Category: In the News

a giant straw Christmas goat… ON FIRE!

Have you ever heard of the giant straw Christmas goat? In some parts of the world, it’s a thing.

In Gävle [pronounced “yeah-vleh”], Sweden, they build a giant straw goat for Christmas every year. It’s big — at least 43′ high, up to 49′ some years, and it weighs 3 tons. I don’t know why they do this. One news article said the association of a straw goat with Christmas goes back centuries there, and now some residents don’t even know why. In some stories Christmas elves would ride the Yule goat door to door to deliver gifts to sleeping children. Another site associates this Yule goat with Thor, god of thunder, and sacred trees and fertility. Considering the modern take on Thor from The Avengers, it’s hard to see how a straw goat fits in. (Leave a comment if you can think of anything.)

Just a straw goat by itself is not so special (at least to people not familiar with the traditions), but there’s more to the story. There is a tradition that’s not supposed to be part of the tradition — burning the goat down. They have been building these giant ones since 1966, yet only 16 have survived past beyond Christmas day. I don’t know how the residents there feel about this, so no offense intended toward them, but the burning of it has happened before the internet existed, so it’s probably not just tourists wanting in on the action.

One year some people dressed up as Santa Claus and gingerbread men and they shot flaming arrows at the goat to burn it down. In 2010, someone attempted to bribe a guard so they could steal it with a helicopter, but their offer was rejected. (I’m against stealing, but it would be surreal to see it flying through the air.) One time someone ran into it with a car which made the legs collapse.

The staff here at Buffet o’ Blog have discussed the idea of building our own giant straw goat numerous times. It hasn’t happened yet, but here’s a highlight of a few of the ideas:

  • Have a big one-night festival with it, selling burgers, hot dogs, hot chocolate, memorabilia, etc. Have live bands playing music in exciting styles. Then for the big finale, set the goat on fire for a giant bonfire. Could roast marshmallows and make s’mores. Sell tickets or parking fees to raise money for charity.
  • Make the straw goat over 50 feet tall, to set a new Guinness World Record.
  • Fill the butt of the goat with fireworks and smoke bombs, activated by remote, to start the bonfire. Picture that! It would be a memorable evening for everyone there!
  • In a previous discussion, someone left a comment suggesting the belly of the goat be filled with fireworks and manure, so when the burning is almost done, it will be raining poop and everyone will know to go home. While it’s a creative idea, I am totally against this. That would certainly be memorable, but people would not come back the next year.
  • The idea of our own festival is not to mock the tradition. It would just be fun to have a party and burn a 50-foot straw goat.

If you want to read more of the original discussions years ago, it was here, originally, and more here.

If you have any ideas to make this idea even more random and/or awesome, leave a comment. And if you can think of any connection between Thor and straw goats, share that too.

breaking news about Thanksgiving

I was visiting some family over the Thanksgiving break, and someone turned the TV news on for a few minutes. One of their “Breaking News” stories was that there was a lot of holiday travel on Thanksgiving. That’s not really news, since everyone knows it will happen, and it’s not breaking news because it was already predicted and known.

I’ve seen a lot of other mundane things be called “breaking news” before. One time the President’s plane was landing in Philadelphia. I don’t keep up with his travel schedule, so I wondered if something was wrong. Nope, that was where he was going. He was just traveling to a meeting. So I don’t see how it’s even news. Does anyone need to know? Was there nothing more relevant happening that day?

I understand that the news networks want to keep their viewers “engaged” [i.e., glued to the TV / radio / stream all the time] so they want “breaking news”, and they sometimes manufacture drama, but instead of all that, why don’t they actually report interesting and/or relevant news? There’s a lot of good things that happen in the world each day. It seems like these days some of the most popular mainstream news sources just try to incite anger toward a particular political party by blaming all the problems on that one group of people. (I’ll stop the rant on that before it gets going, but let me remind you that biased reporting like that is called propaganda. News is reporting the facts of what happened, not casting blame on that “other party”. Look to see if your preferred news sources do this. Both sides do it.)

