Eddie the Echo

McDonald's had an incredibly ill-fated ad campaign in the States a few years ago featuring a character called Eddie the Echo. The executive summary of these ads is that this was the kind of guy who got beat up in high school. Frequently. To call him annoying would be an understatement comparable to suggesting that Mike Tyson has anger management issues. I remember thinking at the time that if I ever saw this guy walking down the street, it would require every ounce of self-restraint I possessed not to haul off and kick him right in the McNuggets. (Come to think of it, maybe I have anger management issues.)




The reason I bring this up is that there's a guy who runs a little coffee-and-pastries stand on the ground floor of the building where I work. He's friendly, always pleasant, and never fails to say hello when I walk by.

The problem is, he always says it twice. "Tjena tjena," he'll say. If you say "hej," he'll come back with "hej hej!" I suppose it doesn't seem that annoying in print, but it has gotten to the point where my co-workers and I have started to speculate about how he might react to other "inputs." ^*

For instance, I wonder what would happen if I said "hej hej" to him myself.

Hej hej hej hej?!?

On second thought, that would make him sound like a Swedish Fat Albert, which is a bit much for my brain first thing in the morning. Maybe I'd better just keep my sparkling wit to myself.

^* (Nerd alert: if you are an engineer, you may recognize this as simply the measurement of an impulse response. If you value your friends, you will keep this to yourself, too.)

Holding It Down On The Engineering Tip

Recently, a friend of mine sent me links to three of the funniest, most brilliantly satirical television ads I've ever seen. For your comedic enjoyment, check out Volkswagen USA's Unpimp Your Ride.^*

Aside from the demonic relish with which the mad scientist trashes the posers' hapless attempts at automotive masturbation, what I love about these clips is that they lampoon precisely that aspect of hip-hop culture which I've always thought was most self-evidently ridiculous: the intentionally ungrammatical language, the comically affected hand gestures, and the pretentious self-importance. (Quoting Snoop Dogg is an especially witty touch.)

Incidentally, you may be asking yourself: "Self, what does anything in this post have to do with Sweden?" Well, it turns out there is a Swedish connection here after all. (Or, as we say in Swedish, "Jaha!") The eagle-eyed among my devoted readership (all three of you) may have noticed that the demented V-Dub is played by none other than legendary Swedish character actor Peter Stormare, who is perhaps best known for being on the winning end of the woodchipper (as opposed to Steve Buscemi, whose character was on the, uh... not winning end) near the conclusion of the Coen Brothers' dark comedy, Fargo.

^* From the Credit-Where-Credit-Is-Due Department: These were created by Miami-based ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. High-res pop-up versions are also available here.

Who The Heck Is This Vernal, Anyway?

Spring is sprung! After a long, dark, and relatively snowy winter here in Sweden, we've finally arrived at the official change of seasons: the Vernal Freaking Equinox. Daylight exceeds night, the flowers are blooming, birds are chirping happily in their new nests, and Swedes everywhere are slowly stripping off their many layers of winter clothing.* Woohoo!!

At least that's what you would think. But you would be wrong. As I write this, it's approximately, oh, I don't know, fucking freezing outside (OK, so at mid-day it got just slightly above freezing... but for about 5 mintes, tops. And then it decided, "nah, screw this," and ducked its head back down below zero and went away, muttering under its breath), and dark.

I am seriously looking forward to going back to the States for vacation next week.

^* For non-Swedish speakers, "ett ord: långkalsonger" translates to "one word: long underwear." Such is the profound efficiency of the Swedish language that it's possible to express the concept in fully fifty percent fewer words than if you had only English at your disposal.

Great Openings III

The third in an occasional series. Previous installments here and here. Some links updated after the original post was written.

Today's installment comes from a collection of short stories by one of my favorite authors, Garrison Keillor. While it is intriguing to wonder whether or not the story is autobiographical, as the title suggests, the thing that catches my eye is the vivid description of adolescence (at least part of it, anyway) in full flight:

When I was sixteen years old, I stood six feet two inches tall and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. I was intense and had the metabolism of a wolverine. I ate two or three lunches a day and three full dinners at night, as my family sat around the kitchen table and observed, and I cleaned off their plates too when they had poor appetites or were finicky. There was no food I disliked except muskmelon, which smelled rotten and loathsome. Everything else I ate.

