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If you’ve ever met a Swede, chances are you asked her the following question: “What do you think of [ABBA/Ikea/The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo/socialized medicine/the Swedish Chef]?” For Swedes, it’s the last of these questions—the one about the unintelligible, shotgun-wielding, and much beloved chaos Muppet—that is especially vexing. I know this because it was one of the first questions I asked my Swedish wife when we were introduced. “I don’t see how it’s funny,” she responded in a tone that I took at the time to be an endearingly sarcastic deadpan, but would soon learn was actually an endearingly...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OCbuRA_D3KU If this doesn't crack you up, your humor bone is broken. They never should have cancelled The Muppet Show

During the 19th century, most of the mining peasants – whose task was to produce pig iron – gradually lost control of both iron ore mines and pig iron production. However, a few worked as local bankers. By lending money and goods, they managed to continue production. They profited from their colleagues, and over time became mining peasant capitalists, known as pig iron merchants. This is revealed in a history thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. The mining peasants were farmers who, alongside their agricultural work, also carried out mining and produced pig iron from ore. During the 17th...

A chef at a Stockholm restaurant rushed out of his kitchen on Thursday afternoon and threw a meat cleaver at a departing thief as his restaurant was robbed for the second time in a week. The robbery took place at 2pm at a restaurant in Hässelby Villastad in west Stockholm. Two masked robbers held staff at knifepoint and forced them to hand over all the cash in the till. "Apparently the chef's meat cleaver struck one of the robbers in the back, but they were able to disappear from the scene. The same restaurant was robbed a week ago and...

Opera Software has exacted revenge on Microsoft for allegedly making anyone who visits the MSN home page using Opera get the impression that something is wrong with the browser. Opera's answer was to produce a version of its browser that it calls the Opera 7 "Bork" version, after the Swedish chef Bork from the Muppet Show: Bork, Bork, Bork! Opera's Bork version renders all pages fine - except the MSN home page. This page loads as normal and then immediately gets translated into Borkspeak. (A screenshot is here; those on slow connections be warned, the image is 102k.) In a...