The Girl from Oslo - Netflix Series

What Happened in Oslo (Bortført) - Trailer - Netflix
FanCat

Norwegian girl goes to Sinai for fun in the sun with a couple of Israeli friends and they all get kidnapped by ISIS terrorists. Chaos ensues.

The show is about evenly divided between what's going on with the kidnappers and what's going on on the home front, both is Oslo and Israel, which is mostly politics and emotional caterwauling. Israel won't take direct action because that would mean crossing the border into Egypt, and that would offend the Egyptians. That's weak (fuck the Egyptians), but we get to see drones and spy satellites at work trying to keep track of the kidnappers and their victims.

Some of the details are a little weak, and there is the usual Netflix claptrap, but overall the show does a good job of telling the story.

City of Gaza
Area shown is about five miles across.

Gaza is like a big city. ISIS and Hamas are bitter enemies and would love to kill each other.

CIA map of the Sinai Peninsula, 1992

The Sinai is a desert. The northern edge is on the Mediterranean Sea. The southeastern edge borders the Gulf of Aqaba. 

We prefer to watch shows in their native language with English subtitles, even when the show is in English. It doesn't work here because it only shows the subtitles when they are not speaking English, so to get subtitles all the time you have to switch to English, which means much of it is dubbed and the dubbing sucks.

Bortført translates as abducted.

Apex - Netflix Movie

Apex | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Ninety minutes of Charlize Theron performing death defying stunts while being chased by a cannibalistic serial killer. She climbs unclimbable vertical rock walls, kayaks down rampaging rivers and bounces off rocks. Is she trying to outdo Tom Cruise? Or maybe, like her character, she is an adrenalin junky. It's terrifying.

Apex movie shooting locations near Sydney Australia

Besides Australia, portions of the movie were shot in New Zealand and at the Troll Wall in Norway. Locations via reddit.

Charlize is 50 years old.

Verners Pattern prismatic marching compass

This British WW1 compass shows up a couple of times. Plenty of them for sale.

The Devil's Star - Netflix Series

Detective Hole | Official Trailer
Working Title

Detective Harry Hole is a creation of Jo Nesbø. He has appeared here before.

Pretty great show. Very complicated revenge plot. Willy, an effeminate theater director finds out his wife is still exchanging love letters with Martin (a guy she had an affair with like 20 years ago) and loses his mind. He contrives a scheme to make Martin look like a serial killer, but in fact kills all the victims himself. 

Meanwhile, we have a very nasty villain, Tom Waaler, a dirty cop. He is a member of a right-wing death squad, illegally importing weapons. Unfortunately, his source for the weapons is Martin, the same guy Willy is trying to frame for murders.

Occasionally, someone will come across Tom (the dirty cop) doing dirty deeds and Tom kills them. So we have two killers running around loose. Harry sorts it all out.

The framing of the smuggler goes very well, the guy is arrested and the coppers think they have a solid case. But something about it bugs Harry. He explains it to his boss that 'it felt right, but it didn't feel  genuine'.

There are a couple of gory scenes, one in a very sleazy public restroom and another in an elevator. Seems like the makeup artists are always trying to outdo each other. Does this level of gore boost their audience numbers? I suppose it must. I think I prefer the old English style of bloodless murder mysteries.

P. S. Martin comes from Prague to visit his mother in Oslo on a regular basis. She lives in this house:

Martin's mother's house

The house is situated in a railyard in Oslo, or so it would appear in the show. Looks like it might be an antique railway station, carefully preserved. However a close inspection of the railyard in Oslo shows no such house. Google could not identify it, other than to say it was 'in the German style'. So, AI. Still, a pretty nice house. Except for being in the middle of a railyard.

Bluetooth

Haraldr Blátǫnn Gormsson

Stolen entire from The Village Hemorrhoid:

The Origin Of The Term "Bluetooth"

Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson (Old Norse: Haraldr Blátǫnn Gormsson; Danish: Harald Blåtand Gormsen, died c. 985/86) was a king of Denmark and Norway.

The first documented appearance of Harald's nickname "Bluetooth" is in the Chronicon Roskildense (written c. 1140).

