Jan 23

Scandenavia, Why Must You Delight Me So?

Shall we count the ways? Excluding my favorite gods, we have

1. Trollhunter.

2. Jagannath.

3. First-aid Kit, especially their song about a werewolf.

and now 4. The Great Norway Goat Cheese Fire of ’13.

Let us count the ways this is fucking wonderful!

  1. Who knew cheese could catch on fire?
  2. It burned hot enough to destroy a tunnel.
  3. 2/3 of the men in that story are named Viggo.
  4. “Kjell Bjoern Vinje, of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, said it was the first time he could remember cheese catching fire on Norwegian roads.”

So, yes, I’m a little bummed that none of the Skaarsgards showed up to glower at me in a sexy manner, but Norway, your goat cheese fire just about makes up for it. In your honor, I have just now added a Scandenavia category to the blog, in case the awesomeness continues.

13 thoughts on “Scandenavia, Why Must You Delight Me So?”

  1. If you liked the great goat cheese fire of ’13, you should check out the Christmas Goat of Gävle, Sweden.*

    Every year since 1966, they put up a giant straw goat in the town square. (It’s a ginormous version of traditional Swedish Christmas decoration.) More years than not, miscreants find some way to destroy the goat, usually by burning it down.

    You can read more (including the goat’s blog!) here: http://www.merjuligavle.se/Bocken/In-English/. Click on the “History” link for a year-by-year accounting of the goat’s fate. They haven’t updated the list with 2011 and 2012 yet, but the goat burned both years.

    *Bonus Scandi trivia: Gevalia coffee comes from Gävle. “Gevalia” is the Latinized name for the town.

  2. Are you fucking kidding me?! I have been cheated out of knowing about a giant straw Christmas goat that blogs up until this very minute?! I shake my fist at fate. How much better would my life have been over the years if I had known that there was a giant straw Christmas goat out there in the world? Who can even say? But some percentage of happiness has, until right now, been kept from me.

  4. And he doesn’t just blog. He blogs his own destruction!

    “I suddently woked up, It became awfully hot I noticed that I was on fire!” (Okay, the goat’s English could be better, but then again I’d have trouble writing grammatical Swedish if I were on fire.)

    So happy I could help bring this small slice of Sweden to you. ;-)

  5. This remains the biggest mystery. How would you get anything in a snow-covered frozen land to catch on fire?! I really hope Sam will come by and weigh in on how one catches goat cheese on fire to begin with.

  6. I love it when people discover the glory of the homeland. Heh. Really though, Scandinavia has some pretty awesome things to offer. And they are greatly in favor of setting things on fire for holidays. It was just a matter of time before things like cheese started setting themselves on fire to celebrate whatever holidays things like cheese have.

    Soon you’ll discover Scandinavian cuisine and you’ll think it’s great at first, but then not so much over time. (Although it’s not much celebrated anywhere, certainly not widely available in Nashville, so you might have to befriend me and get me to cook the traditional dishes for you in order to try it.)

  7. Amy, I completely agree. I don’t think I could manage grammatical English if I woke up to discover that I was on fire and I’m neither a goat nor a native Swedish speaker. I give the goat extra credit for managing what it did.

    Creakerjackheart, I am a tiny bit Swedish on my mom’s side. My great-great grandma, Hulda Annie Albertina Anderson came over from Sweden and married a German guy who was hiding from his family in Chicago, and they had my great grandma Teckla, who I’m named after. But, honestly, except for the name, and my mom’s sage advice to never get into a butt fight with a Swedish woman, nothing has been passed down to us about it.

    Though now I am wondering if Swedish women are well-known for their great butt-fighting skills, if perhaps they run illegal butt-fighting rings. I had been assuming that was just something my mom made up, but I’m learning so many delightful things that now I am imagining Swedish women throwing their hips into each other, like some kind of modified sumo wrestling.

  9. For your reading pleasure: http://satwcomic.com/the-world/page9 I suggest you start on the last comic on the last page (9, I think) and work your way forward to the most recent one. In short, it’s the Scandinavian countries personified and acting out the characteristics of their people. I think you’ll find Sister Sweden particularly amusing.

    I’m Danish and Norwegian on my mom’s side. My maternal grandmother was in good standing with the Sons & Daughters of Norway and taught all her granddaughters the finer points of Norwegian cooking as learned from her mother-in-law. My stepfather is Swedish. This is a source of much hilarity to the Norse/Dane side of my family. My sister is Norse/Dane/Swede and makes her own jokes because of it. Reading the SATW comic will help understand why this is funny. :)

  11. Hello, all.

    B., thanks for your earlier praise for “Trollhunter.” I’d seen something about the film when it was first released, and though it interesting. I finally saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I was laughing all the way through. It is delightful.

    FYI, if something is flammable it will burn, no matter how low the ambient temperature. I’ll give you a link to follow about a fire that started yesterday in Bridgeport. It was below zero outside, but the fire quickly escalated to a 5-11 anyway. Fortunately my company wasn’t dispatched to go out there and freeze our cheese. Water carnivals get really dull really quickly, and no one wants to stand around babysitting a master stream when it’s 5 below and the heat in their rig is kaput.

    But I digress. If you look at the screen cap on the video atop the article, you’ll notice that the shell of the building looks like an ice castle, but there is still fire somewhere within.

    http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-fire-3700-ashland-187989951.html

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