Sunday, August 30, 2009

No more meaningless than anything else

The rumors are true. In less than a month I will be officially old. I'm not talking about 25 or some silly age that kids think is old.

I'm talking about the age that means there's no denying you're an adult. This is the age that makes you too old to think about dating someone in their twenties. Not because you don't want to, but because people in their twenties also think you're too old for it. (Naturally, if you're rich or famous these rules don't apply. In those rare cases you can afford to be any age.) I'm talking about the age when people who are really old have stopped saying, "You're not that old."

I can make myself feel better about my upcoming birthday by considering a few things. I only remember a handful of days and events from everything that happened before I was 14 or 15, so by that measure, none of the first decade or so should not count toward my age.

I mean, shit, when I was seven I was just sitting around an HO-scale model train set for like weeks at a time. That ain't livin'.

It wasn't until I started building cool shit that I really started living. When I was in the Scouts, I built a car that won the Pinewood Derby at my school. I got a big old trophy for that. Then I built a replica of Walt Disney World's Contemporary Resort Hotel out of Legos and entered it in a contest at the local mall. That won me $100 worth of Legos from Thornbury's Toys. A hundred dollars worth of Legos was a lot. These were 1980's dollars and I was a kid. It was like a gold mine (if you replaced the gold with Legos and the mine shaft with a mall toy store).

Things have changed since then. These days the Boy Scouts are basically a Christian militant group, Thornbury's is long out of business, and a hundred bucks for a kids' toys is maybe enough to get a Trapper Keeper with a couple Pac Mans on it... or whatever kids like these days. I don't know. I try not to look at them little shits. And the dollar? Hell, it ain't hardly worth seven kronor.

Something else that makes me feel better about my age is that when people try to guess it, they always guess it super low. I met a Swede just last weekend who gave it a whirl and was off by ten years. Ten years in the good direction, I should say.

Wow. Ten years ago. Those were also good times. Bill Clinton was president, the US Government was running a surplus, people had jobs and the dollar had value. There had only ever been one US war in Iraq and one President Bush - and we thought both of those were terrible. We really had no idea what madness was lurking around the corner. Nobody had even heard of Nickelback or "Hollaback Girl" yet. Precious times to be sure.

The third thing I think about when I want to not feel so old is that I didn't start drinking until I was 27. That is probably enough of a story for another day, but I think not drinking while you're going through all your first heartbreaks and hard knocks is probably a smart approach if you don't want to age too quickly.

Certainly no one can discount the youth-preserving effects of not getting married and not having kids. I hear it's different if their your own kids. Screaming kids that make it unpleasant for everyone else in the restaurant doesn't seem to bother you as much if they've already ruined the rest of your life.

Other people also like to pitch in from time to time try to make me feel better about my age. Some people say things like, "Forty is the new thirty." Well, this sounded like a pretty good deal but I looked into it, and contrary to popular belief, it turns out that forty is actually still forty.

My research revealed that no such official decree has been issued to alter the birth records of everyone born more than 40 years ago. In fact, I further discovered that thirty is neither the new twenty. It is still thirty. (Can you use the word 'neither' like that?)

I can remember when my parents turned forty and the avalanche of tongue-in-cheek "Over the Hill" birthday cards that accompanied it. I'm not so good at math, but I'm pretty sure that even if I start now, I won't be able to meet the deadline of having kids who remember my birthday next month.

There is honestly very little I can do to avoid the upcoming date.

I realize that even without this milestone (is it a kilometerstone in Europe?) I'm already at the age where it is inevitable that people who are younger than I am are doing things more awesome and more relevant. If I do something creative, it's probably not going to be nearly as cool or fresh as someone younger. Those youngsters are so edgy nowadays!

Case in point of someone younger than me who has excelled in life is the United States' new ambassador to Sweden, Matthew Barzun. Okay, he's barely younger than me. I'm 39 and he's 38.

