I should be working but

I cannot resist a story in Dagens Nyheter about a fight in a Dutch lorry which was parked in Växsjö, a small and not overwhelmingly interesting town in Småland, a large and not overwhelmingly interesting region of southern Sweden.

In any case, the firm of van der Kwaak was delivering flowers. One of its lorries parked for the night on Wednesday: at three in the morning, the police were summoned because the lorry had crashed into an electricity sub-station some distance away. In it they found the driver; on the ground nearby they found, and recovered, his nose, and one of his ears. Both had apparently been bitten off. The passenger, who is suffering from “severe internal injuries” has been charged with attempted murder. So has the driver, who is a 58-year-old Dutch citizen. Both are male, but nothing is known about the passenger, who is still in intensive care.

There is in fact a new media hook: I found this through a PR story about Twingly, a blog searching service which allowed DN to link automatically to a photograph on a local blog which shows the crashed lorry, though not, alas, the ear. This is quite an encouraging example of the way in which newspapers and blogs can interact, though, like all technolgical fixes, it can obviously be gamed. If DN automatically links to blog stories based on keywords, there is nothing to stop the local fascists blogging heavily about, say, a race riot to get their side of the story over.

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4 Responses to I should be working but

  1. rr says:

    Fascinating. Is this available in English or any language other than Swedish? I can’t find any English on the site other than for the screen-saver download (which appears to be Windows only)

  2. acb says:

    I haven’t seen it in English. But I have translated all of the facts in the article

  3. rr says:

    Sorry I wasn’t clear… it was Twingly I was so interested in, not (you will probably be surprised to learn) the bitten-off nose.

    Although, come to think of it, it must be quite difficult to bite off a nose in one go and in a sufficiently large piece for it to be recognisably a human olfactory organ when found on the ground. Perhaps it was a very large conk and the assailant had extremely sharp teeth. Or was a dog.

    But seriously, it’s Twingly making me tingly.

  4. acb says:

    “these”:http://www.primelabs.se/contact/ are the guys who run it. You probably want to talk to Martin Källström, pronounced, vaguely, “shellstrerm” — ie the “K” is “sh” and the dipthongs are more or less German.

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