Riding trains in Norway

In Norway they know how to make something solidly real. Norway, with is mountains, fjords, and trains in gorgeous places.

Here is a clip from a 10-hour riding-the-train-through-the-seasons movie (thanks PP):

On the cinema

The life of Monica Zetterlund is presented on the cinema. She was a fantastic jazz singer and her music is loved by many. The other interesting thing here is the cinema "Bio Kontrast". In this case (our town) the city hall also have a concert hall, which is used for movies. When I grew up, I could see, for example, French and Russian films on Bio Kontrast, in a small cinema in the library basement in my old home town. These movies were not the mainstream movies, but a bit peculiar. Like Koyaanisqatsi and Pica Pica about magpies, not a word spoken).

Soon to an IMAX theatre near you: Rocky Mountain Express

I have a feeling that there are plenty of people in this family who want to see this movie.

What are your favorite Christmas movies?

Here is my partial list:

In English:
It's a wonderful life [can't live without it, strangely enough I had never heard of this movie when I lived in Sweden]
Miracle on 34th Street [for the smartest Santa ever, plus black and white is fantastic]
The Holiday [modern romance, with modern complications, ah I love this]

In Swedish: 
Karl-Bertil Jonssons julafton [animated, a postoffice clerk decide to reroute some Christmas gifts to needy kids]
... (EH and the other can fill in the rest here, it was so long since I lived in Sweden)

Stamp of the Day Citroen

There is nothing like a French car, right!?  Here is an old Citroen, Traction Avant.  Nice! We have been watching a great French movie "The secret of the grain" (link to review), which is set in southern France among Tunisian immigrants.  It is fantastic!  See it if you can.  OK, so there are no old Citroens in it, but that is OK. It is filled with cous-cous, emotions, and great moments.

Quote of the Day: from Mad Men about Swedes

PP and I are watching Season 4 of the Mad Men TV series about 1960s advertising executives.  Fascinating and good.  And the set is so right, down to the wall paper and cereal boxes. No sloppiness here.

So, in today's episode Peggy said this:

"You are never gonna get me to do anything Swedish people do!"

(episode 3, season 4)  Won't tell you more, the rest you have to see. :)

No more "Just one more thing"

Today, one of our most favorite actors died, Peter Falk, 83. He is most famous as the police detective Columbo in the TV series with the same name, but I think I first saw him in the movie the Princess Bride where he plays the old grandfather reading the story to the sick kid in bed.  That is a lovely movie.

And as Columbo, he became Columbo, famous for his smart intellect he hid behind his everyday rumpled looks inside an old gray beaten up French car and his trenchcoat that looked like he had slept in it.  His most characteristic line was probably, while walking out after an interview with a suspect, turning around and saying: 'oh, just one more thing', and then the question came that skewered the unsuspecting person, or providing some important clue to the solution. He was very popular as Columbo in Sweden when I grew up too.

He was also in Wings of Desire and in the very funny movie Murder by Death.  If you haven't seen him acting you have missed something, but these days that is easy to fix.  Just rent the movies!

Here is a slideshow of photos from his movies. Enjoy!

Stamp of the Day: Frans G Bengtsson

In Swedish literature there is ONE great book about the Viking age you should all read if you like reading.  Röde Orm (Red Orm = Red Snake, but also known as The Long Ships in English).  This is a tale of vikings as traders as well as marauders, and it takes place all across Europe and is supposedly rather historically correct.  Part of it takes place when one of our (possible) ancestors Harald Bluetooth was King of Denmark.  This book has been elected as one of the top ten best books in Sweden, ever.

The author was Frans G Bengtsson, and he is depicted on this Swedish stamp together with typical Viking longships. The book, which is in several volumes, was written during World War II and Frans made a political point in the book on how the Vikings allied themselves with Jews over a thousand years earlier. He tried to simulate the language in the book after the old Nordic sagas, with their terse sentences and usually not very elaborate descriptions of people and places. 

