I’ve been wanting to adopt a cat ever since I moved Gothenburg over a year ago. Actually I’ve been wanting to adopt a cat ever since Uddevalla, but the conditions then and there were never right. I’d looked into adopting from a local animal shelter or cat rescue, but they always seemed to have some rather stringent adoption prerequisites. These are based more on their particular cat ownership ideas and beliefs and less on actual science or expert advice. For example, they believe cats need constant companionship and therefore they require that you already have at least one other cat or a dog so the newly-adopted cat won’t ever be left on its own. If you don’t have another cat or a dog then they require you to adopt an additional cat. However, unlike dogs, cats do not require constant championship. Any cat expert or veterinarian will tell you that cats are solitary creatures and perfectly happy to be left on their own all day.
Some of these organizations also insist on visiting and inspecting your home to make sure it’s suitable, both before and after the adoption. Additionally, they strongly recommend (if not require) that the cat has access to the outdoors. In a way I can understand these requirements since many of these rescue cats came from some pretty bad situations, but since there’s such a huge number of adoptable cats needing good homes and many good people willing to adopt them, they should really consider easing up on the adoption requirements.
Well, I wanted only one cat and the cat was definitely going to be indoor-only, so adopting from a shelter wasn’t really an option for me. Therefore, a few months ago I began checking regularly the listings of Blocket, which is a online classified ad website that covers the whole of Sweden. You can set the parameters for what you want to buy and where, so it’s quite convenient to use. At first I had a very specific idea of what kind of cat I wanted, which I altered later when it proved too difficult to find. I wanted an young adult male, neutered, vaccinated, and indoor-only. Oh, and he had to be cute, of course. It didn’t seem too much to ask but apparently it was. I did find a couple of kitties who met all the requirements but who just weren’t cute enough. I can be quite picky about that.
Then I found the perfect cat that met every single requirement. We got in touch with the owner and made arrangements to pick the cat up later in the week. However, fate intervened at the last minute. The day before we were going to pick up the cat, the owner informed us he had given it to his sister. She had told him that she wanted to take the cat and he felt that he couldn’t really say no to her since she was family. I was devastated when I found out I wouldn’t be getting a cat after all.
Then a few weeks later I saw an ad for an absolutely gorgeous green-eyed golden brown tabby female. Her owner worked full-time and just didn’t have time to take care of her. Apart from being a female, this cat met all of the requirements. She wasn’t just cute; she was a real beauty. So, we headed down the very next day to pick her up. I held her on my lap all the way home and she was remarkably calm. She didn’t much like being in the car, but she didn’t freak out and try to hide under the seat. She stayed on my lap the whole time.
Now, I’ve brought home new cats before and I was fully prepared for her to run and hide under the nearest piece of furniture. Sometimes they’re so freaked out that they don’t come out for days. However, when I set her down on the floor for the first time, she didn’t run under the couch, but began to sniff the floor and everything within sniffing distance. Then she moved to the walls. After walking around the perimeter of the apartment three or four times and sniffing carefully all the walls and corners, she flopped down in the middle of the floor as if she’d been living here for years. I was so happy I nearly cried. It took her only a few hours to get settled. We’ve had her for two weeks now and she’s become the queen of the household.
I never really considered myself much of a Michael Jackson fan. I never bought any of his albums. However, once initial shock wore off and the reality of his death hit me, I suddenly felt incredibly sad. It was like part of my childhood just died.
Despite his recent legal troubles and increasingly bizarre behavior, he was the most outstanding entertainer of my generation. Here is one of his greatest live performances:
In case you hadn’t heard already, President Obama swatted a fly during a recent CNBC interview, and PETA is none too pleased about it. Here’s the video in question, during which the President demonstrates his James Bond coolness and kills the fly in a very presidential manner: swiftly and decisively. Afterwards he celebrates for a few seconds before getting back to the interview:
The problems of over-population, animal abuse/cruelty/neglect, and the inhumane conditions of industrial meat farms apparently insufficient to keep them occupied, PETA has stated for the record that, “We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals. We believe that people, where they can be compassionate, should be, for all animals.” They’re even going to send President Obama one of those humane bug catchers as a gift. How very thoughtful of them.
