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we saw casino royale on saturday night. i take back everything unflattering i ever said about daniel craig's hair colour. mads mikkelsen was exactly right: "they will shut up when they see this." it was really entertaining - exciting and funny, well-acted, pretty and generally awesome. i could totally see that again. it made me want to put up the poster, but we don't have any rooms where that much blue would be appropriate.
what was kind of disturbing - though i wouldn't say it actually ruined the experience - was that the guy behind me had an (epileptic?) seizure in the theatre which went on for probably twenty minutes at least. i realise it would have been a giant pain to get him out, especially a full-grown guy like that, it's not like you could just pick him up or anything, but still, there wasn't really room to have a seizure comfortably there - i mean, he was twitching constantly and hitting his feet, and he kept making these kinda scary choking noises - i think he vomited (wax says he did). although he didn't actually choke; after the seizure he did leave. i don't think i've ever seen a seizure in person before. well, it was memorable.
also, the department chair gave another lecture on swedish-speaking finns today; she was talking about the "language border", both geographical and societal. she's kind of old and evidently a staunch member of the swedish people's party and kind of conservative and paranoid about the language dying out - well, she's from åland besides being old, so i don't know. but she told us that you shouldn't go out and speak swedish on the streets late at night in places like turku/åbo because it isn't safe; that the swedish people's party has the support of almost all swedish-speaking finns but that the overly-liberal helsinki swedish-speakers are out of touch with the rest of the population which is why the chief swedish paper, hufvudstadsbladet, is so unreasonably supportive of bilingualism (because bilingualism is just the fast way to language death); that children with one finnish-speaking and one swedish-speaking parent speak "bad" swedish akin to the english learnt in school by non-native speakers because they "just put swedish words" into finnish expressions and even structures (i bit my tongue to keep from pointing out she'd just told us herself a few minutes ago how strongly swedish-influenced western and southern finnish is); that a language cannot survive if it is not officially protected and used in the society at large; and that the future basically looks really bleak for swedish in finland. her prognosis is radically different from that of the bilingualism specialist from helsinki who gave us a lecture a couple of weeks ago, but then, i guess she's one of those liberal helsinki bilinguals. she finished the lecture half an hour early and she was kind of desperate for people to talk, but, well... ahh, i'm an academic coward. if i were rodney mckay i'd've just picked a fight, but i like her; she's a quavery harmless grandmother type, with an earnest face and huge eyes.
what was kind of disturbing - though i wouldn't say it actually ruined the experience - was that the guy behind me had an (epileptic?) seizure in the theatre which went on for probably twenty minutes at least. i realise it would have been a giant pain to get him out, especially a full-grown guy like that, it's not like you could just pick him up or anything, but still, there wasn't really room to have a seizure comfortably there - i mean, he was twitching constantly and hitting his feet, and he kept making these kinda scary choking noises - i think he vomited (wax says he did). although he didn't actually choke; after the seizure he did leave. i don't think i've ever seen a seizure in person before. well, it was memorable.
also, the department chair gave another lecture on swedish-speaking finns today; she was talking about the "language border", both geographical and societal. she's kind of old and evidently a staunch member of the swedish people's party and kind of conservative and paranoid about the language dying out - well, she's from åland besides being old, so i don't know. but she told us that you shouldn't go out and speak swedish on the streets late at night in places like turku/åbo because it isn't safe; that the swedish people's party has the support of almost all swedish-speaking finns but that the overly-liberal helsinki swedish-speakers are out of touch with the rest of the population which is why the chief swedish paper, hufvudstadsbladet, is so unreasonably supportive of bilingualism (because bilingualism is just the fast way to language death); that children with one finnish-speaking and one swedish-speaking parent speak "bad" swedish akin to the english learnt in school by non-native speakers because they "just put swedish words" into finnish expressions and even structures (i bit my tongue to keep from pointing out she'd just told us herself a few minutes ago how strongly swedish-influenced western and southern finnish is); that a language cannot survive if it is not officially protected and used in the society at large; and that the future basically looks really bleak for swedish in finland. her prognosis is radically different from that of the bilingualism specialist from helsinki who gave us a lecture a couple of weeks ago, but then, i guess she's one of those liberal helsinki bilinguals. she finished the lecture half an hour early and she was kind of desperate for people to talk, but, well... ahh, i'm an academic coward. if i were rodney mckay i'd've just picked a fight, but i like her; she's a quavery harmless grandmother type, with an earnest face and huge eyes.
