I recently purchased this bottle of vodka because I thought it looked fantastic.

It is hazelnut and coffee flavored and it features artwork by a Stockholm artist named Lindalovisa Fernqvist (www.lindalovisa.com)

The brand is Good Old Sailor. It tastes great in a White Russian.

Snowy February night at S:t Eriksplan in Stockholm

I have dozens of followers on Twitter but I have never actually use the service, that is, I have never “tweeted.”

I’ll be honest. I don’t understand Twitter.

I have asked a lot of Twitter devotees, “What IS Twitter? Isn’t it just the status updates from Facebook without the rest of Facebook?”

Nearly two years ago, I deleted my Facebook profile. (See Block this Application, May 2010)

I have never missed it, never looked back and never regretted it. Despite almost-daily pressure to rejoin from friends and co-workers, I just don’t feel like I’m missing anything.

It’s weird when people react to me like not being on Facebook is the equivalent of not having an email address or telephone. It’s not like that at all.

So it seems that Twitter is a way for people to publicize their conversations, as long as they keep it short.

One guy I work with said he doesn’t use twitter that much because “it’s just a bunch of people telling you what to do.”

I’ve also been told that the service Twitter provides is called microblogging. So it’s like broadcasting your Post-It notes

“Micro” is a good way to describe my level of interest in it.

Nonetheless, I’m curious about it and the door is not completely closed.

So here’s the deal.

If I get 500 followers on Twitter, I’ll start using it. Tweet the word out. Tell your friends to add @scottritcher as soon as they can. The race to 500 is on!

Medborgarplatsen ("Citizen Plaza") in Stockholm

Gubbängstorget

Gubbängstorget

Hej! (Taken with Instagram at Rådmansgatan/Sveavägen)

Vintervikens strövområde

Louisville

Taken with Instagram at Louisville, Ky

Meat, Louisville

Wheel of Fortune. I’ll say. (Taken with instagram)

When the weather gets cold enough each winter, I recommit myself to one simple oath: “I refuse to be cold.”

The transition to walking around completely insulated against the elements consists of a base layer of long underwear, upon which I simply add more of the same clothes I wear every day. Double shirts, double socks, et cetera.

This morning as I put my socks on, I made my traditional winter transition to wearing two pairs of socks.

I had to make a choice. Would both pairs not match, even the two that aren’t seen? Would a secret match exist within the four individual socks? That is, one of the hidden socks would be a match to one of the visible socks?

While I ultimately decided that all four socks should be unique among the set, a larger realization occurred.

This is a sock-making machine.

For the first time in my life it occurred to me that socks are probably not manufactured in pairs. There is probably a big machine somewhere that spits out 20,000 socks an hour, the loose products of which are then paired up by a machine that packages them, or by an 8-year-old kid with one of those plastic guns that stabs a white I-shaped tab between the two, uniting two socks, at least until they are removed from the purchaser’s feet for the first time.

Socks are born alone and die alone. The pairing of two so-called “matching” socks is merely an illusion that has been so masterfully perpetuated that I never realized it was not the natural order until I was an adult man. Today.

I have to add a caveat. This new insight into the sock world has not been confirmed or denied by any professionals with knowledge of sock manufacturing processes.

If there is a reader in the audience who can, in fact, confirm that socks are actually made two at a time, as pairs, please let me know.

The Killer showing off his new socks.

The single sock theory neither sours nor sweetens my love affair with new socks. It only provides new insight into something that is likely different from the way I always presumed it to be.

Nor do I imagine it matters much to Jerry Lee Lewis, a man who has the means to live the dream, it has been said, to wear a band new pair of socks every day. Oh that I could live like that.

Kitchen 1 floor down (Taken with Instagram at Hermans)

Taken with Instagram at S:t Eriksplan

K Composite Magazine www.kcomposite.com

Taken with instagram

Taken with Instagram at Åsögatan 131

Taken with Instagram at Åsögatan 131

Every j-hole knows Joe Biden’s middle name.

