Capital scenes (Washington DC)

In May this year I had to travel to Washington DC for a conference and took a few hours to see the sights:


The Washington Monument.  Impressive. 


The White House.  I wonder how many spy cameras that are in the flower beds. 


I wonder if the President ever sends out Secret Service to get him a Polish dog?  This cart was right next to the White House.


This anti-war tent vigil has been going on for three decades, every day, every hour, every minute.  It is right in front of the White House, and is more of a statement than a disturbance.  I wish we lived in a world with more peace.


Outside the US Department of Agriculture they had planted parsley in the flower beds, and it was flowering nicely and greenly. So appropriate and unusual.

Inside the USDA was a small museum about food history, which included this great quote:

 "...the most valuable of all arts will be the art of deriving a comfortable subsistence from the smallest area of soil." Abraham Lincoln

They also had a lot of old posters from World War I and II.


Don't waste Food.  We need these posters for today's consumers.


Lick the Platter Clean - I remember us kids saying we could lick our plates because our grandpa did it too.


There was also a little tiny exhibit about the old ice trains that transported blocks of ice for refrigeration around the country.  I am glad there are electric refrigerators nowadays, I wouldn't want to get back to a time when you had to handle 50 lbs (25 kg) ice blocks. 

Book review: Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann av Jonas Jonasson

One more book review of a Swedish book in Swedish on this blog, but this one it on its way to be translated into English and a multitude of other languages.  It was a long time ago I read such a hilarious book.  It helps that the long beginning takes place in a small village not far from where I grew up, and that the author successfully makes fun of Swedish society, world history, politicians and incompetent bureaucrats, and puts together an obviously too-incredible story, but it is fun!  Just like crazy movies like Young Frankenstein is fun.  It is not because the story is believable, but because the book (or movie) creates laugh-out-loud moments in your life. 

In Swedish this book by Jonas Jonasson is called 'Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann', which means The 100-year old who stepped out the window and disappeared. It will be made into a Swedish movie in 2012.  Jonas Jonasson is a former Swedish journalist who had the first draft of this book in his drawer for over 20 years or so.  The story seems simple, but it is not.  An old man turns 100 (named Allan) and decides to escape before his birthday party at the old-people home, and steps out the window.  And then the story starts, which includes murders, elephants, police, journalists, mafia, drug dealers, akvavit, swedish summer, swedish women, and much more... all written in a hilarious Swedish based on 1940-1950s intricate and sometimes stilted grammar with words of today thrown in. Throughout the book the 100-year old reminisces about his colorful life, where he has traveled the world, and in fact, helped (or not) world history personalities such as Franco, Roosevelt, Mao, Einstein's brother, Stalin, and he visits and deals with the associated gulag camps, atom bomb makings, secret submarines, and Iranian revolutions.  The book gives a great work-through of 20th century history, but of course it is all wrong because Allan is inserted in it.  But hilarious! I won't tell you the ending of the story, but it is good to the end.

I loved this book.  Apparently many (snobbish?) book critics in Sweden didn't like it at all, and thought it was silly, overwrought, or just plain dumb.  Well, dumb, that is Danielle Steele.  Overwrought, sure, but that is the point!  Just like a Mel Brooks movie, get it!?  Remember Springtime for Hitler - just the same thing, but this is nearly better, I think.  Silly - come on, good culture can be FUN. One critic complained that the book wasn't believable (hello, it wasn't meant to be!). This is pure entertainment, not serious literature... I am keeping this book so I can read it again next time I get the flu and have to lay in bed for a day or two. It will make me laugh many times again.  (And thanks to BOS for sending it to me!)

So, English-speaking readers, keep your eyes open and get it when it comes out in your country in the translated form.

Peace on Earth

Peace on Earth, originally uploaded by Vilseskogen.

God Jul and Merry Christmas to everyone everywhere on this planet! These lights are from our house in USA in 2007, but the message is still important - we need more peace, love, and understanding. I hope you all have a great holiday, get some rest, make some good food, have a great time, and I wish you all a happy (and happier) 2011. I am ready for a change for the better here in USA, that is for sure. So lets work for it. As Gandhi said: "You must be the change you wish to see in the world. " Fred till er alla!

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.)

A no win-no win situation

Who profits from war?  Well, not us, but others do.  Then and now. Sickening.

