Johannes Wilm - a blog on social science, activism, politics, programming, etc.

Johannes Wilm

Author: johanneswilm

  • Social Anthropological Yearbook 2005

    It took quite a while, and it used up quite a bit of my summer this year. But now it is out: The Norwegian Social Anthropological Yearbook 2005!

    Besides trying to teach poetry analysis and US history to a 12th grade, trying to finish my master thesis before November 15th, producing a bunch of mid-term papers, engaging in minor political struggles on institute and university level as well as planning for those on an even higher level, helping to get the distribution of this book going has been my main occupation lately. I personally have contributed with a few months of setting plus one article which tries to compare Douglas and Flensburg in a Marxist analysis, and then there are twenty other articles from all over the country (and yes, they’re all a lot better than mine, but nobody dares say anything cause they’re afraid to loose their setter for next year’s edition)! So please, go on and buy it (click on it)! It’s only 100 NOK for those of you who are are in Oslo (you can get it at the institute office), but we’ll send it anywhere if only you pay the postage. We have already received orders the anthropological institutes from the universities of Bergen, Oslo and Copenhagen, so hey, we’re important. 😛

  • Olaf Hansen, your dog misses you!

    Olaf Hansen's dog? It's really my parent's Rita!
    Olaf Hansen’s dog? It’s really my parent’s Rita!

    As some of you probably know, we just got a new government in Norway, and so now the “Socialist Left Party” is part of the government. While they held talks, we were a few that did some theatric action around the place where they were talking (seepost a few days ago).

    Well, now they are finished talking and have released a new plan for the Norwegian part of the occupation force in Iraq. The plan is now to leave a grand total of 1 soldier in Iraq. Yes, you read correctly, there will be a Norwegian occupation force of ONE (O-N-E) soldier in Iraq!

    Now, this is ridiculous, and of course it’s meant to be just too little for anybody in Norway getting mad at it, while Bush can still list Norway as a supporter on his “war on terror” in Iraq.

    Now what should we do about it?
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  • Mobile stolen!

    I didn’t think Norwegian subways could get that crowded, nor that they could ever pose a threat to me in any way. But unfortunately, on Friday my mobile phone disappeared while I took the subway just one single station. I started calling it immediately, but nobody took it.
    Fortunately I can check online who I have been calling, and so I could see the following three numbers having been called since Friday 1600, when I lost the phone: +48774162530, +48888203385 and +4798416477. The first two numbers are in Poland, and the person on the third number either speaks only Polish or pretends to only speak Polish.
    Anyway, I find it fair to suspect that it is some poor Polish migrant worker who probably only needs it to call back home, and given the wage level that it has been revealed several of them receive here in Norway, I can totally understand that.
    But when I lost the phone, there were about 150kr on it, and now there are about 74kr on it, so at the current rate it will probably be empty within a day or two. And by then I’d rather want it back then ending up in some trash can, with my entire address book and everything. So if you have any knowledge of Polish, or just some spare time that you don’t mind using on the phone, just start caloling those above numbers. My mobile number is +4794352594, by the way.

  • Caro-song

    I just got this from another Caro-fan (see a few posts below). It’s the text for the Caro advertisement that was send in TV (and radio?) advertisement in the late 1980s (maybe also somewhat later). You have to know German to understand it of course.

    Ich mag das Schöne dieser Welt, ich mag den Wind im Roggenfeld
    – Ich mag es, wenn der Tag erwacht
    Und die Sonne dazu lacht
    Ich mag Plaudern am Nachmittag, Obstkuchen mit Schlag
    – Ich mag die Lichter meiner Stadt
    Diskutieren bis in den Tag
    Lass mich von deinem Duft verführ’n
    Deine Wärme spür’n
    – Caro, ich mag dich! Du bist einfach gut!

    But the important part is anyways not the text in itself – the important part is the time period that West Germans connect to it.
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  • BureauCRAZY!

    Oh my, these last two experiences really made me loose the last little bit of faith in “the system” (OK – granted, that’s a lie, I lost that quite a long time ago, but it makes it sound more dramatic). It’s really not meant to be read all the way through- if you fall off some time in there you really got my main point 🙂

    UiO Administration Building - straight from hell!
    UiO Administration Building – straight from hell!

    The situation that I want to tell you about is about a friend of my from Douglas, AZ. I met him there when he was about to graduate high school, and now he has been attending Cochise College for almost three semesters. He has good grades and all, and he thought that he could just come over here under whatever program they have in place. So he asked me to find out what possibilities there are, and this is where the fun starts… We have this building called the “Administration building” and it looks very much the way I remember the office building that Asterix and Obelix (a very popular comic book series in Europe) have to enter in their tour to Rome when they have to get just one form for some reason, but they are send back and forth and up and down the stairs as they always need just one more form to get the form they request, etc. .

    Now I don’t know whether they modeled the comic drawings after our building or whether they build our admin building according to the comic or whether simply all bureaucrats make their buildings look that way, but the similarity seems striking to me.
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  • Chanceloress Merkel!

