I bundled up in the gym lobby, girding myself against the sub-freezing temperatures outside; five below, centigrade, when I walked in and undoubtedly colder now. As I stepped outside, and rounded the corner, beginning my long ambulatory trek home, I did my usual sky-survey.

I’m a little bit of an amateur astronomer; I don’t have a telescope, but I really enjoy the natural beauty of a full, unpolluted starfield. Reykjavik, like any other city, is wretchedly polluted with excess lighting, but these days we’re getting decent views of the Venusian-Lunar conjunctions. Orion’s low in the south and Ursa Major high in the north.

Today, as I looked over towards Ursa Major and then towards Polaris, I noticed a little something strange. There was this weird contrail stretching out from the northeast sky, cutting just north of the Dipper, and continuing on towards the northwest. It was a fairly diffuse contrail, but it could believably be lit by the moon or the city’s light. Then it started shifting.

Northern Lights!

I stopped dead in my tracks and watched the nascent aurora gently shimmer in the sky. There were streetlights everywhere, so I ran down the ice-slick sidewalk into a big - and unlit - gravel parking lot nearby. I had a great open view. A diffuse band, maybe a degree or so of of arc in width, but stretching all the way from northeast to northwest along the sky. It was hardly bright, which is why I’d initially thought it was some unusual kind of contrail. But, staring straight at it, the subtle rippling of the aurora belied its true nature.

This initial display was probably pretty unremarkable for the locals; few people seemed to be stopping or even taking notice of the celestial waltz happening above. I ended up quickly walking farther along my route, as halfway down it there was a long, nearly light-free path between bunch of darkened houses, with a broad and unobstructed view of the heavens.

Once I reached that spot, I stood there for a good twenty minutes. The lights had gotten more active; the iridescent curtaining was clearly visible. As I watched, a ripple - several degrees of arc in width - silently passed overhead. Sublime. The band slowly faded.

As I got farther towards home, I looked up again and was astonished to see an even more remarkable formation. The northwestern band had reappeared and seemingly split, fanning out into up to five bright, writhing green tendrils. Like a giant bird’s foot undulating in the sky.

In the end, I stumbled home, nose icicular, after a full hour of intermittent walking - a trip that normally takes twenty minutes or so.

Regardless of where you sit on the Games As Art bench, it’s hard not to appreciate the craft Gregory Weir puts into his flash titles. He recently won an award for December’s I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors. It’s one of those sublime games that reaches a new strata of emotional impact, similar to the way I felt about Raph’s seagull game when I first played it. If you haven’t tried Majesty of Colors yet, go for it, right now. It only takes a few minutes to play through once.

What’s notable now is that he’s just released Bars of Black and White, an interesting twist on the ubiquitous “room escape” subgenre of the puzzle/adventures. It doesn’t have quite the immediacy, flow or oomph that Colors does, but it’s admirable all the same. The theme feels a little bit like the mid-90s adventure game Normality, albeit far more serious and dystopian. The internal monologue really speaks to me, though; it’s strikingly reminiscent of a character I’m working on for one of my projects.

Definitely give Bars a play-through.

Via Raph’s Blog comes this interesting article in the Boston Globe: How The City Hurts Your Brain.

Its conclusions are striking, but without actually reading the (uncited) paper referenced by the above-linked article, I’d approach the article with caution. It was only a few months ago that the folks at F13.net got a first-hand lesson in the pitfalls of peering through a journalist’s filters, and it’s the frequent pop-science article that leaves the educated shaking their eggheads.

Thus disclaimed, I find it interesting that purely anecdotally, the idea that crowded, noisy urban environments wear us down by neurological overstimulation makes perfect sense. I’ve voiced very similar thoughts, in a somewhat less-formal manner, whenever I get into a comparative discussion of the many places I’ve lived. Given that Icelanders’ favorite question is “How do you like Iceland?”, the topic is brought up not infrequently.

My two former residences that stand most indicted are, of course, Los Angeles and the City of New York. I’ve never hidden my distaste for LA; it only takes a wee bit of crawling through this very site’s archives to find invective leveled against it. When you boil down all the comments on its social scene, traffic, layout, attitudes, housing and other issues, you find that the problem’s pulsating heart lies in the fact that Los Angeles is a multi-hundred-square-kilometer concrete cancer festering on the side of California. Go to Google Maps and look at it from space; even at the distant scale linked, there’s a notable pallidity to the landscape.

