picture of bill's head in a jarWhat's In Bill's Head?

Icelandic politician relocates home of elves who saved his life

 Posted by Bill on May 17, 2012 at 11:30 am
May 172012
 

Posts at Iceland Review and Raving Ravens report that Árni Johnsen, a member of the Icelandic parliament, has had a 24-ton boulder moved to his home in the Westman Islands off the Southern coast of Iceland. Árni wanted to save the stone from destruction because it’s home to some elves who saved his life two years ago when he crashed his car nearby. The stone was subsequently in danger of being paved under as the highway was widened, so Árni had it moved out of the path of construction. Now he’s decided to move it to his house.

He called in Ragnhildur Jónsdóttir, an expert from Álfagarðurinn (the Elf Garden), who is able to see and communicate with the elves. Iceland Review quotes Árni:

“She said it was incredible, that she had never met three generations of elves in the same boulder before.”

“She said an elderly couple lives on the upper floor but a young couple with three children on the lower floor,” the MP described.

The specialist concluded that the boulder’s inhabitants were content with the move. “But they asked whether the boulder could stand on grass. I said that was no problem but asked why they wanted grass. ‘It’s because they want to have sheep,’ Ragnhildur replied,” Árni continued.

The specialist also said that the elves wish for the boulder’s “window side” to face the view. “I promised to do so,” Árni stated.

The boulder was trucked to its new location while the elves rode in a sheepskin-lined basket in Ragnhildur’s Peugeot, eating honey all the way. You can see pictures of all this at Visir and video at Morgunblaðið and RÚV.

This may not be the storybook happy ending it seems, though. In a followup article, Iceland Review reports that Magnús Skarphéðinsson, principal of the Icelandic Elf School, has doubts about whether the elves really consented to the move. Magnús warns that accidents are known to follow disruptions of elf settlements. Indeed, only last year some construction equipment breakdowns were blamed on angry elves, and such elf-related problems are common.

If it’s true that Árni has taken the elves’ home without their consent, it wouldn’t be the first time he has stolen property in the name of home improvement. As described in The Iceland Weather Report, Árni was convicted several years ago of corruption, fraud, and embezzlement for taking money from the National Theatre (which he oversaw) to pay for the construction and renovation of his homes.

What may surprise you most about all of this elf business is the fact that it’s being reported mostly with a straight face. That’s because belief in elves (more correctly, huldufólk, or “hidden people”)–or at least acceptance of the possibility of their existence–is fairly widespread in Iceland (see articles in Iceland Review and Slate).

While many Icelanders regard the elves mostly as something to avoid when building roads, others, like Hallgerdur Hallgrímsdóttir, enjoy having sex with them. Her blog, Sex with Humans is Boring, is no longer being updated, but you can watch a video of her discussing sex with elves (and her book about it) at VICE. Her elves apparently are much taller than the basket-sized ones that Árni kidnapped.

 Iceland, Superstition  No Responses »  Tagged with: ,
 

Link: What Isn’t for Sale?

 Posted by Bill on May 1, 2012 at 3:10 pm  Philosophy
May 012012
 

Market thinking so permeates our lives that we barely notice it anymore. A philosopher sums up the hidden costs of a price-tag society.

A debate about the moral limits of markets would enable us to decide, as a society, where markets serve the public good and where they do not belong. Thinking through the appropriate place of markets requires that we reason together, in public, about the right way to value the social goods we prize.
Continue reading at theatlantic.com  »
 Tagged with: ,

Makes me want to join the Tea Party*

 Posted by Bill on April 16, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Apr 162012
 

New content from Bill’s Head has been lacking lately, partly due to Bill being extra-busy at work. So here’s a mildly-amusing work-related story for you.

Last week we got a bid solicitation from a federal agency. They want to renew their support agreement for our software. The total cost is about $500. I won’t get into what a waste of time it is to be filling out all this paperwork for the sake of a $500 sale–that’s not amusing.

The bid form that they want us to “fill out” is in a Microsoft Word document. Inside this document, all the details about what they want to purchase are there in text format. So is all the contact information for the agency. So are 10 pages worth of definitions, requirements, and general bureaucratic crap, most of which has absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand.

