If Bush says we hate freedom, let him tell us why we didn’t attack Sweden, for example.

Top 10 reasons why Osama Bin Laden didn’t attack Sweden:

10. Couldn’t tell Sweden from Switzerland.

9. Attackers decided to take extended sick leave at 80% pay instead.

8. Stockholm World Trade Center is only seven stories high, and they couldn’t find it.

7. Osama’s illness turns out to have been Stockholm Syndrome.

6. Has been reading a lot of Little Green Footballs, thinks Sweden is a Wahhabist theocracy.

5. WMD attack did occur, but Swedes are immune to surströmming bombs.

4. Because everybody knows Sweden has no army.

3. Will never forget the summer of 1982 in Afghanistan and those long warm nights with Lotta Hedman, that hot Swedish backpacker — especially how she would unravel her blond pigtails as they bathed naked in the Amu Darya while the full moon illuminated the Hindu Kush. He still wakes up in a sweat thinking of her. Sometimes he wonders what has become of her.

2. IKEA furniture easy to transport from cave to cave. Especially likes his Lagom™ brown tarpaulin backdrop and Slarvig™ collapsible desk.

1. Still holding out hope for a Nobel.

The ninth in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planning
Seven: Premature mastication
Six: Irrational discalceation
Five: Radiotjänst i Kiruna AB
Four: Temporal engineering
Three: Tunnelbana visionTwo: Simölacra

I’ve learned a few lessons in life I’d like to pass on.

Don’t drink British wine. Don’t drink Italian beer. Don’t drink cosmopolitans in dive bars, don’t drink Rolling Rock in diva bars. Do as the locals.

Don’t drink decaffeinated coffee. Don’t drink de-alcoholized beer. Don’t eat vegetarian food made to look like meat. Seek out authentic things.

But what to do if these two prescriptions for life clash? What if the locals seek out simulacra? I am referring, of course, to that sad abomination of an acoholic beverage, lätt öl [Swedish], a Swedish class of barely beers, “light” on taste, alcohol and point, a straight-to-bladder production that not even the state alcohol dispensing monopoly, Systembolaget, could be bothered regulating.

And yet Swedes don’t get the hint about what that implies. Every day, at luncheon places all over Sweden, hundreds of thousands will optimistically ask once again for lätt öl by name, just in case that, over night, it might suddenly have developed into something substantive.

It’s hard to describe the lack of taste it has. You know how sometimes, when you buy a coke from a concession stand and the dispenser has almost run out of syrup, you get to drink something with a hint of coke that is actually far worse than just water? Lätt öl is the beer equivalent.

To be honest, I don’t understand why Swedish beer is drunk at all. Sweden has worldbeating vodkas and aquavits and wonderful traditions involving punsch and mulled wine. Swedish beer, on the other hand, is atrocious.

Yes it is, and you know it — there is a reason why you don’t export it. I’m not necessarily saying only Belgians can make good beer — the Germans produce competent brews, even if their restrictive Reinheitsgebot guarantees they’re boring; the Americans have some excellent microbreweries; give them a few more generations as they chisel away at the rough edges, and they will have something that approaches the complexity of the palate of an Orval. But as for Swedish beer, there is no hope, and the whole enterprise should just be put out of its misery.

At least lätt öl consumption has fallen by half over the past ten years, for which we have the EU to thank. Price-sensitive consumers have been getting more booze for their buck by nipping over the border and carting home something realI’ve described the role alcohol plays in Sweden’s social life before.. This upgrading of Swedish drinking habits is encouraging, but Swedish alcohol consumption still ranks below the EU mean — so if Swedes want to bolster their until-now entirely undeserved international reputation as a drinking nation, there is still much work to be done.

I suggest refocusing on core Nordic competencies — bring back Viking meadAnd if you hire Absolut’s marketing geniuses you’ll have another runaway export success on your hands.. Read up on Norse drinking culture, convert Spendrups‘s breweries into meaderies, then start enjoying an alcoholic heritage that is both local and authentic.

