Fugato

Undirskriftin mín, svona um það bil.

Ég gef almennt fremur lítið fyrir undirskriftasafnanir, sérstaklega á netinu.

Jónas og Mikael standa líklega frammi fyrir of miklum sokknum kostnaði í siðferðisnýsköpun sinni til að fara að endurskoða hana úr þessu.

En sagan segir að eigendur DV séu nú þegar lítt hrifnir af ritstjórnarstefnunni; þá er svona áskorun mögulega ekki til einskis.

Skrifið undir.

Two-armed editors said to rape reputations.

Iceland has a newspaper, of sorts, called DV, whose motto is (roughly) “dares when others don’t.”

Yesterday’s front page [PDF] featured a photo of a man, with the headline “One-armed teacher said to rape boys.” Yep, that kind of courage.

He hanged himself the same day.

Investigation of his alleged crime (one charge on file, by two boys) is ongoing. I wonder if the editors of DV (pictured here) will care if he turns out to be innocent.

I was raised to be a good boy. This is a fine thing in itself, although for getting ahead in life it is grossly overrated; being a good boy tends to get you trampled on.

This week I received a trampling of a new and different kind, thanks to my old friend Smári.

Smári gave me a gift certificate for a Chinese massage for my birthday last month. I went this week, and got a full-body foot massage. I.e., was massaged, largely by feet, at Kínverska nuddstofan on Skólavörðustígur. It was … interesting. And damned good. I have little to compare to, though; this was my first professional massage. The masseur was a kindly Chinese man upwards of forty. He did not say much, though a “jæja” and a slight chuckle helped to ease my embarrassment when a push on my lower back let out some air.

There is a square hole in the bench to plant my face into. This makes sense, but the edge of that hole digs into my Adam’s apple when the nape of my neck is, well, stepped on. In lifting my throat to protect it, I was unable to relax the muscles being massaged. I wonder if there are people working in AutoCAD designing massage bench holes to work around this problem based on craniometric data for various world markets. Or if I just have a silly big larynx.

I liked the massage, during and afterwards, and will go again.

Oh, and the illustration is for silly laughs only. At no point in the process was my face stepped on, and certainly not by the foot of Cupid.

One of the regular commenters to this site,
my brother Gunnar with his son Ari Sigurður

For over a month now, all comments to this site have been automatically marked as spam so they were not published and I never knew they were there. Whoops. I have fixed it now. Sorry folks, I was not dissing you by rejecting your comments!

(Background: of all comments submitted to my site, about 86% are advertisements for poker websites or online pharmacies peddling viagra substitutes. The rest I call “real comments.” My site semi-automatically separates the wheat from the chaff … except when it goes haywire and fully-automatically guns everything down as chaff)

The option “Blacklist comments from open and insecure proxies” did this to me. Sounded like a good idea at the time, and it worked just fine until I moved this site to Textdrive hosting. Turned it off and now comments work fine. So if you are using WordPress and want to use this option, then do some testing!

Ég fékk nafnlaust sms í dag, þar sem ég gekk eftir Laugaveginum til að sækja bílinn minn á Grand Hótel Reykjavík eftir góðgleði gærkvöldsins.

Skilaboðin voru þessi:

From: OgVodafone

ther thykir vaent um
mözduna thina?
---
Sæktu tér nyja hringitòna à
ogvodafone.is - Og Vodafone

Ég beið eftir því næsta („Settu tha x m.kr. i omerktum sedlum undir bekkinn i austurhorninu a BSI klukkan tvo, annars heyrirdu mjukt malandi motorsud hennar ekki framar“) en það kom aldrei. Kannski átti ég að sækja þessa bannsettu hringitóna til að bjarga Mözdunni minni? Hún var alltént enn þar sem ég skildi við hana, og ómeidd.

Ég veit ekki um neitt samhengi sem gæti skýrt þetta — hef ekki rætt bílinn minn (sem mér þykir vissulega svolítið vænt um, svona að því marki sem mér þykir vænt um verksmiðjuframleidda dauða hluti almennt) við neinn síðustu daga.

Eina tengingin sem mér dettur í hug er að lokaprófið í Merkjum og kerfum var nýafstaðið þegar þetta sms barst; þetta gæti verið nemandi að hafa í hótunum við mig vegna yfirvofandi einkunnagjafar. Ég efa það samt. Eftir eitt misseri í Merkjum og kerfum á enginn eftir orku til illvirkja.

Skýringar óskast!

It’s a hard life being an absurd hero.
But it works wonders on your figure.

Today I finished writing an exam for my class.

If I’m counting right, I have now written thirteen exams. I have hated it every time. I’m pretty positive about work in general, but writing exams is nasty business. I enjoyed my work at Sómi, the sandwich factory, more. It consisted of standing at a table arranging condiments on bread. A variety of condiments, on various types of bread. And the sense of relief in being finished with the exam is nullified by the impending task of grading it. Because grading an exam is even less fun than writing it.

Giving lectures is a lot more fun — that is, of course, why I’m still teaching. I’ll bet Sisyphus gets a kick out of watching that rock roll down, too; thankfully both of my jobs feature a more favorable fun-to-strife ratio than his. One must imagine me happy.

