search engine humor station

today one person found my blog by googling "quotes about not wasting your life" and another person found it by googling "wasting your life, wasting your life". there is some truly delicious irony in there.

culture vulture

i find myself listening to some absolutely spectacular songs and it makes me want to write. i find myself watching some spectacular tv shows instead of doing the work i am supposed to do and it makes me want to write this instead of doing the work i am supposed to do.

last weekend i played in a magic tournament in malmö and went for lunch with some of the other players and one of them said your university years are basically five years you spend having angst for the stuff you are supposed to do but are not doing. this used to be not true for me, i used to be the planner and the doer and i used to do my school stuff in the day so i could relax and do whatever in the evenings. not anymore.

but this has all been said before and there is not really anything for me to add.

there is a new bright eyes album out and it has the most amazing cover. you will have to check it out because i cannot describe it good enough to make it justice. it is reminiscent of those old black and white dotted 3d pictures that you had to focus your eyes beyond to be able to see and which i was never able to see, not a single one. and the album also comes with a light shade thing that you move over the cover to make out pictures in the dots, it is extremely awesome. however if you live in lund as i do you might not be able to since there is pretty much a void of music stores here. not that i have any right to complain since i pretty much stopped buying records in the city, it's all sonline or downloading. oh and the album is called cassadaga. and it is quite good, albeit not i'm wide awake it's morning good. that album has some of my favorite songs all time on it and i urge you to check it out. (side note: one of my housemates in vancouver had taken a course in czech and gone to prague with school. the course book was called czech it out. THIS IS FUNNY.)

so i urge you to czech out i'm wide awake it's morning because it is fantastic.

rachel went to see architecture in helsinki just before i got to sydney last time. i hadn't heard much of their stuff but they had this single that we never caught the name of but she was convinced they were singing party racist, or rather her best guess was that they were singing party racist, in the chorus. i was inclined to agree. now i have checked (or did i czech?) it out and apparently the answer is heart it races. this is a big letdown, as i would much rather they were singing about party racists than some heart that is racing.

on a different note, my laptop is obviously singing on the last verse. i am not sure if this expression exists in english, but either way it is a win-win. there is some kind of glitch in the power adapter thing and it is hard to keep the battery charged and it could just die on me any day now. not a good time, mr. computer, not a good time at all. if only you could have waited for a few months, then i would (hopefully) have had some sort of income and be able to get a new one. but not now. my total amount of income right now is zero. i need to earn some dollarz somehow.

tomorrow i will be seeing the cat empire IN CONCERT in copenhagen. THIS IS AWESOME. the cat empire are some of australia's finest when it comes to the musical arts and you can find some of their work at their myspace page. honestly, it is tough to describe their style but it makes you happy and it makes you dance and that should be enough for most of you to give them a go.

ok this is a pretty weak post all in all, especially after not having posted for such a long time. i just feel that i am not really experiencing any new and interesting things these days, i am just stuck with my thesis writing and internet addiction and neither is going very well and so i do not see myself getting anymore interesting anytime soon. and i really do not want to reiterate all my problems with thesis writing or internet addiction because it has been said and said again already and there is not much to add.

so over and out for now. there will be more posting though. do not count me out yet.

oh and please watch weeds. it is a phenomenal show. it has awesome music, deals with stuff that are common in the real world but not on tv, is funny, is done in a very stylish and cool way, is fairly out there and sometimes disturbing and does not shy away from profanity or nudity. also the episodes are 20 minutes long which is just perfect for people with attention spans comparable to mine.

imagery

ok so i'm just gonna post some pictures from recent times. there have been an adventure or two and i really should write more but sometimes there's just no energy or motivation for it. so join me on this trip to Picture Towne, Australia.

first, a penguin! straight outta st. kilda pier in melbourne. it has always been my dream to add penguins to the list of animals i've seen, and while i have seen them in zoos and aquariums before, that just doesn't count according to the rules set up by the protagonist and börre in "naive. super.".


these are some white cockatoos, also from the country of melbournia.


this is a gajillion of lightbulbs with one that's actually working somewhere in the middle. spotted at a bar named the container bar and yes, you guessed it, the furniture is all made out of shipping containers.


gymea lilies can grow pretty tall.


those koreans sure know how to make fish ice-creams. and i sure know how to eat them. i wonder if i can find these anywhere back home, those asian stores sure have a lot of good stuff that you don't know is there. i mean seriously, fish ice-creams! so good!


snakes ahoy! it is the land of snakery after all. apparently these sometimes go crazy and bite you, or so i was told by the keeper shortly after holding it.


it's a shingleback! a bluetongue lizard. and it's not looking happy! or maybe it is? i don't know.

so yeah. flight home on the 14th. see you soon, sweden.

procrastinatin' like hamlet

things are working out. i thought they would, but they actually worked out faster, smoother and better than i could have hoped. my australia journey started out low, with the sky opening and massive amounts of rain starting to come down just a minute or two before i was going to leave for the train to the airport. so i had to get my rain gear out of the bag, and i couldn't bring my hat, and i missed the train. i felt like shit when i was running up the stairs to the platform, because if there's one time you shouldn't miss a train, it's when you are going on an interhemispheral flight on a sunday and the next train doesn't leave for thirty-five minutes. i still had decent time, but missing that train meant that i had used up my buffer time for "things that can go wrong" for that part of the trip, and if the next train would be delayed, i would be in serious trouble. fortunately, it was not and the rest of the trip worked out way too well.