One such piece of crap appears on the list of contract clauses “included by reference”: FAR 52.223-18, “Encouraging Contractor Policies to Ban Text Messaging While Driving,” which “encourages” us to adopt policies and train our employees about the dangers of text messaging while driving:

Continue reading »

 Complaints Department  No Responses »  
 

Music Review: The Turpentine Ray; Book Review: Prague

 Posted by Bill on February 11, 2012 at 2:35 pm
Feb 112012
 

The First TV DinnerA friend of mine plays in a band in Prague called The Turpentine Ray, and they’ve just released its first album, “The First TV Dinner.” They describe their style as “turbine room folk music,” and I’d say that’s as good a description as any.

My review of the album: I like it. And I’m not just saying that because I know the guy. That’s not a particularly insightful review, I know, but you can just go listen for free and decide for yourself if you like it. Be sure to buy it if you do.

While we’re on the subject of Prague: I recently read Arthur Phillips’s novel Prague, which is set in Budapest and hasn’t much to do with Prague at all. Or perhaps everything to do with Prague. I had read a later novel by Phillips, The Egyptologist, a few years ago, or tried to, anyway–I think I got bored and quit before the end. So I was a bit skeptical when I received Prague as a gift, but it sounded like something I should like, and in fact was. I quite liked it, and now perhaps will have to give The Egyptologist another try.

Prague follows five 20-something American and Canadian expats living in Budapest, all of them longing for other places and people. The related ideas of nostalgia, longing, and discontent recur throughout the book–one of the characters is even a scholar of nostalgia. I’ve never been to Budapest but I have been to (and enjoyed) Prague and have heard that the two cities are similar–river down the middle, famous bridge, castle on a hill, funicular, etc. As I read descriptions of Budapest in Prague the mental images I formed were all based on Prague, so the book might as well have been set there as far as I was concerned. Perhaps it was my nostalgia for Prague and my occasional fantasy of life as an expat that made me like Prague.

If you’ve read the book (or any of his others) let me know what you thought.

 Books, Music, Review  No Responses »  
 

My new favorite Christmas song

 Posted by Bill on November 29, 2011 at 3:48 pm
Nov 292011
 

Last week’s Studio 360 included performances from Tim Minchin, who I don’t think I had ever heard of before. He finished up with “White Wine in the Sun,” in which he explains why he likes Christmas despite “the usual objections to consumerism / The commercialisation of an ancient religion / To the westernisation of a dead Palestinian / Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer.”

The other songs he performed (“Prejudice” and “F**k the Poor) were great, too. Check them out here. Then listen to the rest of the show–you’ll probably like it.

 

 Humor, Music  No Responses »  
 

Update on Bill’s Wrist

 Posted by Bill on November 19, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Nov 192011
 

Since I can’t respond individually to the hundreds of people who have written in to Bill’s Head Headquarters to ask how Bill’s Wrist is doing, I figured I would post an update here.

My injury was a fracture of the triquetrum bone*, which is the most- or second-most-common kind of wrist fracture, depending on whose statistics you believe. Usually, a little piece chips off. They put you in a cast, and everything works out fine. However, because I’m special, that’s not what happened to me. I broke off a big piece, and there was a large gap between it and where it was supposed to be. I went to two separate orthopedists who between them had been working on hands for over 25 years, and neither of them had ever seen an injury like this before. The doctor who ended up fixing it for me was quite excited–he took pictures of my x-ray and CT scan with his iPhone, I guess so that he could pull it out and show me off at orthopedist cocktail parties.

Both doctors recommended surgery to fix the bone fragment back in place, so I had that done last week. The surgery went fine, and my parents, who had come to be supportive, were able to leave the surgery center in time to make it to the opera that evening.

After a week wearing a half cast/splint that they put on me in the operating room (clearly designed or applied by someone who has never had to wear one, given how miserably uncomfortable it was), I got my real cast yesterday:

Bill's arm in a cast

If you look closely, you can see the pin holding things together.

I also got a waterproof cast cover, which is a little more secure than the newspaper bags I’ve been using to cover my arm for showering. I can probably reuse the thing for next year’s Halloween costume, too, since it makes me look like a low-rent monster from Dr. Who.

Bill's hand in a cast protector

This is the first time I’ve ever had a cast, so I missed out on that whole cast signing thing in childhood. A black cast is a little tough to sign, and I don’t see most of you in person, but if you’d like to sign the cast you can scrawl out your message, then photograph or scan it and send it to me (or just use the comments below). I’ll print out your messages on stickers and put them on the cast, if I haven’t lost interest in this project by then. Also, I’m willing to sell advertising space or naming rights; get in touch if you’re interested. But hurry, because I only have to wear the thing for three weeks (half as long as I was expecting).

