Aapotsikko

Minä elän.

2008-08-11T21:26:00.006+01:00

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

2008-04-13T21:20:00.023+01:00

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 varyingly common intoxicated-me-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

2008-04-01T18:49:00.030+01:00

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

2008-03-30T23:01:00.008+01:00

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

2008-03-29T10:54:00.020Z

"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

2008-03-28T17:27:00.013Z

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

2008-03-24T22:29:00.013Z

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"

Ponzi file #734529: Wincapita

2008-03-19T20:08:00.023Z

No ifs, no buts, no howevers or on-the-other-hands about it - multilevel marketing is dirty, unethical stuff. Stay away from it and tell everyone you don't wish ill to stay away from it.

As a rule of thumb, multilevel marketing (or referral marketing or network marketing) is involved in all business schemes that seem legal and promise to make you very rich very quickly. It is as simple as that, and you don't need any other safeguards than bearing in your mind that if it was easy to get rich, you would be already. Pretty basic stuff.

I sincerely hope that the recent Wincapita (of which there's some excellent commentary in Finnish here, and a little bit information in English here, after that chart) episode will finally give the Finnish breed of multi-level scammers the public attention they deserve. We don't know yet how severe and widely-spread scam it has been, yet most educated online guesses - tipping off "thousands of people having lost tens of thousands of euros" - name it as the worst pyramid scheme ever in Finland. The National Bureau of Investigation has appealed, in Finnish and after there had been rumours of some normally law-abiding citizens, especially in the Republic's eastern and northern provinces, planning to take law temporarily into their own hands, that none of the disappointed investors would resort to violence, which to me can be interpreted as good news. For, as it happens, when there is a promise of violence, there must be headlines, and when there are headlines, there may be education for the masses.

Think about it, these kind of scams are really quite fucking awful. Just imagine a situation where a clueless husband and father has sold the family's car, taken a 10k loan and talked his in-laws into the scheme, or half of his workmates. It's tempting to think that he was evil or greedy and his referrals stupid and gullible, but the sad fact after all is that the pyramid schemes blossom, here and there and now and then, mainly for three reasons: most people (a) want to make easy money, (b) trust their friends and relatives, and (c) hate to admit their mistakes. First you have the most likable fellow of the neighbourhood getting roped in by some persuasive sponsor, then his mates with whom he genuinely wants to share his fast-track to wealth, and finally a bunch of bitter and disappointed people who have lost big bucks because they simply couldn't come to terms with the fact that they had made a wrong decision. Knowledge might have been power, but maybe they didn't have it; maybe they had never heard of multi-level marketing before.

After you have thought about that, think about Albanians. They were brought onto the brink of civil war because of a similar (the smoke-screen product - be it a soap, a rubber duck, a miraculous anti-balding pill or, as was the case with Wincapita, a little-known yet revolutionarily innovative computer software able to forecast currency rates in whose practically flawless bets you might be allowed to invest money, if only being referred by an established and trustworthy insider - always vary, but the underlying logic remains the same: the actual money is generated by the entry fees and therefore can benefit only the upper and older sediments of the pyramid) rip-off, and over 2,000 people lost their lives in the aftermath. That's quite a big deal, if you ask me.

In Albania it happened due to malaises of communism - your average Albanian in 1997 had fairly little experience of what markets are and how they work, i.e. he basically didn't know what money was - whereas a few silly boys back home in Suolahti six years ago, to my understanding, never had the same excuse. We had not been told about multi-level marketing in school or sauna, and one sunny summer afternoon it just happened to be so that my mate and some smoothly articulating and well-mannered Turku-born Hervanta-based uni drop-out named Olli were drinking my citron-flavoured mineral water around my apartment's kitchen table and telling me a lot of rubbish. I didn't initially recognise it as rubbish, though, and since Olli was a convincing, likable fellow and my mate very excited about what he was telling us, I promised to give it a thought. No one had ever spoke to me about this earlier, so the entire Central Finnish market was surely untapped and as I was going to need soap and shampoo anyhow, I could by all means buy them this way - nothing to lose, really.

Well, for a 19-years old conscientious objector with few savings, spending 900 markkanens* (approx 150 euros) on being permitted to buy soap, shampoo and rubber ducks from Sweden was nonetheless going to be a rather significant investment, so on the following day at work I did some additional desk research on the topic. There was no Wikipedia then but there were websites and links, and I did more research...and then some more...and more...and then I phoned my mate and told him to get real. And he didn't.

I and my other friends, with our better grasp of information warfare, made sure that he couldn't recruit anyone we knew even vaguely (a favour he didn't appreciate), yet weren't able to do much for the new-born entrepreneur himself. I don't know how much money he wasted on that crap during the two or three years he was involved in it, though given that he - suddenly convinced that study or ordinary work was not for him - was living merely on welfare, it must have sucked a fairly good chuck of his disposable income. I shrugged that if you want to believe, then you apparently believe, and never brought it up after a while. Today he is fine and working, so I guess he eventually figured it out himself.

Nevertheless, it is a lesson worth learning. Please don't let anyone else learn it the hard way. Spread the word.

*Correction: This blogger's processor obviously bet on a wrong currency - since the year was 2002, it is unlikely that we were using FIMs. So let's just agree that the actual sum was to be delivered in ShiMs, aka shitloads of money, ok?

Running man

2008-03-13T22:29:00.011Z

Thursday is my sauna day. When I was still living in Finland, also Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday were my sauna days, but that was then and this is now. I don't actually live very far from my sauna, and were the East London line not closed due to 2012 related redevelopments I could cross the river via the Wapping station and get there in less than 15 minutes. Since that way is blocked, I usually go by running, crossing the Tower Bridge and then fighting my way through the shady streets of Bermondsey. (To be honest, there is only one street and it's well-lit, but that's not my point now. As Bruce told us in the pub a couple of weeks ago, pointing to the southern shores of Thames: "Different side, different people.")

It's a run that gives you a proper sweat, though not much more; the journey ends always a kilometer or two too soon. So this time I took a different approach and a long way round, running here and there and trying to tire myself as severely as possible before arriving at the church - because that is exactly how you can make most out of your weekly sauna - and finishing with a hard spurt. I'm not your most athletic type north of Thames, so it was certainly enough for me. The weather was adequately crap too, and you can only guess how great is the feeling when you are nearly there, soakingly wet because of both sweat and rain, and mentally prepared for an hour and half of the heat of sauna.

No deal. The guy in the reception told that the sauna is closed for this and next week, for the church is having their annual Easter bazaar. My fatigue didn't allow me to listen to him and learn how a Finnish Easter bazaar can prevent them from heating up their sauna, although I assume they have a reason for their decision - the whole concept and tradition of seamen's church indeed somehow assures you on that you can trust these guys. Whatever is your take on religion and the Church in general, you just count on them; these churches will always be there for you. If I were lost, in a great difficulty and lands afar, I personally would rather turn to the local maritime church than Ilkka Kanerva's foreign service. (Which might prove an admittedly reckless policy when travelling in landlocked countries.)

However, tired and disillusioned, my immediate reaction was slightly more mundane. Deep inside me, I wanted to rush further, push one of the bazaar tables over and loudly express my anger over the fact that this sauna of mine, which will be called a sauna for all nations, had been made a den of vendors, thieves, yet then - very soon actually - came to my more sophisticated senses and acknowledged that when all circumstances are thoroughly considered, such - no matter how ironic as a situation - would be rather inappropriate. So I ran back home, stopping at an off-license to buy a can of Stella, and took a shower. If nothing unexpected happens, will Thursday the 27th be my next sauna day.

Ilkka Kanerva, Finland's pathetic Foreign Minister

2008-03-10T19:55:00.013Z

I told you. That man is a clown:

The weekly gossip magazine Hymy recently wrote about a young woman who says that she had received 200 mobile phone text messages from Kanerva. The woman has been described in the tabloid press as an "erotic dancer". Kanerva has denied the claims.

Well, today he actually denied that he had denied it - which was probably a wise move. With age indeed comes wisdom, and Ilkka Kanerva is already 60 years young.

Seriously, my gentle readers, there are some things you should know and not forget. I keep it short and simple, and just list them below.

Thing 1: Ilkka Kanerva is silly and funny, i.e. factually incompetent but socially competent. Most of the people who meet him like him, and the Ministry's senior level civil servants certainly even more so, for in Ilkka they have a boss whose level of substance allows them to have as much influence over policies as they possibly can legally have in Finland.

Thing 2: Ilkka Kanerva is a spineless opportunist. His party is right of centre, but in the 70s and 80s Ilkka himself was among Finland's greatest friends of communism. When there were rumours and gossips about who likes whom and who wants what in Finnish politics, Ilkka the informer was the first to pass them on to Soviet diplomats.

Thing 3: Ilkka Kanerva is the archetype of those who in Finnish lingo are known as broilers - a natural-born youth politician who simply and painlessly evolved into an adult politician. He studied politics in university, was active in student politics and has never held a job other than that of a politician.

Thing 4: Ilkka Kanerva had an exact-fooking-ly same sort of text message diarrhea less than three years ago. Had he within his head something that could be possibly identified as a human brain, he would have learnt his lesson and approached women belonging to that certain trade solely through his imagination and carpal aide, the ever-faithful Federica, but hell no - instead he concluded that this "finnish Glamour model" could keep all those 200 SMS beans graciously unspilled and thus prove worth the gamble. Which makes at least this blogger think that there must be only some dark, dark matter inside Ilkka Kanerva's Turkudweller's skull.

That's all, folks.

Memory

2008-03-06T23:39:00.003Z

I realised a funny thing today. I'm not sure if anyone else finds it funny, but if not, then we can always just say that I realised a thing.

At least in my case, remembering number sequences like passwords and PIN codes depends more than a bit on what sort of physical apparatus is asking them. I tried to access my Finnish bank's online service while at work today, but got a complete blackout - I could vaguely remember what are the numbers included in my username, but just couldn't get them correct. Once I got home and to my laptop, I had no problems at all. I don't think I ever experienced something similar back home, when using the university's computers for online banking.

In the beginning, I had the same problem also with my bank card. Britain is ahead of Finland when it comes to using Chip & PIN in shops, so only places I had ever really used my PIN code before had been cash machines. So when Waitrose's cashiers handed me the terminal and asked me to enter the code, my brain just went blank.

Maybe it's a visual thing - my laptop and my university's PC's have black keyboards, the desk computer at work has a white one; cashpoints tend to have a silvery numpad, Chip & PIN terminals have colours(?) - or maybe it has to do with ergonomics - I'm used to see and type the numbers from a certain angle - but nevertheless I find it somehow odd. What is it, that switches my memory on?

Prince Harry passes a donkey

2008-02-29T15:18:00.030Z

I'm not sure whether they reflect the tragic, the comic, or the tragicomic side of British society, but hell I've been thoroughly fascinated by all these stories about Prince Harry's (aka "Widow Six Seven") mission to Afghanistan. See, no matter how much they seem to verge on satire, they are obviously meant to be taken at face value. And that's exactly the part what exceeds my capacity of understanding different cultures and their ways of communication, prompting me to condensate my deep frustration into one single sentence: "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?" The British can sometimes get pretty, pretty pompous and mawkish with their lingo.

Whilst that narration itself is of course relatively entertaining - just for the sake of it, join a verbal excursion from Daily Mail, via The Sun, to Daily Star, and experience how harmonically the language and its nuances evolve through the journey - I've actually become more enchanted by the pictures. Don't ask me who has taken them and whose PR agency has coordinated their distribution, but both actors have done a fairly nice job.

There is one that is particularly good. It's so good that it will be terribly wrong if the photographer won't be nominated for a war photography award of any sort, or at least be invited in to a related exhibition. (Such as this - it's continuous and I heartily recommend it, should you ever be in Dubrovnik. Incidentally, the pictures on Afghanistan were my personal favourites, maybe be because they are so versatile and manage to go beyond all the shock and sorrow. I especially liked this shot.)

Yes, I feel obliged to post it on here - the caption is by Daily Mail:

On patrol: Prince Harry passes a donkey in the deserted town of Garmisir

See, people, that's goddamn art. You have a stranger in a strange land, weary yet armed and brave, encountering an initially distrustful but eventually friendly and grateful local civilian on his cute and loyal working animal; they are in some deserted town which is known by a mysterious-sounding, even sinister, name and during their brief encounter they maybe greet each other, maybe not. We shall never for know certain, but are allowed to empathise, thanks to a war photographer who happened to be around.

On Magyars

2008-02-27T22:36:00.010Z

A friend of mine is to visit Budapest this weekend. In a way or another, he got to known some Hungarian girl via Internet in the autumn, and last Saturday evening, when the mood was right, he reasoned that the moment of truth has finally come, and booked the plane tickets.

I'm a helpful man, especially when nobody is asking for my help, so it took me less than an hour to make an appropriate back-up plan for my mate - as it is wholly possible, even if admittedly improbable, that the missus candidate proves a classic femme fatale, who first drugs him and then nicks his wallet, clothes and one of the kidneys, or worse - that is, to arrange him a safe pair of local hands.

Being on call for a Finnish male person who is abroad ain't a task for lightweights, and even amongst the Budapest heavyweights there's only one geezer to whom I could even suggest it. I know him through academia and he was in charge of one of the workshops which we organised as part of our EU seminar in Vilnius, quite exactly 4 years ago. He knows his city. So I wrote him, explaining the situation, and got a prompt reply: "No question, he can call me if he gets into trouble. I've got friends and guns." Make of that what you will, but I personally consider that pair of hands adequately safe.

Which, however, reminded me of the fact that there would have been also another qualified geezer in the Hungarian capital, but his is nowadays a pair apart and cannot be thus considered very safe. Yet he gave me another idea. For King Stephen I, Father of the Nation, may have commitments elsewhere, but I assume that his legacy can be freely exploited if the cause is noble - and the European inside me is convinced that my friend's cause indeed is. So I drafted a brief list of knowledge that may prove useful.

1) Hey, by the way, is that over there the church where King Stephen's right hand is kept? It's famous. What do you think, could it be possible to go and see it?

2) Hey, incidentally, are we anywhere close to that famous House of Terror? Could we visit it? I know it must be a disstressing place for you, but I would really like to learn more of your country's past. That's the only way to understand its present.

3) Hey, now that you mentioned wine, remember to bring me to some store where I could buy a good bottle of Aszú. It's a famous wine. I tasted once a glass and would love to bring a bottle or two to my parents as a souvenir.

4) Hey, sorry to interrupt you, but isn't this the same cemetery where that famous Hungarian leader - Imre Nagrin...Nagy...or something like that- is buried? I was just a kid then, but still vaguely remember those TV news about his reburial. Could we go and visit his grave?

5) Hey, for that matter, wasn't 1956 also the year when your people played against the Soviets in water polo? It's a famous story. I saw once an interview with Tarantino, and he seemed really impressed by it.

There you go, this is probably as much as I can contribute to this mission; better than nothing, I suppose, some doors are opened, others closed. If there's more to do, I haven't heard about it yet; I personally don't think there can be, at least very much.

But then again, I have never got laid in Hungary.