The 1960s movie Long Ships was partly and loosely based on this book, but I haven't seen it.  But they are planning a real movie on the book now, and the director was quoted as saying "It will be like Lord of the Rings".  Except of course that Vikings did happen. And Vikings had gold rings too, and there were smart women with long fine hair (but no pointy ears) not only in Tolkien's books.  I hope they get a huge Hollywood budget to make this Viking movie. 

New Swedish money

Sweden is changing its kronor (kr) bills in a few years and no, it won't be to euros, but to newly designed bills. To find out what the Swedes wanted, the National Bank of Sweden arranged a way for the public to vote on their favorite Swedes. Today they announced the winners of who will be on the new bills.  No more kings on our bills! These are the winners (final designs to be developed soon):

20 kr: författarinnan Astrid Lindgren och naturmotiv från Småland. (The author Astrid Lindgren [Emil, Ronia, Pippi Longstocking, etc.] with nature scenes from Småland where she was from and wrote about. She got the most votes from the public, we love her!)

50 kr: sångaren Evert Taube och naturmotiv från Bohuslän (The singer, poet, author and songwriter Evert Taube and nature from the west coast province of Bohuslän, a place depicted in many of this songs.)

100 kr: skådespelerskan Greta Garbo och naturmotiv från Stockholm. (The moviestar Greta Garbo and scenes from Stockholm.)

200 kr: regissören Ingmar Bergman och naturmotiv från Gotland. (The movie director Ingmar Bergman and nature from Gotland, the big island in the Baltic Sea where he lived the last part of his life.)

500 kr: sångerskan Birgit Nilsson och naturmotiv från Skåne. (The opera singer Birgit Nilsson and nature scenes from Skåne, the southernmost province.)

1 000 kr: diplomaten Dag Hammarskjöld och naturmotiv från Lappland. (The WWII diplomat and UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld and scenes from Lapland, the northernmost province.)

I think this is amazing and wonderful.  First, there are 3 women and 3 men, none are royalty or nobelmen (well, Hammarskjöld was by ancestry...), all are part of the current Swedish heritage and culture, and they will include nature elements from all parts of Sweden, showing the strong connection Swedes have with nature, landscape and wild places. And, how is this for wonderful logic - Astrid Lindgren will be on the smallest bill because that one is the one kids will see the most!  I love it.

The National Bank said that they 'didn't include any currently living people because nobody should be able to pay with themselves'. Ha! True, and funny.  The coins will change too, except for the 10 kr coin. If you can read Swedish, the whole report from the National Bank is here, 5 pages, in easy to read Swedish with clear nice formatting, just like government reports should be but rarely are, except in Sweden.

I wish more governments in the world did more reasonable and democratic things like this.

It has been a slow time here on the edge of the mountain...

... since the last post, because both PP and I got sick in the horrible cold-flu that is whisping around in these neighborhoods.  We have been coughing, sniffling, and headaching, and used up more cold medicines this past week than we usually use in a whole year.  Bad stuffy noses and sinuses...

Since there wasn't much else to do than to let the viruses run their course in our bodies we have also watched some movies and finished some projects.  Clint Eastwood has graced our TV screen with his face several times (the Gauntlet, not one of this best) as has Robert de Niro (New York cop with a son in trouble in City by the Sea). Gosford Park is an English 1920s murder mystery where everybody could have done it, and it portrays the servants in a the giant mansion in an unusual and interesting detail.  Maybe a bit too slow and long, but that could have been because of the medicines too. A Perfect World with Kevin Costner was great, about a prisoner on the run who kidnaps a boy and their developing relationship, probably 1940s - not the usual good vs. bad people movie, and of course Clint Eastwood directed and acted in it too.

Still, my current favorite is Ken Burn's Civil War series, a documentary in 9 episodes made for PBS.  It is great, and captures the history and people involved in the Civil War in US.  All interview, still-life photos and he lets the story take its time, and it is the opposite to the snippet-rush-fast-special effects-stress movies and documentaries that are more common today.  For me that never really learned much about American history in school, this is like a wonderful education and charting new historical territory.

