Es ist passiert

Does anyone know how much news is it safe to watch, before you get negative effects from it? Seriously I have been surfing and reading ridicules much on news sites. Oh well, lest change subject, I have signed up for a course in (western) calligraphy. I’m a little ambivalent about it. It would take time and effort to get good at it, and I ‘m not sure that I need another thing to get obsessed about.

According to the course literature goose quill pens are still the best pens, and the course literature also describe old methods like mixing egg yolk with the writing paint. I’m can imagine that I’ll end up as a hardcore calligraphy nerd that writes a whole book with a quill pen, just like a medieval monk. I also wonder if they make synthetic quill pens for animal friends who don’t want to use animal products? Ok, this is why there’s no risk I would become a hardcore calligraphy nerd, I can’t focus on anything, I started to write about the course I’ll take and ends up writing about animal right.



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* On online sites in English I have seen the claim that canola oil is both unhealthy and a non-traditional industrial product. Hey, my moms dad used to grow that stuff, I can’t see anything my grandpa did as modern, so to me it’s traditional. Old fashion canola oil just like grandpa did. He also feed his milking cows with soybeans from Brazil, before he in the 1970s had to sell the cows for economic reasons. Old fashion dairy made from cows feed soybeans, just like grandpa did. So what I’m I trying to say? Nothing really, maybe just that we have been eating food from a highly industrialised agriculture for a long time. Feeding cow’s soybean doesn’t sound that extreme to me, not compared with feeding cows other protein source like fish or pigs cadaver.

* I fund this list of geniuses in history http://listverse.com/2007/10/06/top-10-geniuses/, the thing is I can’s see a list like that without checking if its “political correct”. On that list there’s only one woman and all genius are white. Ok Wittgenstein was Jewish, and Bobby Fischer, well to me he seems to have been a one man freak show. A guy who won the United States chess Championships then he was fourteen, who later idolise Hitler, who denies the holocaust, who praised the 9/11 attacks, who said all Jews should be jailed, and who himself had a Jewish mother. Ladies and gentlemen see the man who’s extremely smart and extremely bat-shit insane. Another thing to mention is that two on the list - Madame De Staël and Emanuel Swedenborg – both lived parts of their life in Uppsala, Sweden.

* What’s become strange with this journal is that I write about such different subjects, one day it’s very personal things, the next something trivial, the next politics. Well, I just write down things that interests me, what’s the alternative? Writing one blog about literature, one about politics, one about medicine, one about food. Then the first entry in my medicine blog should be about the new stimulating, narcolepsy drug Modafinil, since I should be forced to take something to write that many blogs. Then there’s the question if my opinions, my thoughts really are that good so I need to share them with other.

Let’s write some words about the space, I think it’s safe to write that many kids around the world find space explorations fascinating, then I was a child I was one of them. In American politics is the republican who claim to believe in capitalism, in private companies, and the democrats are at least accused of being socialists. So isn’t it ironic that Bush was the president who started to government owned bureaucratic Constellation program to get back to the moon, and it’s Obama who cancel it and instead try’s to stimulate private companies in space explorations?

One day not long ago I got a whim and searched for the name of a former student pub, on youtube. I got some hits, some clips from concerts in the premises. Searching for a Student pub on youtube can be called lame nostalgia, or something.

It could be mentioned that the building is quite unique: a little gothic, a little English and a little one side bigger then the other.

A man who wants to find the truth becomes a scientist, a man who wants to let his subjectivity flow perhaps becomes an author, but what shall a man who wants something that lies in between become?

From The man without qualities I thought to line was so interesting that I tried to translate it myself.

The latest day at work has been marked by problems and misunderstandings between myself and the company Gojaba. I like to think that Gojaba is a typical postindustrial company of today, they sell used books online, they are currently working on the Swedish, the Brazilian and the Russian markets. They are a subsidiary of abebook.com which in turn is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and for some reason gojabas Swedish headquarters is located in Munich, Germany. Make sense!

This morning I had a handful of dried goji berries for breakfast, since it was all I had at home. To eat something weird for breakfast since that’s the only thing one have home might be a bachelor thing. Goji berries however might not be classical bachelor thing.

