Money, Power, and Women

I’ve read several articles on the phenomenon that power or money, or both, usually attracts beautiful women. Very rarely do you see a successful man being surrounded by a troll for a wife. Now I can’t speak for whether or not a powerful homosexual male would be surrounded by an attractive male, because I’ve never really thought about it. Perhaps my friend Paulo can elaborate if this phenomenon correlates to the gay community as well.

Anyhow, some social scientists say it is evolutionary that women are attracted to males that have power, which usually means that they have money as well, because it demonstrates that they can afford resources to provide for the woman and her offspring. That is a very animal way of looking at things, but in a way I can understand that. If a woman desires to have children, she wants them to have the best access to resources available, and a strong, powerful and successful male will be able to give her that.

If you look at some powerful politicians, how many sex scandals are they not involved in, usually involving beautiful young women? Look at the Prime Minister of Italy, or Eliot Spitzer, et cetera. I think power can also make you attractive. If you take Prince William and Prince Harry, honestly, and just take away the fact that they are royalty, and just have them be regular Joes, they are really not that attractive. At least in my opinion, but what do I know? But add the royalty, the money, the fame, and they could probably have any women in the world that they so desired. Of course I’m being simplistic in my reasoning, but you get the gist of what I’m saying.

For added emphasis, take a look at the First Ladies of Spain and France, aren’t they lovely?

Whatever. Let’s have a fucking lunch meeting.

At 12 ‘o clock I was literally on my way out of the building when Jonas informed me that we’re supposed to be having a lunch meeting. Oh great. My favorite kind of meeting. The Big Boss (the one that everybody hates) had come down all the way from Stockholm and wanted to discuss last week’s interviews with the school inspection people. Okay. Sure. Fine. I guess we absolutely have to do this right fucking now.

I was having such a great day at work too. Some of my colleagues and students and myself had spent the morning painting one of the school walls with different motifs and quotations, and having a really good time doing it. This was one of the student counsel’s projects. They wanted to decorate the school and got permission to paint a few walls. We worked on it until lunch time and then I got ready to leave since I had worked my scheduled hours for the day.

I was pretty eager to get the hell out of there too, since it was past my normal lunch time of 11:30 and I didn’t have time to eat any breakfast this morning. When this happens it’s usually not a big problem because I can grab a piece of fruit or something from the conference room and then have an early lunch around 11 or 11:30. Not today, however.

With my stomach as hollow as the Grand Canyon, I sat down and proceeded to watch everyone else eat lunch for the next hour. We each had to tell the Big Boss precisely what the school inspectors had asked us and what responses we gave during our interviews. He had all the English teachers go first so I was done after about ten minutes. I then sat there for the remaining 50 minutes not able to concentrate on what anyone else way saying (in Swedish, naturally) because I felt like I was about to pass out from hunger.

Then they wanted to have an after-work session at 5 ‘o clock later on and they wanted me to go. I said that I was only scheduled to work from 8 to 12 so I was going home. Yeah, but after-work is not considered part of working hours, they said. Duh. No, I said. I’m not coming back for that. Then when they started to press me further, I informed them rather loudly and irritably, that I really needed to leave because I hadn’t eaten yet and I REALLY NEEDED to eat.

I then stormed out of the building and headed home. Of course I had just missed both of my normal short cut methods of transport (bus and ferry) so I had to take the bloody tram. It doubles the time it takes to get home. When I got to where I change trams at Brunnsparken, I bought myself two doughnuts and gobbled half of one down immediately.

When I got home I ate the rest of the doughnuts and cracked open a Bacardi Breezer, even though it was only two in the afternoon. I’m feeling okay now. Doughnuts and booze did the trick.

…fuck Time Warner Cable

Seriously. Fuck it hard with shards of glass and sand.

I don’t ask for much out of life. All that I really need is a little financial security, a happy and healthy toddler, a home with Tiffany lighting and an internet connection that doesn’t suck greasy, hairy ass.

I’m woefully addicted to connectivity. I go through withdrawal if we lose power and my iPhone battery runs out of juice. I shake. It’s worse than going without a cigarette, in certain ways. That said it’s not just a consistent internet connection to me. It’s my livelihood since I work out of my home.

