Wednesday 3 March 1999

Pic of the day: Bought yet another Sandemo book. This one is called "Mørket" (The Darkness) and is no 15 in the series "Lysets Rike" (The Kingdom of Light).
For the poor people who don't know her (usually by virtue of not being Scandinavians) Margit Sandemo is a prolific writer of romantic fantasy, or something. Her stories are a unique blend of teen-girl romantic, almost-explicit erotic, and dreamlike magic. Here are good magicians (including a very sympathetic son of Lucifer), nature spirits, lemurians and aliens, and almost everyone is falling madly in love sooner or later. Not necessarily within their own species.
The books are reasonably short and cheap. They are also written rather obviously with the not overly bright female reader in mind. And they sell like wild wild wildfire. I find this encouraging: If she can sell like that, I should be able to publish some of the dubious literature that I've churned out over the years, too. If I ever get desperate enough.

Nice to know that the people in the Central Bank of Norway read my diary first thing they do in the morning. I posted yesterday's insightful analysis of Norwegian economy a bit after midnight, and this morning they lowered interest rates by 0.5 %pt. Quick reaction. :)
Actually, I guess we're simply seeing things in pretty much the same way. And unlike me, they have the power to reward the labor unions for their sudden bout of moderation. And to punish them when they fail to keep it up.

This morning I had a long dream, in which I and my friends and family were hanging out with Saddaam Hussein. It so happened that my brother was Saddaam's most trusted servant. (This will usually be a temporary position with that kind of people.) Planning a desperate military solution to Iraq's predicament, the dictator turned to one of the world's greatest geniuses - namely me - to evaluate his strategic plans. Plans that were doomed from the start, and there were not really much to do about that. But it's sort of hard to tell that to a guy like him. It certainly requires a careful choice of words. Luckily, in the dream the man knew enough English and French that we could comminicate. Still, it required some hard concentration, and so I woke up very tired when the dream did finally end.
In retrospect, I noticed that neither my brother nor my mother (who I also saw there) looked anything like any members of my actual family. Nor was my name ever mentioned, so I assume that I was again dreaming someone else's dream.

As for my tax return form (for those who wonder) it ended up as a compromise that neither my conscience nor my reason liked, though my conscience got the fatter deal, definitely. Yes, I would most certainly have bought all the literature anyway. On the other hand, I've spent a lot of money to become able to make those programs in the first place. Money that I'll never get back in any way.

I really don't have the space for a full blown rant, but I hate the way our tax system treats education as a personal expense, whereas any extra money you might wring out of it is taxable. If those blue-collar workers had to buy their own machines, they would throw sledgehammers at any politician who told them that it was private expenses and non deductable. For those who wield knowledge as their tool, this is a given.
On the bright side, this could be a sign that our representative democracy, such as it is, is actually working. Since the law is stupid, it is presumably made by stupid representatives, which means that they really ARE representative of the majority. (Present company excepted, of course. I know you would never have voted for such an awful law.)