When I and my housemate Michele went for a Sunday pint

2008-02-24T18:31:00.015Z

Blame me for resorting to cliches, but I really like the concept of piazza - a public arena where the young and the old can meet and interact. They are places where you can absorb exactly that sort of tacit knowledge you can't learn from books or Wikipedia, or by sitting in lecture halls or in youth hostel lounges, and develop yourself something that men and women wiser than this blogger might call a sense of belonging; they make it easier for young and restless minds to position themselves in time and space. In Italy they are indeed piazzas, whereas in Finland they are public saunas. And for that I have experienced, in Britain they are pubs.

This afternoon, I and my housemate Michele went for a Sunday pint. Instead of going to Town of Ramsgate, which I have kind of adopted as my local, we continued this time a bit further down the Wapping High Street and decided to pop in to Captain Kidd. Opened in 1980s, it doesn't boast much history but is a nice place nevertheless. It has a very friendly, inclusive atmosphere, a cosy outside terrace right next to the river and, being a Samuel Smith pub, it's rather inexpensive as well. It must be a truly charming place in the summer.

There we met an interesting person. A retired docker named Bruce, in his late 60s, has lived whole his life in Wapping-Limehouse area - apart from the five childhood years he and his brother spent as evacuees in Yorkshire because of the war. Nowadays he fishes eels from Thames and writes poems. (As it happens, Ramsgate, whose previous owner was his close friend, actually has some of Bruce's poems framed and decorating its walls.) Captain Kidd is his local.

Although his own family was not Jewish, he grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood (historically, the major tides of East End migrants have been the Irish, followed by Ashkenazi and, more recently, Bangladeshi) and, having also married a girl from there, said that the local Jewish community was always like a second family to him. He told us a lot of how much the Docklands have changed through all these years - when this part of London had to be built more or less from scratch after the Blitz; when the docks and the basins, too shallow to accommodate modern cargo ships, were shut down one by one; when the government finally kicked off its redevelopment scheme and begun to do something about it. As a telling example of everything that has changed here, he mentioned that on the site of a wharf where he used to work for a good part of his working life, there is now nothing more, nothing less than the One Canada Tower.

After telling stories about the blackshirts on Cable Street (his community had been there), the Fortress Wapping (he had a young workmate who died there) and Sir Mark Thatcher (he doesn't like the family), he went to the bar and returned with a pen and a piece of paper. So I and Michele returned to home with a poem:

This is a piece I captured when at Ramsgate some weeks back:

At that time, I didn't know who was the writer. Now I do.

Keep your mind open and dare to explore the world beyond your local, because it will always pay off in one way or another. May that be the moral of this story.

Friday press pack

2008-02-22T16:25:00.026Z

Hey, it's Friday! Here are a few stories that were caught on my radar this week.

Our first piece is not from a newspaper, but about one - one particular, may it be added. (Whose nemesis has been so far the only publication to comment on it, as far as I've followed.) I'll do my fair share and paste it here:

—–Original Message—–
From: rsreply@dwpub.com [mailto:rsreply@dwpub.com]
Sent: 13 February 2008 15:57
To:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Response Source - Diana Appleyard , Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)

PUBLICATION: Daily Mail (Request for personal case study)
JOURNALIST: Diana Appleyard (staff)
DEADLINE: 14-February-2008 16:00
QUERY: I am urgently looking for anonymous horror stories of people who have employed Eastern European staff, only for them to steal from them, disappear, or have lied about their resident status. We can pay you £100 for taking part, and I promise it will be anonymous, just a quick phone call. Could you email me asap? Many thanks, Diana

HOW TO REPLY:
Email: mailto:dianaappleyard@aol.com
Phone: not provided for use
Fax: 01296 738083 (preferred)

A hat tip to Egan for that one.

Whereas the next one is a rare example of good, responsible journalism taking on bad, irresponsible journalism. (Such as this.) In Wales, there's a small town where quite many young people have killed themselves recently, prompting many papers to write about it, and leading us back to an issue I've pondered a couple of times earlier:

South Wales police would like to see less coverage still, fearing that even vague details have planted ideas in young minds. Editors counter that the same could be said of much bad news: excising reports about crime, for example, might reduce anxiety, but by concealing the truth would stifle the opportunity to do something about it.

In that case, they might try harder not to stretch the truth. Three months ago Gnosall, a pretty Staffordshire village, was dubbed the “village of the doomed” after five suicides in nine months—plenty for a small place, but no apocalypse. After repeated press reports and non-stop candle-lit vigils, a sixth decided to follow suit. Resisting the temptation to ramp up such stories might prevent more tragedies. Though, of course, those parents who chuck out the Sun should also think about binning “Faust”.

(Faust? That Mephisto-Gretchen Faust? Did they mean to refer again to that Werther guy, or am I just too ignorant to get this? Nothing annoys me more than a cultural reference that I can't crack.)

It makes a point that should be made far too often: people who don't comprehend statistics shouldn't be allowed to exploit them. Meaning that if you don't know how much is "much", you shouldn't try to spell out any "trends", "phenomena" or other serious stuff out of numbers. Being innumerate can be just as bad a thing as being illiterate, at least if you are expected to be a source of news for other people.

Here, then, is a fun article on British names and what is in them:

Anyone who thinks names are unimportant,” said my friend, the psychoanalyst, “might like to consider what was going on in Henry James's mind when he gave the experienced older woman in The Golden Bowl the name Fanny Assingham.” The book was about adultery, James was fastidious and, even back in 1904, fanny meant fanny and ass meant ass.

Though other writers may be more decorous in choosing names for their major characters, they will almost always consult their internal dictionary for associations. Harry is brave, regal and young (Prince Harry, Harry Hotspur, and that wizard with the scar), Rupert is dashing but haughty (Prince Rupert, Rupert of Hentzau), Charles is pompous but well-meaning.

Now to think about it, at least I tend to associate quite a few names, Finnish and foreign, to certain people with their certain attributes and mannerisms, especially if the name happens to a little bit rarer. Sometimes you just link it automatically to some childhood friend, some funny old man of the neighbourhood, or some TV face, and subconsciously even expect your new acquaintance to behave...erm, 'accordingly'. (No, I won't provide any examples.)

Finally, here is something about a theme that, interestingly to me, seems to be covered strikingly similarly in Finland and in Britain - so much, that you could merely translate most of the commentary from one country and then apply it as such to the other. These are two countries where almost everybody - young, old, employed, unemployed - seems to drink far too much and absolutely everybody seems to acknowledge and be seriously worried about it:

Supermarkets should be banned from selling alcohol to combat Britain's binge-drinking culture, says a health adviser to the Government.

Professor Julian le Grand, the chairman of Health England, said customers should be made to make a conscious decision to buy drink by going into a different shop instead of being "lured" into buying alcohol during their weekly grocery shop.

Hmm, that does sound somehow, if vaguely, familiar.

Seriously though, and without making any opinion of the topic itself, the British appear to be even more serious about it - so much that "Binge Britain" has already become its own discourse concept. It is definitely a fair, sober point, but what has surprised me is that, before moving to here, I had met many Britons who had complained about "Nordic-style alcohol taxation" and dryly concluded that such approach - civilising inherently boozy citizens by ripping them off - is sooo typical "nanny state" stuff. And what happens? I move to this land of liberalism, individual responsibility and Scottish Enlightenment, and the first things that make me feel like home are the fact that alcohol costs a lot, and the collective perception that it costs too little and the government is not doing enough about it. Just like in Finland, even those prices. (Beer is maybe slightly pricier back home; spirits tend to cost less.)

While we're on it, let's not miss this skillful PR stunt by Tesco - the leading retail chain, which sells the cheapest sauce in Britain:

Tesco said legislation was required to "ensure responsible pricing on alcohol" and the alliance between the retailer and doctors will place enormous pressure on Gordon Brown to act.

Competition laws prevent Tesco from discussing an industry-wide alcohol price increase with its rivals, but the supermarket said it would support a mandatory rise.

It claimed people would simply shop elsewhere if it acted unilaterally.

Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco's chief executive, has already held a private meeting with Mr Brown to discuss measures, including price controls, to tackle anti-social and under-age drinking.

Take note, Kesko, S Group. If business is war, then Corporate Social Responsibility can sometimes be that exceptionally attractive geisha who is able to deliver the cutting, decisive stab on your rival warlord.

I love this story

2008-02-18T22:27:00.003Z

The Vulture of Franz Kafka, as fetched from here:

A vulture was hacking at my feet. It had already torn my boots and stockings to shreds, now it was hacking at the feet themselves. Again and again it struck at them, then circled several times restlessly round me, then returned to continue its work. A gentleman passed by, looked on for a while, then asked me why I suffered the vulture. "I'm helpless," I said. "When it came and began to attack me, I of course tried to drive it away, even to strangle it, but these animals are very strong, it was about to spring at my face, but I preferred to sacrifice my feet. Now they are almost torn to bits." "Fancy letting yourself be tortured like this!" said the gentleman. "One shot and that's the end of the vulture." "Really ?" I said. "And would you do that?" "With pleasure," said the gentleman, "I've only got to go home and get my gun. Could you wait another half hour?" "I'm not sure about that," said I, and stood for a moment rigid with pain. Then I said: "Do try it in any case, please." "Very well," said the gentleman, "I'll be as quick as I can." During this conversation the vulture had been calmly listening, letting its eye rove between me and the gentleman. Now I realized that it had understood everything; it took wing, leaned far back to gain impetus, and then, like a javelin thrower, thrust its beak through my mouth, deep into me. Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood, which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.

Aapo, 25, teaches how to shit yourself properly

2008-02-16T14:45:00.029Z

What a feeling it can be, dear readers, when you are young and shitting yourself. Just like Max, 19 , is doing right now.

I'm kinda shitting myself about travelling. Well not so much the travelling part. It's India that scares me. The heat, the roads, the snakes, Australian travellers. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited. But shitting myself.

The guy is only 19, likes to write and has been given the best head start any young journo wanna-be can possibly imagine. He's going to spend his spring travelling in India and Thailand and will be reporting on his experiences for Guardian's website - in form of a blog that has just become hugely popular. That he is blogging in the first place, most obviously owes to the fact that his dad is a well-known travel journalist, whereas for the publicity he can thank his active little readers. The original entry was posted on Thursday, and together with his editor's explanatory response yesterday it has generated several hundreds of comments, most of them critical. In the world of online advertising, all that traffic means quite a bit of extra revenue for his employer.

The main point with that criticism is very much on the spot - boosting the career of someone whose father is a well-established journalist is cheeky and unfair, given that either his theme or style of writing don't really seem to stand out from the young crowd with similar aspirations. It tells of insularity and nepotism, which are hardly a trivial matter. National-level journalists are a powerful trade, and I for one would be more interested in knowing more of they are recruited and connected to each other. That'd be a worthy topic for the good people of Private Eye or MOT to investigate, assuming it's not against their own self-interest.

The complaints about Max himself and his post, then, don't seem too clever to me. Putting the British class obsession aside, when an anonymous 30-something office smartarse slags off a 19-year old debutant merely on the basis of his prelude and somehow manages to fit the concepts "self-absorbed", "pseudo-intellectual", "middle-class", "uninteresting" and "poorly written" within one same textual achievement, it is indeed a pot so full of originality and thought provocation that this blogger would be more than pleased to introduce him to his Comrade Kettle. "Cultural snipers", as some other comment dubbed them, themselves aren't usually the hottest hobs of the cooker.

Who could possibly be interested in reading Max's musings, ask they - and I am, answer I. Gap years (in their Anglo-Saxon form) aren't really common in Finland, and I'm genuinely curious to study which kind of phenomena they actually are. If I were Max and wanted to "find myself", I would have chosen a cheaper and more exotic destination, such as Belarus or Transnistria, but am not entitled to complain, since my own gap jaunt was to somewhere even tamer. See, I and my two mates spent ours in Holland. It was only two months, but felt substantially longer.

Initially, we had got ourselves a job at a Zeelandese apple farm, via Eures and a couple of phone calls, yet fell ill on our second day there, contracting a mass diarrhea. We spent the days three, four and five in the farm's loos. The loos, that were next to our shabby and leaking caravan, looked like huge coke vending machines and were only two. They were supposed to be emptied once in two weeks, yet we three young Finnish male persons manage to fill them up in two days. It was the farmer's son's duty to empty them with his tractor and I remember that he didn't seem very happy while doing it.

In the evening of the day four we felt better, and I went to tell the farmer that we can possibly start picking apples again in the morning. Three days in a loo had taken their toll, though, and my walking pattern was, say, somewhat inordinary. The farmer's wife asked whether I had hurt myself, and I replied that no, I had not, that it's just my knee, an old sport injury, reminding me of its existence, oh nothing serious. At this point these good Calvinists probably concluded that their newly acquired northern drones were chronically unfit, and before an hour had passed, came the farmer's wife to our caravan and told us that her husband was not satisfied with our work and we were thereby fired.

The Dutch job market is pretty flexible, and it was the harvest season in Zeeland anyway, so we were re-employed relatively easily. We were hired to wash barrels in a factory exporting vegetables, and rented a nice and big holiday home together with one Swedish couple, more or less of our age, who had also been picking apples for Calvinists but (having left voluntarily) were now working through the same temp agency as we. It turned out that the house was was far too nice and big for our income level, and every time we had paid our share of the weekly rent there wasn't any money left for food. Which meant that we turned to our employer's products, ending up eating enough cauliflower to last three lifetimes through, but also that we had to borrow money from the Swedes, who somehow...well, just happened to have money. Then we had to work overtime and some Saturdays in order to pay them back.

There is no denying, that for me this financial relationship between us and our Swedish co-dwellers - in its own symbolic way - was always a source of great discomfort, even humiliation.

Traffic matters

2008-02-13T22:10:00.038Z

Brits, in general, are decent and well-mannered people, but there are also far too many of them living on their island, and that pisses them off. They simply don't have enough space, at least in their cities. Or what other conclusions can you possibly make of this? For all its good vibes, stuff and things, I have to concede that if there somewhere is a city where drivers may give middle fingers to funeral processions and school kids throw stones at horse-drawn hearses, then my London is exactly such a city. Thankfully I don't drive myself, and can thus somewhat maintain control over my own tides of sanity.

As it happens, Ken Livingstone (whom I otherwise don't like at all) made an excellent remark this week - calling SUVs "Chelsea tractors" and proposing a £25 congestion charge for all such vehicles. That's Livingstone at his populist best. He's doing it because of the election, but I liked it nonetheless - for it's a hilariously descriptive concept, that Chelsea tractor. Yes, my gentle readers, and as the loyalest of you probably guessed already, it's time for a rant.

Listen, SUV drivers. You people driving your automobiles in cities is an oxymoron. It's not a city car, you fucking morons. It's a fucking jeep. What does its name stand for, huh? I tell you. It stands for suburban utility vehicle, and that ought to say it all. It's a vehicle for suburbs, not cities. Do you get it? City dwellers walk, run, call cabs and use public transport, or small and smart cars if they for some reason want to drive, park, stop at traffic lights and get pissed off - they don't drive any silly acronyms such as yours.