Years ago, I was able to work off-line. Since I transitioned to my new position last year, I no longer have the luxury of keeping things on my own desktop as I work with patient data which must be double-sooper-seekrit encrypted in llama and wingdings. Trying to download and upload any document is a complete pain in the ass on a good day. When the size of the file is the cyber equivalent of the entire State of North Carolina, the task is odious. The process takes so damn long that I’m able to empty and reload the dishwasher and do laundry.

While I appreciate being able to multi-task like no other, I am far too impatient for this madness. Around middle-March, I upgraded my service to uber-maximum-light speed performance. Or so I thought. Our service may be faster but I wouldn’t know as I am now unable to maintain a connection for longer than a mouse fart.

After sitting on the phone with the diagnostic staff stationed in, oh let’s say Bangalore, they finally agreed that it’s an actual physical problem. Being the nice folks that they are, they agreed to dispatch a technician to make some repairs.

The technician showed up in a torrential downpour with a surly attitude. I suppose I’m having flashbacks from all of the acid I did not drop in college because he made us believe that the problem is in our heads. My seven years of living in this house and dealing with the same fucking problem over and over and over again did not matter. Jesus could be standing next to me, explaining the problem to the tech and I would still be wrong. Oh. And going to hell, too.

After slamming my head off the wall and hopping up and down in the foyer (not really), I finally convinced the surly tech that the problem is, indeed, with the actual cable running to the home. Yay! Unfortunately, surly tech did not bring the appropriate equipment to make such repairs. Our only recourse is to schedule another appointment.

I can certainly appreciate the fact that not everyone is a prognosticator and not everyone will bring every fucking tool in the shop to a service call. What I do not appreciate is paying for an upgrade and receiving a downgrade or a no-grade.

So, again, I will have to call Time Warner and sit on eternal rot with Bangalore to have the same surly tech dispatched to the home where I will have the same irritating conversation about what is actually wrong. Because, you see, I have an infinite amount of time to spend on this issue. I will end up dropping to my knees, with tears streaming down my face and pleading with someone who couldn’t give a flying fuck that the problem is not with the router. It’s not with the modem. It’s with that tangled up mess of a cable outside of the house. In short – it’s not me. It’s YOU! It’s you and your shitty cable that does not deliver a consistent bleep-blip-bloop signal to my damn house, Time Warner.

In the interim, I will spend, at the very least, ten minutes trying to access my WLAN to spend an additional ten minutes trying to upload a document. Then I will spend an additional ten minutes trying to explain to my boss why it takes me twenty minutes to complete the simplest of actions.

All because of an upgrade.

The Judge Killed the Bibliophile Dream

I had a dream, and so did Google. The dream was that all the libraries in the world, their archives, their shelves would be scanned by Google and uploaded to a digital world collection, available to everybody ─ for a cost of course. I’m fine with paying for such a service if it would mean access to rare collections and to books that would be hard to find and get to physically. But sadly a judge put an end to that dream. I suppose he had some good reasons for his ruling: copyright infringement, privacy concerns, etc. Still, for just a few moments I thought I could just pull up a book that I wanted online, and send it to an on-demand Espresso Book Machine and have a copy of it! Sadly that is not the case now. RIP Google book project.

Info Ovo

Back story, crack story,
Hooked on facts,
Give me info, give me stats,
Need to be in the know,
Let me see, let me show,
Who did what and where and how,
Need to know and know it now,
What’s that in the middle east?
How’s the planet, and the trees?
What’s with “B list” celebrities?
What’s new in science? Politics?
Who had flings? The latest tricks?
What’s hot on Youtube, and TV?
What does this quiz say about me?
What’s new in fashion? Latest looks?
Google all the latest books,
Take it all in, every drop,
Don’t know how to make it stop,
Soon I’m sure I will explode,
From information overload,
Need to learn to turn and shrug,
To reach down here and pull the pl…….