In other news, my bed broke down, literally. Then I went to bed yesterday one of the beds legs just gave way. And no I’m not fat. Stupid IKEA, well thinking about it I didn’t bought it on IKEA, I don’t remember the name of the store I bought it in. Anyway I had to sleep on a mattress on the floor.

A photo from my job. Honestly I do not understand why the above picture is good, but the artist has studied at “The Academy of Higher Arts" so it must be good. Ok, the last might sound sarcastic, the only thing I saying is that I do not understand it, if someone else is doing it - Great!



Another picture from my work, this reminds me of Jenny Holzer, she also wrote down truisms and called it art. Holzer made it better, I wish I had been in New York that morning in 1982 when she “published” her quotes on an electronic light plate at Times Squares, that should have been fun to see. By the way, the thing with me and Jenny Holzer is that I like ten years ago, actually it was autumn 2000 so it’s almost literary ten years ago, thought I could tattoo some of her truisms on my body. I have had tons and tons of idea for tattoos but now ten year after I have tattooed two of them - “ambivalence can ruin your life” respective “abuse of power comes as no surprise” - for me getting tattoos take time. I think the motive it’s typical of me, something about truisms and stealing it from someone else, feels right to me.

You should like this, or not. Last night just before I fell asleep I wrote down some words on my arm, since I thought they were important. Now I can’t read it, you can’t even see what alphabet it’s written in and of course I don’t remember what it was about.

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Word, word, speaking of words. I think publishers can be ridiculous when they present poets: "He was an original and profoundly lonely person," "She is a veteran of love". What does that mean? I can feel original and profoundly lonely, everyone can feel so, and "veteran of love"? A war veteran has survived a war so I guess that a veteran of love has survived love, about 99% of the world's adult population has done that. None of the descriptions say anything.

Otherwise, something I noticed this Christmas is that my family suddenly is full of engineers, I have both sisters and cousins who are / training to be engineers. In my family the parent’s works at hospitals and the kids becomes engineers. Perhaps it is science, not poetry, which can explain the world. Here is a poetic youtube clip of a perfect airships.

From the legendary place called Berkeley.

Thought of the day, it’s said that in the 1980s there were tons of popular songs about nuclear war, with that in mind one can wonder why we today don’t have any popular songs about suicide bombers? I got that thought since it has been made comparison between the revolt in East Europe 1989 and today’s revolt in Iran. I don't think history is repeating itself however there's one similarity I think is worth writing down, the demonstrators in East Germany were protesting against a regime that said to work for the people, by yelling “Wir sind das Volk” (“We are the people”), and in Iran the protesters yells "Allah'u akbar" (“God is great”) while protesting a regime that claims it’s doing Gods work. Here I could also mention the 2005 novel The possible of an island by Michel Houellebecq (the novel Iggy Pop based an album on) there he let, in his fictional world,  the Islamic societies fall the same way the communist fell, and there he write that techno music played the same roll in the revolt in the Islamic countries that rock music had played in East Europe. Now I come back to the subject of music “let your balalaika sing what my guitar wants to say” Scorpions sang after the end of the cold war. If we put those two things together we will maybe some day hear a techno song about the end of the so called war against terror. That said, I don't think history is repeating itself, and of course it's just a novel ...

One guy I used to work with has printed a booklet with his photographs. As I wrote he had printed it himself and the text on the backside was a bit doggerel (actually I just wanted to use that word, I got it from a dictionary) but the photos was fucking amazing, that's my review "fucking amazing". I argue with myself if I should link to his blog or not, I wont, if I did there most be a risk he could find this page and I wasn't sure I wanted that.

One project that I occasionally work on is to write an article about SIB, the reason is simply that I do not like the way the issue is presented in the media (the old media that it's popular to complain about). Then I could possibly publish it online (on the new media that’s much better and smarter). It is a project that I never seems to finish, it’s one thing to have an idea in my head it’s a totally different thing to share the idea with many people. Simple put, to publish your ideas you need tons of confidence in your ideas.

