Tag: Star Wars

What a piece of (Danish) junk! May the force be with you!

DIANE IN DENMARK

My DD11 (dear daughter, aged 11) was at a
classmate’s birthday party at the ice rink yesterday afternoon. Now, the rink
is right next to our local recycling centre so, when the time came to pick her
up, I decided to load up the car with junk and kill two birds with one stone.
Or should I say,”kill two flies with one swat”? Slå to fluer med et
smæk? 😉

Our genbrugsstation (recycling centre) reopened a few weeks ago
after an extensive makeover. It’s scarily efficient in its layout.
There are even ‘pit stop’ areas where you can clean your hands and vacuum your
car! I was ooooohing and aaaaahing over the streamlined, high-tech look of the
place when one of the recycling crew told me a funny story. The design contract
was apparently won by a French architect. A Star Wars fan. Yep, if you take a
closer look at the layout of the recycling plant, you’ll see that it’s shaped
like…the
Millennium Falcon! The only thing missing, said my
new-best-friend-the-recycling-worker, was Chewbacca… ;)

“What a
piece of junk!” Said Luke, the first time he set eyes on the Millennium
Falcon. Hmm, you can just hear the French architect: “She may not look like
much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid. I’ve made a lot of special
modifications myself!” :P

“Now let’s blow this thing and go home!” Have a (junk free)
wookieweekend!

Diane :)

Candles or lightsabers?

DIANE IN DENMARK

It’s Wednesday – which means that I write about those crazy (but lovable) Danes! 😀

The post is about Danish Liberation Day. And Star Wars.  And you can read it over at my blog desk at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs…

http://blogs.denmark.dk/diane/2011/05/04/may-fourth/

Have a wonderful Wednesday! 🙂

Tee-hee Tuesday! Laugh long and prosper?

DIANE IN DENMARK2 Comments

Ready for another ‘tee-hee Tuesday’?

The kids and I have been really getting into Star Trek recently. We’ve been die hard Star Wars fans for years, as you’ll know from my previous posts Say what, Darth? and Kitchen Essentials. But, as Danish TV were showing a whole season of Star Trek films on Saturday nights, we started watching them and got hooked. Yes, Star Trek is crummy. Yes, the special effects in the old films are trashy. Yes, the plot can be written in two lines or less. Yes, the terminology is all gobbledygook – something I never thought about as a child. But that’s why it’s so good, right? Almost a parody of itself. So imagine our joy when we found a copy of the new Star Trek film at our local library. I enjoyed it immensely, the kids less so. They didn’t think it was as good as the old films…

When I came across an Onion news story with the headline “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film as ‘Fun, Watchable'”, I just had to take a peek. Thanks, again, to my school pal, Terry, for pointing me in the direction of http://www.theonion.com/  He sent me some Onion links in March (I put them in Feel Good Friday) and I haven’t looked back – or away from the computer – since! 😉

OK, before I digress, here’s the Onion link… http://www.theonion.com/video/trekkies-bash-new-star-trek-film-as-fun-watchable,14333/

And here’s Captain Kirk’s legendary fight with a Gorn. Warning: this is from the 1960s and is baaaaad!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SK0cUNMnMM&feature=related

Last – but not least – I couldn’t post about Star Trek without making you watch Eddie Izzard’s absolutely magnificent piece which sums up Star Trek in a nutshell. The sound quality is pretty rubbish but watch out for the “Bones, Jim, Spock!” part…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbOC0uoKYtU&feature=related

By the way, for the trekkies amongst you, ‘Mr Spock’ is on http://www.twitter.com/ You can find him at http://twitter.com/TheRealNimoy I’m already following him and, yes, yes, yes, he signs most of his tweets with ‘llap’! 😛

Have a terrif tee-hee Tuesday…boldly going where no man has gone before? 🙂

Those Crazy Danes – Part 6 (Say what, Darth?)

DIANE IN DENMARK6 Comments

The Danes are pretty good at English. English and German. A bit of Swedish. Definitely not French 🙂 They read a lot of novels and non-fiction in English. With only 5 million inhabitants, you can imagine that the Danish book market is pretty small. So the Danish translation of a book can be expensive and a long time coming. If indeed, it is ever translated at all. And if you’re studying at university (medicine, for example) most of your textbooks will be in English. Foreign television programmes and films in the cinema aren’t dubbed here, they’re subtitled. You’ll sometimes see kids’ cartoons on the telly where the characters are speaking English – without subtitles or dubbing! So, yes, the Danes are good at understanding English.

When they speak English, it’s usually with an American accent. Thanks, no doubt, to all those US telly programmes and Hollywood films…

I sometimes get a giggle, though, when Danes try to pronounce English words that start with W and V. Because in Danish the letter W is pronounced as V. So when they speak English, they can get confused. Village turns into willage. Wellness into vellness. Whisky into visky. [On a side note, when I first arrived in Denmark in 1998, all surnames beginning with either V or W were lumped together in the Danish phonebook.] One of the first things DH remembers learning at school was the exciting phrase “Very well, Vivian” 😉

But my favourite is when DS10 and his friends are talking about Star Wars [Which, on another side note, we L.O.V.E. in this house]. Just who is Luke’s father? Darth Wader! Yep, imagine big old Lord Vader walking around in fishing waders… He suddenly seems a lot less scary, n’est-ce pas?

Have a vonderful Vednesday wonderful Wednesday – may the force be vith with you! 🙂

Kitchen essentials

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We’re just about to start a (huge) remodel of our kitchen which will give us a place to sit down and eat in there. Right now, we either sit in our garden room (if it’s just the 4 of us) or use our large dining room.

The kitchen has always been MY room. DH doesn’t cook, and I don’t ask him to. He has cooked for me twice (when we were first going out in 1994) and can reheat things if I’m on death’s door. So I’ve always had full reign in there, and painted it bright pink.

I’ve got a couple of personal nicknacks in there that I’m not sure I’ll be allowed to display in our new ‘family’ space…

Above the sink, photo of me at the tender age of 21 with H.R.H. The Princess Royal (Princess Anne, the Queen’s daughter). It was taken when she came to visit our offices in Edinburgh. Makes me smile when I look at my permed hair and those long, RED nails I had at work… Must have spent hours looking after them!


My official Star Wars pencil – it says ‘May the force be with you”, though the writing has rubbed off a bit over the years. Got it in 1977 and it has, somehow, moved with me from Edinburgh to Luxembourg to Denmark. Didn’t intentionally mean to take it with me, it’s just been in one of those boxes of pens/pencils that follow you from house-to-house. I loved Han Solo as a child (more so as a woman…) and now that DS9 and friends have become the next generation of Star Wars freaks, I keep it on permanent display 😉

And my single drumstick, thrown by The Klaxons at an open-air concert they played in Malmö Sweden in late summer 2007. I had to fight off a small crowd of other fans to get it. Gives me hope that there’s still life in the old girl yet…