And now a word from our resident scientist...

/Prerecorded message follows:/

Hi! I'm Niklas Järvstråt, mad scientist (see http://www.moon-mine.com/) and quality manager at Bombadil. I must start by saying that John's very first blog entry was most inappropriate! We are NOT a "gang", as that brings to mind a horde of ruffians wandering the streets in disorderly fashion, committing vandalism and destruction as they go. In contrast, we are a highly organised "crew" working together to provide support to young authors all over the world in their quest to make their voice heard and publish their manuscripts as high quality books. Quality is the key word here. ;) Quality and structure. Ah well, I cannot talk too much about that, so as not to get me going I'll stop here and shift subject.

Some more about me, I am Swedish, I lived a year in Norway but still think the Norwegians talk in a funny though fully understandable (mostly) Swedish dialect, called Norwegian. I am married to the boss, Marianne. Well, I'm her boss too at times, as she does a fair bit of marketing for my moon-mine project. She usually does way more than I ask for, and has got several papers interested in writing about the moonbase in Pershyttan. She even once had a team from Discovery headed to a set of small mines in Sweden for a film about how James Bond had influenced the world, which made me think of Moonraker. Unfortunately, James Bond himself was not part of that team - otherwise the terrorists would not have managed to keep the film team from bringing the camera equipment out of England. The film-team was just setting off on their world tour when, due to the London terrorist attacks, security was drastically increased at Heathrow airport and taking camera equipment on the plane became quite out of the question. So, the film missed the window of opportunity at the launch of that new Bond film and their mine documentary was cancelled. Well, guess I will be forced to make up for that in future video blogs at Bombadil.

Oh, and today I am travelling to University West to discuss research with the PhD students I am supervising. I work for University West on Fridays, supervising research students, which is why I blog on Thursdays. Yes, it is Thursday today, but tomorrow I need to be at Chalmers to discuss Design for Extreme Environments with students from Chalmers and Lund following that project course. So, this week, Friday occurs on Thursday, and my blogging cannot be performed live. Thus, this is a prerecorded message, brought to you by some of the other members of the Bombadil crew, or Bombadillos, as we prefer to call ourselves.

/Niklas