Angry Norwegians in Scuba Gear Chase Google Street View Van

Every now and then the Google Street View van picks up something weird. And apparently in the UK they’ve started throwing rocks and rotten vegetables at it, not wanting to have their homes photographed. In the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen, however, they picked up this: two angry grown men in scuba suits chasing the van with giant forks. I used to live in Norway with my girlfriend (who is thankfully not Norwegian and has never chased me with a giant fork in scuba gear) and that is the most Norwegian thing I have ever seen. Apparently, they had been waiting there a while for the van, taking advantage of Norways rather lax working hours. You can get the full story, autotranslated from Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper here.

[via BoingBoing]

Bergensbanen in HD

The Norwegian public broadcaster NRK2 has made available for free download (via torrent) footage of the entire (impossibly beautiful) train journey from Bergen to Oslo – a total of about 7 1/2 hours. It was initally aired as a documentary with interviews and accompanying music along the way. Due to copyright restrictions, they’re unable to release the compledted edit, but the raw footage is availble. The best part is you’re allowed to do whatever you want with it as long as you credit NRK2. There’s even a contest (if you speak Norwegian) where the best edit wins an HD videocamera.

The documentary had picture-in-picture clips with videos about Bergensbanen, a reporter interviewing people on the train, music and two cameras pointing to the sides of the train. Because of rights, we had to remove the music and many videoclips, so we decided to make a clean frontcamera version for this download. It’s recorded on a Sony 700 camera in XDCAM HD 1080 50i. The camera has a 30 seconds buffer, making it possible to switch disks when needed. So we have a continuous recording of 7 hours.

This is a sample of the footage. It’s taken as the train went through Finse, which is where the scenes of the ice planet Hoth were filmed for Star Wars, Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back.

Download Bergensbanen in HD [NRKBeta]