It’s been a productive weekend, in a behind-the-scenes kind of way. The Sighs server has had a spring cleaning, and now comes with a new index page. Worth a visit. It’s turning into a nice little talent show.
Spring Cleaning
1
Category Archives: Personal
Commute
The weather turned balmy this week, above freezing even, and so I shed layers and took the iPod to work yesterday, the extra spring in my step brought to you by early Björk, Danger Mouse and by the disappearance of the ice sheets that until a few days ago extracted regular Bambi impersonations from unwitting pedestrians.
Björk’s happy happy Big Time Sensuality [iTunes] was playing when I got off the subway at Gamla Stan, and then as I passed the turnstyles I got a sudden sense of deja vu. I’d done this before. More specifically, I’d heard this song before as I exited a subway on my way to work, but not here — in New York, Cortlandt Street Station, getting off the N/R line coming down Broadway and about to take my commute through the bowels of the World Trade CenterNot, of course, on my iPod, but on my Rio 600. iPods are strictly a post 9/11 phenomenon — they were introduced in Oct 2001. Since it is hard to imagine life before iPod, I predict we will soon be spotting anachronisms in period films set in pre-9/11 New York, with iPod-toting actors jogging past WTC-intact skylines..
Over the past two and a half years I have often thought back to the human geography of those buildings, especially the mall through which I walked twice a weekday for 4 years until September 10, 2001. I’d always be among the first passengers out the gate, having made sure to board the train at the right spot. Once on the concourse, I’d aim straight for the North Tower on the other end, which meant cutting obliquely across a wash of PATH train commuters brimming up from the depths along steep, wide escalators. They were from New Jersey, I knew, which is why it was tempting to think of them as living on some Dantesque level of hell below, being summoned to work for the day.
Every day, I’d pass the same stores: First, a newstand on the right, source of my weekly Economist, then a J.Crew, where I bought a turtleneck sweater I finally wore out a few weeks back. On the left, Chase Manhattan bank machines, followed by a slew of cosmetics stores. Then, past the PATH, on the right, a GAP, a science gadget store, a souvernir store, and a deli that sold obscenely large Bacci chocolate assortments, no doubt to guidos crawling home to the wife after some infidelity at the office.
I’d then take the revolving doors into the North Tower lobby, and cut across a corner to the footbridge to the World Financial Center, where I worked. Every time I crossed that bridge I marvelled at how tempting a target it could be to terrorists. Blow this up, I would think to myself, and you’d kill scores and block a major New York traffic artery. How spectacularly clueless of me.
Yesterday, as I walked the tunnel that leads from Gamla Stan station to the street, I also walked the old commute in my mind. Björk’s big brash voice led the way in both places. It was good to be there.
Shameless
One six month subscription to the gym at Eriksdalsbadet: 2300 kr.
One “Free Brunei” T-shirt, just arrived: $20.99
My Blogger “hoodie”, just arrived: Free
The looks I got from the good burghers of Stockholm tonight: Priceless
And as I’m on a roll plagiarizing other people’s creative geniusParodying MasterCard ads:
Possibly expensive…
The Swedish word for the day is Nordostersjökustartilleriflygspaningssimulatoranläggningsmaterielunderhållsuppföljningssystemdiskussionsinläggsförberedelsearbeten
Update 10/3/2004: Now minus hyphens to please the pedants among you.
Update II, 10/3/2004: I spelled the word wrong. Correct spelling in comments.It means preparatory work on the contribution to the discussion of the maintenance support system for the installation equipment of the northeast coast’s air surveillance simulator.
Not only is this the longest Swedish word, it is also, apparently, the longest word of any language. Something for Swedes to be proud of, I should think.
Date with Domesticity
Apparently, I have just done something terribly Swedish: I have reneged on a movie date with a friend on account of it conflicting with my laundry room reservation. That’s not as specious an excuse as it sounds: These three-hour slots for washing, drying and ironing are a precious commodity. They require days of advance planning, and are enforced with — in my apartment building’s case — an EZpass-like wireless contraption that won’t unlock the access door if it’s not your turn. Doing laundry requires as much thinking ahead as buying alcohol from Systembolaget, and as much patience as standing in line for a Stockholm nightclub; it’s an investment in time one should not squander unnecessarily.
When I told my friend my excuse, she immediately said, “Oh, so it only took you a year and a half to become Swedish. That’s amazing.” Add a generous dollop of sarcasm to that statement. I do hate being predictable like that, but not as much as going without underwear, so laundry room it remains.