See, SUV drivers, there are two kinds of people: city people and country people. Cities innovate, employ and provide financial support for regions outside the cities, whereas countryside's raison d'etre is to look good and be quiet. It's for holidays and bringing up offsprings, so that they don't get knifed or stoned and will learn not to throw knifes or stones at undertakers and the mourning bereaved. There are some people who can't make up their mind on where to live and try therefore to have best of both worlds (often failing miserably), and that's the reason for suburbs to exist. (You may try and tell me that the truth is never that black-and-white, and if you indeed do, I would like to seek comfort in reminding you, that then your share is grey, and grey is the bitch of the palette.) That is absolutely fine, as long as the people who live in suburbs are willing and able to recognise the fact that they don't actually live in cities. And you SUV drivers happen to be a prime example of people who have failed to recognise that fact.

Why in the hell you want to drive a 4x4 in a city? As their name suggests, they are a suburbian thing and don't belong to cities. It's a fucking off-road car, it belongs to the countryside. It's like firearms, they belong to the countryside too. Life in the countryside can be nasty, brutish and short; firearms keep wild beasts at bay and jeeps bring your loved ones to hospital from remote farmsteads with no roads or telecoms infrastructure. Yet you need neither things in cities, and you come across as stupid and primitive if you try to hold on to them while living in there. Suburbs, then, and as I explained already, are a twilight zone in between, and may well be compatible with both firearms and jeeps, but you SUV drivers obviously aren't happy with that, and that's when the problems start. You are trying to have your own cake and eat mine.

I live in a city, and that commitment has its ups and downs. One of the downs is that there isn't enough space or clean air: both are very scarce resources. When you suburban utility vehicle drivers - subhumans from subplaces - drive your tractors to my city, my space certainly doesn't stretch in size and my air certainly doesn't get any cleaner. That's why you must pay me money for exploiting them. Life is full of choices, and if you postmodern peasants can't leave your tractors to your mental (and pathetically proximate) farmsteads, then that is your choice. I'm fine with that. I simply want it to cost you money, because that makes it fairer.

Incidentally, the active people of Turku have apparently launched a campaign against the local SUVs by systematically emptying their tires. (Like most cultural innovations ever since Protestantism, also this one has diffused to Finland from Sweden and via Turku.) This blogger doesn't say juu or jaa about on, though suggests a more constructive form of action. Stop calling the automobiles in question as "kaupunkimaasturi" - you know, for kaupunki means a city. Instead, respect the original name and call them "lähiömaasturi". Simple semantics should do the trick, eventually.

The writer is a shameless Zone1-based lifestyle fascist who took his driving test twice and can't give any answer when people ask him to compare petrol prices between Finland and Britain.

What's cooler than cool?

2008-02-06T23:50:00.002Z

There are many Tampere people in London this coming weekend. Somewhat coincidentally, this year's Winter Swimming Championships will be held in Tooting (which is where my first London home was) - an awfully bad swimmer, I am not planning to participate the competition myself, but would like anyway to use this occasion to promote this rare aquatic activity to all my readers. It's among the things I miss very much from Finland.

It's not only the physical side of things (the actual thermal shock, the brief euphoria that follows when your circulation gets a little bit of extra stimulus, and that sweet sensation of serenity and calmness your entire body gets when it's all over and you are wearing clothes again), but winter swimming certainly has its psychological benefits too. Someone who has been doing it more regularly than me could probably give you a better and more thorough answer, though for that I personally have experienced it relates to the concept of challenge and the way you perceive it.

Ice-cold water surely feels like ice-cold water, and that initial sensation you get when dipping into an avanto first time is possibly as inconvenient an experience as it was a priori. And even if you get used to it as you experience it more times, it pretty much stays like that - i.e. freakingly cold. And that's indeed what I also love about it - the way you learn to treat something, that at the moment feels utterly unpleasant, as a source of longer-term pleasure. No pain no gain, never look back and all that stuff; what makes you shiver right now, will make you feel great after a couple of minutes. Which, as a philosophy of life, is good for your mental well-being.

Here are a couple of pictures from my Christmas holidays. I and my old mates have a tradition of gathering at one hunters' cabin a couple of nights before Christmas and at there, through our special ways, come to terms with our inner forest man. Nowadays there start to be certain work and family related issues that make it a good deal trickier event to organise, if compared to how it was years back, yet at least this time around we still managed to live it up and have our annual weekend of reckoning.

That's the venue.

That's the avanto.

That's the point of no return.

That's me.

Take care, freestylah

2008-01-30T23:21:00.000Z

Walking is a risky activity. May your paths be dry and stairless, and your steps blessed with the greatest luck of all. Below are illustrated the tales of three walks, of which only one had a happy ending. Treasure them in your heart, and ponder them.

This fellow was an astrophysicist. People never grew tired of asking him about wormholes, time travelling and other science fiction cliches, and - a modest, well-mannered gentleman - he never grew tired of explaining why such things can't exist. How ironic, then, that of all citizens of Britain it was him who discovered that if you are buying groceries at certain Tesco in southern London at certain hour, and lose your balance on its wet floor, at certain spot, you will slip in to the Other Side. Just watch how his left arm reaches out, trying desperately to grab a corner of reality and pull him back to our side, but with no success. He tries to shout, but with no voice, because he is already in there and no voice can escape from that yellow infinity. He falls, but will never hit the ground because where he is falling to there isn't any.

Whereas the man pictured above was a professional footballer. A cunningly Macchiavellian striker, he dived many penalties for his clubs and maybe the same number of red cards for their opponents - and he always got away with it, for his signs and sounds of pain and agony were so pure, so natural. He never admitted anything of it, unless he was really drunk. When he was, he started to brag and entertain his friends by repeating the very best of his repertoire. This was presumed to be the case also on that fateful Friday night out at Shunt, underneath the London Bridge, when he slipped on his way to the urinal. Just admire his imitation of a dying swan - it would be masterly if it wasn't for real. When he landed, his arm smashed an abandoned pint next to the sink, cutting his artery; his mates gave applause and told him to join them at the bar. By the time when the paramedics arrived, he had already bled to death.

That young man over there, he was considered a hopeless case, his life one recurrent coitus interruptus. He just couldn't sit down or stand still, so he dropped out the high school. From time to time he managed to find some odd jobs, but was always sacked in less than a week. On the contrary, he was brilliantly good at parkour, skateboarding and several martial arts, basically anything that allowed him to be in motion, and that was to save his life one day. He was about to catch a train at the South Croydon rail station, didn't take care on the stairs leading down to the platforms and was flying towards cold concrete steps and a lethal skull fracture, yet, out of instinct, managed to summon some trick he had learnt years ago. Just look at him - that is as close to levitation as mortals can get. Besides saving his life, it changed it as well. He moved to the mountains, became a hermit and found peace for himself. No ADHD, no ASBO, no ASDA. Only air.

Think about it when you next time pass a yellow caution sign with a black male figure.

East of End

2008-01-27T20:01:00.001Z

It was in the news about a week ago, that Rupert Murdoch's News International is about to sell its premises in Wapping and move in to new ones, possibly in Canary Wharf. The plant where they are based at the moment is called Fortress Wapping, and if you want to know why is that, then the related Wikipedia article and this retro piece by BBC might well shed some light on the issue. I'd say that Murdoch had obviously read his Clausewitz, before making his move. The picture above is of the gate leading in to the Fortress - it's really close to my home so I included it in my Sunday afternoon walk today.

Whereas this one below is a view to the other side of the Highway, 3 x 25 storeys of prefabricated residential charm. What strikes me as odd, is the fact that the actual components seem to consist of tiles, instead of being just pure, beautifully adamant concrete, as tends to be the case outside Britain. Or am I wrong, fallen in some optical trick? I must investigate this more in detail next time - in the meantime you just have to do with petty ridicule over my photographic equipment and a simple panorama:

This time around I couldn't be arsed though, because I had heard rumours of there being a special site near by and had to go and witness it. It doesn't look very special, but that's not my point. Have you ever watched Mutiny on the Bounty? I hope you have, it's a good film. That is my point and this fellow was the captain of that story:

This sign then is about nothing more than yours contributor's compulsory portion of scatology, to be enjoyed at least on a weekly basis. Oh how outrageously cheeky, daring that dog looks like - "Bow to me and clean it up, you foul of the land", it says to its human:

The next one is Shadwell Basin, with Canary Wharf in distance. If you promise to tell everyone that you heard it from me, I can reveal to you that Shadwell, as a name, derives from some filthy spring or water hole nearby, i.e. "shite well". Looks nice though, especially today when it was really sunny. Lot of people were out walking, talking and smiling, and it really started to piss me off. This is January, go to your houses and hibernate.

Yet my spirit was soon lifted, almost to mesosphere and far beyond, by the sight of this sign - you know, in my cultural context, in light of this relationship that a Finnish man ("En minä perkele vielä kotiin mene. Minä menen avantoon!") can have with different bodies of water, these kind of meta-warnings can't be considered real warnings. They are invitations.

But oh hell, before I had made my final decision on jumping in and swimming home, I saw this other sign and opted for walking. I don't want to be in contact with scum of any type:

The rediscovered life of a pedestrian made me walk past the yellow umbrellas of the Wapping power station - nowadays some sort of art community, "an idea consistently in transition":

On my way home I dropped in at Town of Ramsgate. Town of Ramsgate is my local, and this is your last Wapping history lesson of today:

They're coming to take me away, ho ho hee hee ha ha

2008-01-24T23:43:00.000Z

Is it a circus? Is it a playground for elder people? Is it a clinical trial with 58 million participants and no placebo? A zoo? A huge open-air mental asylum? A new wickedly perverse reality show? A sociological rat test? A biological rat test? Or all of those?

Nah, not really. Just Italy, the same old.

Italy is my favourite lithmus test. Everytime I hear someone musing about the EU being a "community of values", or other metaphysical crap like that, and on such grounds arguing that some countries can never become EU countries because they don't share "our" "values", I just have to make an instant reality check and confirm whether Italy is still part of the same union. So far it has always been.

Societally speaking, it's an awfully underdeveloped, immature country. There are some nuanced differences between the North and the South, but in the scheme of things they are so trivial that you can just disregard them. And if our community of values boasts such a braindead zombie as one of its co-founders, I don't personally think that those great values of ours can be anything absolutely unmatchable. Not anything that Ukraine and Turkey, or Georgia and Albania, could achieve if given the right incentives.

One thing about that Mastella. I hope you non-Italians were not mislead by the way his and Udeur's defection was reported in some briefer pieces of news - you know, "resigned over corruption allegations". I mean, he did by no means resign because he concluded that the investigation had ruined his credibility as Prodi's Minister of Justice. No, of course he didn't; that would have been a really unItalian thing to do - that would have ruined his credibility. Instead, he said that he must leave the coalition because he had become a victim of political manhunt, ideological persecution, foul play, and that kind of stuff. Remember that, for it is telling and important.

As a laconic conclusion, now that I'm on it, let me quote The Economist on how things looked when the coalition was about to swear in and I myself was about to leave Italy for Albania:

One of these second-class ministers is a spirited former European commissioner, Emma Bonino, who will be Europe minister. She had wanted the defence ministry. Her failure to get it shows the problems created for Mr Prodi by his narrow victory—and suggests that his government may not last all that long.

Some on the far left opposed Ms Bonino's appointment as defence minister on the grounds that she is not against war. But the real reason she was blocked is that another, newly powerful figure wanted the job. Clemente Mastella, a former Christian Democrat, leads a party on the right fringe of the governing coalition that took less than 1.5% of the vote. But it has three vital seats in the Senate. And in the past it has signalled that it is ready to desert the centre-left if its demands are not met.

To break the deadlock, Mr Prodi gave defence to a close associate, Arturo Parisi. But to pacify the troublesome Mr Mastella, he handed him the even more prestigious justice ministry. Mr Mastella expressed delighted surprise. As well he might: for he is utterly unsuitable. More than once, he has chided prosecutors for their impertinent curiosity about political corruption. Only three months ago he was questioned at the headquarters of the national anti-Mafia directorate about his friendship with a man who admitted to helping the Sicilian Cosa Nostra's former “boss of bosses”, Bernardo Provenzano, when he was on the run.

Francesco Campanella, a town councillor in Sicily who turned state's evidence after being investigated, has acknowledged giving Mr Provenzano documents that helped him to go abroad for medical treatment. A year earlier, Mr Mastella was a witness at Mr Campanella's wedding.

Loosely related to that, and as it happens, one of my two housemates is an Italian, from Veneto. He's a good lad, and tonight we had one of his friends (also from Veneto) visiting and dining at ours. I was in my room, waiting for the food to be ready, when they asked me to come to the kitchen and drink a glass of red with them, for it was a very special moment. They were celebrating the fact that there may well soon be a new election. Which, of course, is a valid reason to drink wine, yet it nonetheless slightly struck me rather inappropriate that their underlying motive for this modest praise of Bacchus was the prospect of getting Berlusconi back to power. I commented something deliberately blunt, and they - genuinely curiously - asked why so many of us "foreign people" have a bad opinion of il Cavaliere. So we sat down and I explained them, why.

As for Romano Prodi, in him you have got a leader who - seriously - either talks to the dead or has collaborated with Red Brigade's murderers. I blogged a bit on it about a year ago. If you wish to know what I like about Italy, rather than what I dislike, watch that Buongiorno, Notte. It's a beautiful, profound movie.

Germans, stop whining

2008-01-19T23:33:00.001Z

If you have ever wondered how opportunism can be an ism, take a look at Germany and wonder no more. With leaders like theirs, it can go beyond semantics and become pure art.

Nokia has announced that it will close down its Bochum plant, laying off 2,300 workers directly and prompting the local subcontractors to dismiss about the same number. The production will be moved mainly to the new plant in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. (May it be mentioned, that your contributor has once bought a bottle of good Transylvanian palinka from a liquor store in Cluj-Napoca. It was tasty, and very cheap, and his friend Jaska back home drunk it all.) Ruhrgebiet, with its mining and heavy industries either fading away or gone for good, hasn't exactly been a cradle of good news recently, so these kind of things can't be expected to go down smoothly in there. But even still, when your top national politicians urge the public to boycott Nokia's products, it all seems very off-the-wall to me.

Think about it, really. The plant was in the first place located in Bochum because it made more business sense to supply Western European handset markets from Ruhrgebiet than from, for instance, Central Finland. It was opened in 1989 and grew in size as Nokia moved its operations from Finland to overseas. Public handouts played their role too, for sure - for some reason, the Germans have been amusingly keen on emphasising how much subsidies the factory in question has milked from them during its lifespan, and in my opinion 70 million euros of pork to a rich multinational corporation is disgustingly lot of tax money wasted in something where decent and responsibly governed societies shouldn't waste it.

So, now that you may have thought about it, let me say the same in contemporary German rhetorics - some corners are cut, admittedly, though I think that such is quite in line with the overall level of the debate.

