Doing my part to save some trees

I don’t remember the exact date I stopped printing out paper copies of most of the scientific articles, manuscripts, grant applications and other documents that are sent to me for review and editing. I do know that I have been doing my part to save trees on this planet for many years now by not printing out paper copies of every document or article that is sent to me or that I come across during my online travels. I am always surprised when a student tells me, as happened yesterday, that she has misplaced the only copy of a manuscript draft that was edited as a paper copy and given back to her by her supervisor. When I asked if she couldn’t just check her email to access the edited document again, my assumption being that her supervisor does as I do—edits and comments an article draft via ‘track changes’ in Word and then saves it as a computer file--the answer was that her supervisor doesn’t edit/review documents on the computer. She edits and comments in the margins of a paper version of the article and gives it back to the student this way. So if that paper version gets misplaced, I understand how it could be a problem for the student. One could hope that her supervisor made a paper copy of her edits before she gave the edited article back to her student.

I know there are mixed opinions among academics about reading and editing manuscripts on your computer prior to their submission for publication. Personally, I like doing both on my computer. I have no problems following an article’s logic and buildup on my computer screen, and I love having ‘track changes’ available to me so that I can edit manuscript drafts onscreen if that is the task at hand. In the old days, an edited manuscript that you had gotten back as several copies from your co-authors could be a daunting proposition to tackle; some of them were a mess in terms of the pencil scribbles in the margins, the curlicue arrows directing you to move this paragraph to another page or to a paragraph below on the same page, comments at the top of the page telling you what to consider to include in the next draft, and so on. It is no easier to go painstakingly through such an edited manuscript than it is to correct a manuscript edited through ‘track changes’. In fact, I think the latter is much easier; you can choose to accept or delete inserted or deleted text, you can accept or reject format changes, and you can move text around as you like and still see where you removed text from in the final version.   

I also no longer print out the pdf versions of published articles; I read them online as well. It is a rare occurrence these days for me to print out an article; if I do, it is usually an extensive review article. I simply don’t see the point anymore of wasting all this paper. Additionally, the articles of interest are freely available for the most part, so that there is no danger of getting access to an article and then suddenly losing that access. One can get around this problem anyway by saving a version of the pdf file on your own computer to peruse at a later date. I am one of those people who welcome a paperless workplace and household. Offices stay neater as do homes, a win-win situation all around. 

Buying it on Amazon (or how I avoid paying high Norwegian prices)

