Podcasts about Faroese

The Faroe Islands are a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark. It's an archipelago of green and mountainous small islands situated in the North Sea, between Scotland, Iceland and Norway and home to just 54,000 inhabitants. Lena spent the first 20 years of her life in the small town of Klaksvik, in the eastern part of the Faroes, surrounded by family in a close-knit community. She grew up also in a time when the world was far less connected than it is today, and TV didn't arrive on the islands until 1981. Therefore her early life was filled mostly with memories of activities in the outdoors.When she was 20, she made the big step to move to England to take up a position as an au pair, and although she did return to the Faroes for time, she never moved back permanently. She would meet her husband in the UK and over 20 years ago they moved to Perth looking for a change, and in 2020 Lena moved to Tasmania to be near her daughter, and felt straight away at home being close to the see and surrounded by natural scenery that reminded her of the Faroes.Although she has spent most of her life outside of the Faroe Islands now, she still retains some small Faroese traditions at Christmas and birthdays and still speaks the Faroese language with family abroad.

Adam Hurrey is joined on the midweek Adjudication Panel by Charlie Eccleshare and David Walker. On the agenda: a cultural review of the Champions League semi-finals (featuring Daniel Sturridge inventing the "nine and three-quarters" role and the return of CBS's Beckham & Friends), celebration policing ties itself in knots, the Andy Gray of the Faroe Islands, former Wimbledon strikers' names in mid-1960s Marvel comics and a curious Evening With Eden Hazard (feat. Rickie Lambert). Meanwhile, the panel ponder the name and vibe of a hypothetical new fourth UEFA club competition. Play the Happy Hunting Grounds daily quiz at games.footballcliches.com Sign up for Dreamland, the members-only Football Clichés experience, to access our exclusive show and much more: https://dreamland.footballcliches.com Visit nordvpn.com/cliches to get four extra months on a two-year plan with NordVPN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Trolls, as presented in medieval literature, are vastly different from the creatures we encountered in our last episode’s collection of 19th-century Norwegian folktales. These Viking Age trolls are more vividly and gruesomely described, and the “troll-women,” who frequently appear, are akin to witches. We begin the show with a traditional song from the Faroe Islands, “Trøllini í Hornalondum,” telling the story of St. Olaf battling trolls on the coast of Norway. While the ballad presumably originated in Norway, it was first recorded by the Danish priest and historian, Anders Sørensen Vedel, in his 1591 publication, Hundredvisebogen, (the Book of 100 Ballads.”) While St. Olaf (King Olaf II) is regarded as the saint who drove paganism from Norway, but this struggle was ongoing with trolls continuing to embody the old pagan world as belied by various tropes — their dislike of church bells, and fear of crosses. We'll next look at an interesting case from Iceland presenting a direct conflict between a church and troll.  It was collected by the “Grimm of Iceland, Jón Árnason, a librarian and museum curator who published several collections of folktales, beginning in 1852. This one's from his second volume of Icelandic Folktales, published in 1864. Encountering trolls — St. Olaf’s Journey, fresco by Albertus Pictor, ca 1470, Dingtuna Church, Västerås, Sweden After this, we have some general comments on the historical relationship between trolls and giant (jötunn, Þurs and risi) as well as trolls and witches or sorcery (trollldom). Our remaining four stories (the medieval ones) present trolls of the Icelandic saga, epic stories written in Old Norse and relating the adventures of ancestral heroes or rulers, usually with some connection to history but with certain creative embellishments. A subset of the sagas, which take place in their own mythic timeline, the fornaldarsögur were simply written with entertainment in mind and more oriented toward magic and folklore – and trolls, so we'll lok at a couple of those. And then there's the þáttr, a sort of short story, sometimes folded into sagas, but often reproduced independently. As this is a storytelling episode, we won’t spoil the tales with plot outlines, but the sources (in order) are: The 14th-century þáttr of Thorstein Ox-leg as translated in William Craigie's 1896 compilation called Scandinavian Folk-lore: “The Trolls in the HeidarWoods.” A portion of the 16th-century Illuga Saga, translated by Philip Lavender of the Viking Society for Northern Research. The 14th-century Saga of Grim Shaggy-Cheek as translated by Peter Tunstall. The Saga of Orm Stórolfsson, as retold by William Craigie in Scandinavian Folk-lore – under the title: “The Giant on Sauðey” (Saudey). We end with a song “Trøllini Trampa,” (“Trolls' Tramp”) by the Faroese band, Spælimenninir

It's Emily Prentiss! It's Kathy! It's Paget Brewster! The television icon talks about her role as an "angry Karen" in the delightfully unhinged horror film Touch Me. She also talks about Criminal Minds, voiceover work, favourite horror films, and her desire to play, in her words, "a raging bitch". Bui Dam, is an actor and theatre director from the Faroe Islands. He is making his film directorial debut with Birita which chronicles legendary Faroese actress Birita Mohr - who also happens to be his mother - as she attempts a comeback in King Lear while also battling Alzheimer's. It's a moving portrait on family.Subscribe: Apple, SpotifySocials @EndeavoursRadio

Búi Dam is on The Movies talking about his new documentary, BIRITA, which premieres today as part of the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival (CPH:DOX for short).BIRITA is named after Búi's mother, Birita Mohr, a legendary presence and actor in Faroese theatre. (The Faroe islands are located between Iceland and Norway, currently part of the Danish kingdom, though the independence movement is loud and fuckin' proud.)Birita was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2011 and since then, hadn't performed on stage. In a bid to give his mom another at-bat and help her channel this joy and experience which lives baked into her bones, Búi put together a prodcution of Shakespeare's KING LEAR, casting his mom in the title role.He talks about the process of crafting the play, lessons learned about his mother and the relationship with his own aging, what legacy he'd like to leave behind for his children, and much more.BIRITA premieres at CPH:DOX today, March 15, at 16:15pm. More details can be found here.---Music provided Content ID free by @goodkidbandFollow The Movies on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ & ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Letterboxd⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Throw a couple dollars in the ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tip jar!⁠

In this heartfelt episode of Big Blend Radio, we talk with filmmaker, musician, and theater director Búi Dam about his powerful new documentary Birita, premiering at the renowned documentary festival CPH:DOX. The deeply personal film follows Búi's mother, celebrated Faroese actress Birita Mohr, who is living with Alzheimer's disease. In an extraordinary act of love and artistic exploration, Búi attempts to bring her back to the stage to perform King Lear, exploring whether creativity, music, and performance can reconnect memory, identity, and joy. Set against the breathtaking backdrop of the Faroe Islands, the film captures a family of theater-makers navigating caregiving, artistry, and resilience. The documentary reveals how storytelling, music, and family bonds can illuminate the human spirit—even as memory fades. In this conversation, Búi shares the inspiration behind the film, the emotional journey of documenting his mother's story, the role of music and art in Alzheimer's care, and how personal storytelling can help raise awareness and compassion for families facing dementia.

Interview by Angela CroudaceFresh from a powerful return to the region in 2024, Faroese artist Eivør is set to bring her first-ever headline tour of Australia this March, marking a long-anticipated homecoming of sorts. After opening for Heilung last year, the experience left a lasting imprint on the singer, who describes the visit as the fulfilment of a long-held dream and the catalyst for returning with her full band and production .Known for live performances that feel closer to ritual than concert, Eivør approaches each setlist as an emotional journey, carefully shaping the arc of every show while allowing room for spontaneity and connection. “It's about taking people somewhere,” she explains, noting that no two nights are ever exactly the same .Australian audiences can also expect elements drawn from her work on The Last Kingdom, where her voice reached a global audience and reconnected her deeply with her Nordic roots, threads that continue to weave naturally into her live shows .Above all, this tour is about community. Eivør speaks warmly of the love she felt from Australian crowds last time, describing the experience as family-like and deeply affirming. For first-time headline attendees, she hopes audiences leave feeling “something”; whether joy, release, or simply love."Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/heavy-music-interviews--2687660/support.

How do the Faroe Islands – a nation smaller than many cities – build a competitive handball team that challenges Europe's elite? What is the “open-Hall” principle and how does it shape an entire generation of fearless players? And what did the EHF EURO 2026 journey mean for a country where handball is more than just a sport? Our hosts Andrea Lekić and Bengt Kunkel sat down with right wing Hákun West av Teigum to talk about the Faroese handball miracle. From grassroots philosophy to the biggest stage in European handball, this is the story of belief, community and boldness. How far can a nation of 50,000 really go?

Nám skipar í hesum døgum fyri evnisdøgum fyri øllum starvsfólkunum í Fólkaskúlanum fyri at lýsa, hvat rørir seg í Fólkaskúlanum. Arbeitt verður í verkstovum og allir fyrilestrarhaldararnir eru føroyingar og av Setrinum. Sólvá Jónsdóttir, deildarleiðari í Námi, Frida Poulsen, undirvísari og granskari á Námsvísindadeildini, og Ingi Wiberg, lærari á GIljanesi, greiða frá. Ingi heldur, at tað er avgjørt ein fyrimunur at fyrilestrarhaldararnir eru føroyingar. Summarskeiðini í føroyskum fyri útlendingum, sum eru á hvørjum sumri, eru ógvilga væl umtókt. Lena Reinert umsitur skeiðini, og hon sigur, at tey lesandi koma ymsa staðni úr heiminum, og vanliga megna tey at tosa føroyskt tá tey hava verið á skeiði í tríggjar vikur. Sandra Saxov Lamhauge stóð royndina og hevur nú heitið ph.d í málfrøði. Hon vardi sína ph-d-ritgerð í Kongshøll á Vestaru Bryggju í Havn. Ritgerðin hevði heitið A sociophonetic study of preaspiration and sonorant devoicing in Faroese og snúði seg um ávís frábrigdi í dialektini ymsa staðni í Føroyum. Sandra hevur starvast og verið innskrivað á Føroyamálsdeildini. Hon sigur, at hon hesa tíðina hevur merkt at fólk yvirhøvur eru áhugað í dialektum. Mékhala Kollslíð av Skála er farin ímóti streyminum. Hon  tók bachelor í Danmark og nú er hon í gongd við eina master-útbúgving í stjórnmálafrøði og samfelagsvísind á Setrinum. Hon hevur avgjørt at masterritgerðin fer at viðgera trygdar og verjupolitikk, tí tey evnini eru sera viðkomandi í hesum broytingartíðum. -Hóast vit eru lítil, eru vit ein partur av spælinum sum gongur fyri seg í hesum døgum. Eg fari at skriva um hvat okkara leiklutur er í hesum spælinum er, sigur Mékhala. Heini í Skorini, lektari á Setrinum, sigur, at áhugin fyri Grønlandi, Norðuratlantshavinum, Arktis og harvið eisini Føroyum og uttan um okkum er nógv vaksin tey seinastu árini - ikki minst síðani Donald Trump, forseti í USA, kom fram við kravinum um at eiga Grønland. Frá at hava verið eitt lágspenningsøki er Norðuratlantshavið og Arktis nú er háspenningsøki. M.a. Tí at Russland hevur útbygt sínar hernaðarstøðir í Arktis. Føroyar blíva nú partur av Erasmus+, sum er stóra stuðulsskipanin hjá ES, ið stuðlar útbúgving, frítíðarvirksemi og ítrótti. Hetta hendir í 2028 og er komið í lag eftir at  Ursula von der Leyen, ES-nevndarforkvinna, var í Føroyum fyri einum lítlum ári síðani, og hon og Aksel V. Johannesen, løgmaður, skrivaðu undir eitt semjuskjal millum Føroyar og ES. Við hesari E-skipan eru nógv lond, ið ikki eru limir í ES. -Erasmus+ fær stóran týdning fyri Føroyar, tí skipanin letur stóran stuðul. Tí er tað umráðandi at vit eru klár í 2028, tá vit eru partur av skipanini, sigur Marjun Lützen, fulltrúi í Undirvísingarstýrinum, sum umsitur Erasmus+-skipanina í Føroyum. Marjun Lützen umsitur stuðulsskipanina Erasmus+, sum Føroyar væntandi verða partur av frá 2028. Hetta hendir eftir at Ursula von der Leyen, ES-nevndarforkvinna, var í Føroyum fyri einum lítlum ári síðani, og hon og Aksel V. Johannesen, løgmaður, skrivaðu undir eitt semjuskjal millum Føroyar og ES. Erasmus+ stuðlar útbúgving, ungum og ítrótti og Marjun Lützen sigur, at hetta fær stóran týdning fyri Føroyar. -Tað er umráðandi at vit eru klár í 2028, tá vit eru partur av skipanini, sigur Marjun Lützen. Martin Tvede Zachariasen, rektari á Fróðskaparsetrinum, ivast ikki í, at Erasmus-skipanin fær stóran týdning fyri Setrið, tí møguleikarnir hjá teimum lesandi verða so nógv betri enn í dag. Tá ber til at lesa á Setrinum og t.d. fara uttanlands at taka onkur semestur, og Setrið væntar harumframt at fáa nógv fleiri útlendingar til Føroya at lesa. Samanlagt fer tað at skapa eitt meira spennandi lestrarumhvørvi fyri tey ungu, sigur rektarin á Setrinum. 

Video interview with Faroese singer, songwriter and musician Eivør Pálsdóttir. FaceCulture spoke with Eivør about growing up in a secluded place, being close to nature, electronic and organic sounds, how she starts on a new album, the new album Segl, her creative force, opening up for collaborations, Only Love with Ásgeir, Let It Come, listening to your inner voice, contrasts, a crossroads in her life, creative freedom, the title Segl (sail), hope, Patience, making people feel something, and a lot more! (08/09/2020) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Conditions aren't friendly in the Faroe Islands for growing food. Raked by North Atlantic winds and nibbled by thousands of sheep, the nearly treeless islands have poor soil and little room for planting. Potatoes and rhubarb are local staples. But some residents have had enough of importing almost all their food from the rest of Europe and beyond. Many products are stamped with the flag of Denmark, under which the islands are self-governing. There are efforts to grow more adventurous crops like kale, seen as hardy elsewhere in the world, and to promote local products—from seaweed to meat and fish “fermented” by the salty air. That work can be seen in the Faroese capital of Torshavn, where the tiny farmers' market is held one Sunday a month for much of the year. In September, a few stalls offered meats, bags of kale and cabbage, and seasoned salt next to the overcast harbor. The vegetables were priced at around 40 Faroese krona (over $6) per bag, a reminder of the high prices for food in the remote islands whose closest neighbors are Iceland, Scotland, and Norway. Cups of soup made from fermented local radishes—and imported beans—sold for 75 krona (over $11), with a piece of bread. The farmers' market is part of Matkovin, a project set up by a local couple to promote food producers. It notes the growing international interest in Faroese food, including a Michelin-starred restaurant and a network of home-cooked meals for tourists called “heimablidni.” “There is a divide, though, between this romantic vision of the Faroese food culture and the everyday state of things, where the majority of our food is imported from faraway countries,” the project says. It adds, “Few Faroese foods are available in the shops, and we are never told where the producer of these foods is located. The Faroese food producer is invisible.” Some Faroese said the COVID-19 pandemic and its shocks to the supply chain raised serious questions about food security, along with a large labor strike in May 2024 in the islands that led to rationing. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Kate Molleson meets Gavin Bryars, the celebrated and much-loved composer whose kaleidoscopic career defies categorisation. As an inveterate collaborator, Bryars has worked alongside figures as diverse as Brian Eno, Tom Waites, the Hilliard Ensemble, Mainz Opera and Faroese singer-songwriter, Eivør Pálsdottír. He has collected a lifetime's-worth of amazing stories along the way, and Kate invites Gavin to share some of the many surprising twists and turns in his journey from experimental outsider to concert hall favourite.Music Featured: Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet The Stopping Train Crookesmoor The Sinking of the Titanic My First Homage White's SS Medea: Prelude to Act 5 Les Fiançailles On Photography String Quartet No 2 Glorious Hill Cadman Requiem Epilogue from Wonderlawn Adnan Songbook: Song IV Epilogue from ‘G' Biped Morte à spento quel sol ch' abagliar suolmi (Second Book of Madrigals) Double Bass Concerto "Farewell to St. Petersburg" A Man in a Room, Gambling (2, ‘3 Card Trick') The Fifth Century, (VI, His Omnipresence Is Our Field Of Joys) Ciascun ke fede sente (Lauda 37) Tróndur í Gøtu (V, Shall I Abandon) A Native HillPresented by Kate Molleson Produced by Chris Taylor for BBC Audio Wales & WestFor full track listings, including artist and recording details, and to listen to the pieces featured in full (for 30 days after broadcast) head to the series page for Gavin Bryars https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002djt7 And you can delve into the A-Z of all the composers we've featured on Composer of the Week here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB77X3S0/composers-a-to-z

On this week's edition of The Verb: Ian McMillan basks in the glow of a Neon Line explained by the celebrated Faroese poet and novelist Carl Jóhan Jensen; Karen Downs-Barton shares poems from her debut collection, Minx, which reflects on her Romani childhood; Cristóbal Bianchi, cofounder of the Casagrande Collective, on their Bombing Of Poems project; and Naz Knight, poet-in-residence at Luton Town FC, on drawing poetic inspiration from the terraces.Presenter Ian McMillan Producer: Ekene Akalawu

