This is from the run-down allotment gardens by the railway tracks near Stadsparken here in Lund.

Sergei's profile. There's always something diabolical about him ...

This is from around Easter.




I sewed a dress for me and a collar for Mitsu from the same fabric. But I think it suits Mitsu better than me ...


Mitsu doesn't want to step on the wet mud. She doesn't like getting her toes wet at home. On walkies, though, she doesn't care the least.

Sometimes (after an exam, or when I just feel lethargic in general) there just isn't anything better to do than to look for pictures of nice animals in the Google image search.

It's kind of like porn, but with furry animals. My most often searched topics:

1. Akitas (or Great Japanese Dogs, as the variation I like the most is called nowadays)


From http://www.firemanrocketry.com/shugo.htm

2. Furry pigs, such as mangalitzas or kune kune pigs


A mangalitza from http://www.zeneggen.ch/fauna/fauna.htm

3. Big, muscular horses, like belgian horses, north swedish horses or friesians


This big boy was recently for sale at http://www.hastnet.se

Last Sunday, me and Mihai went biking into the countryside near Gunnesbo. Mihai wanted to find a nice, big rape field to photograph.

After biking around for a while trying to find one, we came to a pond in the fields near Gunnesbo, where many birds were hanging around. There was a swan patrolling the waters, as well. On the other side of the pond, the female swan apparently was sitting in her nest, and the male was protecting her. Mihai took some paparazzi pictures of the swan, who was very cross that someone had dared come near his pond …

When we continued on the path from the pond, we came across a young rook, who seemed unable to fly. When we approached it, it hopped away into a sheep fence, and got its claw tangled into the wire of the fence. Mihai picked up the bird and got it loose again, and we tried to see if there was anything wrong with it.

The rook was breathing heavily (from the stress), and sounded as if it had a snotty nose. We suspected that it might have fallen out of its nest. No rook parents were attacking us, so we also suspected that they had abandoned this bird-child.

Well, since we didn’t want it to die or anything, we decided to take it home and see if we could help it. To make it easier to bike with a bird, Mihai wrapped the rook into his shirt and carefully put the bundle in his open backpack.

At home, we unpacked the little rook, whom we had now named Rudolfo.

Rudolfo, who was breathing normally again, with no snotty sound, took a dump in Mihai’s shirt, and then started to explore his surroundings a bit. We put a bowl of water in front of him, but he didn’t want to drink. Instead, he walked a bit uneasily over the floor (too slippery for bird’s feet), until he had settled down under my desk. He stayed there, while I went searching for information on the internet about what to do with findling rooks.

I didn't find much about rooks, but after changing 'rook' into 'crow', I came across Kevin McGowan’s baby crow FAQ at Cornell University.

And it turned out that we were real rookies when it came to young rooks (and other birds) … According to McGowan,

“When a young crow leaves the nest it will be somewhere around 80 to 100% adult body weight, have legs that will never grow any further, and wings that are nearly full size. This is a large bird, to be sure, up to 300 to 450 g in weight. But they still cannot fly! I have had a number of fledgling crows picked up off the ground because the people thought they were injured.”

And on the ASCAR home page, I also found out that all birds are lactose intolerant, so our plans to feed Rudolfo cheese were not really a good idea. ("Oh, so *that’s* why all those sparrows died in my care", Mihai mused as I shared this fact with him.)

So, we decided to bring young Rudolfo back to where we found him. When we were going to pick him up, we realised that he was sleeping under my desk. After Mihai had gently woken him up by stroking his beak and talking to him, Rudolfo seemed very trusting towards us. He climbed on Mihai’s hand, and just stood there calmly. We wanted to give him something to eat, but he didn’t quite like our vegetarian cooking (corvidae are omnivorous, but prefer meat products). After tasting a piece of pasta, he wiped his beak on Mihai’s arm and fleece jacket, as if he wanted to get rid of the taste. I also tried an adzuki bean, but he spit it out into Mihai’s arm hair.

Well, after marvelling a bit about his trust towards us, and starting to be afraid that he might have imprinted on us, and would be far too trusting to all humans from now on, we packed him into the backpack again, and took the bikes back to Gunnesbo.

