Silly Stories From Now and Then
SHE MOZZA BEEN HUNGRY!
A Dog of International Tastes
The thing about destination weddings is, you have to be able to get to the destination.
Feeling well prepared for their upcoming wedding, Boston couple Donato and Magda went out for a few hours to obtain their marriage license and then had a romantic dinner. When they got back, though, Donato’s passport wasn’t on the counter where he had left it.
That’s when they noticed their young golden retriever displaying what can only be described as guilty-dog face. Chickie did not, as the kids say, pass the vibe check. Sure enough, her owners found the passport on Chickie’s dog bed. With bite marks in the cover, the entire page of personal identification chewed up, and barely one week to go until their wedding—in Italy.
“She’s really very well behaved,” Donato and Magda earnestly told the news reporter for WCVB Channel 5 Boston. Sure. We’ll take their word for it. But of all the items to chew up? And of all the times to chew it up?? She couldn’t just root through the garbage, or go to town on a shoe?
Still, the couple seem remarkably chill about the whole thing. They reached out to state officials with requests for help expediting the process for a new passport. In the meantime, one can only hope they are keeping a real close eye on their wedding rings.
THE GARDEN OF EDEN-STAGRAM?
Here Comes the “Sun”
The owners of Stoke Fruit Farm, located on Hayling Island off England’s southern coast, have an unusual problem. In their gorgeous field of over 2 million sunflowers—where visitors are welcome to take photos and pick their own sunflowers—people are determined to hang loose. Show off what their mama gave them. Let the sunflowers shine where the sun don’t.
Siblings Sam Wilson and Nette Petley had to put up a “No Public Nudity” sign outside their field. They only opened at the end of July, yet there have been no less than six reports of visitors stripping all their clothes off before taking their requisite farm selfies. And the siblings resent having their farm's wholesome reputation turn…seedy.
But we have to ask, why? Is this a new TikTok challenge? Is stripping down in a sunflower field the new mental-health fad (think Japanese forest bathing, but naked)? Or are tourists just getting even weirder?
Ironically, the owners’ talking to the media may end up giving people the wrong idea. “The [field] is huge and there are so many places that you can hide away without anyone finding you for over an hour,” lamented Petley to CNN. “But these incidents were blatantly public.”
Translation: Listen up, sunflower pervs. You do you, as long as you can be discreet about it. Then again, I guess if someone’s first thought when gazing upon the sun-drenched glow of a sunflower field is “Finally, the perfect setting for my boudoir shoot!” then discretion isn’t necessarily part of their vocabulary.
BOMBS AWAY!
An Act of Civil Fishobedience
When the community of Lower Sayreville, New Jersey, lost power, electrical workers floundered to diagnose the issue. They might have dismissed it as an act of cod. But then they discovered that the cause was (you guessed it) a fish.
While reporters shirked their duty and failed to tell us precisely what species of fish, some kind of fish was on top of a transformer and had “caused the coils to become misaligned,” according to a company spokesperson.
Experts inform us that this is highly unusual, since a transformer is not a natural habitat for any known fish species. Therefore, the fish must have had help getting up there. The likely culprit is a bird that dropped its fish mid-flight, and the likely bird is an osprey, a fish-eater that’s plentiful in the region.
That wasn’t always the case, though. Due to agriculture’s old favourite condiment, DDT, ospreys were previously endangered in New Jersey, which meant their nests were protected and any nests in inconvenient places had to be relocated. These days, their population has recovered. And for some reason, 75% of osprey pairs use man-made features for their nests—mainly, platforms installed by conservation groups, but also power lines.
If I were an osprey and my species had been driven to the brink of extinction AND my nest had been moved to some silly platform, I’d be pissed off. Most likely, I’d see humans as my mortal enemy. And maybe, inspired by the Summer of Orca Rebellion, I’d decide to fight back by mucking up the power company whose lines I was rudely evicted from: a signal to the other birds of prey that our moment of vengeance has arrived…
Or maybe the clumsy bird just “dropped the fish,” or whatever. A likely explanation. Whatever helps you sleep at night.
Which story was the biggest Oops?
Let us know which story made you cringe or LOL. Someday we might even do something with the responses!
Time for another weird snapshot from history! Make sure your dog didn't eat your passport, because we're heading to Sweden.
LEFT TURN AT OOPS-ALLA
Getting It Right - for the Wrong Reasons
The H in H-Day is short for Högertrafikomläggningen, which translates to “the right-hand traffic reorganisation.” That makes it sound extremely boring, but some maintain to this day that Dagen H was the biggest logistical event in Sweden’s history. Here’s what happened, in a (lemon-shaped) nutshell.
WHEN did it start? Over 40 years earlier. Bureaucracy, amiright? In the early 1920s, Swedish politicians began debating whether they should join most of Europe in driving on the right. They prolonged the debate until the Second World War, during which everyone had more pressing concerns. They resumed the discussion in the ’50s. Finally, in 1963, Swedish Parliament approved the plan to make the change, but not until 1967.
WHY did they make the switch? To improve road safety...or maybe due to Euro-peer pressure. Officials argued that Sweden should align with the bordering countries, which all drove on the right. (Even Lithuania!! How could they have fallen behind Lithuania?!) Officially, though, the reason was that Swedes already tended to drive cars with left-side steering. Driving on the left in a left-steering vehicle was believed to be a major cause of traffic accidents.
WHO wanted it? Well, not your average driver. Part of the reason it took so long was that the proposal was enormously unpopular among Swedish citizens. In 1955, 83% voted to continue driving on the left. I mean, who can blame them? They didn't even have Google Maps to help them out. Nevertheless, the government formed a "right-hand traffic commission" and assigned it the unenviable job of getting the nation ready and hyped up.
HOW the heck did they do that? Yes, okay, I’m dating myself, but please picture the Commission’s strategy in galaxy-brain-meme format:
Regular brain: Fuss with seven zillion infrastructure changes. Approximately 350,000 road signs had to be removed or replaced. New traffic lights and signals had to be installed at every intersection (and covered up until the day of the change). Every transit stop, bicycle lane, and one-way street had to be assessed. And on and on.
Slightly glow-y brain: Teach people how it’s gonna be done. With a four-year public education program. It’s hard to find details in English on exactly what this program included. However, psychiatrists were consulted, which makes me think it must have gone beyond “Here’s how to pass on the right” and addressed, for example, what to do if you’re having Oedipal thoughts about one or both parents (a leading cause of distracted driving in the ’Sixties, probably).
Blinding high-beams brain: Win hearts AND minds! If this were happening now, we’d be swamped with annoying "informative" TikTok dances. In these olden times, instead, a nationwide PR campaign put the Dagen H logo (an arrow moving from the left lane to the right lane) on everything from milk cartons to underwear. There was a song contest (a journalist won). TV programs booked celebrities to make sure people were tuned in, then segued into talking about Dagen H. All with the intended effect, one imagines, of inundating people to the extent that they accepted the coming change and just wanted to get it over with. Now that's leadership!
Finally: WHAT came of it all? With hundreds of thousands of public servants and volunteers facilitating everything, the September 3 changeover went off reasonably well. The number of initial car accidents was lower than expected: “only” 157 that day, and lower in the following weeks. But in the longer term, was Dagen H worth it? By the measure of road safety…not really. By 1969, the accident rates had risen back to the levels seen during the left-side driving system. Hey, at least Sweden had finally caught up with those darn smug Lithuanians!
Sign up for the newsletter!
Give us your email and we will give you emails. Email for emails, it's a win-win!