Knitting and wool are so essential in the Faroe Islands that in the early 1800s, exports of sweaters and socks made up about half of the economy. Today, the nation of about 55,000 people has 8+ knitwear brands, 2 active spinning mills, and 70,000 ewes. Sissal Kristiansen, the owner of knitwear company Shisa Brand, started an initiative called The Wool Islands to celebrate the heritage and potential of Faroese fiber. “We owe it to our past and our future to utilise the natural resources that we have, and on the Faroe Islands, that is wool,” she says. The first project of the Wool Islands was a 15-minute documentary that takes viewers on a sweeping journey through the Faroese landscape, meeting shepherds, knitters, and of course sheep. Available to watch free on YouTube and the project's website, the film welcomes you to the small country, which is located in the North Atlantic between Shetland and Iceland. Today, the economy of the Faroe Islands relies on tourism; the film shows how enticing a destination it is for knitters, spinners, and textile lovers. Sheep and knitting are everywhere in the Faroe Islands, but maintaining the quality and value of the local wool depends on visitors, locals, knitters, and consumers to recognize its unique importance. Drawing on the natural colors produced by the native sheep, Faroese knitting patterns are characterized by graphic, highly contrasting stranded patterns that generally carry floats over less than five stitches. Sissal's designs for Shisa Brand feature bold traditional motifs in contemporary silhouettes and scales. Some of Shisa Brand's iconic garments feature black-and-white geometric patterns, and the ready-to-wear items are handmade by local handknitters using Faroese wool. Undeterred by wool's reputation for scratchiness next to the skin, she celebrates the lofty texture, warmth, and silkiness of the dual-coated fleece. Hearing Sissal speak about her home and her passion for Faroese wool will leave you yearning to wear Faroese knitwear, knit with Faroese yarn, and visit the country's wool islands. Links Shisa Brand website (https://www.shisabrand.com/) and Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/shisabrand) Find The Wool Islands film and resources about wool in the Faroe Islands at the program's website (https://www.thewoolislands.com/) Watch a panel (https://youtu.be/O07UJxisLeg?si=mUwdb82UIJfXW4gk) moderated by Isabella Rossellini featuring Sissal and other Faroese designers and producers, hosted by the Scandinavia House in April 2024 Read Sissal's “Legacy of Wool: Faroese Gold” in Farm & Fiber Knits (https://farmfiberknits.com/legacy-of-wool-faroese-gold/) Føroysk Bindingarmynstur (Faroese Knitting Patterns), the collection of Faroese knitting motifs documented by Hans Marius Debes, is available from Navia. (https://www.navia.fo/en/knitting-patterns/1151-foroysk-bindingarmynstur.html) Yarn grown in the Faroe Islands is available from Navia (distributed in the US by Kelbourne Woolens. (https://kelbournewoolens.com/collections/navia) Spinnaríið við ánna (Spinnery by the River) (https://kyrra.fo/pages/about-us) produces 100% Faroese yarns at a family-owned micro mill. Snaeldan (https://snaldan.fo/) mill produces yarn and knitwear in the Faroe Islands. Signabøgarður tógv (https://www.facebook.com/siignabogardur) offers 100% Faroese wool yarn. This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks' Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters. KnitPicks.com (https://www.knitpicks.com/)—a place for every knitter.

 “One year, we actually offered the Faroe Islanders One million pounds to stop the hunts. 1 million pounds, which would go to promoting whale and dolphin tourism to the islands and marine conservation education to Faroese kids in schools. And the Faroese response to our offer was the most emphatic no you've ever had in your life. They actually held a hunt on the 1st of January. On the first day of that offer, they went out and deliberately killed pilot whales as their official no to us.” – Rob Read  Rob Read is the leader of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK, otherwise known as Neptune's Pirates UK. He and his team have been working for years to end the suffering of many marine animals. Rob has initiated campaigns as well as actively operating boats, coordinating crew and flying drones, working on issues that include everything from seal shooting by wild salmon net fishermen around Scotland, in Japan against the Taiji dolphin hunts, in the Faroe Islands, against the drive hunts of pilot whales and dolphins, in Iceland against commercial fin whaling, and in Namibia, exposing the Namibian seal hunt.  I asked Rob to come on the show to talk about the places in the world where whaling is still the norm. There are not that many left, but there shouldn't be any left. And that's what Rob and Captain Paul Watson Foundation are working to achieve. Links https://neptunespiratesuk.education/about/the-team/rob-read https://www.neptunespirates.uk/

Kate Adie introduces dispatches from Mexico and the USA, Bangladesh, Syria and the Faroe Islands.Donald Trump has threatened Mexico with sanctions if it does not do more to halt the flow of deadly fentanyl into the US. Quentin Sommerville gained rare access to a Mexican drug smuggling operation, meeting the foot-soldiers of a prominent cartel as it prepares to send fentanyl north of the border.Bangladesh is homes to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people, who have been living in refugee camps since fleeing pesecution in Myanmar back in 2017. The Rohingya's survival has been dependent on foreign aid – but that lifeline is now at risk, following cuts to the US aid budget. Samira Hussain visited one of the refugee camps.US negotiators proposed an immediate 30 day ceasefire in Ukraine this week. While President Zelensky accepted the proposal, President Putin said questions remain about the nature of the truce. Frank Gardner assesses the chances for a lasting peace.Back in 2014, swathes of north-east Syria came under the control of Islamic State - though when its fighters reached the city of Kobane, they met strong resistance from Kurdish forces. With the help of international allies, IS was eventually driven out, but local Kurds still worry that IS may one day return, reports Jiyar Gol.In the autonomous Danish territory of the Faroe Islands, locals have been keeping an eye on what's been going on in another Danish territory – Greenland. Donald Trump's proposal that the US might look to buy it has sparked fresh conversations over Faroese independence – and a growing sense of local pride, finds Amy Liptrot.Series Producer: Serena Tarling Editor: Richard Fenton-Smith Production Coordinators: Katie Morrison & Sophie Hill

Pauline is joined on-air by her longtime friend, Guðrun Rógvadóttir, co-founder of the Nordic knitwear brand, Guðrun & Guðrun . Together, they discuss the distinct history and culture of Guðrun's homeland, the Faroe Islands; how her Faroese heritage shaped her current style and tastes; why she decided to launch her own global fashion brand; and how she and her co-founder continue to balance creativity with commerce, purpose with profits.

Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

Tim Ecott, who is well-known as a journalist and writer, has, in his last several books, turned his attention to the history and culture of the Faroe Islands. High in the North Atlantic, half-way between Scotland and Iceland, the islands' inhabitants remain closely connected to the Viking settlers who established communities on Faroe over one thousand years ago. Tim's most recent book, Sigmundur and the Golden Ring (Sprotin, 2024), offers a compelling re-telling of the Faroese saga. It's a complex Viking revenge tragedy: two teenage cousins are wronged by an older distant relative; they set out to right those wrongs; but their success begs the question of who the story's hero might be.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/historical-fiction

I talk with Faroese songwriter and performer Eivør about music, water, The Faroe Islands, and myth!

I read from fade-out to fagoting with Jeff "UHJeff" Nucera.   You can check out his upcoming documentary at these various links: https://showgalsthemovie.com/ https://tightandnerdy.com/ https://baretobestupid.com/ https://www.facebook.com/ShowgalsTheMovie https://x.com/ShowgalsMovie https://www.threads.net/@showgalsthemovie   Check out his recent episodes on Dave & Ethan's 2000" Weird Al Podcast that we talked about! https://2000inch.com/episode-243/ https://2000inch.com/episode-244/     Here's where you can learn about the Fa(e)roese people and their language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islanders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroese_language     Fáfnir!!! Dragon!!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A1fnir     The word of the episode is "fado". The singer he heard in Portugal is named Francisco Moreira and you can watch him sing here: He's so young in the first one!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bovOeXordIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pplp75gUL3g     Use my special link https://zen.ai/thedictionary to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.    Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr     Theme music from Jonah Kraut https://jonahkraut.bandcamp.com/     Merchandising! https://www.teepublic.com/user/spejampar     "The Dictionary - Letter A" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter B" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter C" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter D" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter E" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter F" on YouTube     Featured in a Top 10 Dictionary Podcasts list! https://blog.feedspot.com/dictionary_podcasts/     Backwards Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmIujMwEDbgZUexyR90jaTEEVmAYcCzuq     https://linktr.ee/spejampar dictionarypod@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/thedictionarypod/ https://www.threads.net/@dictionarypod https://twitter.com/dictionarypod https://www.instagram.com/dictionarypod/ https://www.patreon.com/spejampar https://www.tiktok.com/@spejampar 917-727-5757

This is the fourth episode for my segment “Ask Jewells Anything About Iceland”. Thank you to everyone who sent in questions. If you would like to submit a question, please use this link.You can check out previous episodes on Ask Jewells Anything About Iceland here.If you have questions that are specifically for an upcoming trip and getting the answer is time-sensitive, feel free to book a one-hour private video trip planning call with me. 1. Anne C. said: "Have you been to Faroe Islands? Is it an easy enough day trip or overnight or weekend from Iceland? What are logistics and approx costs/fees associated? Best time of year?" Flights from Reykjavik, Edinburgh, and Oslo to the Faroe Islands with Atlantic Airways are only one hour long,The Faroe Islands can also be reached by ferry from Iceland and Denmark. Slow travel at its best! This service is operated by a Faroese company, Smyril Line.Icelandair flights are currently 5-6 times a week from May to October. The price starts at $206 if departing from ReykjavíkCheck out Visit Faroe Islands for more information. 2. Michael F. said: "We are returning to Iceland for the 2nd time in September. Our flight gets in early and we saw some hotels close to the airport offer a nap-n-go option. We were hoping to catch a nap before driving to Hveragerdi. Is this something you would recommend?" I think the Nap and Go program is a great option to get some rest before heading out on the road. It seems that you need to contact the hotels for the room rates because they are not on their websites. 3. Scott H. said: "What is it like taking a car on a ferry? To visit the Westman Islands. We are staying overnight there and I would like to have my luggage and other things with us while we are there." Taking the ferry to the Westman Islands has been a very positive experience for me. I think the best route is when you depart from Landeyjahöfn on mainland Iceland and going to Heimaey. You can book you car as part of your ferry ticket, which makes getting around the island even easier. 4. Ana C. said: "Hi Jewells! How was it for you experiencing winter time in Iceland for the first years? Was it too hard? What was the most difficult part? Do people there change habbits to enjoy the little daylight they can while working for instance (like longer lunch breaks)? What changes in the daily life ? Ended up being a lot of questions ;-) Takk! I talk a lot about the coping mechanisms I have used to thrive, and not just survive, winter in Iceland in this video. 5. Ana C. said: "What is the most difficult part for you about learning Icelandic? Vocabulary itself, conjugation, verbs? " Icelandic has several things that make it difficult. Pronunciation, declensions, conjugations, and some exceptions to rules can trip anyone up. This includes Icelanders. I think my avoidance of saying something wrong due to the four cases in which words can decline or conjugating verbs was more of an issue than saying words properly.For many language learners that have an accent when they speak Icelandic, that can be a deterrent in having Icelanders understanding what you are saying because most Icelanders are not accustomed to hearing an accent when they speak Icelandic. 6. Madeline M said: "This isn't exactly about Iceland, but...can you give us the backstory of your theme music?" The selection of my theme song was based on me wanting to play music that gave you the vibe of taking a road trip or feeling nostalgic.It would have been nice to have a local Icelandic band create the sound but I was DIYing everything so there was not a lot of money to put into this. After many hours of checking out music on a royalty free music site, I knew I had found the right song. 7. Shelley D. said: Do you have resources for lodging in Iceland? Yes, I have many lodging recommendations on My Iceland Map. 8. Christine said: "Thank you for all the great advice and inspiration!

In Part 1, we round up all the latest highlights from the UEFA club competition qualifying rounds. We talk about two villages of under 1,000 people in the Faroes & San Marino that claimed big European wins, the Slovenian keeper that went on a René Higuita-style dribble against Connah's Quay Nomads of Wales and FC Copenhagen's upcoming trip to face ‘pub team' Bruno's Magpies at a stadium overlooking the African coastline. That is followed in Part 2 by an announcement about a change to the podcast, which will return to its previously fortnightly rhythm. We then round off the episode by talking about the ‘Pariah Derby' between the North Korean and Russian women's teams and turn our attentions to pre-season friendlies: the pitch invaders at Rapid Vienna vs. AC Milan, Augsburg's immigration disaster and a playground-style switch in Heilbronn. If you don't want to wait until Wednesday 7 August for our next podcast, then join us on Patreon for our bonus podcasts. In the episode on Wednesday 31 July, we will examine the intriguing back stories of three promoted clubs from Eastern Europe, take a look at the Coupe de France action in St. Pierre & Miquelon and discuss the upcoming Milne Cup between Orkney & the Shetland Islands in Scotland. You can sign up at patreon.com/SweeperPod. RUNNING ORDER: 00:00 - Intro 00:38 - Victorious villages 04:52 - 27th time lucky for La Fiorita 11:38 - The NK Bravo keeper on the run 13:41 - Icelandic accumulator threats 15:19 - Pub team with a view of Africa 21:31 - Podcast frequency announcement 23:52 - North Korea's 'Pariah Derby' 29:22 - Rapid vs. Milan & pre-season friendlies Video of the NK Bravo goalkeeper on a run: x.com/FootballBurp/status/1814063958224978365 Editor: Ralph Foster

Send us a Text Message.A new kind of album review on the Nordic Sound Channel. And what better way to return to the grind than with a new release from one of my favorite Nordic singers, Eivør.Patreon.com/nordicsoundchannel"Eivør calls her Nordic home in the remote Faroe Islands a landscape of extremes. Sitting in the North Atlantic Ocean just above Scotland and southeast of Iceland, with a total population of about 50,000, the climate is “full of contrasts—very dark, heavy winters and bright summers.” Growing up in a small village there, of about 400 people, it's those contrasts that have inspired Eivør's music throughout her career.Often considered to be one of the most prolific and unique Nordic artists of her generation, Eivør has released 11 studio albums to date, crossing musical genres and always pushing the envelope of the expected. Awarded with the Nordic Council Music Price in 2021, Eivør's musical journey continues to fascinate and has seen her perform across the globe; from Europe's biggest festival stages to providing the soundtrack to Netflix's hit series The Last Kingdom and the video game God of War: Ragnarök.Her forthcoming new album ENN ties back to Eivør's Nordic roots. Most of the lyrics, sung entirely in Faroese, were penned in collaboration with the Faroese poet Marjun Syderbø Kjelnæs. Eivør calls the lyrics to the title track especially “hardcore.” The song is about war—“the wars that are going on in the world especially lately, but that have always been going on,” Eivør says, “and how to find a glimpse of light in this overwhelming darkness.” The guttural penultimate track, “Upp Úr Øskuni,” is a thrilling outlier mixing growling beatboxing with visceral throat singing (it's certainly Eivør's most metal moment).ENN stands out among Eivør's discography as a bold new venture. Her debut for Season of Mist, the album leans heavier into dark electronics. Her new Prophet-5 synthesizer hardly made it out of the box before she keyed up “Hugsi Bert Um Teg”, a swooning bit of dream-pop that dances like the colors of the milky way.On a grand scale, ENN follows a cosmic arc. The title track is a symphonic, war-torn space odyssey. But the album also dwells on more earthly concerns. Lead single “Jardartra” is told from the perspective of a wounded mother earth, who calls to us with a steadily thumping bassline that's as dark and warm as our planet's molten core. “Come lie down in my blue embrace”, Eivør sings, reaching into her operatic register, as if beckoning us toward the light.On ENN, Eivør moves heaven and earth."Support the Show.

Working together in a Philadelphia yarn store, Kate Gagnon Osborn and Courtney Kelley learned how to help customers choose the right yarn for a project, welcome in timid new knitters, and create samples to help move yarn out the door. They learned what didn't work (donut-shaped balls of yarn that hopped off the shelves and tangled, patterns that used a few yards of a 100-gram skein) and what did (unfussy classic yarns, wearable sweaters, and lots of fun-to-knit hats). They founded Kelbourne Woolens in 2008 to offer yarns and patterns to local yarn shops like the one where they met. Their academic and artistic backgrounds gave them a love of fibers—both studied weaving and dyeing—but much of what they've learned in business has been gleaned through trial and error, common sense, and their extraordinarily collaborative partnership. They have developed a slightly eclectic grouping of yarns based on natural fibers: a range of colorwork-friendly 100% wools, a trio of heathered and tweed yarns milled in the Donegal tradition, some lightweight summer cottons, a mohair blend, and several other projects at various stages of development. Their Germantown yarn, named for the Philadephia neighborhood and the centuries-old American wool yarn tradition, was fueled by Courtney's love of history and Kelbourne's desire to offer a domestically grown and spun yarn that welcomes knitters at all levels. In addition to developing yarns for the Kelbourne Woolens label, they distribute a small number of other yarn companies, bringing their yarns to American knitteyarn stores. That includes Faroese company Navia, which preserves the knitting and agricultural heritage of a tiny group of North Atlantic islands, and Misha & Puff, a knitwear company that offers a RWS-certified line of yarns and patterns. Having recently opened a retail space attached to their warehouse in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadephia, Kate and Courtney now have their own space to welcome knitters in person, experience the currents of the knitting world, and learn to suppport other yarn shops. Links Kelbourne Woolens's website (https://kelbournewoolens.com/) and store locator (https://kelbournewoolens.com/pages/store-locator) Read more about the history of Germantown yarns in “Yarn with a History as Old as America” in PieceWork Winter 2022. (https://shop.longthreadmedia.com/products/piecework-winter-2022) The Wool Islands, (https://www.thewoolislands.com/) a short documentary about Faroese wool and yarn This episode is brought to you by: Treenway Silks is where weavers, spinners, knitters and stitchers find the silk they love. Select from the largest variety of silk spinning fibers, silk yarn, and silk threads & ribbons at TreenwaySilks.com (https://www.treenwaysilks.com/). You'll discover a rainbow of colors, thoughtfully hand-dyed in Colorado. Love natural? Treenway's array of wild silks provide choices beyond white. If you love silk, you'll love Treenway Silks, where superior quality and customer service are guaranteed. KnitPicks.com has been serving the knitting community for over 20 years and believes knitting is for everyone, which is why they work hard to make knitting accessible, affordable, and approachable. Knit Picks responsibly sources its fiber to create an extensive selection of affordable yarns like High Desert from Shaniko Wool Company in Oregon. Are you looking for an ethical, eco-friendly yarn to try? Look no further than Knit Picks' Eco yarn line. Need needles? Knit Picks makes a selection for knitters right at their Vancouver, Washington headquarters. KnitPicks.com (https://www.knitpicks.com/)—a place for every knitter.

