I guess I've started a trend, if you can count one other person as a trend: The Dutch/Flemish word for the day over at Uren.Dagen.Nachten is overstroming, which means inundation or flood. In Swedish that would be översvämning, according to my dictionary.



- by Francis S.

Irritable male syndrome.



I think I have it.



This explains a lot.



The Swedish word for the day skitstövel. It means bastard.



- by Francis S.

My friend A., the former model, is now working for the Swedish version of the television program "Big Brother."



She told me that every single one of the 2,000 or so female applicants who applied to be on the show stated that they were bisexual.



I had no idea that there were so many bisexual Swedish women wanting to make names for themselves in reality [sic! sic! sic!] television.



The Swedish word for the day is förvånad. It means amazed. (The Swedish word for the day should be something that would translate to incredulous, but it's not a word I know.)



- by Francis S.

It's a lie that everywhere outside the United States is a pharmocological utopia. Well, at least Sweden doesn't fit the profile. Spain, now that's a different story. Or a place like India - my friend the Indian novelist recently told me he stocks up on convenient family-sized bottles of valium whenever he goes home to Bombay.



But here in Sweden, I could almost swear you need a prescription to get anything stronger than paracetamol. And I'm almost out of that bottle of generic nyquil that the American editor and his wife left when they were staying with us last summer. Even with a prescription, they have nothing like nyquil here.



I hope I don't start coughing again as soon as I lay down tonight.



America is a nation of happy drug addicts, and they don't even know it. Lucky dogs.



The Swedish word for the day is narkoman. It means junkie.



- by Francis S.

They think my older nephew - the one who is eight and takes after me and always has to do things his own original, creative and often bizarrely funny way - may have Tourette's syndrome.



It sounds more like he's got a, uh, chronic tic disorder, but it's unclear to me whether full-blown Tourette's means having a small tic that one just can't help indulging. In my nephew's case, he has a funny little ritualistic cough that involves covering his mouth carefully for each cough, as he has been told to do by his mother.



I now realize the reason behind all those strange noises that used to come from one of my former co-workers. And I thought the constant coughings and throat-clearing and whistling was just another aspect of his horrific passive aggression and his general strange closeted behavior.



The Swedish word for the day is småningom. It means little by little.



- by Francis S.

Tommy: Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior?



Hedwig: No, but I love his work.

We just bought the DVD of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." The husband appreciated it so much more with subtitles. Plus the DVD included a documentary as long as the movie itself. I learned that the song "Wicked Little Town" is in fact inspired by Grinnell, Iowa. My Uncle Ed once had a farm outside Grinnell, Iowa. Not as unlike old Isak Dinesen and her farm in Africa as one might imagine. And yet, it does not surprise me at all that Grinnell would be inspiration for such a song.



- by Francis S.

Last night we had dinner with A., the former model and her boyfriend C., the fashion photographer. Moules frites - which is not fried mussels, but mussels with french fries, a tasty dish that must be the national dish of Belgium.



Their friends Annalie and Johan were there, and they had brought Vicky along. Poor Vicky is blind and deaf, and she takes anabolic steroids to help her walk, as her hips are not what they were when she was young.



Vicky is in fact an ancient toy poodle who wanders around in circles bumping into things and sniffing during the half an hour or so each day that she's not sleeping in her bed or cuddled in the arms of her owner, Annalie.



Ah, selfless love. I want someone to hold me in their arms like that when my hair is in uneven matted patches and I'm blind and deaf and my hips don't work like they used to.



- by Francis S.