— "Gary Keillor" (from The Book Of Guys, 1993)

I remember feeling like this. In high school, I participated in a number of sports (whose seasons sometimes overlapped, leading to occasions when I had practices for different sports on the same day) year-round, so it was damn near impossible to gain any weight at all. Swim season, in particular, was insane—swim eleven or twelve thousand meters a day, and you can pretty much eat whatever you like, whenever you like. Sophomore year, in a misguided attempt to boost my caloric intake, I took to having a chocolate milkshake every night after dinner–and still lost weight. Nowadays, the wolverine, not so much–I'm thinking maybe a domestic cat. A golden retriever, tops. And it's not that I'm sitting on my butt all day–paradoxically, between work and just coping with being in a foreign country, I do an awful lot of running around. But it's not the same.

Keillor is perhaps best known for his staple opening line, "It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon," that led off many broadcasts of Prarie Home Companion and most of the short, heart-warming stories in the Lake Wobegon books. The collection that contains the story quoted above, on the other hand, is somewhat darker, perhaps because the common thread weaving through most of the stories is, roughly speaking, "Guy slams into midlife crisis; crisis wins." It's not exactly uplifting reading if you happen to find yourself speeding headlong into that particular ZIP code of your life. But this piece stands apart from the rest, I think because it so vividly describes a time when you feel so alive that don't have to worry about that stuff so much. I miss that.

I am so going to the gym tomorrow.

Places I Want To Visit

Reading the headlines on Boing Boing the other day, I came across a link to this hotel in Nairobi, Kenya. Not much I can add, really, other than that this would be a really cool place to stay, as long as you can sit close enough to (or, if you prefer, sufficiently far away from) the windows at breakfast. Check out the gallery for more pictures. Talk about communing with nature...

And I guess as long as I'm on the topic of hotels I would love to visit, here's one more: the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. A mere architectural description doesn't really do this place justice:





The hotel's site has a large image library, and there are many more images floating around the web as well.

Of course, the nightly rate for a suite in this hotel is only slightly smaller than the GDP of a small Central American country, so it's highly unlikely that I will be going there any time soon. For those who do have the means (or have somehow managed to fannagle a stay there with an expense account), however, a word of advice: don't even think about sunbathing topless. From the hotel's FAQ:

Q. Is clothing optional for sunbathing at the hotel?

A. Topless sunbathing is not permitted under UAE law. In the event a guest chooses to participate in this activity, the Hotel's management will intervene immediately.

I don't know what that means, exactly. But I suspect it may involve swords, or forcible ejection from the the heliport. (I also notice that, strictly speaking, the answer given does not rule out the possibility of bottomless sunbathing, provided you're wearing a top. But before you do something like that, you should probably first ask yourself: "Self, do I really want to get into a semantic argument with this hotel's management?" Once again, I reiterate: swords.)

Of course, this is all basically wishful thinking on my part; my entire apartment would probably fit inside the bathroom of the BAA's smallest suites. But it can't hurt to dream, right?

The Man Sheep of Experience

After several months of living in the posh luxury and breathtaking scenery of the company apartment, the time has come for me to start looking for a place of my own. From talking to people about it over the past few months and reading a bit about the process, I get the impression that apartment hunting here in Stockholm is so difficult that the government is considering nominating it as a demonstration sport for the next Olympics.

For starters, the pricing is really screwed up. In the States, the drill goes more or less like this:

1. Seller lists a house for $X;
2. Bidder likes the house and offers something like $X-10,000;
3. After months of haggling, termite inspections, and the execution of several mysterious financial instruments with names like "Tax-Exempt Municipal Leveraged Capitalization Escrow," the two parties settle on a price that is somewhere in between.
   

Here in Sweden, on the other hand, it works a little differently:

1. Seller lists a house for some ridiculously small price, say 500 SEK. Typically this price will not have any relation whatsoever to the amount they're hoping to actually receive. It might be on par with the cost of a week's groceries.
2. Seller hires an unindicted co-conspiratorbroker to list the place and set up an "open house," which is Swedish for "Hey, Roaming Hordes of Desperate Apartmentless People Whose Sublets Are About To Expire! Come look at my apartment on Sunday! (But please take off your muddy shoes and leave them in the hall for the neighbors to trip over.) "
3. Aforementioned radioactive weaselbroker sets up the open house for Sunday, from 13.00 until 13.15. No, that's not a mis-print. Furthermore, all brokers have their showings on Sundays, and they all have them at the same time. It must be some sort of wack-ass Broker Conspiracy Rule, as it ensures that you will not be able to see more than two apartments on any given day. You have to declare your loyalties early.
   