Being Drunk in Sweden

As a regular user of the City of Gothenburg’s signature trams, I’ve grown accustomed to seeing drunk people. Actually, drunk is really too weak an adjective to describe the condition of some of them. It needs help from a few verbs. Stumbling, slurring, slobbering, shit-faced drunk is more like it. This kind of drunken spectacle is seen regularly on the trams, but for some reason it’s less common on buses. I don’t recall ever seeing a loud, obnoxious and obviously drunk person on a bus. Apart from the so-called night bus that is, which should really be called the take-you-home-when-you’re-wasted-off-your-ass bus.

While I’m used to seeing drunks on the tram, I still find myself wondering what the hell is the deal with them. Have they no shame? Isn’t it illegal to be that drunk in public in Sweden? I know that to be drunk in public to that extent is completely illegal in the U.S.

Maybe this is why the Swedish government insists on the necessity of Systembolaget (Sweden’s infamous alcohol retail monopoly), as well as producing those anti-alcohol propaganda commercials that always air right after a commercial for some boozy product like Captain Morgan’s “Get a little Captain in you” Spiced Gold Rum (highly recommended, by the way…). The government claims that Systembolaget is essential because a number of highly biased studies have shown that it does regulate and restrict the amount of alcohol that one may purchase and consume, and thus it reduces instances of public drunkenness. Its limited hours are indeed very effective in limiting the amount of booze one may purchase. If you want to buy a bottle of wine or some regular beer after 2pm on Saturday then you are, as the saying goes, shit out of luck for the remainder of the weekend.

However, most people find various ways of working around the “system.” One can take one of the “booze cruise” ferries from Helsingborg or any other port that heads to Denmark or Germany. In fact, I’m planning on doing just that during Easter weekend. As soon as the boat exits Swedish waters, you are free to purchase cases of beer and large one-liter size bottles of liquor, both of which are unavailable at Systembolaget. I suppose the government just can’t allow the average Swedish resident to have access to that much booze. Naturally, we’d be powerless to prevent ourselves from consuming the entire liter bottle and all 24 cans of beer all at once. Because, you know, we’re stupid and the government is smart and knows what’s best for us.

And anyway, one can always go to a bar. For a country that really doesn’t want its citizens to get drunk, it sure does contain an awful lot of bars. Systembolaget closes its doors at the pitifully early hour of 6pm on Friday evening, and after that time every single bar in every single Swedish city is dispensing mass quantities of Swedish lager to just about every single Swede of legal drinking age.

Then a number of those people end up staggering onto some form of public transport to make their way home after their Friday night piss-up. And then people like me end up writing blog posts about them.

That is, if I’m not actually included in their numbers. *hic*

Swedish Police priorities

It seems that hardly a day goes by in Sweden that I don’t read about some woman being sexually assaulted, masked men with axes rob a bank, or there is a gang shooting. Growing up in Sweden I’m sure that we had crimes, but it seems to me that there are more crimes now than there used to be. Maybe that’s just me idealizing my carefree childhood, but still, times are changing. Common sense would dictate that a Rudolph Giuliani-style crime crackdown would be in order: prioritize catching the bad guys and getting them off the streets. But no, it seems Swedish cops are way too busy trying to catch speeders, do DUI enforcement, or even dancing!

Granted, all those things are important, but enforcing a winter tire law!!! WTF?

What the hell is a Winter Tire Law, you ask? Well, in Sweden between 16 April och 30 September, you are mandated to drive with summer tires, and the rest of the time, during the winter, you are supposed to drive with winter tires. Apparently this is a big thing in Sweden and the police are out in force making sure that Swedish drivers are in compliance or they will face a 500 SEK fine (approximately $80 USD dollars, 2011). When I moved to Sweden for grad school, I didn’t even know that there were separate tires for winter driving and summer driving. I had never heard of anybody in the United States changing their tires with the seasons. Well, except my old college roommate who lives in Ohio, but he’s German, so does that count? Anyhow, I’m glad that Swedish Police have their priorities, just give them some savory tarts and they will get right on it… solving trombone capers.

