Minä elän.

Huh, you people? Still here? How kind from you, I find your loyalty greatly pacifying.

As you have noted, I have pretty much ceased blogging. Don't worry for me - nothing unfortunate happened, I am still alive and living in London. It is just so that I have just said everything I once had to say, and as my current job tends to exhaust my capacity for writing English more or less on a daily basis, I cannot really come up with anything new and original that I'd wish to say, either.

However, at the moment I would indeed have something to say, but don't know the words. For I have no words to describe the level of this utter disgust I feel towards contemporary Russia. I am increasingly worried for my dear Georgian friends and for their beautiful country, which I'm personally strongly fond of, and don't think that all this is going to end very well. So, I guess the best thing to do is to urge our governments to build more nuclear power and renewables. It's the quickest way to reduce energy dependency from those globally perilous nutjobs who are in charge of that abyssally deep Eurasia-wide [insert your own noun here].

But may that be all, for now. There's a chance that I could start again at some point in the future, but I kind of feel that if I will then I will be writing in Finnish, and possibly anonymously. I miss my language. But do get in touch, dear reader, if you want to go for a pint of something (there's that email on my profile box) and I'll tell you how I ended up singing Finlandia Hymn to two President Saakashvili's brothers and their dinner accompanions in a Tbilisi restaurant on one rainy Friday evening not that long ago.

Let us conclude with a link to a piece of visual evidence that shows Vladimir Putin, Silvio Berlusconi and Jean-Claude Van Damme watching some Russian testosterone show.

Be good.

What men do

As it happens, I and my Australian co-tenant are soon in need of a new housemate, and in order to find one we must post a message about it. Writing that message has proven much more complicated than I was expecting, because this is a boys' flat, we want to keep it that way and there apparently is no easy way to spell it out.

When I was under ten years old, I and some other boys of the neighbourhood used to build huts in that dark and exciting forest that had cut us and our families from the civilisation. They were built of pine branches and twigs, they were hidden extremely carefully from the adult eye and by their entrance they always had a sign that they were huts where "no girls" were allowed. "Ei tytöille!" It may strike very few of you as a surprise, though I have to admit that I have severely degenerated from that age of innocence: nowadays I just can't come up with an announcement that would carry the same message but wouldn't come across as gay. Male gender is the most significant requirement that we have for the new housemate, and I've tried to state it at the beginning and at the end, explicitly and implicitly, bluntly and politely, but my efforts have not actually got me very far. Please believe me, dear brothers, when I tell you that being a man can sometimes be a frustratingly complex business.

I try to articulate my point through an example. Last night we hosted a small dinner party in our living room. The food was tasty and the drinks were plenty, but in course of the evening my general merry mood experienced a serious minority report when I noticed that our chef had left the window of his room open. I couldn't tell whether it had been in that state for days, hours or minutes, though perceived it as nonetheless absolutely outrageous nonetheless - with these gas prices.

So I forced everyone present to witness one of these fairly common intoxicated-Aapo-lectures-an-Italian-in-several-languages moments ("Ei jätkä perkele, ei kuule näillä kaasun hinnoilla. Eikä ainakaan mun kämpillä.") and marched to the window, pulling it somewhat theatrically. Either I was too strong or the latch was too weak - we shall never know - but as I tried to shut it, I ended up with the handle of the latch in my right hand. British windows obviously are too effeminate for Finnish men to shut them safely.

We happen to live on the ground floor, so one of the first things we agreed on in the morning was to shut and lock the window in some sustainable manner. I initially suggested calling a locksmith but my housemates - and in this they are allowed to take full pride - opinioned that we should try and sort it ourselves: we are men, anyway. And that is exactly what we did.

