(no subject)

This is the most bizarre thing ever.

I caught a whiff of intrigue this morning over a post about a hundred year old package stashed in the town of Otta, Norway, and marked "May be opened in 2012". Nobody knows what's in it, and they were going to be opening it live, on air, at 11am Central time -- so about fifteen minutes ago. I clicked onto the stream broadcasting it and was surprised to see people singing. I thought perhaps I'd got the time wrong and the stream had flipped over into some kind of cultural performance.

Not so. When I backtracked, they showed the man chosen to open the package carefully removing it from a glass case in the Gudbrandsdal museum...putting it in a large tupperware container...walking out of the museum...into a theatre...sitting down and putting the tupperware container under his chair...

I don't even know. Apparently he took the package to a concert before opening it? Nobody's really mentioned the package; the concert seems to be some kind of quadricentennial commemoration. Currently there are violins. It's nice and all, but I just want to know what's in the package.

On the other hand these things are never as interesting as we think they will be (see: Harvey Specter, can opener). It'll probably just be a bunch of old documents.

Though if it were some kind of SCANDALOUS STORY it will totally have been worth the price of admission.

(no subject)

Update -- they did actually open the package, which turned out to have another paper-wrapped package inside it.

It cracked me up because you can tell it's scholars and archivists who opened it -- the top of the second package contained a pile of beautiful, obviously handcrafted narrow banners, like altar decorations, in the national colours. But underneath that was a huge collection of envelopes and composition books containing documents, and they fairly FLUNG ASIDE the gorgeous banners to get to the letters, telegrams, newspapers and photographs underneath.

Apparently it's documentation of some memorial or possibly a tricentennial celebration from 1912, though they mentioned a few artifacts from 1919. I was busy LOLing over the second package inside the first. Good thing they had the mayor handy and he had some scissors...