The Bluetooth wireless specification design was named after the king in 1997, based on an analogy that the technology would unite devices the way Harald Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom. The Bluetooth logo consists of a Younger Futhark bind rune for his initials, H (ᚼ) and B (ᛒ).

Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket

Isar Aerospace's first Spectrum rocket on the pad at Andøya Spaceport ahead of its upcoming launch. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Via The Silicon Graybeard

Andøya has appeared here several times before.

WW2 Search Lights & The Battle of Drøbak Sound

WW2 Search Lights
Johnny Johnson

This is light weight video about heavy duty lights. 1.5 meter diameter searchlights seemed to most common for spotting attacking aircraft at night, though there were some that were 3 meters in diameter, which is almost ten feet across. I am pretty sure these lights all used carbon arcs as the source of illumination. I wonder if they caused any radio interference? Spark gap devices were the very first radio transmitters and they had effectively been banned, which leaves me wondering. Perhaps the searchlight housing worked as RF shielding.

A commenter mentions the sinking of the Blucher in the movie King's Choice, which led to this video. It shows the Norwegians using a searchlight to locate warships sailing up the fjord towards Oslo.

The sinking of Blücher - The King's Choice (2016)
ashton

Google also turned up Battle of Drøbak Sound and I put together this map:

Battle of Drøbak Sound

I started watching the movie (on the Roku channel). It's pretty good. Everyone's nervous about the Germans and then these unidentified ships appear in the middle of the night. They fail to respond when challenged, so the Norwegians open fire and bim, bam, boom, there goes the pride of the German navy.

Lofoten Norway

Lofoten Norway

Lofoten is an archipelago.

Lofoten Norway

Lofoten has appeared here before.

MS Bard

MS Bard

Heck of a photo. Nice little ferry boat on a very big, very cold sea. They run excursion tours in the Arctic ocean around Svalbard, Norway.

MS Bard

This boat uses the same power transmission gear as a diesel locomotive. They have diesel engines generating electrical power that is fed to two 350 kilowatt electric motors that turn the propellers. Similar to a hybrid car, but no giant battery pack. This has a couple of advantages over a conventional drivetrain. There is no mechanical gearbox, so the engine does not need to be aligned with the propeller shaft.

Svalbard

Odd feature of Google Maps - notice the light blue circle. It is not the Arctic circle, it is very much smaller. The Arctic circle is at 66° 34' N, this circle is about 20 degrees farther north. Clear the search box and the circle disappears.

Abandoned Coal Loading Dock

The Russians have been digging for coal on Svalbard since the 1920s. I thought I put up a post about it before, but maybe not. Svalbard has appeared here before.

Christmas

Bergen, Norway

Gingerbread City

Gingerbread City, Bergen, Norway

There is also one in London, England and another in New York City.

Viking Wolf

Viking Wolf | Official trailer | Netflix
Netflix Nordic

Gory little horror film that's not very horrific. We have a woman cop, recently transplanted from Oslo or Sweden, along with her two daughters. The younger daughter, Jenny, is elementary school age. The other, Thale, is a teenager. She is out in the boonies, hanging out with her friends when another girl is attacked and drug off into the woods. A search for the missing girl eventually turns up her mutilated body. A big city veterinarian examines the body and concludes that the girl was attacked by an extraordinarily large wolf.

A grisly, old, one-armed dude shows up and tells our lady cop that it's not an ordinary wolf, but a werewolf, a werewolf that he has been tracking for years. He gives her a box of silver bullets that he has put together using the reloading equipment he has set up in his aging RV. She thinks, as any normal, right thinking person would, that he's nuts. A hunting party is organized to track down and kill this wolf. The wolf makes mincemeat of the hunting party, but the lady cop manages to empty the magazine of her 9 mm H&K sidearm into the beast, killing it. 

Our nerdy vet (It's amazing what you can do with a little costuming and acting. He is super nerdy.) examines the corpse and determines that none of the lead bullets our lady cop fired did any real damage to the beast, but the silver bullet (aha!), that one killed it.