He was appointed by President Obama some months ago, but last week he finally arrived on the scene in Sweden. Accompanied by much local fanfare and tradition, he arrived in a horse-drawn carriage to present his credentials to the King. (Good morrow, m'lord. I bear warm tidings unto thee on behalf of the President of the Colonies and other such old timey salutations.)

In a glowing profile, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper declared "The ambassador behind Obama's campaign success" and taped a video feature with him for their website, quizzing him on all things Swedish.

"The new ambassador from the United States had been in Sweden for just over a day when he was exposed to Dagens Nyheter's Sweden Test. The pressure is intense, but he passed it with flying colors," they wrote. Whew! He made us proud.

Like me, Barzun is also from Louisville. I don't know him personally, but we do have some mutual friends. He mentioned Louisville's own Will Oldham in the article as one of his favorite musicians. Whoa! I like Will Oldham, too!

We have a few other things in common as well. He started the Internet news company Cnet which was later sold to CBS for over a billion dollars. I started the social networking site EggFly which was later sold to Ikimbo 2.0 for less than a billion dollars.

He worked on the campaign that helped Barack Obama get elected to the presidency. I worked on the campaign that helped me not get elected to the Kentucky Senate.

I don't know how long he's been studying, but I think the only edge I may have over him is with the Swedish language. I have a feeling he has better teachers than I do. Kanske han kommer att ge mig ett jobb på ambassaden därför kunde jag studera gratis, eller bjuda in mig och mina svenska kompisar till en stor fest i alla fall! (Förlåt till allihop för att jag alltid mördat ditt språk.)

Matthew Barzun isn't the only impressive, inspirational person I've discovered lately who is younger than me.

A few weeks ago, I was going to meet some friends at the rooftop café of Stockholm's Kulturhuset, a massive, gorgeous, city-funded complex of art and theatre that is located in the center of the city.

While taking the escalators up and passing through the various floors of the building, an extensive installation of colorful, gritty paintings with cartoonish speech bubbles caught my attention. I had to stop and look. By no means do I speak excellent Swedish, however, I can read and understand simple things and, like anyone learning a language, you end up learning all the dirty and absurd stuff first.

These paintings - a few of which appear to the right throughout this story - were perfect for someone at my level of Swedish and even more perfect for someone with my sense of humor.

Just the title of the exhibition and the first piece killed me. It depicts a crazed doctor talking to his patient, a little boy with a teddy bear head: "Eh, it's nothing so harmful, it's only a little AIDS." That is also the title of the relentless book she has out that is a collection of her work, available online at this link.

(My apologies if my translations are not up to par. "Farligt" for example, like a lot of Swedish words, has many meanings: harmful, dangerous, critical, hot, risky, perilous, hazardous. Swedish pronunciation and context seem like two additional languages. Maybe "critical" would be better than "harmful" but either way it's hilarious. Or better yet, maybe these are serious paintings that deal with important social issues but my Swedish is so bad and my humor is so sick that I think they're funny.)

There are dozens of pieces in the exhibition and because of the language I have returned to Kulturhuset a few times to see them again and to make sure I'm getting it all. Some of the pictures have so much peripheral detail in addition to the main characters that it's kind of impossible to see it all. One giant wall of maybe four by five meters is covered in tiny black and white drawings.

After I got over the initial shock and delight of how incredibly hysterical I thought it all was, a few things hit me.

When I was looking at the art without knowing anything about the artist, I suppose I presumed the pieces must have been created by a grizzled, cranky, old man in a wooden shack somewhere, scrawling out his manic manifesto one giant frame at a time, in a mess of paint and tireless endeavor.

I was wrong about all of that. The artist, in fact, is a young Swedish woman named Sara Granér. She's 28 and lives in Malmö, Sweden's third largest city.

After finding an article about her on the Dagens Nyheter site (and this one and this one), well, again, no surprises, but she's cute, too. (What did you expect? Of course she's cute, she's Swedish. Everyone and everything in this whole damn country is cute. The language, the holidays, the people, the money, the furniture, the signs. The public buses have curtains! Finding a girl in Sweden who isn't cute is as hard as finding one who doesn't smoke.)

