Hey, tycoons, leave them kids alone

I thought I was dreaming this morning when I heard a muffled voice coming through a loudspeaker:

Icelanders! Everyone down to Austurvöllur today at 3 pm to demonstrate! Let’s show them we’ve had enough!!

Turns out it was emanating from a charcoal gray pickup truck that was cruising the general area with what sounded like one of Iceland’s more notorious truckers onboard, doing his bit to whip the masses into a frenzy.

I guess he was moderately successful, since between 3,000 and 4,000 people showed up [YT was not one of them as I was, um, otherwise engaged] and apparently it was pretty exciting; a group of bikers revved their motorcycles in front of the parliament building, covering it in smog [for what purpose, pray tell?] and a bunch of people threw rotten eggs and tomatoes and skyr at the building. Plus some brave soul took it upon himself to climb onto the roof and draw the Bonus flag to full mast, after which he found himself in a minor scuffle with The Law. According to the RÚV evening news, this was a clear sign that PEOPLE ARE GETTING ANGRY [next thing you know they'll be rioting, just wait till next Saturday when they pull up the stupid old Krónan flag], while other eyewitnesses claimed that, no really, it was pretty tame.

Meanwhile, old Spaugstofan was brilliant this evening, as it has been consistently since the kreppa [depression] started. For the uninitiated, Spaugstofan is a national institution in the form of a weekly half-hour satire on the previous week’s events. Before the shit hit the fan five weeks ago everyone was pretty much sick and tired of them – felt they’d lost that certain je ne sais quoi that they had previously, that they’d just grown tired and old and completely unfunny. Yawn.

However, with the advent of the kreppa they’ve totally come into their own again [maybe they just needed some bite-sized misfortunes to work with], and we’ve been in stitches every Saturday evening, over events that we were practically crying over days earlier.

Tonight’s programme began with a view up Skólavörðustígur reminscent of the Reykjavík poster for I Am Legend. They then proceeded to film the whole programme in one of the huge abandoned buildings that are under construction [those sad, skeleton-like symbols of Iceland's boom-and-premature-bust that are all over the capital], in which people were hard at work with paper shredders, shredding every last evidence of the banks’ collapses before the investigators come in to do a proper investigation [it is unbelievable that an investigation has not yet been launched ... with each passing day more evidence can potentially be destroyed]. The show ended with a whole bunch of adolescents [the generation that will be saddled with the massive debts incurred by a handful of f*ckwits] walking through the building singing a song to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, that went something like this [in English translation]:

We don’t need no incessant drivel
We don’t need no idiot choir
We are not going to pay your debts
Shovel your own shit
Hey, jerks!
Shovel your own shit!
This is our country
That is sinking in your crap

… and then the refrain: Hey, jerks! Shovel your own shit! sounded as stills of Iceland’s disgraced ‘tycoons’ appeared with the credits. Perfect!

[Watch it here, if you like.]

[Same weather as earlier today.]

[Overandout.]

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