— They are going to get that Swedish chef someday.

— Who is?

— The Smorgasbord of Health.

For 20 minutes of guaranteed ruined productivity, click here.

I have seen the future, and it is taller than me. On the occasion, it was also drunker — the occasion being Walpurgis, the location being Karolinska Institute, the medical university where students traditionally ring in spring with a concert fueled by cheap beerEverywhere else in Sweden, this is the night to build a big bonfire with last year’s IKEA furniture, in order to make room for this year’s models. Not so with Stockholm students, who are far too jaded for such blatantly participatory pursuits..

I got in under cover of accompanying Jenny and Maria, who technically aren’t students either, but who at least can plausibly pretend to be. Once in, they were pretty quickly the center of attention of a pack of male students from Idrottshögskolan, Sweden’s sports universityWhat could they possibly be teaching there? Steroid research? Post-graduate swimming? The physics of the hockey puck?.

This group made Eurotrash look like Lady Liberty. They wore soccer jerseys, no doubt an homage to Beckham, but a majority of them also wore one or more gloves in an unabashedly retro-80’s way. And they danced extremely well while simultaneously not being gay. In sweden, it turns out even the jocks are metrosexualApologies for the slight delay in blogging this, but I have added a third cardinal rule to dictate my blogging behaviour: 1: Absolutely no blogging while drunk. 2: Absolutely no blogging while hung over. 3: Absolutely no blogging while it is glorious outside. All three rules were invoked this weekend..

Further burnishing the eurotrash credentials of the night was the band, Lambretta, a semi-famous (so I am told) Swedish thrash-pop act that sounds exactly like Transvision Vamp back in 1989.

Watching them, however, was more of a challenge than concerts used to be. Over the years, my 6 foot 2 frame had afforded me some prime views — in 1992, for example, attending a Guns and Roses concert in Sevilla was like standing in a crowd of smoky midgets. But tonight, perhaps half the room was taller than me. (The New Yorker recently explained why.) If it is important in Sweden that you not stand out, I think I am going to do extremely well here.

The fourth in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planningSeven: Premature mastication.

For some time, it has been apparent to me that the media here are pushing brunch as the new cool thing for Stockholmers to do on weekends. Newspapers, city guides, television and radio have all decided that if it’s good enough for the Sex and the City cast, this should be the next big cultural import from New York. But there is an element of willful obliviousness involved: Swedes invented brunch generations ago, and in fact brunch every weekday, when they take an hour off from work for food. At 11.30 am.

Stockholmers might think they are eating lunch then, but they’d be wrong. Food consumed at 11.30 am can be wonderful, but it is not lunch. Lunch is what the Italians have at 1.30 pm. It’s what the Spanish have between 2 and 5 pm. That said, the Swedish weekday brunch is a lovely ritual — all the restaurants cater to it, friends meet in the old town to catch up and swap gossip, mamma-ledig (“mommy-free”) mothers on their year-long leave from work cart their offspring in SUV-sized buggies to meet admiring pals, and officemates can flirt without really calling it a date. In fact, Swedish brunch fulfills all the same social functions as the New York version, with the added benefit that you get to do it during office hours.

So, to clarify, I don’t hate the brunching tradition as such, but I do bemoan its misclassification as lunch, and one additional opportunity cost: The resultant temporal shift of all mealtimes. Swedes are constantly hungry ahead of the rest of Europe — their eating habits are, in fact, synchronized with those of Iraqis. Walk home from work shortly after 5 pm and you will see Stockholmers sitting at restaurant tables, ordering. The tail end of a three-martini lunch, perhaps? No, the start of middag, which they believe is dinner.

Clearly, dinner is not served at 5 pm. This is obvious to all foreigners. For example, Ayse and Cemo, who are visiting from Istanbul on a baby-goods shopping spree this weekend, were asked by Joachim, a Swede, what time they’d like to meet for dinner tonight. They said 8:30 pm. Joachim nearly gargled his café latte. He had 6 pm in mind. Because it was Saturday.