We're talking about high school gossip, why we won't do coke, Faroese politics, and European black markets. Shoutout slic for the music

10th March 2024 The Spokesmen Cycling Podcast EPISODE 348: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett of Komoot SPONSOR: Tern Bicycles HOST: Carlton Reid GUEST: Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett LINKS:  https://www.the-spokesmen.com/ https://www.ternbicycles.com https://twitter.com/CarltonReid https://www.komoot.com/user/655260825794 https://jkbsbikeride.com TRANSCRIPT Carlton Reid  0:13   Welcome to Episode 348 of the Spokesmen cycling podcast. This show was engineered on Sunday 10th of MARCH 2024. David Bernstein  0:28   The Spokesmen cycling roundtable podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern are committed to building bikes that are useful enough to ride every day and dependable enough to carry the people you love. In other words, they make the kind of bikes that they want to ride. Tern has e-bikes for every type of rider. Whether you're commuting, taking your kids to school or even carrying another adult, visit www.ternbicycles.com. That's t e r n bicycles.com to learn more. Carlton Reid  1:03   I'm Carlton Reid. And this is the fourth in a five part series digging into bike navigation apps. There have been shows with folks from Ride With GPS, Bikemap, Cycle.travel, and today it's the turn of Komoot. although as you'll soon hear, in this nearly 90 minute chat with Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett, we also talk a great deal about travelling the world by bike. And that's before, of course, there were smartphone apps to guide you. Jonathan, welcome to the show. And presumably you're you're in London, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:51   thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure. And yeah, I'm in London, South London to be precise on a very beautiful sunny February morning.  Carlton Reid  2:01   It's kind of nice in Newcastle as well. So we're blessed. Now the reason I said that was because a your name. So we can get looking we can discuss that in a second and you can show me how you're you can tell me how to pronounce your, the Danish part of your name correctly. But also because cuz because we're talking here about Komoot and Komoot is a German company. But first of all, how do i pronounce your name correctly?  Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  2:29   My name is pronounced Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett. And it's actually not a Danish surname. It's a Faroese surname from the Faroe Islands. So I am I a half British, my father's English my mother is Danish, but my mother is half Faroese, her grandma, my grandmother's from the Faroe Islands, and the Faroe Islands for anyone listening who isn't sure exactly where they are, is a bunch of islands about halfway between Scotland and Iceland. And on the southern most of those islands, called Suðuroyu. There's a kind of like a mountain ridge, behind the village where like my gran and her family are from called CamScanner. And that's where that name is from. So yeah, it's it's ferries surname via Denmark. Wow. Okay, good explanation. Carlton Reid  3:26   And because I didn't know any of that, I then didn't go back and check on your, your global world. Crossing cyclist. So I noticed that you went from Iceland? Did you go via the Faroe Islands at all? Yeah. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  3:45   So many, many years ago. Now, I spent three years cycling around the world, which was a whole kind of story in episode in itself. And at the very end of that, I wanted to go and seek because my great grandmother was still alive at the time, and she was alive and kicking the pharaohs. So towards the end of this, this, this free journey, I really wanted to go to Iceland cycle there wasn't particularly advisable in the depths of winter, but had a wonderful time nonetheless. And from there, you can take a ferry to the pharaohs. So I did go. I did after sort of not really seeing any family for about three years. I did go and see my great grandmother, which was amazing. It's an incredibly beautiful place. By that point, I had seen an awful lot of devote the world and the pharaohs. You know, just like truly spectacular. And it was really wonderful that I got to go and see my great grandma because she passed away a few months later. So it was all kind of perfect. A really nice kind of like final stop before I returned to the UK. So Carlton Reid  4:52   I will admit I haven't read every single one of your blog posts from back then but I'll go backwards and I'll go back and read that one because I'm sure that Under brilliant because I hadn't spotted the Faroese part. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  5:04   Yeah, it was a really lovely thing that I got to and then at the very beginning of my, the very beginning of this huge cycle, I left home said goodbye to my dad, my mum lives in Copenhagen. So I started that cycle around the world. I mean, at the time I had, I had no idea. It would be that big a cycle. I was just trying to see how far east I could get. But I wanted to go and visit my mum in Copenhagen. So that was kind of the beginning of the journey. So it was quite nice that I had like pitstop early on, you know, visiting family and it was quite nice that again, towards the very end, I also had a pit stop visiting fan for going home. Carlton Reid  5:42   That's your mum also came out and visited you like you as your beach bumming whether that was in somewhere in Indonesia or was in Thailand. Yeah, that's Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  5:50   right. She came and visited me in. I guess I was in in Thailand, often having seen her for probably a year and a half at that point. So we had a little, very nice, relaxing beach holiday, catching up, and most importantly, not doing any cycling at the time. Carlton Reid  6:07   And I'm sure she's treating you as well. It was, yeah, yeah. Know that for a fact, because we treated our son when he was doing stuff like that. Right. So let's get back to what we're meant to be talking about here, Jonathan, that is Komoot. So before we do that, I mean, give us the history of Komoot, because, you know, would you have used it on your? So yeah, this is 2015 to 2017. Yeah, yep. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  6:37   So I think I was unfortunately, I was a little bit too early. Cuz it's been around the apps been around for about a decade now. Set up by six, six friends from Germany and Austria. They have, I guess they will kind of united by a love of both tech. And also nature, they will come from the fringes of like, beautiful parts of Europe. But a very clever bunch. Yeah, excited about like the future of tech and where it intersects with, like, you know, all aspects of reality in our day to day lives. So Komoot is a German company. But going back to your your opening comment is a German company, but we consider ourselves very much a global or at least a European company, people, the people who work for Komoot are spread out across all of Europe. So we have quite an international outlook on the world, I would say. Carlton Reid  7:39   Was that right from beginning? Or was it very localised to begin with, and then only gradually did become international? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  7:45   Definitely, it was a gradual thing. I think Komoot I can't quite was before my time, the point because Komoot's fully remote. So one point switched and thought, Well, why not sort of recruit from across the entire continent instead of one country. And for a good number of years Komoot has been conscience consciously, international. So like had the app, the product translated to English a long time ago, we now have it available in half a dozen languages. So like, that obviously takes time and resources, but it's quite important for us to allow as many people as possible around the world to like, understand and interact with and interact with the app. So in terms of my own journey in cycling, I was kind of a bit too early on in the process is quite, it's quite funny actually, when I, when I first left, I really was not a cyclist. In 2015, when I left home, it all came together very quickly. And this was sort of the blogging, end of those blogging, glory years, I think around 2010 to the mid teens. So anyway, I found some resources online, and people were saying, Oh, you can buy a cycling computer and use that. I didn't really have much cash at the time. So I picked the cheapest cycling computer that looked like it might do the job. And it was this. This Garmin device, I can't quite recall what it was called. But you couldn't load base maps onto it, you could create a route somewhere and export a GPX file and then you could have this line to follow it. And I I was just following the North Sea coast coastline, on the way up to Scandinavia. And I spent a lot of time getting very lost. And after about three weeks on the road, I met someone who was was like, you know, you can just use your phone for this. And I didn't have mobile data across Europe. It was like before, it was quite so easy to connect to everywhere. But it hadn't even occurred to me that I could use my phone as a GPS device that it had this functionality, which feels a bit silly in hindsight, but why would I have I lived a sort of normal city life where I was always online at the time. And I hadn't realised that I could download load these map files from Open Street Map. And so I could kind of work out where I was at all times. So when I had that revelation, it was kind of blew my mind and things became a lot easier. And as we might discuss later, fast forward almost 10 years, it's now even easier than ever to have this these good quality maps offline and also to sync them with devices. But it's funny to look at where computers now, compared to my very rudimentary experiences, yeah, almost a decade ago. Carlton Reid  10:30   So the first time I came across, Komoot in certainly, you know, seared into my consciousness when my son was cycling back from China. Yeah. And I had all sorts of other ways of doing routes. But he was insistent that he was using Komoot. So all the way back from from China in some pretty hairy paid places, but parts of the world some of which I can see that you've cycled through as well. He was using Komoot and I need to ask him why he was he was using it but he did found it find it very valuable and certainly very valuable in those hairy parts of the world because it was drawing down some pretty ok maps. And it was giving him obviously really good information. So here's the pitch. Jonathan, why why use komoot? Why Why would world tourists use Komoot and why would that non well tourists want to use Komoot just you know, bumbling around the the Yorkshire lanes or the Norfolk coast towards why those two users might might wait. They want to use Komoot. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  11:41   It's really that's really cool to hear that just used Komoot for that. I've watched his like video of that long journey. It's so amazing. And they're very nice to Komoot was able to help that little bit. And I know that you've travelled a lot by bike as well, I think is funny. You know, especially with bikes, and especially with bike touring, it's been around, you know, it's been a thing for a very long time. It wasn't really that long ago that people were relying on paper maps. But that's in the same way that people used to, you know, drive around with British people with A to Z you know, in the car. And that already feels like such a such an outdated thing. I think a lot of very young people will this is probably a fact that a lot of young people don't know how to read maps in the same way that older generations do. So I would say for bike touring, it's, it's kind of like I sometimes why would you not embrace the technology that we have now, when I was cycling around the world, I did not really do any complex route planning on my phone. But now, we have commute and some similar apps and products. It's incredibly easy. The commute app is really intuitive, the algorithms are very sophisticated, it's very easy to find multiple options, but to find very suitable options, from A to B, even in parts of the world, where some of the map data is, is less comprehensive. And you can do all of this from your phone really easily. You don't have to drag paper maps around, you can very easily forecast how long it will take to get from A to B, you can very easily find out where might be a nice detour to take. There's just a lot less guesswork involved. So for the bike tour, it's a really powerful tool. But I would also say for the recreational user popping around the local lanes in the British countryside, for example, or a beginner, we have, we have a lot of tools that make it really easy to find a suitable route based on your ability. So while we have the route planner, which is great for finding ATV rides, whether that's like 100 miles, or whether that's 2000 miles across a continent, for the casual users who are doing like, you know, regular recreational loops. On our discover interface, we have, within just a few clicks, you can find routes that are based on your preferred sport type, whether you're gravel riding or road cycling, if you like hilly, hilly routes or flatter routes, or whether you're a hiker as well, because we accommodate for, you know, hiking as well. So you have these options that are tailor made for your needs within just a couple of clicks. And you can go and someone who's cycling across a continent probably understands how maps work probably enjoys looking at them, probably enjoys the process of, of stitching a route together. But for a lot of other users. That's not a priority for them. They just want to spend the time outside, having a good time without anything to worry about. Carlton Reid  14:55   There are a number of navigation apps some some of which seem to you know, be very popular in North America. Akka and some that are more popular in, in Europe. So that ecosystem seems to be very, very healthy. There are a number of apps going for the same kind of thing you know, from, you know, including one man bands like Cycle.travel. So, all of these different apps that are out there, how are people choosing? Do you think people are going through a list? And they're gonna go, Oh, I've tried that one, try that we're all like this one? Or do you think they just find one? And then they just keep on using that one come? What may? How do you think this ecosystem works? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  15:39   Gosh, that's a very good question. And a very big question. I think for a lot of people, it's probably a question of what they used first. And that's, that goes beyond just these, like app based kind of routing platforms, if someone is very used to using was successful, use paper maps for decades, or if someone in the UK is, you know, swears by Ordnance Survey. And they've always had, you know, good experience doing that, there'll be unlikely to change unless you give them a very compelling argument or a good example. So I think a lot of people, what they first start using, becomes the thing that they become familiar, familiarity is so important, same of a lot of like tech or products that we use day to day, we're quite hesitant to change our routines. I also think within that ecosystem, people's preferences probably change quite a lot based on if they have a bad experience as well. Same with all types of different, you know, products that we consume, you know, there's probably many things that you've used day to day for years, and suddenly when it breaks or something goes wrong, you decide I want to try something different. And then I would also say the local element probably plays a significant part in it. You mentioned in like other regions, or for example, North America, the market is in a different, like perhaps different status for us or you know, different other products that are available for people, I think a lot of it depends on the local side of it has to do with your peers. So like who you explore with you trusting your your recommendation of those you go out with, or the people who give you a great experience outdoors. But also whether or not the product is is localised and translated into your language that also makes a big difference people find rightly so it's reassuring when the product is as easy to understand gives a different level of trust. So I think those are a few of the factors, that that kind of changed the state of play. But overall, I would say that it's really, it's a good thing. There are a lot of incredible, incredibly bright minds and have great innovative companies in a kind of overlapping space, often with a slightly different objective. And, you know, that's, that's just great for the consumer, because it means that we're all kept on our toes, constantly looking for ways to improve those Carlton Reid  18:08   variety of companies out there, some are chosen by for instance, you know, cycle travel companies. So when you go on a on a cycle holiday, they will, they will choose to partner with a navigation app company, and then they will send you all the routes on that. So you're basically you're almost tied in on that particular holiday to that particular navigation app. Good thing, bad thing. So is that something that it's incredibly important to discover who are actually giving these links out and and calm them? Because you know, you go on a North American owned psychology company in say, Italy. And even though you're in Europe, you're using in effect and American app, because it's an American company that's leading those tours. So is that something that you are you as in Komoot? Or your your, your your colleagues and commute are actively trying to partner with these key companies? Yeah, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  19:15   there are. I mean, there are a lot of ways that we might sort of acquire new users. And by that, I mean, like reaching people and giving them their first experience on commute, those kinds of partnerships. I guess they probably represent like a smaller percentage of the ways to reach people. But that doesn't mean that they're not important. Particularly because if that partner whether it's a tour operator, or you know, a hotel or someone who's running a hotel, or even an event organiser, if they trust in Khumbu, and you know, I would say in Europe is you're far more likely to find that stuff that information presented to you via commitment than anyone else. That's great. because it's just reassures the, you know, the user that people look for that kind of reassurance from those those kind of places of authority. So those partnerships are really important to us. And we do work with a lot of tourism organisations, maybe even like hotels, tour operators, we do have quite a lot of active partnerships. And it's great for us because we reach that audience. But it's really good for us, we put a lot of effort into the people that do choose to work with us on educational tools, so that they understand it coming inside out, and can then give their users good experience. And that remains like super important for any of those types of partnerships Carlton Reid  20:39   can notice. If you get a bradt guidebook, a cycling guidebook, and it's you know, to the lanes of East Anglia, or whatever have you Yeah. Well, you're flicking through this, this book. And there's a little QR code. You open that up, I know, there's your route in Komoot via the Bradt guidebook. So what else have you got? Who else are you apart from Bradt, what else you out there in like a published terms? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  21:10   Well, it's just a good question off the top of my head. And when I struggle to think of them, but quite a lot of I mean, of course, is difficult because we are so you know, across the whole of the continent. There are some amazing publications and magazines that we've partnered with across Germany, France, Italy, Spain. And I think one thing that's really nice at the stage that commutes that is, particularly within certain segments, in Europe, we are, it would almost be strange for the user to have the route presented to them in a different way. Because they're so familiar with commute. That's what they use for their group rides. That's what they use for the events they sign up to. That's what they do for their day to day riding. And so a lot of those partners like they will present stuff on Komoot, regardless, like we'd always like to help them present the stuff in the best kind of best way possible. But they're still going to be reaching out and using Komoot, simply because it's a really nice, easy way to share and present routes with your kind of users or participants. Carlton Reid  22:16   And what do you do for Komoot? So what is the community part of your job title? What is what is? What does that involve? Yes, so Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  22:25   I'm the global community manager komoot. The global part is, well, global, but it's in particular, it's about the gaps between. So we have a team of community managers spread out. In some of the markets where we have more kind of community oriented stuff going on, we have more people. So there's, there's a couple of two or three people in Germany, we have a couple of community managers in the UK, I'm kind of filling in the gaps between a lot of the markets that are growing for us, but aren't quite at the same same kind of stage just yet. And then the community, part of it is kind of two things. One thing is our external partnerships. So that could be with events and event organisers that could be with the kind of inspiring individuals that we work with, because they have, you know, a great platform, or they have a very inspiring story to tell, or they're great at motivating people that that follow them. And then on the other side of that, I have a lot of focus, particularly these days on our core community. So Komoot is, while we're really lucky that we have such a huge audience, audience, we've got about 37 million users. So there's a lot of people. And not all of those people are, you know, active every day or using commute to connect with other people and share their stories within the community. But we have millions of people who are and I spend a lot of time, as do my colleagues on how do we give these people? Like how do we reward them for their contributions? How do we motivate them to share more? How do we make sure that people are getting fed the right inspirational content based on their preferences? So elevating our kind of, and looking after our core community is also a significant part of my role. Carlton Reid  24:22   So can you is it gonna kind of go slightly backwards into your background as well, if you if you are going to set out on a kind of track that you started in 2015? Are you going to do that now? For instance, could you open up Komoot and say, you know, do me a route from London all around the world back again? Or do you have to do it in stages? How would you use if you're going to be doing it again? How would you use commute? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  24:55   I think I think doing a route around the world probably possible but That's an awful lot of information for for one file. So I will probably break it down into smaller segments, which is to be fair, exactly what I did when I cycled around the world, and what most people probably would. And so when I when I left home, and sometimes thinking about cycling around the world is quite kind of overwhelmingly big kind of concept to navigate. But I would break it down into really small parts. So I knew that I wanted to cycle from London to Copenhagen. I knew that I wanted to visit a friend in Amsterdam, for example. So to begin with, I would focus on how do I get from London to Amsterdam, that's a kind of more sensible, you know, if you break it down to blocks, the whole thing becomes a lot more manageable, both in terms of logistics, but also mentally. So I will do the same on Komoot. One thing that sets you apart from some similar, some similar platforms is that we have a variety of different sport types you can choose from. So if you go on the route planner, you'll see that even for cycling, there's a few variations. There's like road cycling, gravel riding, bike touring, mountain biking. And that's really important because well, even even within bike tours, people have different preferences. If someone wants to get to Amsterdam, in you know, two or three days, on a road bike, credit card, touring, staying in hotels, they might want to be thinking, you know, they want to have the mindset of a road cyclists, they want to choose quick, efficient routes, they're on 25 mil tires, they don't really want to be going down toe puffs, no matter how they're graded. So these different algorithms think slightly differently, which I think is is really important. I would personally I would, for the way I was touring leisurely, I would be on the bike touring mode. But no, that's it's just important to point out there's different types based on your kind of bike and you're writing preferences. We have a tool called the multi day tour planner, so I could pick from London to Amsterdam. And then I could divide it up into let's say, I want to do it in four days, or I know that I want to do about six hours of cycling a day, I can divide it up and it takes into account the elevation on the way. So it has like a kind of consistent breakdown, which is really helpful when you're trying to forecast when you might get to a certain location. The other tool that I would definitely would be using on the route planner. One of our features is the sport specific overlays. And then you can overlay the long distance or National Cycle routes, which is super helpful. I do this and I'm always toggling between these wherever I'm out hiking or cycling, it just means at a cursory glance, I can see the long distance routes. So for example, I was at the time following loosely one of the EuroVelo. The common which number is the one that goes up along that coast. Well, I can see that overlaid on the map. And so I can compare that against the route that I'm plotting, I can make sure that I'm like loosely following it that that makes a real big difference. Both when I'm long distance touring, or if I'm even just kind of out exploring in the south of England. So those are a few of the main tools that I would use. The final thing I would add, I wouldn't have such a rudimentary cycling computer, I would still have, I'd still have one. The Garmin that I have now is far more modern and has base maps. And we actually have an app designed for Garmin specifically. And with that, I can create the date the routes on my phone. And I can just press one button send to device and I can load up the IQ app on my Garmin device. And the route will just go bing. And here it is. And if I want to change my route, halfway through the day, I can now just update it on commute on the app on my phone and press updates. And I'll get a little notification and my route will be updated. So if I wanted to cut my day short, we'll go to a different hotel or campsite an evening. And that feature is so cool. And I think if I'd had that all those years ago, there would have been a lot less faffing involved, which would have been wonderful. Carlton Reid  29:14   Yeah, I use that the other day, in fact. So I had a Garmin unit and I had I was navigating with Komoot hadn't actually changed the route because I just got on my bike after 70 miles because the wind was about 50 miles an hour ahead of me. But still, I was using it and it was neat that so I agree. So the map, I've got the app open here now and in other apps, you have a choice of quite a few maps. But here I don't I see the the Komoot map. I see a satellite map but then there's no like Ordnance Survey for the UK. So because your is that because you were an international brand and that's just what on market, yeah, there's no point just offering an OS just for one market. I mean, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  30:03   you could obviously you could argue for it. And in the UK, a lot of people aren't really familiar with and put a lot of trust into Ordnance Survey, commutes sort of core foundation revolves around OpenStreetMap, we are such committed believers of the Open Street Map Project. And it's really at the core of everything we do. And we are constantly looking for ways that, you know, we can help to enrich the data that's there or help to facilitate improvements to it. And you're right, I think, because we are active in so many different countries, we could protect, we could try and add all of these different national maps. But the the user experience would become quite convoluted. You know, if I travel a lot using commute, I quite like knowing that I can get my head around the commute render of OpenStreetMap, which is our like, primary map, and then we have satellite map. I like being familiar with it, I like knowing that the sort of routing algorithms will give me consistent results in different places. And that's quite important to ask that we still give people like a quite a not simple, but like, you know, familiar user experience that doesn't become overwhelming or confusing for them. But we really, we really, I should stress that we like, especially in the markets where we are most active in the quality of the OpenStreetMap data is is really amazing. And it's always improving. And it always is, yeah, enough for us to give people a really good experience. Carlton Reid  31:40   Maybe it's it's an age thing then because I mean, I grew up with OS maps, maybe people who are younger than me and not so hide bound, you know, as you could you have seen before, you know, people are no longer using paper maps, if I've grown up as a user of paper maps, and I no longer use paper maps, but I use the Ordnance Survey maps on my, my phone, it generally tends to be if I'm like trying to visualise an area, then me will as somebody who has grown up with that kind of Ordnance Survey mind map, I would I would default to Ordnance Survey as that's how I explain, you know, my, my where I am. So to me that's like, wow, I need I need, you know, I need iOS to know exactly where I am. It's great to have the Open Street Map. It's lovely. And the commute version of it. But still like, Yeah, but where am I? And I need that something's very familiar. But that might just be you know, people have an older generation. And that that is obvious to my son to Josh, that had zero relevance. And he probably wouldn't know his way around and OS map, but you don't know his way around, you know, the Komoot map really well. So do you think that's just telling me Jonathan, is this just me? Is it just me because I'm very, very old? