Showing posts with label Djurgården. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Djurgården. Show all posts

Saturday, October 19, 2013

My first day on Twitter this week -@hbbtruth- was sometimes frustrating, but not without some unexpected surprises of a royal nature; @hbbtruth, #hbbtruth, @swedense, @KarlXVI, #sweden

A few hours in, no tweets, but that's clearly changed since then.

Last weekend marked exactly ten years since I moved back to South Florida from the Washington, D.C. area, after being up there for 15 years, and after far too much procrastination on my part and years of getting so many Invitation emails to join, incuding from some unlikely sources, my alter ego of Hallandale Beach Blog and I are now officially on Twitter @hbbtruthhttps://twitter.com/hbbtruth 


Like almost everyone else doing so, I now see more clearly than ever before, how much I was really dis-advantaging myself by not getting aboard the Twitter train, despite being a person who has been reading certain reporters/bloggers I like who were Early Adopters since they started seven years ago.
And someone who has rather consistently poured cold water on people knocking the platform, since it's not for everyone. 

That time has given me the advantage of forming certain strong ideas on how I do and do NOT want to handle things at my feed, and that will be -I think- a somewhat different role than I employ on this blog.


Most of you reading this, even you more regular readers of the blog, have no idea how many emails and notes I write and send during a typical week, and I mean ones that I really put some time and effort into.

Even the people receiving them have no idea, I suspect.

Now, though, by posting them to the blog and then tweeting them, I'll have the ability to share my discoveries, surprises or outrages with a much-larger audience whom I already know are more inclined to share that information with like-minded people they know, too.


Frankly, that was always part of my great frustration with sending out my Hallandale Beach, Broward County or South Florida-centric emails, and why not being part of Twitter ate away at me, when in saw so many people use it in ways that seemed inadequate to me.

I knew there was a finite number of people who would ever be in a position to see and react to the information, whether factual, informed speculation or soon-to-be prescient prognostications. 

That frustration also came from knowing in advance that only so many people would be better-informed or have more context on a subject of interest.

Or have specific examples of why something being said on local TV or print was actually NOT true at all because the reporter was NOT including all the relevant facts, context or history.
And when that was an important story, and I saw how poorly something important was being reported, which is everyday in the South Florida of 2013, it just made me seethe inside.
Lots of seething over the past ten years!

I know that I'm not alone in South Florida in having those feelings, but since I've always been a blogger who didn't go in for 3-4 sentence blog posts, I always had to make a determination of whether it was worth the time to publicly criticize a reporter or columnist or public official, knowing that there was only so many people who'd see that on the blog in a timely fashion.


Which is why easily 85% of the best material I've written the past ten years was in emails that got sent out to a fair number of people, including media types and govt. officials, but never saw the light of day on the blog because it was time sensitive.


The same things that no doubt frustrates many of you reading this, and you might use texting to get that out of your system. 

But I'm most assuredly NOT a texter.

So, all that being the backstory, I knew in advance that I didn't want to use my own name for this twitter account and needed to substitute something for Hallandale Beach, since it' is at once both too long and too frequently misspelled by people not living here.


In the end, after considering a few names I'd kept in cold storage for a few years, and wanting something easy to remember, I went with what I try my best to deliver on a consistent basis here on the blog that I find so lacking in the south Florida area in all sorts of place: truth! 
Irony!
I thought you'd appreciate that

This weekend when you've got a few minutes free to yourself, depending upon which country you are reading this email in, I'd like for you to spend a second to either Follow
or Följ me, or at least bookmark my Twitter feed URL on your desktop and mobile, to check back during the day and see what I've discovered or am ruminating on in between enthusiastic and discursive blog posts and emails.

Sort of like your own (free) Early Warning System in 140 character spaces.

I intend to make up for lost time and make very good use of this tool and amplify the volume and spotlight on a whole host of issues, subjects and people that I believe have been, alternately, either largely neglected, covered far too intensely in the national, state or local news media, or more commonly, being covered without enough respect for attention to facts and context, to say nothing of a lack of adequate historical perspective.

Unless something dramatic happens in the next few days, I will be using the next few days trying to get more comfortable doing this and tweeting some recent blog posts of mine, to help them get a little more attention that I think they deserve and advance some needed dialogue, but  once I'm more comfortable doing this, and am NOT so overly concerned about making a mistake, I expect that I'll be doing mostly new content for people to know, share and comment upon if they so choose.

-----


Naturally, after I wrote the above in an email and sent it out, I had problems with Twitter.


Perhaps because more vetting at a higher level of authority was necessary to let me into this exclusive group of people, but i had all sorts of problems my first 24 hours on Twitter.


