Snuggling With the Enemy

Jordgubbar is the word for “strawberries.” I thought they looked pretty nice in this photo from a recent hilltop picnic on Södermalm. Here are a few more sunny pictures from the same day:

Södermalm

Johanna

Me

Iida and Therese

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Every year, the reporters who cover the White House get together for a big fancy dinner – almost as fancy as the Stockholm Grocery Store Owners Association dinner.

Typically, some comedians will come out and roast Washington officials, then the president will take the stage and return the favor. Stephen Colbert’s 2006 appearance with George W. Bush is a painfully hilarious classic that perhaps proved him to be one of the bravest men in America.

Just in case you didn’t see Barack Obama at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, this video is President Obama’s response from this past weekend.

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Stockholm’s subway system is not just extensive – 100 stations in a city roughly the size of Louisville – but also quite beautiful. Each Tunnelbana station has been decorated with art and some of the stations themselves were designed by artists. I’m going to continue adding photos of different stations periodically.

This week I bought my summer pass for the transit system, so theoretically I could visit all of the stations. Of course, I haven’t been to all of them yet, but so far, one of my favorite stations is Solna Centrum, just north of the city.

Some of the older stations are dug into the bedrock and have bare, exposed rock walls instead of finished interiors. In the Solna Centrum station, this exposed rock has been painted in a super deep, vivid red. These pictures really just don’t capture how intense the red is or weird it feels to be walking into a tunnel painted this color. As always, you can click on any photo to enlarge it.

As you go down the escalators, you begin to see that it’s not just entirely red everywhere. What you were seeing is part of an enormous painting and all that red is the sky. Little black silhouettes of houses and a horizon begin popping up around you as you descend.

Once you reach the train tracks, you are surrounded by an endless landscape that stretches all around the bottom level of the station. When you walked into the station above, all the red almost looked demonic, but after seeing the entire picture, it was the top of a sunset.

The landscape includes a spruce forest, lakes, waterfalls, bridges, factories, more little houses, and people. The detail of the artwork has a childlike quality that makes the massive scale of it very tickling.

The panorama runs all around the station and is nearly 1000 meters (3000 feet) long, according to posted information. Solna Centrum station was painted in 1975 by artists Anders Åberg and Karl-Olov Björk.

It says the scene depicts “rural depopulation, the destruction of the environment, forests and nature” which were big issues when the station was built in the 1970s. I guess you could say some things haven’t changed.

In some of these pictures you can see heavy cables and what look like transmitters in the ceiling. These carry 2G and 3G cellular telephone signals. Even deep beneath the bedrock, surrounded by stone walls, your phone works just fine.

Here’s a link to a PDF called Art in the Stockholm Metro if you want to see much more than I can tell you about.

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Life in Sweden is not all sunshine, cool breezes, wild strawberries, and two-hour coffee breaks. I’ve been keeping busy lately, working on several projects.

As you may know, I make my living as a designer and writer, both for the Internet and printed materials. Lately, I’ve been doing much more designing than writing, at least in the for-hire department. My clients are all in the United States, so I’ve been doing all this work over the Internet and telephone. Some days I am loaded with work and other times I’m free to sit in the park or explore Stockholm.

A few big projects I’ve been involved in recently have just launched. I thought I’d share them so you can see what I’ve been doing.

CityScoot is a designated driver service in Louisville. If you’re out having a few drinks and it wouldn’t be safe to drive, these guys will come to wherever you are and drive you home in your own car. They travel to you on small motorized scooters that fold up and are stored in the customer’s trunk or back seat. After you’re home safely, they unfold the scooter and drive away.

I built CityScoot’s website and have done all their design work since they launched the company about five years ago. Their website was designed back in 2004, so needless to say, it was time for an update. You can see an image of their original site on the right and the new version above. The overhaul took a few months, but they are (and I am) very happy with the new design. The working version is online at www.cityscoot.com.

Drinking and driving seems to be a much bigger problem in America than in Sweden, if only due to the proportional number of drivers. In Stockholm, public transit is ubiquitous, so the opportunity for it to happen is greatly reduced. Most people don’t drive anyway, much less when they’re going to have a drink, and yes, I meant to say a drink. Sweden’s blood alcohol limit for drivers is 0.02%. In Kentucky, and I think in most of America, the limit is 0.08%. I know from experience that just a few drinks can put you over the 0.08% limit, even if they’re spaced out over a couple hours.

In the wide-open spaces of America where walking, biking, or public transit aren’t options, CityScoot is a wonderful thing to have available. It’s kind of strange now that I haven’t driven a car in nearly three months. Automobiles are such a big part of life in America and yet I’ve only been in a car a handful of times here. In Louisville, even if I wasn’t the one driving, I was typically in a car pretty much every day. Earlier this week, I shelled out the kronors for my SL Sommarkort which gives me four months of unlimited access to Stockholm’s public transit. Where do I want to go first?

In the same way that CityScoot offers an unusual delivery service, so do some other people I work with in New York City. Two of my friends started a company called Relax Already which delivers yoga sessions to busy people in the city.

