#gaggle of swedes

[sergeifyodorov]

Element 020 | Calcium | Borje Salming

Salming was one of the first European players to make an impact in the National Hockey League (NHL), for which he is often considered a trailblazer. Prior to Salming's arrival in the NHL, most North Americans considered European players too soft to play in the NHL.

About these "elements", Lavoisier reasoned: It is even possible that all the substances we call earths may be only metallic oxyds, irreducible by any hitherto known process.

for @simmyfrobby's series

[ratatatastic]

uh everything alright over here boys?

[munsonmuses]

Razors and Tongues (Prince Paul x Reader)

Synopsis: Paul, much to the detest of his mother, has still been struggling to find a spouse, much less one that could carry an heir. And Catherine was desperate to end the war with the Swede’s. Why not kill two birds with one stone? That’s where the reader comes in. You, being in Catherine’s good graces, at least, enough that she won’t harm you, and treats you with a gentle hand, she decides to use you to push the narrative she holds. Unfortunately, you’re a bit vicious and viper-like in tongue, towards anyone but her. And although horrendous, absolutely detestable, and manipulative to the core, Paul can’t detach himself from the idea of you. Pursuing you like a pathetic puppy

Warnings: Cursing, mild gore, lots of references to breasts, reader is a female/has female anatomy, smut (incredibly rough, bratty, a prince gets what he wants smut)

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The sound of the gun firing echoed, cracking through the quiet autumn air. Paul muttering bitterly to himself as he reloaded carefully. Aiming at the helpless buck and firing, watching it go down with a desperate cry.

“No, no I don’t want to marry some Danish Dunce of a woman, I have no clue who she might be, and I know she’s some air headed idiot-“ he told Andrey, aiming once more as he searched the wood for another helpless animal to suffer the consequence of his rage. “Or worse, she falls in line, within my mothers gaggle of vicious, barb tongued geese…” he muttered bitterly as he pulled back to look at Andrey.

Andrey shrugged lightly, looking him over carefully as he hummed to himself. “Well, nobody said you had to love her, or even like her. You merely have to fuck her.” He said as Paul scoffed, fixing his coat.

“If she’s that desperate for an heir I could fuck a common whore, we don’t have to go through all this work-“ he muttered bitterly as he stood, carefully packing away the firearm and beginning the trek back to the palace. Bitterly swallowing his detest in favor of his country, and the duty he was required to uphold.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You stared up at a portrait of the young prince, carefully swallowing the sweet peach wine within your glass. Eyes tracing every feature on his painted face. Catherine scoffing lightly.

“My son is…detestable, in appearance, to say the least duckling, but, he’s not awful. If you can overlook the weak chin, short neck, and pathetically flat cheekbones…he’s got my eyes. He’s cunning, vicious in wit, he’s gunning for the throne-“ she took a heavy sip, that would be better described as a gulp.

“-and he’s a bit of…a character. He falls relatively easy if he sees you as palatable. I know, that you don’t necessarily match that description, but he needs a strong woman to keep him in line.” Catherine mused, earning a curt nod from you.

“Don’t worry, I promise you I can provide an heir, and a placated prince…” you assured, before taking a peer at yourself in a mirror. The heavy and deep green of the dress you wore contrasting with the white lace that decorated your throat. The waxy red pigment on your lips, still in tact after your nursing of your glass.

“I can give you exactly what you-“

The doors flew open, cutting through your statement as his muddied shoes traipsed along the tile of the room. Stopping harshly and turning to look at you with a soft sneer.

Catherine, ever the diplomat, carefully approached you and took your hands, leading you over to Paul who looked you over with eyes filled with venom and malice. He expected a calm and docile sheep, desperate to please to look back at him. Instead, met with the eyes of a viper. Desperate to strike but searching for the optimal point. And for once, he felt mildly challenged.

“Paul, dear…I’d like to introduce you to the crowned princess of Sweden. Before you get smart with me, consider the opportunities it would create for our nation…” she insisted as he scoffed lightly. “There’s a month, between you both, to see how things go.”

His portrait didn’t do him justice, his face was much softer, sweeter. A soft jawline, and plush pink lips. His eyes soft, a forced hardness behind them.

“A suitable whore, a detestable wife-“ he said calmly as he looked you over.

“And you’re a pathetic excuse for a husband-“you retorted sharply.

And his breath caught in his throat, his face felt hot. But he wasn’t feverish in the slightest. He was being challenged by you, and it was ridiculously alluring. Oh good god…was he falling?

As you sauntered off, following Catherine and her close circle, looking back over your shoulder at him.

His body rigid, eyes frozen on you as you winked lightly and left. He had to have you…

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The following three weeks had been filled with stolen glances, teasing, patronizing the poor man. And he was coming undone at the seems, because good god, you were ravishing. He couldn’t keep it together.

Watching you socialize, how you would make ever so sure you were tilted far too forward, were eating precious pastries and allowing the creams inside to rest on your lips for seconds too long, and subsequently licking them off your plush lips. All while maintaining stiff and unrelenting eyecontact.

Teasing him...

Calling him...

Challenging him...

As you dismissed yourself from the table, unable to handle another second of cruel gossiping disguised under the notion of "keeping each other politically updated", you felt a pair of eyes trained on you. Looking up, the prince scowling down at you from one of the many windows and shoving the curtains shut.

Despite the disdain on his face, you knew you'd won. Carefully snatching a pastry off the tray and heading inside. Meandering what appeared to be aimlessly, up to his study, and allowing yourself inside. His back to you, but the grunt he let out signified him acknowledging your presence.

"I brought you something to eat, lord knows you need it. You lock yourself away up here..." you unceremoniously sat yourself upon his desk, and held the pastry out to him.

Though he was looking right past it.

at how your breasts spilled ever so slightly over the lace that lined the square collar of your peacock blue dress, one that matched the hue of his suit perfectly (especially since he'd had it made and sent, due to personal preference). How the whalebone of your corset cinched and pulled everything just the right way. How the gorgeous pendant that hung from your neck had made its home beautifully between your breasts.

At his refusal to take the pastry, you shoved it unceremoniously into your mouth as he scoffed loudly to himself.

"You disgust me, how you stuff your mouth, a-and you guffaw like a goose! You tease and poke a-and you pull my mind as-astray and I just-" he looked up to see if you were listening, and you weren't, unsurprisingly.

That was IT.

He yanked you towards him, his lips practically shoved onto yours as you dropped the final half of the pastry gracelessly onto the papers that had still lied upon his desk.

His kisses were feverish and rough, biting and sucking at your lower lip till it was practically puffy and raw. Pulling back, you went to look away, yet one of his hands roughly cupped your jaw.

"Aside from all those things I want you, you're to be my wife..." he said, eyes dark pools of want and unabashed need.

"Now, let's stuff that pretty mouth with something else-" before you could even get a thought out, he shoved you to your knees, his hands moving quick to rid himself of his trousers. His cock already desperately hard as he took your jaw in his hand once more, tugging gently. He was desperate, but he wasn't a monster. He'd allow you to put in your two cents, even if he couldn't outright ask.

His prayers were answered as he felt his breath catch in his throat, watching as your pretty lips left hot and warm kisses along his shaft, lightly cradling his balls as the kisses stopped at the head, taking him into your mouth.

His eyes fluttered as he slowly placed a hand on the back of your head, his fingers grasping desperately onto the ringlets upon your head, your jaw slackening as he pushed in, deeper and deeper till your nose was nestled against him, soft gags leaving you. The beautiful peach of your lipstick staining his cock as he groaned to himself, the warmth around him addictive.

"This..." he shuddered as he pulled back, "is going to be an incredible marriage..." he pushed all the way back in.

He set his steady pace, it apparent that he was somewhat unpracticed as he fucked into your throat. If this was how the stretch felt in your throat, how delicious would it feel in your sopping cunt. Moaning around him as you managed to work your hand under your mass of skirts and undergarments, cupping yourself and slowly working two fingers over your clit.

A harsh gag left you as he shoved deep, gently pinching your nose between his fingers as he looked at you. "No, you are an educated woman, not some common whore, although you look otherwise...you will wait, patiently." He ordered as you subserviently moved your hands up to his hips instead.

Allowing him to fuck your throat like a depraved animal, because lord knows he needs it...and he just looks oh so cute with his lip tugged between his teeth and lazily whimpering your name.

It wasn't much longer before he had you panting desperately as he came down your throat, pulling back slowly as it coated your lips between coughs.

"Good lord Paul, you have ridiculous stamina..." you commented, earning nothing more in reply than two strong hands lifting you, and throwing you upon the desk. Papers scattering beneath you.

"Paul what on earth are you-" He ripped a thick strip of your underskirt, shoving it into your mouth, scowling lightly. "You talk too much..." he chastised, making quick work of the rest of your skirts.

Eyes widening, he carefully pushed two fingers into your cunt. Already soaking wet at his previous ministrations. Carefully prodding, his own eyes as wide as yours.

Sure, he'd had sex before...but he'd never loved anyone he'd had sex with.

Oh shit he was in love

He looked up at you, slowly removing his fingers before disappearing into the crashing sea of cerulean and royal blue fabrics of your dress, slowly sitting yourself up...what on earth was he do-OH!

The feeling of soft kisses being placed along your slit, the warmth of his lips addictive as he stopped his kisses at your clit, taking it between his lips and suckling lazily while easing his fingers back in, slowly pumping them while working your bundle of nerves.

You gently squeezed his head between your plush thighs, your arousal soaking his hand and rolling onto his sleeves. Slowly pulling them back only to replace them with his tongue as you whined loudly. Immediately moving your gloved hand over his head through the fabric, holding his head in place.