Thanks to all of you who have wished me well and/or told me how lucky I was not to have broken both wrists like your friend/brother/coworker/acquaintance/spouse/distant relative did.

Notes

*
This used to be called the cuneiform bone, which we encountered recently in our discussion of coins. Why did they change the name? I don’t know. ↵
 A Day in the Life  No Responses »  Tagged with:
 

A cheaper alternative to spending $4.3 million for a dull photograph

 Posted by Bill on November 16, 2011 at 5:48 pm
Nov 162011
 

I don’t think I had ever heard of Andreas Gursky until I read yesterday that one of his photographs just sold for $4.3 million, making it the most expensive photograph ever sold. Christie’s auction house describes the photograph, Rhein II, as “a dramatic and profound reflection on human existence and our relationship to nature on the cusp of the 21st century.” OK. Whatever. Here’s the photograph:

Andreas Gursky's Rhein II

Andreas Gursky/Christie’s Images, Ltd., 2011

The Guardian reports that

The desolate featureless landscape shown in Rhine II is no accident: Gursky explained in an interview* that it is his favourite picture: “It says a lot using the most minimal means … for me it is an allegorical picture about the meaning of life and how things are.”

In fact the artist carefully digitally removed any intrusive features – dog walkers, cyclists, a factory building – until it was bleak enough to satisfy him.

That’s right: it’s not really even a photograph–it’s a Photoshop composition.

Well, I suppose the buyer will enjoy bragging about owning it.

cactusBut maybe your taste is different from mine, and you think that this “photograph” is interesting. Maybe you even hoped to purchase it, but got outbid. Well, here’s some good news. Shortly after I saw Rhein II, I happened to walk past a cactus that I have in my house, and noticed a similarity.

So I cropped a picture of it…

cactus detail …and then spent 10 minutes in Photoshop until I was satisfied that it was conveying my intended message about the meaning of life and how things are:

Bill's Cactus II photograph, which is almost as good as Gursky's Rhein II

It’s not my best Photoshop work, since I’m working without benefit of my dominant hand and also didn’t want to waste a lot of time on this, so I’m offering it for sale at the bargain price of $4,338.50, which is 0.1% of what Gursky’s photograph sold for. I’d say Cactus II is at least one tenth of one percent as interesting to look at as Rhein II is, so it seems like a fair price. Now, for this unbelievably low price, you’re getting an unframed print that’s about 30 inches long. I realize that part of the appeal of Gursky’s work is the large size of the prints. Therefore, I am also offering my photograph glass mounted at 80″ x 140″ (about the same size as Rhein II) for the still very reasonable price of $43,385.

Or, if you think that both Gursky’s photograph of the Rhein and mine of my cactus are actually quite dull†, by all means take a look through my gallery and see if there’s something else you’d like instead.

Notes

*
I tried to watch the documentary that contains this interview, but got bored before Gursky made his appearance. I’m still not sure that Ben Lewis, with his breathless enthusiasm for Gursky, isn’t having us on. ↵
†
For the record, I think some of Gursky’s other work is interesting. ↵
 Humor, Photography  No Responses »  
 

Link: The Social Graph is Neither

 Posted by Bill on November 13, 2011 at 2:41 pm  Technology
Nov 132011
 

An interesting essay about the fundamental flaws with the idea of a “social graph,” which is the basis for sites like Facebook. “The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there’s a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!”

Continue reading at blog.pinboard.in  »
 

Link: Up in ur internets, shortening all the words

 Posted by Bill on November 4, 2011 at 4:03 pm  Humor, Language
Nov 042011
 

A humorously serious look at Ralph Fiennes’s claim that Twitter is eroding our language. It’s the sort of post that makes me want to be a linguist.

Continue reading at languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu  »
 

This was going to be an awesome post but then I broke my wrist

 Posted by Bill on November 4, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Nov 042011
 

I had a great post all plotted out in my head for this week. It was going to be brilliant, insightful, funny, heartwarming, poetic, maybe even revolutionary. But then I crashed my bicycle and broke my wrist, and now I can’t do enough typing to get all that awesomeness into words for you. I hope to be up and running with some voice recognition software (or a secretary) soon; in the meantime please amuse yourselves with these selections from my x-rays and CT scans.

x-ray of my broken wrist

CT scan of my broken wrist

 A Day in the Life, Bicycling, Meta  No Responses »  Tagged with:
 
 Older Entries
Words and images copyright by Bill except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. Additional credits