Halloween is almost upon us. Yes, even us who don’t live in the USA.

In the US, Halloween is one of the most celebrated holidays next to maybe christmas. Millions of people dress up in silly costumes, countless children wreak havoc demanding sweets from neighbors and relatives, and a fun-filled celebration of everything that is dark and scary.

For some reason this “holiday” has been artificially imported into Sweden. The reason most likely being that the traditions in Sweden don’t jive very well with commercial interests, and corporations decided to try to graft an American tradition onto a society already extremely americanized.

See, the biggest genuine holiday in Sweden is Christmas. This is a real holiday, created through family and tradition and not implanted by a third party. The reason why I think corporations tried to peddle this business on us is since they need people to buy more crap between Christmas and the other large and genuine tradition Swedes celebrate: midsummer.

In between those two there are no shopping-orgys, and even midsummer has so far mostly resisted being turned into an icon of consumerism. Most Swedes prefer to celebrate toned-down traditional midsummers, as opposed to Christmas which has long since been a nuclear explosion of capitalism.

When I was a little boy I grew up in a family that shared both an American and Swedish heritage. My father took great joy in introducing us to the exotic traditions from his native country, and since there were a few other families around with either direct or indirect ancestry to America this created a small community of Halloweeners. We didn’t really understand the tradition, but hey - we got candy and some silly costumes out of the deal so no one complained too much about it.

I lived almost two years in America, and I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have created the insanity that a genuine American Halloween is. Everyone — and I mean _everyone_ — got into the spirit. Shops would have their employees dress up in weird costumes, and you couldn’t take a step without either tripping over a Jack-o-lantern or getting fake spiderweb in your face. I loved it. It was as if for a few days the government put some weird form of LSD in the water, and people just went bonkers.

As to WHY one would celebrate this is a much more difficult question to answer. None the less, Americans had the heritage, the history and the tradition and that was why it worked in their country. Everyone was on the same page, and even immigrants and strangers like myself quickly adopted and got into the spirit. Sure, I got whopping drunk while being dressed in drag (it’s a long story) but I had a blast, and it wasn’t so much to understand rather than just soak in the atmosphere.

Now, tradition isn’t all that important in my opinion, but it’s a great excuse for gathering your loved ones and trying to have as much fun as possible. How you do it is really up to you, but Christmas is generally a good place to start.

But I don’t like artificially imported traditions. They’re cheap and hollow, and they don’t have the cultural backbone to support them.

Halloween is a great example. A few years ago I started seeing Halloweeners in Sweden. It was extremely strange, almost like seeing nudists in church or something. Everything was backwards. People barely knew WHICH DAY to do it, and I could have confused kids knocking on my door up to a week before October 31st. The silly little confused kids who didn’t know the first thing about why they were dressed up as a cowboy or vampire, or why they were knocking on strangers doors asking with shy voices if they would offer candy to them.

No, they’d been dressed up by insecure parents who didn’t know either why they were doing this, but did it since they imagined that everyone else was doing exactly the same thing and ho boy, they didn’t want to stick out, now would they? So they grabbed their little toddler, dressed them up in whatever thing they perceived was their favorite and booted them briefly out the door to harass the neighbors. Neighbors who aren’t prepared, who don’t have the frame of reference for this tradition, and who are getting tired of having shy cowboys and vampires showing up at the weirdest dates and times asking in hushed voices if they had candy.

I might sound cynical, but I’m having a hard time deciding if this is extremely pathetic or extremely annoying. Probably both, I suppose.

This is what happens when corporations push tradition on us. Rather than traditions being created the way they SHOULD be, i.e. from inside families and friends, they get artificially imported or created in order to supplant the never-stopping wheels of consumerism.

Christmas is getting really bad. It’s still October, and already I see shops putting out the christmas-stuff. Christmas-lights, candles, curtains and everything in between and beyond that. Buy all this and it might fill the hole in your soul.