For the better part of a morning and afternoon, I was largely frozen in a sort of Twitter 
version of Dante's Gates of Hell, in-between not being able to log-off or log-on, and being afraid to turn the computer off because I was concerned that maybe there were some steps I'd accidently missed somehow.

Everywhere I went to try to resolve it on the Twitter website were ominous warnings that I was in an area that I was Not Authorized.
It was like being at Reagan National Airport trying to find someone to man the counter to file a missing luggage incident report.
As I'd know!

Obviously, I hope the Twitter situation is resolved for good.

I signed up for TweetDeck for organizing purposes but if anyone has recently had any bad experiences with them and/or can recommend something better for someone like me, who anticipates following about 225 fairly-heavy Twitter users -largely the same folks I've been reading and following all along for years based on a list I created when I started the blog's first blogroll and it got too large- I'd appreciate hearing about it.

It wasn't a complete waste of time, though, since during those five-six hours, I was able to discover something interesting on the Twitter list of Followers of Sweden.se, the terrific Swedish government website whose awesome photos and Svenska factoids I've used for many years on my blog and emails to great effect, like this one below.




(Above, in a word, for me, Heavenly! Djurgården is the island located a bit east of the Gamla Stan (Old Town) area of Stockholm and the downtown Stockholm business district, where the iconic Grona Lund amusement park is located as well as the Vasa Museum and this year's new entry, the ABBA Museum that I wrote about here on the blog on May 7th, it's opening day:

A" is for Awesome and ABBA as the new ABBA Museum in Stockholm officially opens this afternoon. Monday night's gala premiere brought Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn together, cheered on by a select group of invitees from across Swedish society and the music industry, who are, in the end, just fans of the band like everyone else, and very excited that this amazing museum is FINALLY a reality; #abba, #AbbaMuseum, #ThankYouForTheMusic, @stockholm, @sweden

Djurgården is also home to the amazing Skansen open-air museum where 'Allsång på Skansen' is televised LIVE every Tuesday night during the summer on SVT, and, of course, the source of many of the music videos I've shared on the blog and individually with some of you, including most recently, the very-talented Miriam Bryant.)

Well, it turns out that on that list of Followers, at least then yours truly was located 
directly below....Carl XVI Gustaf.
The king.


Cool!  
From the Twitter Gates of Hell, Hallandale Beach campus, to the Royal Palace in 
Stockholm in just over 5 hours.
I love happy endings!

And now i'm following the king on Twitter, too. :)

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

"A" is for Awesome and ABBA as the new ABBA Museum in Stockholm officially opens this afternoon. Monday night's gala premiere brought Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn together, cheered on by a select group of invitees from across Swedish society and the music industry, who are, in the end, just fans of the band like everyone else, and very excited that this amazing museum is FINALLY a reality; #abba, #AbbaMuseum, #ThankYouForTheMusic, @stockholm, @sweden


Euronews YouTube Channel video: Euronews reporter Valerie Zabriskie speaks with lucky Abba fan club members selected to get a sneak preview of the new museum in Stockholm. Uploaded May 5, 2013. http://youtu.be/xbDW3FdtEgM
"A" is for Awesome and ABBA and the new ABBA Museum in Stockholm, which officially opens today at 1600 Stockholm time/10 a.m. Eastern U.S. Monday night's gala premiere brought Anni-Frid, Benny and Björn together, cheered on by a select group of invitees from across Swedish society and the music industry, who are, in the end, just fans of the band like everyone else, and very excited that this amazing museum is FINALLY a reality; #abba, #AbbaMuseum, #ThankYouForTheMusic, @stockholm, @sweden

I could mention who some of these VIPs are and why they're important and why they're there,
but that's not worth spending the time it would take today to do that, and besides, TMI as I'm sometimes reminded by friends here in Hallandale Beach and elsewhere around the globe.

Plus, I've had a very clear idea of how this particular blog post would look ever since I was there in January, so trying to explain to you all who Carola or Sarah Dawn Finer are and why they are in the video below iis, well, just a losing proposition today.

Aftonbladet TV video: Här invigs ABBA-museet -Jonas Bilberg levererade livebilder från galaöppningen. 
May 6, 2013. http://tv.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/noje/article11311.ab

Aftonbladet TV video: Här inviger kändiseliten ABBA-museet  
7 maj 2013 00:12
http://tv.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/noje/article11311.ab

It's enough to know that it's logical that they were there.
Just go with it.