I thought I’d put in my two cents concerning the discussion about how expensive it is to be a tourist in Norway. There have been a number of recent articles about exactly this topic—how expensive it is to travel in Scandinavia, and especially in Norway—and some of them are pretty funny, at least to me, since I recognize my own reactions (and a bit of shock) to much of what is written in them. Try this recent article, for example http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/scandinavia-on-125-a-day/?hpw). Tourists are not the only ones who are shocked at the high cost of living here; I’ve lived here for twenty-two years and I’m still often taken aback at how much things cost. It’s not so much housing prices (which are comparable to Manhattan and other large cities around the world), but it’s other things, like cars, eating out, gasoline, groceries and other necessities. However, a number of low-price supermarkets have sprung up in Oslo in recent years; here you can find some bargains and that’s always a good thing. Prices in Norway for different items can be shocking; you need to take a deep breath at times and stop converting the prices to American dollars if you’re an American expat. Because if you continue to convert, you will realize how much money you are really paying just to live, and it’s not to live extravagantly. For example, if you convert, you will find that you are paying twenty dollars for one, I repeat, one dental floss dispenser at local pharmacies. It doesn’t matter where you are—in the rich or less rich city areas—prices are the same. And the dental floss is not manufactured in Norway, it is imported. It is good old Johnson & Johnson dental floss that you can find on Amazon for a fraction of the Norwegian price. In fact, a package of six dental floss dispensers (100 yards each, more or less the same size as what is available for sale here), costs about twenty dollars on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Reach-Dentotape-Designed-spaced-Unflavored/dp/B003XDVERE/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1). In other words, you’re being suckered if you pay that price for one floss dispenser in this country. So guess who recently ordered dental floss from Amazon. Even if I pay international shipping costs, which are not much, the total price for six dispensers is still much cheaper than what I would pay for one here in Oslo. And so it goes. Take aspirin. Genuine Bayer aspirin (325mg 200 coated tablets) on Amazon costs 9.47 dollars (http://www.amazon.com/Genuine-Bayer-Aspirin-Tablets-Coated/dp/B001LFG0OI/ref=pd_sim_hpc_1); at an online Norwegian pharmacy, I can get a package of 20 aspirin tablets (440 mg) for 7 dollars. It borders on the ridiculous. Of course, healthcare costs are ‘lower’ in this country than in the USA; but wage earners in Norway pay for universal healthcare through their taxes (at present, the sales tax is 25%), as well as taxes on gasoline, liquor, and cigarettes. I don’t have a problem with paying taxes to fund universal healthcare (something Americans should think more about so that healthcare became more accessible to all), but just so the point is made—healthcare is not free in this country by any stretch of the imagination. Nothing in this world comes for free. But it would be nice not to have to pay through the nose for some basic items like dental floss and aspirin. So whenever I am in the USA, I stock up on such things; it’s worth it. Norwegians pay their taxes willingly, but never believe for one second that they don’t want a bargain if they can get one. Those Norwegians who live on the east side of the country save money by shopping for groceries and liquor in Sweden, where prices are much cheaper. And when they travel, they stock up on duty-free items (e.g. liquor and tobacco products) on their return. And duty-free prices are still expensive, just considerably less expensive than the usual prices. 

Why are prices so high? Someone is getting rich, and it’s not the average consumer. But if you take a look at the incomes of the owners of the major supermarket chains in this country, that will shed some light on the matter. They are quite wealthy; in fact, they are some of the wealthiest people in this country. They control the food prices; the farmers who are always being blamed for the high price of food do not. Farmers are subsidized in many countries; it’s a tricky and difficult profession and I don’t begrudge them the subsidies if this is what helps them to live and as long as the subsidies are reasonable. I have a problem with the middlemen—that group of people who bring the consumer goods to us. Again, I don’t mind paying a 15% or 20% markup so that they can make some profit from importing goods for us to buy. I mind when the markup is 300% or 600%. There is no reason other than pure profit that dental floss and aspirin cost the exorbitant prices they do at present. It reminds me of how middlemen have milked my own profession for years and made huge profits. The suppliers of medical research items like antibodies, buffers and other reagents have charged sales tax on items that should have been tax-free because they were being used for research. They also marked up prices for many of these items by 100% or more. So you had an insane markup plus 25% sales tax. Fair? No. They were finally forced to implement the tax-free policy and made it as difficult as possible to implement. It always surprised me that hospitals and research institutions were not more aggressive and adamant about having this tax-free policy enforced many years ago already, considering the financial difficulties many find themselves in at present. 

Some thoughts about the film The Burrowers

Apropos Kristen Stewart—her recent film, Snow White and the Huntsman, was not a movie I liked very much and I really don’t understand the hype surrounding it. This film got a wide release and generated big box office; I cannot imagine why. I think all involved did passable jobs, but no more than that. The film is forgettable once you’re out of the theater. Charlize Theron overacted/over-reacted and Kristen Stewart under acted/under-reacted (few to no facial expressions in key scenes and so little to say; it was sometimes painful to watch, especially the final scene. It almost seemed as if she was struggling to get some words out, but they never came). Chris Hemsworth did the best acting job if you ask me, within the limited emotional range of the film. The entire film had a wooden feel to it. One can hope that there will be no sequel. I cannot see how it would be feasible, realistic or even necessary. What more is there to say about this story that hasn’t already been said?

