Showing posts with label King Carl XVI Gustaf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label King Carl XVI Gustaf. 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 22, 2012

Getting in some early Tuesday morning quality babysitting with Estelle, the new Swedish Crown Princess, as SVT Play presented the Royal Christening -det kungliga dopet- LIVE from the Royal Chapel


SVT video: Archbishop Anders Wejryd christens Crown Princess Estelle as her grandfather, King Carl XVI Gustaf, mother, Crown Princess Victoria, father, Prince Daniel, and grandmother, Queen Silvia, plus Daniel's parents, beam with pride. Amazingly, Estelle was quiet until that moment. May 22, 2012.

Rather than catch-up on some TV shows I've taped the past week -The Killing, Mad Men, et al- I was diligent and did my Swedish homework early Monday night and watched SVT's information-packed one-hour show with host Ebba Von Sydow on the Royal Christening -det kungliga dopet- in Stockholm at the Royal Palace's Royal Chapel, Slottskrykan.


Which is why I'm so tired typing this, since the pre-game baby/fashion/royals watching analysis started promptly at 4:45 am Miami time, six hours behind Stockholm

And for those of you with a good memory, if the music you hear at the beginning of the info program sounds familiar to you, well, it should.
It's the same music that SVT used so well in their really beautiful and graphics-intensive on-air promos for the Royal Wedding -det kungliga bröllopetin June of 2010, which I actually saved  because of how magical they were.
Like something straight out of a classic Disney animated film -but modern.

And seriously, princess or no princess, that is one quiet and contented baby, as she was quiet until almost the very end of the ceremony, even with a singer, a harp and a flute only a couple of feet away from her.

I'll be posting some screen-grabs on the blog later in the day, as the post-christening show is still on at 8 a.m. Miami time, and I've heard about enough already about the fashions, the hats, and the etiquette, et al.

As usual, younger telegenic sister Princess Madeleine looked stunning + gorgeous + je ne sais crois!
I'll have the video of her, later, too.

Friday, February 24, 2012

There's a new princess in the world and Sweden has her! (Det finns en ny prinsessa i världen och Sverige har henne!) Prince Daniel declares "Mina känslor är all over the place."

Kungabebisen
There's a new princess in the world and Sweden has her! Det finns en ny prinsessa i världen och Sverige har henne!
Prince Daniel declares "Mina känslor är all over the place." (My feelings are all over the place.)


For a while at least, it looks like the Swedish royal family will have some happy news to celebrate and most Swedes will have the common sense and proper perspective to cut them some slack for a bit, instead of continuing the personal criticism of the King and Queen regarding their so-called "secrets" -that were NOT really quite so secret after all it would seem- that have come out over the past few years.


As I've stated here previously, Crown Princess Victoria's positive and warm personality and earnest thoughtfulness has helped keep her personally popular among the populace even while her parents have suffered the slings and arrows that many felt were overdue.


Already, hours later, there are stories appearing in the mass circulation newspapers with various "experts" positing that the birth of Victoria and Daniel's daughter will begin the permanent shift away from her parents and usher in a new era towards what she (and her new family) will do in the future, logic that is very hard to argue with, given how unpopular her parents are with some people.


Dagens Nyheter, http://www.dn.se/, had such a story on Thursday titled Focus shifts from challenged king to Victoria, with various media editorial types from different media groups weighing-in on how they thought they'd cover things in the near-future and long-term.


Fokus flyttas från en ifrågasatt kung
Allt ljus på Victoria och nyfödda prinsessan. Hovexperten Sten Hedman tror på en ny era, som kommer att vara väldigt lönsam för medierna.
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/intresset-flyttas-fran-ifragasatt-kung-till-victoria


Naturally, once everyone got over the initial news, the next question was, so what's her name?
There's the mystery!


We'll all be finding out on Friday morning around 11:30 a.m. Stockholm time, and as I mentioned in an email to someone Thursday night, also named Jennifer, like one of my sisters and my niece, I asked, "So why not name den nya prinsessan "Jennifer" and then Sverige can really celebrate?"


I haven't heard back from her, but popular Stureplan.se blogger/model and longtime HBB favorite Tess Montgomery was already noodling on the name game from her perch in London by the time I came home Thursday:
http://stureplan.se/bloggar/tess/2012/02/23/una-principessa


The DN also has an angle on that naming question, too, with the Conventional Wisdom p.o.v. being Sylvia, like the Queen, the Crown Princess' mother, with some thought towards Astrid, which I like.


Names it WON'T be, based on my own educated hunch, include Chelsea, Hillary, Ashley, Jessica, Shania, Demi, Taylor, Reese, Winona, Juliet, Rachel, Giselle, Alyona, Lexie, Hayden, Angelina, Dakota or Brooklyn.
Or Lisbeth!


