A favorite passage from the original article: One thing we can't learn, of course, is whether her words are true or make sense. Part of the appeal of diagramming is the fact that just about any sentence can be diagrammed, even when it is gibberish.

Diagramming Sarah

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The Rainbow Festival is Malmö's version of Gay Pride, and from what Dr. Darling and I were able to tell (based on the size of the parade), the event appears to have grown a bit since our last attempt to "be better gays" two years ago. In fact, our experience at the "Opening Night Party" in 2006 was so bad that we actually boycotted the entire Festival week last year.

And to be honest, we remained a little gun-shy about the 2008 celebration, especially since the program indicated that organizers were still allowing men-only events to be held at the same time as several of the Festival's main parties. Now I don't claim to be an expert on community-building, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't happen when you segregate the socializing, particularly if the local GLBT population isn't expecially large to begin with...Duh.

But the weather was gorgeous this afternoon and the parade route passed very near The Penthouse-Nordic, so we decided to head over to Stortorget to "support the cause".  It was lively, with lots of good energy, and we really enjoyed ourselves. We may even venture back to some Rainbow Festival parties next year, provided that the boys turn up as well.  Otherwise we'll be forced to crash the men-only parties in drag.

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Hat tip to my cousin Casey for pointing me to MoreCowbell.dj, a site that provides a very essential service: the ability to upload your favorite song (as an mp3) and add more cowbell, as well as the voice of Christopher Walken from his seminal role of 70's record producer Bruce Dickenson on SNL .

Casey thinks it will be the next Ebay, and I'm inclined to agree! Hope you enjoy one of my favorite songs, "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence, featuring 43% “more cowbell” and 100% more Walken!

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But given the fact that I now have regular occasion to actually wear an eye patch, I have absolutely NO excuse for not celebrating this silliest of “holidays”.

My Swedish colleagues are SO going to love this!

Signed,

Capt. Rumjugs McScurvy

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Sometime today, the built-in hit counter here at ShazzerSpeak rolled past the one million mark. Which pretty much begs the question: "Don't you people have anything better to do?!"

Seriously though, nobody is more surprised by this than me. Except maybe the privacy-obsessed Swede, who is convinced that the numbers are primarily the result of spam bots and people searching for pictures of Swedish soccer star Freddie Ljungberg in his underwear.

Shazzer: Hey now, plenty of those hits are real people!

Dr. Darling: Well I don't understand why anyone who doesn't know us personally would have the slightest interest in reading your blog.

Shazzer: Why is it so hard to believe that folks might just enjoy my writing?  Stranger things have happened.

Dr. Darling: True. Who would have guessed there would be so many people searching Google for information on expired yogurt?

Shazzer: That was one entry!

Dr. Darling: Face it, our lives are boring and most of the people who end up on your blog end up there by accident.

Shazzer: That's SO not true! I'm a good story-teller. I'm even funny on occasion. That's why people read it. You want me to ask about it in my next post?

Dr. Darling:  Sure. And while you're at it, ask visitors to leave their IP numbers so I don't have to troll StatCounter for them later.

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Fortunately for the police department in the northern Sweden city of Luleå, a visiting Jamaican tourist was able to confirm that the hundreds of unusual looking plants growing in a local park were indeed ganja.

According the story in The Local, “police theorized that someone had surreptitiously spread cannabis seeds among the flower beds earlier in the summer, leaving the city’s park maintenance crews to unwittingly take care of the marijuana’s cultivation.”

Pretty damn clever plan if you ask me!  As well as a humorous example of Swedish practicality in action!

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- Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt used in vitro to conceive twins - Celebrities - NJ.com

Personally, I would have had no problem at least going through the motions of trying to get it done the natural way. (Yes, I used the phrase "going through the motions"...get it?  Sometimes I slay me!)

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Where do I sign-up for THIS flight?!!! Okay, but incredible eye-candy aside...I've been thinking about this new U.S. airline industry strategy of charging customers to check their luggage, which in my experence, most savvy flyers avoid doing anyway. Business travellers and backpackers alike know how much more quickly you can get in and out of an airport if you limit yourself to a carry-on. (Not to mention the fact that you significantly reduce the chance of an airline losing your luggage if you don't check any in the first place.)

