Norway and t-shirts and cheese slicers, oh my!

Dude, I found out the neatest things in the strangest place tonight.

I looked at NorwegianTees.com, which is an awesome company that will sell t-shirts to America. ;) Anyway, they created this company because there were a zillion t-shirts in English in Norway, and very few in Norwegian. Or so the site says.

Being Norwegian (my mother was born there), I said "oo!" and looked. They have some fun shirts.

And I discovered that there is a popular rumor (and held as truth in Norway) that the paper clip was invented there. Dude. (Wikipedia denies this, but still, it's a cool thing.)

Even cooler? Norwegians wore the paper clip on their lapels during WWII to show solidarity and to display their loyalty to the government and the king, even in his exile.

I've grown up with stories of my grandmother's role in the resistance in Norway and that is SO cool. I am a complete dweeb.

AND!!! THERE IS A CHEESE SLICER SHIRT! O_O And cheese cutters (slicer, thank you, Wikipedia. >_<) were invented in Lillehammer, Norway! (Where the 94 Winter Olympics were.)

I kind of want that shirt. Which will have people wondering why I'm wearing a cheese slicer on a shirt and I will get lots of "what's that say?" comments.

The thing is, I've grown up immersed in my mother's Norwegian heritage. I'm closer to her side of the family, even though it's just her sister and parents and one cousin in Massachusetts.

I was not allowed to leave the dinner table without saying "tuck for maten," which means "thank you for the meal." My grandparents were our daycare, so we were lucky.

But, the cheese slicer! My mother CANNOT get her cheese sliced thinly enough. She would take it falling apart if she could. My grandmother and aunt are the same way, and my grandfather used to press down as hard as he could just to see if they'd tell him the slice was too thick. (Which then meant he could eat it. ;) Hee.)

So, yeah. I want the cheese slicer tee shirt. Because I AM that much of a geek!

I would want the "Norwegian Roots" shirt, but I don't particularly care for the picture on it. =P

I also just realized that every cheese slicer we have is actually FROM Norway. I don't know why I never thought of that before. We have three. One my great-grandmother gave to my parents for their wedding, one we got when she died (from her home in Norway) and one my aunt brought home for my mom the last time she visited.

The last one looks just like the one on the shirt. ;)

Oh, I'm a giant cheese slicing Norwegian geek!



Also, check out penknife's post about Fact-Checking in fanfics because it's brilliant and true.

And you can discover things that will help your fics. Like that the Founders could have played hopscotch as children.

And you can make sure you don't credit the invention of the cheese slicer to Sweden. O_O ::gasp::

And never, never ask my grandmother if she's making "Swedish meatballs." >_