Yes, YOU wooed MY assembly lines from MY recession-hit Finland to YOUR then-prospering Germany by shovelling shitloads of public money to a rich multinational corporation and now you're whining that it's playing dirty when it after all these years moves those same lines to the second poorest country in the European Union. You don't allow Romanians to practice their fundamental rights as EU citizens and move freely to live and work in Germany, and you obviously wouldn't allow any work to move from Germany to Romania either. Hah, just try and preach to me about Europe's missing social dimension next time, you pampered hypocritical dummkopfs.

(It's a bit like with those Italians who have explained to me that their economy is in shatters merely because their clothing industry can't compete with Chinese sweatshops and other forms of slave labour; true enough, but what they always failed to acknowledge is that in fact it's not a terribly long time ago when their own textile factories, then world-beaters, provided nearly similarly appalling working conditions - and this in time when Italy was already a wealthy country, much wealthier than today's China.)

The hard fact is that Ruhrgebiet is a centrally located, well connected and densely populated region with a world-class infrastructure in a country with strong rule of law and a remarkable number of export champions. If its economy can't employ the dismissed workers by - correspondingly with Transylvania's - moving up the value chain, it's simply because the leaders in both regional and federal level are doing something wrong. And because those same leaders fail to spell out what it is to the voters, they have to resort to agitating consumer boycotts and other populist red herrings.

Which as such must be a superb way to attract more assembly lines to your country, I am sure.

They did not pass

2008-01-13T22:19:00.001Z

Multilayer identity is possibly mankind's greatest innovation since wheel, and the very fact that you can at the same time be, for instance, a Finnish / Central Finnish / Karelian / Nordic / European (viti)cultural ambassador of Georgia and Suolahti geezer who, when intoxicated, introduces himself as a reincarnated Illyrian, and still be considered relatively sane and normal by your fellow citizens, is exactly what allows this century to kick so much arse. The term "citizen of the world" is a bit too much of bathos and ihq for my taste, but even still, I think it's an extremely healthy concept. (I know, I know - it's slightly elitist and doesn't apply to the vast majority of Earth's population, but let's not think that far this time, okay? I'm the one who buys his groceries from Waitrose here, anyway.)

The newest product in my identity trolley is East London - or the East End, to be more niche. It's odd how quickly it got into me, but when I for example during my Christmas holidays met people who asked where I'm living nowadays I every time underlined that, hey, mine is East London. I'm Aapo from the docks, chaps, going up west is not my thing. (Well, quite often it is, but, you know, truth is created through narration.) If London is a global village, the East End is its worn down gate; these are the places where incomers usually arrived and where they started to build their new lives, often from scratch, and this is also where ships set their sails and leavers left, to do the same somewhere else. It may have merely symbolic significance, but in any case it makes a stimulating environment if you're a young immigrant yourself. There's some history around here, dudes.

Below are a few photos from my Sunday walk - I actually wanted to do some scavenger hunt on the foreshore, but didn't make it before the end of the tide so I ended up just walking around. Sorry for the bad quality, but the only camera I have is my phone.

This plaque is on Dock Street, parallel to Cable Street and some 5 minutes from my home, commemorating the Battle of Cable Street:

The old town hall close by has a mural painted on its wall, this is one detail of it:

An Eastender communist with a scenically big mouth:

This no-no sign had two words I didn't know:

Ships of wood, men of steel:

Every time I go to the Prospect, I just can't help thinking how it may have looked in its earliest days:

Oltra Boka to represent Albania in Eurovision 2008, maybe

2008-01-10T23:15:00.001Z

Game over, boys and girls. My infamous Sinan Hoxha Facebook group has become obsolete and will be shortly deleted.

It never grew stronger than 190 members at its peak, and was launched hopelessly late too. It was meant to bring me back to the Albanian national television (in case you ever wondered my motives), the only form of show business I have ever tasted, but never gained enough momentum to take off, let alone flying. Perhaps the eagles didn't find my piece of carcass tasty enough, perhaps the Tirana women and Gjirokastra girls were turned off by my seatbelt, or perhaps not. We shall never find out, since the social graph just shrugged when I tried to surf down it. Drugs, British sinks and Ponzi schemes don't work. May that be our bottom line.

The Albanian Eurovision primary was held on December 16, and the results are as follows:

1. Olta Boka - Zemrën lamë peng, 67 points
2. F. Kralani & D. Disha - Jeta kerkon dashuri, 57 points
3. Juliana Pasha - Nje qiell te ri, 54 points
4. Jonida Maliqi - S’ka fajtor ne dashuri, 36 points
5. Mira Konci & Redon Makashi - Nen nje qiell, 35 points

The title of the winning song roughly means "We gambled the heart" (whether it tells about love, poker or organ trade, I don't know) and it was chosen to represent Land of the Eagle in this year's final. Oltra Boka is a pretty girl, and may well have musical talent too, but I'd urge you not to place your Belgrade bets yet - for most reactions were rather mixed:

Several Albanian newspapers have come with different articles and comments for the Albanian festival that took place last night at the Congress Palace of Tirana. In general, the Albanian press seemed not to be very happy with the outcome of the competition.

Newspaper Koha Jone published an article with the title “Accusations to the festival, the organizers 'hush'” on Sunday. In this article, special mention is made for Blero and his sudden withdrawal from the festival accusing the organizers of “selling” the festival’s first prize. The article continues to say that this kinds of accusations is new to the organisers of this event who chose to make no comment.

Rumours of dead threats and corruption prompted those comments pretty soon afterwards, though:

The result of the first Eurovision Song Contest national final of 2008, the Festivali I Kenges in Albania is to be investigated by the national broadcaster, RTSH. The investigation follows unusual voting by two jury members, that changed the result of the competition. Olta Boka won the competition with 67 points, beating F. Kralani & D. Disha into second place with 57 points. Juliana Pasha finished in third place with Nje qiell te ri on 54 points.

RTSH are investigating the disparity in jury voting between three of the jury members and the last two. Their voting changed the result of the competition. The song writing teams behind the top two songs have so far between them won every Festivali I Kenges competition since Albania began particiapating at the Eurovision Song Contest with the winning song from the festival becoming the country's entry.

O tempora, o mores. The case obviously isn't closed yet, but for me and my compassionate minions it doesn't make any difference, anymore. Whoever will represent Albania in Eurovision 2008 will not be Sinan Hoxha, who wasn't even amongst the candidates. But then again, he is a serious artist.

Luton

2008-01-06T20:46:00.000Z

I've understood that quite many of us have started their new year by making a New Year's resolution. I didn't make any. Instead, I started mine by going to Luton this weekend.

I have a good friend called Larry, and he's Lithuanian. I got to known him four years ago when we organised together an international student seminar on EU enlargement. It took place in Vilnius, just two months prior to the E-Day, and we, an odd bunch of young minds from different European countries, spent a lovely weekend socialising and sharing our ideas of and for Europe. You know - workshops, refreshments, sightseeing, that kind of stuff.

Forever impressed by Lithuania's charming capital, I returned there about a year later, to work over the summer at Suomijos Respublikos ambasada - yet by that time Larry himself had already changed his whereabouts to something even more charming (opinions may vary) and moved to Luton, Bedfordshire. He's still there, and I had promised to visit him much before I had even considered moving to London.

Until last autumn (when it was succeeded by Middlesborough), Luton was known as the official Crap Town of Britain. So, from the very beginning and rather unsurprisingly, my plan to travel there stirred many snobbish laughs and dispiriting warnings, suggesting that I'd be so much better off forgetting about it and staying home, but such reactions only strengthened my decision. Indeed: when your contributor travels, he travels for the sake of anthropological curiosity, rather than pompous monuments, fixed football matches, overpriced shopping streets and overcrowded carnivals. True enough, some places are more interesting than some others, but, as it's said to be also the case with people, this disparity can be overcome and uninteresting places can be made interesting. It only takes some...effort.

With some effort, you can find treasures everywhere - for instance, this is a sign I found inside Bellini Club's men's toilet, right next to the toilet seat:

That's awfully many difficult words spent for saying: "Dear fellow Lutoners, do not have sex in our toilets."

In other news, I have been informed that the wise and competent government of Lithuania has recently introduced a law that prevents TV channels from advertising beer and other alcohol products before 11pm. Slightly undermining their popularity, this means that e.g. Champions League football matches and Euroleague basketball matches, let alone the matches of Lithuania's national basketball league, can't be shown live anymore - due to the fact that some main sponsors of the events happen to be breweries. Not very smart, is it? Not at all in line with the ideas I and my friend Larry once had of and for Europe.

Life + style = lifestyle

2008-01-03T21:44:00.000Z

One friend of mine sent me this old(ish) clothing advertisement:

Toyota clothing accessories are a way for Toyota-minded people to dress comfortably. Domestic, fashionable casual wear for youthful going. The collection is renewed continuously.

Toyota Life Style suits every occasion, in summer and in winter.

You want to be a Scandinavian but I and my spirits don't let you

2008-01-01T23:09:00.000Z

Inspired by Egan's recent contribution to promote wider awareness of Finnish tribal differences, I kind of bumped into this piece. I personally think that the stereotype which most people have about Finns is annoyingly uniform, so I heartily recommend you to read it. It sums up a couple of things I always, quite deliberately, underline to people I meet abroad. Doing so makes me feel somehow mischievous - a bit like a saboteur who has just managed to blow up something of great strategic importance.

Mentally, the Karelian tribe are somewhere between Finland and Russia; after all, they have lived on the border zone of two cultures, the east and the west, for centuries. The position between the Russia and Sweden and the sufferings it has brought upon the tribe over the centuries has refined the Karjelian nature to be unyielding: they will bend but they will not break. The Russian influence was very strong until Finland's independence and the area has been dominated by Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is remarkably more mystical than the Protestant Christianity practiced elsewhere in Finland. It is in the Karelian tribe that the Slavic melancholy of the Finnish culture is most clearly present, for that and their ease of emotional expression they are not quite taken as being 100% Finnish. Malmberg and Vanhatalo write that it is this Karelian mysticism in Finnish culture that sets Finland apart from the rest of the Nordic countries (124).

There ain't no mountain high enough

2007-12-31T14:09:00.001Z

From the Tower of London:

Marvelous New Year to everyone. Believe in your dreams and pursue them, but also watch out for black miniature pyramids who try to trip you when you walk past or step over them.

Seasons greetings

2007-12-14T22:18:00.001Z

This is an email regarding my first London work interview, dated September 11:

Dear Aapo

Thank you for taking the time to come and meet with our Senior Consultant Herfirstname Herlastname last week. It was nice to meet with you and to hear about your career aspirations.

Unfortunately on this occasion your application has been unsuccessful, however we wish you luck with your future career.

This is an email regarding my first application that was sent forward by an agent, dated September 12:

Dear Aapo

Unfortunately Theirname have not selected your CV for the
interview shortlist. At present, I do not have anything that is at
the right level and suits your background but if anything comes
available in the near future, I will get in touch.
I am out of the office until next Tuesday, but please feel free to
call next week if you want to discuss further.

In the meantime, good luck with your search.

This is an email regarding my first, and very hopefully my last, group interview, dated September 25:

Hi Aapo,

Please find some feedback from your interview.

Clearly you are very intelligent and came across well in what you said throughout the interview. However, we felt that you didn’t engage in the group tasks as well as you could, and didn’t say enough in the interview to convince us of your broad range of skills and experiences we look for in a candidate. In this instance, it is not a case that you failed for giving any wrong answers, but simply that there weren’t enough answers forthcoming.

Whereas this is an email regarding my first second round interview, which had involved one quite time-consuming desk research assignment, dated October 22:

Dear Aapo

I would like to thank you very much for coming in for the presentation of your project last week. We have now completed our second round interviews. This has been a very hard process due to the high quantity and more importantly the high quality of the candidates and I regret to inform you that we will not be offering you the position. We will however keep your records on file and get in touch if anything suitable comes up in the near future.

Finally, this is an email exchange regarding my decision to cancel an interview the agent had secured on my behalf, dated today, December 14:

Hi again Hisfirstname,

Sorry for this, but I have to cancel the interview. I was just offered an analyst position with another company, and as it's less than 10 minutes walk from my home I will go for that.

That said, one of my friends might be interested - in which case I will tell him to get in touch, if that is OK for you.

Aapo,

I am very pleased you have an offer out.

I believe that this role may be great for you and that I may be able to secure you a £30,000 salary.

My advise would be to still go to the interview and then you would be able to make a informed decision.

I would be delighted to hear from your friend.

Hisfirstname,

I do agree that the role itself would be interesting and probably well-paid too. In this occasion though, it's the location which makes a difference - grown up in a small peaceful place I'm quite allergic to London commuting.

I will have a chat with my friend, and keep the name of your agency in mind when it's time for my next career step.

Enjoy your weekend and have a very merry Christmas!

That was some fucking catharsis, I tell you.

Indeed. It has been a tiring, frustrating and an incredibly educative autumn, but now my job search is finally over. After about two hundred applications, a dozen work interviews, fourteen weeks and - fortunately - a series of temporary works I've at last found what I wanted. It's permanent, interesting, ridiculously proximate and pays enough to begin with. And nicely and neatly I got it sorted just a few days before I will leave for my Christmas holidays.

So I will search no more.

Chavtivity play

2007-12-13T20:41:00.000Z

My usual choice of commute reading in mornings is City A.M. - partly because I have been blessed with the same initials, partly because running to the platform a City A.M. under your arm makes you look more important than if you were doing the same exercise with a Metro - but today my trusted distributor wasn't at her normal spot outside the ticket gates, so I had to amuse myself with an abandoned copy of Metro I managed to fetch from the escalator railing. And not in vain, my friends, not in vain, for there was this funny image:

Those people, they are chavs. It is the second of the two words I had surely heard of before moving to Britain, but of which meaning I didn't really know. The first was 'posh', which I thought had something to do with the way you dress, but apparently it merely refers to the way you speak. It took over ten years from me, though now I've finally understood what made Victoria different from Scary, Sporty, Ginger and Baby in those mid-90s music videos. Oh Joonas Hytönen, Katja Ståhl, Marika Makaroff and Pizza Pekkarinen, why did not you ever tell us?

Posh accent is how the middle-and-upper class children in Britain are stamped when they are small, so that their parents would still recognise them when they are old, weary and sightless. It makes them feel safer, and perhaps justly so - after all it is true that for instance the unfortunate events of Genesis 27 could have never taken place in Britain.* Which is a positive thing, of course. It's kind of interesting, anyway, that you can tell someone's status and social background almost entirely from the way they pronounce words, and as far as I know there really are no equivalents to it among other wealthy countries. Though let's go back to those chavs.

[*Spot the illogicality.]

It's slightly a vague concept, but chavs as a social group seem to comprise inconveniently regularly reproducing, explicitly white citizens whose income level is as low as their education - inside a search engine, a typical Chav keyword module would include at least ASBO, Adidas, Kappa, Burberry and Stella. Chavs stand for the post-industrial proletariat, if you want to put it that way.

Here you can play Chav Games, here you can have a taste of how the finest of Britain sometimes like to put up Chav Parties, and if you can't remember the original story behind the afore-posted picture you might want to read its Chav Version e.g. from here. Should you feel more serious or somehow critical - for some odd reason that you may well consider keeping to yourself - about the issue in question then be a party pooper try the articles here or here.

