In Norway we have a tradition where each year the television channels air shows with a Christmas theme that has a new episode each day between December 1st and December 24th.
Advent Calendar TV Shows
Holyturtle
During my summer holiday, I managed to get a bunch of files out of an old broken computer of mine.
I just stumbled unto the image above, along with the two variations you can see below.
I think I attempted to make a series of new reaction image memes, to be used when chatting on forums.
They obviously never caught on.
Enjoy 😉
The Point Of Growing Up
I saw some similarities between one of the pictures my mother sent me from when I was ten, and another my girlfriend took of me after a hike this summer, so I decided I would combine them into one image, alongside one of my favorite quotes from Doctor Who.
I am ten in the first image, 28 in the second.
The quote is from the Fourth Doctor story ‘Robot’, from 1975.
Getting Help From My Mom
I am currently looking through a bunch of old pictures to see if there are any I can use for posts about my childhood.
My mother is helping me a lot by snapping shots of her photo-albums and texting the pictures to me.
She’s also helping me fill in any gaps in my memory from the times the photos were taken.
InterRail 2010 – Part 9: Cardiff
After having seen Stonehenge, I took the train to Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
I had been wanting to travel to Cardiff for a few years, ever since I got into ‘Doctor Who’.
Cardiff had been the home and main filming location for the British science fiction program
Harry Potter and The Books That Made Me A Reader
In the year 2000, when I was nine years old, my mother read the first Harry Potter book for me and my younger sister over the course of several nights.
After she had finished, I was still so entranced by the world which had been presented to me that I reread it several times on my own.
While I did not understand it at the time,
what I love about ‘Harry Potter’ is that they are mystery-novels disguised as fantasy.
Discovering ‘Doctor Who’
In the fall of 2005, at the age of 15, I fell in love with a British science fiction show.
I had been watching the Norwegian national broadcasting network’s second channel NRK2 to an excessive point all through the summer.
While NRK1 mostly showed mainstream stuff like the news, HBO dramas, programs made by NRK itself, well-known movies and new detective shows, NRK2 often showed more unknown cult fare.
Some of the stuff on NRK2 which I liked the most were British comedy from before the new millennium. Stuff like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Blackadder and The Young Ones.
Then one evening while I was watching the channel after school, I saw a weird commercial for a program which looked like it involved an alien with a pig’s head crashing into Big Ben, and the subsequent political turmoil taking place in 10 Downing Street.
This turned out to be a trailer for just a two-part story a few episodes into the 2005 season of Doctor Who, with the rest of the season having completely different stories each (or every other) episode.
The Space Pig also turned out to be a pig from Earth which had been genetically altered by an alien crime-family, to fool humanity before the family’s actual plan could be set in motion.
This was one of the first times I had been exposed to this kind of weird storytelling, and I loved it!
The only thing similar to it that I had experienced at that point were books written by Douglas Adams, and I later learned that he had written episodes for Doctor Who in the 70s, and that he had even been the showrunner for a year.
That was also something that surprised me when I found out, that this cool new cult television show that I had just discovered were actually not that new at all, and
had been running on-and-off since 1963.
Norwegian Patriot
Yesterday was the Norwegian Constitution Day, so I figured I would write a bit about how I feel about Norway.
While not being very vocal about it, I do feel patriotic about Norway.
And to be clear, when I say patriotic, that is what I mean,
not nationalistic
Norwegian Russ Celebration
The Russ Celebration in Norway is in many ways like the American Spring Break, with many partaking in an excess of sex, alcohol and silliness.
It is a weeks long graduation celebration by Norwegian upper secondary schoolers, taking place in May of every year.
The pupils who partake in this celebration are called “russ”. They traditionally wear overalls and hats color-coded to their particular study path, although few still wear the hat.
From most to least common; there are Redruss (general studies), Blueruss (economy and administration), Blackruss (vocational courses) and Greenruss (agricultural courses).
Some other groups have also joined in, with kindergartener wearing pink, lower secondary school students wearing orange, and Christian russ wearing white.
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The Russ Celebration is an old tradition.
There has been some form of russ celebration as far back as the 1700s, and it seems to have started in Danmark, as there were no universities in Norway at the time.
The celebration we now see in Norway started in 1905. The red caps were inspired by the hats worn by German students who had visited Norway the year before.
The tradition slowly and naturally evolved from those starting points.
I could have joined in as a Blackruss at the end of my two years at culinary school, but I decided that it would be smarter to take some supplementary education with a year of general studies, before my two years as a chef’s apprentice.
That gap between the culinary school and my apprenticeship ended up being far longer than I had anticipated, as I spent a year in the military, and then a year of decompression and InterRail travel as a result of that year in the military.
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So in May 2009, after a year of general studies, I was ready to be a Redruss!
Along with my overalls, I had all the other essentials…
I had a russehat, and a russecat..