A few days ago I partook in a half-day consulting workshop with my colleagues at work. Several important fundamentals about branding and positioning were Powerpointed out to us; I was made familiar with målgrupper (target groups), huvudbudskapet (the main message) and kanaler (channels). The entire session did wonders to my Swedish, and I even articulated my own opinioner about why webbloggar are a great kanal to get our huvudbudskap to the savvier målgrupper out there.

If only they had kept the whole thing in Swedish. For some reason I cannot fathom, the consultants — a company specializing in something called brand-focused differentiation strategies — decided to title their presentation “Dare to Differ!” I was tempted to differ there and then about the suitability of using that slogan in a marketing situation, unless of course you want to argue with your customers.

As the projected slogan illuminated a darkened conference room, my mind wandered to one of my favorite scenes in Woody Allen’s Zelig, where a newly cured Leonard Zelig ends up in fisticuffs with a visiting psychiatrist because he has become too adamant in his opinions. Sort of like the newly minted MemeFirst, actually.

I’m sure that is not what the consultants had in mind. They probably thought their slogan was a clever little riff on Apple’s Think Different campaign. But “differ” is an ambiguous word. I can mean to be different or to vary (“these specifications differ from the norm”), but when agents with free wills are the subject of the verb, to differ implies disagreement. It is usually a subtle shift in emphasis, but in 360-point all-caps on a monday morning it is not.

I’m now off to London to give Eurof a dressing down for his most recent comment.

The sun heads into the southern hemisphere today, but yesterday Stockholmers soaked up every last ray. In Söder, the terraces on Skånegatan were packed, and the park was crowded with young families. As the afternoon progressed, the shadows lengthened, and the entire park migrated to the dwindling patch of sunlit grass, where I happened to sit, latté in one hand, The Economist in the other.

I had this curious vision that we were surrounded, pushed together by a rising tide of darkness.

Today, I finished off the redesign and redeployment of MemeFirst, my other blog, a group blog that ferrets out new memes of all kinds. The subject matter usually revolves around politics and culture, but you’d be forgiven just this very moment if you thought it was about smut in Sweden.

In 1995, a SAIS student magazine called Sighs became Sighs.com, the news clearing house for that year’s graduating class. Over the years, the site collected contributed emails and party pictures and travel writing and wedding announcements and then baby pictures. Obscurity was its friend — if you didn’t know the site existed, you would never find it. It was linked to from the SAIS main site, but you had to dig deep.

Then Google happened. Overnight, Sighs.com was a click away from every employer’s resumé check. For many SAIS alums, the site held their only web mention, and for some, that meant cross-dressing pictures. In other cases, weddings had soured, or banter had lost its context, so it became imperative to shield this little extended family album from strangers. Sigh.com’s archives now hide behind a passwordOh hell, the password to the archives only exists to keep out bots, really, so you might as well know it. User ID is “paul” and password is “wolfowitz”, in honor of our dean at the time. If you are offended by nudity or explicit sexual acts, then this site is perfectly safe to visit.. In any case, its heyday is probably over, with class spirit now supplanted by individual lasting friendships.

Bloggers too have had to deal with the privacy needs of friends that appear in supporting roles, or at least many have made a stab at pretending to. I myself have protected unusual names to spare them an unflattering Google hit, while other bloggers, such as James Lileks or Francis Strand, employ nicknames for their cast.

In doing so, bloggers have stumbled upon (or deliberately employ) a nugget that racier 19th century writers knew well: Masking identities makes for addictive reading, especially if there is a suspicion that public figures are involved.

I have a conceit that the private lives of celebrities hold no sway over me, and I am greatly aided in this pursuit by being completely incapable of recognizing the famous in New York, let alone Stockholm, despite plenty of supposed exposureThe only celebrity I have ever spotted unaided was Jim Jarmusch, on the corner of 7th and Ave A, at 2 am in the morning on my way back from 7B, and only because we were in danger of colliding.. And yet, and yet, I confess to having browsed Aftonbladet twice now in unsuccessful bids to find out what party Francis might have been to.

Anyway, I am off to Belgium for the weekend, for a family reunion of sorts, and also to attend the wedding feast of F. and her beloved N. F. and I go back a long way, of course.

Who needs democrats? Seriously, I just met up with my friend Ben N. from SAIS, who is passing by Dublin, and we had a few in a local pub. He is one of the two smart republicans I know (the other being Kim) but found him to be radically moderate all of a sudden about a great many things. He is against the Iraq war, outright, and has been from the start. He’s against the recall vote in California (direct democracy being bad), nodded at my lamenting the rise of dynastic democracy of the USAfter the Bushes, watch for Hillary in 2008, though she might have to run against Jeb., and had we ventured into the US budget, we would probably have found ourselves in full agreement.

Where were the days of our stubborn idealism? I remember one pitched battle in the kitchen of our flat on Via Irnerio, in Bologna, about whether European or American democracy was superior, which degenerated into call and response along the lines of “is so, is not, is so…” Now we’d probably be at pains to point out the good parts of our respective democratic heritages. I certainly do about the US. On occasion.

I think I know where Ben’s mellowing has come from. He was accompanied by his lovely democrat wife, whom I hadn’t met before, and it is clear that in this bipartisan marriage, Ben has been doing some political migrating. I’m glad he has, because it gives me the necessary empirical evidence to push a hunch I’ve had to the level of hypothesis. His marriage is the third involving overtly political friends of mine that has manifested a lurch towards the political leanings of the woman in the relationship.

