{"id":183466,"date":"2013-02-20T21:31:00","date_gmt":"2013-02-21T02:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/20\/firewood-versus-honey-boo-boo\/"},"modified":"2013-02-20T21:31:00","modified_gmt":"2013-02-21T02:31:00","slug":"firewood-versus-honey-boo-boo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/02\/20\/firewood-versus-honey-boo-boo\/","title":{"rendered":"Firewood Versus Honey Boo boo"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ll go with the aesthetic sensibilities of the Norwegian people<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the angry responses came pouring in.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cWe received about 60 text messages from people complaining about the stacking in the program,\u201d said Lars Mytting, whose best-selling book \u201cSolid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood \u2014 and the Soul of Wood-Burning\u201d inspired the broadcast. \u201cFifty percent complained that the bark was facing up, and the rest complained that the bark was facing down.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>He explained, \u201cOne thing that really divides Norway is bark.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>One thing that does not divide Norway, apparently, is its love of discussing Norwegian wood. Nearly a million people, or 20 percent of the population, tuned in at some point to the program, which was shown on the state broadcaster, NRK.<\/span>

<\/span>In a country where 1.2 million households have fireplaces or wood stoves, said Rune Moeklebust, NRK\u2019s head of programs in the west coast city of Bergen, the subject naturally lends itself to television.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cMy first thought was, \u2018Well, why not make a TV series about firewood?\u2019\u201d Mr. Moeklebust said in an interview. \u201cAnd that eventually cut down to a 12-hour show, with four hours of ordinary produced television, and then eight hours of showing a fireplace live.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>But the real excitement came when the action moved, four hours later, to a fireplace in a Bergen farmhouse.<\/span>

<\/span>Perhaps you have seen a log fire burning on television before. But it would be very foolish to confuse Norway\u2019s eight-hour fireplace extravaganza on Friday with the Yule log broadcast in the United States at Christmastime.<\/span>

<\/span>While the Yule log fire plays on a constant repeating loop, the fire on \u201cNational Firewood Night\u201d burned all night long, in suspensefully unscripted configurations. Fresh wood was added through the hours by an NRK photographer named Ingrid Tangstad Hatlevoll, aided by viewers who sent advice via Facebook on where exactly to place it.<\/span>

<\/span>For most of the time, the only sound came from the fire. Ms. Hatlevoll\u2019s face never appeared on screen, but occasionally her hands could be seen putting logs in the fireplace, or cooking sausages and marshmallows on sticks.<\/span>

<\/span>\u201cI couldn\u2019t go to bed because I was so excited,\u201d a viewer called niesa36 said on the Dagbladet newspaper Web site. \u201cWhen will they add new logs? Just before I managed to tear myself away, they must have opened the flue a little, because just then the flames shot a little higher. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, this is deliciously weird, but this is a hell of a lot less pathological than the American regime of reality programing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ll go with the aesthetic sensibilities of the Norwegian people: The TV program, on the topic of firewood, consisted mostly of people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. Yet no sooner had it begun, on prime time on Friday night, than the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[962,984,1064,1015],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-40yrs","category-europe","category-media","category-weird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183466"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183466\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}