The Core Dump

Midsummer’s Eve is arguably the biggest holiday in Sweden, and definitely my favorite—there’s no flag waving and no gift buying. It’s all about enjoying the longest day of the year, the lushness of Sweden at its finest, and eating good food.

So I was incredibly happy to be able to spend Midsummer in Sweden and partake along with my daughter.

The holiday requires nubbe—chilled akvavit—so there was quite a line at the state-controlled liquor store the day before.

Inside Systembolaget (the Swedish state-controlled liquor store). Click for larger version.

A large part of the tradition is the raising of and dancing around the midsummer pole. As you can see, the phallic nature of the pole was disguised by Christian missionaries with the addition of a cross bar which was then subverted with the cunning use of wreaths. You can use your own dirty mind to figure out what the wreaths resemble. Clever of the heathens, I say.

Midsummer pole. Click for larger version.

After the pole was raised, traditional dancing ensued. Andrea was a bit confused but happy.

Traditional dancing. Click for larger version.

Another important tradition is to eat outside. Dagnabbit, it’s the middle of summer, so Food Shall be Consumed Out of Doors. As is also customary, rain was threatening, so it was a bit touch and go on that part.

Eat outside you want, eh? Click for larger version.

But never say die, so we set the table on the patio.

The table getting set up. Click for larger version.

The most important items are already on the table: the herring and the nubbe. Everything else is gravy.

Fortunately, the weather gods relented, and we were able to dine al fresco.

All in all, an excellent Midsummer’s Eve.

It’s getting past 11:30pm, and my parents and daughter are asleep—I’m sitting in my parents’ living room gazing at the dusk outside, the sky a deep magenta as it patiently waits for the sun to return. Gabriel and Dresden play in my headphones and a glass of red wine sits on the table.

This, my friends, is what vacation is all about—had a great day with my parents, ate a good dinner, listened to the rain fall on the roof, and now there’s only the music from my headphones and the never-ending light coming through the windows as I watch the red wine darken.

There are many things I want from life, but being able to sit watching the midnight sky while my family sleeps trumps them all.

Many happy returns.

Swedish pennant under a blue sky. Click for larger version.

Andrea and I are safely nestled at my parents’ house after a long journey from Phoenix to Sweden.

We had stop-overs in Chicago and Copenhagen, both of which were short and sweet, even though the time between flights was way too chintzy in Copenhagen and we ended up running through the airport with me carrying Andrea and our luggage, blitzing past flight monitors that had our flight status as “closed.” A wee bit on the stressful side, but we made the puddle jumper from Copenhagen to Gothenburg with our stomachs in our throats.

Andrea was a complete champ through the trip. I think it’s that she’s six years old now, and really gets what’s going on as we hop from aluminum tube to aluminum tube.

We landed in a Sweden from some other dimension, with clear blue skies and warm weather.

At this point things have cooled down a bit and the clouds are threatening rain, but it’s still really nice and the summer light is incredible—even though I grew up here, it was still amazing when Andrea and I woke up at 4am the morning after we landed to find it light enough to go outside and read the newspaper.

I understand there are worse ways to spend the month of June.

Our conspicuous consumption, let me show you it:

Acura TL 2008. Click for larger version

The wife’s 1997 Honda Civic with 146,000 miles needed $2,500 worth of repairs to stay road worthy, so we decided it was time to bid it adieu and move on into a vehicle from this century.

And boy howdy is it ever. From this century, I mean. This is one tight driving machine.

You might be wondering why we would go overboard with a luxury car instead of sticking with a Civic or the like, and the simple answer is that we plan to keep the thing for a minimum of ten years, and for that kind of time frame, why not get something really nice?

The same reasoning applies to why we didn’t avoid the depreciation tax by buying one coming off a lease—we plan to drive it till the wheels come off, so it makes sense to have a vehicle we know has been properly taken care of and gently driven.