The other night I watched a film on Showtime called The Burrowers, from 2008. This film was apparently never released to the movie public and instead went straight to DVD. I don’t understand the rationale for that move, since I thought it was a much better film than big budget Snow White and the Huntsman. Who makes these decisions? The Burrowers was actually quite a creepy little horror film, albeit a very unusual horror film since it was set in the American Wild West during 1879. It is a bit slow-moving, but the characters are interesting and well-developed, as is the storyline. A family living out on the lonely prairie disappears without a trace, and a posse is formed to try and find them/rescue them from the Native American Indians whom they are sure have abducted them. How wrong they are. Their discovery that entities other than Indians are stalking them, waiting for them in the dark, is as I said, creepy, because they, like us, find it hard to believe that such monsters could exist out on the plains. But they do. And they are not just any monsters, they are burrowers, creatures that live underground and who have a penchant for tracking and eating humans. But their mode for doing this is quite unique, and I won’t spoil the film by giving this information away, except to say that it is exploited in an effort to kill them off. The creatures, which are CGI creations, are scary enough such that the film works. The Burrowers is a clever film, and while some people on IMDB have complained about the film’s ending, I found it to be realistic, though unsatisfying. All the loose ends are not tied up. The monsters are not completely wiped out. What the film manages to convey very well is a sense of dread; imagine you are out on the prairie at night, sitting around a fire at your campsite. Your vision is limited, the dark envelopes you, you hear noises. Even if there were no monsters, the reality of spending the night out under the open skies, exposed and vulnerable, could be anxiety-inducing for many people. I am one of them. The film never plays for laughs; it takes itself seriously, and that is one of its strengths. Additionally, you get a real feel for what life must have been like in 1879—long periods of isolation, no internet, no phones, little communication, mostly rumors and innuendoes, and the constant threat of attack. I found myself thinking of the X-Files, always a good sign in my book, because some of the X-Files episodes were quite scary. The Burrowers brought to mind the X-Files episode Detour from 1997. Both the film and the TV episode are well-worth watching. 

Life in a fishbowl

Been thinking a bit about the whole celebrity worship thing and the role of the media in magnifying news stories of celebrity happenings. I know it’s all been around for quite a while, but the intensity of the insanity didn’t really distress me until the recent report that Kristen Stewart had cheated on her Twilight and real-life boyfriend Robert Pattinson with Snow White and the Huntsman movie director Rupert Sanders. Ok, so I know the names of all involved. It’s impossible not to know that information these days. Everywhere you turn, there was the same story. The story ‘broke’ in the media in a manner reserved for invasions of countries by aggressors and the start of world wars. All hell broke loose. You would have thought someone famous had died—a statesman, the pope, a president. God only knows. I didn’t watch the major TV news channels that day but I shudder to think of the news coverage of this trite infidelity story. Of course we all know it didn’t deserve this amount of news coverage, but heck, infidelity sells newspapers, magazines, and gets people to watch the TV news. It gets fans to spread the story on Facebook, on Twitter, and all other social media avenues available. I couldn’t believe how fans took the news. You would have thought Bella and Edward from Twilight were real people with a real life. But alas, they are not. Fans should try to understand the difference--Kristen is not Bella, Robert is not Edward. Fans may want them to be, but they are not. Their movie marriage was not real; they were not married to each other in real life. Rupert Sanders is a married man with children. It just points out yet again that the celebrities worshipped by society are just regular people who blunder along and fail like the rest of us, but who do so in a fishbowl unlike anything we could possibly imagine. There has always been celebrity worship (think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and their affair during the filming of Cleopatra), but the coverage was more restricted at that time. It’s another world now. It’s all been written about before, analyzed to death, and talked about ad nauseum—that the celebrity hounding and worship have got to stop, but they continue. They continue because the profit motive remains the goal. But as a society, we have shifted off balance, toward a world that cannot sate itself; there will never be enough news that’s fit to print about any celebrity or film star. The fixation on dissecting celebrities and film stars into minute atoms and to report the results of these dissections—that will continue to snowball. I sense desperation now where before there was just excessive curiosity. What is the natural end of desperation?