A PETA spokesman went on to say: “We wish he hadn’t done it.” It seems that PETA does a lot of wishful thinking these days, having become increasingly out of touch with sanity and reality. Most recently they started what must be the silliest PR campaign in history: to change the word “fish” to “sea kitten.” The idea behind this is that such a name change would put people off from going fishing or eating fish. In their own words:
“…fish need to fire their PR guy—stat. Whoever was in charge of creating a positive image for fish needs to go right back to working on the Britney Spears account and leave our scaly little friends alone. You’ve done enough damage, buddy. We’ve got it from here. And we’re going to start by retiring the old name for good. When your name can also be used as a verb that means driving a hook through your head, it’s time for a serious image makeover. And who could possibly want to put a hook through a sea kitten?”
Makes sense to me….(not)
PETA’s compassion for flies is entirely misplaced. They deserve no sympathy at all. For one thing they aren’t even animals. They are disease-carrying, food-contaminating insects that lay their eggs in shit. And as for “sea kittens,” PETA doesn’t seem to understand that changing the name of something does not change what that thing is.
A “sea kitten” by any other name is still a slimy fish.
Cuz I’s all-powurful, ahmnipitent being. Mizz Kitteh come back latur. Heer I am makinsg teh yoonivurse:
Nao, you must wreed furst chaptur of teh LOLcat Bible:
Boreded Ceiling Cat makinkgz Urf n stuffs
1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.4 An Ceiling Cat sawed teh lite, to seez stuffs, An splitted teh lite from dark but taht wuz ok cuz kittehs can see in teh dark An not tripz over nethin.5 An Ceiling Cat sayed light Day An dark no Day. It were FURST!!!1
6 An Ceiling Cat sayed, im in ur waterz makin a ceiling. But he no yet make a ur. An he maded a hole in teh Ceiling.7 An Ceiling Cat doed teh skiez with waterz down An waterz up. It happen.8 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has teh firmmint wich iz funny bibel naim 4 ceiling, so wuz teh twoth day.
9 An Ceiling Cat gotted all teh waterz in ur base, An Ceiling Cat hadz dry placez cuz kittehs DO NOT WANT get wet.10 An Ceiling Cat called no waterz urth and waters oshun. Iz good.
11 An Ceiling Cat sayed, DO WANT grass! so tehr wuz seedz An stufs, An fruitzors An vegbatels. An a Corm. It happen.12 An Ceiling Cat sawed that weedz ish good, so, letz there be weedz.13 An so teh threeth day jazzhands.
14 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has lightz in the skiez for splittin day An no day.15 It happen, lights everwear, like christmass, srsly.16 An Ceiling Cat doeth two grate lightz, teh most big for day, teh other for no day.17 An Ceiling Cat screw tehm on skiez, with big nails An stuff, to lite teh Urfs.18 An tehy rulez day An night. Ceiling Cat sawed. Iz good.19 An so teh furth day w00t.
20 An Ceiling Cat sayed, waterz bring me phishes, An burds, so kittehs can eat dem. But Ceiling Cat no eated dem.21 An Ceiling Cat maed big fishies An see monstrs, which wuz like big cows, except they no mood, An other stuffs dat mooves, An Ceiling Cat sawed iz good.22 An Ceiling Cat sed O hai, make bebehs kthx. An dont worry i wont watch u secksy, i not that kynd uf kitteh.23 An so teh…fith day. Ceiling Cat taek a wile 2 cawnt.
24 An Ceiling Cat sayed, i can has MOAR living stuff, mooes, An creepie tings, An otehr aminals. It happen so tehre.25 An Ceiling Cat doed moar living stuff, mooes, An creepies, An otehr animuls, An did not eated tehm.
