In sickness... and strawberries

Last Monday I wrote my final exam for this semester. As it usually happens, I got sick the same day. I have caught a rather bad cold and has been more or less down and out since then.

Yesterday I bought some Swedish strawberries to cheer me up (and get some vitamins, minerals and all other things I know are good for me). They were not cheap. For those of you who doesn't know, strawberries is the most exotic thing that grows in Sweden. Most fruits are imported and thus not tasting as good as they would in more southern countries. So, strawberries is a special thing for many of us Swedes. I serve them in a bowl, with milk, some cream and sugar. For a moment it actually felt like summer, but the weather says otherwise. I also took some photos, since I think strawberries are rather beautiful.




This summer I will study three courses in physics. I trust most of them to be very interesting, but I will provide further comments on this as the courses begin next week.

Lastly, in the news. DN writes about the right-wing Swedish government looking over routines for state television and radio. In Sweden we have two television channels run by the state and four radio channels. They mostly provide music and programs which they commercial channels are not interested in. Debates, classical music and so on. They also has to provide it for a large majority of the Swedish citizens. Where I used to live we didn't have any commercial radio channels since the population was only about 10'000, lately one or two commercial channels have become available (and only playing horrible popular music anyway). To finance all this, the state claims ~4 SEK a day from everyone who owns a television. We even have people employed to check in on you if you are paying. Sadly, our government seems to like this solution. I think it's an old (and bad) idea, that was a good idea back in the middle of the 20th century. Back then some people didn't own a TV and would probably not like paying for channels they couldn't watch. Now, things are different. Most people own a television and it takes money to check whether or not someone owns a television and to administrate it all. Why not let it be a part of the tax instead? Thus making the system more efficient and making it impossible to avoid paying for your TV. The increase in tax will be unnoticeable and people will not complain about such a marginal increase. I just can't stand bad solutions to simple problems...

Link to the article (in Swedish).
Link to more comments made by the Swedish minister of culture (in Swedish).
Link to the first statement made by the Swedish minister of culture in SvD (in Swedish).