Chavs are very likely to remain as chavs and to breed chavs who will be equally likely to remain as chavs, since later today I also read that social mobility in Britain is at the same level it was thirty years ago. If you are a chav and cant fookin read, go and see some pictures instead - in Bargehouse there's an exhibition on contemporary British poverty, running until the end of the year.

I remember myself reading, from some random publication I in this hour cannot recall, that Victoria Beckham is a chav, but can't see how that could be possible if she just ten years ago was a posh and there's no social mobility on this island.

Last and least, as a nice little brainteaser I challenge my Finnish readers to come up with a fictive invitation - which must (a) be to a proper chav party, (b) be in Finnish and (c) sound natural. Here goes my try:

Hei kaikki!

Juhlin synttäreitäni ensi viikon lauantaina ja kutsuisin sen johdosta koko remmin viettämään iltaa tänne viihtyisään poikamiesboksiini. Tarjolla on pikkusuolaista ja kuka ties vähän väkijuomaakin, minkä lisäksi halukkaat voivat myös saunoa. Bailujen teemana ovat pienituloiset ja matalasti koulutetut, ja toivoisinkin että pukeutuisitte/eläytyisitte sen mukaan. Vain mielikuvitus ja uskallus olkoon rajana!

-Aapo

PS. Kartta asunnolleni löytyy oheisen linkin takaa. Jos alaovi on lukossa, kilauta niin heitän avaimet parvekkeelta.

How I became aware of Sinan Hoxha and his music

2007-12-11T21:54:00.000Z

From Sinan Hoxha to Represent Albania in Eurovision 2008 Lobby:

It happened at the very beginning of June, 2006. I and my friend were in Shkodra, northwest Albania, and needed to get to Ulcinj, southeast Montenegro. Montenegro had just become independent and we wanted to celebrate it. Myself I also needed to meet some girl called Rusalka, a graduate hydrologist, but that's another story and in the end I never met her.

We took a cab. It was an old Mercedes and its passenger doors couldn't be opened from inside because there were no handles. The cab driver talked too much and we understood too little, but to his credit I have to say that he was playing music which at the moment seemed really good. We named it sword-dancing music.

Even if I tend to get slightly emotional if I'm in such condition, it wasn't only my hangover, but also the car, the driver, the scenery, the road, the potholes, the mosques and churches we passed by, the statue of Skanderbeg that had watched over his square in Tirana and the taste of that Skanderburger I had eaten there. All that, all of sudden, made me think about something in the music that was been played.

I was thinking that the Turkish emissary who at that one night had come down to Skanderbeg's camp and seen the sword-dance of his soldiers must have heard exactly same kind of music we were hearing then. So I turned to my mate and asked: "Mate, do you think that the Turkish emissary who at that one night had come down to Skanderbeg's camp and seen the sword-dance of his soldiers must have heard exactly same kind of music we are hearing?" It may well have been that I didn't listen to my mate's answer, yet I know he agreed.

Then the ride was over and we were in Ulcinj. We decided to travel deeper into Montenegro and went to the local bus station. At the bus station there was a shop selling bus tickets and souvenirs, and the shopkeeper was a young girl who was happy for Montenegrin independence. Amongst the souvenirs she was selling there were some music CD's and amongst the CD's one CD that caught my mate's attention. "Have a look, what a cheesy looking bastard is that", said he, and I had a look.

Oddly enough, I had seen the same cover just five minutes ago in that old Mercedes. I remembered the name too, for it is quite easy to remember if you know even a little bit of Albania. The format had been a cassette tape but otherwise it was exactly the same musical product.

"'Ekzistoj' by Sinan Hoxha, must be same sword-dancing music we heard in the car", I said first to myself, and then, turning to my mate, to my mate: "Mate, that is 'Ekzistoj' by Sinan Hoxha. It's same sword-dancing music we heard in the car." "Interesting", replied my mate, and when we were enjoying our first bottles of Niksic beer in the station bar five minutes later there was a new CD in his bag.

(The picture from Albasoul.com)

Cleaning in progress

2007-12-10T21:21:00.000Z

Tower Hill tube station, a couple of weeks ago:

I, conscientious objector

2007-12-09T21:13:00.000Z

I didn't even see it coming. I had read some brief pieces that Eduskunta was debating on the length and content of non-military service, but I had no clue of that they were actually about to decide something. Without No Guiding Light I would have probably missed it. Instead of 13 months the future conscientious objectors will have to serve 12. (To comparison, their brothers in firearms serve either 12, 9 or 6 months, the latter being the most common and the average length something between 8 and 9.)

I'm surprised. As it happens, my own service was civilian, and when I was doing it in 2001/02 I and my fellow objectors weren't expecting anything to change in next fifteen years. This because it had been tried recently, and the outcome had shown that without a massive landslide to the left there wouldn't be new initiatives anytime soon.

Indeed, when the government proposed the same last time, in late-90s, there was first a somewhat colourful discussion on it and a narrow nay at the end - the then rainbow coalition had defined it an "issue of conscience", meaning that group discipline didn't apply, decision-makers for once were allowed to listen to their heart and (if my memory has not completely let me down) the hearts of all Kokoomus parliamentarists bar Sirpa Pietikäinen told theirs hosts to vote against.

And this time around it was drafted and swallowed so silently that someone who follows his news through the Internet didn't even pay attention. What has changed in Finland during this decade? Last time it really was such a matter of decency and decadence to more than a few politicians, that if you try and search for the archived pre-vote debate I can you will find some pretty dubious comments there. ("Dubious" meaning that if some commentators had pictured, for instance, any ethnic group in a similar manner - as irresponsible, immature, hedonistic etc. - they wouldn't have got away with it in the mainstream media.) Outi Siimes (NatCo, the first female lieutenant in Finnish military history) was of course second to none, and besides her my small black book of Names to Remember identifies also Olli Nepponen (NatCo, a former high-flyer general who had to swap to politics after some unfortunate drunk-driving incidence) and Kyösti Karjula (Cen, a father of eighteen from Oulu region, i.e. a Laestadian) as chief wardens of juvenile spine.

Siimes is nowadays promoting her Spartan virtues elsewhere, but Nepponen and Karjula should be still hanging in there. Someone should have interviewed them, citing their earlier comments, and asked how are they feeling about the decision. If they aren't feeling bad about it, they should be asked to elaborate why they aren't. After all, last time their viewpoint was more or less that cutting a month would suddenly prompt a good deal of Finland's finest to desert the army, transforming them into feckless, stoned youth, thereby seriously deteriorating their sense of responsibility and togetherness, willingness to pay taxes, to grow their own vegetables and to butcher their livestock by their own hands, to help old ladies and school kids across busy motorway intersections, and what else - and that last time wasn't a very long time ago. Times and social norms have obviously changed, yet I would be genuinely interested to learn about how and why.

That said, the biggest flaw regarding non-military service as an equal option is still to be fixed, and that has to do with housing. The law requires the servants' "employers" to provide their accommodation, but in practice they live up that responsibility quite seldom. A common practice is such that an employer formally offered its servant-to-be a room for instance in the basement or attic of the workplace, and the servant then rejects it, stating that he would prefer living e.g. with his parents or relatives, or in his own apartment. (Of which rent in some, obscurely defined and varyingly applied circumstances was paid by the state.) This naturally means that off the record numerous service places only recruit servants who are willing and able to sort out their own accommodation. That is exactly as dodgy as it sounds, discriminating many conscientious objectors not only vis-á-vis conscripts, but also other, more affluent or better located objectors. The solution - i.e. redefining the accommodation as a governmental liability - would make a huge difference, and wouldn't be terribly expensive either. (Especially if you consider the fact that the service places are either public or not-for-profit organisations and thus dependant on tax money in the first place.)

I've never complained about the fact that non-military service is so much longer than the average time served by conscripts - partly because I personally quite enjoyed my own 13 months, partly because I think it's only fair that a less consuming option is a longer option - but that housing mischief is just cheekiness.

As a concluding anecdote, I can reveal that my own service was a prelude of something much greater. The first month was, and maybe still is, a training period held in a remote farmsted in Lapinjärvi, a small Swedish-speaking village in Uusimaa's eastern peripheries, and in my days included themes ranging from first aid to post-service career planning (no, no, it's not a rehabilitation programme!) to history of Finnish pacifism to group discussions on globalisation, and then there's also a little bit of obligatory identity building through whining, moaning and playing martyrs. In regard to the latter, I remember one lecturer, while trying to point out how rare a phenomenon conscription actually is today, arguing that in the pan-European perspective Finland's überlarge infantry makes us "Europe's last Albania". What an appetising description it was.

At that very moment, dear reader, something moved inside me. It was like a gentle shift in the wind. For at that moment, dear reader, I had become curious.

So now you know.

"Sivarierä 19/01 - paras mutta kreisein. Jee!"

My favourite Finnish nouns, adjectives and verbs

2007-12-06T21:29:00.000Z

Once I had slept over them, I wasn't satisfied with the lists of words I came up yesterday. And since there was again more commute fun than usually, thanks to the power failure that, for the second evening in row, had shut down our train station, I drafted a new one. The same rules apply - I don't claim that all of these words are particularly aesthetic or pleasant-sounding, but the point is that to me they are convincing and inspiring, visual. For the translations you can mostly blame my online dictionary.

Since boyz n the bloghood pointed that there were no verbs allowed yesterday, I opted for some affirmative action - or is it segregation? - and gave each to their own. We play with eleven because 33 as a numeral is more beautiful than 30.

Narri (jester, fool)
Kalmo (corpse)
Virvatuli (ignis fatuus)
Hepsankeikka (over-friendly girl - or 'flibbertigibbet', apparently)
Elonkorjuu (harvest)
Hiidenkirnu (giant's kett...asch, you know, this thing)
Piruparka (poor devil)
Uuni (oven)
Syöveri (abyss, depths)
Possu (piggy)
Unilukkari (that guy whose duty was to patrol in Lutheran churches during a service and wake up everyone who was falling asleep)

Kaitsea (to shepherd, to watch over)
Käyskennellä (to saunter)
Uinua (to doze, to lie dormant)
Hummata (to party too joyfully for one's income level...I guess)
Huoahtaa (to sigh, to breathe)
Sammaltaa (to slur like you had moss in your moth, e.g. when drunk)
Liplattaa (to ripple)
Juksata (to hoax benevolently)
Vaeltaa (to wander, to trek)
Kieppua (to whirl)
Versoa (to germinate, to sprout)

Purppura (purple, crimson)
Säyseä (meek, docile)
Valpas (vigilant)
Höveli (careless)
Hupsu (positively silly)
Tympeä (banal, repulsive)
Seesteinen (serene)
Mölli (jerkish, taciturn)
Äitelä (sugary, mawkish)
Kaikkivoipa (omnipotent)
Vehmas (leafy, fertile)

Funnily enough, äiti is the most beloved word that exists in Finnish, but probably no one associates äitelä with anything positive. To me, it stands for Nordic ciders - overly sweet, girlish and full of industrial essence. Tarja Halonen, when chanting (messuta) about *yawn* Nordic welfare ...zzz... state to a foreign audience, can be quite äitelä, too. (And no, heaven's sake no, I will quote neither Sauli Niinistö nor his copywriter here. No.)

Listing words was a surprisingly interesting thing to do, perhaps due to its psychological aspect. I did it so that for each category I wrote down the first fifteen words that 'clinged' and then dumbed riihitonttu, sipata, salakavala and the others which clinged least. And now that I read my 33 through, and tried to see them as a whole, many of them do seem to have something in common, though I just can't figure out what it might be - maybe there's a good word for it but I don't know it yet. Does it have to do with horoscopes, well-translated badly-written fantasy novels, or Kaija Koo's lyrics? Insight, anyone?

Either way, and whatever it is, my bottom line has it that words were better when Finland celebrated her first independence day.

In other news, Free Rice is a synonyme game that lets you donate rice to starving people by studying progressively challenging English vocabulary. It can be quite addictive, especially if you're bored.

Listen to mom

2007-12-05T21:15:00.000Z

This year is a sort of double jubilee back home. Finland celebrates her 90th independence day tomorrow, and earlier this year it was a big day for Mikael Agricola - a clergyman who during his exchange student days in Wittgenstein hooked up with Martin Luther, brought Protestantism to Finland as a souvenir and later decided to atone that sin by launching Finnish as a written language - who died 450 years ago. To honour the latter occasion, the literate people of Turku have asked the visitors of their annual book fair to vote on the most beautiful word in our language. The top, according to Helsingin Sanomat, is as follows:

1) Äiti (mother)
2) Rakkaus (love)
3) Rakas (dear, beloved)
4) Kiitos (thank you)
5) Lumi (snow)
6) Kaunis (beautiful)
7) Kulta (dear, gold)
8) Usva (mist)
9) Aamu (morning)
10) Koti (home)

Äiti is a usual suspect in these rankings, and that's quite about right. 'Ä' is a catchy vowel, and aesthitically maybe the most visible letter in our alphabet, and if you start a word with one it kind of dominates it till the end, especially if the remaining vowels are as submissive as 'i'. Of all persons in your life no one compares to your mother, and the word of mother is the word of 'Ä'; if you see it in a text, you can sense how its caring dots are looking after you. Äiti is the undisputed authority of all Ä-words, when it comes to associations, yet it is no coincidence that in that contest her runnerups are älä and känni ("do not" and "drunkness", respectively), for their purpose is to highlight. Imagine that you're eighteen, your parents are away for the weekend and there's a motherly remindful note left on the fridge door: "Älä kännää! -Äiti."

No shenanigans, young man.

But what the fuck are the numbers two and three doing on that list? Ismo Alanko - an ingeniously great musician who, by the way, did his non-military service in the same nursing home as yours truly did his, some twenty years later - sung once about love as a dirty word, and was absolutely right. Rakkaus doesn't resonate. It's one squeaky door leading into some untidy motel room and rakas is just the same nuisance without love handles. It may or may not be blind, but people who think that it sounds good are certainly deaf. (And I'm not the first one to complain about this, thank you.)

Kiitos is a pleasant, harmonious word, both in writing and viva voce, and in my opinion belongs to the list. As does lumi; it's calm and silent, like a late January afternoon in woods, and that 'u' makes you somehow, unintentionally, sink in it - a bit like in lumo, which means spell or enchantment.

Kaunis lives on its old merits, like those old Miss Whatevers who Spede used to recruit to television - they surely had had it once written all over them, but I just didn't find them attractive. Doesn't belong to the list. Neither does that yawningly indifferent kulta, which is there probably only because the local university's predominantly female literature students (who got one study credit for attending the fair) like to call their fiancés kulta since that is how Rachel called Ross according to Friends subtitles.

Usva is great stuff. It's moist and mysterious, at the same time exciting and sinister, a twilight zone. Aamu is a bit like a rising sun, with that snowy peak of a written 'A' and the sound it makes when appearing as a double vowel, to be catapulted over the bumps of m straight into the bottom of u. I'm not sure about koti; it would maybe get away with Top15, but this was meant to be Top10.

