dfw

today, i went downtown to walk around in one of the few remaining, warm days of the fall. i was on the hunt for a book that i never did find, but i found a book by david foster wallace that i haven't had the pleasure of reading. for those of you who are unawares, david foster wallace killed himself last week. for those of you who don't know who he is, revel in the fact that wikipedia exists and google him.

i walked all around tanum books which is right down the street from the royal castle. i wandered around, read clips, and stumbled across consider the lobster.
after reading a few pages i bought it, headed home and read for about an hour and quickly sent an email to my friend who is viscerally pained by the passing of who he adoringly refers to as dfw.

"i started it. and i got this weird feeling. have you ever noticed the way you feel when you read the work of a young (or merely a living) writer -- it feels as though you are tapped into a reservoir that is somehow hanging above your head. gravity helps the flow of content just pour out in front of you and you lap it up in sort of a bacchanal celebration of things like the internet and water. but when you read something of tolstoy or dostoevsky that you have never read (or saved for later) you are slowly eating morsels of brilliance. maybe cookies your grandmother made last night, before she died this morning. and you savor them because you know that what was once a reservoir of immeasurable (and why would you ever even think of measuring it, even if they could?) contents is now limited, dry, and archived. thats how i feel while reading consider the lobster."

hotdogs and cold weather

It's getting cold in Oslo and I'm not sure that I'm emotionally prepared. My homepage has temperature readings from Singapore and Bay St. Louis and pretty soon I will most likely look at them with spite. Or maybe just fear. Okay, so its not that cold yet. But I can smell fall slash winter.

I wish I were joking, but today while headed to the subway two guys standing in front of a massive stack of boxes were passing out bags of...hot dogs. It was an advertising gimmick, in which the latest brand of hotdogs apparently lowers cholesterol. Norwegians love their hotdogs. At every gas station and convenience store hotdogs are pictured everywhere. Juicy pork dogs often times wrapped in bacon. It's pretty gross but also consistently hilarious. Watching a Norwegian with perfectly gelled blond hair an armani suit and louis vitton suitcase chowing down on a bacon wrapped hotdog while waiting for the tram in the city center is a sight to behold. And it's incredibly common.

Nice job on averting Gustav guys.

Apparently because the storm fizzled a bit and media coverage didn't last much longer than in took for news anchors rain jackets to dry out nonprofits that responded to the storm are going in debt to pay for the help they sent: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/05/AR2008090501624_2.html?hpid=topnews