Melantrys’ Page

I read something on Omar’s blog today (post mainly in German), caught myself IM’ing all and sundry about it and thought “What are you doing there? You’ve got a blog yourself. Publish something!”

For all of you who - like me - never considered pig’s trotters as food (Anyone for a nice knuckle sandwich? ) but are loath to simply always throw everything away, here’s a real novel idea for a different use: as a modern weapon for our Christian values.

How (and probably why) so, you ask? Aha! Norway is showing us the way.

In the Norwegian city of Bergen the Muslim community will be without a mosque for a time as the old one will close at the end of this month, while the building of the new one is apparently behind schedule.
Labour Party politician Jerad Abdelmajid suggested that the city’s Muslims should hold their Friday prayers in Torgallmenningen, Bergen’s central square, from then on.
Now, that might indeed prove a nuisance if it is a big community, but I suppose that the new mosque had been promised to be finished on time, and would say that it is the Muslim community’s right to express their unhappiness about this problem by peaceful means. (I distinctly remember people saying that “they” should learn peaceful protest instead of setting flags on fire and becoming violent after some of the Muslim over-reactions to the cartoon scandal… And what better way of peaceful protest than public prayer?)

But of course in a civilized country «Muslims having their Friday prayers with their butts in the air in the city center is no solution» (Vidar Kleppe, leader of the “Demokratene”, an extreme populist party) and in turn calls for a civilized response.

City council representative «Kenneth Rasmussen told newspaper Dagbladet’s web site that Bergen residents should hang up pig’s feet and play pig squeals over loudspeakers to scare off Muslims, and claimed these tactics worked when he was a soldier for the United Nations in Somalia and Lebanon in the 1990s.» (quotes and general info taken from The Aftenposten)

As an aside, this throws a very interesting light on what United Nations soldiers are doing over there in foreign countries. (Or on what Mr Rasmussen was smoking while being there.)

The Iraqi Konfused Kid summed the reason for a (real or imagined?) success of this tactic up pretty well in a chat I had with him today:

Konfused Kid: That’s oversimplification surely
Konfused Kid: They weren’t probably scared of the pig’s feet
Konfused Kid: but of the crazy squealing dude with the gun

Who wouldn’t be…?
Just close your eyes and picture the scene, if you will…. Armed persons (United Nations soldiers or no) running at you, waving pig’s feet and squealing (Hey, that reminds me of Braveheart)….
Or an army vehicle hung with pig’s feet driving down your street, playing squeals from a speaker…

On a more humorous note, here’s the start of our conversation on this topic:

Melantrys: *waves a pig’s foot at you and squeals*
Melantrys: So what’s your instinctive reaction to this?
Konfused Kid: huh?
Melantrys: Er, seriously, in Norway some politicians consider this a way to “fight” Muslims praying in the middle of the street
Konfused Kid: Death to the infidels!

P.S.: Make sure to watch the video on Omar’s post as well….

… I’ll be gone for a couple of days, so be good and don’t make too much of a mess, ok?

To keep you busy till I’m back….

… here’s a pic of some weird bugs I saw today….

… and if this were Discworld, I’d wonder what She still held in store for me. This being Roundworld, what happened on Thursday evening only leaves me miffed, unhappy and not daring to be hopeful.

What are the chances, dear readers, that a harddrive fails right after it has managed to download the latest episode of Lost and you settle down comfortably to watch it?

What are the chances of this happening four days after the warranty of said harddrive ran out?

And - I swear I am not making this up - what are the chances of the only file remaining accessible on that drive being a particular mp3 file?
A song by Donovan. (Anyone remember the 70’s?)
A song called “Atlantis”!

The continent of Atlantis was an island which lay before the
great flood
in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.
So great an area of land, that from her western shores
those beautiful sailors journeyed to the South and the North
Americas with ease,
in their ships with painted sails.
To the East Africa was a neighbour, across a short strait of sea
miles.
The great Egyptian age is but a remnant of The Atlantian
culture.
The antediluvian kings colonised the world
All the Gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis.
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the
Earth.
On board were the Twelve:
The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist,
The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though Gods they were -
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice and let us sing and dance and ring in the new
Hail Atlantis!
(…)