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  33:00   If I frame my answer, as well, to be careful, I think your Ordnance Survey specifically as a very particular place in the British sort of, well, the psyche of how we spend how we map the country, is equivalent in other countries. I'll give you an example because I sometimes almost feel like as a outdoorsy person who likes Grim Adventures and is British and spends a lot of time exploring the British outside. I, you know, I should be more familiar with Ordnance Survey I confess, I have grown up in London. I didn't kind of do much outdoorsy stuff at school. Honestly, I've never really used Ordnance Survey I am, when when I started to explore, there was sort of these phone based solutions available for me right away sort of 10 years ago, revolving around OpenStreetMap. I do spend a lot of time hiking and walking for leisure. And I've just never found that I that I needed it. I'm super familiar with OpenStreetMap. I'm now an expert in how Komoot works. And so it's just funny, I think it's like different types of people, for sure, especially in the UK, but I would say also globally, is just very different, like different generations who have grown up, especially have the sort of, you know, even for example of Google Maps is sort of omnipresent in our exploring of the world and navigating I'm talking about everything now from public transport to driving. And even like the sort of sat nav, the satnavifacation, I'm sure that's not a word, but how we drive a car around the world has now had a massive influence on on people hiking and cycling. A lot of people would prefer to hike with turn by turn instructions on their phone and find that far more easy to get their head around than navigating from a paper map and pen The people could argue that that's, that's not as good. But I think if you embrace, you know, the quality of the map data and you embrace it, this actually helps a lot more people explore because there are less boundaries or sorry, less. Yeah, sort of less friction points. So less obstacles for them to to get over to outside. I'm not sure that's necessarily such a bad thing. Carlton Reid  35:23   And let's go slightly backwards in that. The name Komoot is a pun on commute. So when it was originally developed, was it as an internal city thing? Or was it always, you know, this is meant to explore the world with or was that explore the world with just something that came afterwards and is the name a bit of a misnomer, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  35:56   is actually a bit of a misnomer, partly because it's actually like a Komoot is derived from, I think it's called the Valsa dialect, which is the region that the founders are from and it's just like as far as I understand it, a casual greeting means something like simple and practical. And so it's a it's actually slightly misleading, because that's the origin of Komoot, obviously, was Carlton Reid  36:22   Nothing at all to do with commute. Well, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  36:25   I don't, I mean, it's not sure if it's a good or a bad thing that they're so similar, but that's the origin of the name Komoot. It doesn't, and the sort of the product and the philosophy doesn't come from commuting at all, it's about spending time outside. Of course, you could probably interpret that in many ways. Perhaps this is an alternative way of you know, commuting in nature. As it happens, many people use commute as part of their commute within town because they want to find a more scenic way of getting from A to B. But that's not the that was never the objective of the company and and still that isn't the case. Carlton Reid  37:05   Right? Interesting. So I got that wrong that Well, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  37:10   I also had one for a very long day if that makes you feel better. Carlton Reid  37:15   It does Thank you very much. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  37:17   I'm afraid now that you'll really struggle to pronounce Komoot without saying Komoot because it's only a matter of time before for that becomes a riddle itself. Carlton Reid  37:26   Well, of course Google isn't I think it's a mathematical term isn't it? So would have been familiar to some people but most people it's not it's not familiar terms. It's just these unusual term. So anything that's slightly unusual is better for a website you know name so the fact that you kind of spelling this and you people think it means there's but doesn't but they remember anyway so that's that's the trick just remembering it. So if it's if it helps some people doing all that must be Komoot Oh, yes, he spelt with a K. And other people's know it as a, you know, a greeting in a certain language. That's also okay. So it's however you get your name remembered? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  38:03   Yeah, very much so. Carlton Reid  38:06   So at this point, I'd like to actually cut away and let my colleague take over and we'll be back in a few minutes. So take it away, David. David Bernstein  38:16   This podcast is brought to you by Tern bicycles. The good people at Tern understand that while a large cargo bike can carry oodles of stuff, many of us prefer something a little more manageable. That's why they've come up with the HSD e-cargobike for folks with big aspirations to go car free, delivered in a compact size, with its rear shock, 280 kilos, and a combined hauling capacity of 180 kilos. The robust new HSD is stable and easy to manoeuvre, even when under load. And with its Bosch eBIKE SYSTEM tested and certified to meet the highest UL standards for electric and fire safety you'll be able to share many worryfree adventures with a loved one whether it's your kiddo or Nan. Visit www.ternbicycles. That's te r n turn bicycles.com to learn more. Carlton Reid  39:17   Thanks, David and we are back with with with Jonathan of Komoot we've discovered that it doesn't mean commute and that's it you want it to mean commute. It can mean whatever you want. But Jonathan is he's the community Global Community Manager for Komoot and he's if anybody's going around the world on their bicycle or wandering around the world on the bicycle and they wanted to use commute then then clearly Jonathan would be a good guy to to learn from Andy certainly in a pretty good job for for the kind of company commute is because Jonathan, you went round the world well, we have touched on this but now let's let's explore this in in greater detail. So we've got the Komoot out of the way. Let's let's, let's talk about what where you've come from and why are you working for for Komoot? So we laughed before. Could you mention the fact that when you started, you were much of a cyclist? And I was kind of thinking, Yeah, that's right, because of what the amount of kit you took to begin with is the kind of the classic. And I made this exact same mistake when I started my cycle touring adventures many, many, many years ago, you take too much kit. So you had an enormous amount of kit. And you had a kind of an old school bike, you were you on steel, you're on a bicycle that I would have been familiar with in the 1980s, you know, a Dawes Super Galaxy,  classic touring bike of a while ago. And then you you you've, you've clearly learned a lot. In that time that you're away, but you started reading your blog, you basically picked this bike, you didn't seem to know much about cycling, and then like, a week later, you're, you're off touring the world. So describe it. Have I got that? completely correct, you were pretty much a novice, and then you went cycled around the world. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  41:18   That is, that is pretty much it. It's almost embarrassing to admit how little preparation or knowledge I had prior to leaving, but I think I was just blessed with youthful naivety time, and I didn't have high expectations at all, I just wanted an adventure. And there are very few simpler ways of finding one than grabbing a bike and kind of just heading off without a plan. Carlton Reid  41:44   Or when it's classic, absolutely classic, the way the way that kind of developed. But let's let's find out what were you doing at the time? How long were you expecting to do? You didn't have any plans at all. We literally tried to go around the world, we didn't know how long was going to take? Or were you just going to cycle and see where you got to and then just what you might give up at some point. What What were you doing? How old were you and what were you doing at the time. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  42:08   So if I rewind a little bit further, we touched upon it at the beginning of the call. I grew up I grew up in London, but my my Yeah, my father's British, my mother's Danish. We never cycled or I never cycled for fitness. I never cycled for leisure or for exploring. However, I did grow up riding bikes, it was just very much like a functional tool to get around. London is not bike friendly city. But it's a very practical city to get around and manoeuvre by bicycle. So I grew up cycling. I studied music at university. And when I returned to London, I wasn't entirely sure what to do next, like I'm sure plenty of young people. Now, early 20s have the same sort of existential crisis. I was quite fortunate that I'd been working the whole time I was studying and, and while I had an awful lot of debt, I had somehow ended up with, you know, a few grand in the bank accounts saved up so I kind of had this incredible, I was in this incredibly privileged position where I could kind of yeah, go and explore a little bit without having to take the next the next most serious steps in life. I had always travelled a lot that had been a high priority for me, I had done a bit of long distance walking, I was kind of prepared for another long hike. And then kind of had this this moment, this epiphany I suppose, where I thought well, what about cycling that could be I was really interested in human power, not human powered, rather, I was interested in overland travel. So I became kind of fixated by this idea of, of cycling and then bike touring. And, and these were, I think, a wonderful period on internet where you could find all these incredible blogs that were so relatable and so inspiring and so informative as well. And so the sort of recommendations I found online, people said, those galaxies a good bike, found one on on eBay bought it was a good pannier to take Balsam or leave panniers from Argos and got all of this around Christmas. And I left two weeks later and the plan at the time, I'd been sort of telling my peers and family I was gonna cycle to Australia, but it was it was a it was a pipe dream. But it was kind of a joke as well. It was a good way of like picking something so outlandish that people wouldn't take it seriously at all, which was fair enough given that I had never cycled further than about 10 miles. And so I I set off as I said to go and visit my mother, and I said if if this goes well, I will continue heading east and I had a fantastic first month and I continued writing to Turkey. I became very good at living, I would say extremely cheap on the road. I realised that I could probably get quite a long way. And, and yeah, I ended up going all the way to Australia, by which point I was completely broke. But I got a job and worked for a few months there. And then at that point, I, it became very clear to me that I wanted to continue and make it around the world cycle. And so I did that. And Nick got home, just under three years after having left probably having clocked around 50,000 kilometres, which is kind of a mind boggling number when I say out loud, Carlton Reid  45:32   huh? There's some people kind of do that in three weeks. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but they do it fast. And, you know, some Komoot users, Markus Stitz, for instance, did on a single speed, etc, etc. But you took three years. Now, it's not that you weren't doing some big mileages, you know, there was there was, you know, I read on your blog, you know, some days you're doing 145 kilometres. And then other days, clearly, you're, you're just doing nothing, because you're just enjoying the location. So you never had any plan to do it in a certain amount of time, you would just basically ebb and flow. It was just whatever the live through it you you kind of did that. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  46:17   Yep. And thank goodness, I personally like that. Because otherwise, I think it would be overwhelming to think about and those people who cycle around the world planning on it or trying to break records, I think it must just require so much. That's no fault and pressure, I really was just kind of going for a ride, there was never any pressure, no expectation. If I went home, whenever I was bored, that would have been fine. No one would have judged me. So I was really making up as I went along. And when I left, I had absolutely no plan to spend anywhere near that long on the road knows that I have any plans to cycle all the way around the world. I am a Tura. At heart cycling at that pace is and I've done a lot of more, sort of a dyno extreme bikepacking. I've done a lot of ultralight cycling, I've even tried a few ultra endurance races. But touring at that kind of pace, for me is just the most kind of beautiful ratio in life. Hmm. Carlton Reid  47:20   So notice, you've done the Transcontinental. So you have done these, these, these races, but your forte is basically just pootling along. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  47:30   Definitely. And if I if I continued to my cycling trajectory in between cycling around the world, and ending up doing what I'm doing currently at Komoot, when I returned home, having spent all of this time on the road, I actually worked as a bicycle courier in London for a short period, which was there's no better way to re calibrate and reintegrate into city living having spent so much time on the road and to get paid to cycle around delivering stuff and exploring, you know, a city even if it's your home city by bike. And I then started working at a company called Apidura. And I know that you're familiar of a producer, because I believe you interviewed the founder of Apidura in this past few years. And I was there for a few years. And that was really, I mean, obviously made sense. I had a lot of touring experience. But that was in 2018, which was really when this hugely significant kind of shift in interest from bike touring to bikepacking. Which you can interpret in many ways. But, but this this shift was really kind of about to explode, and then get even more exaggerated through the pandemic. So I, I had learned so much about travelling by bike and then I learned so much about the benefit of ultralight cycling and these new packing systems that were so different to taking for panniers on a loaded bike. And so I spent four years at the Jura did the roller coaster that was COVID 19. And and that was sort of the segue that led me to Komoot because Komoothas been so involved with bike packing bikepacking as an established but also an emerging sport in the last few years. Because Carlton Reid  49:19   you looking at your your bike setup. Back then with the with the Dawes Galaxy, and the bags you had on that was very much old school. And then I can completely identify with that because I'm clearly old school. And that's where I started. So you know, for panniers at least loads of stuff and caring too much, etc, etc. And you look at that now and you think no, you would have the upward Eurostyle you know you'd have the bike packing bags, you probably wouldn't be carrying quite as much Kip, although some of the place you went to. You know I'm thinking of you like your Australia video. and stuff where you're obviously having to pack. I mean, when you go across the desert, you having to pack you know, an enormous amount of water, you've got to have all of the bug kit, you know, you've got to have all of the stuff that's protecting you from the nasties. So you had some times you have gotten better how many it's not an old school versus new school thing. It's just you have to have a lot of kit in some places and and there's no two ways about that. You know? Even if you're doing a transcontinental style, you know, fast route across somewhere, you would still need a fair bit of of kit. But when you were when you started out, okay, actually good point. Did you finish on the same bike? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  50:43   I did, I finished on the same bike and I still ride that same Dawes Galaxy as my day to day pub, one around bike. Carlton Reid  50:51   Excellent. So it's but it's like Trigger's Broom, you've got you know, you've replaced tonnes of things, or it's still largely the same bike Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  50:58   is the same frame, the same fork. And that is nice. All That Remains of the original bike. Carlton Reid  51:05   So that's pretty good going well done Dawes Super Galaxy.  Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  51:09   Yeah, there's a lot to be said. Having modern bike so us so reliable in general. But yeah, I'm very much of the steel fan club. That bike has a lot of battle scars, from various sort of unfortunate collisions with other vehicles or just the road or ice. But it's still yet it's still going strong. And, and you're right, I've had the been very lucky to experience travelling by bike in very different forms from the kind of old school bike touring sense where you carry basically your entire house, to super ultra light, you know, bike travel, where you just have a bivy bag, and you sacrifice all levels of comfort. I've also done a lot of off road sort of mountain bike touring, I think the thing that I find so wonderful about bicycle travel in general, is that there's always a new way to do it. And there's absolutely no right or wrong way of doing it, I think it's very easy to get caught up in the the idea of I must be a lightweight bike packer, or I must do it in this particular way. But really, there's no right or wrong way of doing it. We're all very different, we all travel for very different reasons. And there's different ways of, of packing for it. And, and even if I refer back to commute and the way that we're set up, we give people the tools to, to pick, you know, they can pick the fast road route, if they want, or they can pick the meandering route, they can pick the most direct one, or they can pick the most leisurely one up over the mountains. I think this whole kind of space is really set up for the user to be able to customise you know, what they're doing, and how they're carrying it based on what their objectives is. And I think that's what's really kind of charming about the whole two wheeled travel thing. Carlton Reid  53:02   See, I'm a historian of many things, but including cycling, and Thomas Stevens, if you hadn't if you've come across that name in in the past, but he was basically a big wheel rider. So what would people would call Penny farthings. And this is 1880s. And the kit he had, the amount of kit he had and how it was packed is very much like bikepacking You know, it's the big pannier bags, that's pretty much the 70s and 80s thing, you know, really, really old and I was calling that old school, but genuinely old school. So 1880 stuff is you know, Apidura-style, incredibly lightweight, hard to carrying anything at all kind of touring. So that's that's kind of where cycle touring started. And we've kind of come full circle in many ways. And so people are going out there with incredibly minimal bits of of kit and somehow surviving. So when you did your your your your cirumnavigation, and you had all this enormous kit, where you jettison bits as you're going along. And just in case you didn't you don't really need this you pick it up basically you became an expert. Just cook you're having to carry this stuff. And because you haven't to carry it, you quickly learn I don't need that Chuck it Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  54:30   Yeah, and I did get rid of an awful lot of stuff. I had some some very questionable belongings with me. Like I had my my, I mean, I was on quite a budget when I left and and while I was going so it's sort of just what am I sacrificing a bit of weight for a cheaper option, but I had like my, my mother's old coat which was this like not anything resembling a down jacket, this monstrous thing that took up half a pannier. I had a pair of jeans with me to wear like when I was off the bike. So much unpractical. kind of clothing thing, I even had like a sort of smart casual shirt, I thought I would like to dress up like a non bike person when I was in town for a weekend, or things that I would never do now. And I did get rid of a lot of this stuff slowly. And as time went on out kind of improved things a bit as they broke. But then there was a lot of things that I wouldn't change, like I travelled with, I mean, I had like a cutting board with me so that I could chop vegetables up when I was camping, and had little film canisters, filmed of spices and a proper source bird. And so I could like, eat well, and, and I wouldn't, again, a lot of bikepackers could turn a nose up at that and think God's this person's just sort of like a moving kitchen. But I you know, for such a long period of the bike, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change that at all. And on and I know that the sort of, especially at the moment with the sort of influences bikepacking has had on on taking existing cyclists and making them realise what they can achieve on the bike. I still am a big believer in taking a bit more stuff if your legs can handle it. And if you're not in a hurry, you know, riding up a mountain with the extra weight on your bag, it's not going to do your fitness any any disservice. If you can get up it. I think a bit of both comfort is quite okay. And while in general, I'm a minimalist these days, I think there's plenty of space for carrying a few extra luxury items whenever you're travelling. Carlton Reid  56:30   But did you come back? Not you but did the bike and the kit come back a lot lighter. So by the time you'd finish, because I know you you'd have to badmouth the bags that you had. But you certainly changed your your your bags halfway around because of various reasons. And other notes on your blog, you do kind of, say a few choice words about the brand you had. But did you come back with? Did you come out with a lot more lightweight than you went? On much more lightweight? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  57:00   I would say I might have shaved off like a kilo. Like in general, I pretty much had the same amount of stuff with me. And yeah, it couldn't have bothered me that much. Because otherwise I would have gotten rid of an awful lot of stuff. So no, I actually, I actually think I returned with a fairly similar amount of weight on my bike. That's Carlton Reid  57:22   interesting, because that's totally opposite to the way I did it. So when I started out, I had so much kit, I had like a wooden hammer for hammering in the tent pegs I had, like, we just get a rock, you know, I had so many things that I just I was chucking stuff you know, from the very, very start and you've kind of quickly got used to you know, what was necessary and what wasn't. And you don't know that until you're actually on the road. So I was ended up with with a lot less kit. So I taught myself minimalism, just because, cuz, whereas you're saying you don't, it doesn't matter, you can just pedal up a hill, I was the opposite as like, No, I'm not the crane brothers. Famously, when they went up Kilimanjaro and their stuff, they they would, you know, drill holes in toothbrushes, I was never that extreme. But I would definitely want to be lightweight, as much as possible. And so I am kind of interested in taking a chopping board. So I wouldn't have done that. This is interesting about how different people approach these things. And like, I have come down to the minimalist and caring such a little like I wouldn't, personally I wouldn't, not even going on like a camping trip. Now. I won't take cooking equipment, for instance, I will generally buy what I need, and eat that and then have to then scrambled to get, you know, fresh supplies. And I know it's much more efficient to take rice and what have you and then be able to boil this up. But to me just carrying any amount of cooking equipment to me in my head, just that's too much weight, I can do this much lighter. And clearly you're you're not you're a different each to their own, isn't it? It's just different people want to do different things. And that's fine. Definitely. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  59:22   And we need to make sure that we always sort of accommodate that. Because people are so different. And and I think it's difficult, you know, in life, for example, in the cycling industry, it's a consumer driven industry, we need to convince people we brands need to convince people that they need to do things in a different way or a better way or an improved way. But really all of it comes down to like giving people options so they can do things in the way that they want to do it. And you know, there is absolutely no reason why one type of bike travelling is superior than another. They are yeah complete The different ways of doing things for different people. So ever people navigate in one particular way, if they choose one kind of route, it's not about that it's about giving people the options. And the same, like if someone wants to go on a road bike really fast with nothing on their bike, that's totally fine. And if someone wants to chuck for massive panniers on their bike, they'll probably be a bit slower. But that's, but that's totally okay. Carlton Reid  1:00:26   And so what are you doing now? During what what? How would you describe your riding, and your adventuring now, Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:00:33   my, I still try. And when I travel, I always want to be on a bike. If I'm not on a bike, I've fully compromised a little bit. But I also like spending time walking around being a normal person, especially if I'm on holiday with my with my girlfriend. But I do try and have one or two bike trips, big bike trips a year. Over the last few years, I've developed a sort of real love for exploring, I guess, capturing the essence of a big adventure closer to home. But in general, I'm sort of a casual cyclist I like to get out for provides every once a week if I can. I think working at QMU is quite is wonderful, but a bit dangerous for someone like me who enjoys spending time looking at maps, because the list of places to visit is evergrowing. But commute has this amazing interface. We have this route planner, which is wonderful gives people all these advanced tools to make informed decisions about where they're going and how they get there. But we also have this discovery interface where you can have these these created routes for you based on your sort of parameters, the smart, this kind of smart solutions, and does have a really big impact on me, since we launched it last year, I'm much more inclined to take a train out from London to a random station and say, load it up on commute and say, Hey, I'm in a new area. I've got three hours, give me something. So while I'm going on less epic adventures, and finding new kind of creative ways of exploring familiar places. I'm doing that a lot at the moment. And I'm extremely excited about doing more of that as the weather improves. Carlton Reid  1:02:19   And is that a curated thing? Or is that an algorithm thing. So Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:02:24   it's a kind of a combination of stuff. commute, we have so much user data, because we have millions and billions and billions of of users, the number of recorded tours is kind of such a big number. It's it's kind of hard to get your head around. So we're able to give people these. These like personalised suggestions so I can take the train out if I'm with a no fun with friends go out for a walk at the weekend, I can look at which train line takes me to a village that looks somewhere Scenic. I don't own a car. So I can just say I'm at this station, it will see where the people who use Komoot are heading when they record their tours. So it's very easy to get a feel for where people actually walk. Where do people go for their recreational weekend straws. And it will give me a clever or suitable solution to get kind of onto that, navigate the route and then return to the train station. And it's incredibly clever how it works. If I go on where I live now and say I want to go for a four hour cycle, starting for I live. I've lived in London for a long time and I've cycled in London for a long time. I know what all of the common roadie routes are that people take wherever they're going off to Windsor or Kent or sorry, Essex and, and if I let Komoot do this for me automatically. It's kind of amazing how it basically gives me the routes that people most commonly do. But it won't just give me three or four options, it will give me hundreds of options, which means I can go out for a new ride. And I can always find something that's slightly different to what I've done in the past. And I find that really inspiring for my, like motivation to explore. Carlton Reid  1:04:12   And then if you were in Iran, would it do the same? Or was it does it need that you know, lots and lots of people have done this before or kind of just glower three people who've done this, okay, that'll be the route we curate for this. This person has just ended up in Iran, for instance, such as yourself a few years ago. Yeah, you Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:04:28   need to have the use of data because it's based on what people actually do. So if we didn't have that it wouldn't we only want to do it when we're confident we give people a good experience. Otherwise, no one benefits from it. You can obviously still use the route panoramic, your own tool in Iran. The what I would say in certain regions where there is less user data, we have an editorial team that make it they're the the we create the content so we'll find what are the classic like walking routes based on like variety of sources, we have an extensive editorial team that will add this content. And they will add suitable highlights, which is what we call the contributions that the community creates to add on to the map. So that this is an amazing viewpoint, this is a great cafe to stop out if you're a cyclist, this is a really beautiful, rich line stroll. So we will help to populate the map so that the people who are used to kind of a circular thing, the better the map data is, the better that the attributions are on commute, the more local people will find, have a good user experience. And then the more they use it, the more they'll contributes. And that's how we kind of launch in in new places where there's less of an active community, if that makes sense. Carlton Reid  1:05:48   Yes, your heat mapping then, in effect, so you're you're working out where people are going, and you see you perhaps, you know, and your your fellow app. This this ecosystem we talked about before, you know, where people are cycling, you know, like the Strava, type heatmap. Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:06:06   Exactly. So we can I mean, it's all obviously, like, it's only when people choose to share stuff publicly. It's all like completely anonymized. But you know, we have so much data, we're just trying to harness it. And yes, we do know where people cycle we have that information that's great is quite hard to sort of digest. But if you can take that and turn it into something actionable, the end result for the user is that they can say, I'm a beginner, I've got two hours, I've got a new phone mount to go on my handlebars, I can select this tool, I can just press go. And I can head off and have an amazing bike ride for two hours. And we can be really confident that it's going to be suitable because that's what other people are doing when they, for example, select bike touring as a sport type. And the same for hiking, we won't have people won't be walking down the road, because we'll only be looking at data that's come from hikers. It's a very Yeah, it's an incredible solution is very clever. And I think it's just a great way of mobilising people, whether they're like really experienced cyclists who are just looking for something new and and bored of doing the same kind of loop over and over again, or newbies who need their handheld a little bit. And once I have a solution that they can just go off and do with five minutes of planning instead of an hour of planning for a two hour excursion. Carlton Reid  1:07:33   Now right now the bike and I don't know how much you know, this, but the bike industry, certainly in the UK, and in many other places in the world is is suffering just incredibly bad. It's just it is it is dire out there at retail. It's dire out there for suppliers, you know, post COVID, we basically just got a huge, huge, low a complete slump. You know, I did a story on Forbes of the day talking about how to 40 year low in the UK. You know, the last time we were as low as this in bike sales was in 1985. So 39 years. And that's that's that's pretty poor. Do. Do you recognise that? Is that something you can look at and say, oh, people aren't writing as much? Or is that just purely at retail and people still riding that is not buying? Jonathan Kambskarð-Bennett  1:08:24   Is a good? It's a good question. I actually saw that Forbes article and is it's definitely bleak reading. But I've worked in the bike industry for a number of years. It's like, I know many people who share the same kind of anecdotal experiences that things are changing. It is a problem with retail and definitely like have these hangover kind of effects from the pandemic that still making it really hard for people to forecast well. And, and it's just been so unpredictable for a few years now. Komoot is lucky because we don't deal with a physical product. But we are subject to the same the same kind of you know, these kind of cultural shifts, whether people are collectively interested in exploring or cycling, we're not immune to that we might not have the same issues that a bike manufacturer has, but we still get impacted by the same changes. And it's hard for us to predict these major shifts in usage in the same way that it's hard for an

