Strange is the fungus' mysterious ways

A few days ago when we took a walk in Hutcheson Memorial Forest, I found these strange things on the ground. The little pretty spring flower Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica) was attacked by and covered by this rust fungus. When I came home I googled 'rust fungus' and 'Claytonia virginica' and immediately found out that only one species of rust fungus is known from this species - Puccinia mariae-wilsoniae. After talking to our mycologist at work, I found out that this is a host-switching fungus, so it jumps back and forth between two species within a year. Those orange things are where the spores are produced and spread. It is amazing how many complicated, unusual, and unknown species there are out there in the green mess.

Review of latest delivery from Sweden

OK, I have to admit. Licorice candy is food. Seriously. And my wonderful brother O.K. sent me some incredibly interesting and innovative licorice candy from the store Lakritsroten (the Licorice root) in Stockholm, Sweden (thanks!!!!!!!!!). But someone needs to tell the people at Lakritsroten that the flower they have as their logo IS NOT from a licorice plant. Licorice roots are not that exciting so I understand their desire to have something nicer, but the flower isn't even from a bean plant in the same family, Fabaceae. Come on, Sweden is the home of Linnaeus and botanical classification, you can do better!

If you want to visit, they are open 11.30 Am to 6 PM on weekdays, and sometimes on Saturdays, and they are located in the old beautiful neighborhood of Odenplan (Odengatan 15). O.K. sent me a wonderful assortment and here is my review.

Djupur. Icelandic licorice. Yes it exist! This candy was covered in crispy white surface, with chewy licorice under, quite wonderful. Highly recommended. I think the name means Deep or something like that, and it is quite appropriate.






Yummy! Lakritstryfflar - licorice truffles. Larger-sized softish salmiak-crusted licorice balls with an even more softish inner center. A great thing and something I had never had before. Definitely worth trying. PP thinks salmiak (ammonium chloride is the equivalent of diaper smell, so some people must lack the gene for this great candy... :)





Now this was the best. "Lucifer - med chiliextrakt" - Lucifer with chili pepper extract. This was great except for that the soft pieces melted together into a giant soft ball during the trip across the Atlantic. You had to pull them apart as far as it goes, and consider the rest a giant piece of chewable licorice. Wonderful taste of the chili pepper - I loved it.


Snusmojänger - Snuff thingies. I don't think I need to elaborate a lot on something with that name, right? :) Hard, sweet, licorice, and brown. Wonderful....








Salmiaklinser (salmiak discs) from Holland. Maybe that is why they were small, dry, and not so exciting. Ha, sorry all Dutchmen. You do make great licorice.

Book review: Transatlantic connection

I am a member of the BookMooch booktrading network (a great invention!), and sometimes I search for books with the keyword Sweden. While doing that, this book suddenly popped up as available: Fly Fishing the River of Second Chances: Life, Love, and a River in Sweden by Jennifer Olsson. The book is about an American fisherwoman from Montana (think Yellowstone National Park), who falls in love with another fly fishing expert from Gimdalen, Jämtland, Sweden. She moves over to Sweden for a summer with her young son, and learns to love some of Sweden's specialties (tunnbröd for example) and not to like some others (surströmming). She goes moose hunting, does the midsummer and Saturday dances, lives with mosquitoes and an outhouse (utedass) and no shower for a summer, and ponders the large amount (20%) of unmarried men in her little village. I think the book is very truthful when it comes to Swedish rural life, but if you read this and then think that Stockholm is like this you will be disappointed.

It is a true memoir and nicely written, but sometimes it reads more like a collection of descriptions of strange or funny Swedish customs, than a personal memoir. I think it is really brave to write a book like this, since it can become so personal. I liked it. It won't be on my 'bring-to-a-deserted-island-list', but then I think very few books will.

Only one thing nagged me repeatedly. If you are an American married to a Swede, with many Swedish friends as well, don't you let them read the book first to catch your misspelled Swedish words? It is Systembolaget, not 'System Bolaget'. It is murklor, not 'morklor'. Or maybe these are Jämtska spelling rules? Gimdalen is close to Bräcke in central Sweden, far north in the forested hills, and people there speak differently. We know, we have relatives and DNA in us from Jämtland.

Here is a little excerpt:
"But I soon learned that true Swedish forest people mustn't look bothered by biting insects, especially mosquitoes. No squealing, swearing, or sudden jerky movements to indicate something has bitten or is about to bite. No preapplication of repellent in the house, car, or parking area. Mosquitoes must be sighted and proved to be an actual nuisance Even then, repellent is applied inconspicuously, if at all. You must never use hats veiled with netting, beds draped with netting, special sonic devices, vitamin preparations, or lemon-scented candles to drive mosquitoes away. Locals view dependence on any of these items as indicating weakness of character. Only foreigners, or people from Stockholm, use any of the above. "

The author and her husband nows have a fly-fishing guide company (Scandiwest). If you like fishing, I bet they are great guides, but one day with private lessons costs 2500 SEK (about $400). A little bit too much for my budget.

