If you don't like other people's opinions about a lot of things, such as mustard, earthquakes and sports, don't read beyond this line! /////////////// Should you dare to proceed, there's a chance that you might read something you have never read before.
| Food and Drink _Interesting Mustard _Nasty Drink |
Sports | Odd Items _Earthquake in Sweden _Legal Pirates in the Soviet Union _Oddities |
Interesting Mustard |
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If you, like me, are interested in sushi, the Japanese fish speciality, you should try Lithuanian mustard. This mustard, only named Garstycios (mustard) from R. Suslaviciaus Imone in Kaunas, is the Lithuanian counterpart of the Japanese wasabi. As you might know, wasabi is a terribly hot, green-coloured horseradish-based spice. This Lithuanian mustard is exactly the same, only the horseradish has been replaced by mustard seed. Imagine my surprise, when I used it as I would ordinary mustard, and was met by wasabi power! Heavy stuff. Mixed with ordinary, nondescript Lithuanian mayonnaise, it makes an excellent egg sauce. The picture shows the mustard in a typical Swedish breakfast environment, one morning when the sun shone and everyone was happy. |
Nasty Drink |
 Spirit
in the bottle?There is definitely spirit in this bottle, but the person is a friend of mine, shot through Bowmore, best of all elexirs. |
I mostly like French chateau wines, and whiskies from northern England with unpronounceable names, with a smell of seaweed and a taste of smoke and old car tyres. But sometimes one runs in to something completely different!
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Azerbaijan brandy (and not a bald Hollywood cop). Admire the terrible typography, normal in the Soviet Union. The brandy doesn't taste very good, but I have had worse. It has a taste of Soviet kolchoz, and an aftertaste with a fragrance of something like a closed down coalmine. I saved it for a long time, mostly to try to forget it, I guess. If this was three-star brandy, one might wonder what single-star brandy tastes, although one should not undertake to test it. But Georgian brandy is worse, having a touch of nuclear power plant. Useless facts: Notice the J in the title “KOHJAK” (H is N). The letter J was included in the Azerbaijan Cyrillic alphabet after 1958, to make it fit the language better (all the Soviet republics had their existing alphabets scrapped after the occupation). The Russian Cyrillic word is KOHbRK (b is a soft modifier, and the reverse R is JA). |
In the Soviet Union very few factories, shops or products had brand names, to avoid creating favourites. Instead everything had unit numbers. This brandy is just “Azerbaijan brandy 13741-76”, which sounds very reassuring.
What? Want to know what you're drinking? All Soviet brandy is good, says Comrade Communist. Just take a deep breath, close your eyes and drink. If the Azerbaijans can survive it, so can you.
Sports |
I completely loathe all forms of sport. Those bellows that run around and cause large, extra costs for our medical system. Their heavy breathing gets far too great media coverage, too. Everything is up for competition, from who can best whack a piece of rubber around, to who is able to hit another man unconscious, but only above the waist. The real heroes are not the athletes though, but the chemists who are continuously developing new drugs that defy the current methods of measurement.
Before, the kids could play football for free on any convenient backyard, but now it's all about fees, sponsoring, sports hall rent, advertising on clothes, tax scandals and bankruptcies. But one has to admit that sports give the kids a unique possibility to combine outdoor life in the weekends, with economic schooling: no shopping centre is free from the hordes of youngsters selling lotto tickets.
I must confess I have visited an ice hockey match once, and I liked it. It was in Lausanne in Switzerland in 1978, the game between Lausanne and Geneva. The spirits were high. People pulled out glühwein and accordions. A festival in its true meaning.
Alas, gone are the days of the accordion. Now, the organisers pump out disco music over the PA as soon as things starts going slow on the rink. Not a second of silence is permitted. The glühwein has been exchanged for Vodka, and the team flags exchanged for iron bars and smoke grenades. The cheering from the cheering sections of the past has been exchanged for trench warfare behind steel fences under police supervision, and international gangs of hooligans going around Europe, wrecking cities, while the authorities watch and ignore in the holy name of sports.
But, visiting poorer countries, one may still see boys playing football for free on the backyards just for the fun of it, without club compulsion, shirt compulsion, team compulsion, advertising compulsion and without sponsors.
An Earthquake in Sweden |
How many Swedes have been through an earthquake? In Sweden? I have. I was in Ängelholm, on the southern coast, sometime in the middle of the 90's, having a course in CorelDRAW for Banverket (The National Rail Administration). All of a sudden something said BOOM! and the house shook for several seconds, as if it had been floating on water.
The house was surrounded by railway tracks and boxcars, and my first thought was that two trains had collided, but as nothing had really happened, after a few minutes I realised it must have been an earthquake. I later got the information that a small quake had indeed occurred, about 3-4 on the Richter Scale.
Legal Pirates in the Old Soviet Union |
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In my wife's collection of records from the old Soviet Union I found this goodie, a pirate release of ABBA's “Money Money” from the government-owned Soviet record company Melodia, pressed on one of those thin, flexible, transparent records you could sometimes find in music magazines in the 1970's. This record is double-sided, and on the flip side is an Uzbek group called “Jalla” that no one has ever heard of. If you look closely you will find the Melodia logotype on the record. |
Being Swedish, I recognise ABBA, and it certainly is ABBA singing on the record, but there is something wrong with the mix, because the voices are drowned in the instrument sounds (that, in turn, are almost drowned in distortion). It may be that Melodia found/stumbled over/stole a faulty mix from Polar Records.
Oddities |
Things I found here and there, that are difficult to put anywhere.
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How not to mount something inside a vending machine! Close-up of the screws sticking out of the roof. A picture I just couldn't resist. |
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How not to make land with a ship! Definitely a no-no for the skipper who just passed his exam. Back to the textbook. A whiskey too many in the Captain's mess, perhaps? |
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Mass murderers are not allowed into the U.S. if they are stupid enough to tell about it on the immigration form. If, for example one of Milosevic's henchmen would go to the U.S., do you think he would tick the Yes-box and admit having committed genocide? Let's say colonel Khadafi would want to have a look at Les Vegas, would he tick yes? |
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There are no limits to Sabena's kindness In the In-Flight Magazine of the airline Sabena they tell you about all the electronic things you can't use during the flight. However, they are generous enough to let you use your hearing aid, and you do not have to turn your pacemaker off! |
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Angel Tits In Kristine Church in Falun, Sweden the pulpit is exceptionally beautiful, with many beautifully carved figures. Looking closer at the angels though, gives the feeling that the wood-carver had other things in mind than the Bible when he carved the angels' fronts. |
