A cool quarter mill

Here in Bergen we've been counting down, not just to the end of summer, but also to our 250,000th resident. (Everyone's current residence is kept in a national database, so it's easy to have an exact running total of how many people live in any given city, unlike the States, where such figures are basically guesstimates.) The Central Statistics Bureau has a running counter on its website, and at this writing there were 4,778,234 Norwegians. The local paper has been tracking the population numbers, and Bergenser #250,000, a boy named August, was born Friday morning at the hospital up the hill from us.
This is big news. The mayor, complete with the cool 15 pounds of official bling all European mayors wear, showed up to gladhand the newborn and be photographed with the kid and his parents:

There's a banner heralding "250,000 Bergensers!" with a quarter million smiley faces (one for each Bergenser) all down the side of the city administrative building too.
No one can say we aren't proud here. Bergen has been Norway's second most populous city (Oslo's population is about a half million) for a good long while now, though I understand back in the seventies it looked like Trondheim (#3) was going to overtake Bergen, so the mayor at that time made a public appeal for Bergensers to "get to it." The population of Bergen was only too happy to oblige, and Trondheim is still stuck in third....