Repairing window latches in hangover does certainly not belong to my favourite pastimes, but retrospectively thinking it definitely was quite fun. We disarmed the living room window of its latch and used that latch for amending the broken bedroom window. The process was fairly straightforward: the Aussie took his Swiss army knife, the Italian took his camera and myself I took my shoes and went to press the window from outside. It was raining and I had a headache. Then we rotated so that everyone was let to use the knife and its screwdriver feature, as well as to stand outside in rain. When we had finished the job, we went to the pub to watch football.


All this would have involved so much more fuss and so much less enthusiasm, had there been women around.

Ilkka Kanerva's text messages

Citing wider blogospheric interests, his personal witch-hunt against former errand boys of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as unashamed search engine hubris, blogger Aapo has decided to translate 12 of the ca. 200 hundred text messages that Ilkka Kanerva, 60, sent to Johanna Tukiainen, 29, into English. If someone is not entirely happy with that, then blogger Aapo will also cite Bible, Qur'an and selected parts of Top Gun dialogue.

Ilkka Kanerva is no Foreign Minister any longer, having resigned this morning, and for that I am pleased. May that what is to be found below amuse you and serve as our conclusive remark. Hymy (which, incidentally, means "Smile") printed some 20 of them, these are the ones that I gathered from the Finnish Wikipedia. I'm a notoriously bad translator, so for all possible errors you can blame me and only me. If I missed any valuable nuances, do let me know.

"...if you [two] are interested to sit down, eat and see what then..."

"I find it lovely to watch when the partner is aroused and shows what's what. You wouldn't dare?"

"Oh damn, Sunday would have been fine, but I'm again abroad. I too went out and felt like to...meet."

"Also two is OK, the man involved. I meant dinner, if the woman (women) seduce and you start to feel like to. What to do?"

"Indeed. I think I said how charming they look on woman. Without knowing what is underneath! Since can't tell of your daring..."

"Sounds almost like fantasy. Have you taken good care of your garden?"

"Do you wanna do it in some exciting place? What could it be?"

"How would it feel to touch you with fingers, in a nightclub"

"No, also yesterday might have been OK. You praise your sister so much that I start to be keen to meet her as well."

"Wow, what a picture! Can't get much better than that. Does your sister have the same sex appeal?"

"I also read those answers. Besides everything else you goddammit are smart as well! Even better!"

"Yeah but how do you make sure that there won't be any stories in papers. That's impossible. Now nothing happened and you won't gossip or anything. Otherwise OK. Are you in a bar?"

Make of that what you will. Hardly anything stroke-provoking, but that's not important. Or can somebody seriously imagine a meeting where the National Coalition's parliamentary group would have sat down and through careful hermeneutics judge whether the explicit dimensions of His Excellency's prose could be considered appropriate or not? That would have been a bizarre sight. Basically the same goes for claims that Kanerva's biggest mistake was the fact that he lied - sounds sweet and Protestant and all that, but could you actually picture a serious press conference which starts in a following manner:

- So, Mr Kanerva, what did you actually discuss in your correspondence with that lady?

- Oh many things - but primarily her lingerie, her pubic hair, her sister, and my fingers. I also asked her not to tell anyone about it.

Aye, what a boost for ministerial credibility that would have been.

Alex Stubb is Finland's new Foreign Minister. Depending on whether I will manage to come across new and interesting Albanian music videos or something else that I at this very moment find about 100 times more significant than walks of life of politicians from that particular party, I may or may not be arsed to post about him one of these days. Or now to think about it again, I kind of feel that I won't be arsed. Sorry. So in the meantime, you could do much worse than turning to Svenskfinland, which seems to be a great addition to Finland's English blogland.

Alexander is a good move by the Coalition though, and their only good move during the whole farce. I think I've voted them twice since I was granted my suffrage - which is not terribly long ago - but this latest demonstration of utter idiocy has really, really pissed me off. "Pooh-pooh, old buddy, hush-hush, it's alright, now we just wait till the drones get bored and start watching F1 and then everything's back to normal." You arrogant, shameless and miserable pieces of broilercrap. A special mention goes to Ben Zyskowicz and the funny jokes he made about the topic. Har har har. I laughed. Almost.

