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Some (well, as many as 37) conscripts serving in the border guards have got frostbite injuries as they were doing the cold plunge exercise. The idea is to ski into open water, control yourself to avoid panick, let the cold shock subside, then come up and warm yourself up by running. The border guards don’t have a frost limit to their exercises and the guys serving have volunteered to go for a tougher than average service.
[Here’s a clip](https://youtu.be/9HHI2EuZoWc?si=Ju0bIMyZpUjE_p4-&t=3609) where Finnish troops guided two Swedish and one American guest through said exercise. As I’m a touch cold sitting in my livingroom, I can’t think of anything that would make do that voluntarily, despite having experienced dips in natural waters down to about 5ºC.
YLE (Finland’s national broadcasting company) just published stats on the power systems on new cars purchased recently.
My part of the country had 40.5% petrol, 37.3% fully electric, 19.3% petrol hybrid, 2.6% diesel and 0.3% other.
Reasons for fully electric still being beaten by petrol might include a) there are lots of apartments where getting a charging station is difficult, b) I suspect some people are not happy with the range of moderately priced EV’s, c) ?
I was watching a guy cook a Korean sandwich yesterday. He made something like a TEMU okonomiyaki (cabbage, carrots etc mixed with egg and cooked in a pan) like a pancake). Then he toasted two slice of bread. Then he spread strawberry jam, placed the cabbage pancake on top, and then ham, and then “cheese” and ketchup and then he sprinkled a whole load of sugar. English recipe websites don’t have the strawberry jam. I guess they don’t want to weird people out. Anyway, it was a bit of a trip. I may try it sometime.
Speaking of recipe websites… Some people were complaining about excessive ads on recipe blogs. I am heavily armed with ad blockers but man, I miss the 2005-2010-ish internet. YouTube had no ads, websites were people with nice hobbies just making their stuff available (basically like [joyofbaking.com](http://joyofbaking.com), [akvarell.se](http://akvarell.se) or [handprint.com](http://handprint.com), all of which I use extensively). There wasn’t this big drive to monetize every single thing. Nowadays even if you are posting generic cookie recipes you have a million ads and also have to include half your life story so that people get confused enough to look at those ads.
When I post art or show people my handmade paints, every single time people ask me how they can buy them. Is it that weird to make stuff just as a hobby with no intention to sell? Maybe I should make a good old-fashioned website. Hosting is like 5 Euros a month or something.
What kind of niche, nerdy website would you guys make?
ETA I asked my friend in Korea and she said most Korean “toasts” (so savory sandwiches) have strawberry jam and it’s disgusting.
I did end up going to the chamber music concert even though it conflicted with the opening day of Rally Monte-Carlo. I actually managed to watch the first stage before the concert, and then the two other stages on replay at night once I got back home. Worked out fine.
In the concert they played a Schubert piano trio which was okay but not my taste, a Dvorak piano quartet which as fine but didn’t excite me, and a third piece by a composer I had never heard of. It was called The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind composed by Osvaldo Golijov, who is apparently a contemporary Argentinian composer with eastern European Jewish roots. The piece was so great. Extremely beautiful and dramatic. Easily the best one out of the three performed. I’ll see if I can figure out what else to listen from him.
I’ve noticed that the split between performers who have sheet music on paper versus performers who have sheet music in a tablet is about 50/50. I assume people prefer a tablet because a bunch of paper is awkward, and people prefer paper because they don’t like staring at a screen. But here’s my idea, what if you took the awkwardness out of paper?
In Paris-Dakar they race with motorcycles as well, but on a bike you can’t have a co-driver to read the road book. So they use [this kind of a device](https://www.utvdriver.com/resizer/I4kg4C65GLg8PWarQyc3sYh86Uc=/1440×0/filters:focal(773×300:783×310)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/octane/WCNURHS52FDG5DCDY2S4UNREMA.jpg), where the paper road book automatically scrolls down as the motorcycle moves forward. This could so easily be adapted for the concert hall as well. Maybe there could be a foot switch to control the speed it scrolls at, or you could pre-program it somehow. Just print the sheet music on a long scroll of paper, put it in the device, and play away.
I saw [this on the drawing subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/drawing/comments/1qjxwd0/transit_people/). It’s so cool. As someone who uses public transport every so often and has done so for many many years in different countries, I feel like I know all of these people. Crazy.
I went to a shop in a district that I usually don’t go to and I saw a Brickchurch. Vienna isn’t known for “Brickgothic” but I noticed many districts have atleast one. Some examples: [1](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitenfelder_Pfarrkirche#/media/Datei%3ABreitenfeld_(Wien)_-_Kirche.JPG), [2](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirche_Maria_vom_Siege_%28Wien%29#/media/Datei%3AMaria_vom_Siege_Wien.JPG), [3](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonskirche_%28Wien%29#/media/Datei%3AAntonskirche_Wien_Ansicht_2.jpg)
Today and throughout the weekend, Sweden’s largest ornithology organization BirdLife Sweden arranges [Vinterfåglar Inpå Knuten](https://vinterfaglar.se/) – ”Winter Birds Nearby”. This is an annual event that has been going on for many years now during the last weekend of January, where the general public all across the country get to observe, count and report the number of birds of each species that they see at the bird feedings at home in their own gardens. It’s a very popular event with many thousands of households participating.
Even if the results are of course not extremely scientific, it does at least give a general feel and trend for which species are the most common in winter, and which species might be increasing or decreasing in numbers over time. In this way, it’s of quite good help to conservationists. Plus that it’s also just really fun, and a nice way to get the public more interested and engaged in birdwatching and learning about birds and how to tell different species apart. Swedes do in general already have a large interest in birds and nature, and many are quite knowledgeable already.
In these winter counts, the [great tit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit) *(Parus major)* basically always comes out on top as the most common species on a national level, but regionally it does vary a bit. For example, here in Scania in southernmost Sweden it’s the [Eurasian tree sparrow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_tree_sparrow) *(Passer montanus)* that has been by far the most common for many winters now, with the great tit usually in second place. On the other hand, in the northern half of Sweden it was actually the [Eurasian bullfinch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_bullfinch) *(Pyrrhula pyrrhula)* which was the most common last winter, and it has increased a lot in numbers in the country recently.
So it will be interesting to see what the results will be this year, and I of course hope that many people will participate in the count. So far, this has been quite an unusual winter, where it has been unusually snowy and cold for much of January even in southern Sweden. And even though we don’t have any snow here in Scania anymore now, there is still snow much further south in the country than usual, which might likely lead to more birds at the garden bird feedings as well.
I saw the most healthy looking fox I’ve ever seen. A lot of the time they’re kinda thin, fur looks a bit patchy and dirty, and so on. But this one looked like it was straight out of a cartoon. Some weight on it, perfect looking orange fur with a white tip, it was sniffing the ground doing its thing.