The final ignominy has befallen the plucky/wildly over-leveraged island nation. Pizza Hut have announced that they're closing two of their three Reykjavik restaurants. McDonald's closed theirs earlier this year. Both companies blamed the collapse of the Icelandic economy.

No matter how you feel about tonight's health care vote, it's better than a huge volcano enveloping our nation. This might happen to Iceland, where an eruption is threatening to trigger even bigger blasts. Related: this John McPhee book. [AP]

In your explosive Thursday media column: Iceland's bad bet, the wienermobile is the future of journalism, more hard times at USA Today, Conde Nast would like to be the new Wonkette, and a scary scene at Fashion Week.

A new study says that out of all the countries in the world, the most environmentally great is Iceland, "which gets virtually all of its power from renewable sources" like burning the abundant corpses of its starved, poverty-stricken citizens. [NYT]

The Way We Live Now: To the extreme. We will sell ourselves for food. We will torture someone over loan modifications. We will make an entire nation too broke to afford McDonald's. What a seductive lifestyle!

In your deluged Monday media column: Conde's heartbreaking receptionist layoff, the Miami Herald is JUST FINE, Lee Abrams is a cuddly animal, and Iceland is so touchy:

Even as their country plummets down the geyser hole, Icelanders are still awfully nice to gay people. They've appointed an out-and-proud lesbian to be their interim Prime Minister, a world first the papers say.

If ever there was a grim picture of the current financial clusterfuck, it's the once artsy (Björk! sigur rós!), hip, and rich island nation wonderland of Iceland, which fell into cataclysmic economic failure earlier this month. And it happened pretty much overnight. Since the three major banks collapsed under crippling debt and a plummeting currency, job loss has been widespread—the architecture industry, for example, has seen some 75% of its work force laid off in the past few weeks. Now the seemingly peaceful population has devolved into an angry, violent mob, with a gay "troubadour" named Hordur Torfason leading the charge against the government.

"The nude portrait was a gift from Iceland's first lady, who tells Bloomberg News she has 'yet to meet someone who does not want a naked picture of their loved ones with text about themselves.'" [Gothamist via Fleshbot]