Meanwhile Thale has been nursing a scratch on her shoulder that she got when the first girl was attacked. Looks like she has been infected by the werewolf disease. Uh oh, this looks bad. Bad is putting it mildly. She raises hell in town until she is put down with the vet's tranquilizer gun. Last we see of her she is unconscious and tied down on the operating table. Mom has a silver bullet, but doesn't use it thereby leaving an opening for a sequel.

Heddal Stave Church

The best part of the show was a shot of an old church:

Heddal Stave Church

It only appears on the screen for a second and it doesn't play any part in the proceedings other than to sit there and look ominous. The church is in Notodden, Norway, which is where the film was shot. It was built in 1200 and is one of the largest Stave Churches in Norway.

War Sailer - Netflix Series

WAR SAILOR Trailer | TIFF 2022
TIFF Trailers

A couple friends in Bergen, Norway, get jobs on a cargo ship just in time for WW2 to break out, so their 18 month voyage turns into five years. One guy has a wife and three kids, the other is a bachelor. Basically, life during wartime. Isn't that a Talking Heads song? Anyway, it's a pretty good show.

P. S. The Germans built a submarine pen in Bergen which led to trouble that shows up in the show.

Submarine Pen in Bergen Today

From BattlefieldsWW2.com:

When the Germans conquered Norway in 1940, it gave them a golden opportunity to move their U-Boats closer to the front. Construction of a U-Boat bunker in Bergen started in 1941. The bunker had 3 dry boat pens, 3 wet ones, and one that was used for storage.

It was the Kriegsmarines’ 11th U-Boat Flotilla, transferred from Germany, who made its new headquarters in Bergen.

After the Allied landings in France in June 1944, there was a massive expansion of the U-boat base in Bergen. This led to a massive English air raid in October 1944, involving over 150 aircraft. The attack ended in a disaster when 193 Norwegians, among them 61 children at a nearby school, were killed. The bunker took several hits, but remained intact. Only two U-Boats were damaged.  Later the same month ended another attack without success when the 244 aircraft could not find the target due to heavy clouds. A few planes dropped their bombs, but did not hit the bunker.

The third and last air raid took place in January 1945, when 33 bombers loaded with "Tallboy" bombs attacked the base. The bunker took 3 direct hits. One of the bombs penetrated through the roof, damaged two U-Boats and killed 20 Germans.

As with the other German naval bases, the base in Bergen was named using the German phonetic alphabet. As it was located in Bergen, and ”Bruno” is phonetic for"B," it thus became Bruno.

The bunker is used today by the Norwegian Navy for the repair of submarines as well as storage.

From Wikipedia:

A large part of the work to build the bunker was carried out by around 2,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and Poland. The bunker's roof consists of five-metre-thick reinforced concrete, where an entire year's Norwegian production of cement was used for the construction.

. . .

The future of the submarine bunker is uncertain, as the Norwegian Navy's new submarines are too large for the docks in Bruno and will receive new service facilities at Haakonsvern .

P. P. S. Bombing of the school reminds me of another such incident during WW2 in Copenhagen.

 

Luther: The Fallen Sun - Netflix Movie

LUTHER: THE FALLEN SUN Trailer (2023) Idris Elba, Andy Serkis Movie
Movie Coverage

We've got Idris Elba as Luther, all around tough good guy, which means it was pretty great. And, as is typical of all the Luther shows, we've got a unspeakably vicious villain committing horrendously cruel murders. Kind of makes you glad we have a police force and a justice department to keep us in line. Just imagine what life would be like if we all felt free to let out impulses for violence loose. Or maybe the police are just for those whose social conditioning didn't take. Or wore off. Or when something happens that let our inner demon loose.

The climatic scene in the dungeon in the basement of an abandoned mansion in the wilds of Norway was like something you used to see in James Bond films, but now they are everywhere, like in Little Women. Elaborate sets like this don't really add anything to the story. You can make a very scary movie with nothing more than a menacing tone of voice. I'm not sure why they put them in. There must be a reason for it, I just don't know what it is.

