Over Here

Oh, and by the way, the new picture you see in the banner above was, like the old one, taken here on Härnön. It shows the peninsula called Härnöklubb in January.

Just to let you know, I have been pondering your mysterious object. But I will have to come back later to elaborate on my musings.

nah, start with something more difficult. Das ist eine “[CENSORED]”! Are the objects supposed to be cultural artifacts or just objects in general? In other words: is your intended audience non-swedes or mankind?

Good to hear of your safe return, btw.

Hi Jonas. Look, I said I was starting with something easy–at least easy for Swedes. So in this particular instance, I guess my audience is non-Swedes, that is, the inferior part of mankind.

I promise that next time I will show something that Swedes won’t know about. Maybe a bagel. That would be good.

And sorry I censored your comment; I’m generally against censorship, but I don’t want to make it too easy for people.

Alejna, please do stop back and muse.

Well, also Swedes like to scratch their heads, and think about their inferiority, so looking forward to more visual riddles. I’m actually ok with your [CENSORED] decision not to allow the [CENSORED] object [CENSORED] in Swedish since that would truly [CENSORED] which is also a good thing, I think, generally!

Jonas, you know I’m teasing about Swedish superiority. I can’t think of a population where it’s less acceptable to talk about “our superiority” than the Swedes. I’ve always found this fascinating, since the contrast is so great with the US, where politicians and others routinely begin speeches with words like “In this, the greatest country in the history of the world…”

As for your earlier question, I have no idea if future objects will be cultural artifacts or not. I guess it depends on what I find. I’m keeping an open mind–something else you don’t often see these days in the US.

hmmmm…it kind of looks like a ceramic fuse to me…

DING DING DING!

Laura, your background in real estate is shining through! You are right—it is a ceramic fuse. This is the type of fuse used in Swedish houses that don’t have circuit breakers.

Since you can’t see inside the fuse, you have to rely on a little colored metal flake that is supposed to fall away from the end when the fuse has blown, though in my experience they’re pretty hard to interpret. The one shown here is a 10 amp fuse.

Congratulations, Laura!

YAY! Do I get to burn down the goat now?

Now Laura, don’t blow a fuse. In fact, fuses are used to avoid fires, so clearly that would not be appropriate. I’ll let you know when it seems like a good time to burn the goat.

Ah, I would not have guessed fuse. I think it might be smaller than I thought. (I though it looked about the size of a soy sauce bottle. Which would make a pretty enormous fuse.)

Alejna, Con-fuse-us say: “Some things are smaller than a bottle of soy sauce.” Check the grain of the wood for one indication of the object’s true size. Of course, I wanted it to be mysterious, so I deliberately didn’t photograh it in, say, the context of a fuse box.

Well, I see by reading the comments that my guess of an oddly shaped wine bottle cooler is not correct.

Hi Gregory! Long time, no chat. I knew I wasn’t right, but the picture made me think of a sanding bit from a Dremel tool.

More Eyeball Benders, please!

Erin: Hi! Nice to hear from you. Actually the sanding bit is a pretty darn good guess, since it does look a lot like that, and is about the same size. However, I would not try to sand anything with this particular item.

Aimee: You and Alejna both seem to have overestimated the size of the doohickey, unless of course you have some wine bottles that are about 3 cm tall. Which would have the advantage of making them very easy to cool, I would think.

On a linguistic side-note, is a “wine bottle cooler” something that cools wine bottles, or something that cools bottles of wine? If the latter, “wine cooler” would seem a more appropriate name, but then we run into the fact that “wine cooler” is already in use, specifically to refer to a rather vile sort of 1980s-era drink. So we have the classic linguistic problem of “blocking”. What to do? (One possible answer: have another glass of wine.)

[…] I realize that the What is this? series will never become a series until there are at least two entries, so here is number […]