Spring feelings- Stamp of the day

I have to blog something to celebrate that the spring has arrived. Outside it´s a least 10 degrees and probably 25 degrees Celcius in the sun. Lovely weather. Some new stamps from Sweden illustrates my feelings today! I love the sun!

Bathing Goose

An funny happening. I saw a bathing canadiangoose lying on its back and try to be clean. I have never seen a bath like this before.

Herding sheep is not easy

A must-see video about sheep hearding. I won't say any more, you will have to watch it yourself:

The Atomic View

A thing to ponder:

There are no objects, only time-delimited assemblages of particles.

I don't know who said it, but it is pretty true, isn't it? But you have to think pretty long-term for some things, like when you think about a gold nugget or other rock, hardwood floors, and plastic-based diapers. Then there are the ephemeral things that changes and decomposes/rusts/withers/disassembles quickly, such as books, clouds, wool mittens, and pizza. It is pretty amazing that all these things are made from the same thing - particles of elements.

The "Closed Loop" exp

Living with your trash

Now here is a real US/Sweden relevant post!

Interesting experiment. I used to think about such things in design school too...will it ever make a difference?

Kvarnsten (Millstone)

I like old mills (gamla kvarnar). Here is a link to a website with wonderful photos of some mills in New Jersey.

En värld av kritor (a world of crayons)

When it is gray and dreary outside, then you can melt some crayons and make things like this! This is by an unknown artist, and I saw it at an art gallery in Newark, NJ, in 2008. It was amazing. The sculpture was much larger than this photo shows (look here), and was all made from melted crayons. Fascinating! Like a wonderworld from Dr. Seuss.

Car news

New York Times has an article today about SAAB, titled:
Sweden Says No to Saving Saab (let me know if you can't see the article).

This weekend we saw a fantastic movie called Yank Tanks, about Cubans repairing and maintaining 1950s American cars with no parts or supplies at all. Cuba is the largest living car museum in the world. The documentary film is a must-see, not just for car fanatics, but for the people it portrays.

Sterling Hill Mining Museum

...is a place worth visiting. It is in northern New Jersey, and has a Swedish connection. It competes with the Swedish mine Långban in being the place with the most found minerals in the world. The Swedes and the Americans seem to still argue over who the winner is. I was there in June 2008, and enjoyed it a lot. See more photos here.

Winter never ends

This was our view when we woke up on March 20. Depressing. But the snow melted and the sun came out this weekend.

Garden fair

Here I am and this is where I will go next week.

Garden fair at Älvsjömässan, Nordiska trädgårdar.
Picture taken at the fair last year.

Bats in space?

Or just maybe, read more here. I think the bat got very surprised, and I hope it survived.

(photo: NASA)

Where am I? Where do I want to go?

I have a new on-line toy. If you haven't seen Biogeomancer, try it! You can search for any place name in the world and get the it mapped on a Google map, and get the latitude and longitude coordinates too. Amazing, I just found out there is only one 'ärla' place in the whole world. A place I know very well. And 'Vattungarna', which means 'the small water islands' or something like that, occurs in three places, all in the Baltic archipelago, twice in Sweden and once in Finland. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.

You can zoom around, move the map, check it mapped on satellite or as a topographic map and find new names of places that you have never heard of before such as (in Swedish): Inre Håkansskär, Tjockö, Velen, and Flaten. For you English-speaking, how about these (from United Kingdom): West Ella, Horkstow, Scunthorpe, and Swinhope. Happy geography hunting!

En knöl i krukan (a tuber in the pot)

So, if don't have green fingers, a lot of money, and suffer from a lack of time, but still want a bonsai, here is the perfect book for you. The art of the bonsai potato. The kit contains everything you need except the potatoes, which I assume means just the pot. You can grow the potato even without water, at least for the first week, until it shrivels up and turn into a wrinkly ex-potato.

The photo of the plant of the cover looks a bit alien, like something from Mars or The Triffids. Would you want one of these in your window?

OK provided the photo. Great find, OK!

