Who came up with the ‘all you can eat’ concept? It’s a very dangerous one, that’s for sure, for two (obvious) reasons. First, there’s the financial aspect. The price is fixed so that just one portion of rolled salmon doesn’t seem to make any sense - especially since the buffet is all pizza. But even with all-you-can-eat-pizza, eating just one slice is madness, when the unit price of one slice is a fraction of the buffet.

So, the more you eat, the cheaper it gets.

(Or, as with my old company which arranged a ‘bonus lunch’, the more I ate, the bigger my bonus).

» Continued

Remember a while ago when I wrote that “[t]here is no place - and this is no exaggaration, simply a fact, so I repeat it: no place - a Swede can’t set up a bench, or hasn’t already done so"?

Yeah, the other day I went for a walk and thought about how I said that, and how right I was. I think I may have even said it out loud, “that thing you wrote about the benches last summer, on July 14, that was so right on, it was so true.” The thing that made me remind myself of that piece was a bench that I saw on my way to the mall.

This one:

» Continued

Apparently, I suffer from some kind of an early winter blues. That’s not very unusual around here, and I am sure there are physiological reasons for that. The lack of sunlight, the lack of warmth, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, the lack of the cold, too, the cold that would make it a real winter, and give us snow which would make everything a little lighter again.

» Continued

In 1959, Paul Anka played at the Linnanmäki theme park in Helsinki, and the country went nuts. "Paul Anka at Linnanmäki" became a catch phrase to describe a wild and crazy herd of people. It was Beatlemania before there were the Beatles. He was a teen idol, a pop star in an era when there weren’t any.

At the same time, he was still rooted in a tradition that was different from the one that the Beatles and the Stones and the rest came from.

» Continued

In a couple weeks, a K-1 tournament is going to be held somewhere in Sweden, Stockholm, or the surrounding international waters. Now, the fairly new combat sport has a lot of fans, and it attracts a lot of people, and I guess it’s gaining in popularity.

On the advertising posters that you can see in the Stockholm subway cars, they run a few quotes from papers to add creditibility to the event.

One of them is by an evening paper columnist and it goes like this: “… this is the future.”

» Continued