Tidbits
By way of explanation for the slackening of the pace around here, I’ve spent all my free time this past week immersed in a project using DVD Studio Pro 2, Apple’s brilliant DVD authoring software. This also means you will presently be subjected to my half-baked musings on DVD authoring, and — as the preceding clause aptly illustrates — I am additionally initiating a policy of preëmptively criticizing my own posts, effective immediately, as a means of smothering whatever small pleasures are left to the Eurofs and Charleses of this world when they are compelled to snark on my site. As far as I’m concerned, if they are having this much fun, I want a piece of itClearly, this is a stupid idea, as if I am going to exchaust all the possible ways in which what I write can be ojected to..
Then, you’re going to have to sit through another garrotting of the Swedish language, performed by me. I got back a corrected version of my last effort, and it shows my Swedish skills in a clear retrograde motion. My teacher helpfully asked if I had weaned myself from typing it in MS Word, whose spell- and grammar checkers are like a life vest and a kiddy pool, respectively. I lied. With those things turned on, I know Swahili.
What’s also lame is linking to my own article on another blog, even if it is interesting.
DVD Authoring: DVDs may bring all manner of high-bandwidth goodness, but DVD players themselves are dumb beasts. Those DVD menus have nowhere near the sophistication of Macromedia’s Flash or Shockwave because DVD players don’t have the processing prowessdon’t ask me what the difference is, I don’t think they know either.. They’ll just about manage playing video and audio tracks linked to buttons, with a bit of scripting thrown in reminiscent of peeking and poking at a Commodore 64. Because of this constraint, even the fancy Lord of the Rings menus are just videoloops with clickable hotspots. For example, until now I never noticed it is impossible to have one audio track playing uninterrupted while navigating menus. I tried to make it so, to no avail. Each click of a button requires the DVD player to initiate a new audio track (or none).
This, I believe, is the reason for the ubiquity of my pet DVD menu peeve: Interminably long transitions between menus. My guess is it lets the author play some theme music. My other peeve: overproduced menus: Why do they almost always have to look like CNN breaking news intros? I don’t make my web pages look like that, not because I can’t but because it’s uglyOK, so I can’t, but that’s not the reason why they don’t look like that..
Och nu på svenska: Det är kanske lite svårt att antar vad utvandrare tycker om Sverige. Och det kan vara konstigt att försöka berätta om sig själv som land, men det gör www.sweden.se. Vad ska man berätta om Sverige? En artikel igår på Sydsvenskan påstår att bilden på webbsidan är helt fel, att det verkar svenskare är “duktiga, flitiga, skötsamma, galna, sensuella, sentimentala och stolta. Självmedvetna men aldrig självförhärligande.”
Som artikel skriver, andra länder försöker inte att bygga upp ett stor nationellt varumärke som Sverige (utom Belgien!). Dock betyder det inte att Sverige inte bör göra det. Internationell bild av Sverige är jätte positiv, och det är inte eftersom svenskare är duktiga lögnhalsar.
Till exempel, så bygger man upp ett gott rykteGo ahead, click on the FT link, it leads to a cute English-language story.: FT skriver hur Ikea öppnade en ny affär i Sevilla, och använde typiska svenska anställningsmetoder. Men dem var revolutionär för Spanien, och nu börjar Spanskare att diskutera deras arbetspolitik.
Kanske bör Sweden.se skriver om det…
Why I eat at McDonalds
After some snarky comments on my last post, I feel compelled to explain why I eat at McDonalds.
Every saturday, no matter where I am in the world, I seek out a mint copy of The Economist and then a nearby McDonalds, and read the leaders over a Big Mac meal. It’s one thing to read about the forces that propel society today; it’s quite another to see the gears clicking at close quarters. Globalization, mass customization, marketing, consumerism… McDonalds rides the crest of all these waves, producing something as basic as a fast meal, yet managing to convince the locals from Bali to Barcelona that they want it. It’s an amazing feat. By going to McDonalds, I make sure I understand, at a visceral gut levelBonus pun., how the world works. That is why I eat at McDonalds.
But I lie. Who am I kidding?
I was imprinted at an early age, when road trips with my parents across the US were punctured at regular intervals with screams of “McDonalds!” as yet another set of arches floated into view on the horizon. My sister and I vied for the honor of being first to see the next one, but to win you had to have the best view, and to have the best view you had to have the middle bit of the back seat, so we fought a lot over that.
But it was worth it. On road trips, our family had a symbiotic relationship with McDonalds — a pact: We the offspring promised to behave if at regular intervals we could partake in a simple Pavlovian routine: Arches appear, we scream, we stop, we gorge, we shut up. My parents were happy, we were happy, and above all, McDonalds was happy. To this day, I see nothing wrong with that, and I don’t even have kids. People who do seem even more grateful to McDonalds.
