Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

People are weird... II

There was more to this story.

There was no man selling books. The woman made it up.

The police says the woman was hurt, but they don't know how it happened. They call it a 'personal tragedy'.

The police also says it's important "to let people know that there is no need to worry if someone comes to your house wanting to sell something. At least we have no reason to believe they will fire a gun at you."


The two things that surprised me;
a) someone wants to sell books and they shoot you?
b) you've been shot in the leg and you go to bed?

are not quite as surprising anymore since;

a) no one selling anything shot anyone
b) she had her reasons not to tell anyone

A personal tragedy...

Do you know this picture?

I think I found it in a Google search a couple days ago. When I clicked for the original version, there was something else on the page and this picture was nowhere to be found. I just have the little version shown in the search results and I'm trying to figure out what it is, where it's from.

It's beautiful, isn't it?

People are weird...

You're a 58-year old woman. You live in Norway, close to Bergen. You're at home when someone rings your doorbell, you go to open the door. There's a man there, mid 20s, wanting to sell you some books. You talk for a couple of minutes and you decide you don't want to buy anything. He pulls out a gun and shoots you in the leg.

What do you do?

You go to bed. Your husband/son finds you two hours later, calls the police and an ambulance. They send a helicopter, you are transported to the hospital where you go into surgery.


Erm... This happened today and I can't do anything but say I am mildly shocked because;
a) someone wants to sell books and they shoot you?
b) you've been shot in the leg and you go to bed?

There must be something more to this story...

How old are you?

My sister and I were out in the driveway playing basketball when the little girl next door and another girl went past on their bikes. I asked my sister how old the girl (our neighbour) is and she said "4...5...maybe 3". Then the two little girls came up to our lawn, going "Hello! Hello!". My sister asked "Hey, how many years are you?" The girl said "Four!". Her friend (another neighbour's granddaughter, visiting for Easter) said "I'm this many!" and held up her hand.

Didn't make us much wiser though.
She was wearing a mitten.

Implicit Association Test

I've been reading a bit in my Exploring Social Psychology book by David Myers the past days. After reading each Module, sort of like a short chapter, there are exercises we can do on a cd. I took the Implicit Attitudes Test that may show whether I really feel about things the way I think I feel about them, or whether I, for example, prefer whites to blacks, men to women, while claiming otherwise.

• The first test told me this:
  
  Results: Slight preference for African American
  
  Along with 6% of the more than one million people who have taken this test (this is a real test used for psychological research), I have a slight automatic preference for black people.
  
  If your test results showed a preference for a certain
  group, you may have a hidden, or unconscious, bias
  in favor of that group. The results of more than one
  million tests suggest that most people have unconscious
  biases. For example, nearly two out of three white
  Americans show a moderate or strong bias toward,
  or preference for, whites, as do nearly half of all black
  Americans.

• The second test then told me this:
  
  Results: Moderate association between Male and Career
  
  The same as 15% of the others who took this test. I'm not surprised. A little disappointed maybe, but not surprised.
  
  The gender IAT often reveals an automatic, or
  unconscious, association of female with family and male
  with career. These associations are consistent with
  traditional gender stereotypes that a woman's place is in
  the home rather than the workplace (and vice-versa for men).

So 6% and 15%... I'm not like most people.
Then again, I'm not American.

Wanna see how you do? Understandingprejudice.org
I'd do it if I were you.

Auburn

Auburn = (chestnut) brown

Says my sister's English-Norwegian/Norwegian-English dictionary, after I translated "(kastanje)brun" into "(chestnut) brown".

Auburn is brown. A shade of brown. Here is a chestnut.



This looks kinda red to me. But at least it's not orange!


My sister's dictionary has cartoons in it. Calvin and Hobbes cartoons. No fair. I've been reading in the dictionary (yes it's a hobby, reading dictionaries) and these cartoons are nothing like any other Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip I have ever seen. All the others have been horrible big things, colours here and there, big pictures where you don't figure out which one to read first. These are great though, three or four little squares, maybe this is how they were to begin with...


Here's a pumpkin.

