Question of the Day

If it’s bad luck when a black cat crosses your path, what kind of omen is it when a slug crosses your path?

Door #5: Goatwatch 2007 — Looking for Love

When I got home tonight, I logged on to AIM for a few minutes and ended up talking to my friend Marilyn — another of the Gävlebock’s fans. She wanted to know if I’d been checking the goat’s blog lately.

“No, not really. Has he been attacked yet?”

“He’s looking for a girlfriend.”

After the goat asked whether anyone knew any nice nanny goats, a helpful American, sent the him a link to Lucy, the Amazing Elephant Building in Margate, New Jersey.

I don’t want to stand in the way of true love, but after checking out Lucy, I really think she’d be a better match for Stoorn, the giant moose.

Bockens Återkomst (The Return of the Goat)

Yes, the Gävlebock is back, and he’s started posting on his blog.

Workers installed the goat at the Castle Square (Slottstorget) in Gävle today in preparation for the big opening-day ceremony on Sunday.

I’ve linked to the English version of the blog, but if you can you read Swedish, you might want to check out the Swedish version as well since there are some details that go missing in the translation — like the fact that the goats horns were a little mussed after his summer storage — or are contain amusing misspellings — such as the goat being “tiered” instead of “tired” after today’s intensive activities.

Talking Turkey about Thanksgiving Rituals

On Salon.com yesterday, Adam Roberts interviewed chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill restaurant in New York City. I appreciated his more laid-back attitude to sustainability, but was a little more skeptical about some of his comments about Thanksgiving and tradition.

Are there any traditional dishes you refuse to cook because they’re beneath your standards?

What’s a traditional one — like jellied beets from a can?

Or marshmallows on sweet potatoes.

Well that’s a ’70s tradition. I don’t consider that part of our heritage.

But a lot of people do it.

A lot of people are misguided. That’s a 1975 sort of invention — or ‘65.

It makes me wonder what dishes Barber does consider traditional. Turkey, obviously, since he gives advice on buying heirloom breed turkeys for your Thanksgiving dinner. Pumpkin pie? Green beans? Just how old must a tradition be to be legitimate?

The Thanksgiving holiday as we know it dates from the Civil War era, and it’s likely that the inclusion of turkey in the holiday meal dates from about the same time. Accounts of Puritan feasts describe meals that don’t anything like today’s Thanksgiving dinners: fish, roasted meats, cauliflower, syllabub, sugared almonds and chocolate.

So, go ahead and object to marshmallows on sweet potatoes because you don’t like marshmallows, or because you think they’re full of unhealthy ingredients. The argument that they’re too new an innovation to be legitimately traditional seems specious to me.

Lost in Transcription

One of Mark Liberman’s recent language log posts has turned me on to my latest guilty YouTube pleasure: foreign language music videos subtitled with a phonetic transcription of the lyrics that makes some sort of weird sense in another language.

Here for example is the Russian (?) German [so much for my linguistic acuity] group Dschengis Dschinghis Kahn singing their song Moskau, Moskau with the lyrics transcribed into an English-language approximation with lines like “Moscow, Moscow, please respect the caviar!” The “Golden Horde goes to Vegas”-style costumes only add to the appeal.

Liberman’s post contains links to other examples of this emergent video genre, which his informant, Ben Ostrowsky, has christened “Autour-de-mondegreens.” A mondegreen is a misunderstanding of a spoken or sung text. One of the best-known example might be the mishearing of “’scuse me while I kiss the sky” as “’scuse me while I kiss this guy.” Note that some of the video links are definitely not work safe.

A pleasant surprise was finding that these sorts of videos have been popular in Sweden where they’re known as “Turkhits.” Swedish Wikipedia provides links to some of the these videos including the most famous, “Hatten är din” (“The Hat is Yours”), a Turkhits version of the Lebanese song “Meen ma Kenty/Habbaytek.”

Goatwatch, The Sequel

If you’ve clicked about this blog, you may notice that I have an inordinate fascination for an enormous straw goat in a Swedish town called Gävle*.

In Sweden at Christmas time, you can find small straw goats decorating people’s homes and Christmas trees. The town boosters in Gävle** decided to go the tradition one further and set up the world’s largest straw Christmas goat (Julbock, in Swedish) in the town square. They erected the first Julbock in 1966, and in the 40 years since more than half of the goats have been destroyed or damaged by anonymous vandals.

To find out more about the Gävle Julbock and the variety of ignominious ends it’s met over the years, check out my first Goatwatch post from last year.

According to the Gävle Christmas site, this year’s Julbock will be on display starting December 2, Skyltsöndag. Skyltsöndag is the Swedish equivalent of Black Friday, the first official day of the holiday shopping season. Outside the big cities, stores (at least other than grocery stores) are typically closed Sundays in Sweden. On Skyltsöndag — literally “Display Sunday” — stores decorate their windows with special holiday displays and open for Christmas shopping.

And for the first time ever, the goat will have a blog, apparently in his own voice. I can’t even imagine what he’ll post when the vandals try to burn him down again. Perhaps that’s the point. If the miscreants know the goat will describe the agony of his injuries, maybe they’ll think twice about trying to burn him down.