While watching movies I knit and knit, mostly scarves and hats, but also other things.  My favorite online knitting site is a mecca for free patterns and ideas - check out Ravelry.com (it is free to sign up). Right now I am working on a gray 1940s WWII Watch cap, not sure for whom, and is just about to start a lacy scarf for myself in a color called neptune.  There will also be new knitted cotton dishcloths that can be thrown in the washer every week, instead of linen ones that are thin and fall apart, or wettex that turn slimy and gross.  Here are some hats I have knitted recently.

Help, I am pixelated!

Here is a really cool animation movie. Unfortunately you have to ignore an ad first for 25 seconds or so, be patient, and the fun will come.


PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. -

Ponderings on utopias

When I grew up I remember seeing the movie Shangri-La on TV one Sunday afternoon, and I loved it.  A hidden valley, far away in the Himalayas, a paradise away from everything else, isolated and self-sufficient. Last night PP showed me an old movie by Lewis Mumford called 'The City", which shows another kind of utopia - a village where workers live in nice houses without industrialization's horrors and pollution. It is worth watching, and you can find it here, in the Prelinger Archives of ephemeral films.

What struck me after seeing this movie is that there aren't any utopias anymore.  We can't realistically dream about paradise islands where you can live away from the rest of the world.  Everything is connected, affected, even if you want to be isolated.  Every hidden valley, little town, or tropical island is affected by the global climate change, atmospheric pollution, radiation, and trash and toxins thrown into the sea, groundwater, or rivers. Over you satellites are watching you or give you connectivity to anywhere else in the world.  All economies are linked, and what happens at Wall Street or in Asia's stock markets affect a country and village across the world.

So, the idea of Utopia has changed.  Now we wish for small Utopian things, like affordable health care for all, toys without lead, and cleaner streets, while in the past you could dare to think big and dream away... I think this creates a kind of hopelessness and apathy in the new generations - it is much harder to change anything, the problems are big, global, and enormous.  Even if you plan a small better village locally, you run into global and national problems and forces, since so much is controlled at a higher level, not locally anymore.  Here in New Jersey, there used to be several local villages (like Roosevelt) built and based on Utopian ideas of fairness, sharing, and ethics.  Now they are all just regular places like any other (with a few exceptions, like Free Acres).

Who even wishes for World Peace anymore?  I do, but who really works for it?  No big masses of people...  I think the whole world view has changed since the hopeful 1960s, and gone downhill since then.  The only way to change global things is for all of us to work together in all countries, and that seems pretty much impossible, sometimes even within just one country (US for example). Sad and depressing, unfortunately.  Now the only real Utopias are new planets somewhere out there in the universe.

Maybe Utopia is just an impossibility, because humans are too selfish and competitive, and that all goes back to evolution and competition over scarce resources for survival?  Still, I like the thought of better places for all...

Links for more information (to avoid the breaking up of your reading* I put these at the end)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Where does the stuff go?
Utopia
Prelinger Archives: Lewis Mumford: "The City"
Shangri-La
Free Acres, New Jersey : Roosevelt, NJ

* Researchers have showed that reading online text with a lot of links in it breaks up the thought process and you get distracted and don't learn and think so much.  At each hyperlink in the text your brain thinks "should I click on this or not", and you loose your thought and memories of what you just read.  So even if you don't click on the link, you are affected, without knowing it. So, links at the end on this post.  (Link to more about this here and here.)

horizon and islands - update from NJ

horizon and islands, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

Friday night post from New Jersey - the boys in the family are watching a hilarious 1980s movie, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, which I tried to watch but gave up on, all the homemade pizza is gone (either eaten or in the fridge for lunch tomorrow), my virus-infected computer might be rescuable (yeah!), and I have been uploading some more photos from the Sweden trip here in the kitchen while listening to the excessive and funny sound effects of the banzai movie.

