The Swedish Meteor

September 17th, 2012

I'm not sure that I spent a single hour back when I was doing my GCE O-Level in History looking at Sweden's imperial phase. To the extent that I was aware of it at all, it was as the great power that Peter the Great of Russia pushed aside as Russia became a great European power.

All of which means that I somehow missed out on The Blazing Career and Mysterious Death of "the Swedish Meteor":

[Charles XII (1682-1718) was...] An endlessly fascinating figure – austere and fanatical, intelligent yet foolhardy – Charles has some claim to be the greatest of Swedish kings. Voltaire, an admirer, dubbed him "the Lion of the North," and though he was at heart a soldier, whose genius and speed of movement earned him the nickname "the Swedish Meteor," he was also a considerable mathematician with a keen interest in science. In other circumstances, Charles might have turned himself into an early example of that 18th-century archetype, the enlightened despot. Yet plenty of Swedes, then and now, despised their king for impoverishing the country and sacrificing thousands of his subjects by fighting almost from the moment he ascended the throne in 1697 until he died two decades later. For the playwright August Strindberg, he was "Sweden's ruin, the great offender, a ruffian, the rowdies' idol." Even today, the king's biographer Ragnhild Hatton observed, "Swedes can be heard to say that no one shall rob them of their birthright to quarrel about Charles XII."

The story of how Charles XII died – still a matter of debate nearly three hundred years on, apparently – is as fascinating as the story of how he reigned.

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Whoosh

July 3rd, 2012

New York's Roosevelt Island is home to a large-scale Swedish-built pneumatic garbage disposal system. The company that maintains the Roosevelt Island system is also responsible for running a similar system at Disney World:

[Repairman Frederik Olsson], a tall blond man in work boots and loose overalls, coughed politely. "Magic Kingdom can be problematic," he said. "I visit it often. It usually breaks because so many sticky things run through it. This one usually breaks down because New Yorkers throw too many big things away."

"The machine doesn't break down that much," Marli said. "But, you know, you get a rainy weekend and people clean out their closets. They throw away the weirdest stuff. Stereos, old computers, steel pipes." The unwieldy objects sometimes clog the works. One time, a piece of rebar backed up the machine for several hours. Another time, it was a skillet. Envac workers have also recovered geometry textbooks, tape players, window frames, lumber, and old clothes. On a third-floor window ledge, there is an array of houseplants in industrial buckets, rescued from the trash.

Let's face it, if your apartment building contained a central garbage disposal chute that emptied periodically by sucking the waste away at 60mph, would you be particularly choosy about what you were dropping down the chute? Or would you be calling 'Bombs away!' as you tried to time the drop to coincide with the trapdoor opening?

[Via MetaFilter]

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You want me to show you what Swedes eat!!? Do you!!? DO YOU!!?

March 13th, 2012

Gangsta Sweden!

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Stockholm 1, Newcastle 0

May 11th, 2008

Swedish versus British Nightclubs: can you tell the difference?

[Via plexi, posting at MetaFilter]

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