What a world!

Just a short update and not terribly interesting, but now I'm officially a member of Stockholm squash club. I've given up on Uppsala because the courts are more fit for ice skating than playing squash.

This now gives me more challenges, as the best in Sweden are based at this club, so will no doubt get my arse kicked at some point.

The title of my post refers to a 'story' I read on Sky news. The headline read 'Dad Branded A Paedophile Over Pic Of Son'. Basically the dad of this young kid took a picture of him whilst riding some little train ride in a shopping centre. A security guard was watching this and approaches the man, phones the police and the dad gets arrested for being a paedo. The police asked the dad to prove the kid was his. How do you normally do that?! Quickly do a DNA test? Give the kid some ID? (well I guess the passport thing exists, but thats another joke!!!).....this is some dilema.

But why are we in a society where we look to accuse everyone of being a kiddy fiddler? Do people not realize the majority of people are not paedos. It's probably due to the prison sentences/protected identity of real paedos, so instead of naming and shaming, they hide under the protection of the law- what the f**k? These people are sick and need to be put down. The knock on effect is simply a severe lack of trust between everyone, each to their own, you have your own back and that is that.

I'm not quite sure why we are looking out for someone with a camera to be a paedo. As most parents would argue- how do you catch the 'first' moments in life, how do you take care of your baby without being accused of frigging molesting it?! This world has officially lost the plot. If a security guard came up to me and accussed me of being a paedo, I think I would kick his arse. I feel sorry for the dad.

To rub salt in his wounds, the police decided to delete the photos!!!

Squash and another first

Well two quick things. Firstly I have my first ever biology paper published! Although it won't count towards my PhD as I'm not first or second author, it is still a proud moment in my life. Another first, another mini triumph. The next paper is the really important one as I'll be second author and it will count toward my PhD, providing it gets accepted (it's being revised now).

More interestingly, I watched the quarters of the Swedish Squash Open a few weeks ago in Linkoping. I went down with a certain Dutchman, yes, El Capitan of the squash team. After seeing some delightful squash, a lot of whinging from a certain French baby, ahem Mr. Gaultier and some sublime relaxed coasting from Mr. Shabana, the night drew to a close. After a quick pick me up, in the shape of a kladdkaka (only 10,000 calories), a 3 hour drive and a inspired squash mind, the night was over. I did take some pictures and a few mins video- some 10 mins, but just to see who was playing etc. I did find two clips that were interesting:

What a load of old crap

There are somethings, which despite being continually rejected as ludicrous ideas/theories by people who know what they are talking about, still come out as complete rubbish.

This is just to mention something, which 99% of the (mainly female) public believe(d) in. No not ghosts, E.T. or other weird paedophilic aliens, but the idea that if you take the MMR jab (well for your kids) that they would in some way develop autism and some bowel disease.

From the moment this became a public thing, suddenly everyone's running around saying their autistic kid had the MMR jab, so are going to sue etc. More importantly, parents were afraid to vaccinate their kids, against potentially life threatening disease. Stupid? Yes. Ill-informed? Yes.

I don't really know how the truth gets lost in all this media crap. Newspapers, TV channels need to make money, so just jazz it up a little. One numpty says something bad about it, with absolutely no leg to stand on, yet it comes to the forefront.

Well the lesson is both twofold. Firstly don't believe (basically) anything anyone tells you- association isn't causation. Secondly, please get the MMR jab, it says lives.

p.s. The Lancet journal completely retracted their so called finding about autism and MMR. This is basically unheard of, as people, especially science journals never admit they are wrong.

p.p.s. what we should be scared of is some hurrendous auto-immune arthritis after the swine flu vaccine. Only kidding......or am I?

My legs are tired

A fine Swedish road......

Check out the skates (the neck thing are ice picks just in case you fall through the ice)

It will make more sense when you read below : )

I didn't want to rub it in his face, but well done Andy Murray, haha. No seriously, kudos to Mr. Federer, it's nice to have watched the career of the best in their field. Almost unquestionably the best tennis player ever, may be the Swedes have an arguement about that one!

Not to bring it back to a real sport, but the Swedish (squash) open is this weekend, where again some of the world's best are going to be. I shall be heading down to Linköping to see how to play real squash.

There was another first for me last weekend. The first was a Torvill and Dean impersonation of the highest quality. Well kind of. You see Sweden is similar to England in one sense- they invent things only they play/do to appear good at something. Take England for example, we have darts, snooker and the most pointless sport ever created, cricket, and bar the later, we are truelly awesome. If you don't know who Phil 'the Power' Taylor is, then you should. Sweden do this to a certain extent, but we will let them off.

For starters, they only have 9 million or so ex-vikings, who have to indulge in sports such as bandy, innebandy, handball etc. The one thing we did on the weekend was similar to ice skating, well a different version infact (yes it will make sense I promise). It's called långfärdsskridskor, or long-journey-ice-skates. There are a number of different styles of this too. We had an army boot/original ski boot setup with a fixed heel. The other type is a cross country ski heel release type thing. The things are then about as long as speed skates (yes another pointless 'sport') but these things are surprisingly stable.

Despite the weirdness of it all, the whole experience was rather pleasant. To be out on a frozen lake, only months before we swam in, out in -10, with 30 cm of untouched snow to gaze across, in the glorious sunshine, was not a bad way to spend a couple of hours. No falls either, but one thing I have to mention, which I thought (again) was hysterical, was a poor young women, on the ice, in a remote part of one of the ice tracks, selling hot dogs from a cart, hahaha. Of course Johanna thought this was normal and the joke was apparently on me (also again).

Well this whole thing set us up nicely for our Sunday run. For those who don't know, we are glutton for punishment and have entered the Stockholm marathon again. This time though we are actually going to do some proper running training. We decided to start as of Sunday it seems: a nice casual jog for 2 hours, covering 20 km in -11, running in the snow, whilst snowing. I was impressed for a couple of reasons. The main one being the furthest we'd actually ran before the marathon, was based on time, for 1 hr and 15 mins. You can do the maths, but lets just say a marathon is going to last around 4 hoursish, and we ran for just over an hour, once. Hmmm, so to run basically a half marathon in these conditions was actually a pride filling moment.

I did do something incredibly retarded afterwards though. I ate food, no problem, but this was to give me energy for what I did next. Yes, I'm a nob I know, but I decided to play squash for 1.5 hrs, with a mixture of drills and conditioned matches. In a couple of words, complete penis comes to mind. So guess how my legs feel now? Well remember my teeth? If you take that pain and put it below my waist, that's pretty much where they are now.

So the fact that I punished my groin (through skating, not anything else) on Saturday, ran 20 km in the morning only to push myself in a concrete box, really has done wonders for my body. The fact that I'm still alive is a bonus. More incredibly, I can still walk. Just awesome. I'm not old, not yet.......