T-post

Despite the weather of almost natural catastrophe proportions, I've finally gotten my long lost passion for skiing back.

Back in the day (read the 80's) the most important part of skiing was to look good on the slopes. So as long as you kept your skis together, your weight on your heals and played Woodpeckers From Space as loud as you could on your Sony Walkman you pretty much owned the slopes.

Unfortunately that's not really the case anymore. So I started my weekend by renting the best carving skis they had in the store together with a technique lesson to learn the ropes of carving. I've always thought that ski lessons were just for suckers who can't ski. Which apparently was a perfect description of me. A sucker who can't ski worth a shit.

Fortunately this wasn't my instructors first time converting a sucker stuck in the 80's. Thanks Stefan for my new found love for surf-skiing instead of my long lost love for 80's water-skiing.

We thought we'd share with you a little secret that only recently made its way into the Chinese media after 150 years.

Chako Paul City, a town in the northern Sweden woods, is a place where all the residents are women, and all the women are gay.

Founded in 1820 by a wealthy widow, Shakebao, as it's also referred to, boasts 25,000 residents and a medieval castle guarded by hot female sentries.

Not so fast, guys. While tourism is booming, and "hotels and restaurants are everywhere to receive women from all over the world", any men wishing to enter risk being "beaten half to death" by the lesbionic police.

I just came back from a weekend of skiing in the Swedish mountains. And man was it cold. When the weatherman on TV explains that on the first plato of the mountain the temperature will get well under -50 degrees Celsius (-58 degrees Fahrenheit). You've got to ask yourself one question..

What the F**k am I doing out!!?

I just bought a new bed for my 4 year old son Arvid. The specifications where simple. He wanted a BIG bed without railing on it. And the "without railing" seemed to be the most important part. I must admit that I was a bit surprised that he even knew that a bed could come with railing. But none the less I finally found a bed according to all his specifications.

My strategy was simple. He would probably roll out in his sleep one or two times within the first few nights and then he would subconsciously know in his sleep not to do it again.

But man was I wrong. He's fallen out at least once every night since then. And he will not at any cost put up a piece of wood to keep him safe. When I asked him why, he simply responded: "- There's this kid at my daycare that doesn't have it, that's why I can't put mine up before he does." 

I can totally see them talking on the yard, one 4 year old to another. "- Can you see this cut, I got this falling out of bed last night. You know I don't have any railing on it. Do you?"

The pharmacology industry is about to change things up a little. Okay, a lot. Until recently, drug research has almost always been dedicated to discovering treatments for specific ailments or disorders, now there’s a growing interest in enhancing the normal and healthy human condition instead.

According to a recent report from the British Academy of Medical Sciences, the next few decades will see a boom in so-called cognition enhancers. These drugs affect the brain and improve things like attention, perception, learning, memory, language, planning and decision-making. In other words – they make you smarter.

But do we really need to get any smarter? Is the problem really us, or have we just created a world that we can’t keep up with and now we’re hoping that new drugs will compensate? Maybe humanity has hit a point where we have to modify ourselves chemically in order to keep up with our own progress.  Whoops.

The idea of robots becoming a part of our society may seem like a farfetched sci-fi fantasy, but it's not. Technically we already live with robots on a daily basis, they just don't look like the Hollywood version - yet.

Robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers are being used daily, and although they're limited to fairly basic tasks, robot technology and application possibilities are advancing quickly. For example, Samsung has developed a border surveillance robot for North Korea that's armed with a machine gun. 

As robot technologies and abilities are progressing, we need to figure out how we're going to regulate them. Robot experts such as EURON, the European, Robotics Network, have already started the debate by lobbying governments for legislation regarding the ethical treatment of robots.

I just came across this video "When I Remember". I made this together with two friends, Johan Lundström and Anne-Li Karlsson (the designer of T-post issue 20) some years ago for a band called Blindside.

The story in the video is about a boy living with his abusive, alcoholic father and the only way he can cope with it all is to draw pictures of it. The video is set when someone has found the boys picture diary and is flipping through it.

Now when I watch it again for the first time in years I think it turned out quite nice.

Nice enough for someone to do a mock video on it anyway.

Ah technology, its advancements have improved our lives in so many ways. Thanks to technology we no longer need to use our precious brains for things like remembering phone numbers, how to spell or read a map. Author, Cory Doctorow, refers to our technological exploitation as using an “outboard memory”. We’re freeing up our minds for better performance in daily living; leaving more energy for creativity and problem solving processes.

But when a recent study showed that a third of people under 30 can’t remember their own phone number, it makes you wonder if our technological advances are really all that good for us. Maybe the Author and Journalist Bob Brooks was right in a recent article for the New York times when he said: “I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less.”

And what about in the long run? What kind of long-term effects are we going to experience as a result of our inability to do anything for ourselves?