4. Aforementioned People stop by the place on Sunday and, if they are interested, so indicate to the aforementioned puppy abuserbroker.
   
5. The following day, aforementioned miserable, vomitous massbroker begins calling the list of people who expressed interest and soliciting bids. If and when someone bids high enough to satisfy the seller, and no other party is willing to bid more, the transaction continues with bank loans, paperwork, and the like. In short, this is a good old-fashioned auction, in which the final sale price is guaranteed to be significantly higher than the initial asking price. Twenty or thirty percent is typical; seventy-five percent is not unheard of for particularly desirable places.
   

Think about this for a minute. In the States, there is usually at least some mechanism to balance the interests of the two parties involved: the sellers and their brokers can agree on whatever (mis-)representations they think they can get away with, but you can generally request an independent assessment of the home's value. So there's a balance. Whereas here in Sweden, the broker completely controls the bidding process, while having a direct interest in seeing that the place sells for the highest price possible (thus maximizing his commission). So the broker might call the following day and say, "Hej! Bidding has been brisk on this one, ja! Is now up to the Gross National Product of Ecuador. You are still interested?" Of course, there is an art to playing this game, but the point is that as I understand it currently, I have very little leverage in the process other than to say "no" if the price gets too high.

As you can imagine, this post may well be the first in a series of increasingly hilarious accounts (hilarious for the real estate brokers, not me) about my escapades in trying to find a place. So I won't dwell on the struggles until I actually have some. However, I can't resist quoting a paragraph I recently saw on the website of one of the main housing brokerages here in Stockholm, as presented in the inimitable poetic stylings of my favorite web-based translation engine:

Another necessary knowledge is the man sheep of experience. We have sold apartments in almost each house on Söder and in each söderförort. Therefore, we have a hum about what the should cost.

Yeah.

I imagine they might be humming Wagner. I wish they would go have a hum somewhere else.

I just want to find a damn apartment.

I Bet It Tastes Like Chicken

I got annoyed with my phone constantly running out of memory, so I decided to delete all the porn clean it out this morning. I'd already downloaded most of the pictures onto my computer (some of them have even made it onto this blog), but I came across this nugget I'd found while walking through Fortnum & Mason on a recent weekend trip to London:

Figure 1. Keep this shit away from me.

WTF?! I can't imagine the conversation back in the ol' Haggis R&D department that would have led to this product.

Aidan: You know what, Steve? I suddenly have the urge to chow down on a hearty blend of sheep heart, liver, and lungs.

Steve: Uh... you're vegetarian.

Aidan: Oh. Yeah.

Steve: Wait—I've got a great idea! What say we make some vegetarian haggis?

Aidan: Aye!

I'll take "Flagrantly Unnecessary Foods" for $1000, please.

Seriously, that is just about the only plausible explanation I can think of for the existence of something like this. And so we have another member in the honorary Ridiculous Foods And Beverages club. Right there next to decaf coffee and low-alcohol gin.

I'm Only Mostly Dead...

... so there's no need to go through my clothes and look for loose change.

After what feels like a long time away, I'm back.

Yes, this makes me a Bad Blogger^TM. I know. Shut up. Just because it feels like there's no one else around here doesn't mean I haven't been doing stuff, and writing about it. It's just that I haven't been very good about actually posting it.

Anyway, I'm going to try polishing off one item from the backlog of drafts I've built up, and posting it, every few days. As before, I will keep the original dates wherever it makes sense to do so; I've backdated just this one post (it is early August as I write this holy time travel, Batman!), so that it won't keep sitting up at the top and making visitors think there's nothing new going on (gee, why would anyone think that?).

I have also added sidebar links to a couple of other things I've been reading lately. Two are pants-wettingly funny blogs that somehow manage to also be profound much of the time, and two chronicle the wonders of all that is Sweden with a far keener and more observant eye than mine. Enjoy!

The PWKMALNCVI

To the Person Who Kept Me Awake Last Night Chatting Via IM (PWKMALNCVI ^TM):

I hereby accept exactly 50% of the responsibility (no more, no less) for staying up waaaay past my bedtime. Not that I'm complaining or anything.

Nine o'clock this morning came around seriously early, though.