Happy Holidays! For our Holiday special this year, we're heading over to Iceland and the Faroe Islands for a hidden monster, the Huldufólk! Why do Icelanders still craft hillside houses for these invisible elves? How do they relate to Christmas and New Year? Find out this week in our last episode of Season 3!Support the showYou can find us on -Myth Monsters Website: https://mythmonsters.co.ukSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5RPGDjM...Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast...Google Podcasts: ...

Prof Magni Mohr is currently Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Faroe Islands. He is running research projects in 20 different countries around the world. The topics include basic human physiology, exercise physiology, exercise is medicine, health promotion, fitness testing and training in elite team sports. Magni has been active in communicating his research to the public through talks, interviews, popular science articles, seminars, public conferences, webinars etc. during nearly two decades, and has received the Faroese prize for public research presentation in 2018. In addition to this, he has won several international prizes for his research. Magni is a former competitive football players and has worked for several large international football teams including Danish FC Brøndby, Italian Juventus FC, English Chelsea FC, Italian AC Milan, Chinese Shenzhen FC and Spanish Deportivo La Coruna, as well as the Danish and Cameroon National Teams. He is also a UEFA and FIFA instructor and teaches in pro-licence courses around the world. This podcast episode is sponsored by Fibion Inc. | The New Gold Standard for Sedentary Behaviour and Physical Activity Monitoring Learn more about Fibion: fibion.com/research --- Collect, store and manage SB and PA data easily and remotely - Discover new Fibion SENS Motion: https://sens.fibion.com/

KÍ Klaksvik have shocked the whole of Europe this season by becoming the first Faroese team to ever reach the group stages of a European competition.On today's bonus edition, Dotun and Andy are join by the I's Chief Football Writer Daniel Storey who recently spent some time in the Faroe Islands to report on this extraordinary tale. Ahead of Klaksvik's decisive final two group games, Daniel tells us all about how a football team in a village of 5000 people made it into the Europa Conference League while picking up some pretty impressive scalps along the way.Ask us a question on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, and email us here: otc@footballramble.com.For ad-free shows, head over to our Patreon and subscribe: patreon.com/footballramble.***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, host Andrew Lewin discusses the controversial topic of the pilot whale and white-sided dolphin hunts in the Faroe Islands. He highlights a recent report by marine conservation organizations that questions the claims of these hunts being humane, sustainable, and integral to the local culture. Join Andrew as he delves into the debate surrounding these hunts and explores the implications for ocean conservation. Links to articles: 1) https://www.awionline.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/Unravelling-the-Truth-Whale-Killing-in-the-Faroe-Islands.pdf 2) https://www.ktoo.org/2023/07/14/78-pilot-whales-were-slaughtered-near-a-cruise-ship-carrying-marine-conservationists-in-europe/ Share your conservation journey on the podcast by booking here: https://calendly.com/sufb/sufb-interview   Fill out our listener survey: https://www.speakupforblue.com/survey   Join the audio program - Build Your Marine Science and Conservation Career: https://www.speakupforblue.com/career   Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3NmYvsI Connect with Speak Up For Blue: Website: https://bit.ly/3fOF3Wf Instagram: https://bit.ly/3rIaJSG Twitter: https://bit.ly/3rHZxpc  The host of the show repeatedly encourages listeners to leave a message and a review, emphasizing the importance of sharing their thoughts on the episode. He expresses a genuine desire to hear from the audience, as well as highlighting the value of their feedback for potential new listeners. The host provides various avenues for listeners to get in touch, including Instagram, the podcast's website, and even voicemail. Additionally, he reminds listeners to follow or subscribe to the podcast for regular updates on new episodes. Overall, the host actively values and encourages listener engagement and feedback. The episode delves into the controversial topic of the Faroe Islands' drive hunts for pilot whales and Atlantic white-sided dolphins. It raises thought-provoking questions about the claims of these hunts being humane, sustainable, and integral to the local culture. The episode references a report titled "Unraveling the Truth, Whale Killing in the Faroe Islands" by a coalition of marine conservation organizations, which challenges these claims. Throughout the episode, the controversy surrounding the Faroese drive hunts and the opposition they face is highlighted. Criticism or attempts to cancel the hunts often result in backlash from those who participate in and profit from them. Defenders argue that the hunts are deeply rooted in their culture and have been practiced for centuries. They also claim that the hunts are carried out as humanely as possible and that the populations of the hunted animals are sustainable. However, the episode presents counterarguments to these claims. It suggests that while modern hunting techniques have made the hunts more efficient, they may not necessarily be humane. The methods used to chase, secure, and kill the whales and dolphins would not be permitted in the killing of livestock or other animals in most countries. A review of these techniques concludes that they are ethically and morally unacceptable, considering the sentient nature of these animals. Furthermore, the episode questions the sustainability of the hunts. It highlights that the technology used allows for the capture of larger numbers of whales and dolphins, potentially harming their populations. Concerns are also raised about the consumption of the hunted animals, particularly regarding high mercury levels in their meat. The episode suggests that consuming whale meat may not be advisable due to these health risks. Overall, the episode critically examines the Faroese drive hunts for pilot whales and Atlantic white-sided dolphins. It challenges the claims of cultural significance, sustainability, and humane practices, presenting arguments and evidence that question the validity of these claims. In addition, the host invites listeners to share their thoughts on the Faroese drive hunt and encourages them to reach out through Instagram or the podcast's website. He expresses a genuine interest in hearing what listeners think about the hunt and whether they believe it should continue or be stopped. The host acknowledges the challenges of having a dialogue with hunters and locals as outsiders, but suggests finding ways to engage in conversation and understand their perspectives. He also asks for suggestions on how to initiate a dialogue and learn why the hunters continue to hunt, as well as what can be done to stop the hunt. The host welcomes different viewpoints and encourages listeners to participate in online petitions and support organizations working towards ending the Faroese hunt.

Is Francesco Farioli Europe's next exciting young manager? Is French football fan culture fundamentally broken? Will any of football's next Ballon d'Or starlets achieve the reach of Messi and Ronaldo? And can Faroe Islands' finest make it into the next round of the Europa Conference League?!Join Dotun, Lars and David as they answer all your questions!Ask us a question on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, and email us here: otc@footballramble.com.For ad-free shows, head over to our Patreon and subscribe: patreon.com/footballramble.EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/continent Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee!***Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. It means a great deal to the show and will make it easier for other potential listeners to find us. Thanks!*** Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

KÍ Klaksvík have been the European football story of the season since they became the first club from the Faroe Islands to reach the group stages of a UEFA competition. But they didn't stop there and have since followed up a draw at home to 2021 Ligue 1 winners Lille with a famous victory over Olimpija Ljubljana. Daniel Storey, the chief football writer at the i and a regular panelist on The Totally Football Show, was in the Faroes to witness the historic moment and joins us in Part 1 to tell us about his trip and reflect on the KÍ Klaksvík miracle. Part 2 kicks off with a chat about domestic cups across the continent: Balzers have an all-Vaduz cup run in Liechtenstein, Jeanfield Swifts record the biggest Scottish Cup win for a non-league team since 1896, Trencin are knocked out of the Slovak Cup by a fifth-division team and seventh-tier Deportivo Murcia are preparing for their Copa del Rey tie with La Liga side Alaves. The segment concludes with Lee telling Paul all about his trip to Czechia at the weekend to watch the team that recently lost 9-5 and re-living the awful birthday he spent at a concrete factory in Ostrava. The third and final segment of the podcast is dedicated to some stories beyond Europe's borders: a Tongan team has completed a perfect season with two 62-year-olds in their ranks, a 27-year-old former bricklayer has led an Ecuadorian team from the third division to the top flight and two fans of Thai second-division side Suphanburi FC recently made the 850km journey to Krabi to watch their team play. Last but not least, we read out some e-mails from listeners who have tuned into the pod from multiple different countries around the world. RUNNING ORDER: Part 1 - The KÍ Klaksvík miracle & the rise of Faroese football with Daniel Storey (00:39) Part 2 - Quirks and cupsets, a trip to Czechia to see the team that lost 9-5 & a terrible birthday surprise (24:39) Part 3 - A perfect season in Tonga, two away fans in Thailand & a 27-year-old coach in Ecuador (42:04)

A thousand Facets sits with Keira Wraae-Stewart from ætla. they discuss her beginnings in the jewelry industry, how her travels inspired her and how teaching children art can ignite your passion for jewelry all over again! about: ætla was founded in Edinburgh by Keira Wraae-Stewart in 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic with a view to showcasing and supporting fine jewellery created by talented local, international and lesser known designers and artisans. A major focus of the business has been to provide clients with a range of luxury, designer jewellery created through sustainable and ethically responsible means. Before launching ætla, Keira worked in the design and manufacture of jewellery in both London and Thailand for over 10 years, at a number of well established brands including Vivienne Westwood and Maria Francesca Pepe. Of both Faroese & Scottish descent, Keira decided to return to the UK to launch ætla; the boutique maintains its Scottish roots - being intertwined within Edinburgh‘s majestic City Centre - whilst clearly embracing the Faroese/Scandinavian aesthetic sensibilities that have greatly influenced Keira throughout her life. You can follow Keira Wraae-Stewart on Instagram @_aetla_ or visit her website https://www.aetla.co.uk/ Store location: 46 St Stephen Street in Edinburgh Please visit @athousandfacets on Instagram to see some of the work discussed in this episode. Music by @chris_keys__ https://youtu.be/nKQHjg_E0yE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this podcast, we talk about history being made, both big and small. We start with a bried update on the remarkable rise of KI Klaksvik in the Champion's League qualifying rounds. They've already dispatched teams from Hungary and Sweden, and now stand poised to knock out a team from Norway. They've already become the first Faroese football team to qualify for the group stages of a European tournament. History, indeed. Then we talk to the CEO of Atlantic Airways about the historic opening of air service between the Faroe Islands and New York. And finally, we'll visit a long vanished river that has been brought back to life... in the form of a fountain. Also, we're still in fundraising mode and could definitely use your help to nudge us over the finish line. If you're able, please visit our gofundme page and show us a little love. 

Who needs the European group stages? It's clearly all about the qualifying rounds - and with a major milestone for the Faroe Islands, notable results for Andorra and Malta, and a number of other captivating storylines across the continent, there's plenty for co-hosts Lee Wingate & Paul Watson to get stuck into on this episode of The Sweeper. In Part 1, Lee & Paul start off by talking (once again) about team of the moment KÍ Klaksvík and another headline from the Nordic nations: the Icelandic youngster whose hat-trick knocked his father out of the Champions League. Then there's a crazy game in Kosovo with 23 minutes of added time, a landmark for Santa Coloma of Andorra & a look at the eight countries that have never had a group-stage representative. Then, in Part 2, we turn our attentions to the state of limbo facing the Afghanistan women's team, the curious case of a raccoon that fell through a US press box ceiling, the Greenlandic team missing the Championship to go on a reindeer hunt and an Austrian derby that has been 18 years in the making as Austria Salzburg are drawn against Red Bull Salzburg - the club that bought them out back in 2005. RUNNING ORDER: Part 1 - The European qualifying rounds: Faroese magic, father-son battles & stoppage time madness (00:44) Part 2 - The Afghan women's team, Greenlandic reindeer hunts, raccoons in the US press box and a spicy Salzburg derby (18:40)

The Sweeper crew have been to Liechtenstein and San Marino in recent months – but the 26,000km round-trip to Micronesia was by far our biggest off-the-beaten-track football adventure. Having now overcome the jetlag, Paul has the full story on the Pacific nation's first-ever futsal tournament and its newly assembled Football Association. Part 1 sees us reflect on Paul's past in Micronesia as the world's youngest international football coach, the Twitter DM from Kenny that changed everything, the tournament format, the lost suitcase of futsal shoes, Kosrae's controversial path to the final, Yap's victory, the trophy flown in from Guam, an emergency wood carving and much more besides. Then, in Part 2, we talk about the establishment of an FA, the constitution that Paul wrote on the plane, the importance of futsal to Micronesia's football strategy and whether the AFC or the OFC offers the likeliest route to membership in a FIFA Confederation. Lastly, we chat about the upcoming sequel to Paul's popular book “Up Pohnpei” and where you can read it. Finally, in Part 3, it's time for our usual European football round-up. Faroese side KÍ Klaksvík pull off a huge shock in the Champions League qualifiers, Glentoran and Gżira United play out the highest-scoring penalty shootout in UEFA history, there's a night to remember for Andorra and two Crimean clubs are incorporated into the Russian football pyramid. RUNNING ORDER: Part 1 – The first-ever Micronesian futsal tournament: the Twitter DM that changed everything, Kosrae's controversial path to the final & Yap's victory (00:45) Part 2 – The first-ever Micronesian futsal tournament: the establishment of an FA, routes to membership in a FIFA Confederation & the sequel to “Up Pohnpei” (20:23) Part 3 – The European football round-up: KÍ Klaksvík's UCL upset, the highest-scoring shootout in UEFA history & the contested fate of two Crimean clubs (33:48)

In today's episode of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation Podcast, I speak with Captain Watson about the recent grindadrap in the Faroe Islands.  About 80 to 100 pilot whales were slaughtered in the Torshavn harbor, right next to a visiting cruise ship.  Unfortunately the John Paul Dejoria was unable to make it to the harbor before the whales were beached and slaughtered by the Faroese people.  Captain Watson hopes that with the help of the on-shore volunteers we will be able save the next pod of whales or dolphins targeted. Support the showhttps://www.paulwatsonfoundation.org/https://shop.paulwatson.com/

On this episode, we finish up our conversation with Gudmund Helmsdal. He's the Faroese filmmaker whose short film "Brother Troll" has racked up awards at festivals around the world. He's also worked on "Peter Pan and Wendy" and the last James Bond film, both of which were partially shot in the Faroe Islands. We'll talk abotu the future of filmmaking in the Faroe Islands, and about plans for his first feature film. Then we go to a church and listen to music from our good friend Stanley Samuelsen,

On this special episode of Home and Away, Stella talks to an Icelandic and a Faroese comedian about an upcoming (now in the past) comedy show in Torshavn, and the gowth of comedy in both the Faroe Islands and Iceland. As always, if you'd like to hear the full episode with including the musical breaks, you can stream it from the FM1 website.

“You hear how there’s many words for snow in native cultures in Canada; there are actually over 20 words for ‘fog’ in the Faroe Islands.”  –Matthew Landrum In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Matthew discuss what makes the landscape and culture of the Faroe Islands distinctive, and how Matthew came to study Faroese (2:00); how your motivation to travel to a place affects what you see and experience there, and how isolation affects people’s worldview in a place like the Faroes (13:00); Faroese history, art, and culture, and how World War II transformed it (24:00); how the weather affects one’s experience of the Faroe Islands, and what it’s like to travel there (34:00); and how the Faroe Islands have changed — and stayed the same — over the years (46:00). Matthew Landrum (@MatthewLandrum) is a writer, speaker, and teacher. He is the translator of Faroese poet Katrin Ottarsdottir’s Are There Copper Pipes in Heaven, and the author of Berlin Poems. He lives in Detroit where he teaches at a private school for students on the autism spectrum. Faroese music, art, and literature links: Eivør Pálsdóttir (Faroese singer-songwriter) Teitur Lassen (Faroese singer-songwriter) Christine De Luca (Shetlandic poet) Viking metal (music subgenre) Týr (Faroese folk metal band) Trom (TV series set in the Faroe Islands) William Heinesen (Faroese novelist and painter) Magic realism (style of literary fiction) Faroese ballads (traditional music and dance) Ring Cycles (Germanic heroic legends) Völsunga saga (Norse saga involving dragons) Hjalmar and Ingeborg (Faroese ballad) Faroese travel, language, and geography links: Streymoy (largest and most populated of the Faroe Islands) Tórshavn (capital city of the Faroe Islands) International Summer Institute in Faroese Language Norn language (extinct North Germanic language) Týr (Norse god of war) The case for trekking on foot (Deviate episode) Vágar Airport (only airport in the Faroes) Akvavit (Scandinavian distilled spirit) Kirkjubøur (cathedral-ruin village in the Faroes) Gásadalur (village near Múlafossur Waterfall) Heimablídni (Faroese home-hospitality meals) Skerpikjøt (Faroese wind-dried mutton) Lutefisk (traditional Scandinavian dish) University of the Faroe Islands (school in Tórshavn) Note: We don't host a “comments” section, but we're happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at deviate@rolfpotts.com.

“You hear how there's many words for snow in native cultures in Canada; there are actually over 20 words for 'fog' in the Faroe Islands.”  –Matthew Landrum In this episode of Deviate, Rolf and Matthew discuss what makes the landscape and culture of the Faroe Islands distinctive, and how Matthew came to study Faroese (2:00); how your motivation to travel to a place affects what you see and experience there, and how isolation affects people's worldview in a place like the Faroes (13:00); Faroese history, art, and culture, and how World War II transformed it (24:00); how the weather affects one's experience of the Faroe Islands, and what it's like to travel there (34:00); and how the Faroe Islands have changed -- and stayed the same -- over the years (46:00). Matthew Landrum (@MatthewLandrum) is a writer, speaker, and teacher. He is the translator of Faroese poet Katrin Ottarsdottir's Are There Copper Pipes in Heaven, and the author of Berlin Poems. He lives in Detroit where he teaches at a private school for students on the autism spectrum. Faroese music, art, and literature links: Eivør Pálsdóttir (Faroese singer-songwriter) Teitur Lassen (Faroese singer-songwriter) Christine De Luca (Shetlandic poet) Viking metal (music subgenre) Týr (Faroese folk metal band) Trom (TV series set in the Faroe Islands) William Heinesen (Faroese novelist and painter) Magic realism (style of literary fiction) Faroese ballads (traditional music and dance) Ring Cycles (Germanic heroic legends) Völsunga saga (Norse saga involving dragons) Hjalmar and Ingeborg (Faroese ballad) Faroese travel, language, and geography links: Streymoy (largest and most populated of the Faroe Islands) Tórshavn (capital city of the Faroe Islands) International Summer Institute in Faroese Language Norn language (extinct North Germanic language) Týr (Norse god of war) The case for trekking on foot (Deviate episode) Vágar Airport (only airport in the Faroes) Akvavit (Scandinavian distilled spirit) Kirkjubøur (cathedral-ruin village in the Faroes) Gásadalur (village near Múlafossur Waterfall) Heimablídni (Faroese home-hospitality meals) Skerpikjøt (Faroese wind-dried mutton) Lutefisk (traditional Scandinavian dish) University of the Faroe Islands (school in Tórshavn) Note: We don't host a “comments” section, but we're happy to hear your questions and insights via email, at deviate@rolfpotts.com.

On this episode, we talk to Sveinur Trondurson about the results of the recent Faroese election. We'll get super-nerdy on the new coalition, the challlenges ahead for the new government, and we pour one out for Self Rule Party, which was one of the original political parties in the Faroe Islands, but was shut out in this most recent election. Then we'll visit a candidate forum at a university and think about small-scale politics.

On this episode, we cover the national election for the Faroese Law Thing. 160-ish candidates are running for 33-ish seats in the parliament. (There are 33 seats in the Law Thing, but ministerial jobs can push that number up a bit.) We'll visit a polling place, talk to a journalist and a candidate, then head over to the Nordic House and wait for the results to come in. It's a unique opportunity to view the Faroese electoral process as it happens. But this is a long episode so... pack a lunch.

Faroese voters head to the polls this week to chose who will represent them in the Law Thing. On this episode, we'll get an overview of the upcoming election with Sveinur Trondarson, he's the editor of Faroese newspaper Dimmalaetting. We'll also visit a candidate forum in Torshavn and trail our own Heri Simonsen as he casts an early vote at city hall. The Election is on Thursday, December 8th. No matter where you are in the world, you can watch live coverage of election returns on the KVF website.