Clear messages

Most of you readers probably remember our previous blogpost about the WWII era British posters Keep Calm and Carry On, and their recent modifications (Now Panic and Freak Out).  Here are some new variants, for knitters, doglovers, bikers, teadrinkers, bloggers, writers, teachers, bakers, photographers, sailors, and sushi lovers, etc., all for sale over on Etsy.  I love them - clean and clear. How about this one? (That one really should have used an old model, not the current model in the image, but things are rarely perfect.)

Book review: In case of survival food, do not consult the US Army

I recently picked up a book from the library called The Complete Guide to Edible Wild Plants by the Department of the Army.  Yes, that Army, the US Army and Pentagon are listed on the back page.  This is a 'no-nonsense survival aid, {...} an essential guide for serious adventurers and the armchair botanist alike."  I thought I would get some interesting information about locally edible and poisonous plants, but the book provided something else, a serious scare. 

First, the book covers the tropics, subtropics, and temperate zones, but covers very few edible plants from each region.  That is OK, even if not great.  In the beginning of the book it is stated that you should never eat any plants you can't securely identify to the correct species.  Well, well - I would like to see the person that can identify any plant to the correct species based on the photos and descriptions in this book.  I can't even see some of the plants in some of the photos. Many of photos are grainy, too dark, and over-tinted in green. And when they couldn't find good photos they resorted to stick figures of the plants, also badly pixelated.

The photos of sorghum grains, the only photo used to illustrate this plant, looks like a large bunch of small cockroaches on a tabletop. The description of sorghum, which supposedly is there to help you identify the plant, follows: "There are many different kinds of sorghum, all of which bear grains in heads at the top of the plants.  The grains are brown, white, red, or black.  Sorghum is the main food crop in many parts of the world."  Would you be comfortable with identify a wild plant as sorghum after reading this?  I mean, the only real description here is that the seed color can vary and that the seeds are in heads on the top of the plant.  It doesn't even say it is a grass! Plant families are only listed for poisonous plants, I wonder why?  If you get sick, only then you need to know the family?

The mixture of tropical with temperate plants provides some interesting contrasts.  Sago palm (with a horrible photo), and sassafras (with a great photo, from the season when the plants have leaves) share one page. Same with prickly pear cactus (Opuntia) and pokeweed (Phytolacca, a plant which actually is very poisonous if raw or taller than 25 cm.)

Some information is dangerously wrong.  The fish tail palm, which I recently saw in the botanical garden in Stockholm, is edible, but the fruits are toxic and the leaves can give you dermatitis (link)."  In this manual, this is a perfectly fine plant without any warning signs at all. Only 17 poisonous plants are listed, and this book is supposedly covering the whole world.

Looking through this book I am starting to think it is a joke.  Either that, or the American soldiers are much dumber than I thought.  The text reads often like an essay by a 4th grader, for example:
"Look for sugarcane in fields. It grows only in the tropics (throughout the world). Because it is a crop, it is often found in large numbers."

This book is an embarrassment to the US government, US publishers, and botany. The book was published in 2009, and even if it was printed in China (true), I bet the material was provided from the US.

Remember that this book is called the "Complete guide..."?  It is as complete and useful as the human anatomy chapter of a high school biology book is to a neurosurgeon. As a survival aid, this book is not very helpful, and could even be risky to use for the serious outdoorsman. I also really doubt there are any armchair botanists out there that would enjoy a book with so many botanical faults.  I really hope the US Army provides their soldiers with better field manuals than this. There are many more and better books on this subject for those that really are interested in wild edible plants and wilderness survival.

Stamp of the Day: December 7 and Hawaii

Today is the 341st day of 2009. Are you ready for 2010? I am not, it feels like 2009 just started and I haven't even picked up speed yet. I need two-three months more to finish what I had planned for this year, both at work and home.

Today' date is the day Pearl Harbor was attached in 1941, Cicero was assassinated in 43 BC, Delaware was the first state in 1787 to ratify the US Constitution, US declared war on Austria in 1917, the stea locomotive Norfolk & Western 611 ran for the last time in 1994, Galileo (the spacecraft) arrived at Jupiter (yes, the planet), and the birthday of Louis Prima. And finally, it is the Cotton Candy day in the US.

A shirt not suitable for airports...

But that is where he wore it, my son (LA). We did get some strange looks...

The shirt design is a spoof on a WWII era government poster from the UK, with the original stating: KEEP CALM and CARRY ON! Now Panic and Freak Out seems to be more suitable for our times...

