Avoid Swedish Operations

Woman catches fire during hemorrhoid operation.

Ugh, yuck, and ouch.

Fjuckby

Readers have surely been waiting to hear more about the Swedes who have to live in the town of Fjuckby:

The hapless inhabitants of Fjuckby have lost the last chance they had of changing the name of their village to something less suggestive of sexual intercourse.

On Thursday, the National Land Survey of Sweden - the government agency responsible for the handling of place names - announced that it was following the recommendation of the Institute of Language and Folklore to preserve the name Fjuckby.

"Preserve" here meaning, "to saddle the townspeople with." More:

Fjuckby is saddled with the dual misfortune of containing both the rude Swedish word 'juck' and its more internationally recognizable English equivalent.

Speaking to The Local in February, Flensburg said she was surprised by the folklore institute's resistance to a name change since the alternative, Fjukeby, was "pretty and nice".

Fjuckby and Fjukeby both translate roughly as 'Windy Village'.

Shot Through the Leg and You're to Blame

Dave Zirin, one of the only pinko sportswriters in the business, offers an interesting analysis of the media furor over the murder of football player Sean Taylor:

Media illusion or not, we felt we knew Sean Taylor—and have wept for his family and their loss. There is nothing wrong with this. If anything, we’ve borne witness to people’s capacity to reach out and care.

BUT NOT everyone felt the better angels of their nature emerge. Within hours—minutes—of Taylor’s death, a collection of sportswriters tried to turn this tragedy into to a brazenly racist “life lesson.” They speculated that Taylor effectively got what he deserved, the fruits born of a “thug life.”

Never mind that Taylor was the son of a police chief who attended the same private schools as the Florida wing of the Bush family. The narrative of a young Black athlete dying by gunfire was too succulent to resist. The callous copy ran rampant, and this time went beyond Fox Sports Jason Whitlock’s easily dismissible, painfully predictable hot air...

The hypocrisy is breathtaking. If Taylor was white, imagine how this story would be played out: “Hero tragically dies defending his family in home invasion.” Instead, we get yet another example of how sports has become an absolute trash receptacle of racism over the past several years: an acceptable place for troglodytic writers and announcers to yip about “hip hop culture” and “thug life,” being the rot at the heart of professional athletics.

Getting the Skinny

An interesting new website, ZipSkinny, lets you get basic demographic information on any zip code and to compare up to 20 zip codes. Here's part of the data on mine:

The Liberal Academy

If you're even tangentially part of the academy, you're probably aware of the eternal debate over whether and why American colleges and universities are so politically liberal. Myself, I think that American higher education is laudably, permanently liberal (though often in some pretty shallow ways) largely because the goals of liberalism as a political movement are so directly related to the goals of higher education - for instance, equipping people to think critically, rather than reverently, about those who hold political, social, economic, or some other kind of power, and to act to alter present arrangements of power, rather than simply maintain them.

A new study proposes that one reason conservatives are underrepresented in the academy is that people who are politically conservative prefer to either get jobs right out of college (rather than pursue PhDs) or to start families (again, rather than pursue PhDs). Interesting stuff:

The study — “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates” — argues that the much debated minority status for conservatives in higher education may be the result of differing priorities of graduating college seniors of different political persuasions. The study presents evidence that conservatives are significantly more likely than liberals — at the point when college students decide whether to apply to graduate school — to value raising a family and having money. In contrast, liberals at that point in their lives are significantly more likely to value writing original works.

The authors of the study do not dispute that conservatives are a distinct minority in academe and that the imbalance is problematic. They also hold open the possibility — much proclaimed by other authors at the conference of the American Enterprise Institute where all of the work was presented — that there may be bias against conservatives (although they question whether this has been proven). But the authors of the work on the pipeline say there is considerable evidence that could show conservative self-selection out of academic careers.

Finnegan's Wake, the Picture

Envisioning works of fiction as images is a challenge (unless they're graphic novels, I suppose). But here is a fascinating attempt by Hungarian Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy to represent Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. I guess Ulysses was too easy.


The Guardian has much more on Moholy-Nagy, a brilliant designer and artist who could also toss off some good lines: "It is not the person ignorant of writing but the one ignorant of photography who will be the illiterate of the future."

