Champis is a dwarf rabbit in Sweden who think he’s a sheepdog! He belongs to Nils-Erik and Greta who have a farm near the village of Käl. That’s about all I can get from the Swedish, but you can read more at Gårdsbacken’s blog. Link -via Metafilter

Pirates and file-sharers, rejoice! The Missionary Church of Kopimism (just say it out loud) has been recognized as a religion in Sweden:

Since 2010 a group of self-confessed pirates have tried to get their beliefs recognized as an official religion in Sweden. After their request was denied several times, the Church of Kopimism – which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V as sacred symbols – is now approved by the authorities as an official religion. The Church hopes that its official status will remove the legal stigma that surrounds file-sharing.

All around the world file-sharers are being chased by anti-piracy outfits and the authorities, and the situation in Sweden is no different. While copyright holders are often quick to label file-sharers as pirates, there is a large group of people who actually consider copying to be a sacred act.

Philosophy student Isak Gerson is such a religious file-sharer, and in an attempt to protect his unique belief system he founded The Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010. In the hope that they could help prevent persecution for their beliefs, the Church then filed a request to be officially accepted by the authorities.

After two failed attempts, where the Church was asked to formalize its way of praying or meditation, the authorities finally recognized the organization as an official religion. The Church’s founder is ecstatic about this news, and hopes that it will motivate more people to come forward as ‘Kopimists’.

Can I get "Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Amen?"

Link

The Treehotel is a group of unusual tree houses in northern Sweden that guests can rent. All six sides of this one are mirrored, creating beautiful images as the sky and trees reflect on the surface. Others look like a bird’s nest and a flying saucer.

Link -via My Modern Met | Official Website | Photo: Peter Lundstrom

Christmas is less than a month away, so it’s time to put up your Christmas straw goat. That’s what the town of Gävle, Sweden has done every year since 1966, although residents support the practice for different reasons:

Half of the people take pride in the giant animal, while the other half take equal pride in attempting to burn it down. To date, the goat has been burnt down more times than it has survived the Christmas period.

Large sums of money apparently change hands, as people bet on whether it will survive, or how long it lasts before being burnt down and previous attempts to sabotage it have even included the bribing of security guards

Link -via The Agitator | Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The rituals at Kanaljorden were conducted on a massive stone pavement constructed on the bottom of a shallow lake (currently a peat fen). Some crania were fairly intact while others were found as isolated fragments. The more intact ones represent eleven individuals, both men and women, ranging in age between infants and middle age. Two of the skulls have had wooden stakes inserted all the way from the base to the top. In another case a woman’s temple bone was found inside the skull of another woman. Besides human skulls, the finds also include a small number of post-cranial human bones and bones from animals, as well as artefacts of stone, wood, bone and antler.

The skull depositions at Kanaljorden are clearly ritual in character. The next step is to find out if the human bones are relics of dearly departed that were handled in a complex secondary burial ritual, or trophies of defeated enemies. The archaeologists hope that the ongoing laboratory analysis [stable isotopes] will give clues as to whether the bones are the remains of locals or people with a distant geographic origin, and if they represent a family group or persons unrelated to each other.

Read more at Aadvarchaeology. Link

(Image credit: Anna Arnberg)

The 31-year-old tells the paper that he was able to buy radioactive waste from foreign companies and picked apart the components in a smoke detector (apparently older smoke detector contain nuclear material). He believes he spent between $5,000 and $6,000 on the project in total.

It was only later when the young man contacted Sweden’s nuclear power agency that he realized his project was illegal. Police came to his apartment and confiscated the material. The young man was arrested but later released.

It is uncertain how the project went unnoticed, as the man kept a blog about his experiments. Link to story. Link to blog. -via Breakfast Links

Örebro, Sweden is celebrating its annual open art festival, which sounds like a prime opportunity for dividing a community by aesthetic. Ask a handful of people whether or not they like Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman’s giant wooden rabbit, which appears to have toppled over and decided to rest, and you’ll get about a 50/50 split of fans and haters. Regardless of which side of the line you fall on, it’s kind of hard not to admit that the big guy is cute. Check out tons more pictures of the Big Yellow Rabbit on Kuriositas. Link

Image: swedishCass

The ageing rocker claims to have attended almost three hundred shows last year, often skipping work in the process.

Eventually his last employer tired of his absences and Tullgren was left jobless and reliant on welfare handouts.

