The main reason for the trip is to welcome two new additions to the family; the first of my immediate family’s next generation. My sister had her son a week ago today, and my sister-in-law is due any day now.

I don’t think I mentioned that I got a new job that I will be starting in October. I will be a Project Manager for Opera Software, which is SUPER COOL. I’ve been trying to get in there since I moved to Norway over two years ago, so it’s massive.

So this will be the last chance to visit Australia for a while, given that you usually don’t get holidays in your first year in a job here. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again, and I’m already making a list of all the things I must eat and drink while I’m there. I’m packing light so that I can take advantage of the recent Aussie dollar slip against the Norwegian kroner.

Stay tuned for some photos and more quick notes in the next month.

I recently saw “The Dark Knight” and although I didn’t think it was such a “dark” movie, I did come away with some interesting thoughts about exactly what makes Heath Ledger’s Joker so scary. After all, the bulk of the praise you will hear in regards to this movie is for Heath’s final performance. Heath’s portrayal of The Joker is worth watching the movie for, even if you’ve heard that the movie itself is not that great.

It annoys me intensely when Hollywood movies give back-stories to characters who don’t need them. This is especially true in movies that have come from books or other source material where no back-story previously existed. Case in point: Tim Burton’s hideous and nauseating attempt at “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, which gave Willy Wonka a dentist for a father who wouldn’t let him eat sweets. Why do we need to know this? Can’t someone just be eccentric without us needing to know his childhood woes?

Which brings me to the latest incarnation of The Joker. In “The Dark Knight” we never find out who he is, where he came from or any of his history at all. He even tells two different versions of how he got the scars around his mouth, and we’re left suspecting that neither is likely to be true.

I began to think about what kind of criminal The Joker is; he’s not after money, he wants chaos, disarray and fear. In short, he’s a terrorist. Every criminal act he performs in the film is an act of terrorism; blowing up a hospital, setting explosives on boats filled with civilians… he even manages to terrorise mob bosses. His crimes are motivated by the desire to cause fear and panic.

Some of you will have worked out where I’m going with this by now.

So then I thought, what kind of criminal is most likely to scare western (and particularly American) audiences today? A terrorist. And if we know his background, or what caused him to become a terrorist, we are forced to identify and sympathise with him, if only a little. He makes a much scarier, and therefore effective, villain if we have little to no sympathy for him.

Yet thanks, in part, to a rather wooden performance by Christan Bale, it’s hard not to be drawn to and fascinated by The Joker. That’s not to say I want to know his back story, I just wanted to see what he’d do next.

I don’t know if this was the thinking behind the development of this character. For all we know, there might have been more to reveal in the next instalment. However, now that Heath is gone, I can’t imagine that they’ll try to replace him in any future Batman movies. Replacing the nauseating Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal was a good decision, if only because no one likes the taste of vomit with their popcorn. But replacing Heath would be a disaster. The Joker will just have to disappear somehow.

So how does Heath Ledger’s Joker stand up against Jack Nicholson’s Joker from the (here he is again) Tim Burton invention of the last Batman series? Well, they’re actually a little too different to compare. Jack Nicholson’s Joker was the one that made clowns scary (or scarier, depending on how you already felt about them). He was driven by vengeance, and was something of an artist in his insanity.

Heath’s Joker was harder to fathom. You could write him off as simply being insane and getting his kicks from chaos and destruction, but to my mind there is more to him than that. He wants power and control, but seemingly only so that no one really has it.

The Joker is what makes this film worth watching, and is the one and only aspect I found myself thinking about afterwards. Without him, it would have been just another super hero movie.

If Heath had to go, I’m glad he could go out on top of his game. At least this way he’ll never suck.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. Not ALL pine nuts are evil. My research has indicated that it is only pine nuts imported from China that are the cause of my suffering, and the suffering of many others.

Last Thursday night I was preparing dinner for myself and a friend, which we possibly wouldn’t be eating for another hour or so. I was hungry and needed a quick snack to stop me from eating all the dinner ingredients. So I reached into the cupboard and grabbed myself a handful of pine nuts. Mmm tasty. They were from the same box of pine nuts I had used on my carpaccio, rocket and raspberry salad a few weeks before, so how could I know the effects that would soon take hold…

On Saturday morning we got up late; it was almost noon, so instead of breakfast I decided to skip straight on to lunch and eat some leftover leek and potato soup that was in the fridge from earlier in the week. At first taste I thought, “Agh, I think this is past it’s used-by date.” A second taste seemed to confirm this, even though it didn’t smell bad, so I threw all the soup away. Next, I tried some toast… which also tasted horrible. I began to wonder whether I had gotten dehydrated through the night and just had a bad taste in my mouth.

