THE TERROR TRAUMA OF TALKNAFJORDUR!

It's A Town In Iceland

I don't have the option of an Icelandic alphabet on Blogger, so the diacritical marks are missing.  I say 'town' when 'village' is more appropriate, as there are less than 300 souls living there.

    Before we continue to pursue this theme, allow me to inform you that you are more familiar with Iceland than you realise.  Art!

Hes right to be suspicious about this snackpot

     There's lots of location work in Prometheus in Iceland, because it looks like all the leftover bits of planet Earth after creation were dumped here.  Let's look at that waterfall with a little distance added to give perspective.  Art!

CAUTION! Not suitable for bathing

     Then there is a television series calling itself "Game Of Thorns" or somesuch nonsense, where they needed location filming where it was consistently icy, snowy and so cold to look at that the audience turned their central heating up in sympathy.  Art!

     Conrad will take it on trust.  One field of snow looks much like another, you need geographical differentiation to make things stand out and look exotic (and cold).  Art!

Yup, looks cold enough.

     Instead of the far future or the far past, Iceland has also been celebrated in that contemporary anarchic, if not nihilistic comedy-thriller "War On Everyone".  Art!

    That thing in the background is an Icelandic architectural artefact.  I think we'll skip over this particular film, mostly because Iceland is quite peripheral to the plot and I can't find any other clips featuring the island nation.

     O here's Talknafjordur - 

     I know what you're thinking - what?  How can this sleepy fishing village be the epicentre of a tsunami of terrorism, insurrection, murder, fornication, grand theft auto and passing port to the right?

     Enter, stage right, the Resident South Canadian Idiot-in-Charge in Iceland.  Art!

     He was appointed to this position back in the early Twenties, by none other than Donald Buck, who must have done it in return for a bribe, because J.R. Gunter had absolutely no background or experience in diplomacy.  His tenure in Reykjavik was notable for two things:

1)  Spending $20 million on security for the South Canadian Embassy in the city.

2)  Refusing to go to Iceland for 4 months and hiding in California until explicitly ordered by the White House to get his saggy behind overseas immediately.  Art!

Every dollar visible

    When actually in-country, he insisted on being driven around in an armoured limousine and tried to hire locals as bodyguards.

    Why is this behaviour ludicrously inappropriate?  Well, for one thing, Iceland regularly tops the list of Safest Places On Earth.  The only conflict it got into post-Second Unpleasantness was the Cod War with the UK, a conflict fought with such ferocity that the only casualty was an Icelander who got accidentally electrocuted aboard a ship.

     Conrad remembers reading a murder mystery set in Iceland, and remembers nothing except that the weapon used was a chisel.  One cannot help feeling that any author trying to create an oeuvre of whodunnits in Iceland is battling uphill.  Most crime is traffic offences, many of them probably caused by being forced out of the way of an armoured limo.  Art!

     There's the island of Island, as they call themselves.  Despite the size, there are only 370,000 people living there.  If you want another statistic, the Icelandic murder total varies between 0.0 and 1.5 per year.

     In search of a South Canadian city with a population of 370,000, Conrad randomly settled upon New Orleans.  "This will be an interesting comparison!" I chuckled, only to find that last year's murder count in New Orleans was 280.  Art!

     This is unusually high, according to various pundits.  186 times the highest Icelandic average, in fact, and if it keeps up like that, New Orleans will be empty by 3350 AD.

     Conrad has a theory.  J Grunter never washes his ears out, so he heard "Ireland" not "Iceland" and, thanks to never having looked at a map, he'd never heard of the latter island and considered every written instance of it a spelling error.  This makes quite as much sense as $20 million on electric fences, barbed wire, scouting drones, mines, guard dogs, a couple of Bradleys and - Art!

     Better end it here.  The Icelandic Consulate staff in Gomorrah-in-the-Irwell are all large and well-fed.

It's All A Matter Of Perspective

For Lo! we are about to feature another picture from the BBC's showcase of Astronomy Photographer of the Year.  Art!

Courtesy James Baguley

     This nebula (or cloud of gas) is so so obviously - of course! - known as the Wolf Nebula that it's not true.

     But that only holds true from our perspective here on Earth and for possibly the nearest solar systems to us.  Viewed from a different angle the apparent resemblance will distort and disappear.  Also, consider this; as the nebula continues to expand, so too will the gaps and voids that form the 'Wolf' and in a few millennia - possibly before New Orleans is emptied - there won't be a wolf any more.

"The War Illustrated"

Now it can be told.  The Allied amphibious landing at Anzio managed to drag near-defeat from down the very gullet of victory; instead of forging ahead when surprise was greatest, the invasion force sat and drank tea and coffee on the beaches and then wondered why people were suddenly shooting at them.  Shooting at them a lot.  Art!

    

     Now that the crisis is over, TWI is able to give a sense of how bad the fighting was on the beach-head, with a very real prospect of it being split asunder and driven into the sea.  And note how jauntily cheerful and positive the caption is at the bottom. One suspects the troops actually at Anzio would have been less than enthused with such whitewashing.

"City In The Sky"

The Doctor has parsed exactly how the Big Crash came about, and it wasn't merely Hom. Sap. being as beastly to each other as they usually are.  O no.

‘Only circumstantial data as yet.  Let me guess – the countries that started both the Little Crash and the Big Crash were military dictatorships?’  A muted chorus agreed with him.  ‘Always the easiest to control.  Get the man at the top and his drinking cronies and you can run the whole country.’  He stopped to generate an air of drama before sweeping his hat off and gesturing to the upper hemisphere of the arcology.

     ‘I remember speaking to Virginia Branson about perspectives, how different things look from Upstairs or Downstairs.  To you and your brethren Downstairs the Big Crash, the Great Northern War, all that destruction, was madness incarnate.

     ‘Madness - from your perspective.  From the perspective of our alien squatters, it was business as planned.  Get rid of half the human race in a matter of months.  Then came the Phage.  What did people classify that as?’

     One of the medical staff took the bait.

     ‘A neurotropic, haemorraghic fever.  Extremely virulent, with a very high morbidity rate.  Not a naturally-occurring pathogen, so we ascribed it as a designer bio-weapon.’

     A dismissive pshaw! sprang to the Timelord’s lips.

     Yes, because neither the Doctor nor Conrad are big on swearing.

Just To Fill Up A Space

Because Your Humble Scribe has to mention 'Switzerland' many times a day, his thoughts, such as they are, turn to the "Tripods" novels for Young Adults, by John Christopher, and especially "The Pool Of Fire".  Switzerland, because that's where the human resistance to the alien invaders (the 'Masters') is centred, and TPOF because of the colour illustration.  Art!

     This colour cover illustration is not mere creative licence; as we discover later on, the Masters are peculiarly attentive to the colour green.  The horse and rider above are a trap, as I remember.

Finally -

Time to do the weekly shop, I fear.  Wish me luck.