Aw shucks!

When Gregory was here visiting last month, we went up to look at the Fantoft stave church, which is a magnificent example of traditional Norwegian churchbuilding dating from ca. 1150. These stave churches are a big part of the national heritage; see for more information.

But actually, the church we saw was a reconstruction of the original 12th century church which was destroyed in a wave of church arsons in the early 1990s. My father-in-law is very active in the Bergen church community and remembers congregations organizing to watch their churches in shifts in order to keep them safe. When the dust had finally settled, the culprit turned out to be a prominent figure in the Norwegian death metal/devil worship scene, and he was eventually convicted of most of the church arsons and the murder of his leading death metal/Satanist rival.

The maximum penalty for anything at all in Norway is 21 years in prison, so he's been up for parole three times now already and just got denied again. That might have something to do with the fact that the last time they let him out on unsupervised leave, he didn't come back and was found in a stolen car with a cache of weapons and a fake passport, so he was moved to a maximum-security facility. Or it could be that people are still peeved about his willful destruction of beloved symbols of the national heritage. Or maybe it's the murder. Hard to say what the parole commission's rationale could be, really.

So one of the local papers is running a series of articles based on interviews with him, and today's front-page headline proclaims when he finally gets out he's "never coming back to Bergen."

Darn.