Thursday 13 December 2001

Pic of the day: Princesses are for fairy tales and role playing games like Daggerfall here. In real life, other things count. Still, one can dream, right?

Princesses

In national news today: The only princess of Norway is engaged to marry some moderately successful writer whom people associate with illegal drugs. He's made some idyllic artistry about the stuff, and on the news today he refused to say whether he has used drugs himself. This is probably the right thing to do, if he wants to be controversial. That has been his style so far.

It is indeed so that the royal family is now getting more ordinary than ordinary people. I hope this is the last generation we need to feed them, since they now have pretty much established an impression that the way to get into the royal family is through doing drugs and macking out. Not that I want a president in their place, mind you. I want true democracy, which does not need rulers, only servants.

In a modern democracy, citizens would deposit their voting power with a trusted representative. The representatives would have votes accoring to the number of deposited votes at any given time, not one vote per representative like today. And in any given case, voters may withdraw or transfer their vote if they disagree with their voteholder. It would be a bit more complicated, but we do it all the time with money. It's not impossible, if we get fed up with the fat cats of politics. We have already made the monarchs powerless, even in the countries where they still persist. Why not do the same to the congressmen and members of parliament? Let them stay as decoration, but give the power to the people. And if you don't trust the people, find yourself another people.

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That's not why I have been humming this line from Norwegian artists Knutsen & Ludvigsen, though.

Kjære vakre prinsesse, du lagde reisen for lang.
Men vi skal komme og redde deg, kanskje, siden en gang.

(Dear beautiful princess, you made the travel too long.
But we shall come and rescue you, maybe, later some time.)

Knutsen og Ludvigsen, spøkelsestoget (The ghost train).

No, the reason I sing that is that I'm shelving the cute online game EverQuest, after a week of trying in various ingenious ways to get it to run. Bye bye Sony entertainment. Perhaps later sometime. Perhaps not. If you wonder what this has to do with princesses, you should remember that sometimes royalty is in the eyes of the beholder ...