Here’s the story in pictures.

Jerry Brown and Bill Clinton in 1992

I lived in California for a while, and though I never lived there when he was governor before, I always liked Jerry Brown.

I liked him a lot when he was running for president in 1992. I thought if Ross Perot couldn’t pull it off, I’d be happy with Jerry Brown.

At that time, I was absolutely no fan of a man from Arkansas named Bill Clinton. I thought he was, well, I don’t remember really what I thought about Clinton, but I just thought there were other candidates who I liked. Clinton should have been an “also ran” in my opinion.

Things didn’t work out the way I had hoped. Brown eventually dropped out of the race, not becoming the nominee.

Perot, after leading in the polls – unprecedented for an independent in nearly a century – amazingly dropped out of the race after alleged “dirty tricks” by Republicans threatened to disrupt his daughter’s wedding.

Perot eventually re-entered the race several weeks before the election, but by then it was too late.

The grassroots energy of his campaign was gone, the local offices had been shut down, supporters had scattered or realigned with other candidates, and the straightforward, steady-handed Perot was now shadowed by a cloud of unpredictability.

I voted for him anyway.

This was the first election that I had become emotionally invested in, traveling to see Perot speak, doing the yard sign and bumper sticker thing, following the news, watching polling numbers, and helping distribute campaign materials.

Years before the election, my roommate and I saw Perot being interviewed on the Donahue show. He had impressed us both to the point where we agreed that he should be president, though no such topic was discussed, as I remember. We just felt he was a no-bullshit guy who said what he thought and got things done.

By the time November 1992 rolled around, the opposing candidates tried to dissuade voters from going for Perot and “splitting the vote” by arguing that voting for the independent was akin to “throwing your vote away.”

Perot urged voters to go to the polls, take a moment to reflect about who they thought was best qualified to manage the massive problems of the federal government, then, as he said, “vote your conscience.”

I liked that idea a lot, so I held out hope for a surprise upset and a Perot presidency.

In the end, Perot’s take at the voting booth brought in 19% of the electorate. George HW Bush pulled in 37.5% and Bill Clinton won the presidency with 43%.

I was despondent.

It’s strange for me to think about that, because now I totally love Bill Clinton.

It took a long time for me to truly warm up to Bill Clinton. It was well into his second term, a good five or more years after he was first elected.

It wasn’t any particular event that changed my mind about Clinton, but in retrospect, it seems like it just took me a while to realize that a lot of what he was trying to do were things I supported and things that were for the good of the country.

No Clinton story is complete without reference to a scandal or two, but it was perhaps those public indictments of his character and personal life that caused me to feel more sympathetic toward him.

Over time, it certain became clearer to me that the opposition to President Clinton had little to do with his policies. It was all personal.

I’m thinking about all this because the United States has a president at the moment whose every good effort seems to be marginalized and discounted for personal reasons.

Even after his “pass this jobs bill” speech in September, in which President Obama offered his support for a laundry list of historically Republican projects and ideas to get people back to work, the blockade of opposition went up even higher.

The Republicans simply cannot allow Obama to succeed in any way, lest he be credited with saving the country from a second depression. Instead, they’re willing and prepared to welcome economic catastrophes, if only so he will get the blame.

While millions remain unemployed, uninsured, or even homeless, they’re looking only toward the next election.

My hope is that the same transformation which happened in me as someone unenthusiastic about President Clinton could be happening in millions of Americans who have been heretofore unenthusiastic about President Obama.

The results of the local and state elections earlier this month certainly seem to suggest some support for the idea that Americans are beginning to tire of the Republicans, whose most common policy objective over the past three years has been that of simply saying “no.”

Taken with Instagram at Sergels Torg

Finally, a graffiti artist who doesn’t want to ruin someone else’s property. (Taken with instagram)

Taken with Instagram at Slussen T-Bana

Taken with Instagram at Stockholm Globe Arena

Gubbängen, Enskede, Sweden

Here is an awesome Sharpie tattoo of a shark that my friend Iida drew on my arm last night.