But his sessions with the occupational psychologists led to a solution of sorts: Tullgren signed a piece of paper on which his heavy metal lifestyle was classified as a disability, an assessment that entitles him to a wage supplement from the job centre.

“I signed a form saying: ‘Roger feels compelled to show his heavy metal style. This puts him in a difficult situation on the labour market. Therefore he needs extra financial help’. So now I can turn up at a job interview dressed in my normal clothes and just hand the interviewers this piece of paper,” he said.

The manager at his new workplace allows him to go to concerts as long as he makes up for lost time at a later point. He is also allowed to dress as he likes and listen to heavy metal while washing up.

Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user AnnieGreenSprings used under Creative Commons license

From an early age most boys learn that they are “should” play with trucks, love blue and play baseball. Girls are taught to play with dolls, love pink and play house. However more and more parents are educators are experimenting with raising children “genderless” such as the Canadian parents who would not reveal the gender of their baby. Now this preschool in Sweden  leaves gender roles up to the kids. What do you think? Should children be raised “genderless?”

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

“Society expects girls to be girlie, nice and pretty and boys to be manly, rough and outgoing,” says Jenny Johnsson, a 31-year-old teacher. “Egalia gives them a fantastic opportunity to be whoever they want to be.”

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward.

Link

The distraught man, drifting in his disable craft with a broken tiller near Kalmar off the south coast of Sweden, claimed his wife had drowned after he couldn’t find her on the boat, The Local reports.

Rescuers soon found that the sailor’s wife had never been on the boat and was safe on land.

The boat was towed back to shore, and the drunken man was given a breath test and arrested for boating while intoxicated.

Link | Image

Swedish police were called to handle a wayward beaver for the second time in recent months yesterday morning after one of the industrious rodents made its way into a homeowner’s garage.

Whether the beaver took a wrong turn somewhere remains a mystery, but the curious animal’s journey nevertheless ended in a garage on Grindstugevägen in Nässjö in central Sweden.

Police have since contacted local hunters and animal consultants who plan to “return the beaver to freedom” later on Monday.

Back in April, police near Köping in central Sweden were called after an ambulance reported seeing a beaver lumbering down Glasgatan, the local Arboga Tidning newspaper reported.

Rather than put the animal in the back of the patrol car, however, police decided instead to simply point the beaver in the right direction.

Link

You may be asking for trouble when you commission taxidermy work from someone who is unfamiliar with the species. That was just the case for King Frederick I of Sweden in 1731. The lion was a gift, but after it died, the pelt and bones were presented to a taxidermist who had never seen a lion. You see the result looks more like a cartoon character than the king of beasts. The stuffed lion is still on display at Gripsholm’s Castle. Ulrika Good tells us the story, with the help of Google Translate, and has more pictures. Link -via The Daily What

Update: Ulrika Good has posted an English version, which is better than the Google translation linked above.

Vasaloppet {wiki} is an annual 90km cross-country ski race that is billed as the largest in the world. This year’s race took place March 6th between the towns of Sälen and Mora in Sweden. See a video of the more than 15,000 people who took part this year. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

To add to the mystery, 50-100 jackdaws, a bird species in the crow family, fell dead in central Sweden late Tuesday night, English-language Swedish news website The Local reported Wednesday.
"We do not know what the cause is," Skovde police commander Tomas Ahlgren said. The birds fell in the city of Falkoping, which is southeast of Skovde.

But conspiracy theorists beware: mass deaths by birds are actually quite common (the US Geological Service’s National Wildlife Health Center website listed 90 in the last 6 months alone) and the culprit is usually something mundane: military death ray, er, I mean bacterial infection.

Link (Photo: Bjorn Larsson Rosvall)

Google Translate renders the Swedish name as “Observation tower”, but it also looks like a castle. This cute little building was built of brick on a granite base in 1926. It sits on a 1000 square meter lot.

Link (Google Translate) via Super Punch | Photo: Blocket.se

This police officer in Malmö, Sweden, has become an internet sensation. He seems to think that he’s a good dancer. Do you agree?

via Urlesque

[...]a delightful mix of the style of a’50s greaser, the corpulence and bad hygiene of a biker, the love of the Confederate flag of a southern redneck, and the enthusiasm for drinking of a British soccer hooligan. Basically, every stereotype about poor white trash spanning both time and globe, rolled into one.