Malin or Marin or Marina would be good choices, and some of you out there in the blogosphere far from Miami know why I've always loved Kirsten.
But that would be too much to hope for.


Aftonbladet will be streaming the press conference LIVE at their website, so check it out if you can:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/

Sunday, June 19, 2011

One year after the Royal Wedding, Crown Princess Victoria shows her resolve even while her parents' popularity -and the monarchy's- have tumbled

Aftonbladet video: Highlights from the wedding at Storkyrkan and afterwards.
http://www.aftonbladet.se/webbtv/nyheter/inrikes/article13171220.ab
06:33

If you watched the kungliga bröllopet -like me- you'll recognize the song performed above as the secret song commissioned by Daniel for the wedding that was kept under tight wraps until that very moment.

Here's the complete video of that singular performance, the cherry-on-top even before they left the church and took their stroll around the city by carriage and boat before returning to say "Tack."



S
VT video: Agnes Carlsson & Björn Skifs - When You Tell the World You're Mine - Storkyrkan, Stockholm, June 19, 2010.


Aftonbladet video: Highlights from their first year of marriage



In the past year, even as Victoria's personal popular has increased, her parents' popularity and that of the Swedish monarchy in general have taken big hits from both republicans and an anti-monarchy media that sees the Swedish monarchy as... in short, an archaic construct in a modern era.
These groups see her parents as people whose ethics, trustworthiness, and general willingness to be straightforward about facts, to be MUCH LESS than they ought to be given their position in the country.
Especially in light of some facts that may prove more personally troubling than anyone can presently guess.


In May, in the U.S., the AP finally reported that Victoria's German-born mother, Queen Silvia, wants the longstanding questions surrounding her father's personal and professional activities and behavior in Germany and Brazil during the war to be re-examined.
This is usually referred to somewhat euphemistically in the news media as his "alleged Nazi ties." (Her mother was Brazilian.)


In the view of many of my well-informed friends in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia, that moral cloud seems likely to get only more complicated, and some sensibilities may well be rubbed raw by the time the results are finally announced in the Fall.
(Though you're entitled to wonder where all this moral outrage is coming from now in a country that was officially neutral during the war.)

As to Victoria's father, King Carl XVI Gustaf, well, his personal behavior was the subject of an unflattering AP article in early June months after last year's publication of a not-entirely-believable book alleging many unsavory things.
That AP story made most major American newspapers and the cumulative weight of all of this has caused many people in Sweden to re-evaluate their personal feelings of respect for the king, even as his public 'explanation' -which I have watched a few times- only seemed to make things worse in the view of yours truly.

I suggest you read the AP story while you can before before they wipe this WaPo link clear.

Associated Press
Swedish monarchy under siege as king defends himself in strip club scandal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/swedish-monarchy-under-siege-as-king-defends-himself-in-strip-club-scandal/2011/06/06/AGra25JH_story.html


New York Times

Some Doubt if Any King Is Still Fit for Sweden

By John Tagliabue

August 25, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/world/europe/25sweden.html



TheLocal.se
From wedding bliss to royal crisis: the state of Sweden's monarchy
By Clara Guibourg
Published: 17 Jun 11 09:41 CET
http://www.thelocal.se/34412/20110617/


Saturday, June 18, 2011

35 years ago today, THE definitive visual look of ABBA's Dancing Queen


2Shaymcn YouTube Channel: ABBA - Dancing Queen (HQ) - LIVE at the Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm, June 18, 1976. http://youtu.be/qk_Vu6AcbWg


Above, in my humble opinion, the single best version of this song ever recorded on film.


Thirty-five ago today, one of the most popular songs of the late 20th-Century got the definitive visual look it needed to go supernova, and there it stays, frozen in our collective memories.
Well, at least among those of us with a yen for genius lyrics and power-pop harmonies.


The day before the 1976 Royal Wedding in Stockholm of King Carl XVI Gustaf and his fiancee, commoner Silvia Sommerlath, the present Queen Silvia, during a variety program celebrating the nuptials, ABBA performed a never-to-be forgotten costumed version of Dancing Queen at the Royal Swedish Opera for them and their invited guests.

As you watch the video, you can see the almost bewildered look of many of the officials and other musicians seated behind them on the stage, who, the story goes, because of their unfamiliarity with the song, had no genuine idea whether or not the song was supposed to be about the future queen -or not.

And yes, it does remind all of us again of the group's marketing genius, since two years prior, at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton that made them famous, they wore early 19th-Century costumes when they performed Waterloo, which earned them first place.


ABBAVevo: ABBA -Dancing Queen (1976)

As of today this video has received 9,355,415 views.
The current population estimate of Sweden by the CIA is 9,088,728.

Benny sliding his fingers across the piano keys at the beginning -so very, very simple and yet so genius!

