Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Some Mixed Bag Goodness

There's actually a competitive sport called wife carrying. Finland - like other geographic locations that are cold and dark half the year - comes up with some bizarre ways to pass the time. They even set up an obstacle course for participants. What's the background? Back in the day: "Raids on surrounding villages, with the express purpose of making off with someone else's nearest and dearest, were a popular pastime." Stealing women from other places was also a great way of insuring that women made up their own subclass. They'd have different customs, a different language, and be far, far away from potential allies. If you haven't read Blood Rites yet, I recommend it. Stolen women are even more readily given the "other" label than local women.

For all of the book-o-files, you'll want to check out Delicious Library. It's software that'll scan the barcodes on your books, look them up on Amazon, and catalogue title, author and other info into a database on your computer. Yea. That's right. No more "one day I'll make a database of all the books I have so that I don't buy more books that I already have." I think Jenn and Miriam will salivate over this one (via Jed).

There's also a nice little aurora display currently going on that's been seen as far south as Oklahoma and California. Check out the pics here.

More later.

4 comments so far. What are your thoughts?

Anonymous said...

What I want to know is, do they let women enter? Because after all, you don't have to carry your own wife - just somebody's. Actually, now that I think of it, Finland has a limited form of gay marriage on the books, so women could carry their own wives. 

Posted by Jenn

Anonymous said...

Dude. That would be so cool. 

Posted by Kameron Hurley

Anonymous said...

Ooh. Library software. And it's for the Mac. Although I'm not wild about the displays they show (preferring the low tech minimalism of just text and having an abiding dislike of the whole "book rating" system) and it wouldn't work for all the preISBN stuff I have... still. Very tempting.  

Posted by Miriam

Anonymous said...

You do realize that you have to get it now, don't you Miriam? Jenn was terribly disappointed - there's no PC version...

You need to buy 2, just `cause we can't.... 

Posted by Kameron Hurley