Books from the 1990s, part one

How is it you come here to read about small, personal stuff, about what happens in our life’s and I am living in my head so much that I write about larger, more abstract ideas. One book, that I got as a present from mom, was Darwins ofullbordade, (1997) , by P.C Jersild. The title literally means "Darwin's unfinished". It’s about biology and human nature and for some reason I didn’t read the book until this autumn. The thing with that subject was this. The book was written during the era of the sequencing of the human genome, and DNA-evidence in courts, and Jurassic Park, and special agent Dana Scully doing western blots on TV. So One could think genetics was popular. Att the same time, biology, genetics, of human nature had the disturbing political background of being associated with the Nazists. But that’s not what I’ll write about here. On one of the last pages he, in relation to human nature, mentions optimism and pessimism. He writes that an optimist, on a global scale, sooner or later will be proven wrong. We won’t create a paradise on earth (that’s why many in power, historically have promised a paradise after death, not a paradise in life: “you get pie in the sky when you die”). We won’t even create a world where everyone has freedom, human rights, and welfare. Plus, the fact he actually started with, sooner or later humans will go extinct. However being a pessimist has very little reward. Sooner or later you get to say: “I told you so!” and feel “Skadeglägde”, that’s Swedish for Schadenfreude, when whose optimists are proven wrong. The problem is just that before you get that pleasure, you have to spend years being depressed.

The last thing, can you really have Schadenfreude over optimists being wrong? It’s now ten years since Matt Ridley's book The rational optimist was published. In it he amogh other things tone down the impact of the climate catastrophe and the risk of a pandemic. Living in a world with a pandemic and that has been screwed up by climate change, it should be weird to be happy over those things, just because they proved Matt Ridley wrong. Wouldn’t most of us prefer that he was right? We then have other examples with the pandemic. I can, again, write that I don’t know how to best fight pandemics, it’s not my job and I’m happy I don’t have that job. My exemple is just this, all spring one saw experts saying that masks had no use outside hospitals. Of course other experts said the opposite, but hear me out. Are the experts who were pessimistic about masks, now happy that infections have skyrocketed in countries like Italy and France, despite mask laws? No, being happy that ICU-units getting filled, isn't good, even if you predicted it. In the last exemple it's also too early to tell.

This is interesting, I promise : sorry for mention Sweden all the time

As you know I’m not an actor, I have merely been in one amateurish movie and will possibly be on stage next year. It’s a show that takes place in a simulated world. Today I in a weird way was reminded of my grandpas acting career. I was surfing wikipedia and came to the Swedish page for “Exploitation film”. It mentioned Thriller en grym film/Thriller a cruel picture - a movie it’s not possible to mention without claiming it was one inspiration for Kill Bill, that’s an obligatory claim. I have not seen that 1970s “rape and revange” movie, but it stars Christina Lindberg. She also had a role in a historical movie a reviewer on IMBD called: “Greatest trainwreck in swedish movie history”. My grandpa had a role as an extra in that movie.

Ok my grandpa was a farmer, the reason he had a role as an extra was because that movie was filmed near his farm and they took extras from the home guard. Still, why not say that my grandpa acted with the actress from a cult movie and I therefore come from an actor family - just like the Skarsgårds. Thinking about that, our last name also ends with “gård”. Coincidence?

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Then writing about my family. I have heard my four year old niece sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider" in both Swedish and Finnish. She picked up those lyrics in her old kindergarten. That reminded me that she and her sister are 50% Finnish, who won’t speak Finnish. Well, they are not the only example of that. It’s possible that it was on livejournal I first read about Latinos in the US who don’t speak Spanish, just English. (I have no idea how common it is, just that it’s not unheard of.) I also think I have heard that if the mom in a “mixed ethnicity” family speaks a minority language, the kids will be bilingual. If it’s the dad that speaks the minority language, the children are less likely to be bilingual. Intresting.