Changing the way we work

So many people I know or have met recently no longer work the traditional 9am to 5pm workday schedule in a formal workplace. And they seem perfectly happy about this. It struck me more on this trip to New York; that this trend seems to have become a major societal change during the past few years--one for the better, if you ask me. A good number of people I know in both the USA and Europe are working for private companies, but are doing so from the comfort of their own homes. Many of them have home offices. Others work from home one or two days a week. All of them arrange their workday according to what is suitable. Some of them work in the mornings, take the afternoons free, and then work late into the evenings. Whatever the arrangement, I like the flexibility involved, as well as the trust factor. Companies must trust that their employees are going to deliver the goods—that employees will be effective and productive workers when they are working at home. It can be difficult—to get structured enough so that you use your home time productively. When I was starting out in the work world, I liked the more rigid structure and discipline of a formal workplace; now I welcome the flexibility of my home office days. I don’t need a formal workplace to make me a productive employee. I can do what I need to do as a scientist (working in the public sector) from home for the most part (except for the occasional lab experiments that require bench time)—read and write articles, review grants, write grants, and design experiments. I have changed, and I am glad for the change. I feel more creative when I work from home; I am not as distracted by what is going on around me as I often am when I go to my workplace. It’s easy to get lost in idle conversation with co-workers, and as enjoyable as that social contact can be, you suddenly realize that a large chunk of time has been lost from the workday. That doesn’t happen at home; even though I am in close contact with my co-workers should they need me. They only contact me, or I them, when it’s absolutely necessary, and then it’s usually to ask or answer a specific question. Sometimes we can do this via email; other times we need to talk. However it transpires, it works, and it works well. Some of my more productive years during the past decade have been years when I worked a lot from home. I think it has to do with a ‘pared-down’ existence—no gossip, no office politics, no superfluous meetings, less time wasting. It amazes me how much time can be wasted in a workplace.  In any case, I’m glad to see that private companies have recognized the need for flexibility in the way their employees work. By allowing for home offices or home office days, they are changing the face of work and the definition of the workplace, and they are welcome changes. The future of the work world is being created through these changes.

New York moments

Each year I return to Oslo after my annual trip to New York with so many impressions and memories of what I have experienced and seen. I guess because I am now a tourist in my home state, that each New York moment has become dear to me, no matter how small, mostly because I am together with good friends or with family when I experience them. I capture a lot of those moments in photos, as I am wont to do whenever I travel. I have already written one post about wandering around SoHo and lower Manhattan with Gisele, stopping in at small bakeries and cafes, shopping at Tierra, and photographing graffiti. Other moments included dinner with Debby and Eric on Long Island, lunch with Bernadette in Manhattan, visiting my brother Ray and his family, and spending time with Edith--my elderly woman friend who used to work together with me in my first Manhattan job. Photographically speaking, a major moment was photographing a large spider web (and correspondingly large spider) outside the kitchen window of my friend Jean’s house. On one of the evenings I was there, we stood watching the web and the spider’s activity for quite a while. This spider has built a web a short distance away from a wasp’s nest; nature doesn’t ignore golden opportunities. This spider was definitely big enough to tackle a wasp in its web.

Spider and its web

Closer view of spider

I also attended the Peekskill Celebration at the Riverfront Green Park on Saturday August 4^th (http://www.peekskillcelebration.com/) together with Jean and Maria; there was some great live music—one of the R&B bands particularly stood out—New York Uproar (http://newyorkuproar.com/home/). Lots of great old songs from my growing-up years from the likes of Average White Band, Blood Sweat & Tears, Chicago, Ides of March, and many others. You can find the complete song list on the New York Uproar website. The height of this evening had to be the fantastic fireworks that went on for nearly half an hour, sponsored by Entergy (see my short film of some of the fireworks here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-wXGNf02vs). I’m including the information from the website about this event:    

      

The Entergy Fireworks Extravaganza is the largest fireworks display north of the Macy's annual Fourth of July display and is one of the signature activities that make Celebration unique in the Hudson Valley. The pyrotechnic display is synced with music provided by WHUD 100.7 Radio. Whether from land or on water, the fireworks are an amazing sight to behold.

