A common complaint, I know, but I really feel like any one of these avocations could take up most of my free time. I can probably manage to do one and a half of them well, simultaneously ( Read more... )

The pound-to-krona exchange rate is absolutely ruinous at the moment. I may have obsessively visited Iceland during the roughly five years when it was actually financially possible for me to do so.

This has not stopped me buying Icelandic books, as I have to read something (logical fallacy ahoy), but I've decided not to go for that Dracula ( Read more... )

When you wake up at 6am on a Saturday morning because you're so eager to get on with weekend fannish things...

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I was researching collections of Harry Potter translations (as you do) and discovered that the translator of Harry Potter into Faroese is Gunnar Hoydal, a Nordic Council Literary Prize nominated author ( Read more... )

As I recently learned from a Tweet by Jon Gnarr, Iceland's tourist numbers have literally tripled since 2010 (which is, incidentally, the first year that I visited ( Read more... )

New Icelandic word of the day: gluggaveður, literally 'window-weather.' The sort of weather that looks great from your window, but is best enjoyed indoors. (I suspect that the Icelanders have particular use for this word ( Read more... )

Usually I'm against the 'everyone-is-beautiful' rhetoric because it seems to make beauty into a ruling arbiter of value. I feel it would be more productive, ultimately, to argue that beauty is not what determines whether someone is desirable, lovable, worthy of notice, or valuable as a person ( Read more... )

Over the past few weeks I've been feeling particularly cross about the short daylight hours. Maybe this is because I didn't spend the past two winters in the UK, although it's not as if northern New England has lots of daylight at this time of year either. For whatever reason I've been feeling hard done by: one should be able to get up at 7am ( Read more... )

Spent a lovely few hours in Oxford today, poking around in an undirected way and generally enjoying the sunny weather.

I discovered a shop behind the Covered Market called Objects of Use. Hipsterish to the extreme, all about that fetishisation of the "authentic," "natural" (and needless to say expensive) physical object. But they also have really ( Read more... )

When the pharmacy on the corner has a framed Arabic text hanging to one side of the counter and a sign in the window saying "free emergency contraception for under 18s."

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