I tried to think my own word list during my daily commuting session, and came up with these - all may not strike as unquestionably beautiful, but let's say that I find them very convincing:

Lupaus (promise)
Vahti (watchman)
Mummi (granny)
Paju (willow)
Mörkö (bogeyman)
Hulttio (scoundrel)
Äes (harrow)
Löyly (sauna heat)
Neva (swamp)
Rumpu (drum)

The compounds are competing in a different league, I take it, but here goes also their list:

Sydänyö (midnight)
Perikato (ruination)
Taivaankansi (vault of heaven)
Lellivauva (pampered child)
Räkäkänni (deep drunkness)
Ryyppyremmi (group of drinkers/drunks)
Noitarovio (witch stake)
Läskimooses (fatty)
Huru-ukko (crazy old man, 'bacucco')
Palanpainike (digestive)
Juoruämmä (gossiping old bitch, 'bacucca')

That's eleven, I couldn't choose between räkäkänni and ryyppyremmi. Make of that what you will.

No crazy paving for the dying

2007-12-03T20:24:00.001Z

For your information, ladies and gents - the regulations of the earlier mentioned Lambeth Cemetery:

Reported to God and Battersea Police

2007-12-01T16:15:00.000Z

This is from the Lambeth Cemetery, between Tooting and the greyhound stadium of Wimbledon:

If you can't get a grasp of what is written on the small green jars, and are willing to take my word of it, I can tell you that they contain fingerprint powder. Just in case God might forget about it by Har-Magedon.

And yes, it should go without saying that it escapes my understanding which kind of sick, sad individuals steal from memorials.

Good news, bad news

2007-11-29T21:54:00.000Z

I am not bragging, kidding or marveling anything when I say that Finns are - generally speaking - the smartest people I've come across, at least in Europe. (But then again, I've never been outside Europe.) If you want to hear an insular preassumption which in my case has only strengthened through travelling and education, then tick that one. It results in relative lack of everyday stupidity in Finland and, as such, is a nice thing if you live there.

Yep, it's that PISA triennale again. I personally think that for instance honesty, sisu and most other Finnish myths are, well, just myths, but if mankind still is to draw some lesson from my people it could do much worse than preventing everyday stupidity and going to a Finnish primary school for a week or two. Ditto, I tend to be quite skeptical towards most cross-country mumbojumbo rankings, yet wouldn't seriusly mind if PISA results were to draw even more attention than they usually are. That's because the quality of education as an evaluand is something quite measurable, but also because no one can't really explain and analyse why some peer countries are doing so much better than some others. It's a very complex issue, and if you're to learn from it you should treat it as such - i.e. without any kitchen sociology or petty policising. (McKinsey tried to explain and analyse it this autumn, and, as far as I remember got as far as concluding that in order to have good schools you must have good teachers and in order to have good teachers you must have bright young people willing to become teachers...but that's when it all gets blurred again. There seem to so different, yet equally successful, approaches that you can't trace it to one single underlying factor. Here's the PDF, and here's a brief article about it, if you fancy further reading.)

For instance, my student union has traditionally bred idiots who have publically interpreted "the world's best primary education" as "the world's best education system" and on such grounds argued that Finnish tertiary education system shouldn't be reformed - which of course means that they are either lying bastards or suffering from serious cerebral laziness, or just that Finnish tertiary education is counterproductive. Another rather typical hobby horse is that our kids score so well because they are to taught to such a large extent in their mother tongue, suggesting that the small number of foreigners might explain it. However, science-savvy and relatively multiethnic societies like Canada, Australia and Netherlands prove it clearly a wrong assumption.

So, anyway, my most humble observations have indeed confirmed that Finnish youngsters generally know more than their brothers and sisters elsewhere - or, to put it other way, young people in e.g. Italy, Britain or Lithuania generally have not known as much as I would have expected them to know at their age. Which makes perfect sense, of course, since why would you bother about your education system if it made no difference at the end of the day?

This year's PISA theme was science and one of the questions, apparently, whether one can contract a) AIDS, b) diarrhea or c) diabetes by drinking contaminated water. British kids obviously did pretty well at this time, ranking as the 16th overall, and those who did not probably didn't comprehend the questions in the first place - one field where they score badly is literacy, and to get a grasp of that problem you just have to buy an ordinary tabloid newspaper. The Sun and Daily Mail are read by approx ten million readers in total on daily basis, and I'm not exaggerating at all if I say that they are targeted at people who can't read properly - that is, readers who have problems processing information in written form and in order to do so need pictures, catchy headlines and regular concrete examples among abstractness. Their closest Finnish equivalents - Seiska, Katso (always popular among Italian Erasmus students), Hymy etc. - may well be equally bad, but take into consideration that those are neither newspapers nor published daily, whereas The Sun is the primary source of news for its average reader. Bear that in mind: if British news coverage is sometimes sensational, tasteless and of low quality it's not, primarily, because the journalists responsible for it are like that, but simply because they are writing for a deterministically stupid audience. That is scary.

Well, well. I was actually going to relate to this topic to supply and demand in the context of Italian television, but then realised that such would make me come across either as homesick or a wanker (of which I could only subscribe to the latter - no matter how hard I sometimes pine for Keskisuomalainen's unmatchably factual, even-handed and in-depth EU coverage, or the sparking intellect of Finnish talkshows) so it was good that I spotted also this piece of news.

Finland will meet the objectives of the Stability and Growth Pact both in terms of the balance in public finances and with regard to the debt ratio in the medium term. However, a sustainability analysis that includes the forthcoming demographic changes indicates that overall general government finances are not sustainable in the long term. Based on Eurostat's 2004 population projection, a surplus of 4% of GDP would be required to secure sustainability in general government finances. Under the current Stability Programme, the surplus would amount to 2½ of GDP by the end of the government term, which means there would be a sustainability gap of about 1½% of GDP. If the latest national population forecast were to be used for the computations, the sustainability figure would be even bleaker than this.

Here is the same piece in Finnish, for my people to go and test their world-class reading skills.

Did you read it? If you did, did you understand it? If you did, did you try to relate its content to your opinions on politics, democracy and social justice? And if you did, how did you feel about it?

This is a theme that has haunted my readership ever since I kicked off this blog and I quite feel obliged to spell it out on regular intervals. Seriously, do you people have any clue of what that text above means? It means that the government, the same that is accused of saving too much today, is spending far too much - which, correspondingly, means that the ones tomorrow will have to save and squeeze even more. No ifs and no buts, really. I promise that it is this simple.

I'm sometimes scared to braindeath when I - from a safe distance, nowadays - am following the political discourse in contemporary in Finland. It's a discourse between people whose mentality is lagging a couple of decades behind the reality and who will be in agonising trouble when they in most foreseeable future have to come to terms with the fact that politics isn't about what it used to be. Politics has always been about trade-offs, yet in future those trade-offs will be twice as painful. So if you lean to right, you might well stop childishly flattering yourself that you can both have and eat your cake, i.e. cry for tax cuts and oppose welfare reforms at the same time - whereas the lefties just have to strangle their dearest brainchild, and learn to live without the idea that you can banish any possible evil just by valiantly covering it with tax money. It surely hurts, but there's nothing you can do about it, whatever your political inclination is. Just change your mentality sooner rather than later, and you won't be so stressed when times get truly confusing.

Think about it. A surplus of 2.5% is very solid by pan-European standards, but even still it's quite far from enough. That is scary, too.

Sematary

2007-11-27T21:29:00.001Z

This is actually my sign picture number one, taken in Streatham Cemetery, Tooting:

(That said, the sign makes a good point. Ancient and massive gravestones can be dangerous, considering that it's usually the elder folk who tend to visit and spend time in cemeteries - for example, I remember one old lady being once injured in Finland, when the memorial towards which she had knelt fell out of sudden. But even still, I do find its warning a little bit...erm, phantasmagoric?)

Roger Boyes & social life in Europe

2007-11-23T21:02:00.000Z

I think it was more than two years ago, on some illuminatingly light and so very fucking wonderfully warm Adriatic winter night spent with Sangiovese in my Forlì apartment near those inspiringly muddy banks of Rubicon, when I first time discovered this pot of gold: a nicely and neatly extensive list of Eurofound's quality of life indicators - a guaranteed source of pleasure and satisfaction, for certain, given that you're a die-hard social scientist, a stats freak or an "analytical mind genuinely interested in cross-country comparisons" (aye, that's an euphemism for something, or someones), and even if you aren't it might be of your occasional interest.

Just pardon me for my secrecy and informational possessiveness - like a dog who has found a juicy bone I have sniggeringly returned to it only at nights, and always alone - but Ukko as my eternal puppeteer my behaviour and movements have been been haplessly spasmed by words of a Finnish poet who wrote and created on verge of insanity and who ever since his very birth was meant to die on a fatefully dark and cold January night, or day or afternoon - what does it matter at that time of the year? - in 1926 and in the village of Tuusula, and whose hubristically forlorn poems those hopeless hopes of Finland - for that I remember - even today read, analyse and absorb in upper secondary schools; yes, indeed, for kell' onni on se onnen kätkeköön. (S)he who has luck is strongly advised to hide it.

It's time, though. Ari has sung and sunk Roger Boyes even deeper into that endless (as well as appropriately dark and cold) swamp behind his remote farmstead, so all that is left for me to do is to wipe the case under the carpet before the crime scene investigation and foreign journalists arrive, and before any poor teenage girl adds insult to brain injury by drowning herself.

I've got numbers - they aren't exactly up to date, but they're numbers anyway. This is my truth, tell me yours or consider yourself informed:

Satisfaction with social life; percentage of the population aged 15 and over, who are very or fairly satisfied with their social life (2004)

1) Denmark, 96%
2) Netherlands, 95%
3) Finland, 93%
Luxembourg, 93%
Sweden, 93%
6) Austria, 91%
Belgium, 91%
Spain, 91%
9) France, 89%
10) Ireland, 88%

Toivoton taisto taivaan valtoja vastaan.

Use of the Internet; percentage of people aged 15 and over who use the Internet (2003)

1) Sweden, 68%
2) Denmark, 66%
3) Netherlands, 62%
4) Finland, 59%
5) Luxembourg, 53%
United Kingdom, 53%
7) Spain, 50%
8) Austria, 49%
Malta, 49%
10) Estonia, 47%

Kaikuvi kannel; lohduta laulu ei lastaan.

Contact with neighbours; percentage of people aged 16 and over who talk to their neighbours more than once a week (2000; EU15 excluding DE, FR, LU and SE)

1) Greece, 97%
2) Ireland, 91%
Spain, 91%
4) Portugal, 87%
5) Italy, 81%
6) Austria, 79%
Finland, 79%
8) United Kingdom, 77%
9) Netherlands, 72%
10) Belgium, 71%
Denmark, 71%

Hallatar haastaa, soi sävel sortuvin siivin.

Meeting friends and relatives; percentage of people aged 16 and over who meet friends or relatives not living with them more than once a week (2000; EU15 excluding DE, FR and LU)

1) Ireland, 95%
2) Spain, 94%
3) Greece, 92%
4) Sweden, 87%
5) Netherlands, 85%
United Kingdom, 85%
7) Denmark, 81%
Finland, 81%
Italy, 81%
10) Belgium, 78%

Rotkoni rauhaan kuin peto kuoleva hiivin.

Or will they?

2007-11-22T21:54:00.000Z

Me and my mate spotted this one outside Crossharbour's big ASDA, more than a month ago. I can't get it out of my mind.

St Katharine's Docks, my hazardous neighbourhood

2007-11-20T21:16:00.000Z

It feels safe, but it is not. This hazard is just fifty meters from my own front door.

Whereas moving round the corner, and even closer to my house, you're pinned down by the British equivalent to a mine field - i.e. uneven surface. It's a small courtyard with four trees, and two of the trees have been equipped with a warning like this:

Yes, as you enter and leave that rough square meter of sand and gravel totally at your own risk, you might want to pay better attention to the black male figure. Can't you hear him? Can't you hear what he is trying to tell you? You should, because he is trying to tell you that: "Oh no, oh my gosh, what a fool I was, walking straight into this awful trip hazard - cor blimey, it is nobody's fault but my own and now I will soon hit the cold hard concrete, and the only thing left to do is to stretch the arms, like this; if only they had equipped this tree next to me with one of those yellow trip hazard warnings and secured it with a strong metal chain, but oh no, oh my gosh, no they didn't, and now I walked straight into this awful trip hazard."

Or, who knows, maybe he's trying to tell you to rave safe.

Sinan Hoxha revisited

2007-11-18T22:50:00.000Z

As it happens, the largest share of all traffic this blog receives through Google searches owes to Sinan Hoxha, and hence it is probably appropriate to share the following reviews I have originally published as part of the Sinan Hoxha to Represent Albania in Eurovision 2008 Lobby on Facebook also here.

They are five, and they appear so that the most recent piece, my reflections on Sinan Hoxha's and Ermal Fejzullahu's version of "Hajredin Pasha", is at the top; in order to gain a better grasp of Sinan Hoxha's growth and self-development as an artist, I suggest you to start from the bottom.

Sinan Hoxha and Ermal Fejzullahu: Hajredin Pasha
Sinan Hoxha: Qik Kosovare
Sinan Hoxha: Me Fal
Sinan Hoxha: Do Vec Do
Sinan Hoxha: Me Hir A Me Pahir

Sinan Hoxha: Hajredin Pasha

2007-11-18T22:46:00.003Z

"Hajredin Pasha", or "Raisinless Paskha", a profound duetto with Ermal Fejzullahu, is Sinan Hoxha's gesture of goodwill to Albania's Slavic neighbours; it's his statement for condemning feud and prejudice and for siding with peace and amity. Young Ermal, who plays the role of a keen and zealous kid brother, doesn't understand why paskha, a Russian Orthodox Easter dessert, must contain raisins - paskha would be better off without raisins and the world better off without paskha, argues he. Yet Sinan Hoxha, older and more travelled, takes a different stance. If paskha had no raisins it wouldn't be paskha at all; accept it even if you may not approve with it, as it may mean much to someone else. In the end, young Ermal agrees that the older man has seen more and is thus better positioned for making judgements. The song has two teachings: take life, including raisins, as it is, and respect age, for age brings insight. Learn and see beyond the curd.

Sinan Hoxha: Qik Kosovare

2007-11-18T22:46:00.001Z

"Qik(e) Kosovare", or "That Quick Kosovar", tells of strong ethnic awareness and belongs to Sinan Hoxha's more controversial production. It's his tribute to Shefki Kuqi - the man, the myth and the holder of a forged birth certificate - and makes no frontal bones about whose flying headers will soon take Finland to Euro2008. The ten dancing girls symbolise the rest of the national squad; not an innuendo of their effeminity in eyes of Sinan Hoxha, rather than an opinion of whose tune the starting lineup should be dancing their last cabarets to if they're willing to qualify. Before the dance ceases we witness the dancers grouping for a round game and swarming round the hero, just like satellites orbiting their raison d'etre and providing airtime to a head like a television - as it once was in Mikkelin Pallo, or "The Ball of St Michael", where Shefki ascended into his life as a footballer. Shefki's faith knows him as Mikhal and he, a winged creature, is the patron saint of flying headers.

