Rum and beer

It's incredibly hot right now. 30 degrees in the shade outside. Aaargh...

I went to the library a couple of days ago and borrowed some books. I found some books about working in the cultural field, with music, art, etc, how the taxes and such work. There was a book called "100 pages about bookkeeping for those who hate it", but so far that one was incredibly boring. It definitely doesn't make you like it any more. I also borrowed Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse five" and "The rum diary" by Hunter S. Thompson, but I didn't look at those yet.

We went to the liquor store the other day and bought a bunch of different kinds of beer, one can or bottle of each. I don't care much for the Swedish beers I've had before, so I wanted to try something new and see if there's anything I like.
Here's a short list of what we tried, along with completely subjective opinions about them:

Crocodile - It says on the can that it won a gold medal in the biggest European beer competition. There couldn't have been much competition going on... Not very impressive. Tastes ok, but is quite flat. Not much aftertaste at all.

Åbro sommaröl - This was a thorough disappointment. It didn't taste like anything at all. Seriously. Nothing at all. It was like carbonated water. No flavour whatsoever. Good if you don't care about the taste and just want to get severely drunk very quickly, I guess.

Sarek - This was slightly better, though not remarkable in any way. A pretty neutral, unoriginal light lager. Tastes like beer, not much else. No aftertaste at all.

Åbro sigill - An ecological beer. It was pretty decent, it has a bit more flavour than the average bland beer, but still nothing special. Bonus points for being ecological though.

Bellmann 6.0 - This one was pretty good. The best one out of the ones we tried so far.

Saku kuld - An Estonian beer. Not bad at all. It's quite mild, but without being tasteless. Quite ok, but pretty neutral.

Also: 4 cl of Captain Morgan spiced rum + 10 cl of Piña Colada mix + 15 cl of pineapple juice = a tasty and dangerously easy to drink mixture. Getsh you drrrunk quite eashily... (hic!)

Back in business

Aah, the computer problem has been solved, so now I can finally start recording again. I wasn't quite happy with the guitar tracks on "It's all gone", so I re-recorded them and updated the song on my MySpace page and the website. Now there's also a shop up on the website in case anyone feels like buying the songs to show their support. So, what's left to do is figure out a way to get loads and loads of traffic to the website. As someone said about the music business:
"He who promotes the most, wins."
It's kinda true. Promotion might even be more important than the actual music.

I noticed that there was a typo in the link to the website in the link list on the right. Whoopsie! I fixed it now.

I've been carting and stacking some more firewood. It never seems to end. There's probably enough wood out there to heat up the house for several years. If the house was mine and I had some money, I would re-build the heating system in the house to make it way more efficient, toss up a few high-efficiency solar panels on the walls and put up a small wind turbine or two on the roof. Then I would sit back with a beer and never carry another stick. But alas, the house is not mine and I don't have any money. So back to the wood pile...

Rainhat website is up!

Finally, after plenty of frustration over html and css coding, and my somewhat lacking skills with these, the official Rainhat website is online! Check it out!

http://www.rainhatmusic.com

I still haven't quite solved the problem with recording, but I'm working on it. After the midsummer holidays I should be able to start recording again quite soon. I have plenty of music left to record.

Midsummer is here. Fresh potatoes with pickled herring, partying and people picking flowers for midsummer poles all around, but the weather is still disappointingly chilly. It's mid-june and it's still only around 15 degrees C outside. Bah...

I've been helping my father carry firewood and stack it up in big piles for winter. There's loads of it. I had these white workman's gloves made of leather, and I've worn big holes in them. One could say that I've carried so much wood that I've worn a hole in a cow. There's this makeshift roof over the wood pile made of boards and a big tarp, but for some reason dad chose to make the roof only around 1,5 meters high, so you can't stand up straight under it while stacking the wood. And stacking it takes quite a bit of time... I think that could maybe have been planned a bit better. My back is killing me.

New song, finally!

Now that I'm back home again, I have finally had the opportunity to record a bit. I finished one song, and it's now available on my MySpace page. Here's the address:

http://www.myspace.com/rainhat

The song is called "Falling out of love". Enjoy!

I'm going to record as much as I can, so hopefully I will have a new song up every 1 or 2 days for the next week or so at least. I have plenty of new material to record.

I know I just got back from the mediterranean, but still: The weather here in Sweden is freakin' cold. It's +11 outside right now. It's supposed to be a bit warmer than that in June even here. I hope it warms up a bit soon.

I went on a 7 km trip on longboard yesterday. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it now, but man was I tired afterwards... This whole exercise thing is something I haven't done in a while, unfortunately. I'm gonna have to do something about that.

Language

Languages are funny things. Their main purpose is for people to communicate with each other, but there are all kinds of rules about the structure and spelling and such, which sometimes don't make much sense. Take English spelling, for example. The letter combination "gh" can be pronounced in different ways, like in "though" and "tough". There's a pretty well-known, and perfectly logical example showing how the word "ghoti" can be pronounced as "fish".
Languages evolve, so spelling standards change. I've been wondering... How would it be if you standardized English according to a kind of universal phonetic system, so that all the spellings for all the words were perfectly regular and intuitive? Here's an example. I shall write the rest of this post using such a phonetic system.

It mait seem streinch at ferst to riid text that is ritten laik this, but ai think yu mait get usd tu it after a wail. Inglish is such an irregulur langwich, the spelling of diffrunt werds siims almoust randum. Wudnt it bi sou much iisiur if spelling was purfektli lodjikul? It wud bi a pritti radikul breik from tradishuns, thou. It mait liid tu a lot ov konfjushun. Ivun well-noun things wud luk unfemiljur.

Hau match wud wud a wudchak chak if a wudchak wud chak wud?

Theur is alsou thu problum with ridgunul diffrunses in hau werds ar prunaunst. Yu wud hav to spell werds diffruntli depending on weur yu ar. Yu wud end ap with duzins of rittun langwiches ivun within thu seim kantri. That mait bi bad.