Meanwhile, my 1997 Accord with 126,000 miles on it is still trucking along…

What’s blowing my mind is that if everything goes to plan, the vehicle in the picture is the one Andrea will use to learn to drive in ten year’s time.

The Dragon Never Sleeps is prime Glen Cook—a huge, literally galaxy-spanning plot, gritty realism, and hastily sketched but interesting characters.

As with his Dread Empire series, Cook throws the reader right into the mess of things without much explanation, leaving it up to you to figure out what’s really going on, and introduces an army of characters and motivations without ado. The Dragon Never Sleeps is one of those novels you absolutely can not skim; it requires attention if it’s going to make any kind of sense.

It’s always great to see an author working in the genre resist the urge to stretch things out—in the hands of pretty much any other author, The Dragon Never Sleeps would have been at minimum three 800-page bricks, but Cook keeps it under 300 dense but rewarding pages.

Granted, Cook is a bit of an acquired taste, and anybody new to him should start out with the brilliant Black Company series, but for the fan this novel delivers.

Recommended.

Glasshouse takes place in the post-singularity far future where people have the ability to change their bodies any way they like, back themselves up at will, and all the other post-singularity goodies.

The novel takes a while to get going, and at first it’s a bit hard to figure out what kind of drama Charles Stross can mine from an environment where, by definition, nothing bad can really happen.

Once the characters find themselves in the “Glasshouse” of the title, though, the action and the suspense become fast and furious, and Glasshouse settles in to become a creepy meditation on the psychology of memory and gender roles.

Once you have the ability to edit your memories, can you really trust yourself?

The ending feels a little bit abrupt and neat, but apart from that, Glasshouse features strong and interesting characters, impressive world-building, and tense action sequences.

Highly recommended.

Cruel Zinc Melodies continues Glen Cook’s often wonderful Garrett, P.I. series, a heady mash-up of old-school hard-boiled private investigator fiction and swords-and-sorcery magic.

Unfortunately, Cook phoned this one in. The plot is all over the place with way too many subplots that never gel, and the laconic “P.I. voice” comes dangerously close to a parody of the genre rather than a homage.

Only for the hard-core fan of the series.

The other night was Family Science Night at Andrea’s school. Since we’re very interested in having her exposed to as much science as possible, and also to show her that we take it seriously, off we went.

The actual presentation was given by a woman from the Arizona Science Center and involved fun and interesting things to do with liquid nitrogen. The children were highly amused by the flash-freezing of various objects like metal, racquet balls, onions, and bananas.

At the start of the presentation, the presenter had seven balloons, and asked the crowd how many of those she could fit into the small liquid nitrogen container. Turns out, she could fit all of them.

At which point it was incredibly hard to not yell, “Burn the witch! Burn her!“

So, I guess I still have some work to do on this “maturity” thing.

One in 25 Americans is a sociopath. This means, essentially, that they are incapable of feeling love or connectedness and exist in an emotional vacuum where the only thing that matters is to “win” over other people. The damage they cause the other 96% of the population is incalculable.

Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door provides a chilling look into the minds of sociopaths as well as ways to recognize them and above all how to deal with them.

Stout uses exceptionally well written composites of case files from her years of experience as a practicing psychologist to drive home the damage sociopaths cause and how their victims have learned to cope.

The Sociopath Next Door is an important work, and one that deserves to be widely read.

Highly recommended.

David Simon is one of the creators of the fantastic HBO show The Wire. He wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets after spending 1988 observing three squads of Baltimore homicide detectives. Simon’s unprecedented access to the detectives as they go about their jobs resulted in a book so tight and well-written it’s sometimes hard to believe it’s not fiction.

Not only does Simon capture the lingo and banter of the detectives, but he also finds empathy and raw emotion in the most unlikely places.

As a bonus for fans of The Wire, one of the many classic scenes from that show, where the detectives use a photocopier as a fake polygraph machine, is straight from Homicide.

Even though now 20 years old, Homicide is a gripping read. It is hard to imagine that the business of murder has changed all that much in the intervening years.