Underbelly

From a Norwegian tourist leaflet: SKOR.   430 meters above sea level.  People lived here on a permanent basis until about 1960.  At the h...

It's the Heisenberg principle that holds (not so?) that the closer you look at something, the less likely it is to be there.   I guess ...

I will arise and go now, And go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, Of clay and wattles made; Nine bean rows will I have t...

This will  be old stuff to you,  dear jaded and all-knowing reader, but here are two items new to me: Wiki Falu red:   here's how...

Two weeks after Elsinore and I'm still brooding over Saxo Grammaticus. Have you reread Saxo lately (you never ask an intellectual...

Grand Canyon Cake: Update:   yes, very educational,   The White Trash Cookbook instructs (I quote from memory): add a different food co...

You can feel it in the air. This sounds right : Western Norway has the lowest unemployment rates , lowest crime rates , smallest public s...

I did a bit of Googling last night and satisfied myself that the Norwegian kroner is indeed one of the most overvalued currencies in the wo...

I've spent a good bit of time these past few days admiring Viking longboats, warrior halls, stave churches and suchlike. It's a hu...

A couple of followup points re my post on claiming-race taxation .  One, my friend Scott tells me that he has heard--though he admits he ha...

A word about my backup travel reading these past few days. It's something with the restrained and scholarly title of America Aflame, s...

Distracted today, but you could be reading-- Which is Worse: Airline Monopolies or Airline Competition? Uwe Reinhardt's Latest o...

I'm very far from being an expert at this sort of thing but I think I understand the bare mechanics of a claiming race . You enter you...

” Now, Shakespeare was a juggler and he traveled all over Europe with a troop of players so it could very well be that he was right here.” ...

I idled away some travel time yesterday reading sections of King Harald's Saga , available, inter alia, on Kindle from Penguin. The...

I'm looking for something uniquely Swedish to take home as a souvenir and I was thinking maybe a couple of sticks of dynamite.  Cooler ...

So we're checking in from Gotland off the Swedish coast, where they like to think they are not quite part of Sweden and that the langua...

Women in the Viking world,  how did they do?  Were they just chattels, baggage, or did they have a life of their own? On the surface, you...

From a marker by a Swedish burial mound: The Thing took place at Anundshög all through the Middle Ages.  This was a meting point for the ...

Please walk on the grass.