Random babblings from an underproductive mind.

Blogging from the air! Did I do this before? Lucy and I are on our wasy to England, for a gathering of my clan. My dad will be seventy years old next month, we think that's worthy of festivities. And then we'll head to Lucy's part of the world. Yaaaaaay!!

Always a title guaranteed to attract attention.

Lucy and I have fallen into the habit of visiting Svanhills bakery on Saturday afternoons, to nibble at their cakes. Originally, we went there to nibble at their Weiner Semlar, but sadly these are a seasonal item, and this is not the season, so we have been forced to expand our horizons. This has, thus far, not been a painful experience.

Today, we hit upon the idea of blogging about our experiences, so that other people might know of them. Unfortunately, we hit upon this idea after we had devoured our chocolate cake, so here is an artist's impression of said cake;



Unfortunately, this artist was me. However! Lucy deigned to grace us with a picture of last week's cake, which was a very nice choux pastry, with vanilla cream and raspberry icing.



This was much nicer. As is the picture.

The chocolate cake was nice, though a bit heavy, and with a liquorish taste, from arrack. Last weeks choux was... yummmmmm.

From Butinox

Three types of trifle, plum pudding, ma and pa and my aunty Jo. Life is good. It'd better if Lucy and my brothers and their significant others and my nieces were here, but, hey, one has to save something for the new year.

I love you, Lucy Tripp.

Pretty great!
On the front door.

In the freezer.

In the laptop.

On the kitchen surface.

On my pillow.

In the soap holder.

On the 'phone.

In the cooker!

MINE!!

From Butinox

I'm curious as too how non-Swedish speakers would interpret the dog icon? This is from a Göteborg tram.

*sigh*
So, first I went to England.

We did fun stuff.

And then my wonderful girlfriend beat the fiendish Olympic plot to stop me getting to Ireland by driving cross country, and getting me to the airport half an hour before my flight took off. I can't believe that they let me on. But they did. Good old British Airways. Lucy was singing her frustrations as we went... she was, as always, wonderful.
That's not Dublin, that's Bray. So's that. And that. That's Dublin. And that. The end.

I heard a radio programme partly about parkour for the over forties, Kropp och Själ from 19th June, 2012, on P1. Parkour is the activity of using the city landscape as a gymnastic training ground, running up buildings, jumping between bits of street furniture; as seen at the start of the latest film of "Casino Royale". It didn't quite sound like these quadragenarians and older were running across building scaffolding, cranes and such, but still; active, and quite daring.

All but one of the group were women.

Swedish women are very cool. I don't mean in any way that Lucy needs to be jealous of, but they are out there, and doing things, as well as knitting in their spare time, picking up snakes who are stupidly lying on the path and placing them in the forest. It's admirable.

Although last year's fad for group pole dancing in public parks, as exercise, was a little weird, but hey. I'm Irish. I'm the one with the problem.

Freedom.

It's an absurd concept, in a way. I remember an article in the Guardian a few years back about slaves in India having their freedom bought for them. They celebrated their new found freedom, and went back to the same job, with the same conditions, because that was the life they had.

But they have the freedom to try something else now, if they can find it.

We are all of us bound, by work, by family, by debts, by loyalty, by inertia, by preconceptions, race, gender, and not least of all, by laws.

Freedom is a place in the mind. But it is important place.

These are my thoughts as I sit here at Drottningtorget in the centre of Göteborg, not looking forward to getting up at at 4.40 A.M.

I chose this. And it could be a damn sight worse.

Ah, me, how life changes.



I now sit one bench closer to the door than I used to.

Where'd every-one go?

You were warned.

I don't generally read tie-in novels. Stories tend to work best in their original medium, I.M.O. But I saw an ad on Amazon for a Star Trek novel on Amazon lately that caught my eye, "Watching the clock", by Christopher L. Bennett.

It caught my eye because it was about the Department of Temporal Investigations, an institute which featured once in the series, during the Tribbles episode of Deep Space Nine. The episode features a pair of Men In Black types, who have a few lines each, and that's it.

The reviews on Amazon were generally positive, so I decided to give it a swing.

I turns out that "Watching the clock" is a very ambitious project; less one story than a series of vignettes, most of them inspired by events in the television seriess, explaining the development of the characters... and also, attempting to place the various episodes featuring time travel with-in a coherent system for time travel, inspired largely by a current understanding of the laws of physics.