Paul on the other hand, was eating like a man starved, sloppily sucking and lapping at your cunt, it running down his chin and pooling in a small puddle upon his desk as he laughed, sending vibrations through you. Earning a desperate moan from you, he only laughed harder.

And that was you undoing, crying out as you caught him like a vice between your thighs and came viciously hard. Panting as stars were the only thing you could see, vision clearing to reveal a both smug and wildly amused Paul.

"You talk too much, and moan not nearly enough..."

He roughly yanked you towards him once he was stood, grunting lightly as he carefully positioned himself and pushed in.

The both of you moaned in sync, the feeling of his cock sinking into you was heavenly. It was apparent he felt the same, by the twitching felt inside you. Neither of you were going to last long. with how well you'd been handling one another.

His hands took hold of your plush thighs, pressing your legs up beside your head, thrusts growing feverish and desperate as he panted and groaned loudly. The sounds of skin slapping, desperate moans, and panting for air, as Paul desperately rutted into your cunt.

Pulling the rag from your mouth, you tugged him to look at you.

"You are a bratty, brutish, villainous man...who has no use o his words...But you are also sweet, kind...a-and passionate! Y-You'll make a good husband!" You cried, pulling him down to kiss him.

That undid him, groaning into your mouth as hot ropes of cum filled you, earning a mewl from you as he let out a breathless chuckle.

"What a wonderful wife you'll be..."

--------------

Taglist: @punk-in-docs @mypoisonedvine

[mariacallous]

MUSKO NAVAL BASE, Sweden—In a control room carved out of a mountainside near Stockholm, with seats four rows deep, Swedish Navy chief Ewa Skoog Haslum and a close gaggle of her staff look up at a giant monitor to see a troubling scenario unfolding in the Baltic Sea, almost in real time. Their ships are outnumbered. No one, it seems, is coming to help.

This is real life, not a simulation or a war game. It’s October 2023, some 17 months since Sweden launched its bid for NATO membership, and the country is still outside of the alliance. On a filtered maritime traffic map of the region projected above the sailors’ heads, several lonely Swedish and Finnish ships, marked in blue, make their way through the straits, gulfs, and thoroughfares of the eastern arm of the Atlantic Ocean. Without the help of the 31-nation alliance, they are dwarfed by red dots—Russian ships, some military, and others that the Swedes fear might have bad intentions—moving up and down the waterway.

Add Sweden to NATO, and the map changes completely. 

“Can we unfilter the picture?” one of Skoog Haslum’s aides asks. Dozens of green ships—NATO vessels—light up the map. The Russian fleet is vastly outnumbered. The tables have turned, Swedish officials said. Taking a shot at one of a handful of Swedish or Finnish ships is one thing. How are the Russians going to take a shot at the Swedish Navy when it has dozens of allied vessels at its back? Defense industry bigwigs, former generals, and think tankers visiting the maritime operations center at Musko Naval Base whisper in hushed awe. 

For the better part of 200 years, dating back to the time of Napoleon, Sweden was a neutral country, with its armed forces not venturing beyond its large archipelagoes. Sweden flirted with a defensive nuclear weapons program and mass conscription during the long years of the Cold War but formally stayed neutral. 

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 changed all of that. Fearing Russia’s expansionist impulses wouldn’t stop with Ukraine, Sweden, along with Finland, applied for NATO membership in a once-in-a-lifetime political swerve. “There is absolutely a before and after,” Skoog Haslum said last October. “We are more on our toes today.” Now, a step closer to membership in the alliance after Turkey moved to approve Sweden’s bid—but with the Hungarians still holding out—Swedish and NATO officials are hoping that swerve will give the Russians pause before causing problems on their northern border. 

The first thing you see when you hit the docks at Berga Naval Base, a short boat ride across the Stockholm Archipelago from the control room at Musko Naval Base, is the 230-foot-long gray camouflage hull of the HSwMS Helsingborg. It doesn’t look like any old U.S. or European ship. The carbon fiber-reinforced frame resembles a pyramid, pointing skyward, to hide from Russian radar. 

In a darkened room of computer banks on the ship’s bridge, sailors look at a sea of blue, green, and red ships, too. They are tracking anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 ship movements in the Baltic Sea every day. On screen, cargo ships such as the Marshal Rokossovsky, the Aleksandr Evlanov, and the Sparta II sail past the Baltic Sea inlets. 

If the sailors look nervous, they have a right to be. All of the Nordic countries—including Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—are heavily dependent on the latter’s western port of Gothenburg for trade. Sweden is especially so: About 30 percent of the country’s foreign trade flows through the port. Shutting down that one port could wreak havoc on the entire region’s economy. 

And the screens on the computer banks are constantly changing. Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian vessels have been moving out and staying away from the Baltic much longer. But the Kremlin is playing a bit of a shell game, Swedish officials said, switching bigger ships for smaller ones. By swapping out destroyers and frigates, which raise alarm bells for NATO countries, for smaller roll-on, roll-off vessels and maintenance ships that aren’t typically used in combat but can still be up-armed with cruise missiles, Russia can keep a foot on this vital chokehold without provoking suspicion. 

The Kremlin has also been running tests right in Sweden’s backyard. Russia has begun trials of St. Petersburg-class submarines in the Baltic Sea, conducting live-fire exercises in international waters near Gotland, an island off Sweden’s eastern coast. The Kremlin tries to mask the new submarines by navigating through rivers and internal lakes before unleashing them in exercises that are clearly visible to nearby ships. From a signals intelligence ship parked just outside Kaliningrad’s bay, Sweden has detected Russia test-firing missiles from the submarines.

It all sounds pretty ominous. But the Swedes had to deal with the Russian threat long before the United States even existed. The two sides fought 11 wars, mostly over control of the Baltic Sea, before Stockholm began its two-century drift under neutrality. And with assets such as the Visby-class corvette—a stealthy surface ship armed with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, named after the main city on Gotland—Sweden wants to be NATO’s eyes and ears in the region. 

Sweden can “be a very good NATO member,” Skoog Haslum said, including by providing targeting data for allies in the region.

The country has begun to field Link 22 command-and-control, a secure digital radio system that ties together NATO planes and ships. They are allowed to speak with other nations across those links but on a very low level, such as to point out unidentified or threatening vessels. It’s much easier for Skoog Haslum and her staff to call up Denmark and say hello than it was before the NATO bid, she said. 

There’s just one problem: Sweden doesn’t have access to NATO’s encryption. Sweden creates new lines of communication for exercises with NATO countries, but most of those lines go dark once the exercises end. There are no classified communications—yet. 

“When we join NATO, that would be on the screen all the time,” said Henrik Rosen, Sweden’s naval attache in Washington. “That is obviously a total game-changer for us.”

In almost every other way, the 31 allies are treating Sweden like one of their own. At NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, officials point out that they have already built the flagpole where Sweden’s Nordic cross will eventually fly. At NATO’s official headquarters about an hour’s drive away, just about the only meetings the Swedes can’t get into are with the alliance’s nuclear planning group. 

“We act as though they are a member,” a Nordic military official said at the alliance’s Brussels headquarters, where reporters arrived on Jan. 23, the day of Turkey’s parliamentary vote on Sweden’s accession, to discover a flagpole had been built for the Swedes there, too. 

Although Turkey has finally, after months of foot-dragging, voted Sweden into the alliance, Hungary has not backed off its objections about Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary wants Swedish opposition figures that are publicly critical of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s authoritarian leanings to shut up. (Orban came out publicly supporting Sweden’s bid after a call this week with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, but Hungary’s top lawmakers still had harsh words for Stockholm.) 

But even with the NATO bid still on hold, Sweden appears to be taking a victory lap. In December, Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson traveled to the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California—an event full of national security high-rollers—and then on to Washington to sign a defense cooperation agreement with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that gives the U.S. military access to 17 Swedish military bases in the event of a regional war. 

Jonson said Sweden’s muscular new foreign policy will push the country past NATO’s agreed-on 2 percent defense spending mark. 

“This is the biggest shift in our doctrine for 200 years,” Jonson said in an interview at the Reagan Forum in the rolling southern California hills. “We will continue beyond 2.1 percent [of GDP].”

Where is the money going? Sweden is buying more U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems. It is building a whole new fleet of Gripen fighter jets. It is building new Collins-class submarines and new corvettes. And it is arming its troops with British-made light anti-tank weapons that have torn up Russian tanks in Ukraine as well as fresh armored personnel carriers. 

If the name of the game is deterrence in Sweden, then it’s all hands on deck. 

“Just being a ship at sea, with maybe a rifle or something, that is not deterrence,” Skoog Haslum said. “Deterrence is to have all assets you can have. The sensors, the weapons systems—that is deterrence.”

Sweden stayed out of both world wars. And after the dust settled in World War II and the Iron Curtain came down, neighbors Norway, Iceland, and Denmark joined NATO. Sweden didn’t.

In secret, though, the Swedes were building up their defenses. During World War II, Sweden built emergency bomb shelters and landing strips as a fallback plan. In 1950, with the United States and the Soviet Union racing to test the first hydrogen bomb, the Swedish government began blasting 1.5 million tons of rock out of a mountainside on the island of Musko, about 25 miles south of Stockholm, to build a top-secret underground naval base. 

It took them 19 years. But by the time Musko was completed, Swedish sailors could service submarines and destroyers through a cavernous labyrinth of underground tunnels—and even hunt Soviet submarines. Sweden even briefly pursued nuclear weapons of its own, until officials realized they would cost too much.