We let him go on the same spot where we had found him. We hope that he has found his way and met his parents again, and will grow up to be a fine rook with a just as nicely bald face as his older relatives.

I doubt that we could have given him the care and attention he truly needed, anyway.


(Rudolfo just took a dump on my finger.)

My other blog "News from the Underground" has, miraculously, been updated. It's mostly just an English-language summary of an article by Johannes Wahlström about the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, but it might be interesting.

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Ett tips för svennar med TV:

Missa inte den spännande andra delen av Dokument inifrån: Könskriget på söndag klockan 20.00 i SVT2. Genom suggestiva montage, rumphuggna intervjusnuttar och guilt by association, samt genom att rent av lägga ord i munnen på personerna som intervjuas, konstruerar Evin Rubar en bild av alla svenska kvinnojourarbetare (och helst alla feminister rent allmänt) som paranoida galningar som vill döda alla män. Det är så oprofessionell journalistik att det är roligt.

This is way back from the birthday party of me and Mihai. Our birthdays are just nine days apart, so we wanted to have a little party together. Unfortunately, everyone else was also having a party on that day, so we only had one guest (Ainur, to the left). But I insisted that we still light all the 51 candles (24 for me, 27 for Mihai) ...

Today I went out for sushi with Ainur and her boyfriend. We went to a local sushi bar, Ikizukuri. I wanted kappamaki (not because I'm a vegetarian, but because I think it's the best sushi in the universe). Since it wasn't on the menu, I asked the guy at the counter if they could make one for me.

The guy gave me a bewildered look and asked me in English what I'd like to order. I assumed that he was some foreign surfer boy, and ordered my kappamaki in English. He didn't have a clue what kappamaki was, but I was able to describe it to him. Then, the guy yelled the order to the cook in accentless Skåne dialect.

"Oh, so you DO speak Swedish!" - "How AMAZING!", me and my sister shouted in genuine wonder. The peroxide and instant-tan guy looked like he didn't want to look embarrassed, and mumbled something. He then repeated the order in Swedish (in a way that he, with his intelligence level, could understand): "One maki with just cucumbers, right?" Yes. That is the kind of sushi that's called KAPPAMAKI in JAPAN and also GOOD Japanese restaurants and sushi bars elsewhere (like Tabemono in Lund).

Then, he asked 55 crowns for it. Although I had previously, at two other occasions, paid 30 and 40 crowns for the same at the same place (but from other counter boys) I didn't start to haggle, because I just wished I could be relieved from the pain of looking at this moron ...

I wonder if they require new employees to maybe know even a tiny little bit about sushi before they get the job. Come on, there is a high unemployment rate in this country. You should have plenty of people to choose from. Some of them might even have an interest in sushi!!!

Then again, ALL the people at Ikizukuri are already notorious for pronouncing their dish jô in a Swedish way: yoo, rhyming with 'do' when pronounced with, say, an Italian accent.

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Hmm. Maybe I should try to involve myself in some *real* problems for once in my life ...? And start making sushi at home, instead. Cheaper, better, and more fun. With less instant-tan morons.

As mentioned below, I've made illustrations for two articles in Utrikesperspektiv dealing with different aspects of the concept 'white trash'. While researching them I also came across websites like texastrailertrash.com, missouritrailertrash.com, "Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi" and "Great Mobile Homes of Indiana".

Their concept is to show photographs of how poor people live, while giving sarcastic comments about the 'tasteful landscaping', etc. A quote from texastrailertrash.com:

"However, there are those amongst us that want the rest of the world to look down upon us. They eat too many Big Macs, live in beat down trailers, have several cars in the yard accompanied by a washer/dryer/refrigerator, you get the picture. We lovingly refer to these people as 'Texas trailer trash'. They used to embarrass me, but I have now chosen to use them in a productive manner, by utilizing them to satisfy my endless need for amusement. There is a seemingly endless supply of material for the 'Bad' section, and that's where you'll find pictures of these people's dwellings."

This is one of the ways in which the urge to isolate yourself from another group manifests itself. You project negative attributes on a group of people, contrasting them to the positive attributes you project on your own group. That way, you don't run the risk of scary thoughts like "that could be my family living in that trailer ..."

For an antidote, try "Working Class Whites" and Jacob Holdt's "American Pictures".