Sweden In Pop Culture

Despite having seen the incredibly dreary television series Wallender, with Kenneth Branagh, and the movie made from the book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (plus another television program that I don't remember the name of, but that involved typically violent sexual abuse and now-elderly Nazi sympathizers), I took up the recommendation of a good friend and read The Hypnotist, by Lars Kepler.

Based on these sources, I can confidently report that Sweden is a cold, dark country populated almost exclusively by depressed drug addicts, depressed alcoholics, depressed former drug addicts, depressed unmitigated perverts of every stripe, and depressed police officers with failed or failing marriages. This general population is divided between the honourable poor, who are depressed, and a smaller group of sleazy and thoroughly dishonourable middle-class people, who are probably depressed when not torturing their fellow Swedes with their extreme behaviour. There is, perhaps, a scattering of glitterati who spend much time abroad to avoid being depressed, returning home only to indulge in their many and varied perverse passions.

Being a Texan, I know just how accurate these sorts of generalizations about a place often are.

Old Pictures Posted

If you're interested (and why would you be?):

Over the last few months I've been puttering with my scanner, mostly digitizing old photo prints, & have posted some of the better ones to Picasa albums.

I've added some pictures, new and old, to the South Texas album












Pictures from the PCB Tour through England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria & Italy in 1984 are up

A few pictures from the 1991 trip to Mexico ...











and from the 1994 trip to Mexico

and just a few from the 1999 trip to California to see the USA win the women's World Cup











Most of the photos from our three-week tour of southern Germany are glued into a photo album, but I managed to find a few loose that I could run through the scanner. You'll find them here.

Some pictures from various trips taken in 2006 are up now.

So are a few from our first trip to Yellowstone & Grand Teton, in 2005.












There may be others; I don't really remember which ones I've posted in the last few months & which have been around a long time. Feel free to look around at all my albums.