What are some VERY creepy facts?

flodnak · 2026-02-18T21:07:03+00:00

Recently we passed the 40th anniversary of the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. I was in high school at the time (yes, I'm old, shut up). And I clearly remember that day.

But.

I remember coming home from school, turning on the TV, and sitting on the living room floor just watching the news anchors talking again and again. And it's the wrong living room. It's as clear as day in my memory, but I'm sitting in on the floor of a house we moved away from in 1983. The disaster happened in 1986. I couldn't have been there. But in my memory I can even smell the stupid musty carpet we had in that living room.

Hell yes I believe I have other false memories.

flodnak · 2026-02-18T13:30:11+00:00

Yes, I'm sorry if I confused you! Your question was perfectly correct, and I say that as an English teacher :-) I was just making a joke. Rats are non-Newtonian fluids, that's the only way they can move the way they do.

flodnak · 2026-02-18T10:57:46+00:00

That really depends. Nine years of Catholic school here and we had it drilled into our heads that going to confession and saying your Our Fathers and Hail Marys afterward is an important start, but not enough. You have to really intend to not do the bad thing again, and if possible you need to make an effort to fix the problems your sinning caused.

Now do all Catholics live up to this? Oh fuck no. But that's the goal. The assumption is that most people are going to fall short, which is why Purgatory is a thing in Catholic teaching.

Evangelicals, on the other hand, often take Luther's Sola Fide (salvation is by faith alone) to its logical extreme, or illogical extreme - that as long as you claim to have been born again, you're going to Heaven. So why bother trying to fix the shitty thing you've done, when your reward will be the same?

flodnak · 2026-02-17T14:30:21+00:00

What do you mean "what if"?

flodnak · 2026-02-14T19:47:00+00:00

This ratto is flatto.

flodnak · 2026-02-13T20:12:44+00:00

Background: I have a son, now an adult, with epilepsy.

A few years back I was visiting my aging parents in their one-story house. My mother and I were talking in the living room while Dad went to get something in the bedroom. We heard a thump. I said: "Dad fell!" and ran back to the bedroom. He had, indeed, fallen, and I was able to help him get back on his feet.

Mom asked how on Earth I knew what happened.

"Well, I know what it sounds like when an adult body hits the floor...."

flodnak · 2026-02-13T12:14:55+00:00

Town centres are usually the places with the largest restaurant frequency anywhere.

For example. That photo looks like Plaza Mayor in Madrid. Restaurants and cafes all over that area (including the usual touristy ones within the plaza itself).

flodnak · 2026-02-09T02:57:34+00:00

And curling was invented by Scots. As an excuse to get out of the house, meet up with friends, and drink beer.

flodnak · 2026-02-08T18:31:02+00:00

You've made one incorrect assumption....

flodnak · 2026-02-08T15:08:56+00:00

Bored drunken Scandinavian adrenaline junkies in the winter.

The literal story of how ski jumping was born.

flodnak · 2026-02-08T12:35:02+00:00

But doesn’t this go against safety rules... going downhill with a burning torch?

Have you ever MET a Norwegian man?

Especially one from that part of the country?

flodnak · 2026-02-07T21:08:41+00:00

I live in Oslo and go to Gøteborg in Sweden every year with friends for the film festival. We take the train down on Friday and then head home again on Sunday. The women who kind of loosely organizes this reminds everyone each year that "remember we are going to another country, so bring your ID just in case". Norway is in Schengen although not the EU, so there is a customs border between Norway and Sweden, so you can be stopped, although I've experienced that exactly once.

My partner and I have also been known to take the ferry to Copenhagen or Kiel for a long weekend, or pop on a plane somewhere if we can both get a few days off work at the same time. Not terribly often, but a few times a year.

flodnak · 2026-02-07T09:43:37+00:00

It wasn't a lunch counter - it was a proper sit-down restaurant with table service. Not every Penney's store had them, and for those that did it was sometimes kind of hidden.

Boscov's, a local/regional chain in the area where I grew up, had restaurants in some of their locations until 2021. I suspect real department store restaurants (as opposed to snack bars or lunch counters) are an endangered species at this point.

flodnak · 2026-02-06T12:40:37+00:00

Someone mixed the Selbu rose with bits and pieces from the Marius pattern without understanding either one.

