To protest rising gasoline prices, a group of truckers abandoned their vehicles in the middle of the highway. It struck me as odd that a country that brims with anti-French rhetoric would adopt one of their protest techniques. Presumably they don't want French gasoline prices either.
Of course, in Sweden, every day is tax day. By now, it's too late to fill out your tax form, which the Swedish tax agency permits you to file on paper, via Internet, over the phone, or even via SMS. They even have what I wish the US tax agency had: An online tax form calculator.
Keith Moore thought I was writing about Extreme Crochet in my previous post about Extreme Croquet. No, Keith, if I had wanted to write about Extreme Crochet, I would have used this link.
This week, Only a Game covered the sport of Extreme Croquet. Still doesn't hold a candle to Extreme Ironing, though.
You can buy 510 grams of peanut butter for only $501. Of course, this is special peanut butter. It must be kept at -20°C. And it is not intended for human consumption. This is peanut butter from the National Institute of Standards and Technology intended for use by food analysis laboratories to calibrate their equipment. For examp...
It appears that I will have an opportunity to visit Sweden during the first week of June. I'll have three days in Uppsala and three days in Lund, with a travel day in between. Now, I've already spent a week and a half in Uppsala, so perhaps I could spend the Uppsala days taking a ferry to Helsinki and back. (And I could visit Denmark from L...
It's proxy season, which means I've been reading through proxy statement after proxy statement. The proxy voting rules for Allstate aren't very democratic. Scroll down to "How votes are counted and discretionary voting authority": The thirteen nominees who receive the most votes will be elected to the open directorships even if they get ...
My entry about Good-Bye, Lenin! appears to have turned into a discussion of formal and informal terms of address in various languages and cultures. Sweden effectively abolished the "du"/"ni" distinction in the 1970's during the so-called "du-reform", getting rid of the formal "ni" and having everybody address each other as "du" - even the ...
Fact-checking? What's fact-checking? I found it on the Internet! Wired News has a story on various people and news agencies being fooled by Onion articles. This used to be news, but now it's so common it may end up relegated to just a counter. "Number of people fooled by Onion articles: n+1".
The National (US) Football League adopted a 15-yard penalty for pre-planned celebrations, such as last year's "phone call from the end zone" or 2002's "autographed football". Apparently, the existing monetary fines weren't having much of an effect on players with multi-million-dollar contracts. (Surprised?) So now the league is going t...
