It's Easter weekend as of yesterday so most of Norway is off skiing.  I'm
not, and am resorting to a lot of evening TV for entertainment.
Tonight one channel was airing 'Smilla's Sense of Snow', a suspense thriller
based on the novel by Danish author Peter Hoeg.  The protagonist, Smilla, is
a glaciologist whose mother was a Greenland Inuit woman and father was
Danish.  We get to see glimpses of Smilla's early childhood in Greenland,
and I can't believe I didn't notice this scene the first time I saw the
film.  Smilla is about 4 or 5, they are out on the ice in bright sun, and
her mother sits down, pulls her parka aside exposing one breast clearly, and
Smilla flops down to nurse.  It isn't commented on at all, but we learn
shortly thereafter that the mother died while hunting, when Smilla was 6,
and that this loss is a shadow which continues to darken her life as an
adult.
Rachel Myr, still in Norway, where no cities are under martial law, no spy
planes are in hostile hands, and the biggest domestic news item was that 95
people have sustained fractures on the ski slopes today.  No kidding.

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