I Swear

Linguistic and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker on why swearing matters and why we should care about it. Fucking brilliant.

Compare & Contrast

From A Word a Day:

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. -Iris Murdoch, writer (1919-1999)

and from Velonews:

Oscar Pereiro was formally named the winner of the 2006 Tour de France on Thursday after American authorities ruled against Floyd Landis's appeal for failing a doping test, the sport's world governing body, the UCI, said.

Pereiro finished the 2006 race in second place, 57 seconds behind Landis but the American tested positive after the race following his 17th stage win at Morzine, three days before the end of the race.

"We can right now say that Pereiro is the winner of the Tour without waiting for a possible appeal by Landis to the Court of Arbitration for Sport," UCI president Pat McQuaid said.

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme said the decision to strip Landis of the 2006 title was too long in coming.

"We have waited a long time, too long. We said since the beginning that we were confident in the laboratory (AFLD) at Châtenay-Malabry," Prudhomme said. "Now it is proven and confirmed that Landis cheated. As far as the Tour de France is concerned, Landis was no longer the winner after the positive test of the second sample."

"According to the rules, the second-placed rider (Oscar Pereiro) will be promoted to first place," he added. "Landis did everything he could in his defense, for which he cannot be reproached. But it is clear that the process has been far too long."

Norwegian Youngsters

I wonder what would happen to the mother of an American kid who did this:

Toddler went hiking alone, in the middle of the night
Donning a backpack and going for a hike is deeply engrained in the Norwegian culture. A little girl up north took the national pastime to heart, much to her mother's dismay.

The four-year-old girl apparently woke up in the middle of the night, climbed out of bed and decided it was time for a midnight stroll. She put on her playclothes (pink), slung a backpack over her shoulders and set off into the newly returned darkness of a late summer night in Tromsø, northern Norway. Police got a call shortly after 5am that a little had been spotted out wandering alone near the Tromsdalen campground. They sent a patrol car to the spot and found the little hiker, who told them her name. She also could tell them her mother's name. The police called her, and then took the intrepid little girl home. "It was, of course, quite a message for her mother to get, but it went well," Trond Amundsen of the Tromsø Police Station told web site iTromso.no.

Snopes, I Don't Believe It

I love Snopes.com, the big urban myth-debunking website. It's the place to go, for instance, with the latest crazy email forward: they almost always have the facts to deflate silly story. But as Defective Yeti points out, they're just not trying anymore:

Alas, it appears that this is either a photoshopped image, or the folks at Snopes have already updated their analysis. (The latest update was just today.)

Location, Location, Location

15 Badly Placed Ads:




On Oddee, via AdFreak.com.

Vive la difference?

Check out this super cool photo essay from Time Magazine - each photo shows a family from a different part of the world with what they eat in a week; the caption tells you how much they spend on those groceries. The variety is really, really interesting.

How Do You Say "Sorry" in Gaelic?

I'm sorry, but all the I'm-sorrying around the planet is making me retch.

First, Japan issues a mealy-mouthed mea culpa for invading everybody else in Asia (and nobody else accepts the apology), then a bunch of Confederate states start lining up to apologize for slavery, and now we have freaking Denmark - land of Hans Christian Andersen, delectable pastries, bike commuting, and doped-up cyclists - apologizing to Ireland for the Viking invasions a thousand years ago. Gimme a break. Has anyone had it easier since 1000 A.D. than the Irish? They have a beautiful country, the English have been happy to help out with religion and language, the whole potato angle worked out great, their IT-based economy is booming, traditional Irish music like U2 is huge, and don't forget Guinness.

But still, they now get a flat, waterlogged Nordic country to apologize for trying to jump-start the Irish import/export business a few centuries ago? Shameless. It's Ireland that oughta be apologizing to the rest of us for this nonsense.

Busted Up

I think it's because I'm now a parent and (temporarily) our family's sole breadwinner, but the ups and downs of the financial markets are suddenly riveting to me. Not in the check-the-tickers-all-day-long kinda way, but in the will-my-401(k)-survive kinda way. As such, this column in the Financial Times is an especially good overview of the market meltdowns that started last week:

Financial markets, and particularly the big players within them, need fear. Without it, they go crazy. Moreover, it is impossible for outsiders to regulate a global financial system riddled with conflicts of interest and dominated by huge derivatives markets, massive trading by highly leveraged hedge funds and reliance on abstruse mathematics and questionable statistical models. These markets must regulate themselves. The only thing likely to persuade them to do so is the certainty that the players will be allowed to go bust.

