2006: blogging

Here are my most visited blog posts from 2006:

1. Brattleboro nudity (849 hits)



2. Roskilde nude run again (285 hits)



3. Naked at Øya (258 hits)



4. Kristian Kjelling goes Beckham (233 hits)



5. More John Andresen (222 hits)



Somehow, I don't feel the whole bredth of my postings are represented here. Actually, it seems any postings which in any way concerns nudity are more likely to be read than any other post. Well, I shouldn't mind too much, I guess...

2006: music

What was the 2006 music year like?

Here are the five artists I listened to the most in 2006:
1 deLillos (451)
2 The Beatles (297)
3 Tre små kinesere (224)
4 Paul McCartney (222)
5 a-ha (180)
(This list is probably not too different from the list of last year or the year before that...)

And the top five albums:
1 The Monroes – Absolute Monroes (60)
2 Vømmøl Spellmannslag – Vømmølmusikken (54)
3 Simon & Garfunkel – The Concert in Central Park (45)
4 Morten Harket – Wild Seed (43)
5 a-ha – Hunting High and Low (39)

And the top five songs:
1 Marit Bergman – Shame on Me (27)
2 Shakira – Underneath Your Clothes (20)
3 deLillos – Min beibi dro avsted (19)
4 Maria Solheim – Too Many Days (17)
4 Dumdum boys – Splitter pine (17)

(all are courtesy of last.fm)

The list of my favorite five songs of 2006 is quite boring - it turns out that all of the top five songs are from the same album - deLillos' newest ("Suser videre"):
1. Jørgensen
2. Ny paraply
3. Regn
4. Du er min supermodell
5. Evig forelsket da

New seven wonders

new7wonders.com are holding a vote on which "wonders" existing today should be on a list of seven wonders - mimicking the famous wonders of the world form antiquity.

It's a cute idea. It draws attention to the task of preserving these "wonders" for posterity - especially since only one of the previous "seven wonders" exists today (the pyramids of Egypt).

The 21 "finalists" are the following - and I've put in bold writing the ones I've visited myself. (Which can be a cute little meme in itself, of course.)

The Acropolis
Hagia Sophia
The Kremlin/St. Basil's
The Colosseum
Neuschwanstein Castle
The Eiffel Tower
Stonehenge
The Alhambra
The Great Wall of China
Kiyomizu Temple
The Sydney Opera House
Angkor
The Taj Mahal
Timbuktu
Petra
The Pyramids of Giza
The Statue of Christ Redeemer
The Easter Island Statues
Machu Picchu
Chichen Itzá
The Statue of Liberty

My favorite would probably not be one of the places I've visited. Angkor, Taj Mahal or the Pyramids seem more worthy...

Christmas fog

Christmas fog
Originally uploaded by BjørnS.

After celebrating Christmas in Oslo, I visited my parents on Stange. Here's how (part of) Stange looked like this year - no snow, only fog (part of which had frozen to the ground...)

Not ugly, just not what we're used to...

My Amazon store

I've created My Amazon Store - which simply means that I will continually put my favorite books, movies and so on in a "store", so that it's easy to refer to them. (And of course, I earn some money if anyone really prefer my store to other stores...)

2006: photos

Here are my three most viewed photos (on Flickr) in 2006 (all are taken in 2006):







Ordering by "interestingness" (a Flickr concept), the top three of my 2006 photos are:







If I should pick my three favorite photos of 2006, however, it would look something like this:







(for instance...)

Click on photos to see larger versions.

2006: books

I've started to try to summarize 2006, and now it's time to look at the books I've read.

I've read only 19 books in 2006, according to my (maybe incorrect) notes. Of these, 9 are books by Alexander McCall Smith, whose books I obviously like a lot.

There are only two other books that I've read this year that I really feel like mentioning now at the end of the year: one is "The Joke" by Milan Kundera. I've enjoyed very much all the books I've read by him, and this one is no exception. At times funny, it still concerns the deepest possible questions - what makes us into the ones we are. Can a joke change our life?

The other book (which I've mentioned in this blog before) is "Mao: The Unknown Story" by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Although I've known a bit about Mao before, it's only after reading this book that I've realized what a monster he was. (And that is even after reading some of the criticism of the book, which does not really make me doubt that the overall picture of Mao in history books should be quite bleak.)

(Books are available from my Amazon store.)

