Capital flows

Thank GOD someone from the financial office of some airline company thought "hmmm... we might just have some money left over this year for some humor" so that a painting team could be mobilized and accomplish this masterpiece, causing an unsuspecting victim in a random country to spray hot tea through his nose. One of capitalism's finer moments.

Calm as hindu cows

On the train doors on the subway and commuter trains here in Stockholm you can see a few small signs telling you among other things to mind the gap and that security cameras are watching, "for your safety" it says. Stockholm is by no means the only city that uses surveillance cameras in public space, all you have to do is look at London where a tourist can walk from Eastend to Westend and have several cameras watching every step of the way.

The thing that I think is most worrisome in the debate is the argument for having them in the first place: "for your safety". If cameras are there to catch the bag-snatcher, mugger, thief or anyone partaking in miscellanious street idiocy, then people won't do it for fear of being caught. But how does that add upp to being safe? It might protect against people trashing train cars, but what's important here is crime against people. Putting aside questions like the democratic legitimacy of assuming someone is guilty or Big Brother issues, I'd like to show just how transparent this argument of "safety" is.

It doesn't take a Ph D in criminology to say that people do stupid things whether they think they can be caught or not, and sometimes people are just plain ill. In Stockholm, like every other city, there are some very mentally disturbed or plain desperate people using public transport or walking around in public space. Sometimes there are gangs of young boys that have quite an intimidating presence late at night in the subway. Just like everywhere else, at night and on weekends, people get drunk. Fights break out. People get desperate for attention. It happens everywhere and it makes no difference if a camera is there or not. Sometimes people commit severe crimes with the full intention of being caught. Sometimes people are doped up, strung out or barely hanging on to their sanity. The point is that when these crimes are in progress on the subway and commuter trains and busses, all that security cameras do is watch them with an indifferent eye, recording everything and protecting precisely jack shit. It must be hard for victims of crime on the trains to see that sign, "for your protection", after being mugged or stabbed at by someone who slipped through the social security net (these are documented cases, shown on TV and captured of course by....violá...security cameras).

Maybe the only way to really prevent crime on public transport is to have security guards for every train car on the subway and commuter trains and every bus, but that's obviously out of the question. The real uses for security cameras, whether digitally storing every living soul in a superdatabase or not, will probably never be revealed. I just hope that poeple don't buy in to this illusion of safety.

P.S. It's not my intention to spread fear of violent crime. In my opinion it's a fact of life that can never be legitimized or prevented by signs, threat of imprisonment, punishment by being forced to listen to Rod Stewart or worse.

Reasons for a blog, part 2 - toilet trauma

Yeah, I know...it took awhile to get to the next post. But it was summer and a lot of things have happened, yadda yadda yadda, and now finally there's a little window of opportunity to write something down. And even though this summer I have broken the cycle of chronic singleness I stand by every word.

But there are obviously many other interesting things to talk about than really heavy quasi-scientific explanations of social phenomena, like the small things. Yes...the small details..

Like restrooms. This past summer I had the opportunity to visit one of Stockholm's very few public toilets (for some reason Stockholmers in power like to keep public restrooms uncomfortably few and far between) in a small park in the southern part of the city (den vid Bofilsbågen för alla svennar därute). Once inside it was easy to see that minimalism was the key word in design. After doing what I had to it was time to flush the toilet. Unfortunately, this is where the problems start.

You would think that the flush button, pulley, lever, chain or whatever would be close to the toilet, but nowhere near was any discernable thing of the sort. After realizing that this might take a second or two to figure out someone knocked on the door outside, which was strange since I hadn't been in there for more than a couple of minutes. I noticed then a series of illustrations which you see above (just because it's so easy with digital cameras) to show how confusing this was. The first three show how to use the sink to wash your hands, which is easy enough. The fourth shows how to flush the toilet. I'll let you guess for a little while before I tell you the answer.

Since it showed a hand pointing to some mystical dot with waves coming from it situated above the toilet I thought it meant a sensor was somewhere nearby, like above the toilet. So there I was, waving my hands wildly over the toilet seat in hope of accidentally setting off the sensor to trigger a flush and someone was still knocking on the door to come in. There was a fleeting thought that it must have been staged so that a hidden camera would show someone wildly flailing about, looking for a sensor to flush the damn thing while someone was about to knock the door down, like a sick practical joke. I even carefully stuck my foot inside the toilet seat in hope of finding the magical hidden dot, but the toilet remained silent. Sooo....have you figured out what the magic might be?



Here it is...


After stopping to think about it for a few seconds, I finally pushed the actual illustration and then came the beautiful whoosh of water. After washing my hands, with the cunning help of the other three illustrations you see above, I walked out to find (of course) nobody there. Does it have to be this difficult to figure out how to flush a toilet? Who's the idiot here, me or the crack design team? Has anyone else had such a traumatic experience before because of strange and confusing signs? I believe in creating discussion, so let's hear it!

Reasons for a blog, part 1

So here it is, folks, the long-awaited debut. One of the reasons for doing this blog is to spank some well-needed sense into a society that indulges in idiotic and arrogant behavior. Not to be negative, but we can't ignore the occaisional bump-in with the common street-idiot or even idiocy hiding out in the netherstructures of large scale social behavior. I have to admit, I'm a nice guy, really. But things just get out of hand sometimes and when it does you have to put your foot down. Or get your fingers moving.

Like when it comes to relationships. Or rather lack thereof.

You can be chronically sick or have chronic conditions with your back, but you can also be chronically single. You know when you meet someone for the first time and you can gaze into his/her eyes, comb your fingers through your beloved's hair and feel all warm inside because your feelings are mutual? You know the feeling. That hasn't happened to me in Stockholm. Being in a relationship is not a necessary function for living and everyone has their ups and downs. But not in seven years of living in this city have I succeeded in breaking chronic singleness. And why? Because people in this city (I know at least many women, I have no idea about swedish men) have a nasty habit of being cold, heartless and arrogant. And how do I know it's not because of me? Because I have no problems meeting women anywhere else.

Here's my explanation: for some reason people have this idea that you can be "choosy". You live in a big city and you think that there's a big sea of people out there, so you can allow yourself to be choosy if you ever find yourself fishing. If someone doesn't fullfill this criteria for an ideal partner then you can ignore that person and keep looking, without even stopping to consider there might be some real chemistry going on. Or this person will just ignore you altogether. These criteria usually involve some strange notion of what a "real" man or woman is, which more or less bars anyone not living up to these norms to life of chronic singleness. And being chronically single is a main cause for severe heart atrophy. Repeated and prolonged disappointment eats away at your heart until there's nothing left but a cold, hard, black clump. Yes, there are friends and you can by sheer willpower choose to not live in a social vacuum, but you can't force people's feelings.

I don't think I'm alone on this thought either.

This dark feeling doesn't come from the fact that I've never been in a relationship in Stockholm, but rather the fact that EVERY single time I've been interested in anyone I wind up being flatly ignored. I'm not creepy or mean, so I have no idea how I would deserve to be treated this way. Nobody does.

Life isn't fair and people are idiots, but nobody deserves to be chronically single.