Fucking Åmål (Show Me Love)

A 1998 movie about growing up gay in a small town (Åmål), the story focuses on two teenage girls who fall in love and what they have to do in order to be together. It was highly influential and most people can still quote extensively from it.

If you want to know what it was like to grow up as a teenager in a small town in Sweden where there is nothing to do but drink and play around with a moped, I would recommend it. Shit, even if you have no interest in that what so ever, watch it for the great soundtrack, implied female masturbation and late 1990’s fashion (hint: plaid shirts). Right now it seems as though the entire movie is on YouTube, with English subtitles.

Friggebod

This type of small cottage is named after the 1970’s minister Birgit Friggebod, who made it legal to build an additional building, no more than 10 square meters, on your land without having to get any kind of permit. Today that has been increased to 15 square meters.

This lead to an explosion in different friggebod-designs and many play around with it, trying out ways to use the small space as efficiently as possible. Some use it as a guest room; others build one for their children to play in. They can be a smaller copy of the main house, or pimped out with über-modern green architecture. It should come as no surprise to you that there are ready-to-be-assembled kits for those who lack the sufficient skills to design and build one from scratch. After all, this is the land of IKEA.

Fredrik Reinfeldt

He is Sweden’s prime minister. There are plenty of books and Wikipedia entries explaining this man and his background, so please consult those for an accurate description of his politics.

Together again

Gävle, Thursday

Rain, rain, rain

Fredrik Lindström

In this clip you can hear an excerpt from his radio special on P1 Sommar (see “Sommar i P1”) where he tries to order a trip using the SJ automatic phone system. 

Fredrik Lindström is something as rare as a popular, intelligent man that is universally liked. You would be hard pressed to find someone who had anything against him. His career started on a radio show where he made prank calls on air, usually with a hint of intellectualism (see “Hassan”). In one example he called a bus company’s lost and found department, asking if they had found an irregular verb that he left behind on the bus. Instead of “merely” becoming a comedian, however, he went to university, got his degree in linguistics and is currently on leave from a PHD-position at Uppsala University. He has since then written several books about the Swedish language, produced and starred in different TV-shows dedicated to the same topic. He has made caring about language somewhat hip. Right now he works as a host for one of Sweden’s most popular game shows (see “På Spåret). With his combination of humor, intelligence and humility he has become hugely popular amongst several different audiences - those who pretend to be intellectual, those who actually are and those enjoy being everything but.