Down from the Mountain

Boy, the 2007 Tour de France just won't stop. As doping accusations continue to spin out, today the tour winner, Alberto Contador, took the pulpit to say that

I have never doped and I have never participated in an act of doping. I won the Tour clean. I cannot understand the attacks against by people that don't even know me. My commitment is absolute and I will always be ready to collaborate in the fight against doping.

Thing is, he might be telling the truth, but it doesn't matter. Cycling's not only so badly tainted now that the freaking tour champion gets disinvited from middling races in which he wasn't even going to ride, but that his team - and the team on which Lance Armstrong rode to win his seven titles - can't even get a sponsor for the upcoming cycling season, and is disbanding. The team had eight of the last nine Tour de France championships, and can't get anyone to give them a few million a year. Imagine if the freaking Colts were kicked out of their stadium in the off-season, or the Cardinals were forced to move to an even crummier town - it's that crazy and bad.

Meta Tragedy

From the Local in Sweden:

A gravedigger died in southern Sweden on Wednesday after becoming trapped in a grave he was digging.

The accident happened in a cemetery in Gudmuntorp, near Höör in Skåne, at 12pm. The man and a colleague had been preparing the grave, and had deposited earth dug from the ground in a large, open container.

The container, estimated to weigh three tonnes, started sliding into the grave while the men were still standing in it. One of the men managed to get out of the grave in time, while the other became trapped under the container, according to Stefan Färdig of the emergency services. The incident is being treated as a workplace accident, Färdig said.

Okay, this is bad and silly enough to begin with, but then the guy they're quoting? His name includes the word "dig"?

Visualizing the Web

This article in Metropolis is not only a good look at a cutting-edge visual designer named Jonathan Harris, but an entree to the incredible stuff Harris has created, such as 10x10, a visual representation of each hour's ten most prominent news stories, or Lovelines, which mines the web for sentences that start with "I love," or "I hate" or anything in between and then displays the results in an everchanging stream of text and photos. It's inspiring stuff.

Doing the Collapse

"Am I dead? I must be dead," in Sunday's Strib, is the best thing I've yet read on the bridge collapse. Literally spine-tingling.

Diegogarcity

You know that phenomenon of seeing a new word in one context, then noticing it all over the place? It's called "diegogarcity":

[fr. Diego Garcia, Indian Ocean atoll; after serendipity]
"a term used [at Wordorigins.org] to denote the appearance
of another term in multiple sources shortly after you have
looked it up in the dictionary" (or first noticed it)

(Simon Winchester's article in Granta on the creation of the vast American military base on Diego Garcia, which started with forced exile of its human inhabitants and the slaughter of dogs and continues today with the projection of naval and air power north toward the Persian Gulf, is worth reading, too.)

Le Bicyclisme

As little old Northfield putters along toward some sort of sustainable transportation strategy and medium-sized old Minneapolis makes a name for itself as a bike-friendly city (as described in this good story from KARE-11 news last night, big old Paris is gettin' r done:

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike. Any tourist in a rent-a-car who’s circumnavigated the Arc de Triomphe most likely will never drive in Paris again. But there are plenty of Parisians who do it all the time — far too many, in fact. So Mayor Bertrand Delanoë, a Socialist, vowed in coming to office in 2001 to reduce car traffic by 40 percent by 2020...

In short, public transportation will take you where you want to go, and you can use it all you want on an electronic card that can be paid by the week or by the month (about $70 these days). Taxis, of course, can also be summoned anywhere by phone...

Mayor Delanoë’s latest front in the anti-car war is the bicycle. Last week, more than 10,000 stolid, gray-painted bicycles (no Tour de France speedsters) became available for rent at 750 self-service locations across Paris. The cost is modest... and the bikes can be dropped off at any docking station. The number of bikes is supposed to double by the end of the year. Already in their first week, the bikes are all over central Paris, many carrying commuters — and, yes, some New Yorkers.