(Used to be) Living in Luleåland

Monday, April 24, 2006

I'm too Spexy

Yeehah!

It's time for Buffalo Bill's Cabaret to hit town - we had the premiere of the Spex for 2006 last Sat, and Buffalo Bill was the theme.

The spex is basically the uni musical review. The origins go back a couple of hundred years, and has a couple of unique features that you don't find in uni reviews back home- the humour is above the belt, the whole show is in rhyme, and there can be an encore called at any moment.

The encores (or 'restarts' in Svenglish, or 'omstart' in Swedish) are cool, and very different to those that I'm used to. An omstart is a sign of appreciation of a song, or a joke, or a mistake, anything really. By applauding, and then chanting "omstart, omstart", the audience basically demands another. But this is not just a repeat of a joke - it's a totally new joke. There's one guy who plays Sitting Bull who is a master of coming up with new, rhyming, lines. When he does a few Dirty Harry send ups, he often gets called on to keep going, or he does a few 'indian' chants, and is usually asked to make up at least one more on the spot. After the main musical numbers we have up to 4 omstarts prepared, the first of which is usually a totally new and different song, with lyrics fitting the character and scene. So some of the omstarts are planned, but some are improvised.

But omstarts can demand the actors will do the scene in German ("på tyska, på tyska!"), or Finnish or whatever. After an angry outburst they can be demanded to do it again, but angrier, or a love scene can be asked to be done with more soppiness, or a fast bit of alliteration can be asked to be done even faster. It's cool, especially when the comebacks are well done.

The music for the show is pretty good overall, some of the songs we play include Son of a Preacherman, a Dolly Parton medly, some Ennio Morricone, Hot Fudge, Sing Sing Sing. Some arrangements are better than others, and the neverending chorus of Fame is particularly hard to take. There are of course the usual cliches - the Mission Impossible and Pink Panther themes get a run, Monty Python's dead parrot sketch gets a run and the Jack Nicholson "truth handling" speech, and there are some good sight gags and good puns that even I get (or are they just the dumb ones?).

Good pics were hard to get, but here's a couple taken from the dress rehearsal

Buffalo Bill and General Custer


Jack Daniel McCall and Calamity Jane

The Ensemble

Me and Marco in Kilts
The official uniform of Lulea spex is the Kilt. Why? Because it stands out, especially in Lulea when it gets to well below 0 in winter. It's suprisingly comfy to wear.

Marco from Italy and I did a sketch at the post-premiere banquet that was very well received (standing ovation, no less!), probably more for effort than actual execution. We did a short parody of the spex, using the opening few lines (which included the line: Your grammar is totally absurd, you can't distinguish between a subject or verb) , which gave us the opening to sing about Sweden from the foreigner's point of view (in swedish of course). To the tune of All of Me we sang about Volvo's (I got a Ferrari F40 when what I really wanted was a volvo 240), and shopping at Ikea (I can't believe there isn't one in Lulea), which morphed into the Proclaimers 500 miles song ("I would åker 50 mil and I would åker 50 more just to be the man who åkers 100 mil to shop at Sundsvalls Ikea Store"). I think the expectations were just rather low when we started - our playing of All of Me was a little underrehearsed.

So did we get an omstart? Yup, actually after the first half, so we continued on with the 2nd half. Which meant we never got to do the Swedish chef song we'd also worked out...

Thursday, April 13, 2006

The Easter Bunny Dropped One


This has to be the strangest Easter egg I've seen - sunny side up! This comes from the Godis rack - the loose lollys like you get at the movies, which are a stock standard item here and considered to be particularly Swedish. There are whole shops devoted to the select-with-a-scoop-and-pay-by-weight idea. In fact the Godishuset (Godis House) near me has the longest opening hours of any shop within walking distance! [And for those of you wondering at this time of year weather godis and God have any connection, no, in Swedish God is actually 'Gud'].

I don't actually know what Swedish Easter traditions are. I've been back from the US for just less than a week and been pretty busy. Apparently a lot of people head outdoors, especially to the mountains, as the weather is nicer, like a kind of quasi spring. Ice fishing is on the cards for at least one of my mates, and like most fishing trips seems to be more about being outdoors with alcohol than the fish. I will actually be back in yankee territory - we have 4 days of rehearsals for the Uni musical/review (Spex), and the theme is Buffalo Bill. Rhymes and puns in Swedish - I am assured it is quite funny.

The warm weather (lots of days hovering between 0 and +5) means that the roads are slushy with all the melting snow. And dirty, muddy, and full of gravel, but still a little icy. The pure white snowy landscape has taken a turn for the worst - a pic is below. I've pulled the bike out of the storeroom (the Marvil), fixed the puncture (hopefully), added some brakes, and tried to get 7 of the gears back, but to no avail yet. It's still a bit dangerous though to ride on though - the paths around my place aren't cleared are naturally bumpy but also covered in ice which is still slippery. And a fall isn't fun because of all the gravel. But there are occasional snowfalls, which still look great to me, but add to the slush, so I'm not sure how much I should cheer them on.