BBC-TV video
Abba museum in Stockholm celebrates Swedish pop group
7 May 2013 Last updated at 04:22 ET 

BBC-TV video
As the Abba museum prepares to open its doors in Stockholm, the BBC's Russell Trott takes a look inside.
6 May 2013 Last updated at 21:54 ET


Aftonbladet TV: Nu öppnar ABBA-museet, Björn Ulvaeus: - "Kan visa det för barnbarnen med stolthet" 6 maj 2013 15:31
http://tv.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/noje/musik/article11284.ab



SVT video: TV Abba-museet öppnades
http://www.svt.se/nyheter/article1203720.svt


NTDTV -ABBA Museum in Stockholm

Tickets for the much-discussed and anticipated museum that's full of innovative technology run about 195 SEK/ just under $30 U.S. for adults, and 50 SEK/$7.63 for children up to age 8, at today's current ratio of about 6.52 Krona to the dollar, more or less.

But fair warning, the museum in the beautiful Djurgården section of Stockholm WON'T take bills or coins, only electronic payments, because as the museum puts it loftily, "Vi har en dröm om ett kontantfritt samhälle, därför går det inte handla med mynt eller sedlar hos oss."
("We have a vision of a cashless society, therefore we don’t handle coins and bills." )

Yes, sorta like in the future as seen in Star Trek, but not quite, since there's a 5% discount with MasterCard.

Björn's explanation on why abba-museet doesn't take bills and coins, largely to prevent crime, has a great introduction that only a real genius like him could get away with saying in his Big Picture way
There was a time when bills and coins served their purpose. They replaced cumbersome barter and made trade between people and nations possible. But do they still serve this purpose? Do we really need cash? Or is it a fixed idea like with Scrooge McDuck? Have we lost the ability to see that coins and bills are mere symbols and that those symbols easily could be exchanged for others? Cards and smartphones today and who knows what in the future.
Read the rest of Björn's comments at http://www.abbathemuseum.com/cashless

Combining innovation, ideals, crime-fighting and Scrooge McDuck! 
Brilliant!!!


Dags för ABBA The Museum 
by Lars Epstein 
15:14, May 6, 2013
http://www.dn.se/blogg/epstein/2013/05/06/dags-for-abba-the-museum/

According to Lars Epstein's post yesterday, above, at his Stockholm-centric Epstein's STHLM blog at Dagens Nyheter, the museum is expecting about 217,000 visitors a year.

Yes, holograms...


ABBA Museum website:

Here's the website of the ABBA Museum exhibit at Stockholm Arlanda Airport that I saw back in mid-January when I arrived for my nine-day trip in Stockholm, where I snapped some photos while waiting around for my luggage at the arrival carousel at Terminal 5which was festooned with photos of... who else?
http://www.swedavia.se/arlanda/om-stockholm-arlanda-airport/om-flygplatsen/official-airport-of-abba-the-museum/


All original photos on this page by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved. Right-click photos to enlarge them.


For someone like me who has been a huge ABBA fan for more than two-thirds of my life, the  biggest ABBA fan that most people I've known have ever met, as small as this exhibit at the airport was, in looking at it and reflecting back on everything, it was hard to get over the fact that for so long, like millions of other fans, we fervently hoped that there'd be a museum some day that would be shaped along the lines of,,, well, just what they seem to have actually done: music plus heart -musik plus hjärta.

Like those other fans of the band, over the past 20 years I've given up counting how many interviews I'd seen with the band members, especially Benny and Bjorn, discussing the idea

of it, but quite naturally, being somewhat unsure of how to answer such a question without seeming pretentious.
But it IS a weird question, isn't it, when you really think about it?
Should there be a museum that people pay to get into that's all about you and three other people you've known for most of your life?
How do you answer that?

TheSpringOf74 YouTube Channel video: ABBA - Dancing Queen - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976, at the gala tribute to Sweden's King Carl XV1 Gustaf and future wife and Queen, Silvia Sommerlath, the night before their wedding. If I remember my ABBA history correctly, this was the first time the song had ever been performed in public in Sweden. http://youtu.be/33Yj5pbsXAs
Above, in my humble opinion, the single best version of this iconic song ever recorded on film.

Here are those January 10, 2013 photos I snapped at Arlanda before and after grabbing my luggage:
 



All original photos on this page by South Beach Hoosier. © 2013 Hallandale Beach Blog, All Rights Reserved.





Here's how they appear on the airport's official exhibit web page:
http://www.swedavia.se/arlanda/om-stockholm-arlanda-airport/om-flygplatsen/official-airport-of-abba-the-museum/

You can see more photos of this exhibit by going to Google Images using these words as your search terms: "Terminal 5, Arlanda, ABBA"


Here's the link to the ABBA Museum-related news videos that have run on TV4, most recent first, obviously, in Swedish, but many with lots of great video of the musem: http://www.tv4play.se/s%C3%B6k?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=Abba
Obviously, there's a lot to see and watch!