It’s All About Me

A quote from a surprised foreign friend, who visited Sweden for the first time this weekend.

As I was explaining the concept of midsummer to my South African colleagues a few days ago, I found myself staring in disbelief at a few video clips from YouTube. The clips showed hundreds of Swedish men and women jumping around a maypole, pretending to be little frogs.

Hundreds of sober and mentally sane men and women, pretending to be little frogs, making loud frog noises.

“What’s up with that”, they asked. “Why do you pretend to be little frogs”?

I have absolutely no clue why. Do we look like little frogs?

Swedish men

Little frog

(Emailed to me from a friend, who took the wrong turn with his motorcycle)

Yesterday I spent some time with Alexander, who is 3 years old. I don’t spend much time with kids normally, so I was unprepared for the raw energy he puts into whatever he does. There were no hesitation, no fear, just a frontal attack on life.

Equally impressive was Alexander’s mother. Even as Alexander smashed his nose into a heavy iron gate, and he started crying as if the world was about to end, she remained cool and made sure he got the attention he needed.

To me, this seems to be the biggest challenge of parenthood - how can you avoid worrying too much, when you know how dangerous the world is to a kid growing up?

I guess you just have to accept that these are lessons for life - painful, but useful. (And since the day I smashed my own head open on an iron gate when I was five, I’ve been quite good at avoiding them.)

With hotdogs, beers, and four smelly friends.

I’ve always been fascinated by apes and monkeys, without quite understanding why. The opening chapter of Jared Diamonds book “The Third Chimpanzee” presents one explanation.

According to him, and according to other studies, there are good reasons to put the chimpanzee in the human family tree. Scientists claim that the chimp is more closely related to humans than they are to the gorillas, and should be put in the same genus as us.

According to an National Geographic article about the same subject, “studies indicate that humans and chimps are between 95 and 98.5 percent genetically identical”, and “researchers argue that humans and chimp lineages evolutionarily diverged from one another between five and six million years ago”.

I know this is an explosive subject, and I’m not enough of an expert to really say what’s fact and what’s fiction. (Gareth probably could though, since he’s a trained zoologist).

But when I study photos of chimpanzees, and my own cousin living in here London, I clearly see similarities.

Since I was my birthday yesterday, I decided to do an experiment. I wanted to figure out what type of media that I’m actually using to communicate with friends and family, and started to count the greetings I received (thanks to all!).

This is how the greetings were distributed (n=67):

- Skype message: 52%

- Facebook: 20%

- Email: 9%

- In person: 7%

- SMS: 6%

- Phone call: 4%

- MSN: 1%

- Offline cards: 1%

Conclusion: Skype is still the heart and hub of my communication, but Facebook is growing in importance. Offline cards is more or less dead. Going to be interesting to see how this evolves over the coming years.

I visited a good ol friend today, who recently bought a house far out in Bohuslän’s archipelago.

She told me a story about her great grand-father, who was a fisherman in the village. Apparently, all of the men in the village used to work on the same fishing boat, called “Polarstjärnan”. Around 1890 the boat went missing, and all the men perished - including her ancestor. Only women and children were left in the village, left to take care of themselves.

So I guess my daily struggle with the District line is quite OK, considering.

Here’s a short clip from Stocken. It’s an amazingly beautiful place, but unfortunately the quality of the clip is bad.

Emerge.se is writing about Kindo, and other similar companies. It’s a good analysis, worth reading (if you’re lucky enough to speak Swedish).

Yep, the food was excellent. Pema stuffed herself with two burritos, she just couldn’t get enough.

Eric (one of the founder) looked seriously sleep-deprived though. But that’s the price you pay to bring real burritos to the Londoners.