Sinan Hoxha: Me Fal

2007-11-18T22:44:00.001Z

Criticised for sexism in his earlier music videos, which had associated the opposite sex with banditry and habitual quarrelsomeness, Sinan Hoxha now refutes with "Me Fal". There's only one culprit this time, and that's the artist himself; witness the role of alter ego in the narration of his sense of guilt, as if a way to say: "I look down on that lecher, that libertine, that myself". Sinan Hoxha is with a woman but then makes out with another woman, which brings him into trouble with the first woman. Were he sane, this loss would finally force him to come to terms with his libido, but no, for what a fool he is - he goes and fumbles even the Maiden of Shkodra! The tower is no coincidence; once phallic and invincible, today defeated and haunted. Yet don't blame it on the chessboard if your bishop has fallen and your rooks bring bad weather; you take the sword, you perish with the sword. Self-sufficiency, hence, won't save him from this siege, either.

Sinan Hoxha: Do Vec Do

2007-11-18T22:43:00.001Z

"Do Vec Do" takes place after the incident that cost Sinan Hoxha his jeep, and shows a different, more mature side of the artist; the boyish "Come on!" has yielded to a less gung-ho, more sure-footed "Ready?". It's a rhetorical question. Drones and lethargists may be sleeping, but this is the night of the week when Sinan Hoxha hosts women's gymnastics in the attic of his Tirana apartment; the trainess, a mysterious afro-haired foreigner, is his muse. The session is intervened by a heated debate over on which garnish they should order their after-gymnastics takeaway. Sinan Hoxha wants rice, but the trainess has decided to put his manhood to test and agitates the others to follow her example and order potatoes. Secretly she hates potatoes, though, and after seeing that the host won't flip-flop on this one, she reveals that beneath her bitchy surface she, too, is absolutely fine with rice. This releases the atmosphere and allows the weekly gymnastics to continue for another half an hour.

Sinan Hoxha: Me Hir A Me Pahir

2007-11-18T22:40:00.001Z

In this music video of "Me Hir A Me Pahir" Sinan Hoxha and his best mate are driving Sinan Hoxha's jeep in the desert. As their co-passengers, they have two Tirana women, yet this doesn't prevent them from taking a third one, a lone hitchhiker, aboard. No one is wearing seatbelts. The men, unsuspecting and oblivious of things to come, are fooled into stopping their jeep and starting to play music; the Tirana women start to dance until the hitchiker, after cunningly contributing the chorus, steals the jeep and drives away with the two other female passengers. Sinan Hoxha and his best mate have to walk home. The story doesn't tell whether there actually was an attempt to beg the carjackers to change their mind and turn around, but I doubt it; it is indeed a story of rural male innocence, two clueless countryside boys being tricked by girls of the capital, but for all their obliviousness there is one thing they must have known. You turn if you want to. The Tirana woman's not for turning.

They are taking the fluid, are they not?

2007-11-17T00:09:00.000Z

The company where I've been working lately has been kind enough to explain what may go wrong if you don't use toilets in a responsible manner - so take note in future, gentle reader, and pay more attention to all that fluid and other waste. Thank you.

Makes me wonder, though, which sort of curricula you have to go through if you want to become an engineer in this country.

Sinan Hoxha to Represent Albania in Eurovision 2008 Lobby

2007-11-11T20:41:00.000Z

(The cover of Sinan Hoxha's 2nd album "Sinan Hoxha", from Albasoul.com)

It was about half a year ago, in the aftermath of last Eurovision Song Contest, when I suggested that the people of Albania should seriously consider sending Sinan Hoxha, one of the biggest names of contemporary Albanian popular music, to next year's event. Some surely thought that I was joking, but I wasn't.

Earlier this week, I launched a Facebook group Sinan Hoxha to Represent Albania in Eurovision 2008 Lobby. I had estimated that by the end of the first week I should have rallied at least 10.000 souls behind my initiative, but obviously got some part of the social arithmetics slightly wrong since up to now I've managed only 148. Also, I've been told by my informants, the people of Albania are to choose the voice of their country already in December, so I am running badly behind any realistic schedule and may soon have to compromise the numeral part of the group's name. The cause itself, however, will remain.

Readers are encouraged to join and invite their friends and relatives.

Analytical times continue

2007-11-10T15:43:00.000Z

Roger Boyes has responded to his critics, and didn't manage to come across as absolutely convincing. Ari condenses it again well; it indeed tells of a pretty muddy flow of thought to explain the murders by picking a few elements and claiming that there is something particularly Finnish about them - and then completely ignoring the fact that none of them really applies to the underlying case.

His witty arrogance makes him appear as unprofessional - myself I can't avoid the impression that he came up with that silly folklore allegory of the original article during his flight from Heathrow to Vantaa, and then just built the rest of his analysis upon it - but above all uncivilised. For example, what on Earth is he trying to say with that "I bet most of you haven't been in Tuusula, it's not Arctic Circle but I happen to think teenagers have quite a hard time of it here" part? Is it his way to say "this place seems boring, myself I could never live here"? That's of course an informative and valid point to be shared as such, but I don't think it's the most relevant thing you can include to serious news coverage. I can perfectly comprehend that such tone serves its purpose well indeed when an undergraduate student of journalism, having transcended into unmatchable wisdom and worldliness during a gap year spent tuning didgeridoos in Australian desert, collecting corpses from Ganges or doing something equally wise and worldly, is writing to his university paper on his disappointing Erasmus semester during which he failed experiencing a sexual intercourse, or when an Established Fleet Street Journalist is demonstrating his level of sarcasm and wittiness to his trade at Friday night drinks in their local wine bar, yet that shouldn't necessarily qualify it for the "analysis" of an authoritative daily newspaper.

His is not a world view of a civilised man, for civilised men don't expect everyone sharing their values and preferences. I grew up in a place smaller and much more remote than Jokela (Yes, Roger, I have been. We have relatives there and their proximity to Helsinki and those vast highways leading to Helsinki, let alone that big and international airport, was always a source of excitement to me.) where we didn't have any traffic lights within the radius of 30 kilometers and where the secondary school was a twenty minutes bus journey away; in December and January the moon was shining when we left from home as well as when we returned to home, and sometimes the only sound you heard, when walking to and from the premises of the local pub (where the bus stop was), was that unique narks-narks only snowflakes frozen in temperatures of below thirty degrees breaking their form under your winter shoes can make. I don't recognise the mental terror and rural misery he is associating with Finland.

At the moment I'm however living in a place where within the radius of 30 kilometers there are more people than is the population of entire Finland, and since this Roger Wilco of British journalism supposedly lives here as well I guess this was one yardstick against which he was evaluating the enjoyability of Tuusula. Personally I'm in love with this city and have no intentions of moving away from here in any foreseeable future, but if I think those forty who graduated from secondary school with me I can name maybe four or five others who might want to live here for a while, and of them maybe one or two would truly enjoy it. And, still, this doesn't mean that London is a bad place to live.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not moaning because I'm a patriot who doesn't bear criticism to his native country. For instance, I consider this month-old radio programme even worse piece of journalism than the one by Roger Boyes. It pictures a whole different version of Finland, but I didn't even listened to more than the first ten minutes of it because it seemed so rubbish. (Nokia this and Nokia that, the Nokia money allowing Finland to provide outstanding care for the elderly population, and bla bla bla. Ironically, in the same week it was aired I read that in Kitee, North Karelia, the residents of municipal rest-homes go to bed after 3pm because the evening shifts are under-staffed by default.)

But just for comparison, think about how this would sound if printed by Helsingin Sanomat: "The case of Madeleine illustrates the famously hedonistic ways of British parents: in a culture where the parents are more likely to bring their children to pubs and restaurants than to sacrifice their own social life by spending a night in with the family, drugging your offsprings was always to be a logical alternative." Or how about the following: "A female student from a country as much known for teenage pregnancies as for casual relationships between its young, Meredith Kerchner was brutally murdered in the Umbrian city of Perugia."

That would be quite fucking tasteless, if you ask me.

The Times gets analytical

2007-11-08T16:30:00.000Z

Ah, almost forgot about this one.

Yesterday, invoking new gods and myths, an 18-year-old brought thunder down on a small frozen township. It was a sign of disturbed times — but also a very Finnish tragedy.

Two words.

FUCK. YOU.

(For versions 2+ consult Ari and Egan.)

On guns

2007-11-08T16:08:00.000Z

I, for one, think that there are too many guns in Finland and too many people have access to them. I do accept hunting, and actually think that it is a good pastime - it of course prevents elks and wild beasts from overbreeding, plus the hunters I know personally tend to have, in my opinion, a less neurotic nature relationship than the people who think that hunting is barbaric and should be banned - but I can't say the same about sport shooting. It makes sense to practice your shooting skills if you are a policeman, a professional soldier, or if you indeed go hunting, but if nothing of those applies to you then I wouldn't care too much if they barred you from it. If you like shooting things then play paintball or shoot with air weapons and if you like aiming at things then play darts, but are there really any valid arguments for why urban people should be allowed owning firearms just because they like to shoot and aim at things at a shooting track? It is a useless, silly hobby.

Also, since I am not familiar with the facts, I can't tell whether or not Finland's gun lex is too lax, but I definitely think that you can buy yourself a gun too quickly and too easily. Pekka-Eric Auvinen had got his license just a few weeks ago. Why couldn't there be a pending time of, say, one year? Young shooters are young, so they have time, they can wait. It might or might not had prevented this tragedy, but I guess it could help with some other cases when a mentally ill (or just violent) youngster applies for a gun license just because he wants to kill people. Year is such a long time that many things may happen. He may get better, kill himself or choose knife as his murder weapon. All of which are better outcomes than the ones you may face if you sell him a pistol.

Apart from that, I believe that if you really want to blame someone or something you can blame the Internet and free speech. These murders would have not happened if he had not been familiar with those of Columbine or Virginia Tech. So basically you can blame every newspaper, TV channel or, most certainly, every blogger, who has spread and discussed the details of previous school shootings more than has been absolutely necessary. It doesn't mean that we should, or could, do anything about it, but it's something useful to acknowledge anyway - consider it the dark side of information society. Young Werther, at least according to conventional wisdom, inspired more than one thousand suicides, and his creator's audience and means of expression were a little bit more limited than Auvinen's role models'.

That's all I have to say about the Jokela massacre. I also think that there should be a certain mourning period during which sociologists shouldn't be allowed to comment these kind of tragedies publically and journalists shouldn't be allowed to ask ministers what the government is going to do now. I find it awful.

Thou shalt not spread yard gossips

2007-11-04T15:21:00.001Z

After a long dogmatic soulseeking, I've finally decided to give in to modernity and start posting pictures on this weblog, now that I own again a mobile phone that has a camera. It's my third phone this year - having lost two previous ones in certain, slightly bizarre nocturnal circumstances - and now I'm actually feeling quite safe. For my bank - a beacon of sanity in this country where opening a bank account is ridiculously difficult if you are a foreigner - indeed provides a mobile phone insurance as part of the benefits associated with my brand new current account.

In regard to the pictures I've been taking, Britain is a country of signs and notes. In the scheme of things, the British aren't as obsessed by rules as, for instance, Finns and Germans are, but on the contrary they really like their recommendations, requests and advices. And I don't know why - perhaps because the Brits can get pretty witty and euphemistic with their language, perhaps because I am weird with my perceptions, or perhaps of some other reason - but those recommendations, requests and advices, from time to time, can be quite funnily put and have given me a good deal of verbal pleasure. I'll start sharing my favourites as soon as I've found a mini-USB for my Noksu, so we'll now launch with two notes from Finland.

They are in Finnish, though the former contains a picture that in its context is a worth a word or two - it is addressed to "Dear Piper" and deals with the delicate residential issue of one tenant wishing to play her wind instrument and some other tenant wishing her to do so somewhere else. It was posted once on the bulletin board of a student house where I lived three years ago; whereas the additional comment was added by myself after a winter night out in Tampere, possibly in Semafori. The latter note I spotted in July, when helping my mate to move from his old apartment in north Hervanta into his new one in south Hervanta. Its moral content is very communal.

Click to enlarge, excuse the poor quality and bla bla bla.

St Katharine's Docks, my neighbourhood

2007-10-28T20:11:00.000Z

After three in Sumiainen, two in Suolahti, four in Tampere, one in Vilnius, Forli' and Tooting, south London, each, plus a couple of odd places in the countryside of Zeeland, south Holland, this is the fifteenth address of these twenty-four years, ten months and a day of my life. (Or let's put thirteenth - the ones in Zeeland were indeed so odd that they shouldn't count.) The fourth address, in Sumiainen, was my childhood home, where I've spent about sixteen years of the aforementioned lifespan, whereas the fifth, in Suolahti, and the sixth, at Lapinkaari, were quite important too - my first real own place and my first student place, as the lone Finn in a dormitory full of exchange students, respectively - but right after them comes this newest one, the dwelling number 13. I haven't lived here more than a week, but I already have a feeling that I won't be moving out very soon - this feels finally more a home than just one more temporary arrangement, and for that I am happy. There are very few nicer areas in London.

Yet let me explain a little bit. As for residential matters, my expatriation has been quite smooth from very beginning: an old friend of mine needed someone to replace him for a couple of months in his houseshare in Tooting, while he was working down in his native Birmingham, so I didn't have to resort to hostels or excessive coach surfing or accepting the first room I could find. It indeed made things easier.

Tooting Broadway as a neighbourhood is OK - vibrant, relatively well connected and most suitable for nights out in Clapham or Wimbledon - but it became soon clear that it wasn't a place for me. I could trade one thousand convenience stores and ethnic takeaways for a peaceful area where to have a walk and some fresh air in evenings, and Tooting could easily provide the former but not really the latter. Evening walks down the high street don't give you much fresh air, concretely speaking, and I didn't find those local side streets absolutely pleasant either; apart from some wild animals, namely foxes and rats, I ran across, there's of course the most hated building of London, but not much more worth mentioning. (Oddly enough, now I'm living next to that second most hated building.) Tooting is admittedly strong at cemeteries, hosting the dead of both Lambeth and Streatham, and those who know me know that I'm a big friend of those places (of which more some other time) but in this country most big cemeteries close at 5pm latest. There were a couple of small parks and the Wandle Trail of Merton (with a proper animal farm, by the way) but in order to get in to any of them you had to take at least ten minutes of the high street, and I simply don't want to walk far or take a bus in order to enjoy silence and fresh air. It's not me. And, well, it's Zone 3, too.

St Katharine's Docks is different. It's central, right next to sights like the Tower and the Tower Bridge, and with adequate services, but still charming and peaceful. Part of what was once the Port of London, where trade fleets dropped and weighed their anchors and where the dockers worked hard and played even harder, it stands for trade, exploration, Cockney and ale, and has thus, to put it shortly, a taste of real London. (Well, today it hosts a posh marina and luxury apartments, but then again, such can be the aftertaste if you take a contemporary bite of Londinium.) It is places like this what made this city the global village it is nowadays.