The Faster Times then presents a gallery of fourteen photos of raggae folk. Conor Creighton of The Guardian further describes the subculture:

The raggare have always tended to be drawn from country folk: farmers, petrol station owners, low-skilled workers. The growth in their numbers is the result of the differing fortunes of the US and Swedish economies over the decades: successive oil crises and a poor exchange rate saw Americans trading in gas-guzzlers for more economical models; the Swedes, relatively rich in comparison, bought their cars for a song.

For young Swedes, these giant American cars, which contrasted with the safe, boxy Volvos their parents drove, were the ultimate symbols of rebellion. And they were dirt-cheap. “They were stupid,” Georg says about the Americans. “Some of the cars were limited edition. They built maybe 70 of them and they were selling them to us for a few thousand when they were collector pieces.”

Faster Times Link and Guardian Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Christer Ehrling

An Official Proclamation letter sent to Helsinki on January 3, 1774, during the time of King Gustaf III, concerning the delivery of grain to the Royal or Military Storage House… The wavy line (known as a meander) with two horizontal lines through it and three stylized “crowns” in the spaces (all together known as a Crown Coil or Kronoslinga) was the indicia that this was to be sent through the Royal Swedish Crown Post… The two feathers (out of three possible) indicate it is a very urgent message.

Some sources suggest that black and white feathers were also used to indicate that travel should be done by day and by night.  This philatelic innovation was commemorated on a Swedish stamp in 1984.

Link.

But is that necessarily true? Consider the case of Sweden:

Sweden’s vibrant civil society exists in a country with one of the world’s most interventionist welfare states. Swedes’ personal income tax can be as little as 29% of pay, but anyone earning over £32,000 will pay between 49% and 60% through a combination of local government and state income tax. The country’s tax burden, at 47.1% of GDP, is the world’s second largest, after Denmark.

In exchange, Swedes enjoy the benefits of arguably the world’s most generous welfare state. Parents get universal nursery coverage capped at £130 a month, free schools, free health and dental care for under-18s, as well as generous personal benefits such as a child allowance of £1,070 a year per child. Most jobseekers can expect to receive 80% of their previous salary for the first 200 days of inactivity (dropping to 70% for the next 100 days). Couples can have joint parental leave lasting 480 days, which they can divide as they want, most of the time paid at 80% of their income. By and large, people are well taken care of.

Sweden’s expansive welfare state helps to explain the vitality of the volunteer organisations in the country, says Svedberg. "The welfare state plays a very important part by giving people the practical and mental space necessary to be able to be active. It creates possibilities for citizens." Strikingly, the people who volunteer the most are those you might think have the least time available. "Most volunteers are working full time and have one or two children," he says. "They tend to be well educated and well connected. If you are connected to different social arenas, you are more likely to be recruited into volunteering activities."

Link

This video clip has been a true Internet meme here in Sweden. It’s in Swedish, but I’ve done my best to add English subtitles, so that you Neatorama fans also can enjoy it.

Link – Tvjournalistjavisst via Pusha

The special features a bunch of cartoons, snippets from feature Disney films, and promos for new projects, and while only a small fraction of the content is holiday-related, half the country tunes in every year as a tradition.

Slate’s Jeremy Stahl experienced the cultural phenomenon firsthand:

The show’s cultural significance cannot be understated. You do not tape or DVR Kalle Anka for later viewing. You do not eat or prepare dinner while watching Kalle Anka. Age does not matter—every member of the family is expected to sit quietly together and watch a program that generations of Swedes have been watching for 50 years. Most families plan their entire Christmas around Kalle Anka, from the Smörgåsbord at lunch to the post-Kalle visit from Jultomten. “At 3 o’clock in the afternoon, you can’t to do anything else, because Sweden is closed,” Lena Kättström Höök, a curator at the Nordic Museum who manages the “Traditions” exhibit, told me. “So even if you don’t want to watch it yourself, you can’t call anyone else or do anything else, because no one will do it with you.”

Any time someone tries to modify the tradition, by even so much as recording the presenter’s lines so he can spend the day with his family, the public gets wind of it and revolts until normalcy is restored.  Head over to Slate and read the full, fascinating article.

Link (via Bifurcated Rivets)  Image: Serieforlaget AB

Is the belief in (or fear of, depending on your point of view) God necessary to have a "good" society? What would a nation of atheists look like? Would a godless country lead to lawlessness and immorality?