The other thing that occurred to me when thinking about her art and its abrasive commentaries - using everything including serious diseases, children, authority, careers and life itself as fodder for jokes - or a dude with two jagged-sharp knives, dressed up as one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, berating a sad, overachieving child with a puppy's head for having taught himself how to become an engineer - ...where was I? Oh yes, it occurred to me that something this awesome would never be hung anywhere near a publicly-funded arts space in the United States. Certainly not in Kentucky.

Of course, if it were, people would cry about how offensive it is, a media frenzy would ensue until a public apology was issued, the art was taken down and the curator was out looking for a job. God forbid if any of the pictures had filthy boobies on them.

It reminded me of the advertisements that were posted around Stockholm earlier this year with the slogan "God is not probable." These ads were for the Humanists and advocated a discounting of religion's role in society, and a larger separation of church and state.

Ironically, the über-conservative Clear Channel Communications owns the billboards where the ads were displayed. Yes, the same company that took Howard Stern off its broadcast stations prompting his move to satellite radio. Would Clear Channel have accepted any such ads in an American city? Not a chance.

Here in Sweden, something like Sara Granér's art which would be considered inflammatory or disrespectful in America, is hung in a public space. Not only did it make me laugh, it made my life better by getting me excited about discovering something new and fun. Sure, it's not for everybody. I saw some older people walking by it who didn't get it or think it was funny, but that's all they did. They walked by and left it for the people who did enjoy it. Not everybody has to agree with you, your religion, your morals, your views.

For America's self-appointed reputation as a free country, it has always seemed to me like there are so many things you just can't say in America. So few people dare to touch topics like misunderstanding or disease with humor for fear of offending someone. Obviously, these are the topics that could maybe use a little humor.

Americans are always told about - and repeating it back to each other - how they live in a free country and the rest of the world just doesn't have it so good. I really hate saying things like this, but I have been to twenty other countries and it only took a few of them for me to start seeing that the United States is one of the least free of the bunch. You don't even have to go to Holland or Denmark to find it. More freedom is as close as Canada.

What's it like to live in a country where the police aren't feared or regarded as adversaries? What's it like to not feel like you have to look behind you when you're walking alone at night? What's it like to not have to worry about the cost if someone in your family gets sick? What's it like to be able to go to college if you want to? What's it like to be surrounded by educated people who speak multiple languages fluently? Freedom isn't how many guns you can own without a background check. Freedom is feeling like you'll never need a gun.

I say a lot of nice things here about Sweden and the Swedish people. It's all true, but perhaps one thing I don't say enough is that I am an American. I still am and I probably always will be. Of course it is so nice to be in Sweden and to see how things can be done in ways that benefit the general good of the people. A lot of these commentaries eventually bring me back to a sadness for America. The people in the United States deserve this quality of life as well. Everyone on Earth deserves it. It's not just health care, public transit, social services, education, and information, it's a prevailing air of dignity, respect, and the feeling that we're all sharing the experience of life. It's a circle and all of those things exist because of each other.

We really are all in this together and it is only to everyone's benefit if we make the journey as comfortable as we can for as many as we can. It is to the rich man's benefit that his city is devoid of poverty and slums. It is to the corporation's benefit to have healthy workers. It is to your benefit that your neighbor went to college. It is to all your neighbors' benefit that you don't lose your job.

Earlier in this story, I mentioned that I'm at the age where younger people are doing more amazing things than I am. I know it's always a bad idea to measure your own accomplishments against those of anyone else. Different people are afforded different opportunities and unique upbringings, and as a result, each person is capable of a different set of exploits.

Some people get their 10,000 hours of practice in at an early age and others are in the right places at the right times for things to click in the proper sequence.

