Or so they say. All I know is willful ignorance in others makes me annoyed and peevish. As when we travelled by plane over easter and the baby (I really should stop calling her the baby, she isn’t anymore, she’s grown into a little lady with a mind of her own, but as I don’t want to use her name on the internet much, I need a new nickname, I know:) the little lass got a “kid’s package” from the hostesses at SAS.

This consisted of a box vaguely decorated to resemble a plane, oval windows down the sides and a plane front window at one end where you could see the pilots and so on, populated by lions. On the box lid the text reads: “Løvemat. Nesten det samme som løvene spiser.” (Lion food. Almost the same as what lions eat.)

The contents: One tiny carton of orange juice, one bag of fruit jellies shaped like small airplanes, one set of colouring pencils and one colouring book – the latter also populated by lions.

The question: Which of these items supposedly resembles something a lion would eat?

Why couldn’t they have called the concept “Monkey food” instead and populated the plane with monkeys? That would at least have been half-way plausible.

I know, I know. Hardly a big thing in the great scheme of things. It’s just that it’s so unnecessary. And it kind of falls into the same category as a lot of the spelling mistakes that make me cringe. People, when this sort of mistake is pointed out, say “But it’s not important. Everyone understands what we are trying to say.” I beg to differ. Some people might actually not understand. And it IS important. I’m probably going to be one of those mothers who write to the television companies and point out the basic mistakes they make in children’s programmes. I nearly did the other day, in fact. There was a song about an explorer where they had illustrated one of the poles with pictures of both polar bears and penguins – which probably explains why I can’t remember which pole they were singing about. In the case of the SAS lions, I doubt whether any of the design team actually believe that lions eat fruit jellies shaped like little airplanes. When it comes to the polar fauna, I’m not so sure the misinformation is willful. After all, a recent survey shows that 13 percent of adult Norwegians believe there are polar bears in the region known as “Nord-Norge” – Northern Norway. In case you’re wondering, no, there are no polar bears in Nord-Norge. At Svalbard, yes, but that is another matter entirely. Mind you, since we’ve all grown up with the “for illustration only” weather map of Norway – with Svalbard floating off the west coast of northern Norway – perhaps most people believe it’s just a skip and a jump across the North Sea from the mainland to our northerly neighbour. It ain’t.

Anyway, why do I think all this is important? Well, apart from being pedantic and just instinctively disliking willful ignorance to the point of agressiveness (seriously, around me it pays to at least pretend to be interested in factual accuracy), I honestly believe this is a symptom of what got the human race into trouble in the first place. If it’s not particularly important to know what a lion eats, it follows that you’re not really interested in how the lion fits into the ecosystem and if you don’t know that, then you won’t be able to see any reason why we need lions in the first place, hence it doesn’t really matter if they become extinct. And if lions don’t really matter to you – they live in Africa, after all (oh, and a very small population in India, remnant of the subspecies Panthera leo persica which once covered most of Asia – did you know that?), and Africa is a far way off (though not quite so far if you run an airline, I should have thought, but never mind), then I suppose you don’t really mind if the whole continent of Africa becomes deforrestated, either? I mean, it won’t affect you, will it?

And so on. Not incidentally, I’ve been overdosing on Gerald Durrell lately, but I read Durrell because I believe in much of the same principles he believed in, not the other way around.

To add insult to injury, the lions were butt ugly, imho.

Oh, and the colouring pencils? Worst ever. Pressing down hard I could barely make a mark in the colouring book, the lass, having grasped the main idea of writing implements but not having had much time to practice and lacking in precision and force stood no chance at all.

…when the best selection of new books (novels and non-fiction) can be found at a newsagent rather than any of the so-called bookshops?

I finished my current read (The Tale of Desperaux) on the bus this morning, and since I’m visiting the bloodbank later – something which usually entails a bit of waiting time – I thought I’d just pop in somewhere to see if I could find something worthwhile to buy. Since the bookshops are not yet open when I make my way to work, I thought I might as well try the largest newsagent – Narvesen at Nordre – which is just down the block. As usual (well, I have been there before, you know) I am astounded at the selection of new non-fiction and fiction they carry. Now, don’t get me wrong, the section for books is tucked away at the back and the selection consists of a few hundred titles at most, but at least it’s stuff that was actually published THIS century. AND they have NON-fiction, a type of book whose existence seems to have been all but forgotten by the major bookshops. I ended up with Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, which is hardly what you’d call new, being first published in 2006, but which I have not come across at a convenient time earlier. However, had I been in the mood for fiction, there were four or five titles that I will be buying at some point, just not today, and there were several more non-fiction titles I might as well have purchased, had I not found Bryson.

By contrast, the bookshop with the largest number of books in English has a fair selection of paperback fiction – though never the really new stuff, or at least never the new books I actually want. Whenever I find a book I’d actually like in the “new arrivals” section I have normally already purchased it – somewhere else and quite a while back. And they have no non-fiction whatsoever. Perhaps most illustrative of the lack of exitement generated by their selection: Even when they run a 25%, or even 50%, off all English paperbacks I have a hard time finding anything I actually want to fork over money for.

The bookshop that used to have a fairly large non-fiction section of the English paperback kind (well, when I say fairly large I mean somewhere between one and two shelf metres dedicated to the category) recently moved from a spacious corner house to a fancy high street venue and lost at least half its area. Consequently its selection of books of any kind has dropped drastically. This morning I noted that they are advertising dvds, something they have not been selling earlier. Great, that will mean more space for actual books, then?

Perhaps they are just adopting to the market. Perhaps there really isn’t a demand for Bill Bryson and Al Franken and Christina Lamb in this town. Or perhaps everyone else actually manages to browse for new titles online and therefore shop at amazon or play or bokkilden. And it is possible that I’m the only one left who’d rather buy the hardback of Douglas Coupland’s new novel in an actual bookshop.

Or it’s back to the old chicken and egg question: Do you have a smaller selection of books because they don’t sell or don’t they sell because you have a smaller selection?