tundra monkey

ok, my old website - http://www.materialist.net - is back up and running, minus a month or two of transcribed life. new host, new infrastructure, new and enhanced capabilities. pleased, though the annoyances have probably taken a month of my total alloted time on earth.

have had three very vivid dreams the last three nights, just 'ere the hour of waking. all three share the same 'texture', which makes me feel they're linked somehow.

in the first dream I'm in a suburban house that belongs to space-elf [in the dream]. the house seems shabby and unclean, particularly the bathroom is dirty. she tries to seduce me and I go along with it, even though I don't really want to. I wake before anything happens.

in the second dream I am in a living room full of pillows and many familiar women are doing something to me, touching me in an asexual way. I am unsure why they are doing this, but there is a sense of concern.

in the third dream I am in prison. the charge is a vague sense of homicide. I know that I am not innocent, but that there are circumstances that explain, if not justify. the director of the prison sympathises with me, stating that it is a tragedy that someone like me should be in prison. I decide to study the prison. in the courtyard, I am taunted by a guard. I reach through his mouth, down his throat and into his guts, grab hold of an entrail and threaten to tear it out through his mouth. will he stop? he nods, crying and speechless, with my arm down his throat.

issues with service provider crash resulted in total data loss. I have backups up to the beginning of october this year and have managed to retrieve my november archives from google's cache [amazing. I don't know how these guys do it...], but in october my replacement website evidently didn't yet warrant the attention of google. if anyone should happen to have that archive saved somewhere, please do get in touch.

amazingly, the process of sorting out new hosting involves my sending a fax with ID photocopies to an official internet body. this is because I've lost site registry passwords, required to change the DNS server entries, and the address I registered my site under has expired... hence I need to change my contact email via openSRS. strange, convoluted and crazily tangible paperwork process.

otherwise, I am back in norway from cambridge and chilling out. watching films, reading, wrapping christmas presents and bracing myself for the sojourn north early next month. still pleasantly hungover from rampant cambridge adventures. all is good.

fucking free service provider down. no idea whether my files even exist anymore- no backups because of logistical problems. anyway. hopefully it will all be sorted out in the foreseeable future and I'll be a happy bunny again.

messed up. reconstructed the old site mostly. URL is http://materialist.cjb.cc, but apparently the host refuses to let the site be iframed. who knows. anyway. please do check the link and tell me if the substitute is atrociously slow or otherwise malfunctional...

bought a scanner today. simplifies life to be able to digitize relevant documents and print-on-demand rather than carry around cumbersome files of flammable photocopies.

also handled a krumkniv, the famed and now illegal curved brain-stabbing implement for reindeer. a lot thinner than I expected - looks less like a blade than a thick screwdriver gone wrong, with a knife-sharpened edge on the inside of the curve. also learned how to handle it - useful, in case I ever have to euthanise a reindeer in the wild by myself.

still moderately annoyed by the hosting situation, but hopefully I'll sort something out by the end of the week. even if I have to resort to re-generating the whole shebang as a set of static pages. I refuse to be blackmailed by 'actually-you-never-HAD-PHP'-tactics into forking out four times as much as I am paying now, only to get the rights to a service that was part of the package when I started but suddenly never was.

hotel in tanabru was closed today [sunday, after all... who goes to a hotel on a sunday, right?] so no broadband. watched superman, in tribute to the late man himself. remains a classic piece of film - over-the-top ending and all. apotheotic myth of the asylum seeker and illegal alien who becomes more american than the pope. the norwegian subtitles were subtly subversive: 'truth, justice and the american way' was translated as 'truth, justice and your way'...

have to say I didn't notice the messianic current in the movie when I first saw it at 7. father in the skies, moral quandaries, etc. down to the fact that he starts his 'mission' when he's thirty. weird how much you miss in films when you're a kid.

and like jesus, a contemporary aspect of the myth is that 'it'd never work a second time'. you know. the 'what would happen to jesus if he tried to come today' streak of speculation. with today's immigration control regimes in western countries SM wouldn't stand a chance - no papers, no name, no parents, no english, no human dna even... arriving as a baby he'd be shot down, interned and swiftly made to confess, before a secret military tribunal. what else to do - they found a conveniently incriminating copy of the quran in his crashed spacecraft. cue the 'al quaida from space' menace, good reason to multiply the defence budget... failing that, he'd be screwed anyway. at least in this country. nowhere to send him back to after his application got rejected! at best he'd end up selling crack and injecting kryptonite solution for kicks under a bridge.

on the real-world front, I learned today that the healing farm I'm staying at is haunted by an old man who resents the way it's run, and the various changes - traditionalism projected into the spirit-world and made agentive. he shifts stuff around, walks around upstairs, scratches the backs of girlfriends who stay over and whispers their name in their ears in the middle of the night, making them run home. apparently he has a bit of a moral streak, the old man. he also makes life difficult for reiki healers holding seminars by keeping them up all night - in some respects, a man after my own tastes! I mean, if I was an old-time deceased resident I might resent the stuff that goes on here too... though locals describe him as dark and a hostile force. according to my source, my hostess refuses to acknowledge him. would love to find out who he was - might make a footnote of him in my thesis...

