They only eat krill.

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How can you get so big, eating something so small?
Easy: Eat lots of the small guys!

Museum of Nature in Bergen. This is a medium size blue whale, about 24 meters or almost 80 feet long, with its innards and outards removed. I'm telling ya, its mouth alone big enough to park a Volkswagen inside and still be able to open the doors and get out of the car.

Good thing all the meat and muscle and stuff had been taken off, or else it would be way too heavy to hang from the ceiling like that!

Haraldstøtta

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A Monolith Marks The Spot!

Here rests one of the kings of old! Or so it's assumed anyway. The king in question is Harald Hårfagre (Harald the Fair of Hair) ? not to be confused with Harald Hårfarge (Harald Hair Dye) ? who once upon a long ago fell upon the decision to gather all of Norðvegr (old Norse for Norway, if memory serves) to one kingdom under himself, meaning of course that he was to be king of it all, and thus impress a certain lady to the point where she would marry him. In fact it was all her idea.

The "hair" bit comes from Harald's royal oath that he should neither cut nor comb his hair until this task was fully done, which probably means he looked somewhat like a hippie at the end of it ? minus the "peace" bit since it tended to involve a lot of battles and killing and stuff.

More recently some seem to think that he wasn't buried here at all, but rather a few miles off at Avaldsnes, but I'm fairly sure that the monument will nevertheless remain standing where it is.

This one is right smack bang in the middle of the ocean panorama view from my cousin's house.

Kicking back

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You're not properly on vacation unless you can take your shoes off, put your feet up, and just utterly relax while you're baking in the sun.

Just testing this new layout, with CSS and everything crammed into the uploaded post. If this works (and if I like the way it looks) I'll probably incorporate the CSS in the Blogger template. So, here we go, and may it hopefully look reasonably good on my homegrown Phlog.

Guardians of the King's grave

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The monument was surrounded by these and their friends, who made sure nobody ran off with it.

Looking kinda sheepish, really. Is that what you'd call a wooly expression?

Finding Nemo?

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Hmm ... Nope, not in here.

The fish market in Bergen ... World famous in all of Norway for its fish and for its being in Bergen.

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Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Just testing how it works to manually upload and enter images into my posts.

Adventure view at 3000 feet

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I totally fell in love with this view and simply had to stop the car and take a picture of it. This was on our way home from summer vacation, about 1/3 of the way across the mountains. I took a few landscape pics of fjords and such on this trip, but personally I think this one came out best. The half-dry bits of lake i the foreground is called Kjelavatn.

Location is 59°48'23.74"N 7°13'34.85"E, south-west direction.

This is a water reservoir, used to make hydroelectric power. One of the easiest ways to spot this is by noticing the water line, and the dry gray rocky layer below the green grassy one. It's pretty low at the moment, promising astronomical prices on electricity this upcoming winter.

Being a member of the European electricity market, Norwegian power companies will produce huge amounts of electricity while water supplies are abundant, and sell cheaply to European countries, spending 90% or more of the available water this way. Later, when water levels are low, they won't be able to afford the same production rate, so they'll import expensive coal or nuclear power generated electricity for our industry and private households, at sky-high prices. That's taking care of your own for ya.

A new Phlog arises!

I used to post my bloggings at Phlog.net, where I started in December 2003. Sadly, Phlog has fallen into decay after a company called 20six came in, took the place over and dumped it. This has led to a need for new places to blog. So far I've checked out BusyThumbs, which is perhaps the closest I've come to a free, Phlog-like blogging service, and Flickr, which costs money if you're going to use it for anything more than the bare basics. Now, the good thing about Flickr is that it can be combined with Blogger, which is what I'm going to try out here. Let the games begin ...

Smirks are bad news!

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Going from the faraway vacant look of utter concentration to the beginning of a smile that knows very well that by putting those cards together in just that order and lay them on the table, she'll floor the rest of us and win the round. She just needs one card to get it right.

This was taken at my aunt's place during one of many traditional rounds of Gin Rummy.