In this programme we explore the realities of island diets. Ruth Alexander hears how diets are changing, and what this means for population health. Indigenous diets were limited to what grew in the native soil or could be raised or caught in the limited space available. Today imported, often processed foods are becoming increasingly popular. We start in the Faroe Islands, in the North Atlantic Ocean between Iceland and the United Kingdom. Traditionally the Faroese diet is protein heavy, fermented wind dried lamb is a staple and the poor soil makes growing a wide range of vegetables challenging. Reporter Tim Ecott travelled to the Faroe Islands for this programme to report on how diets there have changed. We then look South to the Pacific Islands, starting with the coral atoll nation of Kiribati. The coral ground makes it difficult to grow food to supplement the diet of seafood. Ruth speaks to dietitian and public health nutritionist Dr Libby Swanepoel from the Australian Centre for Pacific Islands Research based at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Libby makes the case for seaweed cultivation to supplement diets and incomes. In contrast the nation of Fiji in the Pacific Ocean has volcanic soils, and an array of fruit and vegetables can be grown. Despite this communities have increasingly turned to imported processed foods, contributing to a health crisis. Sashi Kiran, founder of FRIEND Fiji - the Foundation for Rural Integrated Enterprises and Development – talks about how this can be addressed. Presented by Ruth Alexander. Produced by Beatrice Pickup. (Image: part of the Kiribati island nation, palm tree covered island surrounded by blue sea. Credit: Getty/BBC)