Fox-TV's multi-national hit Glee featured a performance of Dancing Queen in their May 10th episode titled Prom Queen, with Amber Riley and Naya Rivera doing the duet.

You can watch the entire episode on Fox's website until this coming Thursday at
The song begins at 0:40:46 and goes to 0:42:39.

-----
Swedish Royal Court website: http://www.kungahuset.se/

Official Glee website: http://www.fox.com/glee/

Friday, December 11, 2009

Hoosier Hysteria in Stockholm: IU's Elinor Ostrom accepts her Nobel Prize for Economics from King Carl XVI Gustaf

Photo by Jonas Ekstromer/Associated Press
IU's Elinor Ostrom accepts her Nobel Prize for Economics
from King Carl XVI Gustaf in Stockholm


For "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons."

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/12824.html
https://www.iu.edu/~iunews/blogs/nobel/

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
(
Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien)
-lots of very neat stuff here worth taking a look at, too
http://www.kva.se/en/

Nobel Prize web page on 2009 Economic winners:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/presentation-speech.html

Here's some photos of the royal family
-a.k.a.
Kungafamiljen- attending the formal Nobel
banquet earlier Friday, which ran a little under four hours
with entertainment and speeches.

http://www.royalcourt.se/kungafamiljen/aktuellahandelser/2009aretsaktuellahandelser/aretsnobelpristagarepatraditionellmiddaghoshmkonungen.5.62402a8b12475b47cdb80004857.html

This Aftonbladet online article has an especially great
photo of Princess Madeleine worth seeing.
Så var Nobelfesten
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article6269587.ab

Here's the story and photo that Aftonbladet ran on
October 13th about Prof. Ostrom being honored:
Så vill Elinor rädda världen
http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article5948388.ab

It's always good to see
Indiana universitetet
in print.
----------


Early this morning, I received my weekly editor's
newsletter from The Local -Sweden's news in English.
http://www.thelocal.se/email/127/88512/

In that newsletter were these very amusing and spot-on
comments from the editor, Paul O'Mahony, which were
titled,
Nobel banquet broadcast makes toes curl:

Last night I carried on the by now venerable tradition of tuning in to the live broadcast of the Nobel banquet for five minutes before taking aim at the screen with heart in mouth and dignity almost intact.

Sweden is justly proud of its Nobel Prizes, as scientists and writers are rewarded in this life for their vast contributions to humankind. But something deep inside me rejects the idea of television cameras trained on the every move of boffins, royals and dignitaries, all dolled up to the nines and gorging on a bacchanalian feast under the watchful eyes of the etiquette Stasi.

However, the gods of curiosity demand an annual five-minute suspension of disbelief to absorb with jaw on floor the public broadcaster's amnesiac rejection of Sweden's trademark egalitarianism and informality.

Royalist fervour drips through the screen as one commentator fawns over Princess Victoria's frock and delights in the prospect of her impending nuptials. The cameras then pan to the Crown Princess, who is in the process of applying lip gloss while talking to a clever person. It's hard to escape the fact that we're watching people having dinner.

Meanwhile a presenter is aghast as the finance minister appears to send an under-the-table text message. "Tell me I did not just see Anders Borg doing what I think he just did. Off with his ponytail!" Or words to that effect. "Help so bored no pizza on menu 2 many nerdz", wrote Borg. Probably.

Cut to the top of the steps in the Blue Hall, where a pantomime horse trots into view, neighing loudly and pursued with great vigour by a red-clad choir. And that's when I reach for my revolver.

Anybody with the stomach for an entire evening of this stuff has my grudging respect, and indeed there are plenty who revel in it. Good luck to them. But by the time the new day dawned and the crowds had dispersed, all I was left with was a hole in my soul and the need for a new television. Again.

He shoots and he scores!

---------

Earlier in the year, I posted a video of the King
and
Queen Silvia discussing the news about
Crown Princess Victoria's
engagement to
Daniel Westling
and the wedding scheduled
for next June.

Since it's going to be at
the beautiful 700 year-old
Storkyrkan
Cathedral, which is in the Gamla Stan
section of Stockholm, the oldest section of town,
it really
ought to be awesome.
http://www.royalcourt.se/royalcourt/theroyalfamily/hrhcrownprincessvictoria.4.396160511584257f218000503.html




A few months after Victoria's wedding. the King
will be walking down the aisle again as Princess
Madeleine gets married to Jonas Bergström.

http://www.royalcourt.se/royalcourt/theroyalfamily/hrhprincessmadeleine.4.396160511584257f218000839.html



Here's a video of Victoria making the announcement
in February

Stockholm: After seven years, a "Ja!"
Kronprinsessan Victoria och Daniel Westling
förlovade. Den 19 juni 2010 växlar Victoria och Daniel
ringar i Storkyrkan.