I do not want to date you

A friend of mine is going through a divorce, and for some reason this has caused a lot of her male friends to start hitting on her. After the fifth facebook-post about this, and how she most definitely do not want people to hit on her or suggest they should date, I wrote this song for her. I doubt it will help in any way, but still:

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Please Stop Donald

The melody of this song is “Waiting for Margret to Go” by Chumbawamba, which can be found here: Link

 

The sun rises up o’er a country once great

Where blue, white, and red stands for greed, faith and hate

A second-rate state with designs to be best

And one man has dreams that are worse than the rest

 

The breadth of his knowledge is mainly a gap

Can’t find his arse on a high-detail map

Armed with his prejudice charging the field

To people like Donald his ignorance’s a shield

 

Not very different from people you know

Waiting for Donald to go

With God on your side you must give ‘em a show

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

Launched a ridiculous birther attack

Can’t stand the fact that the president’s black

Hates the Hispanics because of their race

Thinks people of colour should stay in their place

 

Look with suspicion on those you should love

Waiting for Donald to go

Gladly obeying dictates from above

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

Happily pouring more oil on the fire

His “War on the Other” will never expire

For empathy’s nothing to those who are strong

Showing that even the rich can be wrong

 

Snitch on the muslims when Islam’s a crime

Waiting for Donald to go

The new Middle Ages – a horrible time

Waiting for Donald to go

Oh, waiting for Donald to go

 

The sun slowly sets on a country once great

The dream still is dreamt, but the hour is late

Eight years of fascism with Donald on top

“Loving thy neighbor” has come to a stop

 

If he wins, back to the 40s we go

Please stop Donald from having a go

If he wins, back to the 40s we go

Please stop Donald from having a go

Please stop Donald from having a go

 

 

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Så oskyldigt

Another political song, once again — surprise, surprise! — directed mainly against the People’s Party in Sweden (surprise, surprise! ^^ /skymandr). The leader of this party is currently in charge of educating our kids, and he hardly had time to put on his minister hat after the recent election before he started his campaign to make primary school education more similar to what it was when his ideology was really in vogue — the 19th century.

The melody is perhaps not as well known as the one in the previous songs. It is “Balladen om dagen efter” by Bengt Sändh, which I cannot find on YouTube, but there are CDs with this melody (I have one), so it is available.

Unlike the other songs, however, this is written together with S. I wrote one verse, and challenged him to write the next, and so on.

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tau Ceti, a planetary survey

Warning: Wall of Text!
This was supposed to be a post about some maps I’ve drawn, but it turned into a minor essay (featuring fifteen footnotes and two poems). This regularly happens when I set about describing my work (this paragraph is no exception). I am terrible at leaving unimportant details out of the picture. Since the readership of this blog is very limited, however, I have decided that it is all right this way. I wrote it mostly for myself anyway. If you don’t want to read about my love for maps and my love for the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, feel free to jump to the maps, or got to Get Stuff where you will find more versions. (I also made some animations of the planets revolving which can be found in a follow-up post.) If, on the other hand, you are interested in the background to and process involved in the making of the maps, you are more than welcome to continue reading.

Breaking News! New and improved versions of the maps available here!

Fan-cartography

I’ve always loved maps.

I remember, that when I first discovered fantasy (through The Hobbit, as it were), for many years I held the opinion, that a map was a sure sign of a good novel. If there were ample appendices or a word-list for a made up foreign tongue, all the better! I have since realised that a map is not a sure sign that a book is worth my time, and that not all the appendices in the world could save a bad book from being bad read — I remember one fantasy heptology in particular, whose appendices were beyond most in ambition, but whose story soon dwindled from acceptable to dull, and in the end turned offensively stupid. But I still hold, that a mediocre book can be saved by an inspired map, and that a good map always makes a good book more memorable.

After The Hobbit, I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (great appendices), Eddings (mediocre, but good maps) and the Earthsea trilogy by Le Guin (excellent and with excellent maps [0]). At some point I discovered Science Fiction, and started to prefer it to Fantasy, even though science fiction novels seem to be utterly devoid of maps. Until I discovered The Dispossessed. Science fiction, by an author I knew I liked, from having read The Word for World is Forest and the Earthsea books — with a map!

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Away, Utah!

Leo recently moved to Utah, and while he is greatly missed by his friends and plants, this is somehow remedied (at least as the friends are concerned)by the fact that he is keeping us up to date with his endeavours in our former colonies by means of a “blog”: treeweasel.wordpress.com

As is the tradition in the Bulstrode Whitelocke Society for the Promulgation of the Sciences, his departure was commemorated with a song:

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Bernadotten

I have been told, repeatedly, by Skyman that I write too few political songs these days. Well, to appease him, I wrote this today.

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Short rhetorical song

I was walking home with Skyman the other day, and this popped up when we were about to say good bye:

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Coders of the world, unite!

The company Glue Finance thinks it is a good idea to run their office like a military academy, not involving co-workers in decisions affecting them, and inventing excuses such as “lack of work” to get rid of employees who question this doctrine. I disagree vehemently, and think that companies doing their utmost to comply with the foulest images of capitalism should be subject to public scorn and ridicule:

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Four one-verse songs

Here are some (Swedish) one-verse songs that I feel are too short to merit their own entries.

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Song: “Utvisan”

A third song from the same flood of creativity as the previous two… This one should be looked at as a preliminary draft, but has the advantage that everyone in Sweden will know the melody. Indeed, a few more years of the People’s Party, and we’ll be forced to know the melody, and those who can’t will be sent to wherever Sweden’s equivalent of the Gulags is (Alingsås?).

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