Adios amigos

Amigos adios!

This blog passed away some time ago, may it rest in peace.

In the future I might be found at my Swedish blog (or you can check out my last.fm page if you're into that sort of thing).

Otherwise irl (as in off the net) also works.

MIT weblog survey

Badly Drawn Boy

I think I first heard Damon Gough (aka Badly Drawn Boy) some years ago when one of his songs, The Shining, was featured on Ministry of Sounds Chillout Session album from 2001 (or it could have been the 2002 edition of the same album). I instatly fell in love with The Shining but it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago I actually bought the album the song was taken from, The Hour of Bewilderbeast. The album turned out to be quite good and a last week I also bought the new album, One Plus One Is One, which also turned out to be good.

So how can the music of Badly Drawn Boy be described? I'd call it slacker pop maybe. It feels very laid back and lowkey, with very strong and beautiful melodies set in a quite nice (and in part odd) orchestration with choirs, cello, flutes, french horns etcetera.


iTunes Music Store links:
The Hour of Bewilderbeast
One Plus One Is One

Update + movies

The last couple of months I haven't had much time to spend on blogging here, but maybe that'll change now that the spring term is over. Anyway, there's a lot of things I could write about, but all I'll do right now is to write some line on movies I've seen the last couple of months.

New nice Goldberg

Went to the music store today in search of a couple of recordings of one of my favourite pieces of music, Bachs Goldberg Variations (BWV 988). I didn't find what I was looking for, but by coincidence another recording of the same piece played when I entered the store, and after having listen to it I purchased a copy. The recording was Bach's Goldberg Variations with Jacques Loussier Trio, a jazzed up version for piano, drums and double bass. Quite interesting :-)

Socializing with iTunes?

Over at Alt Text I read about a pretty cool idea: using iTunes as a way of meeting people by using your e-mail address as share name when using your computer in publicly accessible places such as hotspots and encourage people connecting to your shared music to get in touch.
Unfortunately I don't think it would too well back here in Stockholm due to the lack of public (free) hotspots, but it's still a cool idea.

John Legend

I bought John Legends album Get Lifted a couple of days ago. Get Lifted is one of the best albums I've come across in several years. Legends mix of r'n'b, soul and gospel is just wonderful!
Check out www.johnlegend.net now!

Numb3rs

I spent a good deal of the weekend watching a new show called Numb3rs. Numb3rs is FBI mixed up with maths. The show centers around the Eppes brothers Don, a FBI agent, and Charlie, a math professor. Using science in copshows isn't new, CSI for example has done it a long time, but using mathematics felt quite novel.
Being a science geek I enjoyed the show quite much.
I also saw the pilot for the show Medical Investigation which resembled CSI a lot. MI follows a team from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) working to find the cause of outbreaks of infectious diseases and similar tasks. The show didn't quite catch my interest, maybe I'll watch one more episode...

Strange tunes coming from the east

Finnish group Apocalyptica has released a new album, and I just heard a single from it, Bittersweet, that features Ville Valo from H.I.M & Lauri Ylonen from The Rasmus. I really liked Bittersweet and Apocalyptica once again proves that you can make pretty cool music mainly using cellos :-)

Lost again

After having watched a couple of episodes of Lost something strange happened and I lost track of time and before I realized I had seen the first 14 episodes...don't really know what happened. I guess I thought the show was pretty cool :-)

Lost

Yesterday I saw the first episode of ABC:s primetime show Lost which TV4 have started airing in Sweden. The show was pretty cool, and as it has received pretty good reviews I think I'm going to follow it, at least for a while. I plan to see episodes two through four tonight and then I'll decide.

All is forgiven

As far as I care commercial tv in Sweden pretty much suck, as do most of what's aired in the puvlic service channels as well, but I have to give credit to Ztv for airing The Simpsons and Family Guy regularly. The Simpsons episode aired tonight just cracked my up, it was a parody/homage to Mary Poppins and was absolutely hilarious! The "Reservoir Cats" Tarantino-does-childrens-tv was just awesome as well as the songs all done in a cheerful Poppins style. The episode was called Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious and was from the eight season that first aired early 1997.

As long as the commercial channels keep airing Simpsons and a couple of other shows I'll forgive all the stupid reality shows et cetera...

The Gunnar Myrdal Lecture

Went to this years lecture in the lecture series The Gunnar Myrdal Lectures in the Social Sciences at Stockholm University. The lecture was given by world famous economist professor Tony Atkinson of Oxford and the topic was The Political element in Public Economics: The case of the Top Tax Rate. Although (public) economics can certainly be a rather dry subject the lecturer managed to keep it interesting, especially the talk on laborers not acting in a utility-maximizing manner. Interesting.
I found it quite sad though that the attendance was as low as it turned out to be, perhaps 30 people attended the lecture, and I would guess that the vast majority were faculty. Since the university has about 35 000 students all in all and the Department of Economics has about 1 000, you would certainly think that a lecture given by a highly regarded academic would attract more people...

My poor hand...

