PRPG:
Fake or Fact

Fake-or-Fact Friday: Something’s Rotten in the State of Norway

May 1, 2015

Two of the following weird news stories about the Scandinavian nation are true, and one is false. Can you guess which one we made up? The answer is at the end of the post.

A.

Norway is getting rid of radio. Within just two years time, there will be no more FM broadcasts in the country, as Norway will become the first country on earth to switch completely to digital broadcasting. Oddly enough, digital communications have become so prominent in recent years that they’ve driven down the price. It now costs eight times as much to broadcast on good ol’ FM as it does to beam it from a satellite in space. Unfortunately, only 20 percent of cars in Norway—where most people listen to the radio—are satellite-radio equipped.

B.

It’s raining worms! Really. While skiing in the mountains outside the large Norwegian city of Bergen, a woman found thousands of worms on top of giant snow piles. Analysis showed that the worm piles were 18 inches deep—and since there’s so many of them, and they were on top of mountains of snow, there’s no way they all just dug upwards through the dirt. It’s not the first time this has happened, with news reports in Norway marking the phenomenon back in the 1920s.

C.

Norway has periodically had a tenuous relationship with Scandinavian neighbor Denmark. While there hasn’t been an armed conflict between the two nations in centuries, tempers flared up in theatrical circles this month when the Oslo National Theater decided to mount a lavish production of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The play takes place in the court of a Danish king…but ONT workers completely rewrote the play to take place entirely in Norway. “This is an affront to both Shakespeare and Denmark,” said a letter to the editor in The Copenhagen Post.

 

Want more of the patently untrue? Check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)