That harddrive contained all files dear to me, including my photo collection.
A lot of it I have backed up on CD, and the concert pictures and videos I hadn’t yet backed up I can get back from someone else. But a few will remain lost.
In lack of space to put any possibly salvaged data on (I won’t be getting my hands on a new HD before Wednesday; I ordered one at the local electronics store; no more online computer hardware shopping for me…) I just ran the picture file half of a recovery program and did indeed get an unsorted mess of over 700 .jpeg, .gif, .doc, .txt and .mp3 files dumped onto my already laden original drive. The picture files I have absolutely no backup of don’t seem to be among them. Some .mp3 files are empty or incomplete; we’ll see what the other half of the recovery program can do once I have a drive to dump the data on.
The other odd thing is…. I removed “Atlantis” and put it on the original HD. After I had done that a “new” file popped into existence on the corrupted drive. I removed that as well, and another one popped up. It is shown as an empty folder (the content of which I don’t really need anyway), so I tried to delete it - which my comp refused to do, telling me that the folder wasn’t empty. (Yeah? So? That never kept you from deleting folders before, did it?) So there goes my “Hm, maybe I can coax more files into existence by moving every new one away” approach to the matter….

*sighs*

Me no happy.

If you hear a loud wailing noise reveberating around the world between Wednesday and Thursday that will be me. I do hope against hope though that I will have reason to cheer…. at least a little bit.

Keep your fingers crossed for me, friends.

… Condoms with Santa on? On second thought… scrap that, somebody is very likely already selling ‘em…

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This is not only what it looks like, i.e. toilet paper, it also whiffs of spicy Christmas cookies.
We’ve been selling it from shortly before Christmas on, and I just felt like sharing it with you.
As it’s also cheaper than the other brands of paper we have, a couple of colleagues have bought it already. (Plus, we’re using it on our toilet at the store which is where I got my sample from… Unused, I might add.)
One colleague has a young son who still needs assistance on the toilet, um, afterwards. She told me she was wondering what took him so long, and when she went in to check he had rolled most of the toilet paper off the roll “to see if there was anything else but reindeers and stars printed on”. Ain’t children sweet?! At least he didn’t eat it. The smell is really convincing.

“If dysfunction(…), if dysfunction is a function, then I must be some kind of genius” (Pitchshifter - Genius) Man, I love this song. *sings along* *skips back to beginning*

Arrr, I’m fairly sure I wanted to say something else, but my brain seems to be on hold again. I’ll just do a second post should I recall what it was.

the Externsteine

These huge sandstone stones are situated not very far from here.

They’re said to have been a place of worship in Celtic times already. Every year, at times like Midsummer, Samhein and whatnot, hippie heathens go there to party.

They’ve definitely been used by the church, which soon becomes obvious when you approach one of the main stones - a huge biblical scene has been hewn into the poor innocent rock.

I don’t know if the picture can bring that across (especially as it’s in such poor quality, but it’s a photo that has been scanned by an ailing scanner…), but if you just stand there and look at them, it’s like… wow. They’re awe-inspiring.

You can vividly imagine those Celtic “heathens” climbing up them and feeling grand, just like you yourself are doing, standing there.

Sceptics always said that that was more wishful thinking than proven fact.
And during the last month the media announced them to be right. (The sceptics, not the starry-eyed neo-Celts.)

I read an article in our local newspaper which announced the scientifically proven fact that the caves in the stones have not been used before the Middle Ages. It then went on to explain the scientific method the scientists who spent 1.5 years doing their stuff there had used. But let’s skip that for a moment.
As I don’t have the newspaper anymore I dug up a Spiegel article on the web.

Basically it said the same thing, only in more detail.
Two fire marks in the caves are said to have been made in 1325 and 1425 AD.
The marks in the grotto are decidedly older and are estimated to be from 735 and 934 AD. Even with the given margin for error this would mean that the earliest mark cannot have been made any earlier than 555 AD.

Then the article goes on to explain the scientific method used.

Apparently it is possible to date the time when the quartz and feldspar grains within the sandstone have been heated the last time.

See anything green? I sure did right in that Glocke article. The Spiegel people were at least honest (clever?) enough to mention the obvious flaw of this method.

It’s failsafe against smaller fires (as it is a known fact that people have been lighting fires in the caves and the grotto until the 1960’s), but it will only tell you the time of the last really big fire.
The caves could in theory have been in use for 10,000 years, and the method would only show those latest fires.

Yes, I admit I want to believe.

But as long as science does not provide any real proof I dare say that is my right.