Reykjavík Grapevine - 03.02.2012, Síða 18

18
Advice | For you!
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 2 — 2012
Disclaimer: This is The Grape-
vine’s bAD ADVICE column. It’s
where Nanna Árnadóttir answers
questions from our readers about
traversing the Icelandic cultural
jungle. She is usually nice, but re-
ally rather bad at giving advice…
Dear Nanna,
Recently I saw in my local supermar-
ket that they were selling “Boy” and
“Girl” ice creams where the “Girl” ice
cream wrapper was pink and the “Boy”
ice cream wrapper was blue! My girl
picked the pink and then her brother
(my youngest) picked the pink also and
my daughter made fun of him! I was so
shocked. I never expected that my girl
was so stuck on stereotypes. I’ve really
tried hard to teach my kids that boys
can like pink and girls can like blue but
it doesn’t seem to have gotten through.
Any advice?
Best, Gender Construction Sucks
Dear Gender Construction Sucks,
I’m shocked you didn’t give your
daughter a medal for putting your
wussy pink-loving son in his rightful
place (are you sure he even has a pe-
nis?). Boys are supposed to love blue
and girls are supposed to love pink and
the only people who don’t think that
way are fat, ugly and easily offended
hard-line feminists.
I know this because once upon a
time I had the misfortune of meeting
a feminist. She kept saying things like
gender binary and hetero-normity
and I swear it had adverse ef-
fects on my manicure. In fact
just hearing the phrase social
construction splits the seams in my
girdle.
I felt deep shame when Iceland in-
sisted on negotiating with these gen-
der terrorists and pulled this product
off the Icelandic food market following
a public outrage. We are playing with
fire here lady, first the pink and blue ice
creams, then they'll let women become
prime ministers and boys become
nurses! Wait...
My advice for you is to whip your
boy into shape. Force him to play with
cars and toy weapons, if he reaches for
a doll, hit him in the face with a cook-
ing appliance. If we don’t ensure our
children live up to stereotypes we risk
instilling in society a sense of equality
and mutual respect between the gen-
ders and who the hell could possibly
want that? Not me, that’s who.
Best,
Nanna
Hi Nanna,
I read that in Iceland you have elves and
hidden people. In one YouTube video a
girl even talked about how she had sex
with them. If I wanted to meet a hidden
person or an elf, how would I go about
it?
Thanks,
Elf Hunter
Elf Hunter,
Listen, I don’t know how to break this
to you so I’m just going to give it to you
straight. You aren’t about to give any
elf blowjobs. Hidden people don’t exist,
loser. Árni Björnsson, ethnologist and
author of ‘Saga Daganna’ (Icelandic
Feasts and Holidays), has suggested
the whole myth was started by—what
else—home made liquor.
In the olden days on Christmas
Eve, someone was usually left behind
to watch the farm while everyone else
went to church or to some awesome
house party. Sometimes the poor sod
who got left behind would then be ap-
proached by a lonely homeless drifter
looking for a good time with some
sweet nectar. Given a choice between
getting drunk with a questionable hobo
or sitting quietly and waiting around for
everyone to come home most people
went for the dodgy drinking binge.
Then by the time everyone got home
and found the guy in charge pissing
himself and acting a fool, they made
the only logical jump, that elves drove
him temporarily mad. But yeah, you’re
not going to make any elf friends, you
could make friends with some home-
less people though.
Nanna
Got a question for Nanna and need some bad advice? Email
nanna.arnadottir@gmail.com and you might get an answer
published in a future issue.
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Businesses and households remain
mired under crushing debt, thanks in
part to the mortgage system that ties
loan balances to the soaring consumer
price index. People tell tales of friends
seeking antidepressants and families
foregoing trips to the dentist…half of a
nation’s households find it difficult to
make ends meet.”
It’s a well-known fact that people
are scampering off to other countries.
Social-welfare-rich Norway is a popu-
lar destination for Icelandic émigrés.
“There’s a significant threat to brain
drain going forward,” a business pro-
fessor from the University of Reykjavik
told the WP.
In the words of one Arion Bank em-
ployee, this Icelandic mortgage system
is nothing more than feudalistic serf-
dom.
Isn’t there something seriously
askew with this picture? So, the IMF is
generally happy, real estate sales are up,
export sales were up by 11 percent, Stan-
dard & Poors upgraded Iceland’s finan-
cial standing, yet unemployment still
(officially) hovers at around 7 percent,
companies are falling like bricks, and
the people are slow-steaming, waiting
to thaw for a full-on spring pot-bashing.
Or are we missing something entirely?
Someone has money stashed away
somewhere. On January 7, Baltic Busi-
ness reported that the owners of Ice-
land’s IKEA franchise, Sigurður and
Jón Pálmason (brothers of Jón Ásgeir
Jóhannesson’s wife, Ingibjörg Stefanía
Pálmadóttir), are building an IKEA
store in Vilnius and are in the process
of expanding their empire into Estonia
and Latvia. Their Lithuanian company
“has acquired 15 hectares of land and
plan to start construction this spring
for a 25,000 square-meters [sic] store…
the total investment is expected to ex-
ceed 100 million Euros.”
Don’t tell me that there are excep-
tions to the capital control regulations.
In a recent over-the-counter chat
with an Íslandsbanki employee, I my-
self asked the question. “So things ARE
looking up, right?”
“You gotta be kidding me,” she said.
“All over the world, the media is
praising Iceland’s hardiness, steadfast-
ness. An example of a little fish out-
swimming the sharks.”
“Pah!” she snapped.
“People are spending more money,
aren’t they?” I countered.
“Do you believe everything you
read? Many of us have already used up
our pension funds. We have too much
pride to go on unemployment.”
Pride. There’s that five-letter word
again.
Heimir Hannesson, a student at the
University of Iceland, told the WP: “The
smaller the country gets, the bigger the
national pride, the bigger the soul. Here
we are on a tiny island, with nothing
but our pride.”
Now how much is that worth on the
open market?
MARC VINCENz
Continued from page 8
Waiting To Thaw