We actually don't have to wonder - there is a place where the great majority of people are not only not religious - they're can't even be bothered about the questions of faith, God, and life's meaning.

Sociologist Phil Zuckerman spent a year in Denmark and Sweden, the least religious countries in the world and perhaps even in history, and interviewed people about their religious beliefs (technically, the absence of such beliefs). He published his findings last year (Oct 2008) in his book Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment.

TYWKIWDBI has some thought-provoking excerpts from the book:

Here's the premise of [Zuckerman's] book:

“First of all, I argue that society without God is not only possible, but can be quite civil and pleasant. This admittedly polemical aspect of my book is aimed primarily at countering the claims of certain outspoken, conservative Christians who regularly argue that a society without God would be hell on earth: rampant with immorality, full of evil, and teeming with depravity. Well, it isn’t. Denmark and Sweden are remarkably strong, safe, healthy, moral, and prosperous societies…”

He's careful not to extol the absence of religious belief as preferable for a society, while arguing strongly that when religious belief (or dogma) is absent, society can crank along just fine. Herewith some excerpts and some of my notes from the book -

p. 6 - “…their overall rates of violent crime – such as murder, aggravated assault, and rape – are among the lowest on earth. Yet the majority of Danes and Swedes do not believe that God is “up there,” keeping diligent tabs on their behavior… In fact, most Danes and Swedes don’t even believe in the very notion of “sin.” Almost nobody in Denmark and Sweden believes that the Bible is divine in origin. And the rate of weekly church attendance in these Nordic nations is the lowest on earth…” [...]

p. 10 – "When they say they are “Christian” they are just referring to a cultural heritage and history. When asked what it means to be Christian, they said 'being kind to others, taking care of the poor and sick, and being a good and moral person.' They almost never mentioned God, Jesus, or the Bible in their explanation of Christian identity. When I specifically asked these Nordic Christians if they believed that Jesus was the Son of God or the Messiah, they nearly always said no – usually without hesitation. Did they believe that Jesus was born of a virgin or that he rose from the grave? Such queries were usually met with genuine laughter – as through the mere asking was rather silly.”

I haven't read it, but will definitely put this fascinating book on the short list of must-reads this year: Link

Here's a fascinating interview with Phil Zuckerman about, amongs other things, the difference of being a religious Christian in America and a cultural Christian in Denmark and the rise of Islam because of the immigration from Africa:

[YouTube Clip]

The King of Sweden returned from his campaign to find that Blenda and her girlfriends triumphantly standing on top of a massive heaping pile of dead Vikings, and was so pumped up about the whole thing that he granted the women of Smaland a bunch of totally awesome political and social rights that had been previously unavailable to them. From that point on, all daughters had the right to inherit property, money and land equally with their brothers, and were allowed to wear military-style garments around town and at their weddings. They were also given the prestigious right to wear the Royal Coat of Arms on their clothing – a tradition that has lasted to this day. Blenda is still recognized as a national hero in Sweden.

And that, my friends, is a pretty badass way to fight for women’s rights.

If there’s a lesson here, it’s this: don’t ever mess with Viking women. Ever.

Link

The breast issue has proved divisive, with political wranglings leading to the question being struck off the agenda at an earlier meeting in April.

These political cleavages remained on view right up until Wednesday’s meetings with disagreements on both the left and right sides. [...]

According to Forsberg, some on the council had lobbied for wording which would have required women to keep their nipples covered, but Forsberg explained that attempting to enforce such a rule would have been too complicated.

"We don’t define what bathing suits men should wear so it doesn’t make much sense to do it for women. And besides, it’s not unusual for men to have large breasts that resemble women’s breasts," he said.

I’m glad that the city’s sports and recreation committee has finally provided the proper support for this important matter. Rest assured, Neatorama will keep you abreast of the situation: Link

Me and my girlfriend came up with a somewhat different Christmas gift for our friends this year. Instead of running around trying to figure out what each and everyone wants, we bought the same thing for everyone: a Swedish “pepparkaksform” (ginger snaps baking pan) shaped like a Dala horse.

The mission was then for everyone to bake a Dala horse pepparkaka in any style they wanted to. All contributions are now up and the contestants can vote for the winner by email. The one that gets the most votes will win something that we think fits the persons whoever wins.

Which one is your favorite?

The Cookie Race Blog | Photos of all the Contributions