Several of the guest remarked that they had noticed her before, at other funerals.
We have since learned that this lady goes to funerals and the wake afterwards as a bizarre hobby, but, and here is the really weird part, primarily if it is an architect who has passed away.
I think my dad would have found that kind of behaviour highly amusing.
In some countries it is considered good luck to have someone crash your wedding.
i wonder if it also applies to funerals.

Is there such a thing as a free Barbie?

The other day my 4 year old daugther was waiting with my wife at a train station in England.
One of the staff asked her if she liked Barbie.
He then proceeds to give her a big new "Barbie and Ken", set which had been left on a train and was "unclaimed".
My daughter does have a knack of making strangers give her stuff, but this time I am afraid there was something more sinister going on.
Could the "Friendly", train man be on Mattel's payroll?
Something like the drug pusher giving the first hit for free?
Will there be 10 Barbies in our house at christmas?

Music to live by.

This summer we decided to drive down the "Pacific Coast Highway", in California.
Needless to say the trip was great!
Incredible landscape, beautiful weather, good company.
I happily parted with 500 dollars extra to upgrade our rental from a Taurus to a Dodge Charger.
-Living in a country where the cars are taxed more than 200% will do that to a man.
The car came with a plug for my Ipod and my wife made On-the-fly playlists of our favourite songs to go with the changing landscape.
A lot of the songs already remind me of key moments or times in my life, when I hear them
But, back in Denmark I find some of these songs have now changed.
They now remind me of Cruising down past "The Big Sur", from San Francisco to L.A.
I guess that is a pretty good trade.

You have hereby been warned!

I came across this poster while waiting for a flight back from Nice.
Personally I think 3 years in a roach infested french prison for wearing a crappy knock-off seems a bit harsh, but then again I guess we all have to do our bit for protecting the brand names.

What is the punishment for not wearing any fancy brand names at all?
-A one way ticket to the foreign legion?

Casino Night

I was woken up around 2 o'clock last night by the sonar signal I installed as a ringtone on my mobile a while back.
In the morning I checked the message that had been left.
It turned out to be an accidental call, I get them quite often having a first name beginning with an A.
Two unknown guys were sitting on a casino and chatting without realizing they were ringing me.
One of them says something like; "That reminds me of when i was in Monaco".
"Wow", I think, "This is gonna be a great anecdote I get here, right out of the blue, about loose women and stacks of cash".
That is until the guys starts telling the story;
He was on Eurorail and turned up at the casino, but couldn't get in, because he left his passport at the youth hostel.
Here it is, this mysterious casino call in the middle of the night, and the punchline involves a youth hostel!
How crappy.
Sometimes fiction is better than reality...

Do we have the energy?

With Peak Oil approaching, the middle east more unstable than ever, and countries like India and China developing a taste for cars and AC, we need clean renewable energy more than ever before.
Everyone has heard the stories about the big oil companies buying up the patents for brilliant new energy technologies and then locking them up in a vault to protect their core business.
Most likely this is wishful thinking by the conspiracy contingency.
If it is true however, now must be the time for the Exxon and Shell executives to enter the vaults, brush the cobwebs of those prototypes and save our lifestyle as we know it.

Recycling

Today was sunday, the whole family was on the rebound from a freakish case of stomach flu and the sun was shining.
What better way to celebrate than to go to the recycling centre with some of the broken old crap.
After dealing with the old newspapers, the bottles and the christmas tree, I went to the electrical deposit station.
The recycling nazi behind the counter looked through my bag and after putting aside my old Scart cable for himself, got the stuff sorted into various containers.
On the way home i realised that pretty all the broken crap apart from my psychotic electric toothbrush had one thing in common: The batteryless flash light that died on me on a deserted buildingsite in the middle of the night, the card reader with remote control that was slower than a 1995 modem, the totally unreliable motion detector light etc. was all bought in the supermarket chain ALDI.
I have once more made a wow to never again succumb to the lure of cheap ALDI gadgets.
This time I am going to keep it!

Express what!

I believe someone is entitled to a refund from the printer...

Shakespeare in the park

I went for a walk in the park the other day and took this picture of a leaf.
Imagine my surprise later when i realized there was a picture of
William Shakespeare on it.
I am kind of disappointed it wasn't Jesus.
If it had been, the picture would be worth a fortune on E-Bay.

MoCap

Our company has recently invested in a motion capture studio.
we had to find a large enough facility, quick and ofcourse cheap so we have ended up with a temporary place in a seedy basement in an industrial suburb of Copenhagen, which brings memories of countless gangster movies.
Our neighbours in the basement includes a magician, with motorbikes, rabbits and pidgeons, as well as some less than friendly characters who seem to have more tv's in storage than most honest people.

Here i have been holed up for quite a few days.
The setup really kicks ass, and after the actors realize the funky outfit they have to wear, is for a good reason and not hidden camera, they really get into it.
So when my wife and daughter asks me these days what i did at work, i can say;" Well, we recorded a guy in a lycra suit fighting giant killer robots!"

Old men in shorts

Most mornings I see him.
An old man around 70, with a huge belly, shades, shorts, t-shirt and flip flops.
This would not be so weird if it wasn't for the fact that he dresses like this every day, year round.
Snow or rain, storm og hail, there he is ambling down the street.
Lately I have noticed another on the same stretch of road.
He wears a shirt though, tucked into his high-riding shorts.
I don't know what freaks me out the most, that they are clearly multiplying or that i am noticing what old men wear...

The kind of news I like.

This must be the best day news-wise I have ever experienced.
Japanes scientists have managed to film a live Giant squid at a depth of 900 metres.
A huge treasure of Inca gold worth 10 billion dollars has been discovered on the "Robinson Crusoe", island off the coast of Chile.
And, US navy trained "Killer Dolphins", have escaped captivity and are possibly armed.
Has Reuter's been hijacked by the descendants of Jules Verne?
If that is the case they are doing a great job.
Keep it coming!

BZZZZZZzzzzz

It is midnight, the in-laws are sleeping in the guest room next door. My wife comes into our bedroom with something vibrating wrapped in a towel.
"Deal with this, I can't turn it off!".
It is the Braun electric toothbrush.
Something has shorted inside it and i am desperately trying to turn it off without any luck while it is vibrating away, rather noisily, threatening to wake the whole house.
We wrap the toothbrush in the towel and a thick blanket and stick it in the closet.
After maybe half an hour it shuts itself off and the next day it works fine again.
It has happened once before.
I see this as evidence that German engineers do have a sense of humour.

Aldi and I

I must confess to having a secret fascination with the German Discount Supermarket chain; ALDI.
The branch close to where i work looks more like something out of coldwar Russia than a modern supermarket, and it is full of products that at first glance looks like the brands you normally buy, yet the spelling is slightly different; Bacardi might be Wacardi etc.
They also occasionally sell weird appliances like chainsaws and hand powered flashlights and I am drawn to these objects like a moth to a flame.
Last week they were selling metal detectors and night vision goggles at some insanely low price.
For a moment I thought it sounded like a really good deal, but then the truth hit me:
It must be part of some Serial Killer Profiling Scheme.
The moment someone lines up at the counter in ALDI with, say a pair of night vision goggles, a roll of duct tape and some black bin liners, the salesperson hits an alarm button and a SWAT team
will overpower the individual, who will be taken into custody and never seen again.
What will they think of next?