After the Cold War, the threat had cooled down enough that Sweden began a widespread process of hollowing out its military, a downturn that lasted nearly 30 years. Sweden gave away most of its 2,000 fighter jets. It shed troops. It got rid of bases. 

By 2004, though Swedish troops were in Afghanistan and patrolling the coast of Lebanon, the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, was openly stating that the country faced no significant military threats and that it should pare down its defense capabilities to reflect that fact. Defending the homeland wasn’t a mission for the Swedish military anymore. 

“The political slogan was, Sweden is best defended in Afghanistan,” said Oscar Jonsson, a defense specialist at the Swedish Defence University. “That was the armed forces we had.” 

The only reason that the Swedish government didn’t get rid of Musko was because it would have been too expensive to scrub down the 12 miles of tunnels to make them safe for other uses. So the lights were kept on, but the massive facility was put on a strategic lull, with a skeletal staff. People still worked there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, even when the base was at its least active point, but civilian contractors came in to fill up the vacant shipyards, and tourists were even allowed in. 

“It was a little bit of a pity,” Jonsson said. “First of all, you make a secret naval base that can withstand nuclear weapons. Then, at the end of the Cold War, you declassify it. Then, all of a sudden, you realize that it actually needed to be classified again.”

In the Musko mountainside, in a conference room whose wood-paneled walls were made out of the remnants of an old Swedish destroyer, Skoog Haslum and her aides described the bruising effects of the belt tightening on the military. The first thing to go was personnel. The Army downsized from brigades, anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 troops, to singular battalions, about 1,000 soldiers apiece. Weapons were next. The Navy decommissioned all of its big warships, such as destroyers and frigates, in the 1980s, leaving only smaller ships. The Air Force cut planes. In the mid-2010s, Sweden bottomed out, spending only about 1 percent of its GDP on defense, down from 4 percent in 1963. 

But even though Sweden was still neutral, the irritations from Russia had started to pick up. Russian ships were aggressively maneuvering in the Baltic Sea, elbowing Swedish and Finnish ships out of their sea lanes. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, biting off Crimea and pieces of the Donbas region, made it clear to the Swedes that they could also have a target on their backs. 

Sweden’s military budget began to grow in small steps. In 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, the Swedish naval staff returned to Musko. In 2020, the defense budget started to jump, to around $6.25 billion that year, or 1.2 percent of Sweden’s GDP.

Sweden decided to build two new submarines and four new surface ships with surface-to-air missile defenses, which hadn’t been aboard the pyramid-like Visby-class corvettes. Next year’s budget is getting boosted by nearly a third, bringing the overall defense tally to about $11 billion. Sweden is expecting to hit NATO’s 2 percent of GDP defense spending target by the time of the alliance’s Washington summit, which is penciled in for July. 

“The rise of the last 10 years of defense spending [has] been very, very steep,” said Rosen, the Swedish naval attache.

Still, Sweden is mostly building more of what it already has. Long-range land attack capability that could challenge Russia is not part of the plan yet. 

But Musko is buzzing again. The mess halls are full of Marines with the Swedish Viking emblem pinned to their lapels. The bike racks are full, too, with sailors dropping off their two-wheeled rides—unlocked—after cycling around the miles of tunnels to meetings and maintenance yards. 

Sweden’s defense industry is buzzing, too. The onetime carmaker Saab, which uses two of Musko’s drydocks to conduct maintenance on destroyers, has stopped building automobiles and is instead focusing on building Gripen fighter jets and diesel-electric submarines. Volvo builds a line of logistical trucks. Ericsson makes military telephones. 

“There is no other country of 10 million that can produce submarines, fighter aircraft, surface combatants, [infantry fighting vehicles], and very advanced artillery systems,” said Jonson, the defense minister. 

But unlike next-door neighbor Finland, which can mobilize nearly 300,000 troops from civilian ranks, Sweden faces the problem of getting enough people ready to man those weapons. The nation’s conscription model, which once could mobilize up to half of Sweden’s population, was cut down in the 1990s, tossed altogether in 2010, and has only recently been brought back. 

Stockholm is hoping to bring the mobilization number from the current cap of 60,000 to 100,000 conscripts by the end of the decade. Swedish officials are open about the growing pains. 

“We are growing, but it’s quite slow,” Skoog Haslum said. “It’s hard to grow, especially when you come from a capacity that is very, very short, actually.” 

The boyish-looking sailor had just two words for the group: Strap in.

This reporter soon found out why. Richard Cooke, the young Swedish Marine barking orders, and his driver Emil Munkve, proceeded to send the CB90 fast assault boat we were sitting in screaming through the Musko harbor at almost 50 miles an hour, putting the dozen or so American interlopers straight back in their seats. 

Sweden boasts more than 267,000 islands (though, according to the Swedes, an “island” is any piece of land you can stand on with two dry feet). 

And fighting here is not like fighting out in the great wide open of the Pacific Ocean. In fact, the U.S. Marines don’t have anything like the CB90. As it drives from Musko to Berga, islands and landforms pop out of the rock. But even in contested waters, the Swedish Marines can go almost anywhere in Stockholm’s island chain, dropping more than a dozen troops ashore at once. 

“As long as there aren’t rocks sticking up, we can go right up on the beach,” Munkve said. “We can go as far as the Swedish coast goes.”

Adding that 2,000-mile-long coastline to territory under the alliance’s protection will change NATO. It’s a vast region spanning the Arctic Ocean to the North Sea inlets to the Atlantic, with data cables that undergird much of global communication deep beneath the water’s surface. NATO will get Swedish bases in the north to contend with Russian troops in Murmansk and on the Kola Peninsula. 

The Nordic and Baltic countries can’t survive financially without keeping their archipelagoes and the inlets to the Baltic Sea open to maintain commerce through the region. And NATO will get another capable navy that can deal in shallow waters less than 200 feet deep dotted with gulfs, islands, narrow straits, and critical infrastructure.

“In our neck of the woods in the Baltic Sea region, the Western Sea, [and] the Nordic Sea, there’s a lot of infrastructure,” Rosen said. “There’s oil rigs, gas rigs, there’s underwater pipelines, there are underwater cables from communication to power. There are wind parks and windmills out at sea. And there’s a lot of traffic.”

There have been more NATO vessels in the Baltic Sea in the last two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And the Nordic countries have teamed up to follow Russian vessels across the sea with electric optical sensors and an encyclopedic ship base. Starting from Norway’s western coast, the Nordic countries track Russian ships all the way back to St. Petersburg, following them with fixed and mobile sensors, handing off country-by-country as the boats steam through the Baltic. 

The Kremlin used to harass U.S. ships in the region. Now the shoe is on the other foot. “[Russia] followed every American vessel that entered the Baltic Sea before,” Skoog Haslum said. “They really followed it. They can’t do that any longer.”

Now, the Kremlin’s game plan is to surround and show presence toward the United Kingdom, the door jam at the western gate of the North Sea. Russia is almost equally as paranoid about keeping trade lanes open through the Baltic and is heavily dependent on getting through it and on to St. Petersburg and Kaliningrad, where the Kremlin has a great deal of its war industry, including shipyards for surface vessels and submarines, which can fire cruise missiles off their backs. 

But even though Russia’s Baltic Fleet is largely intact, most of the Kremlin’s troops and ships are tied down by the war in Ukraine. 

“Russia has now a long border with NATO … but doesn’t get more forces,” said Dutch Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee. “If they want to invest in more forces, it will cost them.”

The Swedes have three watchwords for how they train to fight: Hide inside, run out fast, and hit hard. And they can make it tougher on the Russians by mining the narrow straits before raining missiles on the invaders. 

“We use the archipelago. We hide in the archipelago. We fire our long-range weapons from within the archipelago or from the open sea,” one Swedish sailor said. There are still 50,000 mines on the Baltic seabed from World War I and World War II, forcing ships to navigate tight corners laden with explosives.

Sweden’s geography also tightens the squeeze on Russia. Everything in Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg will now be in range of NATO missiles. Gotland gives Sweden and NATO an opportunity to build out a logistical hub or block the Russian navy’s attempts to harass Western shipping lanes. The Bay of Bothnia is a lot closer to Russia’s northern sea bases than NATO’s borders currently sit. 

On the flip side, NATO countries will have to defend another big Nordic state that is entirely within striking distance of Russian missiles. And Russia has finally hit Sweden with the avalanche of disinformation and cyberattacks it expected when the country’s NATO bid was announced in May 2022.

But Sweden is not backing down. Though the military shift in the country has been gradual, the political shift has been frenetic. 

After two centuries of neutrality, a majority of Swedes only began to favor NATO membership in March 2022, one month after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. A month later, that number surged to nearly 60 percent.

In Brussels, NATO allies are ready to welcome them with open arms. But there is still a palpable sense of disbelief at how quickly the tectonic shift has taken place. 

“If I told you Finland and Sweden were going to join, you would have thought I was smoking something,” the Nordic military official said. “We are part of a different landscape. Now we have to think completely differently.”

[codexandcompendium]

👶 Does your muse want children? (for ur swede!)

spicy and sweet headcanons || accepting

So, the funny thing is, is that Sweden has three micronations. Technically, he already is a father! But, he thinks children are marvelous little sponges and in his humanverse he would love a small gaggle of children filling his home with life.

[halfway-happyyy]

Dream In Gold

AN: I got inspired by an ask I got recently, so here ya go. Chock-FULL of fluff, some slight sexual innuendos, reader is reunited with the Swedish giant after some time away. 

“What are you thinking about?”

The line had grown silent; the only sound between the pair of you was the all too familiar crackle of the telephone wire.