Kokoomus, what a rubbish party.

Olta Boka - Zemrën e lamë peng

Olta Boka is in the place where dreams are born. She faces a giant ventricular septal defect, walks through it and finds herself surrounded by female water elementals. Was she a Slav, she would recognise them as rusalki, but she's not. Hence her unguardedness. The rusalki have recently become very keen on network marketing and start telling her about their new pyramid scheme. Olta Boka has no heart to reject them. She sees ecstatic promotion events, hears trancelike motivation speeches and invests shitloads of money in shampoo, rubber ducks and illicit heart transplants. All of sudden the market saturates and the rusalki hibernate with the money, leaving Olta Boka to exit through the giant VSD and walk away in confusion. What went wrong?

Let's move this blog's spotlight from zeros to heros - as you see, it is absolutely certain now. Olta Boka, who has dropped one piece of 'r' consonants off her name since we last time heard from her, will represent her Republic of Albania in the Eurovision Song Contest Semi-final in Belgrade, Serbia, on May 22nd, 2008. Dogs maybe barked and the losers protested, but Olta Boka's Eurovision caravan went on. She's not Sinan Hoxha, but I wish her best of luck nonetheless.

Ilkka Kanerva and exciting places

"Do you want to do it in some exciting place? What could it be?"

That's apparently what Ilkka Kanerva, Finland's virile Foreign Minister, texted to Johanna Tukiainen, an erotic dancer, in the small hours of February 20th. It was printed today by Ilta-Sanomat, a tabloid, and is the first of the 200 or so messages that he has sent to her. Hymy, a weekly gossip magazine, is to share more of them on next Tuesday; Tukiainen tried to get an injunction to block them earlier this week, but failed. She's a good girl, though:

Tukiainen, 29, emphasises that her studies at a polytech included classes on morality and ethics, and that she has sought to behave in such a way as to maintain a good conscience.

Yeah, not at all like that dirty Marika, Ilkka Kanerva's previous SMS lust object in 2005. Back in those days he was just a Debuty Speaker, and didn't hold the class and discernment he holds today.

Both publications cite "wider societal interests" as their reason to spill them out, and whilst that may well not be their greatest underlying motive, I agree with them. Foreign ministers shouldn't be using their publically funded work phones for texting sexual proposals to erotic dancers, and if they don't agree to that then they should resign. If they don't comprehend why they should resign, someone has to point it out for them. If that someone is not anyone within the country's more serious media then may it be a task for some of the less serious ones. The bottom line is that Ilkka Kanerva had his chance and he blew it, now he must go. He should have gone already.

A widely held perception in Finland seems to be that the main dilemma has to do with the fact that Kanerva had first obviously lied about the existence of the messages and then about their content, but that in my very humble opinion misses the point. While his purgatorial ascension towards the ultimate truth has been most entertaining to follow - first denying the messages, then admitting that he has sent them but that they were only work related, then adding that even if some few may have been been of extracurricular nature they certainly included nothing vulgar or sexual, and finally confessing yesterday that he probably "wouldn't read them aloud in a Sunday school" - the real reason for his unavoidable resignation should have been the very fact that he was put to muddle through all this absurdia in the first place. Lies and apologies over lies are irrelevant. His night job as a telecoms prosaist has turned him into an international laughingstock, and all possible forms of common sense imply that this distracts him from handling his day job as a foreign minister. Even if it were only a mobile phone in his pocket when Ilkka Kanerva summits, he's a lame duck now. His wound may not be totally self-inflicted, yet don't feel sorry for him.

Some cats have sharp claws.