We were at a show of the band Fucked Up, who I had never heard before. I was surprised, not just because I enjoyed them, but also because they kept my attention through their whole set.

While I was at the bar getting a drink, I took a second to snap a photo of the beer menu for you.

Swedish kronors are about 6 to one US dollar, so as you can see, the cheapest beer is about eight bucks. That’s the “fatöl” (tap beer) Carlsberg, the Danish equivalent of Miller or Bud as far as its ubiquity.

The other beers are all in bottles (“flasköl”) and a good one like Brooklyn Lager is about $10 US.

The show was at the club Debaser Slussen and their prices are pretty much the regular prices around Stockholm, give or take a couple kronors.

Just grabbin’ some “content” from “Hollywood” at a speed that would be a sick fantasy in America. It would be especially crazy in Louisville where there has only been one cable/Internet provider for too many years.

And this is just a random download. I’ve seen it get up to 12 MB per second, and I have the “middle” plan for about $40 a month. I could upgrade and get ten times this speed.

Sweater by Filippa K, t-shirt by American Apparel (the “vacation shirt” via Monkey Drive), jeans by Levi’s, right sock by Björn Borg, left sock and underwear by H&M, shoes by Adidas, half-day at work by Dagen inför Alla Helgons Dag, li’l beer belly by Great Divide Brewery’s Yeti, telephone/camera/music player/web browser/blahblahblah by Apple, half-smile by woman in the elevator who was eager to tell me her daughter lives upstairs and she was just coming by to visit her but she doesn’t live here just her daughter does, feeling awake by secret mocha recipe from the coffee robot at work, excitement by tomorrow’s Halloween/birthday/housewarming/magazine release party!

The story detailed how I was bringing K Composite Magazine into a new world by beginning to publish it to the iPad.

I asked you and your fellow Snuggling readers to get involved by applying to be interviewed, and many of you stepped forward to be subjected to the third degree.

Now, the new issue of K Composite is available as a free download for your iPad and you can see for yourself what I’ve been working on all summer.

And it’s off to a big start, too. In its first week in the App Store, K Composite was the #6 app in Sweden in the Lifestyle category which includes magazines and such. Pretty exciting.

My goal is to put out a new issue on the iPad every other month. The second iPad issue, which is actually issue #15, should be out in December.

For those of you who don’t have iPads, some of the interviews will soon be available on the magazine’s website at www.kcomposite.com and in the companion iPhone app K Mate which is also free.

If you’d like to get involved by interviewing one of your friends, helping with the photography or web aspects, or even by being interviewed yourself, stop by this link and let me know: www.kcomposite.com/participate

The headline on today’s Expressen says it all.

“Steve Jobs died last night: he changed the world.”

Here we see either the world’s cutest bike lock or someone who is just testing the guilty conscience of the neighborhood bicycle thief.

Okay, full disclosure: the rear wheels of European bicycles have built-in locks that wrap around the tire. So if somebody wanted to steal this bike they would have to carry it away, then somehow remove the lock from the wheel.

What is this that Amazon is giving away?
Clown courage?
Closet rage?
Clog storage?
Cloak garage?
Clone suffrage?
Clock mirage?

(Photo: New York Times)

Jacket by Ben Sherman, sweater by Nudie, t-shirt by Muji, jeans by Lee, boots by Hunter, socks by Kapp Ahl, underwear and hat by H&M, belt by The Gap, beer belly by Founder’s Brewery, bags under the eyes by Bulleit Distilling, morgonpigg by Espresso House, deodorant by Arm & Hammer, fresh scent by Whirlpool and Via, shave by Gilette, celebrity crush by Michelle Williams, telephone by Apple, wallet by SL, marker by Sharpie, original structure by Allan and Mary Ritcher, guilty conscience and general skepticism by the Roman Catholic Church, apprehensiveness and lack of confidence by some girl in my sixth grade class who made fun of my teeth, dental work by Evel Knievel and Coca-Cola, additional accessories by Hermans Vegetarian Buffet, and the culinary traditions of Mexico, Italy and India.

