I try not to say things like ”lately i’ve been listening a lot to finnish shoegaze kraut” IRL but hubski is my safe space.
Barely related, but a trans friend told me that a dude had slid into his DMs asking if he could send him some testosterone "cuz that workout would be SICK". Since then I think of bodybuilding as gender-affirming care for cis-males.
My favorite spam ever. Organic, top quality product, made in the USA, instructions on how to use and it even lists possible side effects. So thoughtful. This belongs here!
I just came home from a kayak trip with my father and siblings. It was a late birthday gift for my father who turned 60 last year. I was a bit anxious beforehand since the planning and logistics mostly fell in my lap, but it went smoothly and I think everyone had a good time. Not pictured: the roaming packs of Germans with cases of beer in their canoes, and the JAS Gripen that showed up and put on a show for us during a lunch break.
Man living with his mom fulfills his wish to appear in his favorite TV talk show.
I've been down the rabbit hole that was the Swedish "progressive music movement" ("proggen") of the 1970s, that at its peak made Sweden abstain from participating in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1976, two years after "Waterloo". Most of it is admittedly kinda crappy, but there's some gems. Like Tältprojektet (The Tent Project) of 1977 which was envisioned to re-ignite the movement but instead ended up being a bombastic finale. Fria Proteatern was one of several free theater groups of this time, that was active until the 1990s. Their interpretations of Vladimir Vysotsky are pretty good, but with a lot less grit than the originals. Röda bönor was a shortlived group of feminist music students with some really funny and sarcastic lyrics. "Det ska bli slut på rumban" is as far as I can tell not a rhumba, but asks what the women were doing while men made history. Did they stand and wash his perishable coats? According to an interview, the boyfriend of Louise Waldén who wrote those lyrics was working on a song titled "One hand knows what the other is doing" at the same time. A decade later the cover version by Ebba Grön became one of the most famous songs of the Swedish punk scene.What did the women do when the men wrote immortal works?
I miss the good ol' before-times when you needed them to fight off 30-50 feral hogs.
Got a taste of this last year when the supporters of the major Swedish soccer teams staged a silent protest during the first ten minutes of every game against the police's enforcement of a ban on large flags and pyrotechnics in the audience (the protest ends around 12:30, notice that the referee is delaying the free kick at the end of the video because of the flares).The power of the crowd watching the crowd is also true for sports leagues. Maybe more true for sports than for any social function other than war. Without a live crowd for the TV crowd to take its cues from, the TV crowd will quickly lose engagement and interest. Regardless of the level of competition, a disembodied audience is a bored audience.
"Calm in conversation. Kind of flat facial expressions. Does not appear psychotic, clear and adequate." How's that for a Tinder bio?
Lately I’ve been falling asleep to The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. I’m 60 episodes in and have only gotten to the Stoics. The Paris Review Podcast is great for poetry and short stories. I think they also pointed me to LeVar Burton Reads. Other than that I follow a bunch of F1 podcasts, to keep up with the gossip in the off-season. Oh, and Snedtänkt, the best podcast in Swedish you will probably never listen to. Topics include the subculture of Gothenburg, Jules Verne, 70’s pornos and anxiety sex, pilsner movies, and the dark history of amusement parks.
Congrats on the non-smoking, I just passed the three-week mark for the second (hopefully last!) time this year. Enjoy your time off!
I live in Malmö, where 43 % of people have foreign backgrounds (born abroad or with foreign-born parents). In my neighborhood, that number is 86 %. Sweden is heavily segregated, and not enough has been done to deal with it. Immigrants with degrees has had trouble in the past to make use of it, either because of overbearing bureacracy or lack of connections. Look at 2) and replace city with country. Fortunately, a lot of people and organizations seems to be waking up and trying to do the right thing. My trade union has started up language cafés to allow people to network, and some large construction companies just published a Swedish-Arabic dictionary for industry terms. My parents were the children of poor farm-hands, and thanks to free education and government loans, they both got degrees and careers as professionals. If we steer clear of prejudice, I don't see why class journeys like that shouldn't be possible in the future.