Jacob Christensen

We interrupt the campaign reporting to turn attention somewhat closer to, if not home then our present post of observation: The relationship between Finns and Swedes which is the subject of a report with the bizarre title Different Ways of Encountering a Big Elephant written by Thorleif Pettersson and Sakari Nurmela published a couple of days ago. (Full publication as a pdf; Summary as pdf)

The fun fact of the day is that the average Swede doesn’t know much about Finland but would love to have Finnish friends.

The average Finn on the other hand knows a lot about Sweden and is not particularly interested in having Swedish friends.

Now, how can we possibly explain this…?

PS: The title of the post refers to the peculiar Swedish way of writing “X loves Y” – “X+Y=True”. In Sweden the phenomenon otherwise known as “love” has been replaced with the pragmatic exchange of various kinds of domestic services.

I’m not sure whether DR’s media servers have crashed or if they are simply unavailable from abroad. As it is, I can’t get access to Sunday’s debate on DR1 between Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Helle Thorning Schmidt regardless of whether I use a Mac or a Windows box, Safari, Firefox or Internet Explorer.

So, no comments about the debate from here. I’ll do a round up of the first part of the campaign later tonight or tomorrow.

Update: Using the direct links from DR’s dedicated election site (still) doesn’t work. Using DR’s video player works. And AFR did not wear a tie this time either.

Update update: DR’s video player works on the 11 Mps line at work, not on the 2 Mps line I have at home. Grrr…

I haven’t been able to watch the second debate between Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Helle Thorning-Schmidt which was broadcast by DR TV on Sunday – yet. If possible, I will try to catch up with it on Monday.

According to reports, the two were more aggressive than in the first debate on TV2 (not that that would be very difficult, the debate in round one was more polite than most dinner-parties) but intriguingly Berlingske Tidende manages to name both AFR – okay: Thomas Larsen has always been in complete awe of Fogh – and HTS the winner.