It really doesn't matter if Sara Granér or Matthew Barzun are younger than me - or better looking or have more money or draw funnier pictures or speak better Swedish. What matters is that they have opened my imagination and entertained me. It is to my benefit that they exist and are doing what they're doing. It makes things more pleasant for me.

This is the kind of thinking that needs to be going on. We've seen what has happened to the quality of life in the United States as the richest 1% of people have continued to amass more and more wealth and resources. It has happened at the expense of everyone else.

You could argue that capitalism can't be sustained because there is only a fixed amount of resources on the planet or that socialism doesn't benefit those who are able to work harder. Sweden is using both: capitalism where its appropriate to grow business and socialism to address the common needs everyone has. Maybe there are some things that shouldn't turn a profit. (Gasp! What? You want us to take care of somebody because it's the right thing to do? Sounds expensive. Shoot me a message, we'll hook up tomorrow. Sorry, bro, I have a 1:30 tee time.)

Sweden isn't perfect, nothing is, but it's far from the out-of-control scenario we see playing out in Washington, where instead of trying to help people survive it's a madhouse of already fattened pigs at the trough, stabbing each other in the back to get their friends a bigger piece of the pie.

Homer Simpson once professed in awe, "Wow, Mr. Burns, you're the richest man in the world. You own everything!" To which the frail, old man replied thoughtfully, "Yes, but I'd give it all away to have just a little bit more."

The real reason to not worry about comparing your accomplishments to anyone else's amounts to the ultimate way we're all in the same boat: no matter what anyone else will ever achieve, they will ultimately die.

You know the guy who invented the light bulb? He's dead. The guy who figured out the Earth revolves around the sun? Dead. The guy who invented the swivel chair, the pedometer and wrote the Declaration of Independence? Also dead.

Someday even I - the guy who told you that the dude who invented the swivel chair, the pedometer and wrote the Declaration of Independence were the same person - yes, one day even I will meet my maker and/or become just another 6-foot-long worm feeder underneath a beautiful Kentucky hillside stocked with hundreds of the same. All this, not any time soon, I hope.

As Charles de Gaulle famously declared, "The cemeteries are full of indispensable men." Quite an observation from some asshole who is now sleeping in the bone yard surrounded by indispensable men. Charles de Gaulle? Super French and super dead.

So is life completely meaningless? Yeah, I suppose it is, but no more meaningless than anything else.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Axelsberg Station


The Tunnelbana Station in the Stockholm neighborhood of Axelsberg has the name of the area spelled out in a giant glass, concrete, stone and iron sculpture that stretches the entire length of the platform. Each letter of the name "Axelsberg" is between 3 and 4 meters tall and built into a recessed embankment.

This art installation was put into the Axelsberg station in 1983 by artists Leif Bolter, Veine Johansson, Inga Modén and Gösta Wessel.

Because the platform is so long, it's hard to really see the entire word at once. I tried to capture the entire thing by taking a photo of each letter and then stitching the pictures together. The result is what you see below. It didn't turn out as seamlessly as I had hoped it would, but it was a fun thing to try. As a matter of fact, it's pretty bad. So much for trying to capture "Shoulder Mountain."


Click to view full size

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Picture perfect


Sometimes when I'm in Stockholm, I happen to glance at something and think to myself, "Wow, that really looks like Sweden." Of course, it is Sweden. In fact, Sweden is all around me, as far as I can walk, but I suppose I'm thinking more that it looks staged or like a stock photo someone would use in a text book or travel brochure.

Those moments are convenient because I can get so much of Sweden in just one photograph. In this one, so many typically Swedish elements are represented: picnics, nature, bicycles, baby carriages, vivid colors, general relaxing, healthy people, many with blonde hair and wearing black clothes.

Upon later investigation of the photo, I realized that of the eleven people in the picture, only one of them is a man. Maybe that's part of why it looks so nice. And that one man is partially obscured behind a garbage can. Go on, git! You're mussin' up my pitcher!

Sunday, August 23, 2009

The Sky

The sky is a monster of gases that blankets the planet and protects us from the harsh nothingness of outer space. As an added bonus to this monumental task, it is sometimes really pretty or interesting to look at.