So, please. I don’t want to see any more confused kids wandering around the stairways of the apartments here just because their parents were to weak to stand against an imported tradition. It just makes me very sad. Celebrate a real Swedish tradition instead, by visiting the graves of the people you love and miss, and who no longer are with us. That’s what Swedes traditionally do.

I thought that I had misread something. I hoped that I had misread something. I wanted to know that I had misread something somewhere, and that this wasn’t what had actually happened. Unfortunately, that wasn’t what had happened.

A lot of people will probably remember that in 2005 the hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. FEMA got a lot of very sharp criticism for the way it handled that disaster, as did the Fearless Leader George W. who opted to strum his guitar rather than get his hands dirty.

Now, back to current events. No one has missed the news about the raging wildfires going on i California. I’ve seen the Gubernator himself go on television to assure everyone that resources will be spent on rebuilding peoples homes as quick as possible. Personally I’m somewhat confused, didn’t anyone remember the fires that happened a few years ago? As far as I can tell these huge wildfires in California isn’t something rare, apparently it happens with a few years space between them.

FEMA recently held a press-conference defending itself and patting themselves on the back for doing a much better job than back in ‘05 with the Katrina-disaster.

The only problem was that the entire thing was completely arranged.

From Wikipedia:

FEMA came under intense criticism when it was revealed that a press conference on the California wildfires of October 2007 was staged. Deputy Administrator Harvey E. Johnson was answering questions from FEMA employees who were posing as reporters. Many of these questions were “soft ball” questions, intentionally asked in a way that would evoke a positive response giving the impression that FEMA was doing everything right. In this way, any scrutiny from real reporters (many of whom were only given a 15 minute notice) would have been avoided. Press Secretary Dana Perino later criticized the agency for this. Fox News aired the staged press briefing live. No one was fired.

FEMA-employees posed as journalists asking questions, while real journalists weren’t invited. The only contact real journalists had was through a conference-call to the shindig, and they were barred from asking any questions. In short, this was a completely fake arrangement designed only to make FEMA look better.

In my eyes this is yet another step that the US government is taking towards a dictatorship styled on what Stalin did in the Soviet Union. I’m pretty sure that the land of the free and the brave will soon be turned into something straight out of Animal Farm, with all the George W-clones running around shouting “four legs good, two legs bad” and making sure that some are created more equal than others.

What FEMA did was propaganda. It was a lie. It was not an accident, and only due to the US now being so heavily based on lies do they get away with a “oops, our bad” rather than having heads roll.

It’s a sad day for democracy and freedom in the USA.

Found through Slashdot

One of the most annoying things with many blogs is that the owner has disabled the commenting function. There is no way to input any response to what the author has written, whether it is to criticize the author or provide additional facts. Admittedly, the dark side of commenting is inviting trolls or spam, but there’s always a way to protect oneself against such annoyances. The best defense against trolls is growing a thick skin, and spammers can be thwarted with basic filtering.

I’ve surfed around a bit, and found several blogs where the author doesn’t want comments. In some cases I can respect that, but in most cases it’s just the author putting himself on a high horse rather than interacting with his readers. I quickly grow tired of these sites, regardless of their eventual qualities.

Whenever I see a blog with a disabled or missing comment-function I see a poser. A wannabe. Someone who wants to be trendy and blogging, but doesn’t actually want to participate in a community. The person simply wants to preach his/her opinion rather than evolving through interaction. It’s just like people who bike around on fixed-gear bikes and carry messenger bags despite never having worked as a bike-messenger. They’re posers trying to act a part but without the culture and experience.

So, are you a poser? A wannabe? Someone who wants the trendy confirmation, someone who wants to be able to say “yeah, I’m a blogger” whenever you talk with strangers? Then stop killing the comments. Embrace the interaction. If not, you’re just another poser.

EDIT: It should be clarified that the reason I went off on this rant was that before I started writing it I encountered a long string of blogs while surfing the web. Blogs that in my opinion didn’t merit to be called blogs, rather they were glorified old-style homepages. Several of these were full of preachy language (unlike myself, of course!) and stuffed to the brim with factual errors. This frustrated me since I wanted to comment that the facts they based their writings on were severely flawed, yet my voice had been strangled.