on friday, around noon, i applied for a tourist visa for australia. that's two days before i was leaving. now, i already had a working holiday visa that lasted until mid-september, but i would like to stay longer than that and i wasn't sure how difficult it would be to extend my visa from australia. because of this, i contacted the closest australian embassy and they said it was possible to get an extended visa as long as i applied before my current one expired. what they didn't tell me was that applying before going to australia would cost me exactly $0, whereas applying whilst in australia would cost $215 (that's for the exact same type of online application). i didn't realize this until i rummaged different official websites for the third or fourth time, on friday, around noon. my flight was on sunday. i applied for the visa, but for it to be valid it had to be granted before i got on my plane to australia. fat chance, i thought. australia is 8 hours ahead of sweden in time, so when i applied it was 8 pm there and a weekend coming up. then i started thinking. why is it that i can't seem to get things done until the last possible second? i do this with everything. i waited way too long with getting my ticket, resulting in having to pay extra and getting 18 hours in bangkok. i needed to buy an mp3 player and new headphones, but i didn't look into it until wednesday, meaning it was too late to order them online and i had to settle for worse and more expensive options locally. and i only had to buy one because my old one broke and i haven't pushed enough on the manufacturer to get a repair and now it was too late. and i only booked a hotel in bangkok they day before leaving, meaning i couldn't be sure i would be able to get a room at a good place.

when i booked the plane ticket and found out that my three days of procrastinating had cost me so much, i felt awful. when i realized that my procrastination when applying for a visa extension would cost me a totally unnecessary $215, i felt awful. why is it that i can't seem to learn the lesson? why is it that i find it so hard to do everyday stuff like this, that i know needs to be done at some point? and i know i'm not the only one who's like this, why do people just not learn the lesson and start living happier and more efficient lives?

this time, like most times, things worked out better than they should have if i was to learn some sort of lesson. my visa was granted on saturday, i got the e-mail at about 4 pm, which means that it was midnight in australia. my visa was granted at midnight on a saturday in australia. i find this very amusing. my hotel reservation in bangkok came through within a few hours, not that that ended up mattering anyway, because i was able to get on an earlier flight in bangkok and cut down my idle time there from 18 to 2 hours. i spent most of it going back and forth on horizontal escalators (i know that's a contradiction, but whatever they are called - you know those things they have at airports that make you feel really jet-set because you are walking at lightning speed) and then went through the usual security thingamajig before boarding the plane with a giant smile on my face. i had considered the possibility that i might be able to get an earlier flight, but i couldn't count on it, i couldn't expect it or i'd be crashing hard if it wasn't possible. they took care of my baggage and everything, it was really smooth.

i should probably try hard to find some sort of structure to my life that would make it harder for these situations to occur in the first place. i'm not sure how to create it yet, but i need as much assistance as possible with getting things done in time. i'll try to learn the lesson even if i managed to get out of it this time.

so i got to sydney monday evening instead of tuesday lunch, which made everything a lot better. it was also infinitely better to arrive in the evening than at the ungodly time of 4 am, which i did last time. rachel picked me up at the airport, we took a cab home and had turkish apple tea and tim tams and i patted the cat and i felt so at home and so in love.

on a different and more humorous note, someone yesterday found my blog when searching for "+calculon +pirate +hamburgers" from google in chile. i hope my post answered all their questions. at least it's more likely than the personed who found me after googling "bra adventure".

to reiterate, my terrible secret is...

i am preparing for australia. and bangkok. mostly bangkok, really. anyone who's talked to me during the last month knows about this, so if you have, you might as well skip to the next paragraph, where i talk about...god knows what. i sure don't. so, bangkok. right, i booked my trip to australia a few weeks ago, it seemed fine and was both faster and cheaper than last time. then i get to the travel agency, almost mentally prepared to pay over 12 000 SEK (that's somewhere around two thousand dollars) for an e-item, and find out that the bangkok-sydney part of the trip has been cancelled. and it's now sold out on all days in the near future when i was planning on going. except...there is one left, but it's a whopping 18 hours after the plane from copenhagen arrives. and it's 1 500 SEK more expensive.

***aside on terminology used in magic: the gathering***

this year i started playing magic: the gathering ("magic") again. it's a collectable card game that resides somewhere between chess and poker in style, with a decent amount of random factor but where the best player still wins nine out of ten. magic, like most sub-cultures, is filled with terminology that applies to the game but with varying amounts of creativity also to the non-magic world. applying terms from a sub-culture to totally different situations is something i find very amusing, and sometimes there really are useful terms that deserve a wider use. the term that brought this aside on is "stab". yes, that word already has a meaning and yes, the meaning it has in magic is pretty close to that one. there is a playing format in magic called draft, where you sit eight people around a table, each one with three packs of cards, and you each open a pack, take one card and ship the remanining fourteen to the person next to you. then you pick one of the fourteen that are left, and so on, and then you build a deck with the cards you've picked. magic has five colours and you typically play two or three and try to stay out of the colours the poeple next to you are playing. sometimes, in a pack there will be no good cards in your colours but some good ones in the others; taking a good card in a colour you are not playing to make sure someone else doesn't get it is referred to as a stab. switching to a colour after passing a lot of good cards in that colour (thus giving your neighbour the signal that the colour is open) is referred to as stabbing someone on that colour. and we are now approaching the poodle's core of this aside: stabbing here means making someone else's situation worse with no real gain for yourself.