Here is the ocean, as it looks when you look eastwards toward Finland from the Gävle area in Sweden. Those islands are Swedish, not Finnish :)  I had lunch here with my family, looking out over the ocean and thinking about infinity and space...

Outside the heat is on, it is probably around 25 degrees Celsius still and humid, and the grasshoppers and katydids are still going crazy with their noises. We have caught 7 mice in 48 hours inside our house and there are still many more to catch - that is what happens when you let your inside cats move outside...

Yesterday and the day before we saw migrating dragonflies here at home - there is a species here that migrates like a bird or monarch butterflies.

Mornings are turning cool, finally, and it is time to plant garlic and spinach for harvest next year. It is far to the first frost night, but the owls are howling their noses off at night, especially during the full moon the last couple of nights.

Food fit for eating?

  At Easter time, many shelves in many grocery stores get filled with Peeps, a strange marshmallow concoction shaped like little birds, ghosts (for Halloween), and rabbits, etc.  Their shelf life is probably forever since they seem to be made mainly of sugar and preservatives, with color added. I don't like them much to eat, but for some, this is heaven...  This is our local food store last week when the Peeps had arrived.

A friend of mine says that the Peeps are best when you let them sit out of the box overnight so they develop a nice dry crust - then you bit into the hard shell and a soft, chewy middle. 

The first Peeps where made in the 1940s. I bet you can grill them and make s'mores, but I have never tried.

Peeps have been used as theatrical props for a while,and there are contests of using Peeps in dioramas featuring famous movie scenes and historical events. How about a Marilyn Monroe, made out of Peeps? Photo by M.V. Jantzen on Flickr, of the winner in the recent competition run by Washington Post, a large newspaper.



Then came the competitions and challenges of the Peepshi. How to make a nicelooking sushi out of all junk food: Peeps, fruit by the foot (long bands of colored tough fruity things), and Rice Krispies treats, all things that my kids are familiar with.  The competition spread to Flickr, where people started to add their home-designed junky sushi :)  Enjoy! more photos here!
Photo by Nate Marsh on Flickr (CC license). 

Swedish news in America

You don't often hear news about Sweden on American radio, but a few days ago there were not just one story but two about Sweden. The first one was about a Swedish cartoonist that has drawn the ire of islamic fundamentalists. The second was about the new movie based on Stieg Larsson's book The girl with the dragon tattoo (which has a better name in Swedish, "Men that hate women", but I bet that wasn't marketable in America). Stieg Larsson's book trilogy is great, gory and violent, but smart and a really, really good read. A new Swedish movie is out and has won lots of awards. I haven't seen it yet, but plan to. Of course the movies that are made in Sweden have to be remade in Hollywood, sigh, since some people don't like subtitles. Can you imagine Brad Pitt as a Swedish journalist? Not me.

Otherwise, everyday Sweden in our American household is mostly Kalles Kaviar and knäckebröd, a blacksmith beer opener, Swedish matches (but we are out!), and sometimes pytt-i-panna for lunch.

Mix and match(box), all right!

LA and I are home from Costa Rica after a diverse set of adventures and some misadventures (nothing serious). While rain forest photos are being uploaded and edited, here are some other things I have peeked at in the last couple of weeks (thanks all for sending this to me).

How many things can you stuff into a matchbox? This is not the record, but it's a lot.
Not your usual stitching sampler.
Do not ever attempt to read a James Patterson novel if you want to have a good read. Trust me. (I just read London bridges on the plane, and it amazes me that this is a bestseller author. I won't give you a book review, this is all you get...)
They eat funny things in Thailand.

