Deadly rivalry

No, not really. But neighbors Sweden and Norway do make each other the butt of jokes so much that a startling number of their children really do believe the other country is mentally impaired. And they do have a prickly rivalry, made worse by upstart Norway becoming so rich and successful.

Where sports are concerned the one-upmanship rapidly reaches ludicrous proportions, but no occasion is too small to consider a poke in the other’s direction.

When I was reading the articles about Norway’s penchant for bloodthirsty literary thrills at Easter,

Quick look back

The new media year begins as always with a scattering of studies and surveys to help put the recent past into perspective and numbers. Named the world’s best place to live and best place to visit in 2009, Norway also tends to compete in the ‘most expensive’ category.

The 2009 winner of the most expensive capital city in the world for foreigners to visit came as a surprise to me at least.

Much ado

Norway’s remarkable string of big international headlines continued with a major role in the massive publicity around the 47 million year old fossil dubbed ‘Ida‘ by Norwegian paleontologist Jørn Hurum.

With an orchestrated media campaign more typical of the launch of a Dan Brown film than a scientific discovery, the amazingly preserved fossilized skeleton was hailed as one of the missing links in man’s evolutionary chain.

The hype around the discovery even included comparing the find to