…instant messaging can suck it

Many, many things irritate me. One of my bigger bugbears is being interrupted at work. I realize people have questions and I realize that I’m the one with the lack of patience. I fully accept my flaws and eat the fault. I simply cannot abide by instant messaging, though.

A few months ago, our IS department decided to turn all of our laptops into mini-cyborgs with the magic of Office Communicator. It’s pretty slick program and while I’m not the biggest fan of VOIP, I do love the convenience factor. What I love most is the ability to share my screen and work collaboratively. The amount of problems solved in short amount of time is staggering. Being able to explain something to someone and have them actually get it without rolling out the white board and dry erase markers is sheer joy.

Being interrupted every five fucking minutes (via IM) by some stupid question or “ohaihowareyou” comment is enough to drive me to kill. I’m so not fucking around here, either.

As I’m happily pecking along, creating a monument to Rube Goldberg in Excel, I am confronted with the ping. The dreaded ping. The ping to end all pings. And I know that on the other side of the ping is an otherwise lovely individual deliberately interrupting my brilliance for their stupid questions. Or boredom. Or frustration.

We are not permitted to disable this feature. Don’t bother setting your status to busy or do not disturb, either. No one pays any attention to this. Particularly those who are prone to sending you an instant message about what flavor of oatmeal to have for breakfast. I don’t fucking care. Sincerely. Really. I don’t care.

I’m not the least bit concerned of the whereabouts of a meeting agenda. I don’t care that you cannot find something. I don’t care that you’re doing something tedious and need some amusement to lighten your day. I. AM. BUSY. I am doing something. I am occupied and that’s all that really matters in this world, isn’t it?

I would love to generate some sort of automatic response that reads: Unless you’re on fire, kindly fuck off and die. Alas, I cannot. I don’t want to hear feedback about my lack of interpersonal skills and that I need to be a “team-player.” No. No. Instead, I will grit my teeth, inhale deeply, slap on a fake smile and say “ohaithar! howareyoutoday?” while pointing a finger gun at my temple.

Save America’s Public Broadcasting!

Sorry, that’s just how I feel folks. I’d rather invest in public broadcasting, libraries, museums, and education than giving money to bail out banks and corporations that then give huge bonuses to the people who landed us in this mess. Hmm, would you rather give a $1 million dollars to a Goldman Sachs executive or to a program on PBS that entertains your children? Which choice gives the most “bang-for-the-bucks?” Feel free to disagree, but that’s my 2 cents.

Danes in Afghanistan

When I first read that there were Danish soldiers fighting in Afghanistan I imagined them looking like the toy soldiers at Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. At first I didn’t believe that Denmark would send soldiers to Afghanistan, partly because Afghanistan is far away from Denmark, and secondly, what does Afghanistan have to do with Denmark? I can understand the United States involvement in Afghanistan to a certain degree, with Osama bin Laden hanging out with the Taliban, the U.S. did have a hand to play at that table, but Denmark?

Maybe it’s the fact that I grew up in Skåne, Sweden, and often visited Denmark as a child, that I have some affinity for the Danish people and culture. Skåne actually used to be part of Denmark at one time, and with the Øresund Bridge now linking Denmark with Sweden, the region and people are closer than ever. It’s actually neat to see Danes speaking Danish with Swedes and Swedes speaking Swedish with Danes and both sets of people understanding each other. My appreciation for Danish people is why I am so concerned with their involvement in Afghanistan. I recognize that their membership in NATO means that they might feel an obligation to do their part for the treaty organization, but in the past such things usually meant a field hospital or a tent or two, not a contingent of combat troops fighting a grueling and exhausting ground campaign.

I first stumbled across this film when I read about it winning the grand prize at the Cannes’ International Critics Week. Just like Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s documentary Restrepo, Janus Metz’s film Armadillo will leave you breathless, bruised and battered. Armadillo “… follows a platoon of Danish soldiers on a six-month tour of Afghanistan in 2009. An intimate, visually stunning account of both the horror and growing cynicism of modern warfare, the film premiered at the top of the box office in Denmark, provoking a national debate over government policy and the rules of engagement.” I highly suggest you see the movie for yourself.