Vegetarian
For 14 years now I’ve been a vegetarian. At the time, it seemed it was only odd, washed-up hippies who were into it. Eating choices were more limited then, supermarket shelves did not offer a plethora of tofu varieties, and restaurants could only offer to pick out the bacon from a Caesar salad. That is, in Australia. Here in Norway the situation is pretty grim for vegetarians, although no doubt improving. It’s not yet at the stage of being able to find tofu at a normal supermarket, but luckily my local ethnic has it in stock.
During the Norwegian leg of my fantastic Scandy tour of 2006 I was at a dinner in a cabin in the far, far north. The others at the table chowed down on some kind of moose stew, while my hosts prepared a very tasty wild mushroom stew for The Difficult Eater1. The head chef, the father of a friend of mine, was sitting next to me and was quite befuddled by vegetarianism.
“So, why are you a vegetarian?” came the question shortly after starting. I gave my usual vague answer. “I see,” he replies, thinking for a bit and then earnestly adding, “but how?” He really couldn’t understand how I could physically bring myself to do it. To him it was as if I had chosen a life of celibacy. Conversation moved on to other matters, but after a few minutes he stopped eating, looked at me, and said with a sigh: “well, it’s your life.” In his eyes, not only was I celibate for life, but was now running off and joining an extremist Pakistani madras. Once again conversation moved on, but from what I remember on at least two more occasions he would stop and bring it up again. “But how? I don’t understand.” Shaking his head he would once again add, “well, it’s your life.”
I have met a few veggos here though, one of whom (bless her sweet, adorable soul) gave her life to vegetarianism thanks to Moby. Good to hear that licensing every track off Play was not his only life accomplishment. Oh, and dating Natalie Portman, that has to count for something.
I knew I hated Moby for a reason.
1 On the spectrum of difficult eaters, surely a plain ‘ol vegetarian rates pretty low these days. Try eating with a gluten-intolerant vegan.
8 days agoMore stuff in: drivel
Sunday Craft
This rainy Sunday I scratched two of my (many) perennial itches: neatness and creativity.
Sorting and cataloguing photographs somewhat sated my pernickety Virgo desire for neatness and order. When things are not ‘in place’ I am essentially incapacitated until they are. Someone dear to me composed a little ditty about this, something along the lines of:
“Something’s in a place it shouldn’t be! I’m going to fetch my apparatus to put it right”
They would gently sing it to me in an ultimately vain attempt for me to come to my senses when I was in a ‘putting-in-order’ paralysis.
In the process of tagging, starring and deleting I found a number of photos I wanted to polish up and put online. The ensuing Photoshopping sated my second itch of the day. As for other itches, let me just thank-you for the cream recommendation; it’s working out fantastically.
As a result, there are a number of new pictures up in:
19 days agoComment [3]
Presentation Templates
At the TLA, we have company-mandated templates which we are required to use whenever PowerPoint must be inflicted upon an audience. There are some fine reasons to have the people in charge of corporate identity managing how employees project the image of the company out to customers. Particularly when the company in question is a massive, sprawling multinational. It’s good to present a uniform face and ‘story’.
The templates however are incredibly inadequate, managing to not only tacitly encourage poor presentation style, but also fail aesthetically. I’m not sure how this works for the company. The slides look ugly and amateurish, and surely cheapens the brand.
I have another bone to pick while I am up here, steady on my soapbox – Typefaces. This same company, with quite a lot of resources at its disposal can’t manage to license a real typeface for use in documents produced by employees. Thus, we must use Arial, in lieu of Helvetica, which is the official typeface for the company. Arial.
… Arial.
If Helvetica is too expensive to license, what’s wrong with commissioning a typeface? Why can’t a big company attend to its own appearance? To its credit however, TLA has a simply brilliant, ageless logo which works well in a multitude of contexts, which I dearly hope isn’t modernised into some meaningless swirl any time soon.
A positive example of attention to appearance which I’m seeing a lot of at the moment is StatoilHydro. They have commissioned a slight variant of a readable, modern typeface. You see it used in all communications from the very top all the way down to relatively informal notices posted around the workplace. Simple, clean presentation designs are used. In one, the only graphic element is the logo placed in the lower-right corner. No unnecessary embellishments, structural aides, gradients, fills or lines. Just the branding and the content with a good measure of whitespace. Winner.
30 days agoComment [3]
More stuff in: drivel
17 May, 2008
Norwegian Constitution Day, 2008
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