The Ballad of Sigyn the Dragonslayer

I was with most of my family in Örebro this weekend to watch a theather show with my sisters boyfriend in one of the rolls. A childrens play with a little viewer participation called "The Ballad of Sigyn the Dragonslayer". The story goes that the audiance is travellers in an inn where we meet two servatns to the throne and a wizard and witch, the last two telling us about the threat of Gnollerna (which I belive isn't based on gnolls) and then let us look on the daily life of the servants through some magic vision. There we see the princess Sigyn, a rebellious princess who wants to fight and a very feminim prince. Of course the conservative king (sisters boyfriend) don't approve this and tries to marry the princess with a knight and uses potions to make the prince more maculine. Of course it doesn't work, but the princess falls in love with the knight although she accidently sent him out to get the head of the dragon who terrorize town. They only find is burnt cape. The king have had enough and sends his son to once and for all rid the town of the dragon. Of course he gets in trouble and it is up to Sigyn with the help of the audience to save him.

Here begins the next session with the audience divided in two and the servants leading them around to different people for aid. The wizard gives all the children magic stones and a spell to fight gnollerna, the witch gives two potions (one to each group), the first a potion to bring people back to life and the other to scare gnollerna away (she also gave my group the gnoll spell since we were there first and finally we met the dwarf smith who gave us a sword and... something else to the other group (maybe a knife), I didn't hear what. During our tour of this part of the city gnollerna attacked twice and we recited the spell to keep them at bay until we could join the other group and then find the prince who was tied up. Using the anti-gnoll potion they ran of and he was released (with the knife maybe). We found the princess and the prince told us that the dragon was controlled by gnollerna. We went to an arena and there the dragon showed up (they did it like a chinese dragon puppet) who the princess killed with the sword. In the dragon the wounded knight was found so the fairy life potion was used. Back too the castle, king apologize everyones happy. The End!

Shadows of Doubt

Well, might be time for a sporadic post to commemorate over 10 000 views on the blog. If they are all one of the same person reading I don't know. So what should we discuss today? Well, we can write about the latest meltdown of Swedish politics that went down last week. The last couple of months the four oppositions parties had made a full-scale frontal assault and banded together to stop the raising of the state income tax (I've learned afterwards it was something down annually to counter inflation and all that although it was a bit higher than usual). These four parties were the left party, the social democratic party, the green party and the Sweden democrats. To achieve this, since they haven't planned on putting forward a single budget, was to break out this bit from the governmental budget and get a vote on it. This is seen by many as a break against the compromise that a budget must be voted as a whole as to avoid political chaos when it is a minority government and no one can muster a majority for an alternative. The opposition try to justify it with that it is allowed in order to ensure the finances of the state (which open a real can of worms since what is seen as the best for the state differs greatly and could lead to a social democratic minority government see their budget picked apart, and then we are not even disusing the implications for the red-green parties as they made a deal with the Sweden democrats)

This is the back-ground, the vote was last week and everyone expected the opposition to win since they have a majority. THEY LOST WITH ONE VOTE! The vote was cast and the result was 154 with the government and 153 with the opposition. How was this possible? First of the Sweden democrats had one member in New York for a political meeting and since they aren't involved the weighing principle he couldn't be done with. But the opposition still would have had a two vote majority. The second problem was that the party leader of the left was in the south of Sweden debating the school minister and a communication miss between the left party and the weighing committee failed to take one person away from the government side. They opposition still would have had one vote majority. Thirdly, two politicians from the social democratic party was in the area, but in the wrong building and missed the vote. Not anyone either, the party's stand in for their party leader who isn't voted into parliament and one of the veterans. After 1-2 months of boosting speeches they fail to deliver, becoming the laughing stock and showed some immense incompetence and failure to organize themselves. If the governmental parties are lucky this will throw such big doubt about the oppositions fitness to rule that the center-right parties win for a third time.