Finished reading Knife of Dreams by Robert Jordan yesterday. It is the latest book in the Wheel of Time series and supposed to be the second last one before the series concludes. Robert Jordan have gotten a lot of criticism from his fans that the last few books felt like they where standing still in terms of progression. And I have to say I am somewhat agreeing to that. That said, Jordan has said he in afterthough agrees that the layout of Crossroads of Twillight was wrong in retrospect and that he should have made the book sequential instead of having all the substories starting at the same point in time. Anyway, this last book picks up speed again IMHO and is quite nice. Maybe the book do suffer a little from the problem of to many paralell stories in the earlier books, which means that even if a lot of stuff gets wrapped up its still maybe a little to much stuff happening. Anyway I liked this book, and I even discovered that Robert Jordan have a blog these days.

Poultry

So I learned that my uncle and aunt is coming down to Barcelona. My Uncle is a well known authority on poultry in the Norwegian vetrinarian community and he is coming to town to attend a meeting of the The Poultry Veterinary Study Group of the EU. Will be nice seeing them again. For those interested in poultry I suggest Poultrynews.com.

So I just came back from a long weeks vacation in Norway. Had a great time overall. First weekend was spent celebrating my oldest sisters 30th birthday. Was kinda fun and yet scary to see how some of her girlfriends had evolved. Had a couple of ‘yikes, good thing that never worked out moments’.

Hang out with my friends Tron, Christian and Thomas on Monday watching a movie, started watching the Star Wars Holiday Special also, but it was so horrible we stopped halfway inn. Kinda understand why George Lucas want it dead and burried.

Took it easy on Thuesday apart from a trip to the doctors to have a bit of microsurgery done. Vanity might not be a good thing, but I don’t really care

Went out for a few beers with Owen Frasier-Green on Wednesday. Got reminded of the prices in Norway when 14 beers and 2 burgers ended up costing 120 €. Still we had a good time, and it was quite nice to be able to stay at a bar and not be bothered by cigarette smoke.

Went to a business meeting which Owen had set up for me during the day. In the evening I spent some time with the familty on Thursday just eating good food, talking and watching some telly.

Went to a release party for the new Depeche Mode album on Friday. Got lucky and won both LP’s and CD’s with various remixes of their latest single and also the collection CD with all their major singles up to 96. Since we where there for my friend Christian’s birthday and he is the big Depeche Mode fan among us I gave everything apart from the singles collection cd to him (he already had that).

Spent Saturday morning digging out stuff from the storage room which I was planning on bringing back to Barcelona. Chilled in the evening.
On Sunday I tried help my friend Thomas get his tv-capture card going, but there probably was some driver issues under Linux yet.

So being sick at the end of last week and not fully recovered during the weekend I used the opportunity to watch most of the movies in Jan’s DVD collection which I hadn’t seen before. And for the most part I realized there was a good reason for me not having seen them before.

The best of the pack was probably Legally blonde. While being based on rather well used elements at least it contained a shred of a message and the main character did actually have some development through the movie. And some of the gags where not so overdone they stopped being funny.

On the other hand the sequal was just pure crap. Like it was cute and funny when she had an iBook in the first movie where the rest of the class was using uniform looking black laptops, but the pink colored beast in the followup just went overboard and became stupid instead of silly. And every ‘joke’ in the movie was like that, they took something from the first movie and made it even more of a extreme.

Another movie I had the ‘pleasure’ of seeing was
Two weeks notice with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. A typical weakly scripted romantical comedy, but the main problem here is that it felt like both Hugh and Sandra where both getting rather tired of staring in these kind of movies so both of them where radiating a heavy dose of ‘lack of energy’ and ‘are we done we this scene yet’.

Also got to see 13 Going on 30 starring Jennifer Garner. Seemed to want to be the girlie version of Big, but no matter what angle you play it the movie stunk. The main character was very unconvincing, depicting a level of innocense in relation to sex for instance that only a 13 year old living in an amish boot camp can be believed to possess. Her reactions and those of her surroundings felt so fake that it came across quite clear that they had a plot, but forgot to write a real script to implement it.

Also had a dose of Kevin Smith movies. Saw both Clerks and Mallrats in addition to having seen Chasing Amy earlier in the week with the rest of the guys. Where not to impressed by either Clerks or Mallrats. Both being very similar, with two very unlikeable main characters and frequent appearances by Jay and Silent Bob. At the end of Mallrats I was actually hoping that the father would manage to send his daughter of with someone else and that the second guy would lose his girlfriend to Ben Afflecks character, so worthless was the main characters. I still think that Chasing Amy is a really great movie, but neither Clerks or Mallrats are even in the same ballpark.

Also saw Stepford wives. Not all bad I guess, but the whole storyline felt like it came out 30 years to late.