How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

The future wears clothes made of tight-fitting and synthetic materials, right? At least it usually looks that way in movies. Strangely enough, as far as I can tell, the future will look like what it looked like thirty years previously. That is if history is any judge. It scares me a little, makes me laugh a little, that all the clothes that everyone wore in 1971 when I was ten - hip-hugging bell-bottomed trousers, marimekko dresses in loud prints, bluejean skirts and peasant blouses with shag haircuts - are in fashion again. And have been for the last couple of years, in fact. I remember well how ridiculous we found those clothes by the time I graduated from high school in 1979.

Are we condemned to repeat the past out of nostalgia, or lack of imagination? What goes around, comes around - but is it a curse, or just the natural order of things?

Unfortunately, clothes, unlike whores and buildings, do not become respectable with age, they just go out of fashion. Fast, but not forever.

The Swedish word for the day is kläder. It means clothes.

- by Francis S.