And then on Sunday evening, Jean, her sister Barbara, Maria and I ended up at the beautiful Boscobel Hudson River estate in Garrison (http://www.boscobel.org/) for the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival (http://hvshakespeare.org/), which has been an annual event for us for at least the past five years or so. This year Romeo and Juliet was on the menu—a modernized version of this tragedy—and it was very good. Much of the first act was played for laughs, which was unusual but not at all irritating. But I would guess that Shakespearean purists might find some bones to pick with this production. Nonetheless, it has a lot going for it, especially with the younger lead actors and actresses, who bring their youthful enthusiasm to their roles. It wasn’t hard to remember, when watching them, how absolutely overwhelming, giddy and confusing it was to really and truly fall deeply in love. You never forget those moments even though they get buried in the stuff of daily life, but watching this version of Shakespeare’s play really brought them back, a testament to the fine acting jobs.

View of the Hudson River from the Boscobel estate in Garrison

Tent where the Shakespeare plays take place

I always enjoy my time in New York visiting friends and family. Friends have commented on my packed schedule when I’m there, and the fact that I travel quite a bit around from one place to another, but it doesn’t feel rushed or stressful. I feel free, and that’s a great feeling. It’s summer, the sun is shining, the warm weather beckons, I’m on vacation, and life is easy. I found time to walk from Tarrytown to Irvington to meet my good friend Laura for lunch, and marveled at the beauty of these two adjoining river towns. I know I was privileged to grow up in Tarrytown, along the beautiful Hudson River. I talked about this with my friend Stef on my recent visit with her and her husband John. (Stef also grew up in Tarrytown but now lives in New Jersey, as I did for four years in the 1980s). It’s not something you understand as a child; mostly you just want to get away from small-town life when you are a young adult, and it wouldn’t have mattered how beautiful any aspect of that life really was then. You need to get out and see the world. I am speaking for myself, but I know of others who felt the same way as I did when they were younger. Stef picked me up at the New Brunswick train station in New Jersey, and drove me to where I used to live, an apartment complex in Somerset; it was interesting to see how much has changed since I moved from there. What was once open farmland that stretched for miles along Route 27, has been built up with shopping centers and housing complexes. I hardly recognized the area. However, my apartment complex looked the same, if a bit older and in need of a few renovations, but what I noticed most were the numbers of trees that had grown up around it. Lovely tall trees, providing shade in the summer’s heat. That’s the kind of progress I like, because it contributes to the creation of beauty. 