Whoops! Started to rant there. My bad! Back on topic, here’s some “breaking news” about Thanksgiving — many people ate a lot and had a good time doing it! 🙂

Here’s some Thanksgiving-related news… at a family get-together I attended, someone brought cheese dip with sausage in it. I think there was some slight befuddlement at that, since it’s not a traditional side dish at Thanksgiving. But it’s not like green beans and corn are anything special on their own. Besides, cheese dip proved to be beneficial since the turkey was on the dry side. (I’m not complaining — it’s hard to cook a turkey well, and it was still good — especially with the cheese dip.)

Here’s another point along those lines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tradition and having the same foods for Thanksgiving each year. I’m glad we always have dressing/stuffing, since it’s rare and delicious. But it’s better to not let tradition keep us from making things better. It’s good to ask, “How can we make our Thanksgiving meal more awesome?” Keep what’s already great, but don’t be afraid to add new items or change things up if it improves the experience. The holiday meal is not great just because of tradition — it’s great because of good-tasting food and enjoyable fellowship with family. So make it awesome!

enjoying holiday feasts

We’re in the holiday season now, with Thanksgiving and Christmas approaching. And typically there are family reunions and parties during this time where people eat a lot of food. And there will undoubtedly be “news” reporting linking this with obesity. So let me say this again: holiday meals don’t cause obesity.

While this blog has a lot of randomness and made-up content, that is absolutely true and supported by research. Follow the link to read more and find my source.

The TL;DR version: The average weight gain for the entire holiday season is just 0.8 pounds. Less than one pound! So while at these feasts of celebration and fellowship, enjoy the food. During that meal, don’t worry about calories and fat grams — just enjoy the time. Resume your healthy eating at other meals.

Perhaps I should add a disclaimer that I’m not a doctor nor a dietician. Although I do know a lot about eating… 🙂 I also try to eat healthy and responsibly most of the time. It just irks me when “news” people try to make people feel so bad they can’t enjoy a celebratory feast with family and friends.

Does poop contain gold?

The other day I was in a conversation that got random really fast. Someone started sharing some scientific trivia, and they said you could burn a bucket of cow manure and get some rare elements like gold. I was immediately skeptical and made that known. They went to get their book of random scientific stuff (not the actual title) and found the reference. It turns out that someone had taken cow urine and boiled it to produce something useful. At this point I’m still skeptical, but figure since it’s actually published in a book and not just some obscure blog, it’s worth a minute of research. The results were surprising (and not all related to the original article)…

Apparently some doctor in India believes that cow urine has healing powers and can supposedly cure 70 to 80 incurable diseases like diabetes. It’s also sold as “highly effective products for preventive medicine” in some countries. (So if you don’t get sick, it worked, and you should buy more!) However — and this is important — there is thus far no scientific proof about it healing anything. Some studies have shown that it can lead to significant side effects, including death. So I wouldn’t recommend it. But it is good to use as fertilizer to grow actually edible food…

During my research, I saw where one guy said, “I drink cow urine every day. That is why I do not have Covid right now.” That is faulty reasoning, and it could easily be countered by someone saying they do NOT drink cow urine at all, and thus they don’t have Covid. But then again, how many people who drink cow urine every day catch Covid? The number has to be really small, right? (Surely there are very few people who could even be in that group.)

Some doctor made a “wonder drug” of cow’s milk, cow’s urine, cow excrement (soaked in water), and butter, and they claimed it will cure “99 percent of diseases”. I’m no professional doctor, but I’m fairly certain that’s a load of crap (both literally and figuratively).

Back on point, there has been someone who claimed to have found gold in cow urine and dung. Perhaps if you want to investigate the microscopic level you could find some — I have heard that ocean water has gold in it, but it’s such tiny amounts that it’s not worth doing anything with.

Thanks to the internet’s amazing ability to lead you down rabbit trails you didn’t even know existed, I just learned that human poop does contain trace amounts of gold, silver, platinum, copper, and rare elements like palladium and vanadium that are used in cell phones and computers. So is your poop worth its weight in gold? Not quite. These particles are about 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and of course there are other non-valuable particles in there to sort through. (That job would stink!) It’s estimated that an American city with a population of 1 million sends down the drain about $13 million worth of precious metals each year. So maybe it’s worth finding some automated way to filter it. Actually, I bet this becomes a legitimate business someday, when someone figures out how to efficiently extract the valuable elements from all the worthless elements.

People have tried to figure out alchemy for years (converting a metal into gold), but perhaps this is the closest we’ll get.