yes, I am still working on the problem. have registered with a couple of webhosts that provide PHP support, including the aptly-named polarhome.com... reluctant to disburse too much cash on this, as I just paid for renewal of my domain registration six months ago. to test the new hosts out i need to upload both my database and the pivot framework - this serves as sufficient incentive to fork out for one of my irregular trips to the wireless area in tanabru, one of these days.

on the subject of globalisation, i'm really starting to feel the global flow up here. sami-tamil marriages in the newspaper announcements, workforce problems at the fisheries due to underwaged polish immigrant labour, local theatre troupe performs dario fo plays translated into sami... not to mention the ongoing trade to east asia, of both king crabs and reindeer antlers. today I went to a joik-percussion performance at the museum in varangerbotn - after the show i struck up a conversation with the italian [!] percussionist, and got introduced to his friends, including an italian popstar from bergamo, near where i grew up. distance shrinks vertiginously, yet is reaffirmed at the same time, in the confused italian visages. weird. her husband is a 'mystical' travel writer who might come back up to do a project on umberto nobile, an italian polar explorer. I gave him my email - nothing less surreal than the prospect of acting as a tour guide and translator to an italian travel writer. fieldwork - expect the unexpected.

then drove to vadsø, to catch one of my key informants. also there's a promising jazz concert here tonight. currently at the coffee bar, which is closing down around me for the weekend...

in work terms, things are progressing slowly. slaughter remains erratic at the industrial abattoir, only feeble signs of coming activity from the field abattoir at krampenes [one of these days I am going to post a map...]. the funereal pause extended by a week, and by now the weather has shifted into that uncertain liminal zone between late autumn and proper winter. heavy snow threatens to fall from one day to the next, with it the risk of slippery frictionless surfaces within the fence, leading to needless breakage of bone for beast and herder alike. in the shadow of this meteorological guillotine there remains nothing to do but wait. an art i have developed a certain familiarity with, over the years...

...to frame in livejournal content. not the most pleasing of solutions, but until I get proper high-speed and personal internet access - hopefully over the weekend - it's the best I can think of.

and now, the motherfuckers at nameroute.com tell me that the hosting service I purchased never had PHP support... if I had it working it was only working 'intermittently', as part of an upgrade accident, but I should not have been relying on it. intermittently, for more than two years...

paraphrasing orwell, whoever controls the present controls the past - wish I'd saved a copy of the service agreement...

have submitted a query to my webhoster, asking for clarification on the breakdown. meanwhile I remain where I am - virtually and physically. drove down to varangerbotn this morning for newspapers and a bottomless coffee [15 NOK, about 1£] - a disturbing number of unfamiliar cars have started flashing their lights at me or honking when I drive past. after a couple of weeks of acute paranoia ("what's wrong?! headlights not working?! driving too fast?! no seatbelt?! bad hair day??! WHAT do they WANT, DAMMIT!!!") I've gotten used to this. my reflexes have sharpened to the point where half the time I even manage to raise my left arm in a surprised gesture of aversion that from a car on a highway driving the other way can be mistaken for a wave, even though to any stationary observer it must looke more like the last surprised half-second gesture of bruce banner facing that gamma bomb.

in varangerbotn I bumped into two of my informants in the smuk clan, one of them delivering mail and the other one on his way to hunt moose on the inland plateaus. drove over to the varangerbotn abattoir, the head honcho there was just on his way to vadsø because the computer at the abattoir had choked on an SP2 installation and he had urgent business. stayed around and had a chat and a cup of coffee with a murmansk-based russian geographer who's collecting data on the smuk reindeer breed, on his third season there.

one salient feature of the abattoir is the unbelievable multilingualism - people working there speak norwegian, skolte or eastern sami, northern sami, finnish, russian and english, usually at least two or three of these each... finnish workers are apparently more flexible than norwegians: though the wages are the same, finns and finnish sami are more willing to stay til the work is done.

not sure what to do now - drive to vadsø and have a chat with the vets there, or drive to kirkenes, where the shops are. need to buy a portable scanner and a new camera - after four years of hard use and two weeks in the fence, my old one is stuck on maximal zoom, which makes for interesting but limiting closeups of reindeer noses, fingertips and bloodstains.

for some reason my serverside PHP-support collapsed yesterday, leaving my densely PHP-woven weblog, as they say, UTTERLY FUCKED. extremely annoying.

instead revived an old never-before-used livejournal account as a placeholder while I work out what's gone pear-shaped in my little quadrangle of cyberspace [easier said than done. remember, I'm on the tundra...].

anyway. wish me luck.