The best part about the sky is that it's free. All you have to do is look up and there it is. Another very cool feature is that it never looks the same twice. Wait just a few minutes and it will be totally different.

Lots of people take pictures of the sky for all these reasons, but it seems sunset photos are the most popular ones. Photographs never quite capture it, though. It's hard to fit something into a few inches of a photo that in reality is all around you, everywhere you look.

Nonetheless, I also continue to try to do this with a beat-up pocket camera. Here are a few of my latest feeble attempts to point-and-shoot something that is impossible to reproduce.


30 July, 9:56 pm


14 August, 1:10 pm


14 August, 7:50 pm


15 August, 9:00 pm


17 August, 2:17 am (8-second exposure)


17 August, 2:28 am (15-second exposure)


18 August, 4:23 pm


18 August, 6:39 pm

Friday, August 21, 2009

Hermans and Gröna Lund

My favorite restaurant in Stockholm is Hermans which is a huge vegetarian buffet that is open late. Not late like Louisville-late, but like 10:00 or 11:00 at night. That's pretty late for Sweden.

The restaurant has tons of outdoor seating and it sits high up on a cliff overlooking the city. On a pretty day the food and the view cannot be beat. I usually leave with a food baby in my stomach, that is, if they don't have to roll me out of there carrying a bucket in my lap.

I have been coming to Hermans for years and it is always a special treat that I am so near to it now. Almost every time I eat there I have a moment when I'm looking at the skyline of Stockholm and it strikes me that this is where I live. It's really something special.

On the day I made this 180° panoramic photo, there was some type of old-timey German ship docked nearby. You can see it on the left side of the image, partially obscuring the Old Town.


Click to view full size


Toward the right side of the picture, across the water, you can see Gröna Lund amusement park, where I was recently brought out of my quiet Stockholm shell on the Fritt Fall Tilt ("Free Fall Tilt"... you probably could have figured out that one). It's the tallest white tower in the photo and it's one of those vertical-drop rides.

I used to be really good at these kinds of things, but that was when I was living in Extreme America. Adrenaline is something that doesn't exist in such high quantities in Scandinavia.

This particular vertical-drop ride is not as tall as the Drop Tower at Kings Island near Cincinnati, which I've ridden several times, but if you're out of practice, it's equally terrifying. Fritt Fall Tilt is 80 meters tall (262 feet) while the Drop Tower is 96 meters tall (315 feet). Drop Tower also rotates on the way up and takes 40 riders at once, while Fritt Fall Tilt takes twelve.

"Tilt" comes into the name when you reach the top of the tower. In the pause at the top, before you have a chance to enjoy your view of Stockholm from 26 stories up, the seats lean forward toward the ground. Shit, my hands are getting sweaty as I type this. Holy fucking shit.

Iida and Erik have a video of me riding this monster, but I don't want to embarrass myself by posting it here. I'd hate for everybody to see how I'm holding on for dear life, like a little girl. It helps if you hold on, you know? Like if something goes wrong with the machine, your little hands can save you.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Dropping like flies

Being an unmarried member of the Swedish Royal Family has been going out of style this year... and fast.

About six months ago, before I arrived in Sweden, both of the Swedish princesses were single, well, unbetrothed. Today, they're both engaged to be married.

First, in the spring, 31-year-old Crown Princess Victoria got engaged to her longtime boyfriend, a businessman and gym owner named Daniel Westling.

At the time I thought, "If you can't have the crown princess, at least the cute one who likes to party is still single." She's the one I liked anyway. Well, now, Madeleine is engaged, too. Curses!

Last week, the Aftonbladet newspaper announced (a day before anyone else) that Princess Madeleine, 27, had secretly become engaged to her boyfriend ... pfft! ... some handsome attorney (they have lawsuits in Sweden?) a casanova named Jonas Bergström ... And in fact, this engagement has been a secret for more than two months.