You cleared your throat and out of the corner of your eye, noticed that the clock next to your bed read 11:58 pm your time which made it almost 5 in the morning in Iceland where Alexander currently was. “I've been dying to ask you a question…”

“Well go on then,” He murmured sleepily.

“Have you had a chance to visit the penis museum yet?”

A beat on the other end, before Alexander laughed loud and heartily. “If you mean to say, have I had a chance to visit the Icelandic Phallological Museum, the answer would be no. We’re pretty tied up with shooting now, my love.” He took a gulp of coffee. “Shall I bring you back a keepsake if I do happen to make an appearance?”

The teasing lilt to his voice, combined with the accent caused your heart to ache in the best possible way. “Mm, yes please. I would like a phallic-shaped paper weight.”

“A paper weight, hey? A girl who knows what she wants. Well I’ll see what I can do, kid.”

You could feel yourself getting drowsy with fatigue, your eyelids had begun to grow heavier with each passing minute. “I miss you, Alex.” You stifled the yawn you could feel coming on.

“I miss you so much it hurts... Though I think it may be time to say goodnight, no?”

“It absolutely is. I’ll see you in two weeks… will you give my love to Bill?”

Another sip of coffee. “I will right now. Sleep well my love.”

It never ceased to amaze you how fast time flew when you and Alex were apart. That wasn’t to say that the distance was easy all the time- quite the contrary. But the reunions always seemed to have a knack for allowing everything else to dissipate. The anticipation at the airport was a palpable thing; waiting with your arms tight to your body, frowning inwardly each time someone who wasn’t him entered through the double doors. And then that feeling when you did finally catch sight of him in all his 6’4’’ glory, towering above the gaggles of people in front of him. It was the knowing smile etched across his features, and the way his glassy blue eyes still managed to sparkle in the dank light around him. Watching him walk towards you had just about the same effect on you as looking directly into the ball of fire in the sky, and yet you always found yourself powerless to look away. You hadn’t realized you’d been holding your breath until he wrapped his arms around you, inhaled your scent, and murmured, “God I missed you, kid.”

Would you order in or would you take a stroll a few blocks away to have dinner at Gemma? The hardest decision either of you would have to make for the next week while he was off. He ended up opting for Gemma, which didn’t bother you at all- he could have suggested ramen from that hole in the wall a block away and you still would have said yes. And so, the two of you conversed for over two hours together at a tiny booth tucked away in the corner of the restaurant. You lost count of the number of wine glasses consumed, completely sated on delicious food and overwhelming amounts of love. “Working with Bill has been just the best thing.”

“And Iceland?”

Alexander brought the edge of the wine glass to his lips, took a long sip and grinned around the rim of the glass. “Iceland is wonderful. Only thing missing was you.”

The walk home, though chilly, was a welcome reprieve to the flush of your skin caused by the wine consumed. You were dizzy and slightly breathless, and you knew the culprit to blame was the sirrah, but also the warmth of Alex’s much larger hand around yours and the anticipation of what the week with him had in store for you.

You waited with bated breath as he turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door to your apartment. He tossed the keys into the metal dish next to the closet and waited for you to kick off your heels. “Shall I pour you a nightcap my love?” He asked, quirking an eyebrow and stepping into the kitchen.

“Oh, but of course. Surprise me.”

You made for the bedroom at the end of the hall while he was mixing and opted for a brand-new set of lingerie you had purchased especially for this coming week. You suspected he’d be a little disappointed not to undress you himself, but you pushed the thought from your mind when you remembered he’d have multiple opportunities to do so. You waited patiently at the edge of your bed and listened for the sound of his socked feet against the hardwood floors.

“Ta-da!” He sauntered into your bedroom, double fisting clear, fizzy drinks in two tumblers. He let a whistle escape his lips when he took note of your evening attire. “And what do we have here?” He took a seat next to you, passing over your drink wordlessly. You could feel his gaze on you, could practically see the gears turning in his head; where would he place his lips first? Neck? Clavicle? Breast? He teased a fingertip under the lace strap of your top.

“I should ask you the same thing.” You gestured to the drink in your hand.

“Ah, that is what you would call a Brenn and Tonic. Brennivín being Icelandic schnapps. Try it,”

You did as you were told and were pleasantly surprised at how refreshing it was and how easily it went down. “Those Icelander’s are onto something, aren’t they?”

Alexander grinned at you. “I’ll cheers to that, kid.”

You sat in all-too comfortable silence for a while as you finished your drinks and when he was done, he stood up from the bed, un-looped the belt from his jeans and shimmied them down his legs. You watched in awe as he pulled his boxers off, his socks, and finally (arguably your favourite part), he pulled the dark blue button-up shirt from his body and sat back down, facing the window. A soft rain had started to fall sometime between when you got home and now, and you watched the water droplets race each other in lines down the pane of the bay window. Wordlessly, you moved across the bed to sit behind him, tracing gentle patterns up and down the expanse of his ever-expanding muscled arms. Your favourite things about the Swede currently cuddled into you? The delicate, crinkled lines next to his eyes that told everyone he spent a lot of his time laughing and smiling. You loved his wicked sense of humor and that he possessed the ability to make you laugh until you had to pee, even when you wanted to wring his neck. You loved the cadence of his accent, the obvious adoration for his family and homeland, and the way he made love to you like it was the first and last time he’d ever touch you again.

“I missed this, Alex.”

He hummed happily and tilted his head back to rest in the crook of your collarbone. “I know, kid. Me too.”

It was late into the evening when he was finished with you, tired, and inexplicably blissed-out you fell asleep effortlessly to the familiar sensation of his arms wrapped around you. When you awoke hours later, the evening rain had given way to a gloriously sunny spring morning, beams of light shone through the cracks of your drapes, bathing you in a warm glow. You glanced at the corner of your bedside table and let out a loud laugh when you noticed the object there. Alexander had placed a pink, penis-shaped paper weight over a note that read ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo! Gone to grab coffee. Love you the most – A’ in his loopy script.

And it was mornings like these, that made life incredible beyond all reason.

[lihikainanea]

Tiger rarely getting in cuddly moods with people other than Bill, but one day she needed it badly and he had gone for a hike with some others on the vacation. She stumbled into Friend-boy, who was being cheeky as always, and ended up snuggled next to him on the couch. When Bill walked in, he felt that twist in his stomach as she laid against the other man’s chest, stretching when everyone entered as Bill pulled her towards his own.

Would she though? Because here’s the thing, I don’t HC tiger as being a particularly affectionate person with everyone, only with Bill. And it started because she mostly knew that he needed it, and eventually it also became something that she enjoyed.

But okay, you kind of got me with the whole Bill coming in, and pulling her to his chest because oh man…I love that visual. And this is probably what made it very official, that Friend-Boy was now on his shit list. 

Because look, tiger isn’t affectionate but maybe the Pina coladas were EXTRA strong that day and she was probably starving as everyone waited for Bill and the random group of Swedes he met to get back from their hike (”The beach is great but I need a FOREST,” he had explained the other night, and she rolled her eyes at his pure Sweden-ness). The sun was strong that day and she was feeling pretty damn good and pretty damn drunk.

So they’re a gaggle of friends all piled onto one of those gigantic outdoor patio sets and Friend-Boy plunks down beside her, does something lame like pretend to brush sand from her shoulder and just leaves his arm around her. Over the course of about half an hour eventually he somehow, very slowly, manages to get her leaning more and more on him which look like…tiger is drunk and feeling so good about everything and barely even realizes that this guy is full on trying to cuddle her.

Except then Bill comes back., his shirt off and hanging from the waistband of his shorts, saying goodbye to his new friends in that weird gibberish language of his and tiger giggles because god those aren’t even words, Bill. Except Bill looks over at her, and his face hardens. Because he recognizes that drunken glaze in her eyes, recognizes her dopey smile, and recognizes that Friend-Boy also noticed both of those things and was trying to take advantage of her. And that? That’s a solid fuck no for Bill, no matter what level their relationship is on. Nobody fucks with his tiger.

So he smiles at her, not seeing any need to alert her to his seething anger. And to his delight, she smiles back and actually make grabby hands at him which–did you hear that? It’s his fucking heart melting at the sight of her, sitting low on a patio set, reaching up at him while rapidly clasping and unclasping her fists with the biggest smile her face. So he swoops down, grabs her face, plants the wettest, noisiest, smack of a kiss on her cheeks and she laughs even louder. He pulls her up by the hands, crushing her to his chest, plopping another noisy kiss on her head.

“This what you’re looking for, kid?” and he scratches her head as she smooshes her cheek on his chest humming happily.

“I’m back now, you can have this for as long as you want,” he adds, just to rub it in.

[sergeifyodorov]

22-23 Season | First Half

[ratatatastic]

shy creecher uses his smaller friends to hide behind, fails miserably

[reportwire]

Album Review: DARKANE Inhuman Spirits

Album Review: DARKANE Inhuman Spirits

It’s felt like it’s been a couple hundred years since a gaggle of worryingly tall and blindingly blonde Swedes first dared to attach hyper melodicism to death metal. And while tedious repetition and limiting tunnel vision has worked to make the majority of melodic death metal feel like nerves have been frayed and patience tested for a lot longer than actuality, obviously multitudes of definitive…

[multipleservicelisting]

What happened when I tried to become French

(CNN) — Julien was a tennis instructor with steel shoulders, blue eyes and two terraces we could never sit on because he stuffed them both with his marijuana plants.

Everyone back home in New York City told me that if I’d move to France I’d fall for some French guy, and that French guy was Julien. (Well… at first it was a guy named, Nico, but he had a girlfriend.)

