Reykjavík Grapevine - 24.08.2012, Síða 8

8
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 13 — 2012
Iceland | Weather
All summer long, the weather
has been absurdly good, almost
ominously so. According to the
Icelandic Meteorological Office,
Reykjavík has had 836.6 hours
of sunshine in May, june and
july, which is a record amount
of sunshine for this three-month
period, the brightest quarter of
the year. This is not the weather
Icelanders are used to. Icelan-
dic weather is a miserly buzz-
kill, giving you a few hours of
sunshine one day and then fol-
lowing that with eighty years of
sideways sleet.
I'm no meteorologist but I'm
pretty sure that's an
exaggeration.
Yes, it is an exaggeration, but that is how
it feels. If the Icelandic weather were a
movie character, it would be the assis-
tant vice principal in charge of ruining
your fun. For kids, walking home from
school has always been an education in
how many different ways a human body
can be made to feel cold and how many
different ways clothes can get soaked.
The same could be said about going to
summer camp or sleeping in a tent.
Why can't you just enjoy the
good weather while it lasts?
Icelanders could if they were calm Bud-
dhist types, living for the moment and
not worrying about what tomorrow
brings. However, Icelanders are pre-
dominantly Lutheran and know that
while we may be happy now, we will
pay later. Though most Icelanders are
religious more in theory than practice,
it brings a certain fatalism told for cen-
turies: no silver lining is so bright that it
does not come attached to an icy storm-
cloud.
So the weather is a sign of the
Apocalypse? It's 2012 after all.
No, Icelanders do not think the world
is ending, but like a dog that is used to
random acts of senseless punishment,
Icelanders are already whimpering in
advance of the violent weather sure
to come. This is a nation of weather-
obsessives. There are hundreds, if not
thousands, of old diaries consisting of
little more than weather descriptions.
For centuries we have stared at the abyss
over our heads and it has blizzarded in
our face.
Yeah, yeah. Icelanders obsess
about the weather. It's men-
tioned in every tourist guide-
book ever written about Iceland.
Icelanders are not just obsessed with
the weather; they also obsess about their
own obsession with the weather. Sure,
some merely follow the forecast and chat
with friends and family about that time
their basement f looded, but when most
Icelanders talk about the weather, they
do so with full knowledge that everyone
around them is a weather-obsessive.
It's the safety valve in every situation.
Someone gets angry about politics? Ask
about the weather. Someone tells a de-
tailed story about their rectal prolapse?
Ask about the weather. Someone tries to
mug you? Ask them if their basement
f looded last year.
I thought muggings didn't
happen in Iceland.
Icelandic muggers try to get up the
nerve to demand money, but end up
asking about the weather instead to
break the tension. Silliness aside, the
weather-obsession has its roots in the
soil. Until about 1900, the Icelandic na-
tion was mainly comprised of farmers,
their wives, children, and farmhands in
near-enslavement, all living together in
sod and turf houses that were a smelly
combination of human and animal liv-
ing quarters. Everyone's livelihood de-
pended on farming, which depended on
the weather.
If I shared a house with a cow,
the wind I would worry about
wouldn't be the one coming
from the outside.
Be that as it may, weather is all-impor-
tant to farmers and that is true this year
as well. While most Icelanders have en-
deavoured to enjoy the sunshine, farm-
ers have had to deal with a drought. The
hay yield has been low, which is very bad
for farmers who own livestock, which
are most of them. And given that few
farmers are well off financially to begin
with, a drought is bad news. The nation-
al emergency fund, which is supposed
to provide relief, does not have enough
money to fully reimburse farmers for
the drought damage.
Hearing that takes the shine out
of the sunny weather.
Not all farmers have been negatively af-
fected. Icelandic barley farms, commer-
cial grain production being a new de-
velopment in Icelandic agriculture, are
heading for a record-breaking harvest.
Global warming is altering weather pat-
terns in Iceland like elsewhere, and sure
as sleet follows rain, Icelanders will one
day suffer for all those sunny days. Or
that is how we have been raised to think,
by a centuries-long double act of assis-
tant vice principals in charge of ruining
our fun, dour Lutherans and the killjoy
weather.
So What's This Sunny Weather
I Keep Hearing About?
Words
Kári Tulinius
Illustration
Lóa Hjálmtýsdóttir
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i
n
1
As this sum-
mer’s whale
watching sea-
son continues,
the renowned
think-tank Centre for
European Reform has strongly ad-
vised that EU officials demand that
Iceland stop whaling as a condition
to joining the EU. Strong words, to
be sure, probably based on the fact
that according to European Union
law it is illegal to hunt any whales,
even the ones that aren’t endan-
gered. So unless Iceland is granted
an exception to the law, it will have
to decide: hunting whales or joining
the EU. If current public opinion
is anything to go by, odds heavily
favour the former option.
Gay Pride was very eventful, and even had international
implications. The Icelandic Ethical
Humanist Association (Siðmennt)
held its first secular gay marriage.
Renowned gay
rights pioneer,
troubadour and
political activist
Hörður Torfason
officiated the
ceremony. While
Gay Pride is one
of Iceland’s largest
festivals, with tens of thousands
of folks of every sexual orientation
attending, some were less into it
than others. Namely, the Russian
Orthodox Church of Iceland, which
placed an ad in Fréttablaðið con-
demning homosexuality using bibli-
cal quotes. The ad caused quite
a stir in Iceland, with the editor of
Fréttablaðið, Ólafur Stephensen,
saying the ad had slipped through
by mistake—and by that he meant
it was a mistake to run it without a
name attributed to it. Despite his
intention to run the name of the
ad’s author that weekend, Iceland’s
Orthodox Christian community is
not exactly sprawling, and it didn’t
take long to discover that the ad
had been placed by the church’s
priest, Rev. Timur Zolotuskiy. Timur
explained that the anonymity was
not intended to conceal his identity,
but that he felt it would have been
inappropriate to put his own name
under “the word of God.”
Continues over
NEWS IN BRIEF
NEWS IN ICELAND
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