The picture on the front of this magazine from the church (which shows the shoes of some people kneeling while wearing churchy clothes) immediately reminded me of the Heaven’s Gate cult.

Heaven’s Gate was a California mass suicide in which all the “victims” got saved from the cleansing of the Earth by being beamed up to space.

You see, a lot of people don’t realize this, but the planet Earth was wiped clean in March 1997. The Heaven’s Gate people, thirty-nine of them, laced up their matching Nike Dunk Pro SB sneakers, got in bed, and escaped just in time. You call it mass suicide, I call it a quick getaway to sweet freedom in the sky. We’re quibbling over semantics here.

Either way, Nike couldn’t thank their lucky stars enough for all the free promotion that came out of the event by way of news photos. Just do it, already.

A spaceship, which was following the Hale-Bopp comet (pretty foolproof disguise, actually) collected their souls and whisked them away. Finally, dudes, let’s GTFO.

The method of escape was a delicious pudding, laced with phenobarbital and a vodka chaser. Kool Aid was already taken, so the Gate had to do their own thang.

Once on board the ship, it was quite important that each member took $5.75 along with them. I’m not sure if this was for snacks or what, but this is true, each corpse at the scene in San Diego was found with a five dollar bill and three quarters in their pocket.

Update: Those people are now living in a kickass paradise somewhere a few light years past Orion. Unfortunately, Nike has no distribution in that area, but I hear five bucks goes a long way.

The Church of Sweden is a Lutheran denomination that has nothing to do with Heaven’s Gate – to my knowledge – except that their magazine cover sure looks a lot like some crime scene photos.

It was the country of Sweden’s official church until 2000. Pretty late to lighten up on that one, but Sweden can’t win ‘em all.

Money from general taxes still fund the church, though Swedes can opt out when filing their taxes if they don’t wish to support it.

Most people don’t opt out for the simple reason that paying taxes in Sweden is as simple as answering yes or no. When your tax forms come in the mail, all the numbers are already filled in. All you need to do is confirm that the total is correct, which you can do online, by phone, SMS or even the tax agency’s iPhone app. If you want to opt out of giving the church some money, this creates extra steps in the process and – good news for the church – most people just don’t bother.

I didn’t bother opting out either. It took me seven minutes to do my taxes in Sweden this year. My American taxes, however, usually take all afternoon and I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.

The church’s leadership is elected in general elections exactly as the Swedish Parliament. You just have to be a member of the church, a resident of Sweden and over 16 in order to vote.

Their website says that “up to seven million people” are members of the church. Up to? Okay, so it could be five people or it could be 6.99 million. We’re not sure, but it’s definitely no more than seven million.

(Coincidentally, I just bought a washing machine today and I paid up to seven million dollars for it. Well, up to 44 million kronor. Sounds like a lot, but delivery was included.)

Given that the population of the entire country is 9.4 million, it seems that figure of 7 million may have been, well, pulled out of the heavens.

A 2005 study commissioned by the European Union found only 23% of Swedes willing to report that they “believe there is a God.”

Another 23% indicated that they “do not believe there is any sort of spirit, God, or life force.” These are the godless atheist socialists you hear about when Republicans in Congress talk about how health care destroys society.

The majority, 53%, said they believe there is “some sort of spirit or life force,” which doesn’t exactly sound like someone who is a dedicated member of a church. I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure Martin Luther didn’t subject himself to abuse from the Catholics and the Holy Roman Empire because he thought there was probably ”some sort of spirit or life force” out there.

I’m also not sure how the Church of Sweden is counting their membership, but it doesn’t seem very accurate.

If everyone in Sweden who believes in any god is a member of the Church of Sweden, that puts the membership number only around 2.1 million people, according the EU’s statistics.