Fashion from Lisbon

Nipples are in this year

A while ago I posted something on Galliano's fashion show in Paris.
This weekend designers presented their Autumn/Winter 2005 stuff in Lisbon and I noticed a few things I'd like to share;

Strategically placed flowers by Jose Antonio Tente
(kinda cute, but when do you wear it?)
See-through knight-like thing by Lidija Kolovrat
(a little exposed?)
Purple dress by Nuno Baltazar
(I love this picture! ...except for the fur...)
Photo that cold pass for art, creation by Nuno Baltazar
(although I saw some nicer blue shoes on here..)
. by Katty Xiomara
(need I say anything?)

Fashion can be fun but... I think I'll stick with this cool new shop I found - cheap and fun is the way to go. At least I can afford to cover up properly - would get a little cold walking around like that here, don't you think?

Health Insurance anyone?

From: Health Card USA
Subject: Affordable Health Care has Arrived



I just found this in my Hotmail Junk E-mail Inbox. I was talking about this with my mum the other day - she's had a couple operations on her arm and I was wondering how our system really works, what does she have to pay?

It works like this: You have a card 'worth' about 250 USD (1,500 NOK). When you go to the doctor or the hospital, you have to pay a certain amount, and they put that on your card. My mum has gone to the hospital twice and had two operations - she has to pay some of the tickets to go there, and a 250 NOK fee at the hospital. They write that down on her card. I asked her what happens when she has spent all the 1,500 NOK on her card, when she has paid that much for her tickets, hospital visits, operations, medication. What happens when there's no more 'space' left on her card?

Then everything is free. You should not spend more than 250 USD a year for your health care. The state takes care of the rest. And as if that's not enough, if you have children under the age of 16, their medication and hospital visits are put on your card and count towards your 'maximum spending limit' of 250 USD. What happens if you have a disease and you need medication, but you can't afford it? Well... that just can't happen here.

"So what about health insurance?" I asked my mum. "Well.. I don't know.. do we have something called health insurance?" "I don't know." "I don't think there is something called health insurance.."

I checked it out and found that the biggest insurance companies simply don't have something called 'Health Insurance' or anything like it. However, I did read that some people (2.2%) have got some kind of health insurance, it was a big news article from a year ago, focusing on why people felt they needed it, and I tracked down one company that sells it, and this is what it covers;

• Critical disease - if you get a serious disease (one of 16), they pay you a certain amount of money
• International Hospital Insurance - you get to choose where you want to be treated abroad (if you choose the 'full coverage' type of insurance)
• Scandinavian Hospital Insurance - you get to choose where in Scandinavia you want to be treated

So yeah... extra money if you get seriously ill, or the right to be treated abroad. That's what the health insurance (Vital Forsikring) I could find, covers. I assume they also pay if you decide to go to a private hospital.

But I think it says a lot about how well off we are, how our system works, when insurance companies don't offer health insurance and people don't know what it is, this thing that is so necessary in other countries. I remember watching or reading something, and from time to time there's always someone who mentiones something about insurance, and a typical illustration of how poor and 'careless' a young student might be, is that he or she doesn't even have health insurance!

Well... I don't have it either. I don't need it. And not because I won't get sick. But because if I do get sick, getting treatment, operations, medication, isn't something I should have to worry about. That's what our government does for us. What does your government do for you?

Ice outside

I wanted to play basketball today. But there's so much ice on the ground in the driveway, I decided to go out and see what I could do to get it off. No one seemed to like my idea of putting hot water on there; the temperature drops well below the freezing point in the evening and therefore it wouldn't have been a good idea. I rounded up my siblings and we went into the garage to find whatever would get ice off stone.

The ice was really thick some places and thin others; we got some off but when the sun went down it didn't seem like it had worked at all. Not like we thought we'd get it all off in just an hour or so, I just get these ideas sometimes... My sister and I used brooms to get the snow and ice away so we could see how much was left. We found a footprint, a weird one, my sister went into the hallway and threw shoes outside, I checked to see if they were the ones that had made the weird print. We felt like archeologists for a few minutes - archeologists trying to hit each other with shoes. We never did find the right ones though...

Just three more days till spring is supposed to be here - can you believe it? It's March! The winter is almost over. Spring... flowers, leaves, grass! I can't wait!

It's amazing how tired just being here makes me - I didn't get up until lunch time today, although I spent quite a while in bed between waking up and getting up, just dreaming... It's not even midnight now and I'm exhausted! Maybe it's because I can't sit still when I'm here.

I should be reading, two months till exams, but I just can't concentrate - for some reason my mind is anywhere but here. If you want to be with someone but the distance between you makes it impossible, it's always good to have dreams.