This morning I thought about writing about big rivers. That was an uncool subject, but let’s take that the Thames as an example, there is a special experience for me to see the river Thames. That’s hard to explain that experience, it could be that I associate the river with my image of the nineteenth century, newly industrialized Victorian London, you know Oliver Twist, Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, the beginning of Heart of Darkness … Ok, I’m not going to complain about how hard it is to write, I know what my problem with writing is, my texts gets “overbuild” (again a word I fund in a dictionary and don’t know if it could be used in this context), I seems like I describe too many subjects with too few words, the texts gets short and compact. If you understand. I will see if I could work on it. Now I'm going to eat dinner and open the book Danube by Claudio Magris.

I feel like making a Västerbotten cheese pie, I made it one time before however that was like ten years ago. It’s simply a pie, made with butter, filled with egg yolks, cream and Västerbotten cheese (often described as the best Swedish cheese). In other words it contains a big quantity of old fashion, saturated, milk fat. Speaking of cheese, the other day I bought Brie de Meaux made from unpasteurised milk, the last thing is good because it’s taste better and because it’s fun to quote John Sheehan, director of FDA, while eating it, he said: ”Drinking raw milk or eating raw milk products is like playing Russian roulette with your health”. The cheese that makes you feels like you’re livening on the edge and like you’re rebellious against American food authorities.

Ps. I have gotten comments that I mention America a lot in this journal, I could make it a returning joke that I try to avoid mention America too much, and then ends up mention America in every other entry.

Pps. Perhaps I should write about Christmas, for me it was a unexpectedly good Christmas, and I got, among other things, a Sony Ericsson W 595 and Jack Kerouacs The Dharma bum (in the new Swedish translation), and the gifts I gave was quite well well received.

Product of the year, spray with alcohol for disinfection of hands, to avoid flu, winter vomiting disease, etc. (they think). I've not used it yet, I still trust water and soap.

Journal excerpts of the year: “French analyst of international affairs Dominique Moïsi has written a thought-provoking essay (The Geopolitics of Emotion, London, 2009). His thesis is that the world of today is not only divided into separate political spheres but also in different emotional. Asia has become the sphere of hope, the Arab-Muslim world, humiliation and the West fear.” Spontaneous I don’t like that quote, but it is very similar to quote about Bush: “His administration transformed the United States into ‘the United States of Fighting Terrorism.’ This is the real reason, in my view, that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely. They feel that he has taken away something very dear to them -- an America that exports hope not fear.”. From The World Is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. That quote I really like. Ronald Reagan was also unpopular in Europe, he was also seen as an unintelligent cowboy, his administrations even include the same names as the Bush administration - Rumsfeld, Powell, Bush, Cheney. But my gut feeling is that back in the days of Reagan USA still explored visions, dreams and hopes. Rememberable quotes from him are: "Tear down this wall" or "It is time for us to realize that we're too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams”. Bush, and I think even most Cheney, just explored fears.

Now we have Barack "Yes we can" Obama who we hope will export hope. That's why he got the Nobel Peace Prize, or the funny explanation is that Norwegians are tired of foreigner believing that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Sweden and that they believe that a choosing a few controversial winner will give the peace prize so much attention that people finally will learn that the peace price, unlike the other Nobel prizes, is awarded in Oslo.

What’s the point of being a beautiful loser if no one can see me lose?

I’m almost feels smart for writing that sentence.

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Then I make my diner shopping at the supermarket I feel like I’m in the classic Monty Python sketch there a older couple visit a cafeteria that serves spam to all dishes, the only different is that instead of spam the whole store is full with salmon. Sure that’s was an exaggeration, but the freezer cabinet is full of frozen salmon, the delicatessen sells smoked salmon, in the fish disk where are fresh salmon, if you want to buy pre-made sushi you will find that all peaces are salmon ... People here seems to eat a lot of salmon, if you are what you eat, we are a fish that is known to swim up for waterfalls just to experience the pleasure of having sex once and then die. Sure that was a exaggeration too, I just think there seems to be some kind of hype around salmon, and I don’t even like salmon. What about local freshwater fish as perch, walleye, pike? Or other marine fishes such as tuna or maybe turbot, that's a good fish, ok I've only eaten turbot once but it made an impression.

