Tuesday 25 November 2003

Pic of the day: Look, it's a new ...

Watch this time

Notable event of the day: I handed in my wristwatch for repairs. It was just a tiny little thing: The small golden bar that represents 12 had come loose. It would from time to time get stuck in the hands of the clock, making it stop. An unreliable watch can be worse than no watch at all, so after some months I finally went back to the shop and asked them to fix it. This would take two days, so I went over to a competing shop and bought a digital watch. I could have bought one at the first shop, but that would send the wrong signal: That if you make your customers wait a couple days, they will buy more. I prefer to send the signal that if you don't fix things at the spot, customers may take their business elsewhere. I doubt they pick up the hint, but it still felt good.

The digital watch looks cheaper than it was. It probably is cheap, it's just that the specialist shops have a high mark-up. But at least it is a Casio, which I have only the best experiences with. My pocket PC is a Casio Cassiopeia E-125, and it works flawlessly. I have also had Casio calculators and they lasted until they were obsolete or lost. Perhaps I have just been lucky, but in that case I cheerfully expect to continue to be lucky as far as Casio equipment is concerned. And it beeps every hour, a small discreet beep. I also looked at a wristwatch with GPS. But frankly, I find beeping once an hour more useful. I don't travel a lot, but the hours do.

Like most other civilized nations, I'm sure, Norway has a couple radio broadcasters that send a short news bulletin every whole hour. Which is exactly when my wristwatch beeps. That's nice, because it makes it easy to remember to listen to the news. So what's new in Norway? Well, today it seems to be the national party politics. For the first time in my lifetime, I believe, the Labor Party (Social Democrats) has struck an agreement with the sitting center right government about the national budget. People are generally very satisfied.

Very dissatisfied is the Progress Party. This was originally a right-wing party roughly patterned on the Republican Party in the USA, except they support Norway's monarchy instead of a republic. The party has gradually degenerated into reckless populism, even more so than their inspirator. They want to spend a lot of money and lower taxes too. The party leader may be smarter than George W. Bush, but the rest of the party's politicians generally make up for it. They had announced well in advance that they expected the minority government to turn to them for support... and then they would turn it down and vote the government out of power, to replace it with an even weaker Labor government which they would then torment until the next general election. It was a great plan for them, strategically... if they had not told the newspaper about it. Now they are all very angry at the government for allying with Labor instead.

There is also a heated debate about whether a gossip magazine should qualify for the tax break given to newspapers, now that it is published twice a week. The results so far is a no. But I can see how it can be hard to differentiate between politics and entertainment... Something to watch, indeed.