Eideard

A Swedish man was dug out alive after being snowed in to his car on a forest track for two months with no food, police and local media have reported.

The 45-year-old from southern Sweden was found on Friday, emaciated and too weak to utter more than a few words. He was found not far from the city of Umea in the north of Sweden by snowmobilers who thought they had come across a car wreck until they dug their way to a window and saw movement inside.

The man, who was laying in the back seat in a sleeping bag, said he had been in the car since December 19.

“Just incredible that he’s alive considering that he had no food, but also since it’s been really cold for some time after Christmas,” a rescue team member told regional daily Vasterbottens-Kuriren, which broke the news…

Umea University Hospital, where the man is recovering after being rescued by police and a rescue team, said in a statement he was doing well considering the circumstances.

Doctors at the hospital said humans would normally be able to survive for about four weeks without food. Besides eating snow, the man probably survived by going into a dormant-like state, physician Stefan Branth told Vasterbottens-Kuriren.

“A bit like a bear that hibernates. Humans can do that,” he said. “He probably had a body temperature of around 31 degrees (Celsius) which the body adjusted to. Due to the low temperature, not much energy was used up.”

The police hope that sooner or later he’ll be able to tell folks what he was doing out there.

A Swedish woman’s recent toiling in her garden turned up a rather unexpected harvest when she pulled a carrot out of the ground ‘wearing’ the wedding ring she had lost back in 1995.

After 16 years, Lena and Ola Påhlsson, who reside near Mora, Dalarna, in central Sweden, had given up hope of ever finding Lena’s lost wedding ring. The ring, which Lena had designed herself, went missing after she had put it on the kitchen counter in midst of a holiday baking session back in 1995.

But as Lena was about to gather the last of the carrots from the family vegetable patch…she pulled out a carrot that had something attached to it. As the carrot was so small, she was about to throw it away when she realized what it was that appeared to be “growing” around the finger-sized vegetable.

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No, that ain’t Swedish. It’s ignoranush?

Sweden’s first case of congenital rubella in more 30 years has been discovered after a woman who was infected with the viral disease whilst on holiday gave birth to a child in Sweden with severe birth defects.

Since vaccination began in the 1970s rubella has all but disappeared in Sweden.

But a 22-year-old woman who lives in Halland, in southern Sweden, but was born in a country where vaccination against the disease is rare, caught the disease while visiting her home country during the early stages of her pregnancy, according to the local Hallands-Posten newspaper.

It is well known that rubella can cause birth defects. Unless you’re an ignorant religious nutball. The viral infectious disease often has mild symptoms, with a spreading rash and sometimes a fever.

However, the major issue with the disease is that those infected whilst pregnant have a high risk of suffering a miscarriage, or giving birth to a child with birth defects.

The woman’s child was born prematurely and with a number of defects, including problems with its eyes, ears, and heart.

“This case shows that we need to improve our screening of the people who come here from other countries, where the vaccination programmes aren’t as built out as ours,” said Maria Löfgren, assistant epidemiologist in Halland, to the newspaper.

Like potential immigrants from the United States – where religious beliefs are sufficient for someone to ignore vaccination. Cripes.

Norway’s holiday butter shortage leads to criminal solutions

Two Swedes have been arrested by Norwegian police for smuggling more than 250kg of butter into the country, offloading one consignment for more than £25 a packet.

The two men, from the Northern city of Umea, managed to make their first delivery before a police patrol stopped their van on Saturday evening.

“They allegedly sold the coveted butter packets in Beitstad Steinkjer before they drove north along the county road 17,” police officer Lars Letnes told Norway’s Adresseavisen newspaper.

“Then they were stopped by a police patrol, which found 250kg of butter in the small van.” A sudden spike in demand has left Norway with a butter shortfall of between 500 and 1,000 tonnes, leaving the country’s citizens facing Christmas without their seven traditional varieties of home-cooked biscuit…

The arrests follow the seizure earlier this month of a 90kg consignment found stashed in the car of a Russian man at the Norwegian-Swedish border. The Norwegian police plan to destroy the confiscated butter.

They could always switchover to lard. That’s the traditional way to handle shortages of plaque in your circulatory system in New Mexico.

Set thirty meters underground, deep within the bedrock and in what was once used as a Swedish atomic bomb shelter, lies this high security internet center. What sounds like the perfect hideout for a CIA facility or a film set for the next Jason Bourne film, is actually the HQ for the Swedish internet server provider, Bahnhof. Named “Pionen, White Mountain,” the internet service facility is centrally located in Stockholm, directly below the Sofia Church, where the cave-like formation houses server halls and offices.

The architectural firm behind this impressive transformation was Albert-France Lanord which was asked to treat the granite rocks as if they were a living organism. The idea was to bring human comforts from earth underground, such as plants, light, water and technology. “We created strong contrasts between rooms where the rock dominates and where the human being is a stranger against rooms where the human being took over totally,” says AF-L. Daylight was obviously one of the biggest challenges for the architects, who designed a long tunnel, allowing for natural sunlight to filter through the underground space, with small buttresses to reflect the light into several zones.

There’s a steady market in leftover missile silos and command centers throughout the world. Bunkers that cost taxpayers billions of dollars are being sold for a comparative pittance.

Of course, you still have to find a reasonable use for something originally built to suit cowardice and fear.