There are many amazing stories out there:
Being nurtured by a leopard seal. (thanks for the link PP)
Duct tape saves the day. (hat tip to BV)
Five ways to change the world. (good advice... vote, shop, garden, have a party, etc., PP found this)
I wonder if this can be done with dead ladybugs and stinkbugs... this is both gross and fun. (thanks, EH)

Once a year there is a giant booksale ('bokrea') in Sweden, nationwide, all stores, and you can make amazing finds. Everybody knows about this, and people stock up on books. Now I have to see if there is anything I want, that my friends over there can get for me and then get over here to NJ somehow. I know, I have enough books, but I love books.

chess, pingpong ball, and vaccum cleaner hoses...

If all you have is time and duct tape and would like to do some fun, this can be accomplished (reposting of a favorite for those of you that haven't seen it)

Pandora is heaven for biologists

Over the Christmas break I saw the 3-D movie Avatar with the kids, and loved it. OK, I admit, I only saw it because I was told that Sigourney Weaver played a botanist. But, it turned out to be a really good movie.

But what surprised me most was that they must have employed some real biologists to work on the movie (see article here). Animals, fungi, and plants were based on shapes and forms that exist on Earth, just in new compositions, combinations, and colors. Take a spiral algae from the ocean and put it on a tree branch in the rain forest. Aquatic hydra colonies are becoming branched fungi. Animals are still vertebrates, but are hexapods instead of tetrapods.

Everything is connected, like a large Gaia, and luminous, like feelings and neurons showing of light. Of course, as a botanist, I can't help think about what they didn't change. Tree trunks and branches are the same, fern leaves and palm stems are just like on Earth - someone needs to do some biometric studies to see if this is likely (especially since humans can't breath the air, but everything else can). But I think it is more a fact of that it is easy to create large masses of green with palm and fern leaves, they are so easily fractalized and scaled up or down.

Seeds that swim like fluorescent jellyfishes in the air - gorgeous!







Of course there was lots of violent action, bad people vs. good people, story lines from Fern Gully, Pocahontas, Save the Earth, Greenpeace, the Iraq War crazy president we finally got rid off, and grassroot heroes. But the real take-home message was: Life is beautiful. That Sigourney Weaver is a botanist is just mentioned once ('she is famous, she write THE flora of Pandora"), but science and biodiversity is portrayed in an unusually accurate way. You can read more about this aspect in this great article in New York Times. (And here is a kind-of-stupid article as a contrast.)

Mastering art, cooking, and life...

This is two book reviews, a movie review and a cookbook review all in one post. A few nights ago we watched the movie Julie & Julia, which is based on Julia Child's life. Julia Child died a few years ago, but she was the person that popularized French cooking in home kitchens in America in the 1960s and onwards. She had a TV show, very barebones and very loved, and a personality that I would call 'sprudlande' in Swedish. I don't know how to translate that - maybe like an overjoyed fountain. She LOVED food. In France she went to cooking school, and went from someone that like to eat to someone that could make food you fall in love with. I imagine this at least, since I never tasted anything she cooked... I can't think of any Swedish chef that is as famous in Sweden as Julia Child is in the US.

Mixed in with the story in the movie Julie & Julia is another story about (and by) Julie Powell in post-9/11 New York, who in 2002 decides to start a blog called Julie/Julia Project (nearly the same title as the movie, and nearly the same title as the book published from the blog) about her attempt to cook all recipes in Julia Child's cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (hereafter MAFC) in one year. That is 524 recipes. She succeeds, but not without lots of marriage and cooking troubles, some that are shown in the movie. Her current blog is here. (Julia Child didn't like the blog project either.)

I have read the blog book by Powell and her original blog, the biography My Life in France about Julia Child's years there in the 1950s, and now seen the movie. But I had never cooked anything out of the classic MAFC cookbook until yesterday when I took PP's mom's copy from 1967 [good vintage] out of the bookshelf and looked up French Onion Soup, which is what we then had for dinner. The soup was great. The recipe was supereasy. But the best part of the cookbook (from the two parts I read) is the foreword. It is wonderfully and uniquely written. Here are some examples (but get your hands on a copy and read the whole thing! and remember this was written in 1961):

This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children's meals, the parent-chauffeur-den-mother syndrome, or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat. Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. But like any art it requires practice and experience. The most important ingredient you can bring to it is love of cooking for its own sake.

