Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Happy in the Asylet

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

This Oslo restaurant used to be a home for orphans (“asylet“) but now they serve codfish, moose (“elg”), and ice cream with hot berry sauce.

I also enjoyed the conversation where I learned quite a few new things including that Dirac liked to spend time reading Sanskrit, that when Pauli called weapons work the “böse Hinterseite” of science that translates from German as the “evil backside” and that Norway’s moose season comes in October.

If any of these new facts of mine are things I heard wrong, blame the house red wine, which was almost as good as the elg.

Fokke, I still think life is worth living

Originally uploaded by katzarella

… and I mean that in a good way.

Rough travel day yesterday, though Stockholm to Oslo flight takes only an hour.

I never have trouble falling asleep at bedtime, but sometimes a hotel room wakes me up long before dawn. Getting up to “check email” or news ends up in surfing webstuff for braindead hours and spending the day afterward in zombie mode.

Two things often work, in case you’re ever in the same boat.

First, silly peaceful alphabet games as I lie in bed with my eyes shut, trying to sleep. My favorite is “Alabaster Botticelli”–four-syllable words such that syllables one and three start with two successive alphabet letters. I don’t have the whole sequence yet–no, no, don’t tell me!–but I like to keep trying. If that gets frustrating, thinking up a tree or flower name for every letter works just as well.

Second, if that doesn’t work, some work reading (hard-copy only) or writing (on paper) relaxes me with the feeling I’m being productive but doesn’t galvanize bits of me into let’s-do-this-for hours.

Last night I exhausted (haha) both methods in sequence–but still did not get enough hours of zzzz. This cat, however, has just given me a truly great idea…

Elf lessons!

Starting in April … and only in northern Finland … there’s now one-year vocational course in elfing! (Will Orlando Bloom be teaching it? One can but dream.)

If the course includes blonde hair and archery skills, I’m there!

Thanks to always-improbable Ig-nateer Marc Abrahams for yet another truly informative email, and to Shamus Young for the great webcomic seen here, “DM of the Rings.”

Outdoors playing with cold wet leaves

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Today’s NYT says that even monkeys “rationalize” past decisions–so that, for example, expressing mild preference for blue candy rather than red quickly transforms itself into strong preference for those blue candies.

In my American middle-class life, my car is blue candy. It’s so easy to drive to the grocery store instead of walking, to drive into Boston instead of taking the subway, even to drive the kilometer to Harvard Square if I know Harvard Book Store will tempt me to buy lots of books.

Living in Stockholm, my car got turned into red candy. Parking is expensive. Buses and subways go everywhere, and go there often. Besides, walking and biking and busing are what people do here. So the one-plus kilometer walk back and forth to work, time spent outside in every kind of weather, is no longer an “inconvenience” to avoid, it’s just something I do–and more-or-less enjoy.

Because I can rationalize, just like anyone else!

Reason to love Stockholm #87

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Hilarious ads in the subway.

The funniest of these three ads for Åhlens department stores is the one in the middle. Sadly, my camera flash makes it hard to see.

On a sofa with lots of Åhlens pillows (“kuddar” in Swedish, and what a nice cuddly word for a pillow that sounds to English-speaking Betsy) a sweet white-haired grandma is beaming, her teenage grandson looks wide-eyed at the DVD she got at Åhlens to watch with him…a favorite “old” movie she loved once and now wants to share … “Basic Instinct.”

Swedish packet for Lipitor tablets

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… (people I’ve sat next to at various dinner tables in various countries)–every one of the ones taking cholesterol meds (every one that I asked, btw) takes Lipitor, and not its generic sibling simvastatin.

Yes, yes, I know this is grossly unscientific. Maybe more grossly unscientific than (er, grossly bit follows, skip to next paragraph?) my art historian friend who claimed “scientific” proof that shaving one’s legs made leg hair grow faster–she had shaved only the front of her leg-fronts for years, and found (in her 40s) that now her leg-fronts (shins) were hairier than her leg-backs (calves.) She was not happy when I counter-exampled (do you want to read this?) that I saw the same shin-to-calf difference despite shaving (or not) both, year after year.

Grossly bit ended; on to new-but-unscientific addition. My US doctor says that Lipitor is no better than Simvastatin, and my HMO makes me pay more for L-not- S. But when I needed prescription pills here in Stockholm, a Swedish doctor looked at my near-empty bottle of Lipitor and remarked, “Oh, so they found Simvastatin didn’t work for you and had to upgrade you to Lipitor?”

My US doctor to the contrary, I’ve been happy to pay extra for Lipitor. And can it be totally coincidence that she used to criticize me regularly, when I took Simvastatin, for not “doing enough” to reduce my cholesterol? But now I keep getting good marks for cholesterol virtue?

Just my very unscientific two cents on NY Times story.