How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons

My favorite Finn flew in from Helsinki for the day to interview some Swedish television executive. So I treated him (the Finn, not the television executive) to a sushi lunch, and we sat by a church in a park with our chopsticks and soy sauce and wasabi and pickled ginger.

I yammered on about being in San Francisco, and George W. Bush, and how I would probably be going crazy if I were living in the States, given the political situation and the domestic policies of the current administration ensconced in the White House. When I finally stopped, I asked him how things were in Finland.

"It's a small country, with small problems," he said. "The biggest thing now is that this guy who used to be a wrestler in the WWF in the States, and he's a boxer too and he has two lines in the latest Terminator movie, got elected to parliament but a little while ago there were gunshots from his apartment and his wife called the police and they found him passed out on the sofa, choking on his own vomit, and he'd shot holes in the ceiling and the papers now are all writing about if he'll ever fully recover and I wanna know, recover from what exactly?"

What I wanted to know was whether this was Finland he was talking about, because it sure sounded like something that would happen in, say, Minnesota.

The Swedish phrase for the day du är inte klok. It literally means you are not smart, as in you're crazy.

- by Francis S.