The story of the poster is interesting:
"Back in the spring of 1939, it was an anonymous civil servant who was entrusted with finding the slogan for a propaganda poster intended to comfort and inspire the populace should, heaven forbid, the massed armies of Nazi Germany ever cross the Channel.

This was the third in a series. The first, designed to stiffen public resolve ahead of likely gas attacks and bombing raids, was printed in a run of more than a million and read: Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory. The second, identically styled, stated: Freedom Is In Peril.

From August 1939, both posters began appearing all over the country, on billboards, in shops, on railway platforms. The third, though, was held back. This one was for the real crisis: invasion.

... For 60 years, the poster had been forgotten. Then, one day in 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sifting through a box of hardbacks he had bought at auction when he saw "A big piece of paper folded up at the bottom. I opened it out, and I thought, wow. That's quite something. I showed it to Mary, and she agreed. So we framed it and put it up on the bookshop wall. And that's where it all started." (link to full story)

The reprinted poster is now everywhere, and tens of thousands of copies of it has been sold.

Fort Nonsense, a real place

This place is not as nonsensical as the name implies: Fort Nonsense in Morristown, NJ. Up on a hill overlooking the relatively (and relatively is here used in a US historical concept, not European or otherwise) ancient city of Morristown are the remains of a fort built by the revolutionary army in the late 1770s (1777 more precisely). All that remains are.... nothing. The outline of the defense system are marked with newer stones in the ground. The soldiers were told to build the fort by George Washington during a winter, but the British never came so the fort was never used. The name came later, possibly reflecting that Washington told his soldiers to build the fort just to keep them occupied during the long winter. Today it is a wooded hill and part of the US National Park System, and a great place for picnics. Back in the 1700s I bet there weren't so many trees around, since they had been cut down to feed the the iron furnaces in the areas. (Thanks to SK that showed me this place.)

What do a war cost? (Vad kostar ett krig?)

link to more (PP found this, I posted)

What will come after Americanism?

There is a really interesting opinion article in the latest issue of Newsweek by Fareed Zakaria titled "The Post-American World". I haven't read all of it yet, but I wanted to share some with you. It is about the changing world and how USA are no longer the superpower it used to be. He addresses the increased importance not only of China's economy but many other developing countries, the increased peacefulness of the world (even if we don't feel it), the anxiety of Americans, and how islamic militants are becoming less popular in muslim societies. USA is no longer the center of the universe, and I think this is a good thing. This connectivity among people and cultures that we can see developing creates instant and unexpected connections across borders and minds, and I think Obama's success is also part of this. The new web-based world works different than the old media and economies, and it will take time in some countries to adapt to it. Old stiff, self-important politicians from years past will especially be left behind (bye, Hillary Clinton). Here are some excerpts, and you can read the rest by following the link above.

"We are living through the third great power shift in modern history. The first was the rise of the Western world, around the 15th century. It produced the world as we know it now—science and technology, commerce and capitalism, the industrial and agricultural revolutions. It also led to the prolonged political dominance of the nations of the Western world. The second shift, which took place in the closing years of the 19th century, was the rise of the United States. Once it industrialized, it soon became the most powerful nation in the world, stronger than any likely combination of other nations. For the last 20 years, America's superpower status in every realm has been largely unchallenged—something that's never happened before in history, at least since the Roman Empire dominated the known world 2,000 years ago. During this Pax Americana, the global economy has accelerated dramatically. And that expansion is the driver behind the third great power shift of the modern age—the rise of the rest.

At the military and political level, we still live in a unipolar world. But along every other dimension—industrial, financial, social, cultural—the distribution of power is shifting, moving away from American dominance. In terms of war and peace, economics and business, ideas and art, this will produce a landscape that is quite different from the one we have lived in until now—one defined and directed from many places and by many peoples."

"Why do we think we live in scary times? Part of the problem is that as violence has been ebbing, information has been exploding. The last 20 years have produced an information revolution that brings us news and, most crucially, images from around the world all the time. The immediacy of the images and the intensity of the 24-hour news cycle combine to produce constant hype. Every weather disturbance is the "storm of the decade." Every bomb that explodes is BREAKING NEWS."

Insightful!

There are some good things on American TV after all

From last night - Keith Olberman's Special comment on President Bush and the Iraq War. Watch it, he is grilling Bush alive!