It was the summer of 2008, and I was 28 years old and I’d done the crazy thing and moved to Montpellier, France. My rent was 250 euros a month. I munched an entire crusty baguette each and every single day. I got tan on Mediterranean beaches and I got drunk on bottles of pale French beer at open-air boîtes de nuit (night clubs.)

Very quickly, I’d become that girl, dating that French guy and living exactly that French dream we all think will be so damn beautiful.

And it really is…

… until it really isn’t.

If I’d stayed in Montpellier, I might still be that French girl. After several months, though, I couldn’t get the French dream to match the French reality, and that damn return ticket was always there waiting for me.

Escape from New York

Turns out Montpellier is France’s seventh largest city.

PASCAL GUYOT/AFP via Getty Images

I’d been living in New York City for eight years in one insect-ridden apartment after another. I had a job in television programming my coworker described as “moving color bars around a screen all day.”

I was tired of the crowded expensive city and I needed much more than a two-week vacation. I have dual American and French citizenship thanks to my Caribbean dad, and I was thinking the French life would be for me.

So, I decided to attend a language school. All across Europe you’ll find these small, non-credit, unofficial schools which offer three or so hours of conversational classes per day. They help students find housing and organize group activities. They’re probably meant for European college students, but they attract anyone looking for a short escape.

In my case, it was a crutch to a new start in French life.

Once I bank transferred my 1,000 euros for my first month of classes at Odyssea Language School, I got on the web to buy a one-way British Airways ticket leaving in June. Then I panicked. I clicked instead on a refundable round trip returning in October. If my savings ran out, and I couldn’t find a job, the return was already paid for.

The school was in the Languedoc region in southern France. From the online photos, the town looked blissfully suburban compared to New York and Boston (my college town.)

In fact, Montpellier is France’s seventh largest city.

My creamy colored heaven

Day trips from my French school included an outing to the historic city of Avignon.

AFP Contributor / Contributor

When I arrived, I stashed my stuff in a closet-sized room in a tiny apartment the school hooked me up with. I shared it with a girl who spoke not much English and not much French.

With no help from her, I somehow figured out how to explore the town on my own before my classes started.

Montpellier is actually a sprawling little city known for big universities that bring in 50,000-plus students seasonally.

Tall clusters of apartment buildings and department stores dot the outskirts and a small metro snakes in and out of the town center. The central square, or Place de la Comédie, is paved in white and cream-colored stones and anchors a maze of tiny shops and restaurants.

Every friend in this photo comes from different ends of the Earth: Italy, Hong Kong, Canada, US and Germany.

Channon Hodge

There were too many historical buildings to count, but I vividly remember walking by a plaque commemorating one of the first medical schools in France. It had been there since before the United States was even a concept. That’s when my decade spent studying American History seemed rather trite.

On a tour the school organized, I learned about Europe’s southern history before borders carved it up. Some of the townspeople still speak a Catalan language and love explaining the region’s ties to Spain before it became part of France. They made sure Catalan names were etched on signs along with the French ones and their independent spirit was a precursor of what I would eventually encounter when I finally found a job.

The Spaniards taught us how to play ‘Merde’

Open-air clubs were everywhere in a region where summers are long and winters are mild.

Channon Hodge

The school organized wine and cheese “meet and greets” for new students and bus trips to Avignon and Carcassonne. They organized trivia nights at the local British pub, The Shakespeare, and made sure everyone gathered for outdoor watch parties to see the French lose out in the World Cup.

The social part seemed as equally important to the language classes. I’d taken French in high school, college and even doled out $500 for classes at New York’s Alliance Francaise. My entrance exam at Odyssea informed me that none of that effort put me above “advanced-beginner.”

I could answer “Comment allez-vous?” but I couldn’t have a conversation for more than two minutes before becoming mentally exhausted.

Odyssea – Institut Européen de Français – Language schools attract European students who can take long breaks to learn a language. My friends did not feel the pressure to graduate from university in four years and thought nothing of a long break.

Picasa 3.0

No worries. These schools have no set term start or end dates. You simply roll in any week at all, get placed with students at your level and “graduate” up if your teacher feels you are ready. That open acceptance helped me make all manner of new friends, including:

Jim — An American film editor determined to pick up a language in between contracts.

Marianna — A vivacious, gorgeous, curly haired Russian Italian who refused to wait in any line ever.

Hannah — An adventurous Canadian who’d eventually convince me to scramble down an off-limits cliff in Marseilles because we’d heard the waters were crystalline blue (they were, and they were freezing).

Felippa — A smiley Swede who shockingly explained that Ikea product names actually have real meanings and who would become my roommate in a much bigger and nicer flat.

A young German couple who’d just had a baby and who were spending their year of parental leave hopping around Europe.

Plus a gaggle of young dance-loving Singaporeans on exchange, a party-hardy group of Italian nuclear scientists sponsored by their company, and a rowdy group of Spaniards.

We’d spent so many days on the beach, we once foolishly tried spending the night on one. We were frozen by midnight and fled home at 4 a.m.

Channon Hodge

A bunch of us would spend our afternoons biking out to the beach in a town nearby. I’d found a massive red checkered sheet on our apartment’s clothesline and we’d sprawl out on the sand while everyone turned out offerings of cheese, sliced meats, chips, fruits and baguettes.

The Spaniards had a car, they smoked like a coal factory, and they soon taught us a card game they insisted was called “Merde!” (S–t!)

We sadly mostly fell into speaking the more mutually understood English. Try as we might, French all day was simply exhausting. Eventually, though, I did get the accent down straight. That’s all thanks to a lot of fruit and a questionable pick up line.

Framboise, fraise and frozen juice

After a few weeks, I realized if I wanted to stay in Montpellier for a long time I’d need a job. The euro was nearly double the value of the dollar then and my savings were dwindling fast.

Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible to find a job as unemployment for young people was around 20%. Businesses were loath to take on news part-time employees because once they had you, they were stuck with you because of labor laws.

At this organized social event, we learned how to make crepes and a local favorite – bread with goat cheese, honey and herbs de provence. Events cost extra, and the euro’s value was double the dollar then.

Channon Hodge

The Russian Italian convinced me to try working for an Irish bar in town by pretending that my first name, Channon, gave me some Irish cred with the owner. That failed as soon as he realized I was African American.

Instead, he offered me about 15 hours per week making frozen juice at his new Jus Plus store in the mall. It was a new concept in France, then, and I suppose I looked like I could handle a blender.

I easily learned the frozen mixes, mostly based in apple juice, and quickly blended them together before calling out the drink orders to guests.

“FRRREZ!”

“FRRRRAMBWAZE!”

(Fraise = strawberry, framboise = raspberry)

Customers stared back at me dumbfounded and I didn’t know why. My dear coworkers Stella and Charles helped me to realize that a hard American “r” doesn’t really work in French. I quickly learned to make the correct and softer sound using the middle of my tongue and the roof of my mouth. I describe it as a mix between: a soft g, w, and que.

“Fgwquezzeeee”

“Fgwquambwazzee”

It worked! Stella also kindly forced me to speak French. Charles was a musician and he loved to explain all the rights I then had as a worker and all the great ways young people were starting revolutions.

The “mec” taught me something else entirely.

Le mec et la petite amie (the guy and the girlfriend)

I’ve been told French relationships can become serious rather quickly, which is completely at odds with what I’d assumed about French promiscuity.

Channon Hodge

French people do indeed drink lots of wine and eat lots of bread and cheese. But they also guzzle down cheap beer and stock up on tinned meats, packaged toasts, bags of processed cookies and cartons of highly processed milk.

I was drinking beer with a group of friends at a café (which is, in fact, a bar), when a guy named Julien walked up to me and asked in English:

“Where are you from?”

“New York,” I said.

“Oh really?” he asked and then added: “I thought you were from paradise.”

Maybe it was the French accent? Maybe it was the tennis instructor body? I was immediately in like.

We had one date. He kept texting me and after a few weeks he referred to me as his “petit amie'” I quickly learned relationships can really form that easily in France.

Julien had lived off chômage (French unemployment) for nearly two years and would gasp when I used all his beurre on my baguette. He knew not much more English than he’d used to pick me up, so our relationship was mostly about what you think it was mostly about.

One day he did manage to scrounge some cash for gas and we went out to the beach, swimming out as the waters turned choppy and filled my nose with salt.

My days were all free and clear and sunny, until I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

The French way — No bills, no laws, no worries!

It was completely against the law to scramble down the dangerous cliffs to the water in Marseille, France. Even moms with little children ignored the signage.

Picasa 3.0

I’ll never know if it was all that saltwater, but a week or so after the beach trip my lungs started shrinking. I could barely wheeze. One day it got so bad, I woke up in a panic sinking to the floor beside my bed feeling like my throat had become a red cocktail straw.

When I walked into a doctor’s office, I signed my name on a slip of paper because there was no receptionist, just him. He took a listen to my sad lungs and gave me a prescription for expectorant and a calming agent at the pharmacy. When I asked about the bill, I mentioned my French citizenship, but I admitted I hadn’t worked long enough to get a medical card.

“Well, you’re French so you’re not supposed to pay,” he told me, politely letting me go.

The medicine cost me around 15 euros, but over the next several weeks the infected lungs never quite went away. I never spoke again in France without coughing.

The beautiful haze grows hazy

My typical morning started with café au lait, baguette with cheese, and French magazines. I lived in four different apartments over the season. My last room cost me €250 per month.

Channon Hodge

The weather got cold and crisp and the beach lost its charm. Then my friends began to leave, one by one returning to their home countries. The Spaniards left, then the Canadian, then the Russian Italian. My cheap summer room had to be turned back over to the fall student I’d sublet it from.