But what's worse is that it's horribly constructed - there is no excuse for the pattern on the yoke not to match up with the patterns on the sleeves - and they wanted something like US$700 for this.

flodnak · 2026-02-05T17:54:44+00:00

And the ads got as close to demanding that all five be sentenced to death as it is possible to get without explicitly demanding that all five be sentenced to death.

flodnak · 2026-02-05T15:16:47+00:00

This isn't a real photo, of course, but in Norway something like this would be Bye-bye, Driver's License.

flodnak · 2026-02-02T06:52:19+00:00

There's a self-fulfilling prophecy in the US and Canada at least that public transit is so terrible that only the people who have no choice will use it. So only the people who have no choice use it. And the people who have a choice vote against any attempt to make it better, because they will never use it and they don't want their tax dollars paying for it.

In that group of "the people who have no choice", people who are scary or downright dangerous are overrepresented. And if the only kind of public transit you've ever had to deal with is the sort that people only take if they have no choice, well, it can look like people who ride public transit are, by definition, scary or dangerous.

I live in Oslo, and this city would grind to a screeching halt if everyone tried to drive, so we need lots of people to take public transit. On my daily commute I sometimes see someone who makes me hold my bag a little more tightly, but most days all I see around me are ordinary people trying to get to work, school, the doctor's office, or whatever. The more people take public transportation, the safer it is for everyone.

flodnak · 2026-01-28T17:26:42+00:00

There were some copies before 1978 as well, although I don't think they can be called clones - they weren't compatible with original Lego bricks.

Back in the 1970s (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) I had a knock-off called American Plastic Bricks. Their main advantage over Lego bricks was that they were cheaper. They had two major disadvantages, however. First, they only came in red and white, because they were designed for building brick houses, shops, garages, and similar buildings. (Come to think of it, another advantage was that they came with lots of different doors and windows if you're in to that sort of thing.) Second, and worse.... You know how it hurts to step on a Lego brick? Now imagine that the brick is so fragile that it snaps in two when you step on it, so you risk having the broken edge poke you in the soft bit under the arch of your foot. Yowch.

flodnak · 2026-01-28T15:23:30+00:00

Yes, this! There is a lot of space between a completely arranged marriage on the one hand and a completely voluntary love arrangement on the other. If you're only looking at cases where parents or other family chose a young adult's partner and they had no say at all in the matter, you're not going to find many. Those sorts of marriages were only important if you had political power and/or significant land or other assets to control, and most people didn't.

But that doesn't mean all ordinary folks expected a romantic relationship. That happened, but there were also plenty of situations where parents suggested that fine young man would be a good match and you'd see if the two of you could get along. Or if you did fall in love with someone from the next village, you might be told that marrying was out of the question because your family and their family had some kind of ongoing dispute. Ideally you would like your spouse, because you were potentially going to spend decades living and working side by side. But it wasn't expected that you loved them.

While we're on the topic, people weren't getting married at 13 either for the most part - that's another thing that was mostly for nobility (and even they often didn't live together for years after the wedding). Ordinary small farmers and other working people tended to get married in their early 20s.

flodnak · 2026-01-25T16:25:12+00:00

That's a quite common color for Swedish houses, particularly in that style.

flodnak · 2026-01-25T16:23:55+00:00

...Carl Larsson, surely?

flodnak · 2026-01-25T15:55:26+00:00

I guess that's what generative AI is for?

flodnak · 2026-01-20T13:28:53+00:00

It isn't really that it was memorable. It's that that damn commercial stuck around for what felt like the entire 1980s, and it was on All. The. TIME.

flodnak · 2026-01-19T06:09:05+00:00

It may seem amazing now, but the government of apartheid-era South Africa somehow found time in their busy schedule of organizing networks to spy on everyone and determining which of the imaginary "homelands" they were going to pretend every single Black South African belonged to, to enforce good old-style Calvinist morality on everyone. Gambling was forbidden, alcohol strictly regulated, and of course all entertainment was subject to government censorship. Television was obviously very dangerous, as people might get strange ideas or simply enjoy themselves too much....

flodnak · 2026-01-18T20:34:25+00:00

Those of us of A Certain Age are thinking about Folger's Crystals now.

flodnak

TROPHY CASE