Over the years, I have become an expert rationalizer for my visits to McDonalds. Here are a few more ways in which I tell myself that eating at McDonalds teaches me things I will not learn anywhere else:
Meet the locals: It’s they who eat at McDonalds in Barcelona; the foreigners sit at Café Zurich being fleeced for their authentic experience. In Moscow in 1993, I stood in line together with hundreds of others in eager anticipation, dollars in hand, to be met by an absurdly eager Russian serving crew. Russian and eager! If I didn’t know any better, I would have thought McDonalds was holding their loved ones hostage at gunpoint out the back.
Make a statement: In Brussels, I make a point of ordering in Flemish: I will say “Een Big Mac, een groot friet, en een cola” and the response, often, is a surly “quoi?”. Then, depending on my mood, I will either repeat the order in slower Flemish, or else breezily in French, thereby clearly showing how linguistically superior I am to a high school kid making minimum wage.
Also, whenever the server asks me if I want to “supersize” or “plusmeny” my order, I make a point of refusing. This way, I am signalling to McDonalds that I am immune to their marketing ploys; I’m the one making the decisions here, and that I know exactly what I wantDeep in the inner sanctum of the McDonalds University library, I am sure their sacred texts mention this as the main reason for asking me. “Let the customer say no; give them a sense of empowerment that they will want to repeat.”.
Consumerism is good: People say that democracies do not go at war with each other. I’ll go further: Countries with McDonaldses in them do not go to war with each other. And that can only be a good thing.
In fatta
It’s linguistic deja vu all over again: After embarrassing episodes with mores and awry it now turns out I’ve been making arguments in Swedish all over the place using the Swedish term “in fatta” whenever I want to say “in fact”. But in fact it turns out “in fatta” is pure fiction on my part. I must have used it once, nobody complained, and it soon became a standard argumentative technique.
Which, again, leads to the question, what were people thinking I was saying? Problem is, there does not seem to be a exact conceptual translation into Swedish for this rethorical shortcut. OK, nu vet jag äntligen att “in fatta” inte betyder “in fact”. In fatta, det betyder ingenting på svenska, även om jag använde det varje dag tills Fredagskväll, då en vän frågade vad egentligen jag betydde.
Men jag tycker om att använda “in fact” på engelska, därför att jag vanligen argumenterar med en struktur som behöver ge specifika exemplar av en motsats. Nu har jag ingen översättning av detta mentala begrepp på svenska. “Faktum är?” “Egentligen?” Det verkar inte vara samma sak. Kan ni inte börja använda “in fatta”, för min skull?
New Year's in Stockholm
On New Year’s eve, while I am packing for an early move on Jan 1, my friend E— calls. Her Polish cleaner is all alone in Stockholm and wants to go see the traditional fireworks display at Skansen, but has nobody to go with. Would I go with her? “I’d rather not.”
My friend calls back 10 minutes later. Her voice is strained. “She really, really wants someone to go with her. She’s here with me now. Can she call you when she’s done working?” This brings out a measure of noblesse oblige in me. If I can stop this person from thinking suicidal thoughts on New Year’s eve just by taking her to Skansen, of course I will. Besides, I’ve never seen it myself. “She’s young and pretty and she speaks a little English,” assures E—.
Beata, we’ll name her, calls me. We agree to meet at Medborgarplatsen. It’s too early to go to Skansen, so I suggest we get a drink at Kvarnen. She appears shy, or maybe just quizzical? She’s not sure she’ll get into the bar. “Why not?” She’s only 19. But it’s too early for those rules, so we sit at the bar and I have some wine, while she has an orange juice, and the conversation begins, in halting English.
She is from Krakow. She has 4 brothers and a sister. She shares an apartment with 3 other Polish girls, all cleaners. They have the same boss, a Polish immigrant who hired them in Poland and is somewhat of a father-figure to them, having promised their parents to take good care of them. She works 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day, in offices and in the homes of Swedes. She worked on Christmas and will work on New Year’s day. She goes to church on Sundays — there are 2 Polish churches in Stockholm. She doesn’t have a computer, internet access or even an email address, and neither do any of her friends — but they do SMS each other. She has no plans to go to university but she wants to have three children. And she likes to cook. Polish food.
She doesn’t like Swedes — they ignore her when she works for themBe nice to your cleaners, Swedes!. She does like Americans, however. The ones she works for, like my friend E—, talk to her like she is a normal person.