Update: Alrightio, now I have done what any 21st century digital boy with a cause against someone or something would do, and kicked off a new Facebook group: Älkää jättäkö Ilkka Kanervaa rauhaan - Do not leave Ilkka Kanerva alone. I got somewhat bemused by the fact that there existed already two groups related to the topic, but both were supportive for Mr Foreign Minister. "Leave Ilkka Kanerva alone" is funny sort of civil activism, methinks.

BBC is trying to rip me off and I don't like it

My views regarding the TV licence had earlier been rather neutral, but now I'm getting increasingly pissed off by the idea of having to pay for it. I don't think it's a good way to fund a public service. Either make that service commercial or fund it through taxes - I don't care anymore, to be honest - but for goddammit, just make everyone a good deal happier and scrap this silly licence game. Governments peeping into living rooms and citizens taking stress over such small sums of money don't contribute to a healthy societal environment.

Let's start with some background. Back in Finland, even though I owned a small telly, I never really watched it after moving away from my parents, so I didn't bother with the TV licence either. For the first couple of years in uni I happened to live in rooms where there was no antenna socket within easy reach, so I borrowed it to some friends, and the first time I finally set it telly up was when I had returned from my Erasmus year. My new flat had a big kitchen - with many modern niceties, such as a cooker ventilator and an antenna socket - and I decided that it'd be good to watch evening news and some bigger sport events from time to time. (The only series I follow regularly - Family Guy and Curb Your Enthusiasm - I acquire through other means.) I set it up on Sunday, never thought about the licence, and got an inspector ringing the doorbell on Tuesday.

I'm from the countryside, brought up in a friendly neighbourhood by a law-abiding family, so I had not been accustomised to that petty doorbell paranoia which ubiquitously haunts Finnish student blocs, ("Shhh...it must be an inspector. Don't breath, don't move, don't open."), meaning that if someone uses the doorbell or knocks on the door, I simply go an open it, because that's what doors are made for. And that time it was indeed a TV inspector, that semi-mythical creature. Besides not being paranoid, I am a bad liar too, so when the guy told me that according to their records no one in our flat had paid the TV licence, I just told him that, well, yes, I just moved in a couple of days ago. More than a few people, when hearing about this incidence (entirely unsurprisingly, as this is indeed one of the easiest areas of life for dull citizens to come across as daring and exciting) shrugged deliberately and asked why on earth I had not said no like everyone else and told the man to fuck off, which was of course a very delightful thing to hear. Who sane and decent man wouldn't take pride in being a skillful liar and a rude asshole.

So I got a penalty, of 60 euros or something like that. I didn't protest or complain, because the inspector had surely heard the same excuses approx five thousand times before and I didn't want to waste his time or mine. We agreed that I'd pay it and cease using my TV, promises which both I also kept. I put the telly in my closet and took it down in course of the year only when there was the parliamentary election, hockey world championships final and the Tampere United vs. Levski Sofia away leg. Those rare moments of broadcasting accounted for a rough ten hours, and even if I did not enjoy them legally, I reasoned that they couldn't be worth much more than 60 euros, and didn't therefore feel bad conscience for breaking my earlier promise - reminding myself of my unsociable housemate who happily watched his telly for almost the same amount of time everyday and for nothing. I never complained about it; I had made a mistake, and this was the consequence.

Summa summarum. At that time, if been asked what was my opinion of the TV licence, I would have probably said that I was slightly in favour. I didn't consider it a good funding mechanism, but maybe the least bad of all possible, and certainly not worth all the fuss some ideological ranters were kicking over it. What is it that has made me change my mind, I will explain a bit later.

Wet, wet, wet and slippery

Four useful ways to warn reckless Londoners of the dangers of their wet/slippery floors/surfaces:

"White Men Can't Jump So They Reflexively Cross Their Legs When Being Caught in the Middle of a Triangle"

"Magic Carpets Can Save You When You Least Expect Them to Do So"

"On a Slippery Slope No One Can Lend You a Hand, Let Alone an Arm"

"Mischievous Petrochemicals in Random Places Are No Fun"