Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.07.2004, Blaðsíða 29

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Island Life
Hella - Cocaine and horses
Cocaine dealers in Iceland were
busy last weekend trying to sell
their product to horseback riders on
the national equestrian competion.
Clearly Icelandic pushers are trying
to widen their target group even
though they make over 600 million
ISK a year just for selling the drug.
SEARCHING FOR
SHANNON ELIZABETH
by Bart Cameron
You need more Americans here.
It is a sunny but windy and cold day, and Höddi the photographer
and I are walking down the center of a fairway in Hafnarfjörður.
We’ve been searching for Shannon Elizabeth - best known for ap-
pearing nude in American pie - for an hour. All we’ve found is a
bunch of fat and lethargic American men in their mid-thirties.
Seeing Höddi’s camera, some stop
us to deliver quotes: “I came to enjoy
the culture and the game itself ”
says John Poppy, a Heineken beer
distributor from Phoenix. Never
mind that all I asked him was where
I can find Shannon Elizabeth. Never
mind that he is speaking so slowly
and loudly that he must suspect me
of being Icelandic, hard of hearing,
and possessing sizable learning
disorders. His buddies all say
“Bullshit, you came for the women.”
“Yeah you came for the chicks.” But
he looks at me with a mock sincerity
as though his quote was somehow a
deep answer.
Poppy’s fat friend Bubba from New
Orleans takes me aside and says
“This island’s great. You need to get
more Americans here.”
Höddi and I grab some Heinekens
and donuts from a golf cart driven by
two teenage Icelandic girls whose job
it is to provide refreshment to the
American men, but who are doing
their best to avoid them.

Who´s Tanya Roberts?
We give up talking to the American
men and only now talk to the
Icelanders working the course. The
problem: they don’t know who the
celebrities are. Adam, a fourteen-
year-old who has been assigned the
task of standing on an especially
windswept rock and waving flags
when the balls go out of bounds,
eventually fills us in. The old one, he
says, is on hole five. He hasn’t seen
any young woman.
Finally, we find our celebrity. A
celebrity. We find Tanya Roberts,
the hot mom from That 70´s Show.
She is nice, and she is freakishly
attractive. She is also very, very small.
A golf ball takes up her entire hand.
She says the same thing she said on
RUV the night before: “I really want
to see Gullfoss and the geyser, but
we haven’t gotten there yet.” In the
same tone she goes on and says, “I
hate getting stuck in lava.”
She poses for Höddi. She then
prepares to drive, Höddi standing
directly in her peripheral vision,
distracting her by snapping away at
his camera. She lobs a drive into the
rocks about thirty yards away.
“Where is the alcohol?,” she says.
“We’ve been waiting for the beer all
afternoon.”
We don’t find Shannon Elizabeth.
The tournament, which boasted
that contestants would “Golf at
midnight” started at 2pm, and the
organizers have all left by 3:30.
Instead of midnight golf, the
itinerary for the evening includes a
ten-bar pub crawl. Included in the
Icelandic pub crawl, two Irish pubs
and quite a few seedy bars which
must have only been chosen because
they served Amstel.
Better than Shannon Elizabeth, we
find an American marketing expert.
Iceland is the next Myrtle Beach.
“It doesn’t matter that the wind is
bad and nobody golfs here. This is
the whole Myrtle Beach experience.
It’s a guys trip. Strip clubs, women,
beer. It’s a location,” says the
marketing expert when I ask why
160 golfers were deposited in a
suburban Icelandic golf course.
“There’s a guy out there named
Bubba,” I say.
“Really? Bubba. That’s great,”
she says and writes it down in a
notebook. “That’s what’s great about
this kind of event. This is the new
face of golf. These are guys who buy
clothes off the clearance rack. They
won’t pay for a nice shirt, but they
will come out to Iceland.”
“Do you have a name for this type
of person?” She has been so specific,
there must be textbooks about these
guys.
“Average American golf consumer,”
she says.
I pointed out to my marketing friend
that Iceland is expensive, that there
are very few strip clubs, that it is a
literary and artistic community. She
shrugged off my answer. There were
160 guys here who didn’t have a clue
about Icelandic culture, and they
were extremely content.
If the ugly Americans are coming
to Iceland, coming to golf into
incredible headwinds in extremely
temperamental weather on courses
full of rocks, well, it may not do
much for American stereotyping,
but it will probably be good on
Icelanders’ egos. And it’s possible it
won’t really hurt anyone.
Hornarfjardarmanni. World
champion
Iceland has a new World Champion
of Hornafjardarmanni which is a
card game only known in Höfn í
Hornafirði a small town in the south
of the country. 135 people tried
their best but Björn Arnarson came,
saw and conquered. Björn is a bird
enthusiast and a member of staff in a
local cultural center on daily basis.
Keflavik - Attempted break
Two teenagers were caught trying
to break through the fence of the
NATO base at Keflavík by the 10
soldiers of the US military police
who showed up in two SUV´s. The
boys claimed that they were just tak-
ing a walk along the base fence.
H
.S
.
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