It doesn’t hurt that, as a desert, Southern California is naturally antiviridian.

New York’s case is closer to the Newbury Street example than the naturalist slant found in the article. Whenever I visit the City, and especially Manhattan proper, there’s a palpable pulse in the streets themselves, a neverending crush of ideas, words, people, things. While invigorating for a few hours or days - though that may, of course, be partially attributable to nostalgia - remaining there longer leads inevitably to the anxiety, tension and irritability spoken of by the study. As much as I may admire what New York stands for, its pace is impossibly hostile.

On the inverse, examine Iceland and San Francisco. In San-Fran, I lived close enough to Golden Gate Park that, after a light drizzle, I could open my windows and welcome in a wonderful arboreal scent that instantly refreshed my apartment. The ocean lay a ten-minute streetcar ride away, while the hothouse of downtown was similarly accessible in thirty. Here in Iceland, I can see the literal edge of civilization from my rear porch and escape humanity entirely with a simple forty-five minute drive into the moonscapes and glaciers of the interior.

Oddly, an orbital survey of San Francisco looks objectively similar to LA, although the latter’s sheer area is still unmatched. What you do, see, though, is a greater proliferation of intra-city green space, and in far less concentrated lumps. It makes a difference, I suppose.

Just a brief post this time, not one of my five-hundred-word monsters.

Spotted on Raph’s Blog, check out Champion of Guitars (requires Java), a sweet sendup of Guitar Hero styled after traditional interactive fiction by Bill Meltsner.

By random chance, and likely by downturn of economy, my usual hair salon was closed when I checked on it last Saturday. This is rather inconvenient, as it’s a good twenty minutes’ walk from work or home and now only open during a tight slice of my working hours. Instead of trying to cram a trim into the hectic tempest that is my average working day, I instead decided to brave the tiny rakarastofa - traditional barber shop - located just two doors down from my apartment.

I’d avoided this place prior for a couple reasons; chief among them, it’s a seriously old-school barbershop. The sort you see in old films, with the heavy leather-cushioned iron chairs, razor strops hanging from the wall and a weathered barber’s pole hanging outside. It also has a pedigree as one of the neighborhood’s fixtures; it’s been in business essentially throughout the living memory of all whom I’ve spoken with.

As I’ve got rather thick, stiff hair, I tended to prefer Asian salons in San Francisco; they were familiar with the consistency of my mane and tended to do a great job for rather little money. Your average Icelander has soft, downy hair that requires the application of Dark Matter to do more than droop. I was, therefore, afraid of the potential expense for an artisan ‘do that wouldn’t suit my particular type of hair.

Also, being an ancient Icelandic establishment, I foolishly doubted the proprietor’s ability to speak English.

Turns out I had absolutely nothing to worry about. The gentleman on duty in the murky gloom of Reykjavík’s January at 9 AM had a fine command of the language, but moreover, he was enthusiastic in trying to speak with me in his native tongue. It was my first real Icelandic linguistics workout since I’ve started learning, and we were able to communicate fairly well after I asked him to speak slowly and clearly for me.

Of further surprise was that this was a serious business type of barbershop. Entering it and having a cut - mind you, one of the best I’ve had, ever - was like stepping right into TVLand’s Fifties. I’ve been searching all over Iceland for proper men’s grooming supplies. Most places either sell overpriced designer crap or worthlessly cheap mass-market product. This tiny little establishment, just next door to my home, stocks real double-edged safety razors, several types of blades, a bewildering variety of shaving brushes and an utterly unbelievable array of traditional aftershaves and colognes. Plus all the accessories needed to operate the above properly.

Having already purchased an entry-level pure-badger brush during my initial quest, I picked out a beautiful golden-brass DE razor and some blades. I’m thinking I’ll check out their selection of proper soaps and colognes next; my current soap is only marginal for a proper wet-shave.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend working on an article for Rob and Dream Not of Today. It was a lot of fun; Palli and I spent a good two hours out among the protestors. I managed to drag words out of a surprising number of people, given the rather reserved persona of your average (sober) Icelander.