26 An Ceiling Cat sayed, letz us do peeps like uz, becuz we ish teh qte, An let min p0wnz0r becuz tehy has can openers.
27 So Ceiling Cat createded teh peeps taht waz like him, can has can openers he maed tehm, min An womin wuz maeded, but he did not eated tehm.
28 An Ceiling Cat sed them O hai maek bebehs kthx, An p0wn teh waterz, no waterz An teh firmmint, An evry stufs.
29 An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, the Urfs, I has it, An I has not eated it.30 For evry createded stufs tehre are the fuudz, to the burdies, teh creepiez, An teh mooes, so tehre. It happen. Iz good.
31 An Ceiling Cat sayed, Beholdt, teh good enouf for releaze as version 0.8a. kthxba
And at least in this case, “stuff” isn’t a euphemism for “bad stuff.” It just means mostly normal everyday and occasionally mildly pleasant stuff. My last day at work was the 30th of May, so recently I’ve been enjoying my first week of summer vacation. Last Tuesday Tobbe and I went out to Saltholmen, where there is a small-boat harbor and a swimming beach. There’s no sand out there, but no matter. Beach combers simply lie down on the big boulders. We forgot to bring the camera (naturally) but Google has graciously provided me with a nice aerial view of the harbor and shoreline:
From there we boarded a ferry which took us out to Brännö, one of the many picturesque islands in the Southern Gothenburg Archipelago:
We walked around this sleepy little island community for a couple of hours, had an excellent dinner at the local pub, and bought a book from an entirely unattended used book shop. There was a sign asking patrons to leave the money in a can. We then took the ferry back to the mainland. It was a fun and relaxing day and I’d hope to repeat it quite soon. There are plenty more islands to explore.
In other news, I’ve recently been given moderator status on the Local’s discussion board . I enjoy policing the forums, although I can’t ban anyone (yet). As a duly-appointed representative of The Local: Sweden’s News in English I felt it was my duty to attend a Local-sponsored event last Thursday at the local casino. It was supposed to be an “International Mingle” where members of the English-speaking community were given the opportunity to get together and…well, mingle. At least that was the theory. In reality I met up with my friends, and although we shook a few hands and did some initial minimal mingling, we stayed in our little clique for the rest of the time we spent there. It was pleasant enough standing around drinking bottled Coors Light and other delightful beverages, helping ourselves to the free buffet, and engaging one another in some extremely ribald conversation topics.
By the time we left (around 9:30pm) it had started raining, so we (rather stupidly, in hindsight) took a cab to a pub that was only about 200 meters away from the casino. The cab driver grossly overcharged us for it too. The pub wasn’t very nice, so we each had one beer and (having learned our lesson) walked to another more suitable place. I stayed until a quarter past twelve, and then when I was somewhere between slightly tipsy and slobbering drunk (the best place to be) I headed home.
The only other thing I can think to report is that Tobbe and I are planning on spending the holidays with my family this year. I haven’t spent the holidays with my family since 2004, so I’m long over-due. I’ve got our flights all booked and now I need to start making a list of things I need to remember to do before we leave, and things we need to buy while we’re there. I try to stock up on certain things that are either too difficult or too expensive to buy here, such as contact lens solution. I bought several bottles of that the last time I was in the US (last June) but I ran out and had no choice but to buy some here. A four-ounce bottle of solution in the US costs as little as $5.99 and you can find it just about anywhere. In Sweden you can find it only at an optometrist’s office and they carry only one brand: (the most expensive one of course) Boston, which costs 125 crowns ($16).
Paying that much for a bottle of solution made my teeth hurt.
Sorry for not updating in what seems like forever. I’ve been pretty busy with work and life and honestly didn’t have anything worth posting on my mind. However, this story posted over on The Local is just too good to pass up. That pesky Jesus just keeps messing with (stupid) peoples’ heads. This time his face has appeared on a fried potato in a restaurant here in Sweden. The scientific word for this phenomenon (seeing faces in stuff) is pareidolia.
