The Fjord Foundation

It was Erik the Red who first perfected the "bait and switch." He named the rocky wasteland to the north "Greenland" to lure potential settlers, while he called the more lush and tranquil spot to the east "Iceland." Brutal savages, those Vikings, but exceedingly clever in the realty arts.
Just a few years ago, Icelanders were riding high. They rode a wave of an economic boom that made millionaires out of many of the three hundred thousand residents of the North Atlantic nation. And if you think the bust was bad here in the United States, all three of Iceland's biggest banks imploded within a week of one another. Their unemployment rate, which used to hover somewhere around zero jumped to eight percent. Now, even McDonald's doesn't want to do business up there.
That's about the time the country itself began to rebel. Not the people, who had already staged their own "Saucepan Revolution" and started much needed economic and banking reform, but the very earth beneath their feet. The less-than-pronounceable volcano, Eyjafjallajokull, blew its top after two hundred years and gave Iceland a very redundant metaphor for the turbulent times just below the Arctic Circle. What damages weren't done by the actual eruption were felt weeks later in the travel and tourist industries. These are not happy times in Reykjavik.
Which is why it was interesting to find that men in Iceland have the lowest risk of dying compared to their counterparts across the globe. The United States, by contrast, has dropped to forty-ninth on that list. Maybe it's yet another Viking trick. A very cleverly conceived, diabolically staged event to throw all of us down here off the track. My guess is that if you showed up on the shores of Keflavik, they'd all be giddily going about their postcard lives, wearing cool sweaters, and dancing around to Bjork.