After cleaning my teeth, brushing my tongue and gargling mouthwash, I also tried tea and even water, but to no avail. When the problem persisted on Sunday, I realised there was more to this than meets the taste buds; everything tasted like battery acid. It was time to do some internet searching. As is usual when searching medical symptoms online, I turned up all the usual scary cancer and tumour-related stuff, as well as some information on stomach ulcers, acid reflux and liver problems. However, none of the symptom descriptions seemed to match what was happening to me.

Finally I came upon a forum where people were discussing the exact problem I was having; namely a metallic, bitter taste at the back of the tongue that was exacerbated by food, particularly anything sweet. About halfway down the topic posts, someone mentioned pine nuts, and after that post the agreement flooded in from people around the world suffering the same problem after having recently eaten pine nuts. With this new information in hand, I narrowed my search to “pine nuts bitter taste” and suddenly I had my answer from an official source; the European Journal of Emergency Medicine:

Taste disturbances after pine nut ingestion M. Mostin Poisons Centre, Brussels, Belgium Case report: A colleague anaesthesiologist experienced two episodes of taste disturbances after pine nut ingestion. At the first time, he just consumed a handful of pine nuts. Two days later, he developed an episode of taste disturbances (bitter, metallic taste). The disturbances lasted a few days. He made a link between pine nuts and the taste disturbances after the second episode when his wife and friends who shared with him a dish prepared with the same pine nuts complained of a persisting bitter taste sensation 2 days after the meal. Examination of the pine nuts revealed they were oxidized and not fit for consumption. No fungal contamination was found. No explanation was found for the taste disturbances. In the following months, six similar cases were reported to the Poisons Centre. The pine nuts involved in those cases were imported from China. The pine species remain unidentified. Analysis on pesticide residues and heavy metal did not reveal any contamination. One member of the medical team of the Poisons Centre tested on himself several brands of pine nuts and experienced two separate episodes of taste disturbances with the pine nuts imported from China. The phenomenon remained unexplained.

A student in pharmacy undertook chromatographic examinations on two samples involved in the taste disturbances and compared them with pine nuts from other origins. This led to the isolation of constituants compatible with triglycerids, formed by 16-18°C unsaturated fatty acids. The role of those triglycerids in the taste disturbances remains hypothetic.

So there you have it. And if you do further searching of your own, you’ll find much more information out there (even Wikipedia: wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut#Risks_of_eating_pine_nuts). But I have yet to find anything about a cure, other than patience. I have also discovered that peppermint tea and peppermint green tea are the only things I’ve tried so far that don’t taste horrible. I’m on day three now, so hopefully it won’t last too much longer.

There is still debate on the forums I’ve read about whether or not roasting the nuts makes a difference, but I can tell you that for me it did. I served my rocket salad to eight people a few weeks ago with a generous helping of roasted pine nuts on each, and no one had this problem.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any law in Norway that requires food to disclose its origin on its labelling. My pine nuts don’t say anything about where they were imported from. However, in all the information I read, it was Chinese imported pine nuts that caused this problem. Check your labels and if you experience the same thing, contact your local consumer affairs branch, or possibly poisons information if you are particularly concerned. As far as I know, there’s no danger, just a nasty, nasty taste for several days.

The first are twins, born in Kristiansand Zoo here in Norway:

The second are these white lion triplets from a safari park in western Germany:

Click on either of the photos to see more of these cute little fellas. Aww.

It must be the year of big cat babies; they seem to be popping up everywhere! The article I got these photos from is written in Norwegian, but here’s a basic translation for you:

Today, the newborn bengal tiger cubs were shown in the Moscow Zoo for the first time. It was a clearly proud mother who strutted around while the newly arrived cubs, two boys and a girl, peeped curiously at the assembled crowd of people.

The cubs were born at the end of March, but had been kept indoors until today. Now they have, among other things, access to a swimming pool.

For more pictures, click the link below…

Photos: Maxim Shipenkov/EPA/Scanpix

If you’re interested in knowing more about Christian the London Lion, have a read about it here.

Thanks again to Cute Overload for giving me yet another tear-jerking tip-off.

Last week I was, as I am wont to do, updating myself on recent cute discoveries on Cute Overload, when I discovered that there is EXTREME CUTENESS going on right here in Norway.

Kristiansand Zoo, in the south of Norway, has recently been blessed with the arrival of four new baby lion cubs named Nala, Lea, Kiara and Akira. But that’s not the best part (or the dangerous part!)… the best part is that they’ve set up a live webcam so that you can watch the little cubbies 24 hours a day live on the internet!

“Where?” I hear you ask. Go to VGTV and see for yourself, but I warn you; it’s more addictive than you think. Remember the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? That was NOTHING.

