The lead male character, loosely based on the author, is named is Blomkvist, a wry nod to the real driver named Stig, the guy who perfected cornering with the power slide driving a Saab 96, one of the first front wheel drive cars. He'd apply the gas while locking up the back wheels with the park brake to fly through rough rally course corners and win many a race in this manner throughout the seventies and early eighties. Until the Audi Quattros, he was unbeatable.

He was my hero as a kid, which makes watching that other Stig as annoying as some computer show having a 'secret' character known only as The Woz. who was not Steve Wozniak.

The real Stig Blomqvist was a genius. His innovative technique saved my life when my little Honda broke a strut and lost a front wheel while travelling down the freeway. I used the brake and gas to keep the car under control and brought it to a safe stop at the side of the road rather than letting it flip into a hunk of twisted metal as it seemed destined. Didn't even hit a sign or mile marker.

Well there is still the dispute over his estate. He died without a will and as I understand it his father and brother split up his money and took the book rights. The woman he lived with for many years claims to have the only copy of a nearly complete fourth volume of the originally intended series of ten but refuses to let it see the light of day. Although other stories say she is working on completing it. Have also heard she somehow was able to get the film rights.

It would be great to think a lot of people are actually reading the Millennium Series. It is a compelling series and well researched. Steig Larson made his mark as a journalist who exposed a variety of covert neo-nazi organizations in Europe. He was a frequent recipient of threats and his death at a young age was initially investigated as a murder.

From my anecdotal evidence, agree with you on this number being more marketing engineering than reality. I know very few people who have even heard of the Millennium series outside of my mentioning it. Been enjoying the series as a book I read only while waiting for medical appointments. Enough appointments that I've read the first two so far and not one person in any of the waiting rooms mentioned reading the book and a room full of nervous people tend to make small talk over any connection they can find.

In fact, the only people I've come across who have read the book, or even heard of it, are doctors and one physical therapist who freaked out her book club when she got them to read the first installment. To the rest of the generally illiterate population, they probably think it's a Taco Bell commercial.

This could reflect more on the fact that I live in Central Wisconsin: home of many of your average American hate groups and cults including Ed Gein, Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society and the Posse Commutates (the group who spawned the recent Holocaust Museum shooting and several assassinations of Doctors who performed abortions). The whole area seems pretty obsessed with neo-nazi ideologies and tend to find it difficult to see nazis as the bad guys. Things haven't seemed to change much here from the days Herzog filmed Stroszek here roughly thirty years ago.

For example, when we moved here, the kids in the local high school were tourettes-level obsessed with saying 'Heil Hitler' and casually use the term 'Jew' as a strong pejorative. It was like banging my head against a brick wall trying to convince the principal that this was offensive. Even after explaining to him we are Jewish descendants of Aushwitz survivors, he saw no reason to intercede. Instead, the school's solution was to try and save our souls and convert us to Christianity.

Which is probably why movies like American Beauty don't even show in the local theaters. It's almost Stalinist, the tendency of so many interesting sounding books and movies to just sort of disappear -- airbrushed out of the general consciousness.

It could be salvaged if Ellen Page played Lisbeth and could redeem her reputation from that dreck flick she was in Juno, too. Reading the book, I imagined Lisbeth to be a mix of her as Treena Lahey and her role in Hard Candy. Was sad to hear she's no longer up for the role.

I loved the Swedish version and can't see it being improved upon. Wonder if they going to recast the location, too?

I avoided reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because the title sounded like that song Willie Nelson did for the Taco Bell ad, The Girl with the Rose Tattoo.

Glad I waited. Found it in hardcover at a garage sale for a buck. Totally awesome read.

Have to agree with you. Once pharma advertising budget surpassed pharma research it was game over.

Although it is a slightly different game than the googlitis

.... not to say the two can't combine for a mega-cocktail -- especially when you consider pharma advertising recombining with GoogleDNA adsense.

Have for sometime really been hating looking up health info online. It's just chucked with so many experts exchanges.

I think we're starting to go back on the pendulum started by Susan Sontag who was an early advocate of taking control of your health back when doctors would often conceal diagnosis from patients as to not excite them.

Your post worried me, and immediately tested with ADP Timesaver and it worked for me. Not sure if it's the same product.

Keillor can be funny, although I prefer his daily show, The Writer's Almanac, which I read on the web, completely unable to listen to his voice after stumbling upon a CD compilation of his oration of Penthouse Letters, which all I can say about is no soap can clean from your psyche.

I've always suspected Keillor was basing his Lake Woebegone name on my old hometown, the Canadian city of Dryden, Ontario, located roughly 200k north of Bulwinkle's hometown of International Falls, MN.

My suspicion is only supported by the geographic coincidence that Dryden is on a homonym lake, Wabigoon. And the observation that Americans like to appropriate Canadiana.