Still, in the process I received my fair share of glances bespeaking puzzlement - or other, less kind, emotions. But nothing untoward was said or done; most of the natives seemed content to answer briefly to whatever basic questions I could formulate on the fly.

There’s a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff that went unpublished for the article; interesting tidbits that didn’t quite fit into the established narrative. I’ll reproduce them here for the interested.

• Several people carried blank signs, in both rectangular and disc-shaped form factors, and offered the sign-less markers with which to construct their own.
• A woman carrying a large European Union flag, mounted on a thin PVC pipe so tall it listed under its own weight.
• A gentleman on stilts.
• A picketer with UTSALG emblazoned across a depiction of the Icelandic flag. The phrase is Danish, meaning “For Sale”. Remember that Iceland was ruled by Denmark for hundreds of years.
• Another sign: Látum Auðmenna Borga. Let the Rich pay.
• The orator’s speech mentioned support pouring in from the countryside, naming towns as far away as Austurfirðir - clear on the opposite side of Iceland.
• A sign: Landrað Af Gáleysi Er Landrað. Strictly translated, “A treason of incompetence is (still) treason.”
• A ladies’ choir singing softly in front of Alþingishusið - the house of Parliament - just after the “main” protest concludes.
• Several small white splatters on the facade of Alþingishusið. Dried eggs from previous evenings’ protests.
• A blue bag strung up from a lamppost. Further inspection, and the questioning of a nearby woman, reveals that it is a falcon. They’ve lynched, in effigy, the symbol of the Icelandic Independence Party. That would be the party of Geir Haarde and Davið Oddsson, both widely blamed for various aspects of the crisis.
• A woman carrying a sign: Ókeypis Knús - free hugs. “An interesting way to boost spirits,” observed Palli.
• There are no (visible) policemen near the protest. One, in a bright yellow traffic vest, ensures that no one befouls the garden behind Parliament.

Strange times indeed.

After long hours toiling in the UNIX mines, I’ve finished upgrading the various bits and bobs behind the Men From Sky facade. At the same time, I’ve kicked together - twice - an articular draft for Rob@(d)N0t. Once I can get through to the fine friend who ended up being my photographer on today’s expedition into the heart of the Icelandic Dream, it shall be published. My ego will, of course, compel me to post news of such things here.

I would write more, but the hour is late and tomorrow, as someone once said, is another day.

If you truly want to get technical, today is another day.

The idea, originally, was beautiful in its simplicity. A few hundred words every other day or so, describing the daily struggles of an American grappling with expatriatism and acclimatizing to a rather unique pace of life. What it failed to take into account, of course, was the seduction afforded by internet silence and a “unique pace of life” disrupting writing’s natural rhythms.

That is, of course, no excuse. I might just as well claim lack of muse or will.

Regardless, we, collectively speaking, are now Here, in a new Year. We’ve received Hope from a new President for the United States and the Promise of a new Parliament for Iceland. The past months have been traumatically dramatized by the ever-toppling stream of financial dominoes.

I’ve recently started, or re-started, a few other side projects in lieu of playing with games during the rare free evening. Now seems as good an opportunity as will be had to give an old project compository-prosical resuscitation.

This evening, should I not be sidetracked - don’t count on that - I intend to update the software behind the site and crack out one of a few things that have been clawing away at my braincase. But for now, I must depart - my good friend Rob of (d)N0t has requested I investigate the unusual riots that have, of late, rocked downtown Reykjavik.

It’s been a bit of a busy week, and I’m getting used to the time schedule here, so I’ve had less of a chance to randomly hike about the city. I’ve also exhausted a lot of the more immediately interesting subjects in the downtown area, with a few notable exceptions. In particular, I’m waiting for a nice clear day to photograph Hallgrimskirkja, preferably after they tear the scaffolding off it.

That said, I should have some very nice stuff over the weekend.

Five photos after the jump.

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Yup, it may be Monday but I still managed to snag some shots. Fortunately there’s several routes I can take around the city, and even the smaller streets will occasionally yield an interesting photo.

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