And if you need more to make your head really explode, check out this video of the cubbies being weighed in a bucket. And BANG! There goes your head. I warned you.

Here are some screenshots I took during my first two hours of captivation:

Read more about the legislation in this article from Aftenposten from March this year.

Norway joins Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa and Canada in granting gay people full marriage rights.

This might not seem like a very big deal, especially for those who have never applied for a work and/or residence permit in a foreign country, but since I’ve been here in Norway for two years now, and have technically been a “working holiday maker” for most of that time, it’s a massive relief.

When I first got to Norway in March of 2006, I was just on a holiday visa, which meant I could only stay for three months and couldn’t work. When that was over, I went back to Australia to pack up  my house and my life (which took two months) and while that was happening we discovered that the easiest way for me to be able to get back to Norway was to apply for a working holiday visa. It was approved within two weeks an enabled me to get back there and start work as soon as I could find a job.

When that visa was running out, we were advised to extend the working holiday visa so that I would be covered for another year, and then apply for the first time work/residence permit once that was granted. It took three months to process the extension, and then we decided to wait until March to apply again so that we would have evidence of two years living together in Norway, as well as our previous four years in Australia.

It might not sound like that gruelling a process, but considering we’d already been through all of this once back in Australia, it was exhausting to do it all over again. At the last minute I was told that we needed to provide further past evidence of our relationship, so I had to get my Dad to send over some tax documents and bills in our joint names from Australia… oh how I waited every day by the mail box. Let me tell you, when they say international express post will take 2-3 business days, don’t you believe it! It took six working days in the end. Six nail-biting, mailbox-checking, neck-knot-creating days. I should have used a courier company. Thank you Australia Post.

Anyway, in the end it has all worked out just in the nick of time. My working holiday visa was due to expire on the 10th of August, so it’s not a moment too soon. Even though I would have been able to stay while they made their decision, I couldn’t work and I couldn’t travel… or rather, if I did leave the country I wouldn’t be able to come back.

So THANK YOU to the immigration police in Oslo for responding to my request for haste. I could literally vomit from relief. But instead I think I’ll just take a few deep, calming breaths and begin to enjoy being a resident of Norway.

With all this in mind, you can imagine that I often search the internet for recipes when I can’t find inspiration in a book. So what really burns me is how many recipes that I find online that are more like something you would find on the back of a packet mix for how to make said packet mix more interesting.

If you’ve ever searched for a recipe online, you probably know what I’m talking about. You see a great looking recipe title, you start reading down the list of ingredients and lo and behold, there it is: 1 can of Campbells Cream of Mushroom soup. What the?!

Now I understand that some people don’t want to spend hours cooking every night and rely on having some premade ingredients in their cooking to speed things up. But seriously, just adding a bunch of frozen vegetables to a can of premade soup and then calling it a recipe for Broccoli-Cheddar Bisque!? That’s not a recipe, it’s a serving suggestion! Not to mention being just plain laziness. In this particular case, the recipe I’m referring to purportedly came from Better Homes and Gardens. Fie! You can do better than that, BH&G!

It’s not just soup recipes either. So many recipes I’ve found call for brand name spice mixes or packet mixes or even breads that you can’t get outside of the country the recipe hails from (I’m looking at you, America), and if you don’t know who Mrs Hockenburger is, it’s likely you’re not going to know what she puts in her All-American Grill Spice. (Note: names have been changed to protect the innocent… or because I can’t remember the name of the particular grill spice in an offending recipe.)

Now before you jump on me, I will say that as much as I’d love to have the time and money to cook everything completely from scratch, I know realistically that I can only afford to do that on the weekends, if I’m lucky. So I have no problem with using premade stock or stock cubes and concentrates. Hell, I’ve seasoned things with curry powder and chicken noodle soup mix along with everybody else. But I don’t give those recipes out to friends and blog readers with “Maggi Classic Chicken Noodle Simmer Soup Mix” written in the ingredient list. These recipe writers should always give an alternative to brand name item, or at least explain what it is so we can find our own alternative.

There is a line to be drawn, however, between a recipe that uses a spice mix or stock cube and one that is just made up of premade foods. I have found, sadly, that this line is more often than not a geographical one. I have far more success finding “real” recipes searching google.co.uk or google.com.au than I do in google.com.

It is also noteworthy that when you make food out of so many premade ingredients, you have more and more trouble keeping track of exactly what you’re eating. Each ingredient will have salt, fat, preservatives and sugars that you can’t always keep track of, and I think we can all agree that in that sense it’s much better to use fresh ingredients wherever we can.

So to end this rant on a positive note, I would like to offer my congratulations and thanks to all those recipe sites and blogs out there that know where to draw this line and offer recipes made with real food, not canned soup, frozen hash browns and packet mixes. You know who you are. Well done.