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May 19, 2022 3:47 AM   Subscribe

 
"I, for one, welcome our new" etc. etc.

Honestly, this would also be a straight up improvement over the experiences I've had in the past trusting my colleagues to cover my files while I was away.
posted by LegallyBread at 4:06 AM on May 19, 2022 [5 favorites]


"Types fast, but might take a nap" is my honest resume.
posted by the primroses were over at 4:08 AM on May 19, 2022 [21 favorites]


... that's an incredibly tempting offer. I'm not sure I make much more sense than they do anyway.
posted by humbug at 4:20 AM on May 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


Wishing I had shiny hair and was assertive :(. What are the chances Hrimnir will end up taking my job
posted by KnittedNoodle at 4:28 AM on May 19, 2022 [10 favorites]


Iceland, the Manic Pixie Dream Country.
posted by acb at 4:59 AM on May 19, 2022 [7 favorites]


acb: Iceland, the Manic Pixie Dream Country.

No. It’s a real place with human beings. This is an advertising campaign playing on the exoticization of Iceland by foreigners. Which, you know, as far as self-exoticization for money goes, it’s a fairly innocuous example.
posted by Kattullus at 5:21 AM on May 19, 2022 [9 favorites]


No. It’s a real place with human beings.

I've only spent a single night in Reykjavik (a long layover in a European trip in 2019), and it was quite pleasant, with a visit to the Hallgrímskirkja, a walk around downtown, and a nice dinner, but one thing which stood out for me was that, as we walked through a residential neighborhood on our way up to the church, in an otherwise quite clean and tidy neighborhood, we saw a single graffito on a wall, simple unadorned text but large enough to be legible across the street. It was just the two words, in English, "FUCK TOURISTS". I was weirdly charmed that despite their extremely tourist-friendly media blitz and their hospitable image, there are folks there disgruntled about that presentation to actively and vocally push back on it and that the view is widespread enough that nobody seemed in any hurry to clean that wall off.
posted by jackbishop at 6:32 AM on May 19, 2022 [10 favorites]


My wife and I stayed for a week in a rented cabin on Hvalfjörður with friends. Those goddamn emo ponies are everywhere, and when you pull over to take their pictures, they know and start doing coy over-the-shoulder looks at you while flicking their big beautiful manes. This increases my odds of returning by about 1,000%.
posted by fatbird at 6:45 AM on May 19, 2022 [11 favorites]


Wait, they did all that but didn't register a .horse domain for it?
posted by biogeo at 7:49 AM on May 19, 2022 [10 favorites]


We went to Iceland five years ago and saw these horses just south of the Blue Lagoon, not too far from last year's volcano: https://i.imgur.com/bJwDobJ.jpeg
posted by hypnogogue at 7:59 AM on May 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm really disappointed. I signed up for this and it just gave me an away message to copy and paste and setup myself, presumably. They don't actually have a horse respond each time an email comes in. Yes, I would totally give icelandic horses access to my gmail if they would type individual replies to any message that comes in.

Also, I'm really curious that the horse's last name doesn't end in -son or -dottir. Does Iceland use different conventions for naming horses?

Message:

If only I had a penguin is away on vacation and not able to respond to your email. Meanwhile, Penguin has OutHorsed all emails to an Icelandic horse called Hekla frá Þorkellshóli, who is trained in corporate communications.

Here is Hekla frá Þorkellshóli’s response:

Aælkj5hbyiu89 n89u ð´'i2+ji hð9 u3boæjrk2 n 9089ui qeægj eronbqo ð gnjqergni8h aq fear i

Qfiuoq4uhhæ 34 4 4 ædoifuuuuuuuuua q34o

This email was composed by an Icelandic horse using a giant keyboard for horses. Seriously.

OutHorse your email at: www.outhorseyouremail.com

Penguin will return to work on May 20, 2022.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:10 AM on May 19, 2022 [8 favorites]


Mod note: One comment deleted. Please avoid using "spirit animal" more details in the microaggressions section.
posted by loup (staff) at 8:45 AM on May 19, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have been to Iceland several times, and am aware that it is a very real country with the usual mundane infrastructure of modernity one expects. I was referring to the overwhelming tendency of Icelandic tourism marketing to crank the whimsy up to 11, presenting it as a vaguely magical place outside the quotidian.

An analogue could be Ireland, a country with more data centres and logistics parks than leprechauns.
posted by acb at 8:54 AM on May 19, 2022 [7 favorites]


Horse-like typing detected.
posted by Xiphias Gladius at 10:14 AM on May 19, 2022 [4 favorites]


I'm annoyed that I only found out about this at the *end* of my sabbatical.
posted by Johnny Assay at 10:49 AM on May 19, 2022 [3 favorites]


As a person who works in tourism advertising, this is aspirational work. Literally, moments after I sent it to my fellow creative director he wrote back and was like, "The fact that we both love this so intensely is exactly why no client would ever let us get anywhere near that kind of budget"
posted by thivaia at 11:18 AM on May 19, 2022 [9 favorites]


my brain parsed this as "Out-horsey-our-email" and loved it even more!
posted by alchemist at 12:07 PM on May 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


Oh my god the temptation to do this is SO STRONG.

Unfortunately my very by-the-rules agency would probably not react well.

I wonder if I could set up rules that apply just to particular email recipients?
posted by suelac at 1:21 PM on May 19, 2022 [1 favorite]


Well now I've apparently accepted half a dozen scrum invites starting at 3am because they're on GMT so THANKS A LOT HORSES.
posted by JoeZydeco at 1:25 PM on May 19, 2022 [2 favorites]


I just returned from 10 days in Iceland. It was incredible. The landscape, the people, the weather...

We had a number of encounters with Icelandic horses, but none was more photogenic--nor more ready for their closeup--than this guy (I hope you can follow the link--why doesn't Mefi support inserting photos directly?):

I call it "blue steel."

In short, Iceland is breathtaking.
posted by ltLurker at 2:00 PM on May 19, 2022 [8 favorites]


Actually, "THIS is the one I call blue steel!"
posted by ltLurker at 2:12 PM on May 19, 2022 [6 favorites]


If only I had a penguin…: Also, I'm really curious that the horse's last name doesn't end in -son or -dottir. Does Iceland use different conventions for naming horses?

Patronymics and matronymics are used for humans.

And there are naming conventions for horses, there's even a "horse naming committee", run by the Federation of Icelandic Horse Assocations, which accepts and rejects horse names for their database (though if you aren't a horsebreeder, there's no need to register your horse with them). Predictably enough, the horse naming committee was set up a few years ago because some breeders tried to register horses under obscene names.

The conventions are roughly that the grammatical gender of the name should correspond to the sex of the horse, that it should adhere to the conventions of Icelandic orthography and grammar, and a few other minor peculiarities (e.g. that the name shouldn't include the definite article, i.e you can name your horse Steinn, the Icelandic word for Rock, but you couldn't name it Steinninn, The Rock).
posted by Kattullus at 2:24 PM on May 19, 2022 [10 favorites]


You could, however, name it Dwayne Johnson. But only if it was a boy horse.
posted by corvine at 8:06 AM on May 20, 2022 [3 favorites]


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