Blagdaross

Alex is distraught that we’re losing to some racist nutcases in the 2006 Weblog Awards. Weirdly, Haloscan thought my comment was spam, so I’m putting it here instead.

Dude, these are the wingnut awards. Unlike the liberal Koufaxes, they aspire or pretend to be non-partisan; they have a bunch of non-wingnut nominees, and non-political categories. This works out fine for them, because the liberals don’t link to them, so the wingnuts always win against the more popular liberwal blogs, and not too overwhelmingly. They never get to win in the Bloggies, since progressives are more popular.

It’s so wonderfully illustrative of the the wingnutosphere in general, and their whole modus operandi.

No need to feel bad about losing them. No one takes these awards seriously, anyway.

Last week when I was walking in a park, I saw swans eating from an old man’s hands. I’ve never seen anything like it. Two adults, and they’re gray, already big children, and I think literally hundreds of ducks, but I don’t know if they got any food.

Swans are beautiful, fierce creatures, wild animals that one should have a healthy resopect for. He must have come to the park every day for months and developed their trust.

One of the wonderful things about Nynäshamn is that it’s chockful of swans. If you walk by the water (we’re surrounded by the ocean on three sides), a swan pair will eventually turn up, always a husband and a wife. I’ll move to Stockholm pretty soon. I’ll miss this place.

I’ll start blogging again.

I haven’t given up on the blog, but I’ve had work to do.

Inspired by this Brad DeLong post.

Birds. Lots of them.

Deers. Hundreds of times. They were completely shameless and unafraid back in the 90s, you’d often see them in broad daylight munching on our plants. Far rarer now, probably due to the recovery of the fox population, which was almost wiped out by some disease back then.

Rabbits. My sisters pet rabbits lived in cages in the garden. They were cute. RIP.

Cats. A fat old cat used to come and scare the rabbits. We had to shoo it away all the time. One time a rabbit got out of its cage, and the cat came and made it flee up the forest before Maria had a catch it. Last we saw of that rabbit. We don’t like that cat.

One of our new neighbour’s cats is in our garden like all the time. He was really tame and let Maria pet it the first time they met, but he can also be sulky and ignore her. The funny thing about this cat is that it always moving its tail around. It’s never still. He must have pretty strong tail muscles by now.

A fox. Me and my sister saw a red fox strolling around just five or weeks ago.

A hedgehog. Right after we saw the fox, Maria* discovered a hedgehog lying in our garden, all still like. She took it home and our mom fed it snails, and it became more active. So she let it out in the garden the next, but it never went away, and later she saw worms coming out of it. Ugh. Maria had to have a vet put it down. She was completely devastated.

A moose. In the late 90s. A calf, no horns, but close to full grown, still pretty huge. I actually went out to see it better, but stayed close to the door. It paid me no mind.

Another moose. Early aughts. My dad and Maria liked to tell my mom there’s a moose in the garden every April 1st, and she fell for it every time. So one time my dad says a moose had come and she didn’t believe him. But there was: A full grown male, IIRC. It started munching on our trees, or some other muchable thing, and my dad didn’t like that. So he had the bright idea of throwing a stick to scare it away. The moose charged. If he had stood a little farther from the door, maybe I wouldn’t have a father anymore.

* She’s moved out, but she used to come here all the time when she lived in her old crappy apartment, and still comes fairly often. I currently live with my parents, will move out in November. It’s fairly common to move back to your parents in you live around Stockholm and are in your mid-20s, according to a recent article in Dagens Nyheter.