This is ambitious, because the time travel in Star Trek has been hither-to driven by story logic. And it's very Star trek, because, though the seriess have been guilty of random technobabble, and have their own, fictional laws of physics, they have also produced some excellent stories based on real, hard science. This book and it's sequel, "Forgotten History", make a fair stab at reconcilling the two.

If anything, "Forgotten History" is more ambitious. "Watching the clock" deals mostly with the modern Star Treks, but "Forgotten History" attempts to reconcile not merely the original series, but the much overlooked animated series.

The prose can be a little dry at times, but i like these books. Not only has the author set himself the task of creating a Unified Theory of Star Trek Time Physics, but he also makes a lot of observations about illogical little happenings in the stories, the things that always made me chuckle when I was watching the episodes; and, like me, he likes to come up with explanations to render these occurrences consistent, or give them a logic.

I have read further in his Star Trek output, reading his epic account of the life of Picard between the destruction of the Stargazer and his assumption of the command of the Enterprise, in "The Buried Age"", which features both believable science and an attempt to explain why Picard is as he is, and a love letter he wrote to "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" called "Ex Machina", in which the mystery is partly solved by linguistics and archeology, and still manages to be a romp.

Overall, if you are a fan of Star Trek, and are deeply, deeply nerdy, these books have a surprising amount to offer.

Västtrafik

From Assorted

To translate; This is the 142, the timetable from Bäckebolsmotet to Gerrebacka. (Here in Göteborg, every stop has it's own, individual timetable. I can't believe that I take that for granted now).

So, it's a bus from Bäckebolsmotet 'till Gerrebacka. Right?

Except for the times that are marked with a B. B = drives only to Klareberg and not via Gerrebacka.

Right.

Except, all of the times are marked with a B.

So this is the bus from Bäckebolsmotet to Gerrebacka... except that it never goes to Gerrebacka.

In ter est ing.

I love the Guardian. It's owned by a trust, and consequently doesn't have an agenda based on commercial relationships, or appealing to a certain market segment, unlike so many news outlets.

They reported an especially cruel practice in this article about California's solitary confinement habits.

From 6 Jun 2012

8 x 10 inches. Cruel indeed.

It's no laughing matter, really. This is torture. Not even a window. No matter what they've done, people should still be treated like people, in my opinion.

Get a life. There's nothing clever about what you are doing.

From Flight and tram stop shots.

I flew over to England and back last week, to see Lucy and most of my family.

I flew with Norwegian, an airline that for some reason has the same colours as Opera. They are marketed as a budget airline, but I found them a pretty good flying experience, though not so very budget. As long as you can cope with automated check-in, I'd recommend them. They have free onboard wi fi, low baggage charges, and a helpline that is actually helpful, and polite. And no, they aren't paying me.

They are actually an interesting story. They originally operated as a subcontractor for another airline, and when that airline was bought out, their business disappeared. The solicitor in charge decided to try a different approach, and so far it seems to be working. He's Bjørn Kjos, the second man here, and a pilot himself, as well as a former district court judge. Impressive.

The details online are often contradictory, so I've been conservative here.

Sometimes, one has probably hare-brained ideas that one lacks an effective forum for. If one happens to be me, they end up here. I saw a documentary on T.V. a few years ago called "Änglar med skit på vingarna." ("Angels with shit on their wings"; it's in Norwegian).



It is about how eagles are killed by wind turbines along the Norwegian coast; they can't see them.



And I wondered why they don't surround them with a thin wire mesh. Not enough to block the wind, enough to block the birds.



And I have read and listened to a lot of criticism about hydroelectric power.



They wipe of fish; on one major river in Sweden, less than 0.1% of some species survive the journey through the four power stations along it's course.



Plus, rotting vegetation that is a result of flooding caused by the dams can create serious levels of carbon emissions, depending on location; in Brazil, it can take decades for the dams to create enough power to make up for the damage they cause.



Plus, they are made less effective by rivers freezing in the Winter, when power is needed the most.



And I though, why not build smaller turbines, micro-turbines, again with meshing, along the bed of the river? They'd be relatively difficult to maintain, what with silting, but, no dead fish, year round power, no need for dams.



As I said, probably hair-brained. But i don't know who to send them to in order to be ridiculed publicly. So you get to read them. Lucky you!

From Sunsets, etc.

From Sunsets, etc.

From Lucy

I leave it to you to work which is my favourite bit.