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It seems the Big Wet One has been left high and dry in Svalbard and, using a brain only a cartoon character could possess, has decided climbing up a frozen mountain is his only hope for survival. This isn’t what’s in the local safety training book but since this week’s fishwrapper reveals our editor is Svalbard’s stupidest stumbler in terms of safeguards, we won’t be judgemental. Instead we’ll leave that up to whatever geek at comicsalliance.com dug out this back issue from 1961 where “Aquaman and Aqualad have to go high enough up the mountain to hit the year-round Snow Line, so if we’re going to be as charitable as possible and assume that this story takes place in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — which has the lowest approximate Snow Line due to its Arctic climate — that means that they have managed to climb at least 300 to 600 meters in under an hour through steep, rocky terrain.” Did our heroes choose wisely (meaning they were able to sell more comic books with their subsequent adventures) or poorly (actually, maybe it doesn’t matter since Superman was bought back to life)? Consider this: if the snow line is well above sea level, does anybody with a clue about such things want to calculate the odds the sea in Adventfjorden is frozen completely over at the same time?…
Since this week is by far our trashiest fishwrapper ever, we figured we’d devote this rant to various leftover dregs from the governor’s cleanup cruise. While we were obsessed with giant balls early in the main cleanup cruise article, the part about the how participants played with them ended up limited to the extended internet version. In summary, it’s unknown which of two teams on the second cruise won the ball game (in which, duh, the unofficial trophy goes to the team with the most balls) as one team expressed skepticism about the other’s count based on a coastal visit that may or may not have happened. But we’re pretty sure the unofficial individual Big Balls award goes to Chris Borstad whose brass ones (OK, they’re probably iron or steel, but bear with the pun) literally moved mountains. The Biggest Dip award goes to Visit Svalbard Director Ronny Brunvoll since he’s the only person we have visual proof of when it comes to swimmers in the northernmost waters. But the biggest individual winner of all had to be Jennie Olsson Qvist, who got to go on the cruise after responding almost immediately to a Facebook post by governor saying someone dropped out hours before departure. She was picked among four who responded during the next 90 minutes and, about an hour later, she joined her mother who was already going on the cruise.