* An interesting bit of Gävle trivia: if you mispronounce the town’s name — that is, if you say yehv-luh, instead of yev-leh — you’re actually saying a common Swedish curse word.

** Yet another interesting bit of Gävle trivia: The Gevalia in Gevalia Coffee is the latinized version of the town’s name.

Happy Halloween!

I admit feeling a little guilty about writing a special Halloween post since I completely forgot this was anything other than a normal Wednesday until I checked the date on my watch this morning.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t resist linking to some of the most amazing jack-o-lanterns I’ve ever seen. All of these appear on Tom Nardone’s ExtremePumpkins.com site. The past couple times, I’ve visited one of the local bookstores, I’ve leafed through his new book and laughed out loud at his wild and wacky pumpkins.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Cannibal pumpkin
• Electrocution pumpkin
• Drowning pumpkin
• And of course… the giant squid pumpkin

Sweden to Phase Out Å, Ä and Ö

In the fine tradition of April Fool’s Day media hoaxes like the hotheaded naked ice borer and the Swiss Spaghetti harvest, The Local, an English-language site with news from Sweden, posted an item about a parliamentary proposal to make the Swedish language more globally competitive by eliminating letters with diacritical marks.

When I clicked on the link to the story from my friend Susan’s post on a Scandinavian music and dance mailing list, I think I actually believed it was on the level, but then I’m not necessarily the best judge.

I not only believed Natural History’s story about the ice borers, I told my entire family and a number of my friends about it. Fortunately, the whole thing happened before I got tangled up in the Web, so there’s no incriminating email trail my friends can resurrect to remind me how gullible I am.

I’ve bookmarked Slate.com’s April Fool’s Day Defense Kit — a round-up of some classic media pranks — and set an alarm in my calendar program for next March 30, with a reminder to prepare myself.

Update: And speaking of April Fool’s pranks, I almost forgot to mention my pal Chopper, who temporarily transformed his site Cars! Cars! Cars! (A car blog. Only angrier.) into Krauss! Krauss! Krauss! (An Alison Krauss blog. Only fiddlier.).

School’s out!

At least for the next ten days.

Tonight I had my last class of the semester — finally! — and my first final in 19 years. (Well maybe 12 years, if you count that anatomy class I took during my short-lived “I think I’ll become an acupuncturist” phase.)

Despite much panic over the past few days (especially yesterday night when I found myself uncontrollably surfing the Web instead of studying), all went well. I finished within the time limit. I felt comfortable with all my answers. The test was oddly fun even.

After I turned my exam in to the TA, I felt like skipping around the quad shouting, “I’m done! I’m done.” I restrained myself, though. Such displays might well be considered unseemly at Fancypants U. – at least for forty-year-old returning students. If I were a drunken undergrad, it might be okay.

The oddest thing kept happening as I was writing the answer to the essay questions: I kept almost, not quite writing in Swedish. The same thing happened as I was writing my paper for this class (Intro. to Folklore). That was at least understandable since the paper was actually about something Swedish; it involved reading Swedish books and listening to tapes of people speaking in Swedish.

Maybe it’s just that I was reading a Swedish novel before class started — something to take my mind off the test. Whatever the reason, though, it was nice to have my other language bubbling up unbidden that way.

Behind Door #17: Goat Attacked!

When I posted yesterday’s “goat still standing” update, I didn’t realize that the Christmas goat had survived an attack on Friday night. The Gävlebock Web site has pictures of the goat’s leg being repaired. Someone tried to set fire to it, but apparently, the flame retardant limited any damage.

When I stopped by a local bookstore this afternoon, I found a book called Pagan Christmas in their holiday display. I started leafing through, thinking that I might find some pictures of (or at least a mention of) Krampus. There wasn’t much to be found. From my albeit quick look through the book, it seemed like the authors were more interested in proving a connection between the red-and-white Christmas color scheme — à la Santa’s suit — and red-and-white, hallucinogenic fly agaric mushrooms.

Before I put the book back on the shelf, on a whim really, I decided to take one last look at the index, and, sure enough, there was a listing for “Yule buck.” It turns out, according to the authors, that there’s a connection between Yule bucks (e.g., Scandinavian straw Christmas goats) and Yule logs. Both were burned around the winter solstice, and the ashes were thought to have healing properties. So, really, the whole point of straw goats is to be burnt.

I guess I can empathize a little with the Gävle town elders who want to keep the “world’s largest Christmas goat” standing, as a tourist attraction, throughout the Christmas season. (And having been to Gävle, I can attest to the relative sparseness of tourist attractions. The best thing going when I visited was the truck parked on the town square where you could by the most delicious fresh-friend donuts with their outsides all crispy and their insides like warm, cardamom-scented clouds.)

Maybe there’s another answer, though. I keep thinking of Kafka’s parable of the leopards, where the leopards come to the temple and drink the sacred wine every night. Eventually, the priests just make the leopards a part of the ritual.

Why not make the burning official? The goat could could fulfill its destiny, and the town tourist bureau would get an event guaranteed to draw visitors. It could be Sweden’s answer to Burning Man, but without the nudity. It’s winter there after all.