The next day, I will discuss this with E—’s husband, a Swede. He thinks the reason is twofold. First, Swedes are naturally more restrained. Second, domestic help is a relatively new phenomenon in Sweden, after having disappeared for half a century. Swedes will tend to see this kind of work as demeaning, goes his theory, and hence they will feel ashamed on behalf of the help. Americans, on the other hand, see an enterprising young Pole taking deft advantage of economic opportunities abroad and who is willing to work hard to make her dreams come true. And Beata does have a dream: With her savings, she wants to go to Italy next year, for the first time. She’s already taking Italian lessons at a language school here in Stockholm, in return for her cleaning services.
We walk all the way to Skansen. As we approach the gate, I ask her, offhand, what made her want to see this. After all, even Swedes think twice about spending hours outside in the bitter cold. “But you wanted to, E— said.” “No, you did, she said.” Two pennies drop. We’ve been trying to save each other’s soulsThe next day, E— comes clean, and all is forgiven. Nevertheless, I make a mental note to set her up with Henry Kissinger sometime.. The nerve! But it’s hard to be angry; Beata and I are having fun, and it is a typical E— thing to do. At midnight, under the fireworks, we share a bottle of champagne — all courtesy of a fortunate ruse. Later, she will be delivered home, chastely.
Wish list
Two things I want but am too lazy/ignorant to build myself:
One: I want instant translations of words I do not understand in texts I am reading. I want to point my phonecam at the text, take a picture of the word and send it to a service that does OCR on the image and returns the dictionary entry to my phone. And it should take 3 seconds.
Two: My apartment building’s laundry rooms have just been upgraded. Access to the rooms is now computer controlled: You have to wave a card at a machine at the door and then navigate a computer menu to the time you want to book the rooms for. All good and well, except that the laundry room is down a flight of stairs and at the other side of a courtyard, temperature -10°C. Since this building has pervasive 10Mbps piped into every apartment, why can’t we just book over the internet? An outside company could provide this service for many computerized laundry rooms. Not only could you book ahead, you could ask for email reminders, or have it alert you when the laundry room is free (my favorite feature), or have your laundry time show up in your iCal, or find out about broken machines and list lost/found items on a laundry bulletin board. I’m the kind of person who cannot plan ahead, so I lug my laundry all the way there only to find the rooms used. This service would be a real help.
Back from being away
I now declare the 2004 blogging season open. Disregard this post — it’s my spring trainingThat’s baseball terminology, as Matthew will be proud to see me use.. I have not entirely been away from the web these past two weeks, I have checked in occasionally to dispense with blogspam and fire off the odd comment when I could not resist, and I did make good use of some of my Christmas holiday to redesign felixsalmon.com, penned by that renowned metrosexualist Felix, domiciled in the Lower East Side, and his Antarctic sister, the pre-Nobel atmospheric scientist RhianHence pink for Felix, blue for Rhian. It’s a no-brainer if you know them.. My help was not entirely altruistic: Now I no longer have to wade through the overwrought NYT analyses, useless Las Vegas eatery reviews and dubious design tips from the clueless to get to the breathless highs of Antarctic living, journal style, in the best tradition of the earliest explorersKidding! But only because I know how competitive Felix is., because Felix’s and Rhian’s posts are now separate, if you like. The coolest page though, if you ask me, shows you where Rhian is.
Because you are not reading this, herewith an aside as to some technical trickery in felixsalmon.com’s new design. By the judicious use of stylesheets and Movable Type tags (specifically, using MT tags as components in style names) I was able to give the posts of different authors different looks. Then, the right-hand column uses the “overflow: hidden” style attribute for DIV tags to allow text to appear depending on the width of the browser, as first done on MemeFirst. This particular trick took a while to get right on the various browsers, and, by the way, if you use Windows exclusively, you have no idea how good a website can look. Standard Windows fonts suckIn my more strident moments I will concede that my web design philosophy is to make sites that look great on Macs and do not break on Windows, on the premise that people for whom design is important tend to use Macs in the first place.. All in all, the site is sure to irk the likes of design “guru” Joe Clark.
I spent Christmas at the family compound in Ireland. Next door, the Royal Dublin Society had a fair, on which was erected a tower whence were dropped, every 5 minutes, a bevy of prepubescent girls whose shrieks permeated Ballsbridge. These emanations of terror were oddly comforting; they put a constant smile on the face of our house guests — and I felt like I was on the set of Monsters Inc.
The way back to Sweden, pace Ryanair, wended its way through a day’s stopover in Glasgow, where the architecture had me flooredDreadful and unintentional pun.. Granted, my expectations were low, but I had no idea that Glasgow is an Art Nouveau destination on a par with Brussels or Barcelona, and all thanks to Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Then, on New Year’s day, I moved apartments. With that out of the way, let the blogging begin.