Svalbard’s toughest polar bear is playing the lead role in a new “Amazing Places” video titled “The Islands Where Guns are Required.” The video, part of a series by producer Tom Scott, is fueling a lively debate among gun fans and opponents, including questions about what kind of firepower would be needed to take out the star of the show (tripwire explosives end up being part of the debate, thanks to a massive overestimation of their potency).
Other videos from Svalbard focus on the Doomsday Vault and how miraculous it is there are modern things like wi-fi. But not everybody watching seems to come away with a clear understanding of the area. Guns.com, noting Svalbard’s remoteness and bitter cold, declares “it made a good idea to locate the Global Seed Vault there as sort of a Noah’s Ark of plant species as a hedge on the apocalypse. There, guards at the worlds most hard to get to garden center keep a 24-hour armed watch against random polar bears.” Bad grammar aside, the only full-time armed guards we’ve seen outside the vault were on “The Futurama Holiday Spectacular” back in 2010…
Stone stupid: These misunderstood Klan heroes apparently have ties to our seed shrine.We’ve been known to stretching things a bit to connect weird happenings in the world to Svalbard (which is to say, we do it all the time), but we can’t figure out how somebody has managed to tie the Confederate flag, Hitler, the Klu Klux Klan, the Taliban and the fourth dynasty creation of The Great Sphinx of Giza to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Yet a picture of our local zombie hideout is featured in an article titled “Confederate Land Art: The Apotheosis of Racist Iconography” that delves into the questionable history of folks who created some of the world’s best-known landmarks. We might understand if the article was yet another conspiracy rant about Bill Gates and Monsanto taking over the world by controlling our food supply, but here’s the bizarre passage that seems like it was inserted by a random word generator: “Green design today, inspired in part by precedent but more by new technologies, environmental imperatives, and economic adjustments also looks at ways to merge with the earth itself planet (plant?) and according systems both in form and function. Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault of 2008 by its public works office Statsbygg provides a peerless metaphor, a ‘living Fort Knox.'” It then proceeds to the blowing up of sixth-century sandstone Buddhas of Bamiyan. In short (since we’re out of space), WTF?
I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation.
Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads.
But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.
I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation.
Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads.
But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.
Icepeople is again facing an immediate existential crisis due (of course) to hardships largely inflected by the pandemic. In short, 1) the website needs $22 U.S. (190 NOK) to stay online for another month and 2) the editor needs any and all help possible to avoid homelessness in the middle of polar winter (not that it’s legal here any other time of the year).
So if you appreciate Icepeople for its unique stories about Svalbard and/or critical news during these critical times, as well as its features about the more colorful aspects of life here (today’s feature about the upcoming Polarjazz festival is for the event that first drew our editor’s attention to Svalbard way back in 2008) please do whatever you can during what are admittedly incredibly harsh times for many.
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