So now we know...

Beautiful...

...I could gaze at this picture forever...

Folks...
My case is not severe...
I blame the flu and the dark
but amazingly mild
Icelandic winter for my lousy blogging these past weeks... ;o)
(Winters becoming milder every year in this country...
maybe a reason to worry...? :/)



[Thanks to The Nonist]

Dear friends!

I promise
to become
a good blogger
again when
I have beaten this

You Are Sheryl Crow!

Down to earth with tons of creative energy When you talk, everyone can relate to you "Life springs eternal On a gaudy neon street Not that I care at all"

Who's Your Inner Rock Chick?

...And today then I´m a Cheryl Crow with a cold and a sore throat and a nasty cough...arrg...

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

~ Adolf Hitler

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 50% Average@Internet-User.com (41% - 60%) You seem to have a healthy balance in your life when it comes to the internet and life away from the computer. You know enough to do what you want online without looking like an idiot (most of the time). But you enjoy seeing your friends and going out to enjoy life away from your computer. The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Quiz Me!

Here is a very interesting and informative post by Einar Örn in Luxemburg on stuttering.

Oscar 2006...

An Icelandic film, "The Last Farm", by Rúnar Rúnarsson and Thor S. Sigurjónsson is on the list of nominees for an Oscar for short films 2006. The musical score of the film was made by Kjartan (Kjarri), one of the members of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós.
This is the second time an Icelandic film has been nominated for an Oscar. The other was "Children of Nature" by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson (1991), nominated in 1992 for the Oscar for "best foreign language film".

I´m pretty sure that most people (300.000+) on our little island will be exited to hear the results on March 5th !

Joke?

If you click on the image on the right, the sign for Islam, you will be able to view one of the cartoons published by the Danish newspaper
"Jyllands-Posten" that have caused such a lot of unrest and controversy in muslim societies all over the world. In my opinion this picture was never just an innocent joke. I fact I think it describes very well the fears and worries (and predjudices ?) that we in the west have about the Islamic faith and the way life seems to us to be lived in the Middle-Eastern countries. It´s highly provocative, both politically and with regard to religion and therefore highly explosive. I only publish it here to make that point.

I would not have published it if I was the editor of "Jyllands-Posten", I think it was a bad failure of judgement, a blunder, to do so in the first place. Very well, we Scandinavians pride ourselves that we cherish the human right of free speech, but it has to go along with limits of consideration for other peoples´s feelings and religion. Like the head of the small Islamic sect in Iceland pointed out on television last night, the comics always used to depict Jews like handwringing Scrooges in the last century, now it seems to be the turn of people of the Islamic faith to have themselves stereotyped and ridiculed as bombthrowing devils.

I think the Danes have handled this matter badly. We have a saying in Icelandic "Sá vægir sem vitið hefur meira", which means that the most clever person let´s go in a dispute. I think it should be put to use in this context. The right thing to do for the editor of Jyllands-Posten was to apologize to the Islamic world for having published these pictures, without fully realising how very provocative and mean at least some of them are. He has in fact at long last done so, more than four months after he allowed these cartoons to be published, in a letter of apology that looked rather lame to me, and the harm is certainly done.

Let´s not kindle the fires of hatred.
Let´s not light matches in a room full of explosives.
Let´s try not to throw bombs like this one at the frail peace there exists in this world.

Links:
Letter from Carsten Juste, Editor-in chief of Jyllands-Posten,
to fellow muslim citizens in Denmark.
Google Search - (denmark muslims)
Religinscope
The Star
Jyllands-Posten
Wikipedia about the Jyllands-Posten cartoons