Sign up for our Patreon for bonuses and more! www.themidnightrainpodcast.com    Do you happen to swear? Is it something you happen to do when you stub your pinky toe on the coffee table? What about when you've just finished dinner and you pull that glorious lasagna out of the oven, burn yourself and then drop your Italian masterpiece on the floor, in turn burning yourself once again? Odds are that if you're listening to this show, you have a rather colorful vernacular and aren't offended by those that share in your “darker” linguistic abilities. Those dramatic and often harsh, yet exceedingly hilarious words, have a pretty amazing history. Were they written in manuscripts by monks? Or, did we find them used by regular people and found in prose like the names of places, personal names, and animal names? Well, could they tell us more about our medieval past other than just that sex, torture, plagues and incest was all the rage? Let's find out!   Fuck   Let's start with our favorite word. Let's all say it together, kids. “Fuck!” This most versatile yet often considered one of the worst of the “bad words” doesn't seem to have been around in the English language prior to the fifteenth century and may have arrived later from the German or th Dutch. Leave it to those beautiful Germans to introduce us to such a colorful word. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary says it wasn't actually used until 1500. However, the name of a specific place may have been used even earlier.   Many early instances of fuck were said to actually have been used to mean “to strike” rather than being anything to do with fornicating. The more common Middle English word for sex was ”swive”, which has developed into the Modern English word swivel, as in: go swivel on it. Some of the earliest instances of fuck, seen to mean “hitting” or “striking,” such as Simon Fuckebotere (from in 1290), who was more than likely in the milk industry, hitting butter, or Henry Fuckebeggar (1286/7) who may have, hit the poor.   The earliest examples of the word fuck in the English language appeared in the names of places. The first of these is said to be found near Sherwood in 1287: Ric Wyndfuk and Ric Wyndfuck de Wodehous. These both feature a kestrel known as the Windfucker which, we must assume, went in the wind. The next definite example comes from Bristol 1373 in Fockynggroue, which may have been named for a grove where couples went for “some quiet alone time.”   However, Somewhere among the indictment rolls of the county court of Chester (1310/11), studied by Dr. Paul Booth of Keele University (Staffordshire), a man whose Christian name was Roger is mentioned three times. His less Christian last name is also recorded. The name being mentioned repetitively pretty much means it did not result from a spelling mistake but rather it's the real thing. Meaning, the man's full name was Roger Fuckebythenavele. Not only does his second name move back the earliest use of fuck in its modern sense by quite a few decades; it also verifies that it is, in fact, a Middle English word. But of course, there are those fuckers that will undoubtedly debate it's fucking origin.   The stem *fukkō-, with its characteristic double consonant, is easy to explain as a Germanic iterative verb – one of a large family of similar forms. They originated as combinations of various Indo-European roots with *-nah₂-, a suffix indicating repeated action. The formation is not, strictly speaking, Proto-Indo-European; the suffix owes its existence to the reanalysis of an older morphological structure (reanalysis happens when people fail to analyze an inherited structure in the same way as their predecessors). Still, verbs of this kind are older than Proto-Germanic.   *fukkō- apparently meant to ‘strike repeatedly, beat' (like, say, “dashing” the cream with a plunger in a traditional butter churn). Note also windfucker and fuckwind – old, obsolete words for ‘kestrel'.   A number of words in other Germanic languages may also be related to fuck. One of them is Old Icelandic fjúka ‘to be tossed or driven by the wind' < *feuka-; cf. also fjúk ‘drifting snowstorm' (or, as one might put it in present-day English, a fucking blizzard). These words fit a recurrent morphological pattern observed by Kroonen (2012): Germanic iteratives with a voiceless geminate produced by Kluge's Law often give rise to “de-iterativised” verbs in which the double stop is simplified if the full vocalism or the root (here, *eu rather than *u) is restored. Kluge's law had a noticeable effect on Proto-Germanic morphology. Because of its dependence on ablaut and accent, it operated in some parts of declension and conjugation, but not in others, giving rise to alternations of short and long consonants in both nominal and verbal paradigms.   If the verb is really native (“Anglo-Saxon”), one would expect Old English *fuccian (3sg. *fuccaþ, pl. *fucciaþ, 1/3sg. preterite *fuccode, etc.). If these forms already had “impolite” connotations in Old English, their absence from the Old English literary corpus is understandable. We may be absolutely sure that *feortan (1/3 sg. pret. *feart, pret. pl. *furton, p.p. *forten) existed in Old English, since fart exists today (attested since about 1300, just like the word fuck) and has an impeccable Indo-European etymology, with cognates in several branches. Still, not a single one of these reconstructed Old English verb forms is actually documented (all we have is the scantily attested verbal noun feorting ‘fart(ing)').   One has to remember that written records give us a strongly distorted picture of how people really spoke in the past. If you look at the frequency of fuck, fucking and fucker in written English over the last 200 years, you may get the impression that these words disappeared from English completely ca. 1820 and magically reappeared 140 years later. Even the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary pretended they didn't exist. The volume that should have contained FUCK was published in 1900, and Queen Victoria was still alive.   According to the Oxford English Dictionary: Forms:  α. 1500s fucke, 1500s– fuck; also Scottish pre-1700 fuk.   Frequency (in current use):  Show frequency band information Origin: Probably a word inherited from Germanic. Etymology: Probably cognate with Dutch fokken …   In coarse slang. In these senses typically, esp. in early use, with a man as the subject of the verb. Thesaurus » Categories » intransitive. To have sexual intercourse. ▸ ?a1513   W. Dunbar Poems (1998) I. 106   Be his feirris he wald haue fukkit.   transitive. To have sexual intercourse with (a person). In quot. a1500   in Latin-English macaronic verse; the last four words are enciphered by replacing each letter with the following letter of the alphabet, and fuccant has a Latin third-person plural ending. The passage translates as ‘They [sc. monks] are not in heaven because they fuck the wives of Ely.' [a1500   Flen, Flyys (Harl. 3362) f. 47, in T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell Reliquiæ Antiquæ (1841) I. 91   Non sunt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk [= fuccant uuiuys of heli].]   transitive. With an orifice, part of the body, or something inanimate as an object. Also occasionally intransitive with prepositional objects of this type. [1680   School of Venus ii. 99   An hour after, he Ferked my Arse again in the same manner.]   transitive. To damage, ruin, spoil, botch; to destroy, put an end to; = to fuck up 1a at Phrasal verbs 1. Also (chiefly in passive): to put into a difficult or hopeless situation; to ‘do for'. Cf. also mind-fuck v. 1776   Frisky Songster (new ed.) 36   O, says the breeches, I shall be duck'd, Aye, says the petticoat, I shall be f—d.   transitive. U.S. To cheat; to deceive, betray. Frequently without. 1866   G. Washington Affidavit 20 Oct. in I. Berlin et al. Black Mil. Experience in Civil War (1982) v. xviii. 792   Mr. Baker replied that deponent would be fucked out of his money by Mr. Brown.   transitive. In oaths and imprecations (chiefly in optative with no subject expressed): expressing annoyance, hatred, dismissal, etc. Cf. damn v. 6, bugger v. 2a. See also fuck it at Phrases 2, fuck you at Phrases 1b. 1922   J. Joyce Ulysses ii. xv. [Circe] 560   God fuck old Bennett!   Phrases   Imprecatory and exclamatory phrases (typically in imperative or optative with no subject expressed sense).  P1. Expressing hostility, contempt, or defiant indifference. Categories » go fuck yourself and variants. 1895   Rep. Senate Comm. Police Dept. N.Y. III. 3158   By Senator Bradley: Q. Repeat what he said to you? A. He said, ‘Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars'; he tried to punch me, and I went out.   fuck you. 1905   L. Schindler Testimony 20 Dec. in People State of N.Y. Respondent, against Charles McKenna (1907) (N.Y. Supreme Court) 37   Murray said to me, ‘Fuck you, I will give you more the same.' And as he said that, I grabbed the two of them.   P2. fuck it: expressing dismissal, exasperation, resignation, or impetuousness. 1922   E. E. Cummings Enormous Room iv. 64   I said, ‘F— it, I don't want it.'   P3. fuck me and elaborated variants: expressing astonishment or exasperation. 1929   F. Manning Middle Parts of Fortune II. xi. 229   ‘Well, you can fuck me!' exclaimed the astonished Martlow. Cunt Cunt is a vulgar word for the vulva or vagina. It is used in a variety of ways, including as a term of disparagement. Reflecting national variations, cunt can be used as a disparaging and obscene term for a woman in the United States, an unpleasant or stupid man or woman in the United Kingdom, or a contemptible man in Australia and New Zealand. However, in Australia and New Zealand it can also be a neutral or positive term when used with a positive qualifier (e.g., "He's a good cunt"). The term has various derivative senses, including adjective and verb uses.   Feminist writer and English professor Germaine Greer argues that cunt "is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock". The earliest known use of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was as part of a placename of a London street, Gropecunt Lane. Use of the word as a term of abuse is relatively recent, dating from the late nineteenth century. The word appears not to have been taboo in the Middle Ages, but became that way toward the end of the eighteenth century, and was then not generally not allowed to be printed until the latter part of the twentieth century.   There is some disagreement on the origin of the term cunt, although most sources agree that it came from the Germanic word (Proto-Germanic *kunto, stem *kunton-), which emerged as kunta in Old Norse. The Proto-Germanic form's actual origin is a matter of debate among scholars. Most Germanic languages have cognates, including Swedish, Faroese, and Nynorsk (kunta), West Frisian, and Middle Low German (kunte), Middle Dutch (conte), Dutch kut (cunt), and Dutch kont (butt), Middle Low German kutte, Middle High German kotze ("prostitute"), German kott, and maybe Old English cot. The Proto-Germanic term's etymology ia questionable.   It may have arisen by Grimm's law operating on the Proto-Indo-European root *gen/gon "create, become" seen in gonads, genital, gamete, genetics, gene, or the Proto-Indo-European root guneh or "woman" (Greek: gunê, seen in gynaecology). Relationships to similar-sounding words such as the Latin cunnus ("vulva"), and its derivatives French con, Spanish coño, and Portuguese cona, or in Persian kos (کُس), have not been conclusively demonstrated. Other Latin words related to cunnus are cuneus ("wedge") and its derivative cunēre ("to fasten with a wedge", (figurative) "to squeeze in"), leading to English words such as cuneiform ("wedge-shaped"). In Middle English, cunt appeared with many spellings, such as coynte, cunte and queynte, which did not always reflect the actual pronunciation of the word.   The word, in its modern meaning, is attested in Middle English. Proverbs of Hendyng, a manuscript from some time before 1325, includes the advice:   (Give your cunt wisely and make [your] demands after the wedding.) from wikipedia. The word cunt is generally regarded in English-speaking countries as unsuitable for normal publicconversations. It has been described as "the most heavily tabooed word of all English words".   Quoted from wikipedia: Some American feminists of the 1970s sought to eliminate disparaging terms for women, including "bitch" and "cunt". In the context of pornography, Catharine MacKinnon argued that use of the word acts to reinforce a dehumanisation of women by reducing them to mere body parts; and in 1979 Andrea Dworkin described the word as reducing women to "the one essential – 'cunt: our essence ... our offence'".   While “vagina” is used much more commonly in colloquial speech to refer to the genitals of people with vulvas than “cunt” is, its  origins are defined by its service to male sexuality, making “cunt” —  interestingly enough — the least historically misogynistic of the two. “Cunt” has also been used in Renaissance bawdy verse and in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but it was not until Shakespeare's era that its meaning began to fundamentally shift, during the dawn of Christian doctrine.   Arguably, if cunt simply means and refers to “vagina”, then why would that be bad? Vaginas are pretty great! They provide people with pleasure, they give life, and they're even a naturally developed lunar calendar! So, why would a person refer to another, assumedly pissy person as a vagina?    So, should we as society fight the negative stereotypes and embrace the term cunt again? It's a tiny word that bears a lot of weight, but it should be anything but scary or offensive. It can be a massive dose of love instead of an enormous force of hate if we actively define our vocabulary rather than letting it define us.   Words only have that type of power when the uptight, vanilla flavored, missionary only Karen's and Kevin's of the world decide they don't like them. This has been going on for as long as we've been using words. So, let's take it back. We love you, ya cunts!   coarse slang in later use. Thesaurus » Categories » The female genitals; the vulva or vagina. Cf. quaint n.1 a1400   tr. Lanfranc Sci. Cirurgie (Ashm.) (1894) 172   In wymmen þe necke of þe bladdre is schort, & is maad fast to the cunte. 1552   D. Lindsay Satyre Procl. 144   First lat me lok thy cunt, Syne lat me keip the key. 1680   Earl of Rochester et al. Poems 77   I fear you have with interest repaid, Those eager thrusts, which at your Cunt he made. 1865   ‘Philocomus' Love Feast iii. 21   I faint! I die! I spend! My cunt is sick! Suck me and fuck me!   A woman as a source of sexual gratification; a promiscuous woman; a slut. Also as a general term of abuse for a woman. 1663   S. Pepys Diary 1 July (1971) IV. 209   Mr. Batten..acting all the postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined, and..saying that the he hath to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him.   As a term of abuse for a man. 1860   in M. E. Neely Abraham Lincoln Encycl. (1982) 154   And when they got to Charleston, they had to, as is wont Look around to find a chairman, and so they took a Cunt   A despised, unpleasant, or annoying place, thing, or task. 1922   J. Joyce Ulysses ii. iv. [Calypso] 59   The grey sunken cunt of the world.   Bitch   Women were frequently equated to dogs in Ancient Greek literature, which was used to dehumanize and shame them for their alleged lack of restraint and sexual urges. This is believed to have originated from the hunter goddess Artemis, who was frequently depicted as a pack of hounds and was perceived to be both beautiful and frigid and savage. According to popular belief, the term "bitch" as we use it today evolved from the Old English word "bicce," which meant a female dog, about the year 1000 AD. The phrase started out as a critique of a woman's sexuality in the 15th century but eventually evolved to signify that the lady was rude or disagreeable.   Clare Bayley has connected this growth of the term "bitch" as an insult to the suffrage struggle and the final passage of women's suffrage in the early 20th century, particularly the 1920s. Men were intimidated when women started to challenge their subordinate roles in the patriarchal power structure, and the phrase started to be used to ferocious and irate females. Men's respect for women and the prevalence of the term are clearly correlated, since usage of the term rapidly decreased during World War II as men's appreciation of women's contributions to the war effort increased.   However, as they competed with women for employment after the war ended and the men went back to work, the word's usage increased once more. As the housewife paradigm started to fade away during the war, the position of women in the workplace and society as a whole underwent an irreparable change. However, males perceived the presence of women in the workforce as a challenge to their supremacy in society.   With songs like Elton John's "The Bitch is Back" ascending the charts in 1974, the slur became more common in mainstream culture and music in the latter decades of the 20th century. As a result of artists like Kanye West and Eminem using the term "bitch" to denigrate women and depict violence against them in their lyrics, hip-hop culture has also long been accused of being misogynistic.   We just need to look at Hillary Clinton's recent campaign for president in 2016 to understand how frequently this slur is leveled at women, especially those in positions of authority who are defying patriarchal expectations and shattering glass ceilings. Rep. AOC being called a "fucking bitch" by a GOP Rep. is another similar example. It is evident that the usage of the phrase and the degree to which males regard women to be a danger are related.   bitch (v.)   "to complain," attested from at least 1930, perhaps from the sense in bitchy, perhaps influenced by the verb meaning "to bungle, spoil," which is recorded from 1823. But bitched in this sense seems to echo Middle English bicched "cursed, bad," a general term of opprobrium (as in Chaucer's bicched bones "unlucky dice"), which despite the hesitation of OED, seems to be a derivative of bitch (n.).   bitchy (adj.) 1925, U.S. slang, "sexually provocative;" later (1930s) "spiteful, catty, bad-tempered" (usually of females); from bitch + -y (2). Earlier in reference to male dogs thought to look less rough or coarse than usual. The earliest use of "bitch" specifically as a derogatory term for women dates to the fifteenth century. Its earliest slang meaning mainly referred to sexual behavior, according to the English language historian Geoffrey Hughes:   The early applications were to a promiscuous or sensual woman, a metaphorical extension of the behavior of a bitch in heat. Herein lies the original point of the powerful insult son of a bitch, found as biche sone ca. 1330 in Arthur and Merlin ... while in a spirited exchange in the Chester Play (ca. 1400) a character demands: "Whom callest thou queine, skabde bitch?" ("Who are you calling a whore, you miserable bitch?").   In modern usage, the slang term bitch has different meanings depending largely on social context and may vary from very offensive to endearing, and as with many slang terms, its meaning and nuances can vary depending on the region in which it is used.   