So here are my reviews:

The cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Based on the Foreword and one French Onion Soup recipe, this is a wonderful book. I want to tackle the deboning of a whole duck at some point, but maybe I should start with something simpler first, like roasted duck with orange sauce on page 276. [grade A]







The book, My Life in France: I could have sworn I had reviewed this wonderful biography here in the blog but I am glad I didn't swear on it, because it appears I never did. This is a great book, based on letters and stories. I loved it, and many scenes from this book make it into the movie. You don't have to be a food freak to love this book. It also wonderfully describes the very loving marriage between Paul and Julia Child. [grade A+]





The book, Julie & Julia: This book was also not reviewed on the blog, and I know exactly why. I read the book (which is based on her blog), but I didn't like it too much. A 20-ish woman blogs and whines about everyday life and miseries and successes in her tiny kitchen. The attitude was so different from Julia's attitude to life. I have sympathy, it is just that I didn't think it was great literature or very interesting. (Sorry Julie, if you are reading this... but I don't like swear words in print.] Her husband at the time must have been a very patient and understanding person (and is a great character in the movie). I actually didn't keep the book, I gave it away and I remember forcing my way through some pages. But it lead to something good, the movie... [grade C]

The movie, Julie & Julia: Meryl Streep plays Julia Child and is the best I have ever seen her. Incredible. Just see the movie to see her! Julia's husband Paul, is a wonderful person and done by a great actor. The actress that plays Julie Powell, the blogger, got criticized for being 'too nasty and grumpy' in the movie, but they actually toned her down compared with the book. There are many other great actors as well, so the acting is outstanding. Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, remember that one?), was the director and she is also a former food journalist, and also had part in meshing the two stories together in the script. It works OK, but not great, to move back and forth between France in the 1950s and New York in 2002, and when you are in the New York scenes you just want to get back to France. But I would say New York is rather accurately depicted, after living there myself. The food looks amazing in the movie, it is nearly so you can smell it.

After seeing the movie, I slept bad the night after and woke up repeatedly with yummy images of giant whisks with whipped cream, tarte tatin, and sole in lemon butter... mmmmmm... However, some parts of the movie story made no sense, and were disconnected from the rest of the story, such as the government 'are you a communist'-interview in Washington DC of Paul Child, and the wedding of Julia Child's sister. But overall, it is a great movie, and the married men of both couples are wonderful, wonderful husbands. There is a lot of love in the movie, and not just love of food. Nora Ephron manage to show life and love and the art of living and cooking all at once. So rent it, it is gorgeous.

Grade A for the movie, would have been A+ if not for the lobsters that had to be put in misty cold water (looking like hot water) and "off camera representatives from the American Humane Association monitored the creatures’ health" - come on, guys, there is death and dying of seafood in every restaurant, why does this matter in a movie?! And to all you vegetarians, did you know that plants scream when we cut and cook them too? We just can't hear them. I am all for humane treatments of animals, but not being allowed to throw a lobster in boiling water in a movie is a bit too much. These people should worry more about pink slime in hamburgers. New York Times review here

Real Julia Child (left) and Meryl Streep as Julia Child (right).

1/1/2010 = 5 stars

A new year have started, quite surprisingly too soon. I wasn't ready, but here it is. We started the year by making Friday night pizza, like so many times before (yum!), and watching the movie Mr. Smith goes to Washington. The movie is from 1939, so it is over 70 years old, but still extremely relevant. I should have seen this a long time ago, it taught me a lot about how Congress works and the politics-as-usual which we still have in the US today. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It is definitely a 5-star movie. James Stewart gives the performance of his life. Happy New Year to all our blog readers, and It's a Wonderful Life we have here on Earth! Sleep well everybody!