There is a student survey at the end of each semester, so that we get feedback on our teaching. My students have left remarkably charitable comments through the years; I hope that keeps up. Makes my day every time.

This year, to encourage students to fill in the survey, the university is offering prizes: “Those students who participate in the survey have a chance of winning a 100-sheet print quota sponsored by the University IT Facility. One lucky participant wins every day.”

I bet that sent participation through the roof.

Some guy has taken it upon himself to declare this blog worth $1,693.62.

Any takers? I’m more than willing to sell it for that amount and start another one instead. In other words, my own estimate of its worth is lower. Significantly.

Of course, stuff is worth (in the fiscal sense) precisely what someone is willing to pay for it, no more, no less. So in the unlikely event that I find no buyers at this price, I’ll have to pronounce this blog value estimator a load of baloney a little flawed. But I think that was the author’s point too.

Skrímslið Styrmir

Lítið dæmi:

Það er engu líkara en Styrmir ritstjóri hafi tapað jafnvæginu þegar hann varð uppvís að því að vera partur af skrímsladeild Sjálfstæðisflokksins – enda var það ótrúleg upplýsing.

— af bloggsíðu Össurar Skarphéðinssonar

Hér er maður kallaður skrímsli fyrir vægast sagt óljósar sakir.

Össur vísar hér auðvitað í moldviðrið um það hverja Styrmir talaði við um Baugsmálið. En nákvæmlega hvaða tilteknu gjörðir Styrmis hafa skilgreint hann sem skrímsli? Ef gengið yrði á Össur með þessa spurningu (harla ólíklegt) yrði hann að drepa málinu á dreif og fara að tala á loðinn hátt um „óeðlilega aðkomu“ að málinu, og kannski svolítið um „andrúmsloft og jarðveg“. Hann sæi þó sóma sinn í að fara ekki að ræða svefnherbergið; Össur slettir ekki þess háttar leðju (þótt hann dái að sumu leyti þá sem það gera) — en hann slettir nú samt leðju.

(Hann má eiga að hann ræðir ekki kynlíf manna mikið, þótt hann sé svolítið hallur undir urriðaerótík.)

Auðvitað verður ekkert gengið á Össur með þetta, og þó svo færi myndi hann auðveldlega snúa sig út úr því. Leðjunni er slett, hann kemst upp með það, og það virkar. Hjá þeim sem lesa blogg Össurar lækkar Styrmir ómeðvitað pínulítið í áliti, að meðaltali. Andrúmsloftið verður honum dálítið þyngra og jarðvegurinn súrari. Pínulítil áhrif, en svo kemur næsta ómálefnalega leðjusletta einhvers staðar (kannski úr öðrum herbúðum á Össur), með svipuðum árangri, og svona gengur þetta. Almannaálitinu er hnikað fram og til baka með óljósum loðnum ad-hominem-árásum. Það er freistandi aðferð; að hnika því til með heiðarlegri málefnalegri rökræðu er nefnilega bölvað maus.

Eitt er að vanda öðrum ekki kveðjurnar, annað að vanda bara ekki málflutning sinn yfirleitt. Oft gerir þessi ástmaður urriðans vel í að vanda mönnum ekki kveðjurnar … en oft hefur hann líka vandað málflutning sinn betur en hér.

Hinn eini sanni Gulli Briem	Einhver allt annar Gulli Briem

Úr fimmtudagsmogganum:

[...] en með henni spila þeir Börkur Hrafn og Daði Birgissynir sem áður voru kenndir við Jagúar, Pétur Sigurðsson á bassa og okkar eini sanni Gulli Briem á trommum.

Hinn eini sanni! Eins gott að það verður ekki eitt af þessum bannsettu gervieintökum!

Mér er alveg sama. Eins og ég sé eitthvað sár? Ég er ekkert sár.

Some people might prefer to rephrase the question as “Does Bush read?” and regard it as rhetorical.

Lately I have been increasing the time I spend reading. I have been reading Chekhov, Proust, Breiðfjörð :), Einar Ben and plenty more … and all of these I chose simply because I had heard that they were worth my time, from people I trusted with that judgment. The choice of what to spend your time reading is a nontrivial one: we have a disastrously short time on this earth, and the number of books we can possibly read in our lifetimes is alarmingly minuscule compared to the number of books worth reading.

So here is an interesting project: Who Reads What? All kinds of well-known people (politicians, actors, writers, musicians) are asked for recommended reading, and their replies are published along with brief comments. What does Nelson Mandela recommend? How about John Kenneth Galbraith?

Sure, there are plenty of people recommending things like Tom Clancy novels, but there are interesting entries as well.

Yes, George W. Bush does have an entry in there … as “the governor of Texas.” It is from 1999, possibly before it was clear that he would run for president, so his answer is at least less likely to be written by a crack team of psychologists specializing in electoral profiling or PR, than if he were asked a year later or any time since.

There is a new list of dozens of people each year, and it’s been going since 1988, so there is a fair number of entries by now. This is an interesting collection to browse through, not only as a tiny peephole into the minds of well-known people, but also as input from people you respect into your own process of deciding how to spend your ridiculously small amount of reading time in the vast world of stuff to read.