Author Archives: jon

My Favourite TV Shows/Films (by Freya)

Posted on by

Don’t know why I haven’t written about this earlier, but I’ve been really busy exploring the world (and the box with Daddy’s beads in). Anyway, it’s high-time I told myself a few things I like, so let’s start with the easiest: TV.

I think the first program I showed Mum and Dad I liked was Bolibompa, a children’s TV show shown every weekday. It wasn’t so much the show itself as the theme music and green dragon at the beginning of the show. I could find myself dancing wildly to the beat. 10/10 for entertainment (my parents, that is).

Soon after I got into Teletubbies, which isn’t surprising because some psychology bod helped in the making of it. The pretty colours, cute baby-faced charecters (Po rocks), the tediously slow (but educationaly giving) repetion of words and actions; it had everything!

The Jungle Book by those chaps at Disney. Wow! Elephants, snakes, a bear that scratches himself on rocks and trees while he sings, monkeys that..well do monkey stuff, elephants again. Do I need say more? (The vultures were a bit boring, though.)

Madagascar by some other chaps that aren’t Disney. It’s OK, actually. Seen it a few times and, while it didn’t have me rolling off my parents’ knees with laughter, it had some nice bits in it. Penguins, for example. Oh, and a lion, a rhino, a zebra, etc. Animals rock, too.

Ice Age (or Mammoth, as I like to say if I want to see it). More animals, with a sloth that bares a striking resemblence to a cuddly toy whose company I enjoy, Rune. It’s got snow too, which is cool since I just learned about snow, having experienced winter in Stockholm. Something I can relate to.

Dora The Explorer. I’ve just recently got into this. It’s a cartoon in Swedish, which helps me learn English (like I need it). Originally it was in American English/Spanish, and I fear that if I were to watch too much of the original I would die a torturous death. You see, Daddy and Mummy think that the accent of the American/Spanish Dora grates the ears and mashes the brain with a hot screwdriver. Personally, I have no idea what they are talking about.
Those are probably the most oft-watched of the bunch of stuff I get to see. No doubt I’ll have a few updates in the future.

Barbapapa Has Attitude

Posted on by


Freya was given her first Barbapapa book (having already inherited a thinner paperback-book from her mother) a few months ago now, and we all enjoy reading it at bedtime. That which lifts it above many of the other children’s books we own is the amount of detail/objects in each drawing, giving it a longer life span.

Her second Barbapapa book was bought about a month or so ago, and, while offering the same pictorial quality, shows the Barba family in a very different light. Entitled “Barbapapa and the Ark”, it covers environmental isues and animal rights in one fell swoop. Hunters, big-game hunters and whalers are given what for, whilst the rest of the population are shown to be uncaring abusers of their environment. It was quite a (pleasant) shock, considering its fluffy predecessors.

I wonder if the shape-changing family are vegans.

One Step Further Away

Posted on by

We’ve had Mozilla’s Firefox as our primary web-browser for some time now, and we’ve been very happy with it.

Recently, we feel that Outlook Express (and, therefor, Hotmail) has been hindering us from doing certain things, not least using Trillian with MSN Messenger. Updated versions of MSN get placed (without asking) somewhere where Outlook refuses to look, using instead the older version. This means that we appear offline to anyone with the new version of MSN Messenger.

This problem is quite possibly extremely easy to fix, though much searching/installing/re-installing/unistalling has not given us the answer. This is a downsight on Microsoft’s part. As Jo says, a company that dominates the market should have the best customer support available, but it doesn’t. Long from it.

So, we have decided to (painstakingly) do away with all things Outlook, slowly changing our emails to Thunderbird-friendly (Microsoft and POP3 is a taboo). This also means an eventual end to Trillian, since most off the people we know use Skype, or can be convinced to do so.

Posted in Jon

When Two Words Are Better Than One

Posted on by

This last week Freya has started to string two words together, to our combined delight and amazement.

Whilst she has enunciated in such a way before, it has only become her standard method of communication these last few weeks. Most favoured “sentences” seem to start with “there”, and Freya can be heard regularly stating “there Mummy”, “there water” etc.

How wonderful it is to be a part of this developmental phase.

Paschal Sillyness

Posted on by

As Easter appraoches, people in Sweden ebulliently partake in the buying of sprigs of (birch) twigs decked with coloured feathers, known here as påskris.

Apparently, in days of yore, folk would whip themselves with such a device (minus the feathers, which only appeared in the 1930’s) on Shrove Tuesday or Good Friday (wisely, the Swedes call this day Long Friday, which it undoubdtedly was.) Such flagellation was carried out as a reminder of Jesus’ suffering.

This all now seems like a load of nonsense, and instead we (I being Swedish in this context) decorate our homes with brightly coloured pieces of trees.

This must be something unique to Scandinavia, and I simply cannot imagine paskris being exported to any other country today. And yet I wish it would, for I should like nothing more than to hear the mellifluous chanting in marketplaces around Britain, “Twigs with feathers on, get yer lovely twigs with feathers on ‘ere.”

Incidently, a bunch of påskris like the one pictured here would set you back about £1.50.
Double-incidently, Paschal is the adjectival form of Easter, pask in Swedish. These words come from the Hebrew, Pasch, which means passover. So there you go.

Posted in Jon