Yesterday myself & Junior met up with Paddy K. Sr. & Jr. and went to Cybertown, a laser-game place in central Stockholm. Here we paid SEK 60 ($11) per head and donned vests with laser sensors and attached laser guns, forming Team Blue. Teams Red and Yellow each consisted of five ten-year-olds, and Team Green was a dad and his daughter. Then we entered a blacklit dry-ice-smoking dark labyrinth and spent 20 adrenaline-soaked minutes happily sniping at teams Red, Yellow and Green. We won! Not very surprising, given that our team was the only one with two dads. Individually, though, Green Dad was the best player. And Paddy Jr. was the best kid!
We had lunch at a Dovas, an excellent greasy spoon (Sw. sunkhak) full of grizzled heavy dudes drinking daytime lager, and then went to the English Shop, a bona fide immigrant store full of British foodstuffs & books, complete with a notice board advertising English-speaking party clowns and an on-line forum for expat mothers. I bought mince pies, breakfast-inna-can and Ty.phoo tea.
The afternoon was spent in the company of our Rundkvist ladies at Swedish Grandma's making Xmas ornaments, while I cleaned out the hard drive of her old computer and napped. Kids to Jr's mom. In the evening, I dressed in imitation of the sleeve of Kraftwerk's immortal 1978 album The Man-Machine, borrowed some lipstick and went with my stunning wife to the Hootchy Kootchy Club (of which I told you back in February, Dear Reader). Here we enjoyed various musical and burlesque entertainments (including the fabulous Scotty the Blue Bunny, the delectable Paula the Swedish Housewife and the gleefully transgressive Empress Stah), stared in fascination at beautifully (and rather scantily) clad people, received not inconsiderable admiration ourselves, and shook our beauté to good music into the small hours.
Swiftly home, to discover that the ground-floor lock that hasn't worked for eight years had suddenly begun to do so, and that we were locked out of the house. On to my dad's place, rousing him & extra mum (who wondered at first if I had been kicked out of my house in a marital spat), and sleeping very soundly in the big guest room.
All in all an excellent Saturday. What did you do, Dear Reader?
[More blog entries about lasergames, burlesque, cabaret, gay, Sweden; laserspel, gay, Stockholm, burlesk, kabare, hootchykootchy.]
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I awoke at dawn from someone throwing a huge black pudding at me. As it turned out, it was just one of the resident cats jumping from the window-sill craving attention (food). The resident cat-mistress got up and pacified the beasts, while I resumed my dreaming. At noon I took the tube into town and fought the crowds for Christmas gifts and German heavy metal magazines, then returned to the cat parlour, ate some sushi, enjoyed a documentary on Swedish hi-fi nerds, had a beer, made a risotto, drank some red wine, half-heartedly watched Star Wars while playing cards, after which I fell asleep. Not too bad either, on the whole.
My brother's band is on tour here in North America - luckily for me, since that gives me a chance to see him once a year or so. By the time Saturday started, he'd just got off the stage here in Vancouver, where he and his band had recieved gold DVD's for the Canadian sales of their video DVD (Wrath of the Northmen) from the hands of some of my Viking recreation friends (The Reik Felag). Not sure if I was more proud of my brother or my Vikings just then! Then I got to scoop my brother back home to my house while the rest of the band slept in the tour bus. My kids, who didn't know Uncle Johan was here, woke up about as thrilled as they are on Christmas morning at "finding" him there. I made pancake breakfast for them all, then we dropped the kids with the babysitter, drove my bro down to Seattle, where he played for yet another sold out house, and I got to watch again, with my best friends who live down south. After four hours of sleep, over 2000 audience members entertained and litterally 100's of autographs signed, my baby brother got tucked in on the bus by his big sis, who then drove her husband home and crashed into bed at about 5 AM, too high on adrenaline to sleep for hours! Awesome weekend!!
I went south this week for Orust and on friday I met my best "cousin" Tengill alias Ásvas, on Landvetter airport. There he came, so handsome in his saamidress. We went further south by my car, drove through a wonderful landscape, first to visit my duchy in Ladonia, and then we stayed friday night in a hotel on the southwestern coast of Sweden. Saturday we went on to see the, much of talking, stones in Scania, wonderful weather. We had dinner with some nice people we happened to meet at the place. By night we sat by a campfire, at the beach, not far from Stenhuvud, discussing, eating and dreaming. Then we went back to our hotel and next day back north. And now I caught a cold...
Sounds like you too had a good Saturday.
Aha, Christina, your brother is either the singer or the lead guitarist of Amon Amarth! What's the band's relationship to right-wing extremism? I suppose your reenactment group wouldn't be giving them prizes if they were Nazis. And they used to have a drummer named Lopez.
Savon, cool to learn about Ladonia, a micronation set up by provocateur artist Lars Vilks!
The band's relationship with right wing extremists is the extremists would get their heads bashed in if they tried to go to a gig. They like to try every so often to use the band's internet forum to recruit, only to never return again, once they've been told to f-off and then promptly been completely ignored. Some poor dude went on there and tried it once, and ran head first inte ME...uh-oh, I had an awful lot of fun ripping him apart, which went so waaaay over his head that he made himself look like an idiot, and then he never came back. The heavy metal fans simply do not mix with right wingers. The band also makes no bones about the fact that they do not want to be associated with Nazis. And no, the Reik Felag would NOT have participated in any way if there was anything right wing about the band (and I would not have attended the gigs). The old drummer was named Lopez, yes. Unfortunately he ended up doing drugs very eraly on, something for which the band has no tolerance. Fredrik replaced him, and he is truly an awesome drummer. Oh, and the vocalist is my big hairy brother, aka the apple of my eye.