My Blog

The things one can do with ballons …

… and cans.

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever,
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle;–
Why not I with thine?

See! the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower would be forgiven,
If it disdained it’s brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;–
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

(Percy Bysshe Shelley)

Peter Wennblad, berömd från Expressens kulturavdelning, har skrivt en mycket intressant artikel om svart städhjälp i denna månadens Neo-magasin. Som tur är, finns den nu online på nätet. Ni kan läsa den här.

London and Dublin celebrated Samuel Beckett’s centenary this weekend. A little excerpt of “Waiting for Godot“, one of the most influential plays of the 20th century. It is the play where, according to Vivian Mercier, “Nothing happens, twice”.

Vladimir: Don’t go yet.
Pozzo: I’m going.
Vladimir: What do you do when you fall far from help?
Pozzo: We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!
Vladimir: Before you go tell him to sing.
Pozzo: Who?
Vladimir: Lucky.
Pozzo: To sing?
Vladimir: Yes. Or to think. Or to recite.
Pozzo: But he is dumb.
Vladimir: Dumb!
Pozzo: Dumb. He can’t even groan.
Vladimir: Dumb! Since when?
Pozzo: Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

And the last lines of each act:

Vladimir: Well? Shall we go?
Estragon: Yes, let’s go.
[they do not move] [curtains down]

The Polish writer of Science Fiction Stanislaw Lem died this Monday in south of Poland, due to heart problems. He was 84 years old.

Stanislaw Lem was the author of “Solaris”, the book from which Andrei Tarkovsky based his movie “Solaris” (“Solyaris” is the original title) in 1972, one of my favorite pieces of timeless cinema. I remember seeing the movie for the first time when I was on my very early teens, casually stopping by the 2nd channel of Portuguese public TV of the time, in front of an old Grundig black&white TV. I could only understand the subtitles (after all the movie is in Russian). The plot was also strange and with plenty of slow moments, to say the least. But I still couldn’t let go and was never able to explain why. The idea of a planet made up of a massive ocean, likened to a conscious brain, was hypnotic. Many years later I bought the book and the questions got clearer. What is human life? Will we ever be able to recognize other kinds of life? Memories, by defining our lives, can they have a life of their own? And what about conscience?

One of Lem’s favorite themes was the impossibility of communication between human and alien civilizations (we seem to find it impossible to communicate between human civilizations too, so maybe there’s our culprit). But in some of his work he also spoke of the problems of human existence in a world where technology makes human impulses obsolete or even dangerous. This is a problem of our day and age set to worsen with time.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(Robert Frost)

Researchers at a company called Posit Science created a software tool that allows a person to measure brain speed with nothing but the click of a mouse. According to this article, it works by measuring how fast and accurately the test-taker can detect different sounds. After the 10 minute online test, results are shown in milliseconds.

This is what I call progress. The alternative to this test is probably brain imaging technology with electrodes hanging from our foreheads or even worse, being inside a MRI machine. Not pretty.

A team from British network Sky One created and commissioned a live sequence of the Simpsons intro. If you ever wanted to know how Homer Simpson would look like in human form then the answer is just one click away.

Here’s a link to a blog full of optical illusions. It will make your eyes water and your brain go pop.

There’s a very informative article at The Local (written and very well by Melissa de Sieni I must add) detailing reforms to be made on the SFI (Svenska för Invandrare) program in Sweden.

SFI is a free Swedish language course that it is offered as a “welcome” gift to immigrants. Beware Swedes bearing gifts, though, because its merits are quite contentious, as the views presented in the article show.

My own view is that, however noble the intentions, the program is abused by many people that can’t/won’t work to claim assorted subsidies and stay on welfare. The Swedish state is also to blame as it uses SFI (and plenty of other courses it has to be said) as a silver bullet to artificially decrease the unemployment rate figures. Because if anyone believes the unemployment rate to be 6.3% (figures from ‘05) then I have a well preserved bridge over the Göta canal to sell.

Language courses do seem to be the perfect place to court potential husbands, though. Several years ago I took an amount of hours of Swedish and in day one, just after sitting down on a table full of young women of different continents, I was approached with a question. The first thing I was asked was not my name. It was also not where I was from. The pressing question they had was if I was married. I remember trying to breathe calmly and thinking to myself to prepare for a bumpy road ahead. Bummer.