Things you actually can eat

Near us in Princeton is a fantastic little European-style food store (Bon Appetit) that sells the most unusual things (in USA, that is). PP and I went there a few weeks ago to look for licorice candy for my class (you need handouts when you talk about beans, ie., Fabaceae, to undergraduates and to keep them awake on Monday mornings). We also got some other goodies, such as oil-cured olives, some great cheese, mints made locally in Hopewell, and then we found.... black squid ink spaghetti. 50 cm long! We just had to get that too. A week later PP made this fantastic dish of this black pasta mixed with creamy tomato sauce with shrimp, scallops, lobster, and squid. Oh, it was yummy! This is how it looked (I think it really looked better than this, my camera was acting up).

I don't think I am ready to try the squid ink pizza yet, though.

Stamp of the Day: Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island

The Stamp of the Day series has woken up from the dead. Here you go! This is just how they showed it in Golden Door. Even the mustache is correct.

Ellis Island, real time travel

In June 2008 I visited the old, abandoned parts of Ellis Island's hospital. Ellis Island was the immigration center for New York and northeastern USA, and 12 million people came through here. With hardhats on we walked through old mental and infectious disease wards, corridors, the laundry rooms, the morgue, and the furnace rooms. So much is still the way it was when it was closed in mid 1900s, with doors, some furniture, and lamps, but a lot has been removed.

Many windows are broken or bordered up, but you still can get that feeling of history, how people were moved through this place to be treated for common ailments, give birth, or, if they weren't 'fit enough for the new world', then deported back to their old country. I don't know if any of my relatives came through Ellis Island, but it is possible. If we knew their names, we could look it up.

It was the best public hospital of its kind in America, and all free. Many doctors requested to do their training here because you got to see so many kinds of problems and learn cutting-edge treatments. We saw padded rooms for mental patients, an infectious disease ward with washable subway-tile walls, and the demonstration room in the morgue where they could to autopsies. Amazing enough, very few people died on Ellis Island, our guide told us, but in Wikipedia, the truth about everything, it says about 3000. More people died on the way over. Many children were born on Ellis Island , and most people that were sick were treated and then released to go on and live in America. If those walls could talk, imagine what stories they could tell!

PP and I finished watching the movie Golden Door tonight, about an Italian family leaving Sicily, traveling across the ocean and arriving at Ellis Island. It probably gives a rather realistic portrait of how life could have been. The movie is definitely worth watching, but it is slow. But the slowness creates a special feeling, and the filming and music is great.

I have posted my Ellis Island photos on Flickr, in this album: link.

Crazy fact: "Although Ellis Island is federal property and has always been historically considered in New York, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1998 determined that part of the island was territory of New York while most of the island, which was added after 1834, is within the territory of New Jersey."

Advertising for post below

Hi everybody,

Something weird happened, so if you want to read my just written post about New York, you need to go down below and look at it. I posted it today, but it says March 1 as the post date - silly Blogger. I can't seem to fix it.

The modern kick-sledge.

I found this modern kick-spark on www.varmlandadventures.se/kickbikeshop.html. This looks a bit weird but they claim it´s fast. You can have it with wheels or skis on too. They also sell kickbikes.

Kick-sleding

It is so great to kick-sled, most in the winter they have sand on the road, but not this time. It was pefect. It is also fantastic that some "snödroppar" are coming upp in the snow.

Fun time on the ice

We had a race on the road by Barking Dog Plaza yesterday, me and the kids. The 6-year old was the fastest, of course. I didn´t stand a chance. But it was just as fun as when we used to ride our "sparks" as kids.

Today I have muscle ache..but I don´t mind. It was fun!

god mat och total dekadens (Good Food and Total Decadence)

PP and I spent last Friday in New York, to walk around in the old neighborhoods where he spent a lot of time in the last 35 years. Mainly we were in the Flatiron District, the Village, and in Soho, all on the southern part of Manhattan. I got to hear lots of stories about how it used to be in the past, such as trucks falling through the sidewalk into basements, toy cars with rockets landing on neighbor's roofs. Many of the old neighborhood joints are gone, replaced with expensive fancy stores for rich people, but some gems are still left. It was a great day, and total decadence - fantastic lunch at Mesa Grill with cactus pear margarita, amazing cappuccino and espresso at Caffe Dante, great smoked mozzarella at Joe's Dairy, an old-fashioned Italian cheese shop that is still around (thanks!), and an Italian neighborhood food store with pasta in wooden drawers. We went to several old historical bars to take in the ambiance and just talk (I told you, decadence), and then to Balthazar, an amazing French restaurant. But we didn't eat dinner there (= more decadence) just had a drink. Dinner was at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central to celebrate EW's 50th birthday. A fantastic day and lots of new memories. I have uploaded photos on Flickr and if you click on the photos here it will take you to the big photo with more explanations. All you Swedes, next time you come here, we will take you to some of these places. Enjoy!