Frazz by Jef Mallett for September 15, 2022

Du er riktig.

Norway! I hope he’s Finnish!

Do you remember when a republican “lawmaker” said that Global Warming was false because Greenland was once green and that was how it got its name.

Legend has it that another Viking found a fairly nicer island and called it Iceland.

“Duplicitous” is redundant: it’s part of “real” in real-estate.

He had a vision problem.

Especially when they start chucking in some of the more colorful but less printable adjectives into the mix.

In the same manner, they called Newfoundland Vineland, and there is no sign of grapes there.

He knew the potential for development after global warming. Glacier-side condos! Best prices!

Real estate shyster? He killed a couple of people. That’s why he was kicked out of Norway and had to go the Iceland. Then he was kicked out of Iceland for killing more people. That’s why he discovered Greenland.

I’m 15th generation French-Canadian. Real-estate shyster is one thing. Native north-americans gave us their genes, we gave them smallpox…

The color of his beard or the blood on his hands?

And his beard was orange! But they didn’t have the color ‘orange’ back then. Same reason an orange robin is a ‘red-breast’ and folks with orange hair are ‘red-heads’

Well, Erik never tried to sell anything in Greenland. And it has no place called Erikville.

My introduction to global geography, age five or six, was finding Greenland and Iceland on a globe, learning Greenland was mostly ice covered (10,000 feet thick), and Iceland was not only habitable, but geothermally heated. I thought the cartographer (not that I knew that word at the time) swapped names.

Would ‘shyster’ be considered pejorative?

Iceland and Greenland were named that way as a ploy to discourage colonization on Iceland so that Erik’s friends\followers could settle there with less competition, while others were being misdirected to Greenland.

Just got the October issue of Scientific American magazine. Feature article, “The Power of Viking Women. What new archeological discoveries reveal.” Coincidence…?

It’s shorter without the redundancies

If you’d like the real story of the failed attempt to settle Greenland, it’s one of half a dozen in Jared Diamond’s fascinating 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. And yes, he meant that part about “choose”. Pretty much every one of his case histories involved a society that saw the end looming but didn’t take it seriously. The main difference between them and us is that their failures were relatively small and localized, not planet-wide.

When it was warm then it was green and had dry forests so he didn’t lie. Over 450 years it began to get colder and the Christian Norse didn’t want to adjust to what the locals did to fish in ice and snow, so they left. So they left to return to their familial lands.

Smart guy that Eric. He also called a piece of real estate he wanted exclusively Iceland.

If they had a submarine back then and discovered Blue Meanies…

I do remember when a Democrat “lawmaker” worried that Guam would flip over if we put too many soldiers on it.

It was a much nicer place when he found it, before “the little ice age”.