    Angela Merkel - stalinist by heart!
    Angela Merkel – stalinist by heart!

    As most of you probably got by now will Germany’s next chancellor be a female – Angela Merkel. Although she represents the Christian democrats (=Conservatives), she has a past from the political system of the former East Germany (DDR). In the youth organization Free German Youth (FDJ), she was a “secretary for agitation and propaganda”. Now whether that was on a local level or on a higher level seems to be hard to figure out. In either case, that position is something that you wouldn’t just do, if you didn’t believe in the system on some level. So she is not the first woman to take that post – she will also be Germany’s first Stalinist to become chancellor! Congratulations!
    In general, the elections went just as I had predicted, with the Left Party gaining enough votes to make both a Social-democratic/Green and a Christian-democrat/Libertarian coalition impossible. However, what I had not believed was that Schröder would completely ignore the Socialists. This means that the majority that SPD/Green and Left Party hold will actually turn into a government with the CDU having the upper hand.
    However, I certainly hope Bavaria’s arch-conservative Stoiber is right in predicting a radicalization of the masses. This should hopefully mean an even bigger Left Party next time, but even more importantly it should mean the build up of an opposition movement outside the parliament. And I must admit that I am impressed by the German left – they usually seem to have so little interest in cooperating and they split all the time over the most bizare issues. But right now they really look like they are about to make it! Congratulations!

  • Free!

    My home - the silo
    My home – the silo

    “Finally Free,” I thought this morning upon waking up. Although I had predicted the passing away of summer since about mid august on this blog, it was a much freer Johannes that woke up this morning and realized that fall had finally invaded Oslo. Or lets call it autumn, and lets say “arrived” and not “invaded.” Cause this is a happy event. Yesterday two things happened: we had the release party of the social anthropological yearbook (which I have been using most of July through September to set, have been co-editor and written an article in).

    Johannes Wilm - a free man
    Johannes Wilm – a free man

    The other thing was not quite so funny, as yesterday was the end of an era. I dropped out of the coordinating group of Attac Blindern. I had been sitting there since last December, and I felt that I had been doing an overly large proportion of the work connected to it. And also, we really didn’t manage to get new people active within Attac. We were only a handfull of activists a few years back (2001), that together started Attac at the univeristy – even before it was started nationally. But then the bureaucrates started moving in. While most of my former co-activists have left Attac a long time ago and have been denouncing it as a career-building project for single individuals, I tried to cross some fo the divide, after returning from Douglas, AZ and the experience of a place with no anti-capitalist left to speak of at all.
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  • doing the “confused professor”

    Ha! Finally I got my neighboor to speak again – at least a few sentences. The occasion this time was that I had forgotten a frozen pizza outside of our door in the hall way. “Is this yours?,” she asked – thereby breaking several weeks of silence. “Ehm… yes” – I had actually been looking for it for several minutes. She gave me the “you are freaking weird”-look while handing me the pizza. But of course that was not all cause the next thing was that she was about to enter the bathroom: “If you need to shower, just remove those,” I said while pointing at the five wet pink all-body suits that were hanging in the shower. Apparently that was no weirder than leaving a frozen pizza in the hall way, so she just said: “In fact, I do have to shower.” And after another few words exchanges she moved into the shower, putting away those pink suits.

    Johannes Wilm on his knees
    Johannes Wilm on his knees

     

    Now of course, you might ask, why did I have five pink suits in my shower? And how do I communicate with my neighboor without using words? And why does the picture seem to be completely unrelated?

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  • My grandma rides her bike no more

    I crashed my bike last night while riding around inner Oslo on my way home from the university. Or rather, I couldn’t handle it for a few split seconds after shifting gears as somehow the chain got loose. I managed to get home and scared one person that I had chosen to tell about it over mobile messaging, just in case I had some more severe commotio cerebri that would make it impossible for me to communicate this morning in which case the person could call the ambulance the net day. Of course nothing happened,and so I’m sitting here with nothing left but a right foot with a few scrapes which renders me sick enough not to make plans to leave this room too much for the next day or so.

    Grossmutti & me in Rostock, January 2004
    Grossmutti & me in Rostock, January 2004

    It is much worse with my grandmother. My grandmother has been living on her bike. And now she won’t be able to ride it any more. My grandmother without a bike? Not something I can think of. But she likes to ride trains too – usually along that route that she fled along on her bike during the end of WWII.
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  • Oslo Oslo Oslo

    Another thing I was thinking about in connection with my trip to bergen is the extreme focus all other regions in Norway put on Oslo – at the same time as they really don’t like it at all.

    They were all very certain that in Oslo you can get killed by just walking out on the street and living for them was apparently all about moving back out into the middle of nowhere where they were born after finishing their education in the nearest town with a population just large enough to provide for a college.

    The most amazing thing about these misconceptions of Oslo is that Norway is incredibly Oslo-focused.

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