2006: movies

Here's a list of the best movies I've seen in 2006 (these are all the movies that have gotten a "8" rating on my scale from 1 to 10 - no better movies this year I'm afraid...):

1. Atame!

2. Hedwig and the angry inch

3. Volver

4. My Father and My Son

5. Friends of Kim

6. Amateur

7. C.R.A.Z.Y.

8. Scoop

9. Brokeback Mountain

10. Mysterious Skin

11. Kiss kiss bang bang


(In the new version of Blogger, I no longer know how to link to previous posts - which would be nice in a post such as this. However, using the "search blog" at the top of this site, it's pretty easy to find all mentions of for instance "Brokeback mountain" in my blog. In the meanwhile, I'm waiting for input...)

Movie: Jumanji

Yes, these filmmakers found a setting for using the then-state-of-the-art special effects for an entire movie. 11 years later, the effects are not that mindblowing any more (I suppose they were considered good at the time). And sadly, the plot is mainly there so that we can see the effects. (To summarize the plot: someone throw a pair of dice, some special effects occur, another one throws a pair of dice, more special effects, and so on...)

Of course, the actors are good and the whole film team has probably done their best, so it's not a total catastrophe. It's just that it doesn't really engage me. (And seeing it on TV, with commercial breaks every half hour, doesn't help either.)




Jumanji (1995)
Directed by Joe Johnston
Main actors:
Robin Williams as Alan Parrish
Bradley Pierce as Peter Shepherd
Kirsten Dunst as Judy Shepherd
Bonnie Hunt as Sarah Whittle

Index

Sunset in Oslo

Sunset in Oslo
Originally uploaded by BjørnS.

Here's a little report from Oslo from less than an hour ago - a wonderful sunset viewed against the Ammerud blocks (Oslo's highest residental blocks).

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so maybe it's time to say

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!
to you all!

Alison Jackson's William

I'm reading an article on Alison Jackson's art. She takes photos of people who look like celebrities, recreating scenes from the popular imagination. Are the photos creating a feeling of reality, or do they just seem real because they portray what we already have thought about?

Cool photos, anyway.

Pope ranting on

According to many sources, for instance The Scotsman, the current catholic pope, Benedict XVI, has taken some time off from thinking about important things to give us his thoughts on gay and lesbian marriages. He is against. "This tacitly accredits those dismal theories that strip all relevance from the masculinity and femininity of the human being as though it were a purely biological issue," the pope said. Theories "according to which man should be able to decide autonomously what he is and what he isn't," end up with mankind destroying its own identity, he said.

Strange indeed. I have not chosen to be gay (although I am happy I am). I do have a strong identity, and part of that identity is being gay. I only ask the same legal rights as those who happen to be straight. Granting me this right should not in any way destroying anyone else's identity - let alone all mankind's identity...

Thank gods, I'm part of the majority of the world's population to whom this pope's world view is largely irrelevant.

Sunset

157_5708
Originally uploaded by BjørnS.

I thought I'd post one of my other photos from Gran Canaria. There are lots of holiday shots from my trip on Flickr, and I'll probably post more here in my blog as well. I really liked the beach in Las Palmas, which had great sand and a beautiful view...

Gran Canaria

154_5463
Originally uploaded by BjørnS.

I've been to Gran Canaria for a week with my boyfriend now - that's why I haven't been blogging. We stayed in an apartment in Las Palmas, and had fun shopping, eating and walking on the beach. A wonderful week and a nice escape from the snowless cold of Oslo this December.

Here's an evening shot of the beach next to our apartment.

Norway's most sexy heterosexuals

gaysir, Norway's main online community for gays, have had a poll on who is Norway's most sexy heterosexual in 2006. The poll raises the obvious questions ("How on Earth do they know that all these guys are heterosexual? Isn't it a known fact that some people are gay even though they don't say so publicly?"), and the obvious quarrels ("Why is xxx on this list? Why not yyy?"), but the list is nice, clean fun that doesn't hurt anyone.

2126 gays can certainly be wrong, but here is their verdict, anyway:


1. Andreas Thorkildsen 18 %



2. Christopher Dons 15 %


3. Aleksander Hetland 13 %


4. Per Ciljan Skjelbred 9 %


4. Nicolai Cleve Broch 9 %


6. Kristofer Hæstad 7 %


7. Kristian Ødegård 6 %


8. Tom-Erik Nilsen 5 %



9. Henrik Bjørnstad 4 %


10. Alexander With 3 %


10. Tom Stiansen 3 %


10. Sivert Høyem 3 %


13. Martin Andresen 2 %


14. Jon Hartvig Børrestad 1 %


14. Kristian Monsen Røkke 1 %