You have been warned. They are apparently trying to scam me for >900 NOK, according to an agreement that I haven't entered into. I hope I won't have to take it to forbrukerombudet, but if I will if I have to. In the meantime I advice all my friends and any readers to shun tele2 like the plague.
I've been reading blogs a lot lately. Perhaps it's time to update my blogroll? (apparently, that's what they call the links to other weblogs. I wonder why they don't just call them links)
I think it would be useful to write some words about them also, not just add a link with a weird name.
About the ones already there: Pandolphia shouldn't need any presentation, she's my wife, so although it's a personal weblog which is only updated now and then it's at the top, as it should be.
Paranoidkoala comes in a similar category. A good friend since a long time ago, who generously offered to host my weblog. A link is the least I should repay him with, although he updates his weblog even more erratically than my wife. There's nothing there yet, but his photoblog has a couple of really nice shots - perhaps especially in the archives.
Those are the only friends and relations that I know of that have a blog. If you know me, and I know you*, feel free to let me know.
Now then to the more well-known sites I waste my time at.
Tim Lambert is an australian university lecturer who started a weblog to criticize the scientificality (if there is such a word) of some nutty pro-gun academic called John Lott. It has branched out a lot, but the main focus still seems to be is scientific misconduct and misuse of research, particularly by "Think tanks"
Also, I read the weblog of the well-known open-source wizard Aaron Swartz. He's writing about his life on Stanford, where he started not so long ago. Politically, I find him sympathetic. But I must admit I'm a little worried about the society he describes at Stanford - it seems a little decadent in a self-abusive way. But perhaps that's just what higher education in the US is like?
I thought I'd add some of the other blogs I occasionally read.
RealClimate is a dry, scientifig weblog, but about an important topic. As soon as some new (or old) global warming denial theories get headlines, they are there.
The Panda's thumb does the same for evolution.
Crooked Timber is a big, intellectual, politically liberal weblog. While they do occasionally sink into "Samtiden"-stylde discussions (Think Marcel Proust), they have some really good writers with unique skills and sharp pens - I'd name Daniel Davies and John Quiggin in particular (Davies, or dsquared as he calls himself, has ceased posting to his private weblog, posting to crooked timber instead. Quiggin is more active, but I don't read his blog much)
Oh, and to get less political, Language Hat is an interesting blog. It's a little less formal (allows comments) than Language Log, a perhaps somewhat dryer weblog dealing with language.
* A lot of people know me without I knowing them. I blame it on poor memory for faces. My friend Rune has a more blunt explanation: "Everybody knows who the village idiot is, but the village idiot knows no one"
I saw Shyamalans "The village" recently. I thought I'd write some of my thoughts on that film here.
First of all, I'd seen "The sixth sense", and from what I knew about the author I expected: well-crafted suspense in the beginning, but toward the end of the film, the curtain is drawn away and we see that the scary things are not so scary after all. Fair enough. I can see why some people don't like this, but it's OK with me. It's a decent message in itself after all.
The Village follows this pattern, but with some twists. Like his other films, we are expected to accept some pretty weird premise, and in this case it's a utopian village in the woods of Pennsylvania that has been isolated from the outside world for several generations, on account of the red-cloaked, clawed monsters that inhabit the surrounding forest. Well, I liked the X-files when I was young (especially the episodes that weren't about UFOs), so I thought it looked interesting, but it turned out very different, and happily it was far better.
It's unconventional though. It breaks many well-established rules of film-making. For instance, the curtain is drawn away like I expected, but it happens approximately in the middle of the film, before the protagonist journeys through the forest. Shyalaman instead tries to keep the suspense up, and succeds, sort of, but it's not as scary as the first part of the movie, where you don't know what's behind the curtain. Anyway, I must say that this is a good film. It manages to convey credibly a desperate longing for a better society, even though the premises and the twist are arguably quite ridiculous. The beautiful photography and the beautiful score manages to catch my imagination enough that it doesn't matter. Using Hilary Hahn must have taken a bite out of that 60 million dollar budget, but I think it was worth it. Certainly the score compares very favourably to certain other films I've seen recently, which I will not mention here.