College just isn't what it used to be. It used to be that sex, drugs and recreation were extracurricular activities. Today, they are part of the actual coursework.

At Britain's University of Leeds, one can study lap dancing and pass it off as research into the "rise, tolerance and integration of sexual consumption and sexual labor displayed through the erotic dance industry."

In the States, course titles like Cyberporn and Society, Alien Sex, and The Phallus are just a few college classes that students can sign up to explore sexuality on their parent's dime.

If marijuana is your thing, there are courses for that, too. In Detroit, Med Grow Cannabis College offers courses on how to grow, use and profit from medicinal marijuana. There's even required reading: "Marijuana Horticulture: The Indoor/Outdoor Medical Grower's Bible" by Jorge Cervantes.

And when you're done with that, how about watching a bunch of TV shows and movies, and playing video games. Only this time, you'll be tested on it. Better study hard too because your future success depends on it, right?

This year I have a reason bigger then ever to follow the Oscars and their every move. If you haven't yet heard me bragging about it, the T-post sponsored short film, Instead of Abracadabra was nominated for best short film (live action).

So for whoever gives a shit, here are my other Oscar picks: 

At this very moment mathematicians around the world are working day and night to crack one of life’s great mysteries: How heterosexual women could claim to have considerably fewer sex partners than numbers claimed by heterosexual men.

In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women. One survey, recently reported by the U.S. government, concluded that men claimed an average of seven female sex partners, while women claimed an average of only four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. 

Researchers intent on solving this dumbfounding equation refuse to give up. But when asked about feasible theories as to why the numbers don’t match up, a health statistician Cheryl D. Fryar at the National Center for Health Statistics could only reply by saying “I have no idea”.

There's really been a lot of good movies this past year. Inglorious Bastards, Up in the Air, A Serious Man and The Cove just to name a few.

Speaking of The Cove, which was my favorite movie this past year by the way. “The Cove” is much more than just a record of the quest to unfold the mystery of what's going on in the cove and why the villagers is fighting so hard too keep it all a secret. The movie is a Trojan horse, an exceptionally well made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms and mysterious men in gray flannel suits.

Heroes, however, are instantly identifiable. “The Cove,” like the dolphins, would be lost without Richard O’Barry, who captured and trained all five of the animals who made Flipper a television star. His drooping eyes and sagging shoulders testify to the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has spent the last 35 years trying to make up for the wrongs he's made his the past.

“If a dolphin is in trouble anywhere in the world, my phone rings,” he says. (We don’t need to be told that his heart breaks.) You may not give a fig for dolphins, but Mr. O’Barry is giving enough for all of us.

 References: indiewire.com

When I was younger, and more avidly interested in music, today’s digital availability would seem like a wet dream. Services like Spotify, or the various forms of file sharing out there, would’ve been a total fulfillment of my former desires – retroactively seeming a little too fantastic to even be imagined back then.

But as such wishes have nonetheless been granted, why am I so often left starring at my Spotify search window with a strange feeling of apathy?

An old Persian curse comes to mind: “May all your desires be granted at once”.

With music being so easily available, new types of symptoms have emerged. The feeling of not having enough time to enjoy it all has been labeled “time famine”. This creates a “choice fatigue” – out of e v e r y t h i n g, what should I listen to right now?

What’s the point of violence in our rich part of world where there’s – let’s face it – actually very little need for hunting in order to survive?

After hundreds of thousands of years of technical evolution the cultivation and harvesting of the earth’s resources has become refined to the point of making our predatory instinct redundant.In today’s network economy violent behavior is even less essential for surviving. Our most relevant violent action today would be a frustrated, frenetic little clicking on links to websites that doesn’t upload fast enough. But a crooked and angrily wiggling index finger hardly poses the same threat as one of our ancestors would in a state of agitation.

So, from a strict evolutionary perspective it may be that violence has survived its own relevance. That we occasionally still need to mobilize our defensive instincts cannot be denied. But the fact remains that there seem to be other aspects to violence than it being a mere defense mechanism.

25 years ago Swedish Hollywood actor Dolph Lundgren came back to Sweden demanding that all interviews with him would be held in english. This wasn't too popular with the Swedes who are known for being the worlds biggest upholder of the "Jante Law". Which pretty much is the law telling you "– Your not better then us, so don't act as if you think you are". So the Swedish people has been locking down on him for the better part of almost 25 years now.

For crying out loud, if I would have gotten back from Hollywood with Sly's phone number on speed dial, I would have demanded some shit too. So I say let him speak frickin' Mandarin for all I care. That's respect none the less!

But in the eye's of the Swedish people he made his comeback, big time, as the host of the Swedish competition for who's going to be representing us in The Eurovision Song Contest. Take a look and judge for yourself.

Way to go my brother from another mother!