Great! Two wasted months of writing love letters and riding my bike past the Royal Palace at night to see if her bedroom light is on! (I'm kidding, of course. I don't have a bicycle.)

Keeping such a high-profile secret in Sweden is almost as difficult as finding a can of refried beans. Furthermore, the fact that the engagement of the last remaining Swedish princess was kept undiscovered for two months from the obsessive Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet is as flabbergasting as the fact that both princesses became engaged within a period of four months.

What it all really means, though, as I'm sure my faithful readers already understand, is that barring some unforeseen events which could break off one or more of the engagements, it appears that all my hopes of marrying into the Swedish Royal Family have, for the moment, been dashed. Brutally crushed, really. It's a sad day. I, too, may have to marry a commoner. Ugh... I shudder at the very thought of being touched by any of their filthy, cake-eating hands.

I know what the Swedes reading this are thinking: "Prince Carl Phillip is still single." Wink, wink. Sure, maybe I could get a job as his chauffeur. It's kind of a long, old story about his great grandfather, King Gustav V.

Yet, despite any lessons he could have gleaned from his great grandfather about the dangers of driving too fast around curves, Prince Carl Phillip, 30, has become an enthusiast of just that. He's a race car driver.

"I see here on your resumé that you are the Prince of Sweden, the Duke of Värmland and you drive really fast in circles. Is there any other experience you'd like us to know about?"

He seems like a nice guy, but suffice it to say that I would have preferred one of the girls.

It's just that both of these birds were single forever and within a few months of me being in the country they both got engaged. Suspicious, isn't it?

I mean, it's like as soon as I get here, they both suddenly decide to run off and married to basically any old guy they've been dating for seven years.

What is it about women that makes them so interested in men who are handsome, successful and have steady incomes? Don't they know that all the real excitement is with guys who are courageous enough to have no idea where next month's rent money is coming from?

While the media coverage of Madeleine's engagement... whoa, give me a second... I just threw up in my mouth a little bit. Sorry, let me start that over...

While the media coverage of Madeleine's engagement has been fairly extensive, it really hasn't matched the circus that surrounded Victoria's. Perhaps that's why they kept it a secret - to prevent such a frenzy.

The media is covering every aspect of the story down to the trivial details.

One story in the Metro newspaper analyzed reports that the King "clicks better with Jonas" than Daniel, saying that Jonas had a more proper upbringing and already knew how to behave at fancy events.

Aftonbladet reported that there was a secret meeting between the sisters in order to make sure it was okay that Madeleine and Jonas weren't stealing Victoria and Daniel's thunder by getting engaged just a couple months later. It's totally true. I believe everything I read in Aftonbladet, The National Enquirer and The Bible.

A separate article in the Stockholm City paper was essentially an obituary of Madeleine's party-going lifestyle. The headline announces their investigation of "the impression she made." The spread went into retrospective detail about her all-night ragers and showcased some of the fashions and styles she made famous.

City credits "Madde" with helping to popularize wearing oversized sunglasses at any time of day among the girls in Östermalm - "like in Hollywood," it says - and Canada Goose winter jackets. Those jackets are crazy-popular here, rivaled only by the locally produced Fjäll Räven coats which are ubiquitous in Sweden.

"She got the name 'party princess," it says, but "It is over now. Madeleine's engagement with Jonas Bergström means the end of Stureplan's big party era." Wow, sounds like marriage really does equal death.

That story was accompanied by a photo of her ex Erik Granath groping her in public. I'm sure the King clicked royally with that.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

180° View from Skinnarviksberget

The rocky hills at Skinnarviksberget are a fantastic place to relax, have a picnic or just to take in a panoramic view of Stockholm. I was doing all of those things when I made this wide photo montage of the city recently from "The Rocks."


Click to view full size


To the far right is Långholmen and to the far left are Gamla Stan and part of Slussen. Straight ahead is Kungsholmen.


Here are a couple of Swedes enjoying the same experience.