The other really strange thing has been sitting in my apartment and having dinner - with sunlight pouring through the window! Clocks went backward while I was away, and with the lengthening days it is now light till almost 8pm! Soon I'll be praying for the darkness to return when I want to get some sleep...

Happy Easter to you All (Trevligt Påsk)!



Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Chicago



At the end of March I went to the US to help Peter with his experiments at the Advanced Photon Source, part of Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago. My objective was to assist, to gain experience using the synchrotron, and start planning the equipment requirements for (hopefully) my experiments some time in the future. The synchrotron is kinda like an atom smasher in that it accelerates electrons to almost the speed of light using electromagents around a big ring ~300m in diameter, but without crashing into anything. Instead they just use other electromagnets to deflect them off course a bit, and when they grumble and moan about the change of direction they give off x-rays. These are tapped into a beamline where we do the experiments - there are 34 stations at the APS each with several beamlines. The one we used had a beam with about a billion times more flux than a standard lab x-ray machine. The beauty of it is that the beam is focused and quite monochromatic, so you can actually penetrate a couple of mm of steel (or ceramic coating) and sample a whole volume, rather than just the top 10-20 microns (millionths of a meter).

When you apply at least 6 months in advance to get 5 or 7 days of beam and travel halfway around the world to get there, you don't want to waste any of it, so you work 24 hrs a day until the beamtime ends. It's an intense time. But as these weren't my experiments, it wasn't so bad for me, and we had enough people to have a couple of shifts. Our boss Magnus decided not to adjust to US time, so kept his bodyclock to Swedish times and did 12am - 12pm, so that he'd there'd be no jet lag when he flew home and went straight to work.
I was generally on 12pm - 12 am, though that stretched out over the last few days. For those in the know, they are building Australia's first synchrotron just next to Monash, and it should be running in 2007.

There is a pic, and a description of how it works if you're really interested, just click on:
APS
Australian Synchrotron

We managed to spend a night in NY city thanks to a SAS plane that didn't work, which was cool as we got wander around Times Square and Broadway, have a real diner 'burger and drink Manhattans in Manhattan. Sorry, no pics as I didn't get my replacement camera until later. (My cool little Pentax went to camera heaven on the way to France, which still makes me very unhappy). Alot could be written about the total ineptitude of SAS in dealing with this problem - and will be, in a letter to SAS asking for compensation. Every ticket took 15-20 mins to rebook, all 280 of them. We queued for 3 hours, which even tested the patience of the Swedes, and they love queuing! And there was a damned woman (American) who complained loudly about the ineptitude of the staff and boasted to the rest of us in the queue about how she wasn't going to leave until she got what she wanted, took 30 mins to nitpick over details. Of course the Swedes are too polite to complain directly to her, but if she spoke Swedish she might be surprised to find out just how far support for her position actually didn't go.

In Chicago we got to go to the Green Mill, a jazz club that was formerly run by Al Capone, complete with leather booths, large mirrors and elegant woodwork. And funky jazz. After the beamtime we trekked around town looking for clothes, which were cheap but hard to find the right fit: most pants and jeans have the 'relaxed fit', which is basically the 'fatass fit', and look terrible - they stick out at the hips like the jodphurs equestrian riders in France would wear a hundred years ago. T-shirts could also be very wide. A few hard to get jazz CD's were also bought. We did a blues club, the 95th floor of the Hancock tower, part of the Art Institute, and saw most of a baseball match where the reigning 'world' champions the Chicago Whitesox eventually lost in a very low scoring 3-4 run match.

All in all it was a cool time, both work-wise and play-wise. Chicago is a big city with lots to do - a change from Lulea of course. The synchrotron work was interesting, but we'll see if I still find it so after I have the stress of working 20 hr days to get my own experiments done...

Pics from Chicago can be found on Flickr:

Chicago Pics

Again for those confused: single click on the large main picture, then click on the RHS smaller pic each time to advance through the set. Or start a slideshow, but miss the exciting and informative commentary.

London (French Alps 2)


Okay, so I forgot to put up the pics from London, where I spent a day on the way back from the ski trip in the French Alps. The pics are on Flickr, so go clickr:

London Pics

Sunday, April 09, 2006

Water Skiing


Heyall,

It was the end of March, the sun shined for about 12 hours, the lake was still frozen but very slushy, and I finally managed to find gear and someone to go out for a ski with.

It's not too hard to ski on a flat lake, though it takes a lot of arm and upper body strength. Will need a fair bit more practice though, and there is still ice and time. Some pics are on Flickr:

Ski pics