***end unexpectedly long aside***

i like to refer to the eighteen hours in bangkok and added cost of 1 500 SEK as the ticket stab. i was stabbed on the ticket. it was a savage stab. but what choice did i have? i had to have the ticket, the suboptimal ticket, so i bought it and started to think about what to do with my 18 hours in bangkok. all i know about bangkok is that the traffic is horrible and that it's a typical primal city in that it's massively bigger than any other city in the same country (good ol' urbanization in the global south that i took at ubc finally coming in handy), and it's not like i've ever felt any pressing need to go there. especially not for such short time. so i probably won't, i'll try to find a hotel by the airport somewhere and spend the day there sleeping and kicking it back and up a notch and attempt to be decently rested for the second part of the trip and my coming life in the southern hemisphere. how's that for unadventurous?

apart from those 18 hours, i think australia will be great. it may not have saltlaktrits or ernst kirchsteiger, but it does have my favourite person in the whole world, and also other good things such as cheap thai, vegetarian thai and funny thai restaurant names. funny thai restaurant names include:

thaitanic
thairiffic
thai me up

i think thai restaurants in australia are like hair dressers in sweden, the type of business where it is expected from you as an owner to include a witty pun in your name. i love it! i wish all lines of business were forced to use puns for their names. in vancouver, there was a printing/framing shop called prints charming, that is truly the name of names.

anyway, australia. australia will be AWESOME. there's so much i miss that i can't wait to get back to. i find it weird that it's a lot like here, i don't think living there as that different from living here, but it's so incredibly far away. to get to a house that's a lot like houses here except with no heat elements and worse isolation, with cats that look like the cats here and cars and streets and shops that look like they do here, i have to spend 20+ hours in the air. does that not sound strange to you? why would someone do that? it might not really apply here, but i still think of a bit from "love love love" by the mountain goats. yes, the mountain goats. naturally.

some things you do for money
and some you do for fun
but the things you do for love
are gonna come back to you one by one

and that might not sound overly impressive, but in its defense the song also mentions sonny liston and raskolnikov. in other musical news, interpol have released a new album and so far it sounds pretty good, it's been a while since i listened to them and they're really good at that big city angst thing. didn't i write about that somewhere? i'm sure i did. right, here. hearing the new album also made me go back to the old stuff and i was reminded of how incredible a song "leif erikson" is. some of their other songs are also positively amazing, but leif erikson's the one that i listen to the most on repeat. over and over. helps me catch up on my mime. i'm a slave to the details. you should check it out.

tmg fan blog

i've tried. i really have. but i haven't found anything i thought would be worth to write about. i don't have much now either. i'm writing this post to declare that "woke up new" by the mountain goats is arguably the best song i have ever heard, but i've mentioned it before so i don't think it really qualifies as "news". anyway, there's this line in the song.

an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space.

and i've heard the song before and i've noticed the line and not really thought much of it, but now it's just stuck in my mind. i've listened to the song at least ten times today and that line is the biggest reason. (there are other reasons too, the main one being that the song is AWESOME). just thinking about it gave me goosebumps earlier today, and i don't think that's ever happened before. i know i've posted a link to the video on youtube before, but i'm going to do it again just because i can. the mountain goats - woke up new. maybe the line fits my life better now. it's open for interpretation, it's got a dualistic touch like most of the lines in the song. instead of the "she left me and now everything sucks"-theme that is ever so common, woke up new has lines such as "i felt free and i felt lonely and i felt scared" and i know all of those feelings and i know the ambiguity and confusion and i know that song and i like how it doesn't simplify anything. i like how it sees both sides in a very calm way. i think i'm like that, i try to see both sides way too much. it's a good thing in moderation, but if you do it too much you're never able to draw any conclusions or take a firm stand on anything. this can be frustrating for both you and people around you. but since the song is like that and i'm like that, i like the song a little extra.

in other news, my thesis is just not coming along very well. i can't seem to get working on it. and i don't really understand why. i'm not feeling very good about it and i'm not very proud of myself, but nothing seems to help. i'm not sure what to do about it. i've tried. i really have.

concert invite #2

some of canada's finest, great lake swimmers, will be playing at inkonst in malmö tomorrow (thursday) evening. i think they've made some pretty rad stuff so i encourage you to come along. it's slow, folkish music not entirely different from acts such as nick drake and bonnie 'prince' billy. one need not venture too far from the truth to compare them to damien rice either. check things out here and let me know if you want to come with me. perhaps you'd like to hear some of their tunes before agreeing to dish out a whopping 85:- to go see a band in the middle of the week? no need to cut and paste their name into google, for i provide you here with their myspace page. pitchfork has reviewed their first album here; they were also generous enough to provide a free song!

to completely fit the blog description, here's a link to the only dinosaur comic that mentions lakes. it's also about canada day, and ryan north is from toronto, the same place as the great lake swimmers. i'm really getting into full circle-mode here.

jag vill alltid, alltid gå med dig

helvete. förra inlägget är ju bara pinsamt. all min musik-cred åt skogen, kom kom är ju en imperiet-cover. varför visste jag inte det? jag har inte hört originalet och jag är tveksam till att det låter särskilt mycket som broder daniel. inte för att det måste göra det egentligen, jag bara känner att jag borde ha droppat att det var en cover lite snyggt i en bisats, eller åtminstone antytt att alla självklart känner till att det är en cover och att jag därför inte behöver bemöda mig med att berätta vem som gjort originalet. men icke. jag visste inte, och nu är det korskrypardags.

vagt relaterat så skriver mattias alkberg i sitt senaste blogginlägg att han äntligen hört säkerts skiva och mitt inlägg får därmed en snygg full circle-känsla. kanske kan det balansera historielösheten lite.

svenska ljud

det blir ett inlägg på gästspråket svenska den här gången. mest för att jag lyssnar på säkert! och därför har en massa svenska ord i huvudet för en gångs skull. när jag läser på engelska byter tankarna snabbt språk. tänk om man hade det så med lite fler språk. jag undrar hur många man kan lära sig innan hjärnan blir alldeles förvirrad? två går bra. förutom en eller annan gång, som t.ex. när jag pratar med rachel samtidigt som jag chattar med någon vän. då blir det för mycket för stackars hjärnan ibland.