 But from what I can tell, any efficiency and savings that passengers and/or the airlines gain via the new rules will be lost when virtually everybody who boards a plane does so with a carry-on bag. Security checkpoints will take longer to clear and the boarding process itself will be even more chaotic and time-consuming.

Mobile post sent by Shazzer using Utterz. Replies.

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The Lenval hospital in Nice told a local newspaper that a healthy boy and girl were delivered by Caesarian section on Saturday evening.

Nice Matin reported that Jolie and her partner, actor Brad Pitt, have named the boy Knox Leon and the girl, Vivienne Marcheline.

Actually, I think the name Knox is quite cool…but why on earth would they saddle the kid with the middle name Leon?  I’m not sure even Brad Pitt’s son can overcome that moniker.

In any case, best wishes to my favorite rainbow family...and as usual, I'm grateful for any excuse to post a picture of Angelina.  Enjoy this shot of her...and the twins. (Did I actually type that or just think it?!)

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The BBC is reporting that an elderly Swedish man took matters into his own hands when he realized he didn't have enough money for the ferry to Helsingborg.

Drunken Swede tries to row home from Denmark

To be honest, I’m surprised this doesn’t happen more often!

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For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about (i.e. the majority of my immediate family who will read this entry from the comfort of their inboxes), "bandwidth" refers to the amount of data traffic that moves between a website and the rest of the internet. The more visitors a site has, the more bandwidth it uses, and web hosting companies typically set some kind of limit on the amount of bandwidth they provide clients for any given month.

My most excellent hosting service, blog-city.com, provides 2 megabytes of bandwidth per month, which is generally considered more than enough for the casual blogger. (According to the independent comparison service  findmyhosting.com, 99% of ALL websites use less than 2MB per month.) And until recently, 2MB was plenty for ShazzerSpeak...though I have approached the limit a couple of times.

But I'd never come so close as to trigger the warning messages that started streaming into my mailbox a little over a week ago, notifying me that ShazzerSpeak was at risk of going dark for the remainder of June if I didn't purchase some extra bandwidth before hitting the 2MB limit.*  I was so stunned by this information that I actually zipped off a quick e-mail to blog-city support to make sure it wasn't a mistake.

Of course I'd like to think that my writing, linking and commentary has just been especially provocative and entertaining lately, but Dr. Darling is crediting the European Cup Football championships for the increased traffic this month. For some reason, an entry I wrote a couple years ago featuring a very tasty image of Swedish soccer star Fredrik Ljungberg ranks very high on Google image seach, so lots of folks end up here while surfing for pix of Freddie in his Calvin Klein's.

Then again, Sweden did get knocked out of the tournament during early pool play...

Yeah, I'm going with especially provocative and entertaining.

*Final tally for June: 47,906 hits (1,597 per day)/2.30MB of bandwidth. SWEET!

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“Avoiding dying alone at all costs is no longer the primary goal for many of today’s women,” Dr. Detweiller said. “Every year, millions of educated females discover that they can be just as underappreciated and ignored in the workplace as they can while doting on loutish and inattentive boyfriends.”

- Report: Women Increasingly Choosing Dead-End Careers Over Dead-End Relationships

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Underwear condom pockets earn award

Somehow I don’t think this would have gone over big as a 4-H Project in the U.S.

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Men Create More Housework for Women

So then why is it that The Penthouse-Nordic usually looks like a dump unless we’re expecting company?

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LONDON (Reuters) - Calling all chocoholics: British researchers recruiting volunteers willing to eat a bar of chocolate daily for a year, guilt-free and all in the name of science.

I hate to break it to the researchers, but I’ve been following this protocol for years.

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For the first time since I’ve been old enough to vote, my home state is actually a “playa” in a presidential primary race…and I’m living in Sweden.

Usually the nominees for both parties have been determined long before the Hoosier State gets around to holding its primary in May. But this year both the Democratic candidates have been campaigning in Indiana...hell, Barack Obama even has an event scheduled at my high school.

Of course the sad reality is that no matter which Dem takes Indiana, the state will go to McCain in November.  He won't even have to campaign there...merely wave as he flys over.

For Indiana Voters, Talk of Change May Fall Flat   (from The New York Times)

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