Pepparkaka

Hey everyone.
This weekend me and my friends made Swedish gingerbread-cookies, called pepparkakor. I made this one:

Big surprise?

I also made a small house, which I decorated with candy. And we drank glögg, which is traditional Swedish christmas-wine.

Well, happy holidays and merry christmas.

Lucia

Tomorrow is the 13th of December, which is celebrated in Sweden as Lucia. It's a ceremony in which The Lucia, or the bride Lucia, who is a girl dressed in a white gown and with a red band, and with candles in a crown on her head walks in a procession, with what we call maids (tärnor) and "starboys" (stjärngossar), and they all have candles in their hands. The procession takes place early in the morning, and they sing songs and give out small breads, the ones in the picture, called lussekattor. Lucia is a tradition celebrated in Sweden since the 1600's.
Lucia comes from the Catholic saint St.Lucia, who she was a martyr in Syracuse about 300 A.D. Lucia is also the only saint celebrated by the Lutheran Church in Sweden. Some say the celebration holds on to some pre-christian elements of midwinter-light celebrations, (Lucia meaning and symbolising light, and the fact that the prossesion "illuminates" the winter-darkness).

So, be sure to go up early in the morning.


( Oh, and it's also the night when all the kids of Sweden gets the most drunk. Except maybe for Midsummers Eve. And Valborg. )

sleek as silver

In case you didn't know, quicksilver is a good thing. Actually, it's two great things. A computer and an application.
The application can be found here: quicksilver.blacktree.com . It's a launcher, just like Launchbar if you know what that is, but much sleeker, and cuter. And you can customize it to death. You can download all sorts of plugins. The point of a launcher is that instead of rummaging through the harddrive- clicking clicking and clicking, you just type what you want. Fast and easy. Much like the coming Spotlight-feature in MacOSX 10.4 Tiger. (For example, hit Space and type VLC and behold VLC opens.) I've been using Launchbar ever since I got my iBook, two years ago, but I just started using Quicksilver.

The other great thing about quicksilver is a computer. The Powermac G4 Quicksilver.

warning, tight pants

According to gizmodo.com a survery of Swedish retailers showed that the second-most common cause of broken cell-phones are too tight pants. (In Sweden, that is.) How about that? Here's also an article from cnet news about it. Here's a quote:

To put it in perspective, tight pants break more phones than dogs, children, rain, snow, acts of forgetfulness and throwing phones to the ground in a rage, according to a report on the survey by cell-phone news Web site Cellular News.

Well, take care. And be careful of tight pants. If you see them, run!

the Beta Band

I'm sorry for not writing in a while. Have been crazy busy, listening to music mostly. Anyway, I have alot of music. So much music that I always have a couple albums that I've never listened to. So, the other day I went through my records (or was it my harddrive?), in search of them not-so-often-listened-to-records, and Behold, he cried, I've found the Beta Band! Although, I've listened to them before, and seen them live, they have never really caught me. Other than mentioned by John Cusack in the film "High Fidelity", it's been kind of a quiet band. Anyway, I've found myself listening to the Beta Band nonstop for the last three days.

Also, I've been listening to Curtis Mayfield. Come on, baby.

• The Beta Bands own page: http://www.betaband.com/ (warning, it's flash, and damnit- it's ugly!)