One thing I want to know is how come whenever a face is visible in food (or anything else for that matter), people automatically assume it’s the face of Jesus or the Virgin Mary? Just once I’d love to hear someone say, “Oh honey, look! The face of Keith Richards is in my Rice Krispies.”
Fried potato with ‘face of Jesus Christ’ for sale on eBay
A restaurant in southern Sweden has put a potato up for auction after staff discovered what they believed to be the face of Jesus Christ in a spud that “hopped out of the frying pan” earlier this week.
Restaurateur Sylvia Szepanski told The Local that she witnessed the first appearance of the “holy” vegetable first hand in the kitchen of her restaurant at the Söderslätt Golf Club, 20 kilometres south of Malmö.
“Our chef was frying some potatoes when suddenly one of them hopped out of the frying pan and set itself apart from the others.”
But opinions differed initially as to the nature of the alleged apparition. Szepanski’s voice turned to one of wonder as she reenacted the moment.
“I said, ‘Look, it’s the face of a child angel’.
“But the chef said, ‘No, it’s the face of Jesus’.”
Szepanski soon agreed that there was indeed something Christlike about the shapes visible in the fried peel and news of the potato Jesus was fed to the local media.
“We’ve had people coming here asking to see the potato. We have set it up in a sort of plastic crib in the kitchen,” she said.
But with business brisk, Szepanski said staff did not have time to welcome curious visitors into the kitchen. Instead the “miracle” root vegetable has been put up for auction on eBay, where there have so far been no bids.
Bishop of Lund Antje Jackelén was not immediately available for comment regarding the Lutheran Church of Sweden’s view on whether everyday items could attain a form of religious significance.
Just days after the operators of the Pirate Bay were convicted of being “accessories” to copyright infringement, it has emerged that the judge in the case is, in fact, a member of several copyright protection organizations, including the one bringing the case against the Pirate Bay. Although the judge insists that there was none, in what universe would this not be considered a conflict of interest?
A lawyer representing one of the men convicted in the Pirate Bay trial has called for a retrial after reports that the judge was a member of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives.
The judge in the Pirate Bay case, Tomas Norström, has been a member of several of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives, Sveriges Radio’s P3 news programme reports.
Peter Althin, the lawyer who represents Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde, has announced that he plans to demand a retrial.
“I will point that out in my appeal, then the Court of Appeal (Hovrätten) will decide if the district court decision should be set aside and the case revisited,” Althin said on Thursday.
Althin is very critical of the judge’s actions in the case and argues that the defence should have had an opportunity to review the circumstances.
“In the autumn I received information that a lay judge could have similar connections. I sent these to the court and the judge was excluded in order to prevent a conflict of interest. It would have been reasonable to then review this situation as well,” Althin said.
Ola Samuelsson, the lawyer representing Gottfried Svartholm Warg, concurred with Althin in his assessment of the situation.
“All types of interest conflicts are a problem for the judiciary. It should be a matter of course as a judge to ensure that you keep your house in order. This is a high profile case and that is an additional reason to keep a check,” Samuelsson said.
Samuelsson said on Thursday that he has not yet decided whether to join Per Althin and demand a retrial.
High profile attorney Leif Silbersky is one of a number of experts who concurred with Althin and Samuelsson in believing that judge Norström’s various memberships represent a conflict of interest.
“A retrial is a possibility, but in that case the lawyers will have to take this up immediately,” Silbersky told Sveriges Radio.
Pirate Party chairman Rickard Falkvinge has called for the verdict to be scrapped.
“The copyright lobby has really managed to bring corruption to Sweden,” he said in a statement.
One of the groups of which Norström is a signed up member is Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt (’the Swedish Copyright Association’), where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay.
The judge also sits on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws.
Norström argues that he was not however swayed in his judgement by involvement with copyright protection groups.