This theory falls short in the one fact that Keillor, like most Minnesotans, is probably blithely ignorant of the existence of Canada. Have noticed most Minnesotans believe they are the Far North, which may be part of Native Wisconsin's ire -- ask any Minnesotan and they will tell you they are North of Wisconsin.

And don't get me started on their hilarious, but firmly held, misconception that their beloved National Park, the BWCA, is "pristine wilderness" with nothing between it and Admiral Byrd's 48 star flag planted firmly on the North Pole.

As a guide for many a tourists in the hallowed BWCA, I've often chuckled as they try to rationalize the lights of heavy industry to the North as "Northern Lights". Yeah, right, couldn't be anything up there -- there's no roads.

Not a big fan of the Cities, but they're okay. Those under designed highways must make the citizens mental. On the other paw, they could be mental from genetics seeing they had far better public transportation a hundred years ago only to be collectively dumb enough to be sold on the GM backed bus and highway system as an improvement.

Of course the same National City Lines from Eveleth did the same scam on American cities from Baltimore to L.A. for what it's worth.

As for Duluth, never been to a creepier city. It's darker than the Howard Mohr inspired film Fargo. Pure craven depravity is the only way to describe this cargo port where prozzies openly sell their wares even on residential streets. But I guess that's what Minnesota Nice is about.

But the Fargo aspect of the state also touches on the one outstanding thing about Minnesota... the arts. Sure Minnesotans tend to be myopic about anything outside their Loon State borders, but they also are often very open society when it comes to arts and ideas.

Unfortunately, this openness also leads to naivete that belies their well manicured hostile side. For example electing a wrestler as Governor, on a very racist platform to stop the influx of urban blacks. In order to accomplish this, in a time of negative unemployment, he cut social programs to the bone to look good and in the process not only removed the social safety net that has been the fabric of the state's famous Scandinavian social dynamic, but also undermined much of the State's cultural programs. Despite an aspiring film maker for a son, he pretty much brought to an end the State's successful run of film production.

So anyways, that's the long and short of my love hate relationship with Minnesota, as someone who has lived on three borders of the state (Iowa, Ontario and Wisconsin) as well as in Minneapolis and Cook County.

Here's a job looking for a fresh college grad: http://cri.crinet.com/career430/SoftwareDeveloperEntryLevel

Half of the people have below average I.Q.'s while 90% of people believe they are in the top ten percentile... mathematically they just can't all fit no matter how much their parents told them they are above average.

agreed. In the example of the radiator, they might say radiator but it could be a thermostat, hose or water pump.

If everyone knew what was going on the need for technicians would vanish. It's time to get over it and be professional and do your job which is helping people do their jobs by supporting their technology.

Used to work in the far North as a network programmer for remote, fly-in tribes. When a chief calls the monitor in his broken English a t.v., is he really wrong?

In cree the word for monitor I have found is teevee. The word for computer is hard drive. Who am I to say they are wrong? I just have to make it's still working for them when I am 500 miles away back home.

Martin Fowler's UML Distilled is a great read. Roughly 200 pages it offers a concise introduction to UML which is a handy way to visualize software design and share ideas in a common and easy to use visual language.

I think that software bug was unpatched windows machines in Ohio. But I was too close to it all and may just be making an erroneous jump for correlation to causation. The network storm caused by that virus was pretty horrendous.

As the story unfolded the early reports said the machines were unpatched. Then that story seemed to be brushed for reasons I can only guess with tinfoil hat securely fastened.

I imagine there were many factors that met on that day contributing to the blackout. And I doubt the virus was designed to take down the grid. But the lesson I took from it is that there are many critical machines that are hooked up to the internet or networks that hook up to the internet that aren't properly maintained and these sort of events will be more common. Also that if a non-specific virus can do that much harm I shudder to think what a well designed attack would unleash.

Remember the blackout in 2003? There was talk that the computers that failed were hit by a particularly nasty worm going around that week. I think it was the Sasser. Can't remember. But I do remember working as a tech and the worm was really crescendoing at the point the grid went down. The talk of a virus being the cause was put out there and quickly replaced with some excuse less scary. But from my vantage point it seemed to really coincide with the worm.

You are on to something as it being the destruction of the family, but more so the expectation that one must forge one's own identity. By prerequisite this means narcissism. It used to be that doing something in a way because this was how one's father and grandfather did it was a reasonable justification. Now we are expected to not drive our father's Oldsmobile.

This line of thinking was popularized among the babyboomers, and if there will be one good thing that comes out of the greatest depression will be a rethinking of this logic. It's really hard to develop an identity for oneself. This difficulty can lead to an easy narcissism. This easy narcissism is about defining oneself by what one has rather than what one does. It's easier to buy the super laptop rather than learn how to operate it well, etc. It's good though that kids have an expectation of success. Hopefully they can use this expectation to figure out a way to forge this identity through hard work.