How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

Those wacky Americans are at it again! What will they say or do next?

Take Texas. I guess Texas school children got a story quite different from the one I got when I was a child growing up in suburban Detroit and suburban Chicago. One of the things our teachers taught us in school was that those celebrity colonists in Plymouth - the "Pilgrims" of Thanksgiving fame - came to America because they wanted to be free to practice their own religion. "America was founded on religious freedom," our teachers told us. Fact or fiction, it was and is a noble idea.

Just don't tell the Republicans in Texas, though: "Republican delegates wrapped up their state convention Saturday by calling for repeal of the Texas Lottery, praying for an all-Christian judiciary and scolding Democratic gubernatorial candidates for debating in Spanish." (from the Austin American-Statesman.)

An all-Christian judiciary? Uh, doesn't this seem, at a minimum, anti-Semitic? And here I thought such public anti-Semitic statements were pretty much unacceptable in America these days. How naive of me.

The Swedish word for the day is skamlig. It means shameful.

- by Francis S.