The term bitch can refer to a person or thing that is very difficult, as in "Life's a bitch" or "He sure got the bitch end of that deal". It is common for insults to lose intensity as their meaning broadens ("bastard" is another example). In the film The Women (1939), Joan Crawford could only allude to the word: "And by the way, there's a name for you ladies, but it isn't used in high society - outside of a kennel." At the time, use of the actual word would have been censored by the Hays Office. By 1974, Elton John had a hit single (#4 in the U.S. and #14 in the U.K.) with "The Bitch Is Back", in which he says "bitch" repeatedly. It was, however, censored by some radio stations. On late night U.S. television, the character Emily Litella (1976-1978) on Saturday Night Live (portrayed by Gilda Radner) would frequently refer to Jane Curtin under her breath at the end of their Weekend Update routine in this way: "Oh! Never mind...! Bitch!"   Bitchin' arose in the 1950s to describe something found to be cool or rad. Modern use can include self-description, often as an unfairly difficult person. For example, in the New York Times bestseller The Bitch in the House, a woman describes her marriage: "I'm fine all day at work, but as soon as I get home, I'm a horror....I'm the bitch in the house."Boy George admitted "I was being a bitch" in a falling out with Elton John. Generally, the term bitch is still considered offensive, and not accepted in formal situations. According to linguist Deborah Tannen, "Bitch is the most contemptible thing you can say about a woman. Save perhaps the four-letter C word." It's common for the word to be censored on Prime time TV, often rendered as "the b-word". During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a John McCain supporter referred to Hillary Clinton by asking, "How do we beat the bitch?" The event was reported in censored format:   On CNN's "The Situation Room," Washington Post media critic and CNN "Reliable Sources" host Howard Kurtz observed that "Senator McCain did not embrace the 'b' word that this woman in the audience used." ABC reporter Kate Snow adopted the same location. On CNN's "Out in the Open," Rick Sanchez characterized the word without using it by saying, "Last night, we showed you a clip of one of his supporters calling Hillary Clinton the b-word that rhymes with witch." A local Fox 25 news reporter made the same move when he rhymed the unspoken word with rich.   A study reported that, when used on social media, bitch "aims to promote traditional, cultural beliefs about femininity". Used hundreds of thousands of times per day on such platforms, it is associated with sexist harassment, "victimizing targets", and "shaming" victims who do not abide by degrading notions about femininity   Son of a bitch The first known appearance of "son-of-a-bitch" in a work of American fiction is Seventy-Six (1823), a historical fiction novel set during the American Revolutionary War by eccentric writer and critic John Neal.  The protagonist, Jonathan Oadley, recounts a battle scene in which he is mounted on a horse: "I wheeled, made a dead set at the son-of-a-bitch in my rear, unhorsed him, and actually broke through the line." The term's use as an insult is as old as that of bitch. Euphemistic terms are often substituted, such as gun in the phrase "son of a gun" as opposed to "son of a bitch", or "s.o.b." for the same phrase. Like bitch, the severity of the insult has diminished. Roy Blount Jr. in 2008 extolled the virtues of "son of a bitch" (particularly in comparison to "asshole") in common speech and deed. Son of a bitch can also be used as a "how about that" reaction, or as a reaction to excruciating pain. In politics the phrase "Yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch" has been attributed, probably apocryphally, to various U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Immediately after the detonation of the first atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in July 1945 (the device codenamed Gadget), the Manhattan Project scientist who served as the director of the test, Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, exclaimed to Robert Oppenheimer "Now we're all sons-of-bitches." In January 2022, United States President Joe Biden was recorded on a hot mic responding to Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy asking, "Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?" Biden responded sarcastically, saying, "It's a great asset — more inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch." The 19th-century British racehorse Filho da Puta took its name from "Son of a Bitch" in Portuguese. The Curtiss SB2C, a World War 2 U.S. Navy dive bomber, was called "Son-of-a-Bitch 2nd Class" by some of its pilots and crewmen. In American popular culture, the slang word "basic" is used to derogatorily refer to persons who are thought to favor mainstream goods, fashions, and music. Hip-hop culture gave rise to "basic bitch," which gained popularity through rap music, lyrics, blogs, and videos from 2011 to 2014. "Bros" is a common word for their male counterparts. Other English-speaking nations have terms like "basic bitch" or "airhead," such as modern British "Essex girls" and "Sloane Rangers," as well as Australian "haul girls," who are noted for their love of shopping for expensive clothing and uploading films of their purchases on YouTube. Oxford English Dictionary  transitive. To call (a person, esp. a woman) a bitch. 1707   Diverting Muse 131   Why how now, crys Venus, altho you're my Spouse, [If] you Bitch me, you Brute, have a care of your Brows   transitive. To behave like a bitch towards (a person); to be spiteful, malicious, or unfair to (a person); to let (a person) down. 1764   D. Garrick Let. 23 Aug. (1963) II. 423   I am a little at a loss what You will do for a Woman Tragedian to stare & tremble wth yr Heroes, if Yates should bitch You—but she must come.   intransitive. To engage in spiteful or malicious criticism or gossip, esp. about another person; to talk spitefully or cattily about. 1915   G. Cannan Young Earnest i. x. 92   It's the women bitching at you got into your blood.   intransitive. Originally U.S. To grumble, to complain (about something, or at someone). Frequently collocated with moan. 1930   Amer. Speech 5 238   [Colgate University slang] He bitched about the course.   †3. intransitive. To back down, to yield. Obsolete. rare. 1777   E. Burke Let. 9 May in Corr. (1961) III. 339   Norton bitched a little at last, but though he would recede; Fox stuck to his motion.   Shit shit (v.) Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic *skit- (source also of North Frisian skitj, Dutch schijten, German scheissen), from PIE(proto indo-european) root *skei- "to cut, split." The notion is of "separation" from the body (compare Latin excrementum, from excernere "to separate," Old English scearn "dung, muck," from scieran "to cut, shear;" see sharn). It is thus a cousin to science and conscience.   "Shit" is not an acronym. Nor is it a recent word. But it was taboo from 1600 and rarely appeared in print (neither Shakespeare nor the KJV has it), and even in the "vulgar" publications of the late 18c. it is disguised by dashes. It drew the wrath of censors as late as 1922 ("Ulysses" and "The Enormous Room"), scandalized magazine subscribers in 1957 (a Hemingway story in Atlantic Monthly) and was omitted from some dictionaries as recently as 1970 ("Webster's New World"). [Rawson]   It has extensive slang usage; the meaning "to lie, to tease'' is from 1934; that of "to disrespect" is from 1903. Also see shite. Shat is a humorous past tense form, not etymological, first recorded 18th century.   To shit bricks "be very frightened" attested by 1961. The connection between fear and involuntary defecation has generated expressions in English since the 14th century. (the image also is in Latin), and probably also is behind scared shitless (1936).   shit (n.) Middle English shit "diarrhea," from Old English scitte "purging, diarrhea," from source of shit (v.). The general sense of "excrement" dates from 1580s (Old English had scytel, Middle English shitel for "dung, excrement;" the usual 14c. noun for natural discharges of the bodies of men or beasts seems to have been turd or filth). As an exclamation attested in print by 1920 but certainly older. Use for "obnoxious person" is by 1508; meaning "misfortune, trouble" is attested from 1937. Shit-faced "drunk" is 1960s student slang; shit list is from 1942. Shit-hole is by 1937 as "rectum," by 1969 in reference to undesirable locations. Shitload (also shit-load) for "a great many" is by 1970. Shitticism is Robert Frost's word for scatological writing.   Up shit creek "in trouble" is by 1868 in a South Carolina context (compare the metaphoric salt river, of which it is perhaps a coarse variant). Slang not give a shit "not care" is by 1922. Pessimistic expression same shit different day is attested by 1989. To get (one's) shit together "manage one's affairs" is by 1969. Emphatic shit out of luck is by 1942. The expression when the shit hits the fan "alluding to a moment of crisis or its disastrous consequences" is attested by 1967.   Expressing anger, despair, surprise, frustration, resignation, excitement, etc. 1865   Proc. Court Martial U.S. Army (Judge Advocate General's Office) U.S. National Arch.: Rec. group 153, File MM-2412 3 Charge II.   Private James Sullivan...did in contemptuous and disrespectful manner reply..‘Oh, shit, I can't' or words to that effect.   Ass/Asshole The word arse in English derives from the Proto-Germanic (reconstructed) word *arsaz, from the Proto-Indo-European word *ors-, meaning "buttocks" or "backside". The combined form arsehole is first attested from 1500 in its literal use to refer to the anus. The metaphorical use of the word to refer to the worst place in a region (e.g., "the arsehole of the world"), is first attested in print in 1865; the use to refer to a contemptible person is first attested in 1933. In the ninth chapter of his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy, Richard Wright quotes a snippet of verse that uses the term: "All these white folks dressed so fine / Their ass-holes smell just like mine ...". Its earliest known usage in newspapers as an insult was 1965. As with other vulgarities, these uses of the word may have been common in oral speech for some time before their first appearances in print. By the 1970s, Hustler magazine featured people they did not like as "Asshole of the Month." In 1972, Jonathan Richman of Modern Lovers recorded his song "Pablo Picasso", which includes the line "Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole."   Until the early 1990s, the word was considered one of a number of words that could not be uttered on commercial television in the United States. Comedian Andrew Dice Clay caused a major shock when he uttered the word during a televised MTV awards show in 1989. However, there were PG-13 and R-rated films in the 1980s that featured use of the word, such as the R-rated The Terminator (1984), the PG-13-rated National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation (1989), and the PG-rated Back to the Future (1985). By 1994, however, vulgarity had become more acceptable, and the word was featured in dialog on the long-running television series NYPD Blue, though it has yet to become anything close to commonplace on network TV. In some broadcast edits (such as the syndication airings of South Park), the word is partially bleeped out, as "assh—". A variant of the term, "ass clown", was coined and popularized by the 1999 comedy film Office Space.   The word is mainly used as a vulgarity, generally to describe people who are viewed as stupid, incompetent, unpleasant, or detestable. Moral philosopher Aaron James, in his 2012 book, Assholes: A Theory, gives a more precise meaning of the word, particularly to its connotation in the United States: A person, who is almost always male, who considers himself of much greater moral or social importance than everyone else; who allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; who does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and who is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people. He feels he is not to be questioned, and he is the one who is chiefly wronged.   Many would believe the term ass to be used to describe an ungulate or a hoofed mammal of the smaller variety. Those people would be correct. However ass would be used as slang to describe the incompetence of people as they seem to resemble that of a donkey. Slow and stupid. We don't see donkeys in this manner but the people of old may have.   A stupid, irritating, or contemptible person; a person who behaves despicably. Cf. arsehole n. 3, shithole n. 2. Quot. 1954, from a story originally told in 1933, provides evidence for the development of this sense from figurative uses of sense 1. [1954   V. Randolph Pissing in Snow (1976) lxx. 106   When God got the job [of making men and women] done,..there was a big pile of ass-holes left over. It looks to me like the Almighty just throwed all them ass-holes together, and made the Easton family.]   Dick/dickhead   Dick is a common English language slang word for the human penis. It is also used by extension for a variety of slang purposes, generally considered vulgar, including: as a verb to describe sexual activity; and as a term for individuals who are considered to be rude, abrasive, inconsiderate, or otherwise contemptible. In this context, it can be used interchangeably with jerk, and can also be used as a verb to describe rude or deceitful actions. Variants include dickhead, which literally refers to the glans. The offensiveness of the word dick is complicated by the continued use of the word in inoffensive contexts, including as both a given name (often a nickname for Richard) and a surname, the popular British dessert spotted dick, the classic novel Moby-Dick, the Dick and Jane series of children's books, and the American retailer Dick's Sporting Goods. Uses like these have given comic writers a foundation to use double entendre to capitalize on this contradiction. In the mid-17th century, dick became slang for a man as a sexual partner. For example, in the 1665 satire The English Rogue by Richard Head, a "dick" procured to impregnate a character that is having difficulty conceiving:   “The next Dick I pickt up for her was a man of a colour as contrary to the former, as light is to darkness, being swarthy; whose hair was as black as a sloe; middle statur'd, well set, both strong and active, a man so universally tryed, and so fruitfully successful, that there was hardly any female within ten miles gotten with child in hugger-mugger, but he was more than suspected to be Father of all the legitimate. Yet this too, proved an ineffectual Operator.”   An 1869 slang dictionary offered definitions of dick including "a riding whip" and an abbreviation of dictionary, also noting that in the North Country, it was used as a verb to indicate that a policeman was eyeing the subject. The term came to be associated with the penis through usage by men in the military around the 1880s.   The term "dick" was originally used to describe a vile or repulsive individual in the 1960s.   A stupid, annoying, or objectionable person (esp. a male); one whose behaviour is considered knowingly obnoxious, provocative, or disruptive. Cf. dick n.1 6. 1960   S. Martinelli Let. 28 Dec. in C. Bukowski & S. Martinelli Beerspit Night & Cursing. (2001) 132   You shd listen to yr own work being broadcast [on the radio]... You cd at least tell ME when to list[en] dickhead!   Twat noun Slang: Vulgar. vulva. First recorded in 1650–60; perhaps originally a dialectal variant of thwat, thwot (unattested), presumed Modern English outcome of Old English thwāt, (unattested), akin to Old Norse thveit “cut, slit, forest clearing” (from northern English dialect thwaite “forest clearing”)   What does twat mean? Twat is vulgar slang for “vagina.” It's also used, especially in British English slang, a way to call someone as stupid, useless, or otherwise contemptible person. While twat has been recorded since the 1650s, we don't exactly know where it comes from. One theory connects twat to the Old English term for “to cut off.” The (bizarre) implication could be that women's genitalia were thought to be just shorter versions of men's.   Twat was popularized in the mid-1800s completely by accident. The great English poet Robert Browning had read a 1660 poem that referred, in a derogatory way, to a “nun's twat.” Browning thought a twat must have been a kind of hat, so he incorporated it into his own work.   Words for genitalia and other taboo body parts (especially female body parts) have a long history of being turned into abusive terms. Consider a**, d*ck, p***y, among many others. In the 1920s, English speakers started using twat as an insult in the same way some use a word like c**t, although twat has come to have a far less offensive force than the c-word in American English. In the 1930s, twat was sometimes used as a term of abuse for “woman” more generally, and over the second half of the 1900s, twat was occasionally used as slang for “butt” or “anus” in gay slang.   Twat made headlines in June 2018 when British actor Danny Dyer called former British Prime Minister David Cameron a twat for his role in initiating the Brexit referendum in 2016—and then stepping down after it passed.   Twat is still common in contemporary use as an insult implying stupidity, especially among British English speakers.   Even though it's a common term, twat is still vulgar and causes a stir when used in a public setting, especially due to its sexist nature. Public figures that call someone a twat are often publicly derided. Online, users sometimes censor the term, rendering it as tw*t or tw@t.   If you're annoying, you might be accused of twattiness; if you're messing around or procrastinating, you might be twatting around; if you're going on about something, you might be twatting on. Twatting is also sometimes substituted for the intensifier ”fucking”.   As a term of abuse: a contemptible or obnoxious person; a person who behaves stupidly; a fool, an idiot. Now chiefly British. The force of this term can vary widely. Especially when applied to a woman, it can be as derogatory and offensive as the term cunt (cunt n. 2a), but it can also be used (especially of men) as a milder form of abuse without conscious reference to the female genitals, often implying that a person's behaviour, appearance, etc., is stupid or idiotic, with little or no greater force than twit (twit n.1 2b). 1922   ‘J. H. Ross' Mint (1936) xxxv. 110   The silly twat didn't know if his arse-hole was bored, punched, drilled, or countersunk. The top 10 movies with the most swear words: The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) – 715 Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safide, 2019) – 646 Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) – 606 Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (Kevin Smith, 2001) – 509 Fury (David Ayer, 2014) – 489 Straight Outta Compton (F. Gary Gray, 2015) – 468 Summer of Sam (Spike Lee, 1999) – 467 Nil By Mouth (Gary Oldman, 1997) – 432 Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992) – 418 Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge, 1996) – 414

Lydmor - "Nevada" from the 2021 album Capacity on hfn music. This week's Songs of the Day were selected by KEXP DJ Kevin Cole, host of Drive Time, spotlighting artists playing the SPOT Festival in Aarhus, Denmark, May 6-7th.  Danish artist Lydmor [real name: Jenny Rossander] examines the space she's in on her fourth album Capacity, a Björk-inspired expression of futuristic electro-pop. On today's Song of the Day, she's joined by Faroese singer Eivør on guest vocals. Read the full post on KEXP.org Support the show: https://www.kexp.org/donate See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.