Somerset New Jersey apartment complex

The promise of summer

I could just as well have entitled this post ’a taste of summer’. Either way, you’ll understand what I mean about fleeting glimpses of summer—those tantalizing warm sunny days that lead you to believe that real summer is right around the corner. But somehow real summer never materializes. That has been the summer experience in Oslo this year. Perhaps it is more correct to say that summer (as most of us define it—sunny and warm days) came and went in May, which had some wonderfully warm summer-like days (in fact, I wrote a post at that time called The Smells of Summer: http://paulamdeangelis.blogspot.no/2012/05/smells-of-summer.html). May was followed by two months of gray skies and rain. Temperatures have hovered around sixty degrees Fahrenheit since then. Summer has been struggling futilely to return. And then, it happened. Today is a real summer day. Yesterday was also a real summer day. Tomorrow is predicted to be a real summer day. I’ll believe it when I see it. I trust nothing and no one, not the clear night sky of tonight, not the balmy night temperature, not the golden moon, not weather reporters, and least of all the newspapers that are constantly telling us that ‘summer is finally here’. No, it’s not (well maybe it will be for the rest of August—hope springs eternal. I’m not a pessimist). Real summer is what I just experienced for ten glorious days in New York. So hot (temperatures hovering around 90 degrees Fahrenheit) that it feels like the heat is rising up from the street pavements, so hot that you have to throw off the bed sheets at night, even though the ceiling fan is on (can’t run the air-conditioners 24/7—the electric bills would be out of sight). So hot that my friend’s terrace is too hot to walk on in my bare feet. So hot that you think about running through the sprinkler that is watering the plants that need the water more than we do. But I am not complaining. My friends complained about the heat. The New York media reported and complained about the heat. Not me. I savored every chance I got to soak in the sun’s warmth and the summer’s heat and humidity. I walked when others drove their air-conditioned cars, although I enjoyed the a/c too, don’t misunderstand me. I had my water bottle with me on my walks and sipped it when I got thirsty. I rested when I got tired. That’s what the heat forces you to do—slow down. You can do everything you normally do, just at a slower pace. And really, what’s wrong with that? I took the train into Manhattan from Irvington, and sat on the platform benches waiting for the train, breathing in the smell of the wooden platform and the tracks. I see what I never saw before, because now I am a tourist in my home state, and I get to appreciate what I took for granted before when I was younger and lived there. I never get over how beautiful New York State is during the summer months. It doesn’t matter if I am upstate (in Tarrytown, Cortlandt Manor, Albany, or Pine Bush) or in New York City. New York is a beautiful state; it has the Hudson River, the lovely Hudson River towns and estates that I have written about many times, lakes, lush green parks and forests, and abundant farmland. It also has the Catskill and Adirondack mountains; I have not spent much time hiking in them, but it’s on my bucket list. Once you get outside of the city, you come into contact with a myriad of insects—mosquitoes, spiders, flies, crickets, and cicadas. You hear the latter two in the evenings, especially. Do I get bitten by mosquitoes? Yes I do, and the bites are irritating enough so that I ended up buying Benadryl to alleviate the itching. Ticks have become a real problem in semi-rural and rural areas; I actually know several people who have had Lyme’s disease—hikers, golfers, and fishermen.

Back in Oslo. I hope for some continuous weeks of summer from now on. Why? So that the feeling of anxiety disappears, that nagging, slightly frantic feeling of wanting to pack a summer’s worth of experiences into one or two warm days, as though we have gotten a reprieve from prison and have to make the most of it. That feeling that you cannot waste a single warm day, because a real summer day wasted is a summer day gone forever. It has felt like that for some of us this summer. You make the best of it, you don’t complain, you live one day at a time, and you hope for better weather. But many Norwegians decided early on to abandon their country for warmer lands—and did so in droves. The charter trip companies made out like bandits this summer. Financially-struggling countries in southern Europe found themselves invaded by northern Europeans seeking sun and warmth. So it’s not just me who misses real summers. And I can remember real summers here in Oslo during the 1990s when I first moved here; the shift toward cooler, shorter and rainier summers has occurred during the past five to seven years. If this is what global warming is doing to our planet--changing weather patterns to this degree--then I can only wonder about what future summers will bring.   

New York city graffiti (street art in New York)

When I was in New York recently, I spent a day wandering around lower Manhattan with my good friend Gisele. I just had to take some photos of the interesting graffiti we saw. I'm always amazed at the talented graffiti artists out there, in whatever city I happen to be visiting. Hope you enjoy these photos. I'll post some others soon.