This grew even worse when I contemplated the multitude of celebrity-bloggers (i.e. celebrities who for whatever reason wants to add blogger to their list of “merits”) who run some mediafunded “blog” yet lacks every function that I think makes a blog - no comments, no permalinks, no easy way of finding entries, no pingbacks or trackbacks.

I apologize since I managed to miss this, and instead sounded like a rabid maniac.

I like stand-up comedy. Without a doubt one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen was Robin Williams dvd “Live on Broadway“. I’ve seen that thing somewhere around four or five times and the thing never gets boring. Pretty much anyone who’s seen it have laughed until they had problem breathing. This is a good score, since this type of comedy normally have to be experienced as part of an audience. Laughing ones ass of at a recording of it is a good benchmark.

I’ve never known who Jim Breuer was until about five minutes ago when I stumbled upon this clip on YouTube. I’d say the guy has potential, and he takes a somewhat controversial subject (alcohol) and makes fun of it.

There’s a movie coming out in December called “The Golden Compass” starring among others Nicole Kidman. It’s apparently based on the first book in a trilogy by a british writer named Philip Pullman. So far I haven’t paid much attention to it, other than dismissing it as a Narnia-ripoff by some movie-studio, cynically designed to separate viewers from their money.

This was until about ten minutes ago, when I learned that Philip Pullman is a convinced atheist, and that the trilogy of books (called His Dark Materials) is the anti-narnia. Mr Pullman even went so far as to say that his books are about killing the image of God inside childrens minds.

I like him already!

Of course, this has got all the biblenuts panties in very large twists, and of course they’re outraged that someone has the temerity to dare to question their “thruth”, and are warning good bible-waving christians all over the world that OMG THIS MOVIE WILL CORRUPT OUR CHILDREN AND MAKE THEM REJECT OUR DEPRECATED RELIGION OMG.

I read the Narnia-books when I was a kid. I’ve read them at least once when I was an adult. Regardless of my age I always got annoyed that Narnia essentially was hidden propaganda for christianity and God. Thus, I like this Philip Pullman-guy a lot now, and I’m contemplating reading these books just to give support for him. I’ll probably watch the movie as well.

I always get a big kick out of seeing Andreas mentioned in the newspapers (in Swedish). He really deserves every mention he can get, and now it seems that he’s receiving at least some mainstream-recognition.

Occasionally he gets mentioned in the smaller rags, but now Dagens Nyheter (The Daily News), one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden, mentions him and what he does.

So, what does he do? Well, it’s easier to say what he doesn’t do - he’s not an austronaut, he’s not a mutant, he’s not a loud-mouthed braggart obsessed with himself, and he certainly isn’t worthy of getting mentioned.

In fact, he’s a great guy. He’s talented, he’s humble and he gives away stuff for free. The neat part is he manages to make money off of giving stuff away for nothing. His design-templates power thousands if not millions of sites all over the internet, and he encourages people to modify his work to suit their own needs. One of his templates power MY blog, albeit somewhat modified.

I got to know Andreas back in 1995 I think. Since then he’s been a good friend and a loyal comrade. Anyone who’s met him will agree with me when I say that he’s about as great a guy as it’s physically possible to be. He’s also incredibly smart, and predicted long ago that the Internet would revolutionize the way we distribute and pay for music. Sure, it took ten years for it to become a reality, but his vision is slowly but surely coming true.

Give him a visit, download his templates and/or music, and say hi.

The number of superlatives used to describing the item stands in direct proportion to how interesting it really is. Also, the number of exclamation points used in connection with the description accentuates this fact.

2007 was the year of the triples. Three major franchises were squirting out their third installments; Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek and Spider-man was scheduled for the third time around the flagpole.

I’ve seen all three now, and boy… what a waste of time and money. Of the three, the Shrek-one was the least crappy even though it failed to be as funny and fresh as the previous two. At least it was funny and exciting part-ways through.

