A rabbi walks into a bar

I am writing this in blazing (albeit intermittent) sunshine out on the deck, for like a good Icelander I never let a drop of sun go to waste. 🤪

Yesterday was one of those rare Icelandic days where the sun shone all day long, with not a raincloud in sight, today has been partly cloudy, and tomorrow the forecast is … rain.

Not unusual for August, or any time in Iceland, really, but what’s particularly galling about it tomorrow is that we are having a full solar eclipse—the first visible from Iceland since 1954, and the first visible from the west of the country (which includes Reykjavík) since 1433!

You can believe we’ve been stoked about this event and awaiting it with great anticipation … and not just us but foreign visitors, too … accommodation in the west of the country has been sold out for months, and good luck getting a rental car this week.

Given all this, the weather forecast has been a source of much nail-biting, and our worst fears seem to be coming to pass. RAIN in the afternoon, just when the eclipse is due to happen. 😩

This is approximately what we’ll be missing:

All right, apparently we can still experience the eclipse even through the clouds, meaning it will get dark. So we’ll not be cancelling our eclipse parties and sitting indoors with long faces staring at the walls. Like little troupers we’ll be out there, eyes turned upward, rain notwithstanding.

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… we had one stirring up quite the stink around here.

The dude in question is one Rabbi Schmuley who apparently is a rabid Zionist and supporter of all things genocide. And, well, he kinda walked into the wrong country. Icelanders, you see, are overwhelmingly pro-Palestine, and most of us condemn in the strongest terms the atrocities happening in Gaza. Also, we don’t appreciate being gaslit and told that black is white, up is down, murdering children by the tens of thousands is self-defence, and criticism of the heinous slaughter of innocents is antisemitism. That shit doesn’t really fly around here, as the good rabbi duly discovered. In response, he had an absolute conniption and began shouting obscenities at people left and right—like at this guy, Samúel, who was brazen enough (irony) to say “f*ck Israel” to this asshat’s face, and was subsequently followed and harassed for nearly ten minutes:

The next day, Schmuley decided to take his sorry ass to a club, and this happened:

Now, I may be way off base here, but isn’t a rabbi supposed to be some kind of religious leader, a “they know not what they do” and “turn the other cheek” kind of guy? I thought people like that were supposed to advocate for peace and kindness, not run around with their phones up yelling at people, to say nothing of being cheerleaders for genocide. But then I guess it’s all in line with what we see coming out of a country that’s run by a wanted war criminal. 🤷‍♀️

And a number of you have expressed your interest in the posts I linked to last time, and in exploring that route.

(The rest of this post is for paid subscribers.)