Lately I have been more interested in fish, and while I love red meat have decided that I should avoid it. Short story I hope it’s better for environment reasons, it often said that meat production is an ineffective way of making proteins and that the meat industry contribute a lot to the global warming. Therefore I have been looking more at fish and beans as protein source. Might be healthy too, in the good old days experts could speculate that the reason Japanese people had the highest life expectancy in the world was that their diet is low on animal fat and that most of their animal fat comes from fishes. Now of course we have those HFLC-diet people who think it’s very healthy to eat a lot of saturated, animal fat, (however I don’t think they can explain why the Japanese has such high life expectancy maybe they think the Japanese secretly eat lots of lard). That debate is funny, people like Neal Barnard says that a low fat vegan diet protects against diabetes and cancer, on the other hand, the HFLC enthusiasts claims that a diet high on animal fat protects against diabetes and cancer.

Something different, my bicycle was stolen, but I don’t care that much. I care about the money I lost, otherwise “Shit happens”.

The book I mentioned in my last entry: The devil's picnic: Travels Through the Underworld of Food and Drink by Taras Grescoe, is quite funny, light and easy reading about foods and drinks. In the book Grescoe describe some small, quite meaningless, rebellious thing, like smuggling chewing gums into Singapore and smuggling the French Epoisses de Bourgogne, a cheese made from unpasteurized milk, from Canada to the United States. See, cheese from unpasteurized milk are illegal in the U.S.. Grescoe however points out that we has been eating raw milk cheese for 4000 Years Before the FDA, a authority in a country where tons of kids are hospitalized after eating hamburgers contaminated with e-coli each year, determined it's dangerous. He has a point, it's popular to criticize fast food and it would not be much of a surprise if raw-milk cheese is heathery then the thing they serve on MacDonald's cheeseburgers (if that matters, it would not surprise me if there are more French people who eats in MacDonald’s then who eats unpasteurized cheese).

About the lawbreaking. I have actually made a similar thing, back in 2004 I ordered a bottle of absinthe (Un Emile 68) via the internet, and back them it was illegal to import alcohol that way, but I figure no one in the custom should notice or care (thanks to the EU that kind of private imports is now legal). It was a dark time of my life with a lot of stress and anxiety, and I did not got any help, it was very difficult to get a doctors appointment in the first place. There's a saying "You have to be healthy to be sick", meaning to get the right help from a big, bureaucratic hospital you have to be healthy enough to fight for the care you need. So the illegal imports could be seen as a "cry for help". Using an illegal method to order spirits while suffering from severe anxiety, if I put it that way, it really doesn't sound good, but I don’t think one should read too much into it.

The book also inspired me to write long entries about food, that's frustrating since I find it so difficult and challenging to write long entries. Yep, I'm writing an entry there I partly complain about writer’s block, that’s slightly ironic, but it has past. Maybe that's food I should write about, no need for days of research as with history, no need to learn complicated terms, like there is in philosophy, no controversy like there is in politics. Wait! Food is politics. For starting food safety is policy. Grescoe’s book certainly makes you ask questions like: why are several traditional craft manufacturing perfected through centuries, like making cheese from unpatorized milk from grass feed cows, often forbidden, then it in some countries are legal to feed dead cows to pigs? In EU-countries the last thing isn’t legal anymore, on the whole he real seems to like European food safety laws more then the American.

Another reason it’s political is that farmers are subsidized, that’s something the European Union is infamous for, but the US makes that too. I have misunderstood something, or is it that U.S. embraces capitalism, at the same time the corn farmers are heavily subsidized, to dump huge quantities of heavily subsidized corn, actually sold below the cost of production, over the world, that’s not laissez-faire capitalism. In case you think I have whined too much about the U.S., I can write down a far-fetched reasoning, that balance that. The second chapter in The devil's picnic is about Singapore. A city state he describe as a nightmare of social engineering and bans, where every nail that sticks out is hammered down . The result is that everyone who is somewhat rebellious and creative either is uncomfortable in Singapore or emigrates, preferably in Australia or the United States. And as long you’re able to attract the creative and rebellious people in the world, you will live in a fucking ass kicking country, (no matter what one thinks about the American diet). It is my theory.