Then the strikes started. First the wine growers protested land taxes. Then the metro stopped working for weeks in the name of metro worker’s rights. The strikes caused chaos and brought attention to a cause, but they always ended without much progress.

To truly improve her French, my roommate enrolled in a real university for the fall and she wanted me to join her. But I couldn’t stomach the idea of being a college student again living in a dorm at then 29. (I’ve only realized now, of course, that 29 is still so young.)

I grew tired of never completely understanding anyone and only getting the gist. I hated all the money I’d spent buying tickets for the wrong day, and having packages sent to the wrong destination. I was frustrated that I couldn’t have a real conversation with Julien.

And it was so hard to shout “fgwquambwazzee!” while coughing.

While the news in France was full of les grèves (strikes) and the financial crises, the news in the US was becoming more hopeful. Senator Barack Obama was quickly gaining speed as the nominee for President of the United States.

Channon Hodge

At one point I realized I was a lot funnier back in New York. I just didn’t get French humor. I didn’t understand why movies never had a real ending but were instead vaguely unsatisfying. I didn’t get all the constant anger at the government.

Then my coworker Charles started his own revolution in our little shop. He and my British boss screamed at each other over shift changes until he stormed off one day and I lost him, too.

But I still had that return ticket.

Just a tourist again

Jardin du Luxembourg. I spent my days wandering the beautiful parks of Paris and headed home each night to my dear aunt in Villejuif before nightfall hit.

Channon Hodge

Late September, I left Montpellier and took the TGV up to Paris to stay with my aunt for a few weeks before my flight out. As I rode the smooth train north, I gazed out at vineyards whipping by with their grapes hung low to the ground waiting to be picked and crushed.

In the city, every morning my dear aunt made me a bowl of café au lait along with pâté smeared on bread. She sent me out into the city with a thin paper booklet called “Balades a Paris.” I climbed the bright Montmartre hill, learned Notre Dame’s secrets from a volunteer tour guide and bought a classic leather Cassandra bag at the Marche aux puces.

My mom and my brother joined me for my final two weeks and we were dazzled by the marbled figures at the Musee d’Orsay. We loved the thick chocolate at Angelina cafe. We drove down to see the Loire Valley’s castles.

As the date of my return flight drew closer, I realized I was dreading finding a new job in New York and starting my life there over again. Moving to France hadn’t been so hard after all. What had been difficult was staying there, building up a real life. That’s the work you have to do wherever you choose to go and wherever you try to stay.

I realized too late that you never pick up a language. It simply drags you along till you’re standing.

For a short time, I had been that girl, dating that French guy, living that French dream, but eventually I became just another American in Paris and a return ticket took me home.

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[arcticdementor]

The best footballer’s autobiography of recent years is probably I Am Zlatan Ibrahimović. In it, the Swedish striker recounts his rise from an ethnic ghetto in Malmö to greatness. Zlatan (as he is usually known) is currently banging in goals for Paris St Germain.

…

Once you get past the obligatory snigger prompted by the phrase “footballer’s autobiog­raphy”, you can see that Zlatan’s book strangely resembles an earlier immigrant’s tale: Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Philip Roth’s classic novel about growing up Jewish in 1930s and 1940s Newark, New Jersey. Each man’s story illuminates the other. Moreover, each illuminates the increasingly typical yet rarely heard immigrant experience. Most of the talk about immigrants comes from politicians pontificating about them. These books are wonderful first-hand accounts of what it’s like to grow up in an immigrant family. Though Zlatan and Roth are separated by an ocean and four decades, the overlaps are remarkable.

Zlatan’s book is a confessional autobiography; Roth’s, fictionalised confessional autobiography. Roth’s narrator Alex Portnoy is, like Roth, a Newark boy born in 1933. (Roth, who recently announced that he had given up writing, turns 80 on March 19.) Both Zlatan and Portnoy are angry prodigies looking back on the ghetto from early maturity – Zlatan narrates aged 28, Portnoy aged 33. And both books, in large part, are odes to the native blonde girl.

Like many children of immigrants, Portnoy and Roth grew up segregated from the native mainstream. Portnoy explains (the novel is told as a long session with his mute shrink, Dr Spielvogel): “In my cousin Marcia’s graduating class from Weequahic High, out of the two hundred and fifty students, there were only eleven goyim and one colored. Go beat that, said Uncle Hymie.” In short, the dominant American caste of the day – white gentiles – was almost wholly absent from Newark. As for Zlatan’s concrete ghetto of Rosengård, in Malmö: “It was crawling with Somalis, Turks, Yugos, Poles and north Africans, but there were no native Swedes.”

…

Like many immigrants, Portnoy and Zlatan grow up under the shadow of a disaster happening in the old country. For Portnoy, it’s the Holocaust; for Zlatan, the Balkan war. Both boys sense mostly unspoken anxiety. Zlatan writes: “The war was something strange. I was never allowed to hear about it. I was protected … I didn’t understand why my mother and my sisters went around dressed in black. It was totally incomprehensible, it was like a fashion trend.” But he does know that his father’s Bosnian village was massacred and ethnically cleansed by Serbs. Early in Portnoy’s Complaint, 1941 is mentioned as the quasi-innocent date when Portnoy’s family moves from Jersey City to Newark. Later, however his sister reminds him where he would be had he been born in Europe: “Gassed, or shot, or incinerated, or butchered, or buried alive.”

Portnoy is an intellectual prodigy just as Zlatan is a sporting one, but neither man’s parents have the nous to guide his life-path. Like many ghetto children, both boys are caught between an old country and a new one, in neither of which they belong. No wonder they grow up angry. “That extended period of rage that goes by the name of adolescence,” muses Portnoy. He expresses his anger with words, Zlatan with words and violence. “I was aggressive,” Zlatan writes. “I pulled down trousers and held boys tight.” As his former headmistress once told a journalist: “I’ve been at this school 33 years, and Zlatan is easily in the top five of most unruly pupils we’ve ever had. He was the number one bad boy, a one-man show, a prototype of a child that ends up in serious trouble.”

…

Both men spend their youth feeling awkward, unsure of how to behave. They are at ease only in one place: the sports field. Portnoy’s game is baseball, where he masters every mannerism of the center fielder, so that he looks like a pro even though he’s not very good. He asks Spielvogel: “It’s true, is it not? – incredible, but apparently true – there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees?” The novel’s famous ode – “Oh, to be a center fielder” – helps elucidate why, in both the US and Europe, so many of the best athletes come from ethnic ghettos.

…

Both Zlatan and Portnoy yearn with wonder for that incomprehensible being: the blonde native girl who, miraculously, feels at home in the place where she lives. To attain her would be to conquer this alien society. But she seems unattainable. Zlatan recalls “being at the Borgar School in Malmö and seeing chicks in Ralph Lauren polo shirts and practically wetting my trousers when I wanted to ask them out”.

Thirteen-year-old Portnoy skates around a frozen local lake behind gaggles of gentile girls, and marvels: “The shikses, ah, the shikses … How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde?” He dreams of skating up and introducing himself as a goy named Alvin Peterson. (“I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it.”) But he is sure his big nose will expose his origins. Similarly, Zlatan (equally anxious about his own big nose) admits that hard as he tried in adolescence to dress like a posh Swede, he always ended up looking “Rosengård from top to toe”.

Both men first encounter the dominant native class aged 17: Portnoy goes to college in Ohio, Zlatan becomes a professional footballer. Gradually, through the medium of blonde native girls, they start to integrate. During Portnoy’s freshman year at college, he spends Thanksgiving in Iowa with the family of his gentile college girlfriend. Unused to Wasp etiquette, he is astounded when her father greets him before breakfast with the words, “Good morning.” It’s a phrase never heard in the Portnoy household. “At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as ‘Mr Sourball’ and ‘The Crab’.”

Compare Zlatan’s wonder at his future partner, the perfect Swedish blonde Helena Seger: “She came from a model family from Lindesberg, one of those families where they say, ‘Darling, would you please pass me the milk?’, whereas we at table mostly just hurled death threats at each other.”

To Helena, Zlatan is “a miserable Yugo, with a fast car and a gold watch … who played his music too loud”. She teaches him about fish knives and forks, and how to drink a glass of good wine. (It turns out you don’t down it in one like milk.) Portnoy briefly shacks up with a posh Wasp who “knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could pick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon – like a Chinese with his chopsticks! … )”

…

Just as a generation of novelists told the story of Jewish America, and music the story of black America, the arts are now creating a narrative for the European immigrant experience. Zlatan was given a podium because he is a brilliant footballer, but there must be countless other second-generation kids sitting in their bedrooms around the continent, aching to tell their version.

[abetheone]

Leo Borg follows in footsteps of famous father Bjorn Borg

Leo Borg follows in footsteps of famous father Bjorn Borg

[ad_1]

It’s an unusually large gaggle of snappers for this level, but that’s because the 16-year-old Swede is no ordinary tennis player.

He is the son of the legendary Bjorn Borg, the 11-time grand slam winner who became a global superstar in the 1970s courtesy of his movie-star looks, long blonde hair and stunning performances on the court.

An hour or so later, Leo’s Wimbledon hopes…

[ultrasfcb-blog]

World Cup 2018: All that you must learn about Sweden

World Cup 2018: All that you must learn about Sweden

World Cup 2018: All that you must learn about Sweden

Highlights: Sweden 1-Zero Switzerland

England v Sweden Date: Saturday, 7 July (15:00 BST). Venue: Samara Area, Samara. Protection: Watch the sport reside on BBC One, the BBC Sport web site and app. Pay attention reside on 5 reside, with reside textual content commentary on-line.

