oh well, so I am back once more, and the internet still is there. Actually I have been for a couple fo days, but I hadn’t really managed to settle in, and I was waiting for an article in the German Die Zeit on the Solid camp as the reporter spend a considerable amount of time trying to get into the details of my background. Now I wanted to link to it as Die Zeit comes out every Thursday. Well I haven’t found it yet online, and I don’t think the paper issue has arrived in Oslo yet, so I really don’t know how it went. It’s one of the first times that Solid has made it into Federal West German news, so I sure hope we’re doing good. The Norwegian Dagbladet also had a small interview with a couple of us on doing extra-curricular activities in an extra section on education, and that went ok. But then again, the Norwegian press tends to be quite a bit better than the Central European press.
Now summer is definetely over, and the Solid camp once again proved to be quite an experience.
Continue reading Love’s gone by
political history
Hehe. Just noticed this one: The Danish minority in Germany page on Wikipedia exists in four languages: German, Danish, French and English. But the contents are not EXACTLY copies of oneanother 🙂 . I guess that says quite something about just how politicized historical knowledge is:
Guess for yourself which of those I am mainly responsible for (wrote it many years ago)….
Left Party
While everybody got excited about the new “Left Party” growing into being East Germany’s biggest party about two weeks ago with 31% vs. 29% (CDU), this weeks results for East Germany are even more stunning:
Left Party: 33%
CDU: 27%
SPD: 27%
That is 6% to catch up on! Now we’re all waiting for it to hit the 50% mark within the next 10 years and lets sees those western politicians regret that they ever helped West Germany swallow the GDR.
For all of Germany the percentages are:
CDU: 42%
SPD: 28%
Left Party: 12%
Greens: 8%
FDP: 7%
or in other words: 49% for Merkel and 48% against. If it would happen to be that SPD, the Greens and the Left Party got a majority, I am sure that CDU and SPD will find oneanother. They have done that once before (1966-69) and back then CDU and SPD governed together with the FDP as the only opposition party. On oe hand they used that time to make laws that would let the government take away all kinds of democratic rights during “dangerous times” and they were planning on switching to the US election system (winner takes all) which would have meant that they probably would have been the ony two parties left in the future. Luckily they didn’t get that last point through. On the other hand, it was also then that the the Outer Parliamentary Opposition (APO) saw it’s birth. And to a large extend, that was what 1968 was all about in Germany.
In other words: exciting times lie ahead. By now I think it’s close to impossible to squeeze the Left Party under 5% before the elections, although I am sure they won’t be able to get all those 12%.
the end of work
…as we know it. well, that my big hope for right now. Now of course I don’t even have a job, nor a real position or anything, but work piles up nevertheless in some way or another. Now it’s only about 24h until I leave Oslo again. One rather short Norwegian week is about to end, and… oh yeah, I got a new design on this page. It’s not that beautiful and I have a lot of complaints myself, but it’s gonna have to stay that way until I return to my online access. I hope I get enough energy to actually write sensible stuff. I think I should write something about Copenhagen….
Continue reading the end of work
Elections everywhere! – Doing Europe at a S-P-E-E-D
Hey, ho. So I’m back in Oslo. Or rather, I take a tiny little break from my holiday in order to finish up some of my projects here that have been lying around most of this summer. Well, so it never ended up being France I went to. Instead, after demonstration against Bush in Copenhagen and visiting my grandmother and going to see my parents and hang around with my other grandmother in Sydslesvig for a few days, I went on to Berlin on “party business”. After visiting both comrades from Solid and high school class mates, I took the bus North towards Copenhagen to visit the Youth of the Enhedslisten, whom I had met during the Bush demonstration, at their summer camp in Viborg (Jutland). Unfortunately the bus was running late, so I stayed at my grand mothers over night before taking the train the next morning. Four days later, I went back to western Zealand only for a single day to celebrate my birthday (25!) with my parents, my sister, and two couples my parents age at the family’s summer house between Slagelse and Kalundborg, before leaving on the evening of my birthday to Copenhagen and taking the overnight bus back to Oslo. Puh! And now it’s all about getting everything fixed here for the next week, before I dip down into North-Central Europe one last time for this summer.
Continue reading Elections everywhere! – Doing Europe at a S-P-E-E-D
Bushmen & Princes
Ok, so I went to Copenhagen, Denmark for a few days. To celebrate George Bush’s birthday of course. The thing is that my Copenhagen trips have gotten a whol e tradtion to them. The first element is the “de-Norwegination” of my thought process. It’s not something I want to do, but it just always ends up happening no matter how long I have stayed in Norway. This time I hadn’t been outside the country sicne February, but it still somhow happened… luckily I seem to slide back into the Norwegian way once I return.
Continue reading Bushmen & Princes
summer’s gone…
Ok, so it’s only 2:12AM on July 4th, and you would think summer has just begun, right? wrong! Or at least not for me, my sumemr is over, or my Norwegian sumemr at least. It’s actually not before tonight that I realized that this is my last night in Norway, as I’ll be taking the bus to Copenhagen tomorrow night.
Continue reading summer’s gone…
Summer slump
Ok, so another few days have passed by, another few things have been finished up (see fx KonturDebatt nr.1), but today was the first day for a long time during which I had moments that I didn’t have much use for. Or rather, I chose not to use them for anything productive. I still have quite a lot of computer work that I have to do, but the deadlines are moving increasingly more distant…
Continue reading Summer slump
Another Friday night, and nothing but work…
hmm, so there we are again, it’s Friday night, and I’m sitting in fon tof the computer linign up the various papers I have to do before sunrise. Somehow I’ve ended up with another huge stack of computer related jobs that are not the least bit exciting. And that in the few months that the sun is actually out in this country. And of course, it’s all non-paying, and the current course of history (the no-votes in France and the Netherlands) have transformed my monthly Danish student stipend into a much smaller amount of Norwegian crowns. But oh well, I will survive that as well. And then I’m really not in it for the money, so as long as I survive in some way or another, who cares.
Continue reading Another Friday night, and nothing but work…
Ok, so our action out at Drøbak to try to stop the U.S.S. Saipan from entering the Oslo Fjord got quite some coverage last week, as well as our protests against the visit of “Defense Secretary” Rumsfeld. Head on over to blindernfred.org to see more on the matter, and also the programming of pensjonsomkamp.no as well as the student parliament elections and the setting of this year’s social anthropological yearbook have been taking quite a lot of time.
Other than that, I have been quite busy with school, amongst other things, turning in my master thesis. Now all I wait for is the oral exam that is to come up on the 20th. I have no ida what to expect, so I’ll just have to hope I can answer some of the commision’s questions.