Stockholmers, stop being so defensive about your bizarre eating habits; stop trying to shoehorn your meals into accepted global norms, and celebrate your otherness! I suggest trying to export the 5 pm meal to New York as something sophisticated and maybe even a touch decadent, as in “look how early I can get off work.” New York restaurants would take to it in an instant: they could always use an extra sitting. If Carrie and the girls had another season on HBO, they’d definitely be meeting for lunner, or maybe they’d call it dinch.

This week it was the annual joke show on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion, that liberal gem of a radio show hosted by Garrison Keillor. Bush got plenty of come-uppance (What were the best three years of George Bush’s life? Grade 5), but Keillor is generous with his humor, and flawless in his delivery, so you should really listen to the whole show rather than just read the list of the best jokes he collected for the year.

Practically nobody emerged unscathed: not Kerry (John Kerry walks into a bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?”), not Martha Stewart, not Episcopalians (Why can’t Episcopalians play chess? They can’t tell the difference between a bishop and a queen), not Unitarians (How do you get a Unitarian family to leave town? You burn a question mark on their front lawn) not Michael Jackson, not Janet Jackson, not even Ronald Reagan (President Reagan didn’t vote in the California election because recall’s not his thing any more), not Helen Keller, not the Amish and not the blind (How does the blind parachutist know when he’s getting close to the ground? The leash goes slack).

And certainly not the Swedes, for which Keillor has a soft spot:

PP: A Swedish guy likes to go to bed with two women, so when he falls asleep they can talk to each other. He is so repressed, he blushes if someone says “Intersection”. Sometimes he’ll get drunk and go downtown and spend the night in a warehouse.
 
GK: A warehouse?
 
PP: They’re bad spellers, too. [Script]

Well, okay, it was funny when he said it. You can complain here.

The third in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativismEight: Preëmptive planning.

In New York, planning a typical night’s entertainment went something like this: “Matthew, how about a game of Scrabble in St. Dymphnas tonight?” “Okay.” If it wasn’t Matthew, it’d be Itay, or Zach, or a combination of the three.

I could handle that. My event horizon rarely extended 24 hours into the future. It didn’t need to — there’d always be something popping up, and people’s schedules were as fluid as mine. I was free to pursue the simple life of task-based socializing: Find something to do and then find somebody to do it with.

Do not try this in Stockholm. In Stockholm, planning goes something like this:

“Let’s go for dinner.”

“Okay, how about two weeks from Friday?”

“[WTF???] How about two weeks from when hell freezes over?”

“I can’t, it’s West Wing on TV.”

“How about the Wednesday after pigs fly?”

“Å, but I’ll have to see if we can get a babysitter.”

“Å, I’ll pencil you in then.“Å,” pronounced “har” as the pirates do but with the h and r silent, is a passive yes in Swedish. As in, “I have no objections to the proposed course of events, do you?” You’d be surprised how much conversation is superfluous once you have the letter å at your disposal. The reason is that, unknown to most linguists, Swedish is actually a tonal language. “Å!” is an entire passive-aggressive tirade reduced to a letter. “Å?” is the Swedish equivalent of “WhatEVER.” And you thought Swedes just didn’t say much.”

The reason tonight is not feasible is because Stockholmers have all preëmptively booked each other weeks in advance. And the only reason why is because everybody else is planning preëmptively. It’s the temportal equivalent to the predatory seating problem, identified previously. There is no shortage of things to do in Stockholm, nor people to do them with, but try to be spontaneous and you will be doing so at home with the remote control, and the Finnish channel as your nemesis.

What Stockholm needs to adopt, en masse, is a just-in-time approach to managing social obligations. As things stand, there is a non-negligible risk your date gets run over by a bus in the interval between planning and consummation. The solution is obvious, Stockholm: For better living, reduce your time-to-meatmarket.