Sweden stand between England and a spot within the semi-finals of a World Cup for the primary time since 1990.

Janne Andersson’s facet arrived in Russia and not using a win in six video games, no objective in 337 minutes and with out nationwide hero Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

But Sweden, 24th in Fifa’s rankings – 12 locations under England – discover themselves two wins from a primary ultimate since 1958.

We check out the Scandinavians as they put together to satisfy Gareth Southgate’s workforce in Samara on Saturday (15:00 BST) – Sweden’s first World Cup quarter-final since 1994.

How Sweden bought to the quarter-finals

That is Sweden’s first World Cup since making it to the final 16 in Germany in 2006, a marketing campaign which included a 90th-minute equaliser by Henrik Larsson in a 2-2 group draw with England.

They bought to Russia the arduous means.

Regardless of beating France, Sweden had been runners-up to Les Bleus of their qualifying group though they did end above the Netherlands.

They then beat four-time world champions Italy 1-0 over two legs within the play-offs to e-book their place on the World Cup.

In Russia, Sweden had been positioned in Group F together with world champions Germany, Mexico and South Korea but completed high with six factors earlier than overcoming Switzerland 1-Zero within the final 16.

What can England anticipate from Sweden? Evaluation by Shearer & Jenas

No Zlatan however beware Sweden’s ice-Berg

There was discuss Ibrahimovic – probably the most embellished and iconic gamers of the fashionable sport – may come out of worldwide retirement for this match.

“If I would like I’m there,” said the 36-year-old – scorer of 62 objectives in 116 video games for his nation – in March.

Ibrahimovic, who introduced his retirement after Sweden had been knocked out of Euro 2016, shouldn’t be a part of Andersson’s squad but Sweden are progressing properly with out the previous Manchester United striker.

In whole, they’ve scored 33 objectives in 16 video games in qualifying and at this match. Targets have come from all areas of the workforce. In qualifying, defenders Mikael Lustig, Victor Lindelof and Andreas Granqvist scored seven of Sweden’s 27 objective between themselves.

Zlatan Ibrahimovic – watch the complete interview

Striker Marcus Berg was Sweden’s main scorer in qualifying with eight objectives in 11 matches, together with 4 in a single sport in opposition to Luxembourg, however has but to search out the web in Russia regardless of beginning all 4 video games.

Certainly, Berg has had 13 photographs with out scoring, probably the most of any participant to fail to attain at this World Cup.

Nevertheless the 31-year-old, who performs his membership soccer within the United Arab Emirates for Al Ain, did handle to win a penalty within the 3-0 group win over Mexico on 27 June.

Spot-kick kings

Sweden have netted six instances in 4 video games at this match. Nevertheless, solely half of these have been scored in open play by a participant in a Swedish shirt.

An personal objective helped seal their win in opposition to Mexico, whereas former Wigan Athletic participant Granqvist is the primary Swede to attain two or extra objectives in a single World Cup match since Larsson in 2002 after netting two spot-kicks in opposition to South Korea and Mexico.

Sweden additionally scored an additional 4 penalties in qualifying, with Granqvist getting three of them.

Penalties taken in a shootout are much less prone to discover the again of the web than these taken in common play, in response to analysis by Ben Lyttleton, soccer author and creator of a e-book on penalties

Sweden revelling of their underdog standing

Evaluation from BBC Sport’s Paul Fletcher, who watched Sweden beat Switzerland in St Petersburg

It has not gone unnoticed that BBC Radio 5 reside pundit Pat Nevin – a Scot, it must be famous – recommended the opposite day that 99 instances out of 100 England ought to beat Sweden.

Certainly, within the Swedish camp close to Krasnodar they’re completely delighted with this type of remark.

The gamers had been discussing it the day after their win over the Swiss and see it as an indication that the message they like to unfold is as soon as once more taking maintain.

“Properly, it’s enjoyable for England to have that type of confidence,” stated captain Granqvist. “Let’s simply see how the sport goes.”

France and Italy in World Cup qualification, Mexico and Switzerland right here in Russia – all have under-estimated Sweden, all misplaced. Germany had been minutes away from the identical destiny of their group sport.

Sweden know that they lack star high quality, they know that their power is that they’re a workforce within the true sense of the phrase; a gaggle of people working in the direction of a typical objective.

World Cup 2018: Mexico 0-Three Sweden highlights

The Swedish gamers assume they’ll frustrate the English by taking part in in a defensive, type of boring means. They wish to gradual the sport down, draw its sting.

Southgate’s workforce confirmed that they may keep cool and centered in opposition to opponents who tried to spoil and worsen in seeing off Colombia on Tuesday.

Now they have to present that they’ve the intelligence to recognise the Swedish plan and the persistence to beat it.

‘Lack of tempo and in need of concepts’

Evaluation by BBC Sport’s soccer knowledgeable Mark Lawrenson

Granqvist made extra clearances than anybody else in opposition to Switzerland however he’s their largest voice in addition to their stand-out defender.

Granqvist is the person who organises every part for them on the again, and he does an excellent job. That organisation is their apparent power – they had been actually compact in opposition to the Swiss and denied them any house between their defensive strains.

However regardless of Sweden’s spectacular defensive file in Russia, I can see England inflicting them a lot of issues in a means Switzerland couldn’t do.

With the pace and mobility of England’s attacking gamers, together with their full-backs, I feel they’ll transfer Sweden round in midfield in addition to defence.

Sweden are competing of their fifth World Cup quarter-final – they’ve progressed to the semi-final in three of their earlier 4 (1938, 1958 and 1994), dropping solely in 1934 in opposition to Germany

In the event that they make the pitch as massive as doable, and get Kieran Trippier and Ashley Younger bombing ahead, then I’m certain they may discover some gaps.

I do not see Sweden inflicting England many points on the different finish, although.

Tempo is one thing that Sweden do not have after they come ahead and so they appeared in need of concepts – they solely had a handful of alternatives in opposition to Switzerland and had just a little bit of excellent fortune with the deflected objective they scored.

I do know they’ve momentum however, to be brutally sincere, they do not actually appear to be scoring objectives.

Head-to-head

England and Sweden have met one another 24 instances, and issues are very shut with eight English wins, 9 attracts and 7 Swedish successes.

Nevertheless, England received six of the primary 9 matches, and have solely received two of the latest 15 video games – with each coming within the 2011-12 season.

England received 1-0 in a Wembley friendly in November 2011 with Gareth Barry scoring the one objective, earlier than England beat Sweden 3-2 in an exciting Euro 2012 group sport.

Andy Carroll scored a beautiful header to place Roy Hodgson’s facet forward, Sweden scored twice to take a 2-1 lead, earlier than objectives from Theo Walcott and Danny Welbeck gave England the three factors.

Highlights: Sweden 2-Three England

England and Sweden have twice met within the group phases of World Cup finals, drawing 1-1 of their first match of the 2002 World Cup in South Korea and Japan after which drawing 2-2 in Germany four years later.

The one different time England and Sweden have met throughout a serious match got here again on the 1992 European Championships, which had been staged in Sweden.

Once more it was a gaggle match, with the winners going into the semi-finals. David Platt put Graham Taylor’s England forward early on, Jan Eriksson equalised earlier than Tomas Brolin linked up with Martin Dahlin to attain a late winner and seal a 2-1 victory to ship the hosts by and knock England out.

That sport was additionally Gary Lineker’s final for England. He wanted one objective to equal the then-record of most England objectives, which was held by Sir Bobby Charlton on 49 objectives, however with the rating at 1-1, Lineker was taken off after 62 minutes and changed by Alan Smith.

The final assembly between the 2 nations was a world pleasant in November 2012, which included an England debut for 17-year-old Raheem Sterling. Nevertheless, the sport noticed Ibrahimovic produce a shocking particular person efficiency as he scored 4 instances in a 4-2 Sweden win, together with a spectacular 30-yard bicycle kick.

‘England is England, now they assume they’re going to win the World Cup’ – Eriksson

Former England supervisor Sven Goran Eriksson expects his residence nation to win the match. He informed Swedish newspaper Expressen: “England will wrestle to attain objectives in opposition to Sweden. I feel will probably be a Swedish victory.”

In a later interview with Aftonbladet, Eriksson stated he thought the tie would at the very least go to additional time. “You may’t declare that both of the 2 groups line-ups have a lot of objective probabilities in open play,” stated the Swede, who was answerable for England from 2001 to 2006.

“There will likely be few objectives and a few element that determines the result of the sport. I will say draw after 90 minutes after which we’ll see how many individuals have cramps in every workforce.”

With Sweden’s Sven Goran Eriksson in cost, England reached the World Cup quarter-finals in 2002 and 2006 earlier than dropping to Brazil and Portugal respectively

Regardless of the England gamers being dubbed ‘The Golden Era’ when Eriksson was in cost, England went out within the quarter-finals of each the 2002 and 2006 World Cups.

“England is England, now they assume they’re going to win the World Cup once more,” added Eriksson. “Frankly, they’ve crushed Tunisia and Panama. It takes just a little extra to win the World Cup. They won’t get so many alternatives in opposition to Sweden.”

Former Sweden midfielder Hakan Delicate thought England will underestimate the Scandinavians. “England is simple to attain in opposition to”, Delicate stated in Goteborgs-Posten. “They assume they’re so rattling good. They aren’t.

“You hardly get terrified once you see the workforce. They’re spoilt youths who earn tens of millions. They do not have the full desperation required.”

Kennet Andersson, who helped Sweden end third within the 1994 World Cup, thought Sweden’s higher defence could be essential. “Sweden has renewed their defensive sport in such a means that the opponents cannot unpick it,” he told SVT.