But the others didn’t have that benefit. I was very doubtful when bad reviews started pouring in about how the third movie featuring Peter Parker was essentially filtered crap. How could it be? It was the same director, same actors, same everything as the two previous ones - and those two were awesome. It wasn’t until I’d seen it that I agreed with most others. It just wasn’t very good. There were too many villains, too much plodding. The movie spread itself out very thin and everyone in it had to fight for screentime. As someone who had read the comics I felt somewhat cheated about the extreme over-simplification of the black suit/venom-subplot. Sure, I also agree with Ann-Sofie who said that for someone who hadn’t read the comics it didn’t matter.

Even so, I felt that it was a thin movie in every department except an overload of special effects.

Which brings me to the really big disappointment: the third Pirates of the Caribbean-movie, with the subtitle “At Worlds End”. If anyone can be called a waste of time combined with an overload of special effects it’s this movie. Golly gee, It’s been three days and I still cannot believe what a turd that thing was.

The first POTC was great fun. It brought back everything that was great and silly with the old swashbucklers of the 30’s and combined it with modern special effects. The characters were fun, fresh, and even though there were some superstitious stuff this was mostly a traditional pirates-and-swords affair. I had a blast with it, and I’ve seen it several times.

The second one expanded on the first, and started the descent into crapitude with the introduction of a confusing supernatural plot. I got a huge kick out of Davy Jones, and Bill Nighy was exellent in that part. Johnny Depp was crazy as ever. The plot was, well, acceptable and even though it got a little weird at times I still thought it was a decently enjoyable affair.

Oy vey. The third one. Again, I’d read some really harsh reviews when it opened but I assumed that there was some personal vendetta from the reviewers and that they were exaggerating. I was wrong. It was exactly as bad as they said it was. In fact, in my opinion it was even worse.

The third movie featuring Johnny Depp in pirate/drag-outfit is a complete shipwreck, pun intended. Somewhere along the line whatever shred was left of the story got lost in a psychotic explosion of supernatural gods and extremely confusing relationships between everyone and everything involved in it. The tip of this crazy iceberg for me was when Keith Richards sits down in a chair, in full pirate-regalia and STARTS STRUMMING A GUITAR. It was bad enough that he even went through with his little cameo, and even though I’m a bit impressed with him actually managing to say his lines I still say that GOOD GOD MAN, SHOW A LITTLE DIGNITY.

The first half of the film is like having your intestines dragged out of your body by an old dog while you’re still alive and conscious; It’s slow, it’s painful, and somehow it’s extremely boring at the same time. I mean, what was the reason behind having multiple Johnny Depps chasing peanuts and dragging ships through a white desert?

The second half of the film loses the viewer in some strange maelstrom of absurdity, with storms and jamaican goddesses and half-man-half-octopus-creatures screaming, shouting, dying and doing a hell of a lot of handwaving while trying to provoke anything more than a yawn from the viewer. The ending didn’t come soon enough for me, and the only good thing was that the viewing had to be interrupted by phonecalls from actual people. Thankfully, otherwise I might not have managed the onslaught of watching At Worlds End.

When it comes to music I’m a huge snob. Really. No kidding. I wrinkle my nose at pretty much anything that plays on the radio. I think of myself as a musical connoisseur and spend hours boning up my knowledge of various styles and bands that definitely will never be played on MTV. My girlfriend Ann-Sofie has several times called me a musical elitist, and I hate to admit that there’s a large grain of truth in that.

I do however like a very wide range of music. I’m into most everything from classical music (a little of the Ludwig Van) to ethnic stuff such as celtic and swedish folkmusic, to bluegrass, to some genuine country-twang, to death metal, grindcore, and then over to a plethora of electronic music. But the common thread is that most music will never see airtime on commercial radio.

So, that’s why I’m kicking myself. I’ve totally fallen in love with a commercially produced tune that’s being played all over the place. I hate my black-clad self for liking this damn song so much, yet I cannot stop listening to it’s intentionally infectious groove.