anledningen till att jag skriver det här inlägget är just att säkert! (formerly known as hello saferide) är så fantastiskt bra och att jag behöver få ur mig lite åsikter om musik och det är inte så många i min bekantskapskrets som är så intresserade eller besatta av musik som jag är, så ämnet "den här skivan är sjukt bra!" kommer inte upp så ofta som det skulle kunna göra. men tillbaka till säkert!: det var bra på engelska, men det är klart bättre på svenska. varför är det så bra och varför är det ännu bättre nu? för mig är det ungefär så här: annika norlin (som är säkert!:s/hs:s riktiga namn. och hur bildar man egentligen genitiv av ett ord som slutar med utropstecken?) gör ofta trallvänlig popmusik med klatschiga refränger. en bra egenskap. texterna handlar mycket om känslor, då och då om att vara ledsen och då och då om att vara glad. det gillar jag. ibland handlar de om tunga saker, som t.ex. "allt som är ditt", som handlar om våldtäkt. den gillar jag också. för att försäkra mig om att jag inte hade missförstått något i texten så gjorde jag en snabbgoogling och upptäckte då att det finns en blogg. den innehåller meningar såsom "Jag blev så stressad av människans tydliga inneboende godhet att jag var tvungen att gå in på Unicef och hetsskänka 300 kr" och hamnar därför på min bevakningslista. en annan anledning till att säkert (jag orkar inte skriva utropstecknet mer, det blir bara fult) är så bra är att texterna oftast är väldigt välskrivna och ibland har fantastiska rim som "hydman-vallien" på "dricka vin".

för någon månad sen lyssnade jag på emil jensen nästan hela tiden. 2007 har alla en blogg och det har han förstås också. emil. på den står det att han ska göra en cykelturné genom sverige i sommar och mycket bättre än så kan det inte bli. hoppas han orkar ända till skåne, tänkte jag först, men sen kom jag ihåg att han ju trots allt sjunger på ganska bred skånska. hoppas att han spelar någon dag då jag kan komma, tänker jag nu istället. han är väldigt lurig med orden han med och anledningen till att jag tar upp honom här inte någon av hans låtar (men många är väldigt, väldigt bra) utan bara titeln på hans skiva: orka då. jag tänker det väldigt ofta. orka då. det kan betyda både att jag orkar och att jag inte orkar. tanken är nog att det ska förmedla att man inte orkar, men jag känner att det kan betyda båda sakerna. kanske att jag kommer på att jag faktiskt orkar när jag säger "orka då" till mig själv. första låten på skivan innehåller även raden "finns det något mer deprimerande än en läggmatch i pingis på psyket?" och redan då var jag fast.

sedan så hyser jag något slags kärlek till mattias alkberg bd. de är ojämna, men ibland får de till det helt, t.ex. tycker jag att fyllskalle var en grym låt trots att sällan dricker och inte kan relatera till den över huvud taget. nu har jag fastnat för kom kom från deras förra skiva, "ditt hjärta är en stjärna". (jag känner att jag velar mellan att använda citationstecken här och inte alls är konsekvent, ibland känns det bättre med och ibland känns det bättre utan och jag känner att jag borde hålla mig till en standardmall, men det här är trots allt bara en blogg.) kom kom har ett intro som låter mer broder daniel än vad broder daniel någonsin gjort och första gången jag hörde det så funderade jag på om man fick göra ett sådant intro om man inte var broder daniel. nu har jag kommit fram till att man får det, och då särskilt om resten av låten inte låter så mycket broder daniel. nu sökte jag snabbt på nätet för att se om den gick att ladda hem lagligt och vad hittade jag? inte låten, men en blogg. ja, det är klart att de har en blogg. vad inbillade jag mig? jag känner ett framtida, post-ironiskt inlägg om hur alla har en blogg forma sig i mitt huvud.

mäüd ölöfssön

it's time for a language-related rant.

a rant about something that i'm sure you've all come across. it concerns the difference between swedish and english in the area of vowels. as most of you are no doubt aware, there are more vowels in swedish than there are in english, more specifically the notorious triumvirate of åäö. also, in swedish we consider y to be a vowel whereas those english dudes consider it a half-vowel at best. it's a puzzling letter to be sure, but the point of this rant is å, ä and ö. you see, even though they look remarkably similar to some other vowels that exist in english (a and o, i'm looking in your general direction), they are in fact different vowels. different letters, different pronunciations, different pretty much everything. yes yes, i know that historically the å is an a with an o on it and pronounced somewhere in between, and i know that an ä is considered an a with an umlaut. but i'd still like to claim that they are separate vowels. people here don't mistake å's for a's. this is because they are different vowels. not that hard, is it? even dudes in metal bands should be able to figure this one out, right? well, i'm sure you've all heard of motörhead and mötley crüe and rolled your eyes, but this aspect of the issue seems like it's been done to death already. just check out this for some serious dot-related humour. i tried to find a picture of the tour t-shirt, but didn't in five seconds and then gave up. whilst looking, i came across a wikipedia article with the name "heavy metal umlaut", which indicates that this topic has been adequately covered already, and so i shall waste no more space on it.

in the above paragraph i hinted that dudes in metal bands were of low intelligence; i apologize for this and as we shall soon see, people in other areas do not seem to be smarter. i turn you now to a picture i took in a design store in sydney.