“I feel there are various groups who do not wish to meet Sweden, as a result of they can not make their sport work in opposition to us. I do not perceive how England will have the ability to rating any objectives in opposition to Sweden.”

How they evaluate

Sweden goalkeeper Robin Olsen has saved three clear sheets on the 2018 World Cup, whereas England have conceded one objective in every of their 4 video games.

Nevertheless, England have extra objectives, extra photographs and corners than the Scandinavians.

Apparently, England’s ball possession at this World Cup is 53% in comparison with Sweden’s 38% whereas the Three Lions have tried 2,140 passes to their opponents’ 1,113.

England have additionally had 55 objective alternatives and coated 455.23 kilometres – that is 282 miles. Sweden haven’t coated as a lot floor. They’ve clocked up 419 kilometres or 260 miles.

Getting shirty – what the media is saying

Swedish paper Svenska Dagblade (SvD), stories that Sweden followers are discovering it troublesome to search out nationwide reproduction soccer shirts at residence because of the workforce’s World Cup success.

“Issues have gone a bit too nicely for Sweden”, a spokesman for Adidas informed SvD.

“We’ve been informed right here at customer support to inform the shoppers that there is no such thing as a level going to the retailers. The shirts are virtually fully gone,” a employee at Adidas’ buyer companies was quoted saying.

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[americanateurovision]

American “Experts” Weigh In

Melodifestivalen, Sweden’s annual selection for the Eurovision Song Contest, comes to an end on Saturday. Many Eurovision fans pay close attention to the happenings at Melodifestivalen, as Sweden is consistently a strong contender at the Contest. 

Your typical American doesn’t follow Melodifestivalen, or Eurovision, for that matter. But I am fortunate to have a small group of American superfans that spend their Saturdays with me, adhered to a broadcast of a Swedish television show.  

These American devotees share their thoughts on who should win Melodifestivalen this weekend, and go on to represent Sweden at Eurovision.

Lisa Ajax

I wish I could back Dinah Nah, but I simply cannot because of that pink shake-and-go wig she wore on stage. Granted, her recent legal woes probably kept her from having the time to find a decent lace front, but Dinah, honey, that wig cost you what would have been an inevitable victory! SO. This year's reigning supreme will be none other than the young ingenue, LISA AJAX. This girl is serving up everything I wanted from Melodi: a modern, catchy pop anthem, a bedazzled bra, simple staging, and an unnecessary raincoat. Lisa's provocative lyrics make a clear *STATEMENT* that stays with the audience and has the people singing along with her. Come on, Sweden, this is the moment that counts! #JusticeForLisaAjax -Sean Serluco

Charlotte Perrelli’s Broke Off, Dozed Off Air Guitar Playing

When the tens of American Eurovision fans heard the grande dame of schlager music was returning, we shrieked, "Props to ya, Mama!" When we heard she was doing an acoustic guitar ballad, it turned into, "Oooh, I have a thing during her performance"/ a convenient bathroom break. But those that gave up on her missed the true HERO of Melodifestivalen: Charlotte's immaculate guitar playing. 

Charlotte's song, "Mitt Liv" (translated: "Oh Dear God No"), was an artistic masterpiece. She must have been dreaming about pushing her hairline further up her forehead because her strumming did not even come close to matching the guitar in the song. She manages to strum three times slower than the guitar track and plucks only one string at a time, despite constantly changing multi-string cords with her other hand. Nothing says TRUE ARTISTE like faking instrumental talent. 

Some may criticize her for being so off, BUT THEY WOULD BE WRONG. It was a brave choice to interpret guitar-playing like she did, and the Swedes were simply not on her plane of existence. She was awarded dead last place in her semifinal, quite an accomplishment for a former champion. This result will surely go down as the worst outcome of voting in the past five years. 

No one else may want to, but TAKE ME TO YOUR HEAVEN with that guitar playing, Charlotte! -Sharif Shawki

Robin Bengtsson

As someone who generally orders food with an eye for the sides rather than the main, Robin Bengtsson’s “I Can’t Go On” is serving me up a pile of my favorite accompaniments on top of the open-mouthed cod entree that is Robin himself, and I am FEELING IT.

Robin has clearly learned from his first foray into Melodifestivalen last year that it’s going to take more than a harmonica to propel him to victory. 2016’s “Constellation Prize” and this year’s “I Can’t Go On” share some of the same catchy beats and themes, but the similarities stop there. “I Can’t Go On” is giving us MOAR on every level and hardly any of the improvements have to do with Robin as a human performer (aside from the fact that his prominent forehead line appears to have been quietly Botox’d away).

There are three major areas I’ve identified that make “I Can’t Go On” the standout entry of Melodifestivalen 2017, and the only deserving performance to move forward to the Eurovision competition in May.

Lyrics

Along with Lisa Ajax, Robin is breaking down barriers by throwing a couple casual “fuck”s into his mix. “Constellation Prize” gave us the standard fare of,

I'm breaking down the wall That you're a star But now I'm about to fall Because you are, 'cause you are beautiful Beautiful, babe

But “I Can’t Go On” goes edgy, with a tinge of porn, when he croons (open-mouthed and committed to continual emoji hands 👌 ),

I just can't go on no more, When you look this fucking beautiful Ooh hands down to the floor my love And I'm doing whatever you want

Staging

We get our first taste of the greatness to come when Robin and his gaggle of gays start walking it OUT towards a row of treadmills that will be their stage for the next three minutes. Immediately, they are posing, they are unbuttoning jackets, they are hair flipping, and they are giving us full and unadulterated crotch shots, all while constantly in motion.

The effect is incredible. The energy emanating from four queens feeling every oat on earth (plus Robin, I guess) is palpable, as they strut, swerve, and body roll their way through every rotation of the treadmill belt. Must be seen to be believed.

BACK. UP. DANCERS. 

Words cannot, and will never be able to, adequately describe how the addition of Daniel Koivunen to any performance elevates it into the realm of the supernatural. Daniel is 1/7th of Complete Dance Crew, but he may as well be the only dancer in all of Sweden.

While the other boys on stage do deserve some props, it’s difficult to see anyone else when Daniel winds it up and turns it out. All eyes are immediately drawn to his charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent. Points of interest to the unseasoned viewer come at 1:25 (second from front), 1:48 (full on everything), and my personal favorite, 2:34 (far right, giving the most).  

We’ve seen Daniel before alongside Dinah Nah and Anton Ewald, but his spotlight stealing performance in “I Can’t Go On” is reason #1 why Robin Bengtsson must be advanced to represent Sweden in Eurovision. This national treasure deserves an international stage.

In conclusion, “I Can’t Go On” is the one to watch during the Finale this weekend. It’s gay, it’s straight, it’s fun, it’s gross, and it’s giving me everything I’m looking for. ONWARD TO EUROVISION. -Anna File

De Vet Du

I have discovered, through writing these opinion pieces for my friend’s Eurovision blog, that I have a problem. And that problem is called Hot Guys™. I have written for this blog in the past, and at the time, I went against my personal views of having English-only Eurovision submissions in favor of hotness. This year is no different. Allow me to make my case for De Vet Du as Sweden’s entry for Eurovision.

De Vet Du is basically Sweden’s Lonely Island, BUT with a super Hot Guy ™ named DJ Hunk, who only appears topless. Let’s also say that this is a subtle knock against The Patriarchy, because I’m pretty sure that Sweden is woke enough to pull that off too.  

So here’s the brass tacks: I have no idea what’s going on in this song because it’s not in English. However, it contains some great things:  

Falsetto singing

Totally bizarre back-up dancers

A Volkswagen bug

A HOT GUY™ WHO IS ALSO SHIRTLESS

Some sort of joke about NASCAR

A reference to the 1997 movie, A Night At The Roxbury

Key change

They have pizza on their jackets, and pizza is the best

I want to see the Eurovision audience salivate over De Vet Du, as I have been for six weeks. This, sadly, is impossible because they did not make the final. However, this weekend, I WILL be screaming for De Vet Du like a teenager, as I was in the arena for their live performance (the author of this blog will attest to the veracity of that statement). I will continue to show it to people I work with, who have no idea what Eurovision even is. And I will watch it every night before I go to bed for... another reason.

ALSO FUCK SWEDEN FOR NOT ADVANCING LOREEN TO THE FINALS. -Ali Carney

Not Wiktoria

All signs are pointing to Wiktoria being crowned the winner on Saturday. May I use this time to appeal to you, Sweden? This is not the correct representation of Sweden as a nation. It is a girl in a periwinkle bridesmaid dress who sings around and on top of a bed. This is not the best you can do.

Sweden, your musical artists, writers, and producers are responsible for some of the biggest hits of the last few decades. Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Ariana Grande are just some of the recent patrons to your vast musical export market. International superstar and Swedish native, Zara Larsson, is performing at the Melodifestivalen final, in the interval act. Is this to invite comparison? “Look at what we can do, world... And look at what we’re sending to Eurovision!” 

Yes, Wiktoria is adorable. She’s charming and sings (mostly) well. “As I Lay Me Down” is catchy (even though it’s basically the same damn song as her entry last year). And I get it, you just shelled out 125 million krona (around $14 million USD) to host Eurovision last year, so you’re not eager to do it again. But please, let me implore you, pick Robin Bengtsson and his squad of vogueing treadmill dancers. Choose Lisa Ajax with her bejeweled rain poncho and potty mouth. Or, please, pick Mariette, because that is a Eurovision-ready entry. Send something that will stand out among the competition. Not Wiktoria. 

[sergeifyodorov]

the sketchbook: swedes edition