Month: August 2004

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Ongoing

I’m just not in much of a writing mood. I’m enjoying Stockholm (on to Lund/Malmo tomorrow, before crossing the border to Copenhagen), but interviewing all these people is kinda running me down.

Took some pix this morning, but they didn’t come out great. So I put some jokes together instead.

I guess the problem is, the big picture of Stockholm is sorta old-countryish, but the beauty of it is in the little touches, in the way that crazy design sense plays itself out all over the darn place. Like in this lamp on my night-stand, which I thought was askew first, but turned out to make a perfect cone of light on my book. I wish I was here on vacation, because I’d ramble on for hours.

Anyway, here are some other pix:

The university building that houses the bioprocessing group that I interviewed this morning.

An intersection.

Didn’t Tim Duncan foul out of the Olympics because of one of these?

With Sly & Robbie?

I was very disappointed not to find a Randy Moss jersey in here.

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Go ape, part 753,215

Dinner at Erik’s Gondolen with the Life Science project maanger from Business Arena Stockholm (hey, Ylva!). Here’s the view from the restaurant. And here’s the menu:

Dill marinated salmon with crayfish tails in mustard

Breast of duck with chantarelles and potato muffin, herb and garlic bouillon

Apple parfait with cinnamon and sweet-pickled cherries.

I violated my “don’t mix your drinks, you idiot!” rule by drinking the following in 5 hours: G&T, beer, fruity-tasting vanilla vodka concoction, red wine, two capuccinos, beer, and 4 cigarettes.

But I had a nice evening, with good conversation, and I didn’t smoke NEARLY as much as this guy.

Here are some pix from the first two evenings. I haven’t taken a ton of pix, and I haven’t written much about the city (I DO keep a notebook, okay?), but I’ll try to work on that tomorrow.

The view outside my hotel.

Down the block.

The sculpture outside an academy.

One of the locals.

Pedestrian walk, on the way to dinner tonight.

Take it to the bridge.

Look, kids! Parliament!

Another view from the restaurant.

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Taking Stock(holm)

Sure, the flight across the Atlantic was turbulent throughout, so I couldn’t sleep.

Sure, a 200-lb. guy passed out while walking down the aisle and collapsed into my seat, where I happened to be sitting (I caught him and got him (somewhat gently) onto the floor; he just fainted from a combo of nerves and getting up quick after sitting for a few hours. He was fine, and came by to apologize to me for any problem he caused).

Sure, Paris’ passport control setup is so bad that I got onto my connecting flight with 10 minutes to spare.

Sure, the seal on my hair gel wasn’t tight enough, so there’s now a “medium-hold” film over many of my toiletries.

Sure, the hotel didn’t have a clean room for me, so I had to walk around the city with my PR contact for a few hours, insuring that I would reach the crucial 24-hours-awake mark that always bodes so well. (The lack of sleep kept me from remembering to take my camera on that walk, which is a problem since it was a beautiful meander around the city.)

But now I’m chilling out in a nice hotel room in Stockholm. The Airport Express adaptor’s working like a charm, so’s I can type away here in bed.

I’m gonna go find some eats, and maybe finish reading Irvine Welsh’s Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting.

Despite any inconveniences, it remains a beautiful life. (Sure wish I didn’t have to iron my shirts, though . . .)

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Help out

oday’s been designated a “Day of Conscience” by people who are trying to stop the genocide in Sudan. If you’re interested in helping save the citizens of Darfur, there are plenty of regional events today that you can participate in.

For more information on the on the genocide in Sudan, you need to go here.

Also: Salim Mansur, a columnist for the London Free Press, discusses the genocide and how it demonstrates the racism of the Arab Muslim world:

This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.

Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks (‘abed) is a derivative of the word slave (‘abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.

Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.

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I was seriously thinking about hiding the receiver . . .

Article in Forbes about the artificial hurdles that satellite radio faces. Seems that the National Association of Broadcasters actually argues, in front of Congress, that competition would be bad for radio. The NAB also has a history of messing with innovation and stifling consumer choice:

In 1945 many AM incumbents, ostensibly concerned that interference related to sunspots might endanger their rivals in FM, encouraged the feds to uproot the FM dial and move it to a higher frequency band. This rendered half a million FM radios useless and forced the nation’s FM stations to start over. A congressional investigation in 1948 found that the interference fears were bogus and that a Federal Communications Commission report had been conveniently altered to disguise that fact. Too late–the shift helped inferior AM technology remain dominant for the next 25 years. The coda: In 1954 the inventor of FM radio, Edwin Armstrong, frustrated by repeated setbacks and all but bankrupt, penned a suicide note to his wife and leapt out the window of his 13th-floor apartment.

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The Rest Wing

Perhaps the need for clean public toilets will lead to an Iranian counter-revolution. As the Brooding Persian sez:

“A country, I keep telling everyone, which finds it practically impossible to keep its public restrooms clean has no business pursuing nuclear power.”