perhaps it is not clear on the small version of the picture, but click on it and enjoy all the glory of a "Stockhölm" teapot. to indicate that it is from scandinavia you have to put dots on at least on of the vowels, right? otherwise people might not understand that we are selling authentic scandinavian design here! because people have no idea what or where stockholm is. now, i'm not swedocentric enough to expect everyone in the world to obviously know that stockholm is the swedish capital city, but i do think it's a name strong enough to hold its own without the help of dots to indicate its scandinavian-ness. also, what is up with only putting dots on one of the o's? if you put them on one, you've already established that you don't care that they are different vowels altogether, so why not go all out with your foreign branding strategy and leave nothing to ambiguity when you name your product? with the name "Stockhölm", most people will think it's scandinavian, some people will think you are an idiot for putting dots where they don't belong and some people will be completely oblivious to all the mighty viking-ness allusions you are trying to convey in your teapot. if you instead name it "Stöckhölm" (or perhaps "STÖCKHÖLM" for slightly more viking-ness) some of the oblivious people might get the hint whereas no one would think you were even more of an idiot - a definite win-win situation.

when i buy shampoo, deodorant, soap and similar products, there are at least twenty different options that will do the job. they all look remarkably similar. they have names like "arctic", "cool", "sport" and so on, and i usually choose depending on what kind of image i want to convey for the day. if i feel sporty the day i happen to be buying shower gel, i will buy the one that says "sport" (as long as it's also cheap); if i feel arcticy, i will buy the "arctic" one. i don't want to waste my time on inconsequential things like picking a shower gel, i just want to get it over with, so i'm using this method just to have something to base a quick decision on. but once, again in sydney, the decision was easier than normal. a picture is enclosed below, enjoy the spectacular setting.


yes, it is a deodorant called "Norscä" and it has the scent "forest fresh". i don't think i have much to add, the picture pretty much speaks for itself. in a kumadude-esque manner i'd like to close off this post with yet another picture, this time of a coffee shop that also sells ice cream, also in sydney. on a side note, the coffee shop was named "coffee t", which inspired an endless number of mr. t jokes between me and rachel. anyway, picture:

are you an archetype? i'm an archetype.

this post is based on a newspaper clip in swedish, from a magazine called nöjesguiden which is the hipster guide to all things happening in the world of culture, music and partying in the skåne/öresund region, much like time out in london or the drum media in sydney. the clip in question:


this might not seem to exciting at first glance, even if you understand swedish. it's an article about (then) upcoming concerts in copenhagen and the headline is "the suffering artist 2007" and if you like gloomy singer/songwriters you will undoubtedly recognize the man in the picture as the gloomiest singer/songwriter of them all, will oldham aka bonnie prince billy aka ten other nicknames. fortunately, the interesting part has been circled, but not by me. you see, i found this clip on the notice board for environmental engineering because it is mentioned in the circled part of the article. environmental engineering students tend to put up stuff related to the program on the notice board when they find it, so everyone can see that we are getting exposure all over the world and that at least someone knows that we exist. anyway, the circled part. perhaps the image is too compressed to be able to actually read what it says, so i'm going to post a zoomed-in version as well:
now, let's discuss what it actually says. it is about a concert with damien rice in copenhagen and it says "a bonnie prince billy for the environmental engineering student who longs for japan and likes table hockey". does this remind you of anyone in particular? i bet it does! in fact, there is only one person in the whole world who fits these three criteria, and it is me. i do not know the person who wrote the article, but after searching the back corners of my brain i realize that he is the boyfriend of one of my high school friends and that i met him once or twice at one or two parties about five years ago. i remember that we talked about writing, it seems to have worked out for him since he now works for an entertainment paper. however, whereas i haven't really thought much about him, apart from seeing him in the city from time to time, i seem to have made some sort of impression on him as the archetypical damien rice fan. essentially, i am an archetype to him. i look and act like the typical bonnie prince billy/damien rice fan. mind you, this is probably true, for i like both of these guys' music, but he can't know this because i last talked to him before damien rice released his first album, and i'm fairly sure i did not listen to bonnie prince billy back then. all in all, i find this immensely funny and it makes me a little bit proud to be the signature face for a group of people, even if it is only to one person.

it also made me reflect on how little it actually takes to narrow a description down to just one person. three adjectives/labels and you've got no one but me left. granted, table hockey is an unusually obscure hobby compared to soccer, for example, and i study a program that has about 50 students in every year and didn't start until 1998, but still - it probably won't take that many labels to narrow it down to just one person, no matter who it is. this a roundabout way of saying that we are all unique.

true to the name

i realized that i haven't mentioned webcomics in a while now, which is something that this blog claims to be about. time to make up for that: check out the perry bible fellowship for some well-drawn and really nifty stuff.

second time around

tonight i will go to mejeriet ("the dairy", you might be inclined to think that they make dairy products there, but no) here in lund and see the mountain goats IN CONCERT. the mountain goats are one of the best bands known to man, and i urge you to go as well. the line below "adventure" is a a quote from one of their songs, and there's more where that came from. this is one of my favorite segments, from their song woke up new:

the first time i made coffee for just myself
i made too much of it
but i drank it all just cause you hate it
when i let things go to waste

i won't tell you what you should think or anything but seriously, YOU HAVE TO THINK THIS IS AWESOME. their songs are full of imagery like this and many of them have lyrics that just blow me away. and for the well-read peter fan, it should come as no surprise that i saw them in sydney in january and it was possibly the best concert i have ever been to. granted, rachel also being there might have had something to with it, but the mountain goats certainly did their share of being awesome. i have tried to get all too many of my friends to go tonight, but they're all going away for easter. but seriously, is there any better way to spend the ol' good friday than seeing one of the world's finest and depressing bands?