For example, Eurof, who used to fall asleep clutching a dog-eared copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, or who in a moment of drunken sincerity proclaimed his sexual attraction to Margaret Thatcher — this very same Eurof now entertains conspiracy theories about why Greece is no longer a superpower. He believes French foreign policy is enlightened, for God’s sake, and this coming from a Brit. Clearly, he is in love with a GreekEurof is on holiday in Greece at the moment, where they invented the internet 2000 years ago along with everything else, but lost it, so he will not be able to comment here just this minute..

Kim and Matthew, Oregon Gothic, 1998

Meanwhile, Matthew’s trajectory has been the opposite. He hailed from a solid middle class North London Labourite family, and his main stab at rebellion involved making bad postmodern student movies at Oxford. In Bologna, he dabbled in anarcho-revolutionary publishing, and was certainly not above such typical propaganda activities as spreading misinformation about revolutionary rivals. All this came to a screeching halt when he met Kim. Kim owned lots of guns. Now Matthew owns guns. Now Matthew wants to kick ass in Iraq. Enough said.

How to test my hypothesis, so that it can aspire to scientific rigor? Hoping for divorces and observing any shifts would clearly be unethical. Perhaps in the future we should do a better job of chronicling our stated political leanings, so that we can be held to account when we venture off the Shining Path and down the wedding aisle. Oh, that’s what blogs are for.

I take it all back, everything that I said about Ryanair. Two months and 6 flights later, it’s clear that deregulation is drastically changing the way Europeans will fly — much in the same way it did in the US. The era of the accidental tourist is truly upon us: Cheap last minute flights now make it possible to fly from London to Italy on a whim.

And that is what I did last week. Matthew and Kim had already hired a villa outside Siena, Michael B. had already rented the car from Rome’s airport; I just needed to show up at the appointed hour. In the event, I managed to talk Eurof into abandoning his wife and child, and off we went, like Navy Seals of tourism, ready to be dropped into the world’s cultural hot spots on 48 hours notice.

Random acts of tourism have their payoffs. In our case, it was stumbling onto the Palio horse race, which began on the day we went into town. While others had waited for hours in 40-degree heat to witness the race, we rounded the corner to the Piazza del Campo just as the canon went off and the race started. It wasn’t fair — we should suffer more for our arte.

New trend alert: In crowds, digital cameras are now held aloft as periscopes for the shorter members of the entourage.

It was inevitable that I eventually tried RyanairI wrote this post a few days ago, but have been unable to secure unfettered internet access since arriving in Ireland. Consumer broadband in Ireland is very new; cable broadband was introduced to Dublin a few days ago. I’m ready to bribe or kill someone to feed my 1-megabit habit. . They’ve been proclaiming the second coming of aviation all over Christendom, and although their fares seemed too good to be true, I have always been for quantity over quality when it comes to flying. As I am summering in Ireland this year, the perfect opportunity presented itself; how fitting it would be to fly to Dublin on Ireland’s latest contribution to the cause of European civilization, I thoughtThis post is an homage to Felix’s penchant for blogging his suffering on airline flights. It also gives me something to do while waiting for my connecting flight..

How do they do it? I got an early hint as I boarded a Ryanair bus from central Stockholm to Skavsta airport, a hangar in a field 80 minutes to the south. Inside the terminal, a queue of third world proportions awaited me as two employees proceded to check in an entire 737. At the end of that queue I was told, first, that no, I could not check in my luggage here and expect to pick it up in Dublin, I would have to pick it up off a carousel in Prestwick, Scotland, and then check myself in again for my connecting flight to Dublin. Second, I was 13 kg over my luggage limit of 15kg. Never mind that I had dragged the same accoutrements all over Europe over the past year without hassle on BA. Never mind that a laptop, sturdy walking boots and the odd book are enough to put you halfway to their limit. I had to pay an extra $100 if I wanted to take my luggage with me.

Oof. That pretty much erased any price advantage they had over the competition, and suddenly, my eye had become a lot more critical. At that price, let’s see how they stack up. Terminal: crap. Miles? Are you kidding? Window or aisle? No, it’s the Afro-Russian boarding method, where your ticket gets you a mandate to storm the plane for the best seats. In the event, the dash was over tarmac through a good 150m of steady rain.

This free-for-all has one advantage that I thought of too late; it’s an evident incentive to chat up pretty women early, whom, it is hoped, you will invite to share your row of seats during the flight. In that sense it is a refreshing change from all that Lutheran predestination about whom one sits next to on traditional airlines. For once, it is not left up to the gods, who always conspire to have you sit next to bloated businessmen from Basingstoke rather than models from Milan.

Except that the models from Milan do not as a rule fly to Prestwick.

On Ryanair, you pay for your inflight food. This is fine by me; it minimizes waste, etc… But I did not expect, upon a request for a coke and a tuna sandwich, to be handed a can the size of a thimble and a triangle of bread that contained tuna safe for vegetarians (“It contains mayonnaise,” the air hostess stewardess flight attendant cabin crew member warned me.). For $10.

At Prestwick, I waited for my luggage in a sputnik-green terminal straight out of those books of boring postcards you see in museum shoppesAgain, no internet access so no handy link to Amazon. How did I survive before 1995?, then dragged it to the Ryanair check-in counter. Same luggage. Same weight. No problem this time.

“Have these bags been in your possession at all times since you packed them?”

“No.”

“No?!”

“No, I gave them to Ryanair. I just got them back.”

By the time I got onto my second Ryanair flight, however, I was mellowing. Obviously I was not their target customer. Around me sat pensioners visiting grandchildren and students upgrading from bus travel. Ryanair is a bus with wings, not a budget airline. From this perspective, it’s a perfectly reasonable proposition. Just don’t carry too many books to Ireland.