A genuine Englishiander gives us this rundown of what his people do on The Fourth of July (besides watching American TV). One thing they do is watch fireworks:

“Crowds of people dress in red coats and gather under large scaffolds, which are extensively rigged with explosive fireworks. At an agreed-upon time across the country, the fuses are lit and the fireworks shoot downward, into the throng that has gathered underneath. This serves to remind the British people of the pain and suffering that came from the defeat endured by the King’s Army, and to prepare younger generations of English men for the eventuality of a second battle in which the Crown retakes what is rightfully British land.”

“There is a difference between inspiration and imitation,” so stop copying Ace Ventura: Pet Detective in this workshop. (via Prufrock)

All righty then.

In other news, they had automated hot dog machines in Gothenburg, Sweden, in the 1950s.

I believe these are actual submissions from grad and undergrad students, but the result is funny. Last December, a Harvard student put up “LOL My Thesis” as a way to procrastinate her own thesis writing. Here are some submissions:

Reed College: NERO WAS ACTUALLY AWESOME AND I CAN PROVE IT, and building programs act as excellent predictors to how your rule is going to end.

Steton Hill University: It is possible to write an urban fantasy novel featuring vampires who aren’t having sex. But then multiple agents and editors will tell you it’s nonpublishable. Thanks, Twlight.

Princeton: Sauron is pretty evil. Voldemort is also pretty evil. Sauron and Voldemort are also pretty similar, but they are not EXACTLY the same. I will now talk about them for 90 pages.

Boston University: Sir Arthur Cannon Doyle is the Nostradamus of forensic science.

Texas Christian University: Museums are culturally appropriative pack rats, and people are noticing.

U.C. Berkeley: If You Took Out the Best Part of This Book, It Wouldn’t Be as Good.

A student from John Hopkins University offers the actual thesis for comparison: Homegrown Solutions: Global Environmental Change and Sustainability

Translation: Cities aren’t really doing anything but the fact that they’re doing things is a thing and eventually the government may notice that it’s a thing.

I found this site via a Facebook friend, who had another friend add this comment:

My actual thesis was something like “Interactive storytelling through the medium of narrative games facilitates a stronger Aristotelian catharsis, producing more proper pleasure, making them a more powerful tool for sharing hope in a sin-scarred world.”

Translation: “Somebody make a video game based on Christian principles that doesn’t make me want to tear my thumbs off, please.”

Q. Why are tennis balls fuzzy? Aerodynamics, baby.

The fuzzy felt that covers a tennis ball helps you control it when you bat it over the net. The bounce and spin you get with a fuzzy ball is lessened by the fuzz. You would notice a difference if you hit around a bald ball after practicing with a new, fuzzy ball. The bald ball would be a little wilder on the court.

Q. If blood is red, why do veins look blue?

This gets at the reason why anything has color. The light that reflects off an object gives it the color we see. Good light has all colors in it, even colors we don’t see (e.g. infrared and ultraviolet). For the blood in your veins, light must soak into your skin before coming back to your eye. Apparently, the light in the blue spectrum is most successful at this, so that’s what we see.

The label “blue blood” to refer to aristocrats comes from fair-skinned Spainish families who lived in the Land of Castles, Castile. They argued that they had the purest breeding in their country, which could be clearly seen from the blue veins on their skin. The truth is that their skin color made their veins more visible, not that their blood was bluer than the Moors or anyone else.

Q. Why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8?

Actually, the packaging incongruity happened for practical reasons, which we have since overcome. Buns were baked in sets of four, because that’s how large the pans were. See? Practical. And buns are not for hot dog use alone. You could cradle any sausage in a warm, whole-grain bun and shovel chili over it, so the question loses its power when the two aren’t connected.

As for why hot dogs came ten to a pack for so long, it’s because that’s the way they are found in the wild. Obviously. Berk Foods claims, “Americans enjoy seven billion hot dogs between Memorial Day and Labor Day,” which is the reason so many school children are marked “obese” on their school papers, which is important for school funding because larger kids get more federal dollars because it’s easier to leave large kids behind than small, non-hot-dog-eating kids, and as you know, no child will be left behind in American schools.

Thanks for asking.

I meditated the other day, in this space, on the question of whether Lutherans are boring. It’s a given, of course, that I’m boring personally, but what about the rest of my brethren? I tried to think of some notable Lutheran I could point to and say, “You call that boring? Ha!” But I couldn’t come up with any.

And then one of my Facebook friends posted this video.

Now I don’t know whether Egil Ronningsbakken, the performance artist here, is a Lutheran or not. Odds are he’s at least nominally Lutheran, since most Norwegians are, but more and more Norwegians are purely secular nowadays, without even going through the traditional pro formas of baptism and confirmation.

Still, he’s at least Lutheran by heritage. And whatever you may call whatever it is he’s doing, you can’t call it boring. Frankly, just watching the video is almost physically painful to me, afraid of heights as I am.

I might mention that Preikestolen, the cliff where he’s performing here, is the precise spot I had in mind in the big climactic scene in The Year of the Warrior where Erling and his men confront a warlock under the northern lights. I called it the High Seat in the book, not in order to protect the innocent, but just because I assumed that Preikestolen (The Pulpit) wouldn’t be a name the Vikings would have used. So I made one up.

Lutherans. Not boring. Just bug-eye crazy.