this monday i quit playing internet scrabble. i've been addicted to it for a while now, and recently i've just been unable to stop myself from playing. a lot of saying "just one more game, it only takes fifteen minutes" to myself. and i've gone up a lot in the rankings. problem is, it's been seriously cutting into the rest of my life, both study- and friendwise and that's just not a good thing. and i tried cutting down to one game a day, but it just doesn't work for me, it has to be total cold turkey or i won't be able to stick to it. i discussed it with rachel, and she said it's because if you allow yourself to play one game, one more game isn't really that much more, but if you allow yourself no games, then playing just one will result in massive amounts of guilt, and so you won't play it. it's been working so far, no games this week. not that i've necessarily gotten that much more work done anyway, but i'm going to bed earlier and generally feeling better, which is definitely A Good Thing. i still get "the urge" sometimes, but i'd much racher play in real life; trouble is, there's no scrabble action going on in this region at the moment. i've tried to get it started, but it's been tough so far. but soon! there are lots of good players around, it's just a matter of getting them to try the real deal.

i'd love to stay and chat, but i have to go to school and learn a statistics program. yes, i know it's the ol' good friday, but i really feel like i have to do something thesis-related. this week has been a horrible one in that department, i've gotten almost nothing done at all. also, i have to take a photo of something which will most likely lead to a blog post, but that is all i'm going to tell you now. who's the master of cliffhangers? (i'm pointing at myself with my thumbs now.)

i made a lot of mistakes

i had the family over for dinner this afternoon, in celebration of my birthday on the friday two weeks earlier. (i refer you to the post below for a description of the events that occurred on said friday.) i made lasagnas and a simple yet delicious salad. my main claim to fame with these lasagnas is that one of them was made from a recipe by emeril, every old lady's favorit tv chef and pork fat connoisseur. if you are a fan of futurama but do not live in north america, you may be interested in knowing that emeril was the inspiration of elzar, and he loves to kick it up a notch. more often with pork fat than with the spice weasel, though. the lasagna was a four cheese lasagna with spinach and portobello mushrooms, quite extravagant if i may say so myself. it got smashing reviews from all the critics, which means that my family liked it, or at least that they said they did.

i miss the food network, which is where i discovered emeril's daytime tv show whilst i was living in vancouver. not that i'd be able to watch it even if it did exist here, as i don't own a tv. i've considered getting one, though, and were there a food network, that might tip the scale just enough to warrant a tv purchase. but alas, there is not, and the money stays in my pocket. probably a good thing.

for birthday gifts, i mainly got what i have craved for so long: very sharp knives. i'm going to have so much fun with my new very sharp knives.

i ordered myself some cd's as a birthday present to myself, and they arrived this friday. i mention this because one of them was "avalanche" by sufjan stevens and i'm having a big sufjan period right now. i discovered him a few years ago, when i came over the "michigan" album and instantly fell for the album in general and the song "for the widows in paradise, for the fatherless in ypsilanti" in particular. it was probably the first song i ever listened to on repeat, over and over. it made me cry. when i was in school, i felt i was wasting time doing useless things when i could be home listening to the song. it still might be the song that has affected me the most, although there are other songs aspiring for the title. "avalanche" is a cd of outtakes and extras from the "illinois" album and i'm now alternating between those two cd's. they're both over 70 minutes long so it's not as repetitive as it might sound. still, lots of sufjan stevens in my life. it took me a while to enjoy the illinois album, but now i've definitely fallen in love with it. at first it seemed a bit bland and long and too similar to the michigan album, but now it's a whole different world of brilliant songs. i discover new ones every time i listen to it. the avalanche album isn't quite as good, but it's got some smashing stuff on it and i have a feeling it will grow on me as well.

in short, if you haven't listened to sufjan stevens, you should give him a go and probably start with "michigan". i like to describe music with feelings, and sufjan's music has a way of grabbing me and making me care. the word i'm looking for here is engaging. sufjan stevens makes engaging music that warrants multiple listens and is musically complex. not that i'd really know, being a musical illiterate and all, but he plays a lot of instrument and there seems to be quite a bit of orchestration going on. crescendo this and scherzo that. (i don't know if scherzo is actually a word in english. i don't even know what it means, just that it's something about music. the only reason i know it is because it's a seven-letter word that has both c and z in it, and in swedish scrabble there is only one of each. but i'm sure sufjan is all about the scherzos.)

this week has been a good week for my thesis. i've done some serious coding in matlab and made a program that grabs all the data from a spreadsheet and calculates means and standard deviations and plots everything nicely and smoothly. i'm actually a bit impressed by myself, i'm glad i got it all to work in the end. tomorrow i'm printing it all out (32 graphs) and discussing things with my supervisor. it's good, because i've been wanting to learn how to write code that quickly gets out and organizes relevant data for a while now. and it's cool, because when i look at the program, it seems really complex and i feel smart. my thesis topic has also gotten more interesting this week; instead of just doing statistics on collected data, i'm going to build a model for mass balances for clear-cut forests, and we're also going to go up to the actual test areas to collect mineralogy samples, so that means there will also be a small field component in the thesis. these things are both very good, they make the thesis both more engineery and environmenty. also, i feel it is a good thing to actually get to see the areas that i'm devoting half a year of my life to.

money in the bank

last thursday me and david went up to karlstad to arrange a table hockey tournament for an it company and some of their clients. we've done it a couple of times before so it's fairly run-of-the-mill by this point, a lot of pleasant and very little nervous. everything went smooth and the people there seemed to have lots of fun and were very appreciative of us. included in the deal for us were hotel room, free food, free travel to and from karlstad, a bit of money and free tickets to the hockey game that evening, färjestad-mora. it's a fair bit of travel for me for the money i get, but i still really like the fact that i'm earning money just by being good at table hockey. and every year, we talk about designing a package for companies for kick-off events and company promotion events and the like, how much money we could earn and how much everybody would like it, and then nothing happens. of course we've realized this, so now we also talk about how nothing happens. perhaps this is the year it all will happen, but i seriously doubt it. i suppose we get one step closer to saying "this is ridiculous! let's just put this package together, it'll take an hour!" every year, but it might still be a few years away from happening. then we'll be millionaires.

millionaires!