Edit: I failed to point out that the most important reason food is politic is the question how we are going to feed the word, and with which methods. But this entry was supposed to be kind of "lightweight".

“… the Nordic pastime of visiting neighboring countries to stock up on cheaper booze. To avoid paying the equivalent of $40 for a fifth of vodka, Norwegians drive to Sweden, where the same amount cost $28. the Swedes take ferries to Denmark, where it cost $14; and the Danes cross the border to northern Germany, where the same bottle can cost as little as $7.”

From The devils picnic : Travels through the underworld of food and drink by Taras Grescoe. It’s nice to see a foreign really understand our culture.

Can I just have one passion in me? I am beginning to feel, sometimes I think so. Moisture-damaged books. Yesterday I was lucky or what it's called when a positive feeling is strong. So some may not be counting on the floor in my untidy home. Ion. Emo. Winnie the Pooh in Latin. Dictionary of the Serbo-Croatian language. Textbook in a language that does not exist.

That was translated from this morning stream of consciousness writing thing - henceforward called SCWT -, so it's not like I'm trying to impress you with my innovative, and not at all kitsch or doggerel, prose-poem. The last line “Textbook in a language that does not exist” could be seen as a reference to Shmuel Yosef Agnon's novella Iddo and Eynam, now I’m trying to impress you with my literature knowledge.

PhD Musil : or how to be an important person. Somewhere online I happened to read that PhDs on average have an IQ of 125. You don’t need to have a high IQ to know that you shouldn’t believe everything online, if the internet is a library it’s a library with post it notes instead of books and a majority of the post it notes are written by people who have no idea about the subject they write about. That said for me it’s easy to both assume it’s true and to assume it means that anyone with a IQ under 125 can’t be a good PhD, that IQ somehow determent your career. I grow up in a university town, grow up in a child friendly neighbourhood close the university, meaning PhD with kid lived there some of their kids were my friends. To me PhDs were just ordinary grown ups, nothing strange, now I see them as extraordinary intelligent persons who works 12 hour a day.

The part of the above that ‘s most like isn’t true, is that IQ determent your career. That’s what said in the first hundred pages of The man without qualities by Robert Musil. Ulrich, the man without qualities himself, is highly intelligent but it doesn’t help in his attempt to become an important person. In a letter his father writes that Ulrich always run into a task that's appeals to him, but stop after a few steps forget it and find something else. That’s what I have been doing all my grown up life. As an example, that’s why my house plants dies, I got interested in plants got house plants then I run away to the next project and forgot them. So I thought, cool I'm like the guy from a epoch-making novel, that's special or not there most be million who have thought the same thought. Musil himself was a man with quality, he was a philosopher, but gave it up and wrote this novel instead. He was a successful philosopher, he wasn't like for example Claude Simon who started to write after he had failed to become a painter, no Musil was successful in his first profession. What IQ do you need for such a life?

Amateurish writing. I have found that if I do that "stream of consciousness writing" thing every morning (see here), the text can be described as a solution containing a few drops of all the thoughts I thought the day before. And since my life consists of work, books and the internet, most of my thoughts are inspired by these three things. This is one of these sentences from one of these texts, containing one of theses drops (translated and carefully edited): Invigilator to get interpreters of memory, since language is always interpreted, others have said so. Interpretation when a word means a larger size for me than for you. Probably that's just stupid, but parts of me want's to translate everything I write in the morning and post it here.

Ron Paul for president. Sometimes I think that the internet has polarized the political landscape. For one thing it gives everyone the opportunity to look for media that bespeaks them, instated of everyone watching the same news we now have right wing people reading right wing blogg and other right wing online media, similar left wing people follows left wing bloggs and other online media. And we end up with population that's totally split in world view and opinions. So what I'm I? The smart guy who have seen through it all? No I can't be political apathetic. In my early teens I was a socialist/communist, then I was twenty I was a classical liberal, dreaming about a night watchman state. Such a cliché, going from one extreme to the other. Now? Well, I have been voting for parties in the centre of the political scale, that’s doesn’t say much, at least in Sweden almost all mainstream parties could be described as centre party.