They work with a lot of stressed-out Manhattan executives and banker-types who are unable to take the time out of their days to visit a yoga studio. Making another stop during your day in New York could add an hour to whatever you’re doing. Relax Already “brings yoga to you” so they end up running relaxation sessions in conference rooms, offices, homes, or wherever their clients happen to be.

This is another company I’ve been with from the very beginning. Their logo, business cards, brochures, and website are all my handiwork. Their website just launched and you can check it out at www.relaxalready.com.

Monkey Drive Screenprinting is run by one of my best friends, Chris Reinstatler, who also plays drums in Metroschifter. He operates this company that prints shirts and all sorts of other stuff for bands, small businesses, and other groups. In started in Cincinnati in 1998 and moved with him to Louisville about ten years ago. Monkey Drive also has a partner company by the same name in Frankfurt, Germany, that offers printing and shipping all over Europe.

I just finished doing a round of updates to his site, including a new page for hoodies and a redesign of the company’s logo. The Monkey Drive website is at www.monkeydrive.net and the European site (which I did not design) is at www.monkeydrive.de.

My sister Greta recently moved back to Louisville from Chicago where she had been building and repairing violins. A few years ago, she opened a shop in Evanston, Illinois, called Col Legno that I made the website and print materials for. The name “col legno” is a term for the sound that is made when the wooden part of the bow strikes the strings.

Now that she’s back in Louisville, she has opened a string instrument workshop called G. Ritcher Violins. Her space is in one of the city’s beautiful, old, downtown buildings. I tried to give the website for her new shop an old-timey look that would reflect that setting and the work she’s doing.

You can see the G. Ritcher Violins site at www.louisvilleviolins.com and the older site for the Chicago-area shop at www.collegnoevanston.com.

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Over the weekend, Comedy Central began blocking online viewing of videos on their website for anyone outside the United States. This includes The Colbert Report and The Daily Show.

How the hell am I supposed to get any real news in this damn country full of liberal socialists if I can’t watch these?

Of course, I can circumvent the restriction and trick their servers by entering an American IP address into the proxy settings in my network connection preferences. That’s what I ended up doing last night to catch up on a few episodes. What a pain in the ass. Life really sucks, huh? You can’t watch free comedy any more? You poor dear.

The same situation was already the case on other major US network sites like ABC and Hulu. There are actually a quite a few television sites that are blocked outside the US or are redirected to local media partners.

So much for the “world wide” web.

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For some reason, I’m just not afraid of the swine flu. It reminds me of the bird flu and SARS and everything else in recent years that has been hyped up for us to be scared of.

It’s possible that I’m not afraid because I’m invincible! I never get sick because everything always happens to other people. I don’t need to worry about it because it will never happen to me.

Sickness, disease, car wrecks, broken bones? Never heard of ‘em. Those things just aren’t my bag, baby. Other people do that stuff. Sweden’s universal health care is nice because it keeps everyone around me healthy, but of course, I would never need it.

The good news for all those sick and injured people is that they don’t need to worry about someone stealing their debit card number and cleaning out their bank account. I’ve got that covered. And don’t worry about your senator suing you and mocking you in the media. Been there done that.

I think the really scary thing is the changing climate and everything that brings. Melting ice caps, rising sea levels, vanishing mountain water runoffs, and all that kind of stuff is terrifying. It’s frightening that casual observers are able to notice a difference in the climate that has occurred during their lifetime.

Sweden is a land of extremes when it comes to seasonal weather and daylight hours, and Stockholm is a city built on more than a dozen islands. The smallest differences to annual temperature ranges or ocean levels are felt in places like Stockholm long before they reach places like Louisville. Yet, unusual extreme weather has already become painfully evident in Kentucky. Whether it’s the wind or snow or tornados or heat, you don’t need to be near the ocean or the ice to notice that things are not the same as when you were a kid.

The video below is from a recent 60 Minutes episode (the story is about 12 minutes long). The swine flu may kill hundreds of thousands of people, but it is containable and manageable to some degree. With last month’s news that Arctic ice is melting faster than even the worst-case projections from a few years ago, the prospect of billions of people being displaced or not having access to food or water is maybe the scariest thing around.

Note: I always have a problem getting CBS videos to play full-screen. If the full-screen button doesn’t work for you, try watching it here.

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In an earlier story, I mentioned that the Swedish-English dictionary I got for my iPhone has a penchant for displaying English words I have never seen before. Well, the phenomenon has continued!

Here is the latest installment of new English words I have recently seen. I have been making notes as I see them and then looking them up in the Oxford American Dictionary. Again, I’m very suspicious that the makers of this application have invented a bunch of words to beef-up the size of the dictionary.

insouciant: having a casual lack of concern
ailered: (no entry)
acceptera: (no entry)
jaceranda: (no entry)
jacinth: a reddish-orange gem variety of zircon
elevenses: a short break for light refreshments
jumbuck: (no entry)
emed: (no entry)
blain: an inflamed or swelling sore on the skin (Mmmm!)
bleb: a small blister on the skin (Double mmmm!)
jounce: jolt or bounce
roseate: optimistic or rose-colored
lumpen: uninterested in revolutionary advancement
lucubrition: (no entry)
lupin: (no entry)
jodhpurs: full-length trousers, worn for horseback riding
jodine: (no entry)

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