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Millard Kaufman's final novel has arrived!
Pick up Misadventure now—or, see what
you've missed out on thus far by picking up
both Bowl of Cherries and Misadventure
for 27% off the retail price.
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TOM TIT'S EXPERIMENT— This is a very bad time of the year to visit Sweden. It's dark all day and really cold. That's a shame, since Sweden is otherwise a very nice place to visit, and Stockholm is a truly wonderful city, with lots of the windy little cobblestone streets that so many other cities misguidedly ripped up in the great modernization movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, Stockholm is a water city, like Venice, or Copenhagen, or Hong Kong: a city that seems to be in a kind of perpetual fusion with the sea. Water cities are always interesting. As off-the-beaten-path as Stockholm is, Södertälje is even more so. This is understandable, since there is almost no reason whatsoever to go to Södertälje. In fact, just about the only reason one could possibly have to go to Södertälje can be summarized in the words "Tom Tit's Experiment." Tom Tit's Experiment is a kind of museum, of the type that were popular in the eighties, in which one could get one's hands on the exhibits and experiments ... particularly well-suited for little hands. There are many of these kinds of museums around the world, and I suppose that if push came to shove one wouldn't really have to go to Sweden to find a good one, but there is something about Tom Tit's Experiment that is different. Perhaps it's the informal nature of the place. It seems kind of slapped together. In the United States, museums such as these are often well thought out, carefully designed, studied to produce a precalculated result on some gradient of fun. Tom Tit's Experiment is the kind of place your nice and somewhat ditzy aunt would put together if she had the money and the inclination. For example, the most popular experiment is the great soap-bubble-maker thing (so it was translated to me). This device can create soap bubbles big enough to stand in. As a special McSweeney's exclusive feature, the actual formula for the soap-bubble liquid is here revealed:
This will make bubbles big enough to encapsulate a typical Swede. Other experiments include the world-renowned rat circus. This incomparable spectacle is held in the Periodic Table Theatre, in which each seat is labeled and arranged according to one of the elements. Try to get something around atomic number five, six, or seven (boron through nitrogen) as these afford the best views. The rat circus is highly informative. There, you can observe female rats as they exhibit their resourcefulness (no male rats, since they pee all over everything). You can also learn how to say "Min råtta äter min kaka," which means "My rat ate my cookie," which may one day prove useful. You never know. An inside tip—if you can get one of the Swedish children sitting near you to bet his afternoon snack on the rats, you'll garner some easy Wasa and cheese by betting on Ingrid. Very smart rat. Another cool thing is upstairs, where there are scale models of fetuses in various stages of development, nestled into scale models of the parts of women that typically surround them. If, like me, you've never really been able to grasp how a baby could actually have been all scrunched up inside your wife (or inside of you, if you're a mother), and if that image has grown increasingly difficult to understand as the baby in question grows up and starts climbing trees and stuff, then these models are very useful. You can take the baby out, unfold it, then fold it up again and put it back in and see how it works (which is unadvisable otherwise). Lastly, who could possibly skip the device into which one can stick one's head and scream as loudly as possible? Screaming as loudly as you can is a releasing activity that is generally frowned upon in other circumstances, particularly if you spend as much time in hotels as I do. Definitely worth a trip to Södertälje. Tom Tit's Experiment is named after a fictional character, the pseudonym of a French scientist who wrote books and articles about science for children some 100 years ago. It seems that these were very popular in Sweden, and they tickled the imagination of Klas Fresk, who was a teacher and who dreamed of creating an experiment center for schoolchildren. In 1987 he finally convinced some people with money to fund the conversion of a factory that had previously made machines to separate milk from cream, and hence Tom Tit's Experiment was born. It must be confessed that it's probably not worth going all the way to Sweden just to visit Tom Tit's Experiment. However, it is certainly worth going to Sweden to visit Stockholm, and if your children get too bored visiting the wonders of the city (make sure to see Alfred Nobel's house), a day trip down to Södertälje is just the thing for them. Otherwise, they may never know how to say "Min råtta äter min kaka." A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
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