Everything about Ryanair sucks

A furious Swedish family has blasted a Ryanair cabin crew after a passenger slipped into cardiac arrest and was just offered a sandwich and soda.

“We want Ryainair to apologise,” disgruntled passenger Billie Appleton told the Aftonbladet newspaper.

Appleton’s stepfather, 63-year-old Per-Erik Jonsson, fell ill during the flight back to Sweden from England on Sunday and at one point went into cardiac arrest. According to Appleton, staff onboard were hopelessly ill-equipped to treat him.

“They said he had low blood pressure and gave him a sandwich and a soda. And they made sure he paid for it,” she told the newspaper…

According to the EU regulations, all cabin crew should be fully trained in first-aid and the pilot should always alert air traffic control when a passenger falls seriously ill…

There was no ambulance waiting for them when they landed, forcing them to drive the critically ill 63-year-old to the hospital themselves.

The only seriously cheapskate airline I would ever fly is Southwest. They wo’t spend an extra centavo on comforts; but, they take care of folks big time.

I went through “experimental” trips with European cheapos decades ago. An experience I will never repeat.

A Swedish man has been arrested after attempting to split atoms in his kitchen, claiming that he was only doing it as a “hobby”.

Richard Handl said that he had the radioactive elements radium, americium and uranium in his apartment in southern Sweden when police showed up and arrested him on charges of unauthorised possession of nuclear material.

Handl, 31, said he had tried for months to set up a nuclear reactor at home and kept a blog about his experiments, describing how he created a small meltdown on his stove.

Only later did he realise it might not be legal and sent a question to Sweden’s Radiation Authority, which answered by sending the police.

“I have always been interested in physics and chemistry,” Handl said, adding he just wanted to “see if it’s possible to split atoms at home”…

Although he says police didn’t detect dangerous levels of radiation in his apartment, he now acknowledges the project wasn’t such a good idea.

“From now on, I will stick to theory,” he said.

Har.

Now, suppose – just suppose – he was doing this in, say, Phoenix?

Swedish authorities say they are looking for relatives of a man who might have lain dead in his apartment for over three years with no one noticing.

The elderly man’s body was found when a broadband technician showed up to do an installation in the apartment building, the Swedish news agency TT reported.

It wasn’t known when the man died, but investigators said food in his refrigerator was dated early 2008. His advanced degree of decomposition indicated he had been dead about three years, investigators said…

The man’s pension was automatically deposited in his account and his bills were paid by automatic debits.

“It is very tragic,” said Asa Johannesson of the Flemingsberg police…

“He lived alone, but there are relatives. But they obviously had no contact,” Johannesson said.

Police said there was no indication of a crime having been committed.

My kind of family. A hermit – and people who don’t get along with hermits.

WRC is the closest of all world class motorsport competition to the genuine road environment, though conditions vary considerably across the 13 race, five continent series from last weekend’s first round in Sweden where blizzards and -28ºC temperatures necessitated tungsten-tipped studded Michelin tyres, through to the gravel and rocks and 40ºC temperatures the cars will encounter a fortnight from now in Mexico.

New “environmentally aware” regulations were introduced this year based around 1600cc turbocharged, 4WD cars, and Ford’s all-new Fiesta RS made a dream debut with a 1-2-3 finish…

RTTFA for all the details – and lots of photos. Most countries show at least delayed coverage of each event. VersusTV is the likely source here in the USA.

These days, growing numbers of young Swedes about to marry are not only choosing flatware patterns but also picking new names. Sometimes it is an older family name; more often it is one they simply concoct.

Sofia Wetterlund, 29, was born Sofia Jönsson, and when she decided to marry last year, she and her spouse-to-be, Karl Andersson, were simply tired of their names. “We both thought Andersson and Jönsson were very common,” she said. “Karl wanted something different, I wanted something different. We just didn’t want to be taken for the others.”

The couple cast about in their families’ past and Ms. Wetterlund discovered, well, Wetterlund, her grandmother’s maiden name. “We thought it was pretty, and it was quite uncommon,” she said…

While some Swedes like Ms. Wetterlund rummage through family history for a new name, others simply invent one. Some take names with a Mediterranean flair, like Andriano and Bovino, said Eva Brylla, the director of research at the Institute of Language and Folklore in Uppsala. Others adopt English-sounding names, like Swedenrose or Flowerland; others let their imaginations fly, simply using building blocks common in Swedish names and fashioning tongue twisters like Shirazimohager and Rowshanravan.

The government, which must approve all name changes, places certain names off limits. Trademarks, like Coke, are out, as are obscenities. Names of nobility, like Bernadotte, the family name of the Swedish king, are not allowed, nor are names of celebrities. Obama is also off limits, said Jan Ekengren, director of the Patent and Registration Office, which oversees name changes. And Donadoni, the name of an Italian soccer star, was rejected…

Indeed, support for Swedish names is coming from an unexpected quarter. In recent decades, successive waves of immigrants have been coming to Sweden, and many avail themselves of the laws and take Swedish-sounding names to hasten their integration.

Mr. Ekengren recalled a case a few years ago in which an immigrant family requested permission to be called Mohammedsson.

“Permission was granted,” he said.

Rock on, folks. I can see tons of immigrants from California named Firefly or Surfson.