(sorry, black adder III moment there)

moving on, i had the trip back to lund all planned out in my head: leave karlstad early, spend the day in gothenburg sauntering around, have some coffee and possibly buy myself something nice because it was my birthday. alas, it was not to be. on the morning in karlstad, i felt nauseous, but thought it would pass once i had some breakfast. alas, it did not. instead experienced increased nausea and threw up several times on the train down. the gag reflex is one mighty reflex, that breakfast came back up at a remarkable velocity. i can't help but be a little bit impressed. needless to say, of my chillaxin' day in gothenburg became naught, instead replaced by a vomitin' day at a bookshop, where i alternated between a wooden bench and the toilet. a supremely badly timed case of getting sick, although i supposed it would have been even worse if it had happened on the train up. still, getting sick far away from home when you have two three-hour train trips ahead of you, with a six-hour sauntering stop in the middle, has got to count as bad timing. also, on my birthday! hand over the martyr points! i'm still not feeling great, but a lot better. i might get my ass to school tomorrow and continue the data structuring and graph generating.

rachel told me yesterday that there is a studio ghibli museum. a quick web search later and i located it to mitaka, a tokyo suburb that i haven't heard of before (hey - we can't all be harajuku and get our name printed on hoodies from a swedish clothing chain). i believe this might be the ULTIMATE museum. if you don't believe me just look at some of the pictures on this page. a totoro dvd player! totoro in the ticket booth! a cat bus that you can play with! a damn sweet entrance! and more! it just seems to capture the spirit and feeling of the ghibli movies so well. and since pretty much all of the movies are really, really good, by extension the museum is as well. if you are not familiar with hayao miyazaki or studio ghibli, i suggest you watch the following movies: princess mononoke, my neighbor totoro and spirited away. actually, you could go with any movie they have released, i can't think of a single one that i don't like. they are japanese anime movies and very different from 'conventional' animated movies like the ones from disney, but that doesn't mean they're difficult, pretentious or inaccessible. just that they tell very different stories and sometimes in a different way. they're not crammed with stereotypes, the only funny character is not the weird sidekick and the main character is often a young girl. i could go on, but really, you should watch a movie or two. they're extremely likable.

je t'aime the valley

after a month of slackin' around, things are finally starting to happen. i am now officially down with thesis writing. the subject is solid but unexciting: nutrient leakage from clear-cut forests. let's just say it doesn't make people jump up and down in excitement when i mention it, but it also doesn't make them fall asleep. so i've now officially entered the realms of lund university again, it's been a while now. close to two years, actually. some people are gone, most of them are still here. some of them are done with school, most are not. all in all, it's the good old student in lund life all over again. could be worse.

lars presented his thesis last friday and it gave me serious performance anxiety. i will have to find some way to accomplish really difficult things and incorporate way too advanced statistics if i'm going to match him. well, to be fair it also inspired me to do something more than just basic stuff i'm already comfortable with.

i've got my own room at the department of chemical engineering now, which is pretty cool. i'm technically sharing with a ph.d. student, but she's presenting her doctoral thesis in two weeks and is not there at all. instead of her, there are boxes with her thesis in them. and i've stolen her flat screen monitor. it will be a semester of flat screen goodness. my room is situated right next door to the fermentation lab. i feel that this is an important spatial property to point out. the are crazy about making bioethanol at the department and i will be sitting mere inches away from where the yeast is doing its thing. thankfully, there is a wall between us.

my supervisor seems like a nice and competent guy. easy to talk to and very helpful. also, he had two bandaged fingers this wednesday, and said they were from a "sledge accident". definitely a good sign. the swedish word for sledge is "pulka" and it might be one of my favorite words. i like words that have a childish good vibe to them.

on the music note, i have recently discovered xiu xiu. i remember pitchfork marking them as a future top indie act a few years back, i downloaded a few songs when i saw that but didn't like them much and that was the end of that. but then alanna put their song "i luv the valley, oh!" on the mix cd she sent me and it blew my socks off. you must check out that song, for it is the song of songs. if i had some more money, i would rush out and buy all the xiu xiu cd:s. well, i would order them online, since there isn't a single record store nearby worth jack, but you get the general idea.

trouble; invite

ok, since i currently have no phone (the bastard stopped working yesterday) i'm throwing this out here. would anyone like to go and see ratatat at inkonst in malmö this thursday? they're instrumental and hiphop-ish and electro-ish and playful and fun. links for the inquisitive: inkonst, record review #1, record review #2, a song!, another song!

also, did i mention my phone doesn't work right now? so the best way to find me is e-mail, icq or msn.

pretty much nothing

instead of working on my inner qualities, i work on my blog. i've tried to find a nice design over at wordpress because all the people who seem to know anything say it's so much better there, but it's oh so slow. i don't want to wait 5 seconds for a page to load even if it has so many more features in it. well, i could stand waiting once, but getting a blog entry in involves several clicks and therefore way too many dead seconds. maybe one day when it's faster. instead, i opted for this semi-slick design out of ol' blogger. i hope you approve. also i'm aware that it's hard to make out what's actually in the new picture, but...i got nothing. it's cool in full size!

that's all i have for the moment. my life is extremely unexciting right now, tasks for the immediate future include: applying for subsidized rent, paying rent, paying union fees, applying for student loans...it's pretty much the opposite of the title of that ani difranco album, "so much shouting, so much laughter". maybe next week, when my thesis starts, my life will be more like this ani difranco album title.