The last time this happened was sometime in 2001 when I had a brief infatuation with Jennifer Lopez “Play“. Most of that love-affair was due to whatever producers decision to use grinding analogue-sounding synthesizers combined with old-skool drum-machines. The heat cooled off after a few weeks and I haven’t listened to the song ever since.

But now I’m head over heels for the Sugababes song “About You Now“. I’ve had it on repeat about a billion times today, and so far I haven’t grown tired of it. The more cynical part of me is certain that the entire song is constructed specifically to appeal to as many people as possible, with proven hooks and arrangement.

And it worked on me. Dammit, I should be stronger than this! Damn you, damn you all to hell!

Back around 1996 I got my very first exposure to the phenomenon called MP3. This was far before filesharing and P2P-networks, back then MP3’s were traded directly with friends and hoarded like gold. Very few actual files circulated, and whenever something fresh appeared it was furiously distributed among my friends.

Since computing power and storage space back then was much more limited the hoarded collections were of limited size. A collection consisting of maybe 30-40 files was considered absolutely gigantic, and having a computer that could play back a song without stuttering was considered quite powerful. The software players back then were a far cry from the limousine software of today. Back then the only available player was the Frauenhofer original, and it sucked quite badly.

None the less we were blown away by the possibilities of the format. A CD-quality song contained in less than five megabytes? It was unheard of! So, the few MP3’s that existed were preciously stored and enjoyed.

Of course this was complete anarchy. No one knew where most of the files originated, and in many cases we were quite dubious as to the correctness of song titles and artists that were attributed to the music contained in the file. But we were young and didn’t really care much about such pettiness. Like conspirators around a candle we talked of the legendary process of CREATING an MP3 file.

(After a while we learned how to make our own digital copies. Back then the encoding process took roughly 20 minutes per file, so it was a tedious process. This was also at the now relatively low bitrate of 128 kbps. Compare this with my current rig, which is of 2003-vintage yet encodes a 256 kbits MP3 in less than 30 seconds. Quite a difference.)

Now you have the rough backstory to my detective-work.

One of the songs that I listened a lot to back then was an intriguing techno-song that was attributed to Moby. The name of the song in question was supposedly “Hymn”. It sounded kind of like what Moby did back in the mid-90’s so no one was too skeptical about it. That is until a few days ago when I got a hankering for that exact song. I guess some part of me needed a trip down memory lane, and that song was the key to it all. So I set about trying to track the song down.

I quickly discovered that even though Moby did make a song called Hymn, it sounded nothing like the song I remembered. Thus I needed to figure out the real identity of the song.

The first thing I tried searching for was a memory of a sample being played in the intro of the song. Basically a female vaguely computer-sounding voice saying “We create a mental atmosphere”. I tried googling for this, but the only thing I learned was that it’s a very common sample appearing in at least a dozen different songs. I needed something that would narrow the search a bit.

After some hard concentrating I managed to remember a fraction of the lyrics. Something about the power and the glory, until my kingdom come. After several searches I discovered that there in fact was a song named Hymn, performed by a woman named Tina Cousins. After having listened to that song I was certain that I was barking up precisely the right tree. It didn’t fit quite right though, since Tina Cousins song was released in 2004.

Now that I had the title of the song everything else was a lot easier. Some brief googling and Wikipedia confirmed that Tina Cousins song was a cover. It was a cover of an old Ultravox song from the early 80’s. Again, that song was very close to what I heard inside my head, but it still wasn’t the right version. Wikipedia provided me with a list of people who had done covers of that song, one of which was Tina Cousins, and another artist on the list seemed very likely:

A cover produced by a german eletronic music-project called Music Instructor. They’d made a cover-version in 1995, and this fit nicely into the general timeframe. After listening to less than two seconds of Music Instructors version I knew I’d hit paydirt. This was the song I’d heard so many years ago.

Now I can close the case on this song. Music Instructor, Hymn. Original by Ultravox. Tina Cousins-cover in 2004.