Post 93

93rd post! Ineluki ai, io Pan, eh? We played for a bit with my artsy toys this weekend. Much better than Lego!

Recent stuff I like and dislike:

Dislike: True Blood

I watched the first two episodes and thought that "hey, this could actually become interesting!" Having reached episode six, I am already a bit tired of the series. The characters are simply not plausible enough, or perhaps the divide between their cultural setting and mine makes me see them that way. I dunno. They just act rather flat and stupid, being nothing but stereotypes, and nobody really seems to care for more than five minutes after people die. Also, how the vampires not "mainstreaming" seem to be acting in general would lead to the human populace trying to make them extinct, not giving them equal rights. I might watch a few more episodes and see if it gets better, but I think I will spend my precious time elsewhere (Dexter, reruns of Black Books).


Like: After the Quake

I spent the Sunday afternoon on a bench down by Strandvägen watching people go by and reading Murakami's short story collection After the Quake. Like mostly everything else Murakami, it is awesome. Like his other short stories, these are sad and often unsettling in a way that his novels are not. They give me the same sort of feeling that I sometimes have when I wake up in the morning after having a very strange dream.

Right now, I am listening to Tony Joe White on Spotify, which is actually great, something I seldom say about new software, being old and conservative. The creators seem to have taken their cues from Apple, and it "Just Works". Like Apple products, Spotify has very little added functionality in the way of playlists/recommendations/etc, though, but as long as you only want to hear various songs you like, it is the bee's proverbial knees. Combined with Airfoil, it becomes Party Grand Central at home.


New jacket (Zara, actually), by the way, it goes rather well with one of the shirts I designed recently. I haggled the price down to €30 due to some rather hard to spot defects in the weave on one arm.

And I really, really want the new MacBook Air. Now if they could only make the battery easily replacable. Hell, the battery on my MacBook Pro died in ten months and I have been a very light user of it. I would want the iPhone if it was not so bloody limited. I pine for it, but I fear I will not buy it as long as they put strange, idiotic software limits on it (no MMS, no tethering, no copy/paste, only certain mobile operators) and strange, idiotic hardware limits (arse camera, non-replacable battery). Sigh.

You Will Find Me if You Want Me in the Harbour

I went to the finance job fair at the Stockholm School of Economics last week, just to see old friends and have a look at the banks in general. It was sort of gloomy. A large tent thingy, freezingly cold inside with bad lighting and what simply must have been much fewer exhibitors than what was originally planned. In the current gloom, the Swedish stock market just having taken another plunge, bringing the OMX down by 40 % or so this year, it was all like a portent of things to come.

We live in interesting times, this week beginning on a brighter note with upwards movements as big as last week’s fall, and I guess the bankers were feeling a little bit better about themselves again. Graduating with a major in finance in a few weeks does not currently feel so good, given last night’s volatility putting onion on the salmon, as we say in Sweden.

I took a Sunday walk with Jonny. Nominally to find mushrooms, but as usual, our search yielded nothing edible. We did get to see a castle with adjacent sheep as well as some funny villas, and I bought a nice little bonsai tree I had to lug through the forest for a bit. All in all, quite a nice day.


And I spent some time in the harbour. I like harbours and freight containers and all that stuff.

Golden Bird to Flesh-Textured Marble

I found this table-console-thingy at the local Christian charity store. I would have bought it, had it not cost bloody € 500! They also sell dirty, worn Hugo Boss power suits from the 1980s for €80 or so, which is almost as bad. Sometimes I find worthwile stuff, though, like my new, spiffy pipe stand and my 1930s full-body mirror.

I am officially the worst floor-oiler ever. My previously nice but dry floor is now glossy, spotty and strange. I hope I can avoid re-polishing it, at least. Current research: Scotch Brite. Hard work, but yields results, sort of.

Hopefully, I will hear some very good news in a week or two. For me, not for you.

Armania

The cat did not like her shower, but her paws smelled of the wee, so it was inevitable.

I am reading Haruki Murakami's latest (translated, at least) novel, After Dark, and as usual I find his popular culture references rather boring. That is, however, what is expected. Fantastic novels with lots of jazz and Beatles which mostly feels out of place - since they take place in Japan and nobody listens to Japanese music. I could be wrong, but Japanese people might do that some of the time. Anyway, Murakami's world is usually a bit of a wonderland, so I can forgive him for that.

What I have a hard time forgiving him, or for that matter lots of other authors, for is the usage of brand names when symbolizing exclusivity or expensiveness. From Bret Easton Ellis to Charles Stross to Murakami, everybody writes "Armani" when describing "expensive", because that is just such a convenient, well-known brand. However, having a pair of "Armani glasses" (as in After Dark) does not mean a person is rich or even middle class, damn it. Armani (not counting the Borgonuovo 21 or Classico stuff which I recall is more expensive) is not a particularly expensive label. Even though it is in many cases an order of magnitude more pricey than really cheap clothing, it is an order of magnitude less expensive than some other stuff many people would recognize and I guess two orders of magnitude less than some other stuff I would never recognize. Point being, could people please be a little more varied and not use the same brand over and over again. I would be happy even if they mixed it up with a bit of Prada, Cartier and Bulgari, though I guess these do not carry the same "booooooring!" connotations.

Oh, the book is great, by the way. Hitherto.

Done

Moving: done.


After moving, I took a walk past the royal castle. Apparently, somebody had been fishing junk out of the water.


We also went mushroom hunting in the countryside. Nothing found, but it was a very nice walk.

The cat with many names, the current one being Bubblan ("the bubble"), loves the new apartment, and so do I. It is very bright, despite it being the first of October, and with no curtains up yet, the sunlight awakes me in the morning. It rocks. Sure, it takes a bit longer to get to work in the morning, but that is nothing compared to the joy of living closer to... perhaps not nature, but at least a few trees.

I am sort of surprised by the financial blaha in the world. Not so much by the behaviour of individuals as by their total inability to work together to further their own ends in the long run.

As an investment banker friend of mine said; "Everybody was playing chicken, and nobody steered out of the way before it was too late."

It is no wonder that things happened. Sooner or later, the idiot lending to people who could not pay had to end. Using an interest rate of one per cent when calculating would inevitably lead to disaster in a world where it can rise to ten times that or more, as it has done before. But the slick guys giving out credit cared only about their own short term winnings. Which is fine. That is what usually motivates people to work. What is not fine is that the management of the institutions did not have the appropriate checks in place, incentive programs if you will, to make their employees act in a "responsible" way. That is, create value for the shareholders. Apparently, the shareholders had not created the right kind of incentives for management either. And so it goes, mostly everybody loses and a small number of people have their pockets full of money, but not nearly as much as this mess has cost. Ergo, a big fucking net loss to society which makes a great case for those craving greater regulation of financial markets. Regulation for regulation's sake sucks, but I really wonder how to combat this sort of events in a completely "free" market.

Now to go pick up the engagement rings, though my lady is currently in a foreign land, in a foreign time.