Two B's: B-A-B-A-R

Before I came to Sweden, I had heard various opinions (both good and bad) about the socialized medical system here. Today I had my first chance to find out for myself.

I had to go get a health exam for my employer's insurance carrier. It turns out that the company they normally use will not offer health insurance to anyone unless they have lived in Sweden for two years, so we had to make arrangements with another provider. Part of those arrangements required me to take a physical, so this morning I hopped on the T-bana and headed for the address given to me on a slip of paper, on some side street just off Hötorget.

I find the building easily enough, though I am a bit surprised to discover that the clinic is on the very top floor, behind a door that could easily be mistaken for someone's apartment if it weren't for a tiny sign on the wall. I walk in, fill out a bit of paperwork, do the eye chart thing (though I do not have enough time alone in the exam room to memorize the fine-print copyright notice at the bottom, foiling yet again my longstanding desire to reprise the old Bugs Bunny eye chart gag), and sit down in the reception area to wait for the physician. After a few minutes, I am called into his office.

The details of the exam are inconsequential (I'm perfectly healthy), but there is one interesting detail to report about the examiner. Which is that the doctor appears to be—how can I put this politely—COMPLETELY FUCKING NUTS. The moment I enter his office, he begins to mumble, stream-of-consciousness style, in my general direction. For all I know, he could be reciting Finnegan's Wake in Swedish. He does not once say my name or ask me any questions that require an intelligent response. He just mumbles away and pores over the papers I've brought for him to sign.

I take a moment to size up the good doctor. He is wearing ratty scrubs that look like they haven't seen the inside of a washing machine in days; paint-splotched carpenter's pants; thick, horn-rimmed pince-nez; and—wait for it—a scarf. (For those of you keeping score at home: yes, his office is indoors.) There are random bottles filled with colored liquids on the shelves, some with peeling, hand-lettered labels, others with no labels at all. The stand next to the exam table is covered with gleaming metal instruments, some of which may actually be sterilized. There is a world map on the wall for some reason, though I note that it still shows the Soviet Union as a single nation (evidently, this is a place where time truly does stand still).

On the windowsill, there are several ferns and some sort of a creeping vine, which has grown several laps all the way around the window and is now heading across the wall toward the opposite side of the room. For all I know, this might be a distant relative of Audrey II. As if that weren't weird enough, this particular vine nicely mirrors the good doctor's beard, which he has grown out to such an extent that he looks to be in contention to compete with these guys. His cheek hairs are "combed" (and I use that term very loosely) damn near sideways, parallel to the floor, the net effect being that his head has a roughly 3:1 aspect ratio—not unlike a high-definition television, or a roadside billboard. Aerodynamic he ain't.

As I'm sitting there on the exam table, taking all of this in, there is only one thought racing through my mind: If this guy puts on a rubber glove and reaches for the salve, he's going to experience defenestration firsthand.

Fortunately, it does not come to this. He does the usual reflex tests, blood pressure, ENT exam, listens to my heart and my breathing (all the while mumbling på svenska... mumblenmumblenmumblen). Then, abruptly, he says—in English—"I'm sorry, but you must go. I do not have any more time for you. I have many, many patients waiting for me now. You are the weakest link. Bye-bye."

I do not complain. (For the record, however, I observe on my way through the lobby that "many, many" apparently means "two.")

Apparently, he has seen enough to sign off on my forms in the affirmative, and my application should now go through without further delay. I just hope no one from the insurance company ever decides to follow up by paying this clinic a visit. If that happens, I'll have a better chance of getting insurance from Mongolia.

For all its faults, I have to say that I miss US healthcare.

Edit, one week later: Today I received a small handwritten note from Dr. Svenskamumble's office. It seems that they managed to destroy my blood sample before they had a chance to complete whatever tests they were planning on running. So I have to go see him again. Grrrrrr.

The Quest For Seven

I've just returned from my very first Swedish lesson.

Maugham again, this time on the subject of trying to go beyond a basic working knowledge of a foreign language, with the aim of truly mastering it:

Unless you devote your whole life to it, you will never learn to speak the language of another country to perfection; you will never know its people and it[s] literature with complete intimacy. For they, and the literature which is their expression, are wrought, not only of the actions they perform and the words they use, neither of which offer great difficulty, but of ancestral instincts, shades of feeling that they have absorbed with their mothers' milk, and innate attitudes which the foreigner can never quite seize. It is hard enough for us to know our own people; we deceive ourselves, we English especially, if we think we can know those of other lands. ... It seems hardly worth while to take much trouble to acquire a knowledge that can never be more than superficial.

Personally, I have more modest goals. For instance, I would like to be able to pronounce the word for "seven" in Swedish.