Bergen, Norway

Bergen, Norway

Looking west by southwest. Original image was 6,000 pixels across, I cut it down to 4,000 pixels.

Via younger son.

Oslo Cityscape

Oslo Norway
150 piece jigsaw puzzle

This is one of those puzzles I did to find out what it was. I couldn't make heads or tails of the thumbnail they give you. This took about half an hour to assemble. It's funny how the subconscious eye can figure out where pieces go when the conscious eye can't, and vice versa. You can get an almost identical view on Google Maps here.

This is an area of town called Fornebu, site of the former airport. The site is still used by seaplanes.

Post Mortem: Nobody Dies In Skarnes

Post Mortem | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Entertaining story about a small town mortuary in Norway. Well, entertaining once we find out that the proprietor's sister is a vampire. Then it becomes very entertaining. Okay, it's a bit silly as well. However, there are numerous moral conundrums. Like is it okay to transport drugs in a dead body if you can make enough money to keep the bank from foreclosing on your house? And is it okay to kill the doctor who tried to kill you twice? And if your sister is a vampire is it okay to conceal the death of her latest victim from the police?

We also have a slight variation on the old vampire theme. We've dispensed with sleeping in coffins and the fear of sunlight, though how much sunlight does Norway get anyway? We just need a bit of blood, maybe a tablespoon or two to keep the craving under control.

In sum furrin gibberish (probably Norwegian) with English subtitles, 6 episodes, 45 minutes each, on Netflix.

Return to the Future

Return to the Future by Sigrid Undset

Thomas F. Bertonneau has a few things to say about Return to the Future by Norwegian author Sigrid Undset. He opens with this complicated paragraph:

Seeing things plain, not lying to oneself, not subscribing to the delusions of others – these virtues, seemingly so simple, prove in life difficult to achieve and tricky to exercise.  An inevitable imitative pressure assimilates people to one another so that mere opinion, received but never vetted, comes to function as a surrogate reality, in the cave-like error of which people stumble about their errands in a lurching mockery of witting behavior.  The ancients worried about false or second-hand judgment (doxa) or about superstition.  Modern people must grapple with ideology.  The critique of ideology is the single most important exercise that an individual can undertake who wants to stand in truth and by his own lights against the conformist pressure of public opinion, or what dissenters nowadays call political correctness.  But this endeavor is complicated by the fact that contemporary ideology claims, of itself, to be a critique of ideology.  This verbal legerdemain began with Karl Marx, who identified the emergent industrial order as the ideology that he named Capitalism, to which his own Communism was supposed to be the clarifying antidote.  The ability to negotiate such a mental hall-of-mirrors is rarer than it should be.  Those who can do it – or have done it – deserve to be commemorated.

He goes on at some length after this, pretty much in the same style. It's not something you can just skim. Well, maybe you can, I had to concentrate in order to follow it. Pretty tightly wound, I think.

Pic of the Day

Dutch whalers near Spitsbergen - Abraham Storck 1690

Spitsbergen is the largest and only permanently populated island of the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway.

Via A Brief History of Svalbard, Norway

Norway's Coastal Highway Project

Norway’s $47BN Coastal Highway | The B1M
This project sounds almost as difficult as the plan to put a tunnel under the Bering Strait. People used to talk about it anyway. The difference is that this highway in Norway would get used and, two, thanks to their North Sea oil business Norway has the money to pay for it. I'm always impressed when I hear about a big new engineering project. I'm not sure why. They keep getting bigger and bigger. You might think I would get used to that, but I don't. One of these days one of these mega-projects is going to fail and it will be bad when it does. But I guess that has already happened and we charged on regardless.

I know I've mentioned Norway before, but I just checked and was surprised at the number of posts I have about Norway.

Borderliner

Borderliner - Grenseland - Trailer
Started another European murder-mystery series this weekend. This one is a little different in that every episode adds a new twist to the story. We've watched about half and now we're starting to suspect even the most upright characters of being conniving, murderous scumbags. The lead character is gay but the actor is nominally straight. I cannot imagine playing that roll. For me that would be well nigh impossible.

Set in Norway, on Netflix.

Update February 2019 replaced missing video.