The Hunt for Red October?

There's been a great deal of news the past few days about sightings of some sort of a submarine in the Stockholm archipelago.

Enough credible information has come forward to cause the Swedish Navy to conduct an intense search in the area. One of the sightings, last Friday, was off of Runmarö, damned close to our own little island. It reminds me of the plot of "The Russians are Coming!"

The Local, Radio Sweden, and the Guardian all have good English-language summaries of what's going on right now. Even the Wall Street Journal published a good summary on their free site. There is, by all accounts, an intensive search in our archipelago.

Swedes have a sense of dèjá vu over all this. A well-remembered incident in 1981 found a Soviet submarine run aground very close to a Swedish naval base. There have been at least a dozen well documented sightings of submarines in Swedish waters (all presumed to be Soviet or Russian) since then.

Without dabbling in the political in this blog, it is apparent that Russia is flexing its muscles a bit. It would be no surprise to anyone in Scandinavia (or the Baltics) that Russian submarines are up to their Cold War tricks!

A couple of story updates

The Economist has published a couple of stories lately that touch upon my favorite blog subjects.

First, my February 7th post on Swedish domination of pop music is followed up with news that Swedes are leading the way on music consumption as well as creation. Spotify, a Swedish company, is on the forefront of consumers moving from downloads to streaming. It's an interesting read.

Secondly, it appears tall wooden buildings, or 'plyscrapers', which I wrote about last August, are also gaining further acceptance in the marketplace, according to this recent article.