Such a simple little word: "sju."

But the correct pronunciation, to my ear, is somewhere between that of the English letter "f," the Russian letter "x" (as in "Hhhhello. My name is Inigo Montoya."), and the sound you would make if you tried to gargle with a mouthful of sand.

I have been practicing this sound for days. It feels a whole lot like Victor Borge's phoenetic punctuation. Anyone who passes me on the street will probably assume, not unjustifiably, that I must either have an enormous hairball in my throat, or be suffering from Tourette's. Worse yet, I have discovered that there are two totally different pronunciations of this infernal number, the distinction apparently having to do with whether the speaker has a Stockholm or non-Stockholm accent. Unfortunately, I can't seem to master either one. All I have to show for my efforts so far is a somewhat scratchy throat.

At the rate this is going, I'm beginning to think that the Number of The Beast isn't 666. It's 7.

The Quest For Seven continues.

Edit: I suppose I shouldn't complain so much about this, since everyone around here speaks nearly perfect English. I have to keep reminding myself that it could be much worse.

Threatening Use of Herring

Sometimes, the headlines, they just write themselves.

So much for the famously reserved Scandinavian demeanor...

Have you ever thrown a herring at a security guard? Well, have ya, punk? Any other animals?

Fun With Flatbed Scanners and Tornadic Supercells

As a long-time photographer, I was saddened recently to read that Nikon is discontinuing the bulk of their film camera line, choosing instead to focus boom! crash! on their digital offerings. Digital is definitely the way of the future, but I still have fond memories of long nights in the darkroom making prints from negatives the old-fashioned way.

Today, though, I came across one of the coolest camera hacks I've seen in quite a while: a camera made from a flatbed scanner. Such a simple, elegant idea, yet totally original. The notion of selectively making use of three-dimensional motion in the frame, while recording static images normally, is really clever, and makes for some seriously unusual pictures. And as often happens with great ideas, it makes perfect sense once it's explained to you. Excellent stuff.

On a related note, this post gives me an excuse to point out the most incredible page of weather photography I've ever seen. (And yes, I'm aware that Mike shoots with digital gear. Irony, shmirony.) Not only are the photographs mind-blowingly great, but Mike is a good guy who has had to deal with insane, systematic, and ridiculously widespread misuse of his work for the past several years. I can't decide which is more incredible: his photos or his patience, given the extent to which they've been dispersed around the 'net without his permission. In any case, I figure any excuse to post a few links to his site is good enough for me.

Santa Claus? Rasputin? ZZ Top? Amateurs.

So I'm reading through the headlines on the NY Times' RSS feed this morning, and I come across a story * about two quarterbacks who have, for one reason or another, decided to grow beards over the past few months of the NFL season.

First: WTF? I go without shaving for a few days, no one notices (unless I'm home visiting, in which case my mother says, "you should shave."); in professional hockey, this sort of behavior is known as "the playoffs," and it is so commonplace that no one really makes a big deal of it. But these two yutzes do the same thing, and they end up on the front sports page of the freaking New York Times. Must have been a slow day at the sports desk or something. Edit: Now that the Steelers have won the Super Bowl, the victorious aforementioned yutz gets his beard shaved on Letterman.

Second: About a third of the way down the first page of the article, there's a quote from Phil Olsen, the self-appointed captain of Beard Team U.S.A. (Don't be silly–of course they have a blog.) And from this it's just a hop, skip, and a click to the World Beard and Moustache Championships. Which is enough to give you nightmares for weeks.

These people voluntarily travel all around the world to compete. They vie for prizes in such categories as Full Beard Natural, Imperial Moustache, and (my personal favorite) Freestyle Goatee. They even have strict rules as to the permissible use of styling aids, and a special category for anyone who wants to look like Salvador Dalí. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if a doping scandal broke out during some major upcoming competition.

Mostly, though, these guys look to me like someone stapled miscellaneous scraps of carpet to their faces.

I'm normally a pretty voluble guy, but these people leave me absolutely speechless. What on earth would possess someone to do this?

* Check out bugmenot if you want to avoid the registration nonsense. More on the beard saga here, since NYT articles automatically get archived a week or two after publication.

Whiting Out Our Streets Along the Way...

Wednesday morning moment of zen: listening to Fountains of Wayne's "Valley Winter Song" ^* as the snow whips by, horizontally, outside my window. (Of course, not everyone can be a zen master.)

Edit: No, I don't enjoy brown slush, puddles, or slipping on an icy sidewalk and falling flat on my ass—all accoutrements of snowfall in the city. But despite what some people think, I do find it strangely cheery having to brush the snowflakes off my jacket before hanging it up on the rack. It makes me feel alive somehow.