Planes, trains, not automobiles

Last week I was a New Yorker again, at least for a few days, on my annual trip back to the USA. I end up with so many impressions and reflections about modes of transportation—starting with flying. Ironic that just about the same time that flying has become fairly comfortable, that weather extremes are forcing long delays at airports, preventing us from getting on those planes and taking off on time. That was my experience this time; a four-hour delay leaving Oslo for Newark, and a one-hour delay on the return trip. In both cases, weather was the culprit—thunderstorms and tornadoes (in New York) the night before I was to fly to Newark, and thunderstorms on the return trip. The plane used for the Newark to Oslo trip was the same as the one for the Oslo-Newark trip, hence the delay. I could not help but wonder why SAS managed to get a plane out on time whereas United did not, but no one is giving me the answer, except to say something about the crew and the legal requirements for them to rest. It makes sense in any case, and United was quick to respond to potential customer dissatisfaction by offering us a number of ‘rewards’ for our patience—7000 extra bonus miles, substantial discounts on future trip purchases, and the like. I chose the extra bonus miles. Once I got on the plane, I had no complaints about the actual flights, either going or coming back. It is my impression that the future will only hold more of these types of extreme weather situations, so it’s just to get used to flight delays and to work on becoming more patient. Because really, there is nothing one can do about them anyway, and I don’t want airlines to risk flying through thunderstorms, lightning or hurricanes in order to maintain punctuality at the expense of safety. I ended up exploring the duty-free shops and bookstores in great detail as I had the time to do so. I ate a decent lunch (courtesy of United) and thought briefly about the film The Terminal with Tom Hanks—about an immigrant who ended up living in an airport terminal after he arrived in the USA. I never saw the film, but I remember some of the reviews when it came out some years ago. I wonder how business travelers manage; they must have to leave a day early in order to be sure that they make an important meeting if that meeting is overseas (Europe or America). That has got to elevate the cost of business travel—to pay for an employee’s extra night in a hotel when he or she arrives at his destination a day before in order to dodge potential flight delays. I don’t have those problems, thankfully, since my trips are not usually for business. I don’t mind flying for the most part; the planes are so modern now. Turbulence is not as bothersome as it used to be (at least what I’ve experienced so far and I hope it remains that way), and air quality on the plane has improved dramatically just within the past five years or so. That’s a big change on long flights—less dehydration and lightheadedness; the major problem still remains the leg room (lack of) in economy class. That has not improved; as far as I can determine, it’s gotten worse as airlines try to pack in more passengers per flight.

Once in New York City, it is easy to get around without a car, in fact it is preferable not to drive a car in Manhattan, even though it is not difficult to find your way around in this city borough. The major problem is traffic—lots of it, at all times during the day. The traffic is heart-attack inducing, and not for impatient or aggressive souls. There is no rhyme or reason to the amount of traffic, just that it exists. I remember my commuting days in the 1980s; sometimes it took an hour just to get across town if I drove in from New Jersey to my east-side uptown job. So I don’t drive now when I come back to the city. I take the subway—which has really gotten much better since the 1980s—clean stations, the presence of police on subway trains and platforms, passengers who behave well (no rowdiness as far as I can see) and a remarkably cheap price for a subway ticket. Two dollars and twenty-five cents for one ride; compared to Oslo prices, that’s a dream price. A one-way bus/subway ticket in Oslo will cost at least double that. And if I want to get to Westchester from Manhattan, which I often do, the best way to do that is to take the Metro-North Hudson line commuter trains. I used to take the Hudson line back and forth to Manhattan from Tarrytown, just like my father did for many years during his work lifetime, and as far as I can remember, this service has always been good to excellent. Trains are on time, ticket prices are not exorbitant, and you get to experience the scenic part of the trip when the tracks run parallel to the beautiful Hudson River. Of course I am partial to trains in general, so I am a bit biased. But I had the experience of taking a commuter train from Manhattan to New Jersey on this trip, and the service did not compare to that on Metro-North; it was ok at best. And of course coming into the beautiful end station on the Hudson line--Grand Central--is quite ok with me. Overall, getting around in the New York metropolitan area is not problematic, nor should it be, with good planning. It won’t break your budget either. 

Summer movie viewing

Some really good (old and newer) movies that I have seen recently, in no particular order:

·         Mon Oncle (1958) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050706/

·         Elementarteilchen (The Elementary Particles--2006) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430051/

·         Girl with a Pearl Earring (2003) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335119/

·         Midnight Cowboy (1969) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064665/

·         The Skeleton Key (2005) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0397101/

·         Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056625/

·         Bloedbroeders (2008) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1071201/

·         Harrys döttrar (2005) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456972/

·         Puss in Boots (2011) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0448694/

·         Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1515091/

·         Prometheus (2012) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1446714/