Thanks Elisa for cleaning the toilet for Daddy!

View from my kitchen balcony

Having a kid has made me realize that heretofor every thought I ever had has has been primordially selfish.

It suddenly dawned on me today that I am going to spend 50% of my free time over the next couple of years cleaning up after the baby. Elisa seems to have a knack for wrecking rooms. She likes to empty out drawers, flip over flower pots, clear bookshelves, and smear food over a 3-foot radius when she eats. In this picture you can see the desire to make a mess in her eyes.

Get me out of here!

Elisa loves to play in the dishwasher and then she's like, "Pick me up, Daddy!"

Right now it's her first major way to communicate.

This is the view from my living room window one year ago today. That building is Söder Station. The time is 12:00 noon. There was a lot more snow last year. Stockholm is  having the warmest winter on record this year. Right now it's 2 degrees and raining. I am becoming more like the Swedes. I do not go outside in weather like this if I can help it.

Sweden Memes

More Swedish memes here but they are not as funny as this one

No waving yet but a clap

I could get Elisa to clap today. But it took like an hour. I gave here a Cheerio as a reward. The Cheerios in Europe are much sweeter than the Cheerios in the States. Why do companies have to put sugar in everything? I guess because so many people have sugar addictions.

Papaledig

I am home papaledig for 7 months with Elisa. She is 1 year old. It's the second day. I am trying to teach her to wave to me. Now when I wave and say "Winka til papa!" or "Wave to daddy!" at her she gives me the dog-watching-a-card-trick stare. I guess it takes a few more months of development.

I will teach her to wave eventually.

Adobe ... The Master of Bloatware?

I just installed Adobe Acrobat Reader on my Windows 7 box... which according to Adobe supposedly takes up to 335MB when fully installed. The download itself is 53.5 megabytes.

Now I hate PDFs as much as the next person, but they are a fact of life. You just gotta deal with them sometimes. I used to use Foxit Reader (which uses a lot less disk space and likewise memory), but I got a really fast machine now so I thought I might as splurge and use the original.

Of course Adobe Reader is a real stinker like most other Adobe products. It runs a daemon in the background which wants to update itself more often than my Antivirus software. Do PDFs really evolve that quickly that I need an update every week? No. It's just that the program, despite being so large, is about as secure as a pastrami sandwich guarding an open bank vault. And how can it take 335 megabytes to render a PDF when it only takes 1 megabyte to run the whole fucking space shuttle?

My Windows tip for the day is to run 'msconfig' and disable everything that says Adobe in there.

Some interesting facts:

1. The computer which runs the space shuttle really does only use 1 megabyte of RAM.

2. Windows 7 recommended storage space is 16 to 20 GB.

3. If this post interests you for some reason, I wrote an article on the difference between storage and memory on my EFL website English 4 IT.

Swedish Military Vs USA Military

I found this Swedish military shit on YouTube. Funny funny funny. It lists an American military commercial and a Swedish military commercial.



Here is a Swedish anti-tank weapon in action... holy moose meatballs!



People in the military may be tough but they look silly to us civvies. Why does every move involve either putting your head or hands on the genitalia of another man? Just get a hotel room for chrissakes.



Last and least here is a couple frumpy woman and a hot Swedish girl talking about how Sweden is not all neutrality and free day care. I didn't know before this that Saab made grenade launchers. I hope they are not as quirky as the cars are - or people are going to blow themselves up. Also whoever made this video.. nice job on the audio sync lol. As for Sweden making weapons while they haven't been to war in 200 years... yes it's a bit of a hypocritical shame. However Sweden has the second highest standard of living in the world ( after Norway which is basically the same thing as Sweden but with mountains and oil wells ) so they must be doing something right.

Swedes Are Aliens

I knew it!

" In November 1989 a 'completely terrified' woman contacted RAF Wattisham in Suffolk to report her close encounter with a man claiming to be an alien.

She said she met the fair-haired man with a Scandinavian-type accent as she walked her dog on a sports field.

He told her crop circles were caused by others like him who had travelled to Earth and that the purpose of his visit was friendly. "

Read the rest...

Swedish Idol ( yes they make that )

Happy 2009... For those of you who are sick of watching The Israelis bomb the fuck out of Gaza, here are some of my favorite Swedish Idol moments:

This is a real pimply-ass gangsta from the hood...



I don't know what this is but it's hilarious...



Kurt Cobain could learn a thing or two from this girl...

Swedish woman throws up on live TV

You would never see this on QVC back in the States. For those who don't speak Swedish, she blames her on-air vomiting on PMS...

Primal Scream and Spiritualized Coming To Stockholm

Just when I thought Stockholm was hopeless in terms of music, we are getting Primal Scream and Spiritualized playing within a month of each other... at the awesome venue Berns no less.