It is true that, living in the city, you miss the solitude that settles in right after a fresh, heavy snowfall in the countryside (or even in the suburbs). The blanket of snow on the ground absorbs much of the sound, enveloping you in an otherworldly silence, and if the clouds come low it feels like you're between two thick, soft blankets. (Sure, it's cold, but nothing a warm jacket and a hat won't fix.)

Walking home in the evening, past the cones of light pouring down from the streetlamps, has a lonely, intimate ambiance reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting (though, to the best of my knowledge, Hopper never painted any scenes set in winter. Also, I may well be the only person who finds any warmth or endearment in this painting—the writeups I've read of Hopper's work invariably describe it as depressing, even menacing—but somehow I've always felt drawn to it.)

I miss that.

* Eeeevil WMA, low-bitrate MP3, and RealAudio streams, respectively. Unfortunately, the MP3 clip really doesn't do justice to the song. You can listen to the WMA clip using VLC if you want to avoid WMP.

Great Openings I

Every once in a while you come across an opening passage so memorable that you can almost remember it word-for-word years later, long after the details of the rest of the story have faded into the dim recesses of your mind. As Somerset Maugham writes in his astringent autobiography, "Now and then journalists in search of copy ask me what is the most thrilling moment of my life. If I were not ashamed to, I might answer that it is the moment when I began to read Goethe's Faust. I have never quite lost this feeling, and even now the first pages of a book sometimes send the blood racing through my veins."

And so I'm going to indulge in something I've long thought of doing, which is to share in this blog my favorite written openings (of novels, short stories, and pretty much anything else that stands out in my mind), in the form of an occasional series. Now, I only have a handful "in the bank" at the moment, so this may be a somewhat short series. We'll see how it goes.

Today's entry comes from the father of modern American detective fiction:

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who could manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

— Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929.

Despite a surprisingly short career as a novelist (only five years passed between the publication of his first and last books), Hammett wrote such classics as The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, practically defining the genre of "hard-boiled fiction." The brisk, bracing prose hits you in the face like a wet towel; his world and the characters who inhabit it practically crackle with life.

Remarkably, the passage above is the first paragraph of his first published book.

Time to Bringa the Linguistic Blinga

I'm going to start taking introductory Swedish lessons next week. The language is hard enough as it is (e.g. the pronunciation of this stop on the T-bana is rather different than you'd think), so discovering that I would have even more words to learn was a bit disheartening. Oh well.

I guess it's time to go have a snackis, fire up my iPodda, and get cracking.

If a Tree Falls in the Woods and Hits a Mime...

Oftentimes people will tell you that they want you to be completely honest with them. Your significant other or close friends may say that they'll always be there to lend a sympathetic ear if you have a bad day and need to vent, no matter what's on your mind.

The reality, though, is that only a small percentage of those people actually mean what they say. Of those that do, one hundred percent have a limit beyond which they don't want to hear your problems. And that limit is invariably closer than you think.

My mother was right when she told me that no one likes to hear someone who complains all the time. So while being completely honest about what's on your mind sounds like a good idea, more often than not a better one is just to keep your mouth shut. Like New Coke, communism, and any number of Hollywood screenplays, some things that look good on paper simply don't work in real life.

I Would Not, Could Not, With a Goat

OK, this is just weird. I'm all for scientific progress and everything, but was that really necessary?

Maybe the researchers were just big fans of Theodor Geisel?

Apologies

I was recently involved in two apologies—one given, another (not) received—and it has gotten me thinking about the nature of saying "I'm sorry" in general.

As one of my refereeing mentors puts it, "Justice delayed is justice denied." In soccer, at least, the idea is that if you don't deal with a problem head-on in a timely fashion, the players will likely take matters into their own hands.

For better or worse, life outside the pitch works a little differently: a person to whom you owe an apology may not do anything drastic or overt if you fail to give it. He or she may not even say anything at all. Some forgive and forget; others fume, silently. As for people who might have wronged you, it takes a rare strength of character to fess up and ask for forgiveness, particularly if the offense occurred long ago (and the more time passes, the more difficult it becomes to muster up the necessary courage to make amends). It also requires enough social intelligence and introspection to figure out that you've done something wrong, because people won't always tell you.

Lately, it seems to me that very few people possess either trait in sufficient measure, let alone both. So one of my resolutions for this year will be to at least hold up my end of the bargain: beyond a certain point, I can't do much about the (in)actions of others, but I can at least try to make sure that I treat others the way I wish they would treat me.* Corny as it sounds, one could do worse than to live by the Golden Rule.

* No, not "He who has the gold makes the rules." That's the other golden rule.