“My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest,” Norström told Sveriges Radio.
I wholeheartedly agree that verdict should be thrown out, but I don’t think a retrial is necessary. In fact, I think the operators of The Pirate Bay should be compensated for this.
Earlier today I was simply blown away by Susan Boyle’s performance of “I Dreamed a Dream” on Britain’s Got Talent. It’s something that has to be seen (and heard) to be believed.
Meanwhile, in my neck of the woods four lads from Borlänge, Sweden (never to be outdone by the Brits) treated the audience of Sweden’s Got Talent to a comparatively lowbrow performance that can be described as a kind of fan dance, in which the fans have been replaced with Swedish knäckebröd (crispbread). Again, it’s something that has to be seen to be believed. I laughed so hard I almost required medical attention. At one point, you can see one of the lad’s “talent” showing, so this video is mostly NSFW:
I adored the cries of “En gång till! En gång till! (One more time! One more time!) by what sounds like a large group of females in the audience. And when a dancer lost a piece of bread and one of the presenters tossed him another one…absolutely priceless.
Well, it’s all over folks. Both sides have stated their cases and the verdict is in. The biggest and baddest villains in the history of the world, otherwise known as the operators of The Pirate Bay, are guilty! GUILTY!! of the disgusting crime of being accessories to copyright infringement. Justice has prevailed! …uh, sort of. Wait a minute, is that even a crime at all?
I’ve been following the trial of the Pirate Bay these last few weeks. In case you’re not familiar with the details, the trial is well-documented over on The Local: Sweden’s News in English. The Pirate Bay is essentially a large search engine that is a bit more specialized than Google. Users type in the name of something, say, a film, and the site produces a list of links where that particular film can be found and downloaded. There are thousands of sites on the internet (including Google) that do the exact same thing. However, the operators of the Pirate Bay have always been very outspoken about their right to operate their site, and therefore they have been specially chosen to be made an example of in front of the entire class.
The thing is that most people, particularly the ones prosecuting the operators of TPB, do not understand what p2p file-sharing technology is or how it works. They believe that file-sharing is theft (rather than what it really is, which is sharing) and nothing will convince them otherwise. However, TPB wasn’t convicted of theft. They were convicted of being “accessories” to copyright infringement, which as far as I know isn’t a crime, or at least it wasn’t before this whole debacle. They had to make up a crime with which to charge these guys. They haven’t copied anything, uploaded any copyrighted files, or stored any copyrighted material on their servers. Therefore, they have not violated any copyrights. The most they’ve done is to point people in the direction of copyrighted files that other people have uploaded.
The MPAA/RIAA and their lawyers somehow think it makes more sense to blame The Pirate Bay for the fact that copies of their movies and/or music were uploaded (by persons unknown…not TPB) onto the internet. When asked why they didn’t go after the individuals who copied and uploaded the files in the first place, the witnesses for the prosecution replied that they “didn’t have the resources” for that, which seems like a rather feeble excuse. It’s just easier for them to shoot the messenger, as it were.
And before you start shouting, “Oh, those dirty thieves! They deserved whatever was coming to them!” keep in mind that you are in fact violating copyright right now, without even realizing it. A web browser, upon viewing a web page, caches a copy of every piece of that page: Images, text, code, etc. Whenever information is displayed on your computer it is actually stored (gasp!) on your computer (temporarily in your RAM or more permanently in cache-folders).
Now, the MPAA/RIAA and their lawyers expect everyone to adhere to the strictest interpretation of copyright law, meaning that every time someone knowingly or unknowingly copies a link, image, Mp3, etc., that is not specifically their own, that they have committed the hideous sin of copyright infringement. This means that everyone everywhere who has ever used the internet is a dangerous copyright-violating criminal.
Now that The Pirate Bay has been sufficiently chastised and made an example of, it will probably be only a matter of time before the entertainment industry starts going after Google/YouTube, and then every man, woman, and child on this planet with access to the internet. Why think small?