Hope to see you there... it will give me an opportunity to jump around like an idiot and celebrate how much I love life. Until the next morning of course.

Swedish Chef is a Real Guy, Bork Bork

Okay we all know it's funny although we don't always know why. The Swedish Chef is one of America's most beloved muppets, even though it remains a total mystery to the average Swede.

I was recently surprised to find out that the Swedish Chef is based on a real guy.

Here is the story:

Lars "Kuprik" Bäckman is the real-world chef who, rumor has it, served as the inspiration for the popular Swedish Chef character in The Muppets. (This story is however denied by Jerry Juhl, writer on The Muppet Show.) He lives in Leksand, Sweden.

Bäckman was brought up in the Swedish town of Rättvik, where as a child he helped out in his parents' hotel. His interest for food led him to attend restaurant training, after which he worked in numerous restaurants around Sweden.

When he was 21 years old, he left for the United States to help his friend start a restaurant called "Viking Horn" and known informally as "the horny Viking". It was situated in the outskirts of Beverly Hills. After the "Viking Horn" he became head chef of a Holiday Inn hotel and later, head chef at 20th Century Fox.

Bäckman was asked to do a commercial for Swedish food in a show that was later to be turned into Good Morning America. It was to be a live show, where he cooked and explained his cooking to a program host who was supposed to ask questions and guide the process along. However, the host never showed up and Bäckman had to attempt the taping on his own. In his words:

"I was so nervous. I was shaking and didn't know what to do. And all the time I was mumbling strange words. At first the audience was surprised of the idiot that, sweating like a pig, stood before them. But after a while they started to laugh."

It is said that Bäckman was contacted by Jim Henson, who wondered if he could buy the rights for the recorded performance. The chef was paid USD 80 for the material. Henson transformed the characteristics of Bäckman into one of his puppets and the Swedish chef came into being. This is, as said, denied by Muppet Show writer Jerry Juhl.

Currently, Bäckman is travelling around Sweden while cooking, telling jokes and singing in shopping malls, at company parties and similar arrangements. He is also recording TV-commercials for Siljan Food, and working on his own logotype. Bäckman also does promotions with IKEA in the United Kingdom.

The Real Swedish Chef's Homepage

Yummy Kopparberg Cider

We beat Greece yesterday 2-0. Time for some cider!

Party in Sweden's Pants

Many people complain that Sweden is one of the most boring countries in the world.

I am not going to argue. You can't score here to save your life, a mixed drink with 4cl of alcohol costs $15, and between September and June there is no one on the streets after 8:00 pm (except Friday nights where everyone binge drinks and then throws up in the sidewalk).

At least some people have a sense of humor about it.

MacBook Air ENVY...ENVY...ENVY!

Yes Steve Jobs looks more and more like a monkey every year...but he makes awesome laptops. I've often wondered why PC designs lag so far behind Mac designs. There must be 100 PC laptop manufacturers and their offerings look terrible in comparison. And many include some deal-killing stupid feature that no one would ever want (fingerprint readers, glossy screens, Vista, etc).

Dell? Sony? Acer? Lenovo? Hello? These are big companies with huge resources. Their competing models all terrible in comparison to a MacBook Air or even a normal MacBook. The only good thing with the Dell is that you can get insurance against breaking or even losing the thing (which is a good thing if you are me). But fuck it I will just have to be careful.

I would have a MacBook Air by now except in the great land of Sweden they cost $3,000 bucks which is twice what they cost in the USA. YOU CAN FLY TO THE USA AND BUY ONE AND ITS STILL CHEAPER! So that's what I'll do.

Plus if you buy one here you have to deal with the Swedish keyboard layout... which if you read my last post you will know I am not that excited about.

I haven't been this enthusiastic about a product since ColecoVision came out in 1982. ENVY...ENVY...ENVY!

I HATE THE SWEDISH ALPHABET

I hate the Swedish alphabet.

Who do they think they are to fuck with a perfectly good English alphabet?

I hate the Swedish alphabet.

It causes havoc whenever I try to make a website in Swedish. All the weird characters end up looking like insane chicken scratch or ?'s

I hate the Swedish alphabet.

I still like the girls still, though.

I hate the Swedish alphabet.

My last name begins with a 'Z'. I got used to being last. Now Magnus Österberg is last.

I hate the Swedish alphabet.

They didn't officially add the 'W' until 2005! It's only in the name of yer own country for chrissakes!

I hate the Swedish government.

Ooops I meant to say 'alphabet'.

I hate the occasional Freudian slip.

But not as much as I hate the Swedish alphabet.

Swedish Woman Dies Fishing for Chickens

If you think your life is pointless, then check out this Swedish woman's death...

"A 63-year-old woman died on Saturday night after falling down a well while trying to fish out a dead chicken. The accident occurred near Ed in Dalsland in western Sweden. "

Read the whole article at The Local.