At last I got rid of the cast I've been wearing the last three months and it feels so good! The bad news I got from the orthopedic doctor I saw was that the damage I sustained to my right little finger in my accident apparently caused a boutonniere deformity, which is a damage resulting in a permanent crooked finger if left untreated, as mine were...
The positive thing about it is that it looks much worse than it really is, I can still use my finger pretty well :-)

New course tomorrow

Tomorrow marks the start of the spring semester. I'll study Political Science B, Advanced Course at The Swedish National Defence College in Stockholm. I'm really looking forward to it, and it feels great to be done with the horrible course in Administrative Law - I had the final exams this morning...

An update: apparently the course I'm taking is referred to as International Cooperation and Crisis Management, Adv. Course B.

Apple's showing off again...

The new Mac mini, what can you say? A stroke of genius perhaps.
I want one, I need one, and for less than 4000 SEK excl. vat I'll probably be getting one ;-)

The iPod shuffle looked pretty cool too, and should be a serious challenge to the other flash-based mp3-players, like Jens of Sweden.

If everything works out I'll get a friend to buy me an iPod when she's over in the Big Apple in March, at the current dollar exchange rate it's a steal, and it's worth waiting a couple of months to save a grand, at least if you're on a student budget...

Nice new software

Every now and then you happen to stumble upon a piece of software that fills a void you didn't know existed. TVTAD turned out to be just that. In short it's a rss-reader that's built only for one purpose, monitoring the rss-feed of bittorrent files from #TvTorrents @ EFNet and automatically downloading them using the preselected bittorrent client.
So now I don't have to monitor any websites for new torrents of my favorite US shows I'm following, TVTAD gets them for me, which means no more chasing after 24, Joey and The West Wing!

Great :-)

Insomnia please release me...

Having had trouble sleeping for a while I went to bed early tonight, as I'm due in Uppsala at eight tomorrow (or rather today), but after trying -and failing- to fall asleep I decided to postpone sleeping until afternoon, and stayed up instead.

So how did I spend all my extra time? Mostly watching movie trailers (from Apples site). So how is the upcoming movie year looking? Pretty decent I think. There was a Nicholas Cage movie The Weather Man that looked quite good, Hostage with Bruce Willis looks alright. The adaptation of Frank Millers classic comic Sin City looks awesome, as does The Interpreter with Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn, apparently it's the first movie that has filmed inside the UN building in New York.
The remake of The Pink Panther with Steve Martin should be a fun movie, although I'm not really sure that a remake was all that necessary to do - I think Peter Sellers still goes strong...
The sequel to The Ring, Ring 2 looked pretty scary and The Final Cut with Robin Williams looked exciting.
Ridley Scotts new epic Kingdom of Heaven, on the crusades seemed impressive.
There were some movies I'll probably skip, for instance Bride and Prejudice (didn't evenlook at the trailer), XXX: The State of the Union, Son of the Mask (even though I did like the mask, I don't enjoy bouncing crazy babies that much).
James Camerons underwater documentary Aliens of the Deep looked interesting too, Cameron was guest editor of the December issue of Wired, that had exploration as it's theme and was really interesting.

Now I'm off to Uppsala!

Jack's back

And so Jack Bauer is back in the fourth season of Fox TVs 24. This season kickstarted with a double episode a couple of nights ago, and it's looking good so far :-)
That, and the fact that sixth season of The West Wing is looking promising and the third season of Six Feet Under just started airing, means that there's quite many reasons to turn on the old telly again :-)

More movies

Updated the movie-section to cover what I've seen lately.

Respekt åt Gergils

Läste klart Christian Gergils bok Respekt!.

Boken var klart läsvärd och Gergils har viktiga insikter att dela med sig av. Att använda erfarenheterna från Farmen Skärgården, som jag aldrig sett, för att beskriva mobbning och brister i samhället i stort fungerar väldigt bra. Jag tror att han genom att visa att man kan vara en vinnare genom ärlighet och ansvarstagande kan utgöra en inspiration för många.
Personligen hoppas jag att det här ger författaren möjlighet att göra sig hörd i samhällsdebatten igen, jag har alltid haft en positiv känsla för honom och liberala röster behövs kanske mer än på en lång lång tid.

Lättnad

Jag pratade precis med min vän som är i Thailand, och lättnaden över att prata med honom och höra att han och hans flickvän mår bra är svår att klä i ord. Vi hade tur, men många hade det inte, tankarna finns hos dem också.

Ge stöd, alla bidrag spelar roll!

Var solidarisk

På andra sidan jorden behövs hjälp, några som kan förmedla den är:

Diakonia pg 903304-4
www.diakonia.se

Frälsningsarmén pg 900480-5
www.fralsningsarmen.se

Läkare utan gränser pg 900603-2
www.lakareutangranser.se

Pingstmissionen pg 900050-6
www.pmu.se

Radiohjälpen pg 901950-6
www.svt.se/radiohjalpen

Rädda Barnen pg 902003-3
www.rb.se

Röda Korset pg 900800-4
www.rodakorset.se