oh, and i can't go out without music and web comics. so my current favorite album is "what the sea wants, the sea will have" by sarah blasko. she's one of those aussie gems i found whilst hanging out "down under". i don't know if you can find it here at all, but if you ask me really nicely, i'll lend it to you. for webcomics, let's visit some classic xkcd on nachos. for real life comics, i've recently made a trip to the library and borrowed a whole bunch. will set me on to this path of acquiring comics and it's a brilliant idea. right now i'm reading "chicken with plums" by marjane satrapi, of persepolis fame. it's about an iranian musician whose tar breaks and how he doesn't deal with that very well. it's very good. satrapi is very good.

ooh, labels! i'm now going to begin a life of labelling.

vicious challenge, random rant

first, i'd like to address the fact that i'm in a vicious blog challenge with my ol' pal kuma-dude. he is currently in the lead by 1-0, but i'm looking to even things out with this very post. i don't know if i can match his awesome blog skills though, this is a quote stolen from a recent post of his and if you ask me, it is beyond hilarious:

"Leonardo DiCaprio was just on TV, in an ad for some random property development. This was followed by a program where celebrities learn how to re-use a paper cup in various, wondrous ways. Yup, I'm in Japan again."

but maye that's just me. hopefully, it's everyone. how can i match this? i don't think i can! all i have planned for the day is a rant about cheese slicers. yes, cheese slicers.

about three and a half years ago, i Went Vegan. like the creation of the universe, this is widely regarded as a Bad Move. or maybe not, but it's not easy and for a please-everyone type like me, it's hard to say no to so many good things people want to share with me. i still reckon it's the ethical thing to do, but socially it's really hard, since there is pretty much no dish that "normal" people eat that you as a vegan can eat. this forces you to either look like some kind of weirdo who just eats lettuce and mashed potatoes, or to just hang out with vegan copies of yourself all the time, neither of which is very appealing. while there are plenty of mega-delicious vegan dishes, they are not that easy to come by unless you cook them for yourself, forcing you to go diy to a very large extent. this means that living the sweet life as a vegan requires time, planning and love of cooking. and not being lazy. i love cooking, but i don't always have the time, i'm horrible at planning and i'm lazy. 1 out of 4 = does not cut it. also the whole issue of looking like a weirdo at restaurants equally does not cut it. after a year and a half or so of strictly vegan, i once again succumbed to the joys of cheese and eggs. but i digress, severely. the whole point of getting into this subject was that when i went vegan, i demonstratively threw out my cheese slicer to make sure there was no going back. i felt it was an important characteristic of my home as a vegan to not contain a cheese slicer. this was another Bad Move, as there are perfectly delicious and overpriced non-dairy cheeses that would love a taste of the cheese slicer. but out it went.

and so, when i got home a few weeks ago, again living the life of a cheese eater, i found myself unable to consistently make long and thin slices of cheese. so i bought a cheese slicer, the first one i saw, at lagerhaus for 19:-. it is a useless piece of kitchen equipment. it is essentially unable to slice the simplest of cheeses. it makes a very thin slice, is weak and unevenly sharpened. and the sharpest bit is not very sharp. this, my friends, is a useless item. it could not slice a cheese on the sliciest day of the year if it had an electric slicing machine. and it is NEW! i just bought it! why would you make a product like this? have you no pride for what you do? lagerhaus, i'm looking in your general direction. and this is in the country that is supposed to be at the leading edge of technology for cheese slicers! i have gone on and on about the awesomeness of the cheese slicer during my trips around the world, and then i get THIS? me and will made scones at his house a few days ago, and naturally he had cheese to use as a topping, and to slice it he had an obviously leading edge-tech cheese slicer that was rippled. this means that the cheese slice gets less contact area against the slicer, which in turn means that situations where the slice sticks to the slicer and then rips into several pieces when you try and get it off, are avoided. people, this is the stuff we should be concentrating on, not cheese slicers that can't even slice when they're brand new! 19:- down the drain and back to square one.

i'm disappointed and embarrassed.

also, check out dinosaur comics today. it just doesn't disappoint. or embarrass. also, my current favorite song is "i'll believe in anything" by wolf parade. my friend alanna sent me a mix cd a while ago and it had both a live version and an album version and i was absolutely stunned. i still am. funny thing is i have the wolf parade album, i think i bought it in vancouver, but i never really took a big liking to it and i certainly missed the awesomeness that is "i'll believe in anything". luckily, i can make up for it now and listen to it over and over again. perhaps you should too?

the qc

now i know you're all positively dying to read about exciting australian adventures...but not today and possibly not another day either, because i'm quite lazy.

no, this post is all about a webcomic.

those of you who know me may have noticed my rambling about dinosaur comics and xkcd. (they're both awesome!). well, from today i think i'll be rambling about another one.

right, right, the name and link.

questionable content.

also, my luggage got lost on they way from sydney to copenhagen. but they found it and delivered it today! huzzah! also, there are few things more boring than sitting in a chair on an airplane for 24 hours. i'm sure you could figure out that on your own, though.

i feel like recommending a song. so i will. the song i recommend is "john wayne gacy, jr." by sufjan stevens. you should listen to it and the whole illinois album. it rocks as much as any album that ever rocked, possibly more.

wayfaring stranger

contrary to popular belief, i did not perish during my christmas adventures; i am, in fact, still alive. and kicking.

many cool things have happened, but i am in quite the hurry right now, for my australia journey has only a day and a half left to it, and there are lots of things that i have postponed during the course of the year, that i would like to do before i go. and time is running out. hopefully, i will still remember most of the things when i'm home, so i can write about them then.

but corals are cool. and the rainforest is cool. and weird tropical fruits are cool. and woodford was cool. ditto the blue mountains.

exciting times on a plane ahead. sometimes i think the earth is a little too big.