Sure, 2.1 million is, in fact, a number that is “up to seven million,” so I guess they’re right on that account.

Oh well. The good news is that the church is responsible for all the cemeteries in the country and — even if you don’t believe in anything — they’ll pay for your funeral.

That’s right. The Church of Sweden provides free funeral services for every Swedish resident. The family left behind pays only the undertaker’s fees.

All in all, it seems like a really nice little send-off for all these damn atheists on their way to Hell. But since the Church of Sweden also performs gay marriages, the clergy will probably be on the next boat right behind ‘em. Bon voyage suckaaaaahhhhhhs!!!!!

“Household garbage should be thrown into the designated placeand not off the balcony. Thanks for your help in keeping it clean and pretty outside the building.”

Oh no problem. You’re welcome.

It wasn’t me, by the way, who threw garbage off my balcony. Nor was it me who designed the award-winning flyer.

(What are the arrows showing me?)

Not throwing bags of garbage off the balcony may seem like an obvious thing to most people.

However, there are a few more signs I’m thinking about making and posting around the building, just to make sure everyone knows the rules of common courtesy. For instance:

“Please don’t record your bullshit Swedish hip-hop album in an apartment building at 1:00 in the morning.”

I know what you’re thinking. “Swedish hip-hop? What the hell?” Yeah, I know. And you maybe haven’t even heard it. If you’re reading this in America, relax, you will never hear it.

I understand that just like any other music, there is really good hip-hop and really bad. Personally, I can’t stand the really good stuff, so imagine how bad this must be.

If you associate hip-hop with urban struggle, I’m sure you’ll have no problem picturing the overwhelming oppression of universal healthcare, subways that have new-car-smell, city sidewalks crowded with model-worthy beauties draped in next year’s fashions, rolling countrysides dotted with charming summer vacation houses, and armies of cops who pose for pictures with tourists and carefully help drunks so as not to injure them.

Straight outta Dalarna, bitches!

So anyway, yeah, I need to make a sign outlining the appropriate hours for laying down your dope tracks. I just don’t wanna hear the advance tracks before it drops.

If you ask me, the appropriate hours for recording Swedish hip-hop are, well, never. But since I am a guest in this country, I’ll be generous and ask that we shut it down around 10:00 pm.

I may offer my services to my Swedish hip-hop neighbors. You know, as an American I have a lot of street cred that these Svensk homies just can’t buy. I can tell ‘em all about what it’s like growing up in Middletown, Kentucky. I mean, if they wanna hear me drop some science (off the balcony).

Victoria, the oldest daughter of the king and queen of Sweden — not to be confused with Madeleine (the cute one who likes to party… she’s like the Mary-Kate and Victoria is like the Ashley) — got married last summer to a commoner, Daniel Westling.

It now seems that Prince Daniel has made short work of getting some more Swedish blood back into the royal lineage.

The Swedish Royal Family has a mix of French and German heritage at the moment, with a dash of Brazilian, depending on how you’re keeping score.

Just a year after Sweden was wrapt in royal wedding fever, now royal baby fever is the wildfire du jour.

The morning after the announcement, I was on the train to work when I took a quick look at the Expressen newspaper’s website on my iPhone.

The site was ablaze with every angle of the pregnant princess story. In fact, I counted the headlines: eleven of the top 14 stories were related to the royal pregnancy.

The free daily Metro paper dedicated a magazine-style cover to its front page, which is usually a standard newspaper style headlines-n-articles things.

One article I read was completely dedicated to speculation about the exact moment the princess got knocked up. Best guesses are placing the moment some time before a late-May visit to Munich or some events around Sweden’s National Day on June 6. Too much information?

Another article asked people on the street what they think the child should be named. One guy said Mohammed if it’s a boy and Aisha if it’s a girl. Just to do something unexpected.

My vote is for Princess if it’s a girl or Prince if it’s a boy. Chances are, this kid will be king or queen one day. How awesome would it be to have a King Prince or a Queen Princess?