Monday, August 10, 2009

360° view from Västra Skogen

Another panoramic view of Stockholm. This one is from a hilltop in the area known as Västra Skogen whose name means "western forest."


Click to view full size

Friday, August 07, 2009

This tastes weird

Sometimes in Sweden it's a little difficult to find some of the foods I really enjoyed in America.

My favorite peanut butter is called Jif. I was so excited to find it here, but I when I put it on a sandwich it just didn't taste right. Maybe it wasn't fresh or the recipe was a little different.

Oh well, at least it got rid of my sore throat. Completely. I don't have a throat anymore.

Is this thing on? Hello? Check, check... one-two... one-two...

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Doorbells and elevators


One of my favorite reappearing signs in Sweden is this one that is posted near many elevators.

Some of the elevators here don't have automatic doors that open and close for you. Instead you have to pull or push the door open, like going into a regular room.

This sign is telling you that there is a danger of being crushed inside if you transport large objects in the elevator. Something like this garbage can could get hooked on the door frame and, well... I just feel so bad for that poor bastard who met his maker on top of a garbage can.


This is a creative doorbell panel we saw recently on a walk in Stockholm. Instead of naming the apartments with letters or numbers, this building has them named after the months of the year. Very cool.

Monday, August 03, 2009

Wait! It's not what you think!

A word of warning to our more impressionable readers: Today's story may include some risqué language, namely English.

No coverage of Swedish culture would be complete without an article about the abundance of common words in the Swedish language that look like dirty English words.

Perhaps nothing could illustrate it better than this advertisement in a recent newspaper with the headline "Slutspurt!"

English-speaking people who see this headline might expect it to be the title of an incredibly shocking pornographic film - one featuring lots of sluts and lots of... well, I'll let you use your imagination.

Below the headline, there's a vacuum cleaner, a wine rack and a washing machine. Oh shit! This movie's gonna be sick!

Don't warm up your BitTorrent just yet. This is actually an ad for a clearance sale of home appliances. Slutspurt is Swedish for "final sprint" and basically means that the sale is almost over.

Slut (pronounced "sloot") means finished, closed, ending, and about a dozen other similar things. Slut is just one of many Swedish words that look suspicious. In fact, the word for "look" is another one: titta. Yes, the English word for something you're not supposed to look at is almost exactly the word for "look" in Swedish.

The Swedish word for "vacuum cleaner" is dammsuga, but as I've just learned, if you leave out one of the M's it becomes damsuga which means "lady sucker" instead of "dust sucker." Maybe it can stay in the dirty movie.

Fartkontroll is not a new medicine for people who eat a lot of beans, it's a radar speed trap. Fart means "speed" or a way to drive. For example, a garage entrance may have the sign infart. Sounds painful, right?

Suppose you see a picture of a group of men in the newspaper with the caption, "Sex killar." Settle down, they're not in any danger of being arrested. Sex means six. Killar means guys. These "six guys" may be quite the opposite of what you first suspected.

And, of course, bra means good. All you hippies hear that? Bra equals "good!"

In the not-so-dirty but equally confusing category, eleven means "the student" and stapla is to "stack" not "staple" and krimpa is to "staple" not "crimp."

Gift means "married." A bit suggestive about what you're supposed to bring to the party?

If someone shouts "Lycka till!" at you, they're not telling you to put your tongue on a garden implement, they're wishing you "good luck."

One of the words that confused me the most when I first visited is klar which sometimes means "clear" or "ready" but on a computer or ATM it means "finish" or "confirm."

Kram is not a way to shove something together, well, not exactly. It means "hug."

Surprisingly, it's perfectly acceptable to have someone's puss on your face in public. Puss means "kiss."

However, kissa is not something you want someone to do on your face. Kissa means to "pee."

I could go on, I mean, the collection of these words is virtually limitless, but I know you are probably at work right now and I don't want your boss to walk in and see you reading a web page that has puss, sex and slut all over it. You can thank me later.
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