If the tide is low, you can take one of the stairs, like Wapping Old Stairs, and descend to explore the shore of Thames, and if the tide is high, you can just follow the Thames Path and enjoy being close to water, an element I'm so fond of. Water is like hills and mountains - it adds something to the ambiance. And those Wapping Old Stairs, they are five minutes from our flat and can be found on the same narrow alley where is Town of Ramsgate, my potential local pub. It is a pub that lies above the Execution Dock, an historic site where Admiralty used to hang pirates, buccaneers and privateers who had crossed one line too much. Captain Kidd died there, and anyone who as a kid has played Pirates! is likely to agree with me if I tell you that such surroundings make your sauce taste somehow special. Prospect of Whitby is an even older watering hole and Dickens Inn, once a dock brewery, is the closest to my home, but I kind of feel that Ramsgate may well become my local. On my way home, I can stop and admire the view to Tower Bridge, and I've to admit that it's a view that strikes as pretty darn impressive after a couple of pints. This picture could have been taken more or less from our backyard.

We have a ten minute's walk to the Tower Hill - another famous execution site - tube station and a big Waitrose around the corner - meaning that I'm allowed to buy my drinks and groceries like a civilised man is supposed to buy his drinks and groceries, i.e. on foot - and the rent is dirt cheap for Zone 1. My housemate is an old friend of mine (whom I know through his sister, an old Lapinkaarian), which makes this place more fun as well. In my opinion we could do with a proper shower and without our ubiquitous carpet but this being a British house that would be a tall order.

So, that is how I became a man of East End.

Facebook circling

2007-10-06T16:11:00.000+01:00

Of other "social networking" sites I had already tried WAYN and LinkedIn, and found them equally useless. So in the first place I reckoned that Facebook wouldn't be worth the pain either. But then I came to London, was asked three times on my first weekend whether I was using Facebook and, when answering that no I am not, whether I knew what Facebook is, got tired of it and decided to succumb to the hype. And since September wasn't exactly the easiest month to be a jobseeker in London, joining Facebook made it easier for me to play the waiting game without being bored to death, and still staying away from väkijuomat, uhkapeli and other sins that might have proven fateful for my waiting game budget. To cut the apologia short, I signed up.

I've to say that I like it. It's simple to use and seems to have enough critical mass to become The Site of all networking sites, making it more likely that if you've lost contact with some old friend or acquaintance you can soon find him or her via Facebook. All that application fluff (Fight Club, Super Poke etc.) is quite annoying, but for someone who has friends all round the world and a very disorganised address book it's nevertheless a handy toy. I've also used it to get tickets for my first NHL game (25 quids) and my first Premier League game (10 quids) so, at least in a city as big as this, it makes a decent marketplace too. Moreover, curious bastards like me can make good use of possibility to spy on who belong to the network of your friends, who to their network, and so on. For instance, yesterday I discovered the following link from me to...erm, myself.

In August 2005, I attended to one pre-Erasmus Italian language course in Siena. There was another Finnish male person attending as well, from Helsinki, and he apparently knows Paavo Arhinmäki, a devoted AIK Solna fan and a Left Alliance MP often dubbed as a "professional activist". Paavo knows Heikki Paasonen, a TV presenter video jockey famous for not announcing the Eurovision Song Contest final in May, and Heikki knows Martina Aitolehti. I actually don't remember what Martina is famous for, besides allegedly shagging Alexei Eremenko Jr a good while ago, but she has certainly been the victim of possibly the most amusing tattoo gaffe I've ever heard of - an awkwardly visible (that is, in her field) quote on her lower stomach declaring that "there were is mill, there is a road", which she soon, after receiving a public English lesson, had smothered by another, less verbal yet still rather esoteric graffito.

However, Martina seems to be friends with Pauliina Tourunen, a some sort of miss/model/hostess/promotess, who can be at least found in a patient gallery of a Finnish plastic surgeon. Pauliina, from Äänekoski and born in 1983, belonged to the precious few of our nocturnal Brahmin cast, and, whilst entirely unapproachable for us commoners, of course, had always that awe-inspiring aura of social ascension around her, on one hand assuring me that she would make it big some day, as she undoubtedly has, and, on the other, making it psychologically impossible for me and my companions to leave our vehicle any closer than two parking slots away from her or her fiancé's white BMW. If there was no empty parking slot outside the radius of two parking slots from her or her fiancé's white BMW in the car park of Cirius Dance and Night Club, we had to remain in the limbo of circling round the Äänekoski market square until there was. And once inside the Cirius Dance and Night Club, her walk of nightlife was about so intimidatingly high heels, that a mere glimpse of them made you hastily check that laces of your sneakers were tied and, even if they were, kept you tieing them till she was gone and the air was still and protectively smokey again.

Therefore, alas, I cannot say that I know Pauliina Tourunen in person. Yet I do know my uncle, and my uncle, who indeed is a brother of my father, works in the same plywood factory where her brother (according to my mate Jaska's witness) works, or has worked. Had we known this years ago, it would have saved us many circles round the market square and plenty of petrol. Now it's definitely too late.

Though I wonder what would happen if I superpoked her.

New hockey blog

2007-09-15T17:13:00.000+01:00

Hockey in Finland aims at doing something similar to what Football in Finland has done for Finnish football, i.e. providing coverage of Finnish ice hockey in English. It's put up by Egan of FiF (HCM Tesoma fan) and the contributing crew besides us plus Jussi (Ässät) includes Ari of No Guiding Light (Kerho), Mika from Helsinki (Hifki), an Oulu-based Englishman known as Muukalainen (Kärpät), and Yves, a French Canadian Habs fan with the most remarkable cowboy hat of Tampere. Here is my debut.

I'll be following hockey quite closely, now that I'm residing in the UK. I noticed that phenomenon already during my year in Italy - ice hockey gave me some extra attachment to the home country, exactly that kind of "your thing" you want to keep when living in a new environment. I think it was partly because I've never supported any other sport clubs expect those of my home region, and of those the group in ice hockey has always been the first and the most important one. So through following the team you have followed ever since you were a small kid you somehow feel like being closer to your home, and all those people and places there. In a smaller scale, the same happened when I had moved to Tampere, and those four times per season when Jyp game to Tampere always offered an occasion to remind yourself and the others that, ahem, that's where I come from. It is this nostalgic side of things that gives it significance; I'm not sure whether I could feel the same without being personally able to reflect Jyp's present to Jyp's past, with all those noises and smells, and feelings of joy and disappointment, that you associate with it. Such are long distance relationships between a team and its supporter; absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that. Go west, young man, but know your roots.

You may know the feeling you get when you haven't had a chance to talk in your native tongue for a while. It's always a nice surprise when you meet someone who speaks your language and you genuinely enjoy listening to him or her, even if you wouldn't have much else than the language in common. Try to see sport from that point of view. Football is a bit like a lingua franca, or today's English, and allows you to share something with most of the people and to get along with them. It's your common ground, a pub. Whereas ice hockey, to me, is more like Finnish, a small language that is not spoken by every John Doe behind every corner of every city. So when I meet Canadians, Czechs and Slovaks we usually start from hockey. It's your private estate, a summer cottage. Basketball then, in my case, is like Italian. Mine is not very fluent, but certainly conversational, and meeting e.g. Serbs and Lithuanians gives me a nice occasion to draw from something I used to know well but haven't used lately. I don't know what it is, possibly your local barber shop, outside the historic centre, fairly priced and run by an old gentleman and his family.

Colonel P.J. Woods, the King of Karelia

2007-09-08T15:19:00.000+01:00

So I am in London. I'll post some thoughts on why and how I ended up here a while later, once I have settled in and survived the job hunt limbo, and this piece is just of one thing I wanted to bring to your attention. It's a book, published very recently, and I was asked to spread the word about it. Here goes, feel free to spread it further.

The King of Karelia. Col P.J. Woods and the British Intervention in North Russia 1918–1919. A History and Memoir

By Nick Baron

Synopsis:

"In June 1918, Colonel P.J. Woods, a Northern Irish officer who had just returned from fighting in France and Flanders, was sent to North Russia on a special mission with the British interventionary taskforce. At Murmansk, the Allied Commander-in-Chief General Maynard commissioned Woods with recruiting a volunteer battalion of local Karelians to fight against German-led White Finns. During the subsequent year, Woods organised and led the Karelian Regiment, headquartered at Kem' in White Sea Karelia, where he played an important role in the local population's striving for national self-determination. The first part of this book is a scholarly account of Woods' life and times, based on original research. The second part is Woods' memoir of his Karelian adventure, written with elegance, humour, and an evident love for the northern landscape and its people. This volume offers an important account of a hitherto overlooked episode in twentieth century military, diplomatic and political history. It will be of interest to anyone interested in World War One and its military and diplomatic aftermath in Finland and Russia, Karelian nationalism and culture, and the Russian civil war."

It makes an interesting story indeed, and I'm glad that it can be now read in English as well. There is relatively little research about the kinship wars available in Finnish, too - Heimosotien historia 1918-1922 ("The History of the Kinship Wars 1918-1922") by Jussi Niinistö is quite readable, given that its perspective is after all mostly that of the expeditionaries, basing on their personal recollections and ignoring the Russian sources. I'm particularly curious to read how the conflict was perceived from the British point of view, as that is understandably quite new to me - or to everyone else, for that matter. Well done, Nick! (That said, it took approx a nanosecond from a pedant within me to spot that "German-led" in the synopsis. Also that is most new to me, so to speak.)

The conflict in White Karelia (which could be, contradictory to the truism that liberal democracies don't wage war to another liberal democracies, interpreted as a war between Finland and Britain) was a direct sequel to the Finnish Civil War - after which a good number of northern Reds had fled to the White Karelia, thus posing a security threat to the north and northeastern parts of Finland. The Whites (the ideological Whites, not to be confused with the White Karelians) who went after them, then combined the Bolshevik hunt with their idea of Greater Finland - or of "three isthmuses" (i.e. extending to the shores of Onega and White Sea), as Mannerheim later defined it. The expeditionaries were an odd bunch; many were national idealists, many were mere anti-Communists and some had joined simply out of adventure. All were young; the leaders a bit above twenty years and the led more or less below it.

They failed, rather badly and due to several reasons. One was that they didn't have much more to offer to the local population than their great kindred thoughts, whereas the locals, living probably in the most rural and remote corner of Europe, would have been better inspired simply by bread - something they then got from Colonel Woods and the British. Another major reason was the fact that they didn't feel too Finnish, either, calling their western cousins "ruotshit" ("Shwedes"), and those who did feel even mildly Finnish weren't many. Tsar had got a large proportion of east Karelian male population killed and replaced by ethnic Russians during the WW1.

If any war can be normal, then this one was quite abnormal. A chain of skirmishes over villages in the middle of an endless forest, where roads were poor or non-existent, and the locals caught in the middle of propaganda about "kinship" and "national self-determination" - not forgetting those exiled Reds out there, adding to the confusion. (Less than a year afterwards, when White Finns took part in the Estonian Independence War, the WW1 was already over and the British had changed sides accordingly, this time supporting their cause and effort. That's real imperial fun.)

Incidentally, the White Karelia is one of the places where I want to travel in future. Solovetsky islands, for example, are one place I'd really fancy to visit, and especially that famous monastery there. It was built in medieval times, whereas during the Soviet times it was used as a gulag, one of the earliest - there are (in)famous stone stairs, at top of one hill, to where camp authorities marched their prisoners, tieing them to big logs and pushing them downstairs; if they survived, the treatment was repeated. Aside the brutal history, it should be a beautiful place, and I guess the same goes for the whole region. Remote, wild and somehow authentic, mystic, or at least so I am eager to believe.

I didn't bring much stuff to Britain when I came. About 25 kilos, mainly clothes and shoes; of stuff with personal, emotional value I brought only a couple of books and then some family related items. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an appropriate, and absolutely unsurprising, choice of reading for any young expatriate, and especially so as I have got it once from my mother as a souvenir from London. Then there is another souvenir, an icon, and that's from my grandmother, from a sort of pilgrimage she did once to Solovetsky - which is quite an important site for the Karelian Orthodox. It pictures monks Gherman and Savvatiy with their architectural model of the would-be monastery; they are presenting it to God, and God gives them a look that is fatherly incredulous, yet approving. So there you go, such is my personal connection to today's posting.

Now I'm off to West Kensington. There's a pub that, I've been told, shows all football and hockey matches of Finland, and there is one quite important tonight.

Blogging from South Sudan

2007-08-14T18:02:00.000+01:00

Here is an ordinary blog from an unordinary place, by a Neapolitan acquaintance of mine. His name is Gaetano and I've met him for the first (and so far, for the last) time in Catania, where we staying in the same youth hostel (which, oddly and luckily, wasn't hosting any members of the Australian white dreadlock movement) in the Easter week 2006. Been both subjected to the same academic nutrition, we went for a drink and were joined by a couple of my Dutch mates who happened to be around as well, and who then made me stay for a second and a third drink, probably until a twelfth, so that when I eventually made it back to the hostel and went to bed I snored the night away and, according to Gaetano's witness, kept everyone else in the room awake.

At that time, he was living and working in Paris, but apparently grew bored at some point and is now in Rumbek, southern Sudan. He works for one project that tries to set up a vocational training centre in one rural area of this war-torn region, often neglected by Khartoum and NGOs alike. That's something badly needed, since South Sudan's shortage of skilled labour is so severe that the firms there must often get their workforce from places like Kenya or Uganda.

For obvious reasons, the blog is not update on a weekly basis, yet it makes interesting reading nevertheless. So, for starters, get a glimpse of the Rumbek prison or think about how you'd feel if caught in the middle of a riot. Myself I would feel uneasy.

Gaetano's sister and her boyfriend, by the way, are working in Tampere. They live in Sääksjärvi, some 10km from the city, where they bought a house last winter. The food they have cooked has been very good.

Yes, he's on hiatus

2007-08-04T15:39:00.000+01:00

I haven't posted very actively lately, and there's a reason for that. I will move to London at the very end of this month - to start a career, a new life and all that - and have been pretty busy trying to finish what is left of my master's degree before my departure. I like to write at night, so I usually go to the university's computer room around 11pm and stay there till five in the morning, then sleeping till one or so, having a lunch and browsing some books, then having a sauna and taking a nap, eating and going again to the uni, with my books, a chocolate bar, a banana and a bottle of water. The first hour I spend by moving books from my left-hand side to my right-hand side and vice versa. The chocolate bar I consume at midnight, the banana an hour later and at two o'clock I tend to get some fresh air and thoughts by having a walk around the campus. It gives me a somehow relaxing, serene feeling, and I've to admit that these past few weeks have been perhaps the most rewarding and educational ones I've had during my studies. But soon they'll indeed be over.

So, this weblog will hopefully be back in normal business in the autumn, with a brand new expat blog image. I still don't know what exactly I will be doing in London but, as it happens, don't want to know it either. To those (annoyingly many, mind you) insistingly curious souls who have asked about it I have answered "only great things". Let's say that I prefer visions to plans - best strategies aren't defined, they emerge. And such is part of the real emigration fun too, after all; going towards unknown, without knowing what will happen tomorrow, settling in and finding your own way step by step. It's an inspiring feeling.

Nevertheless, one thing that is certain is the fact that I must find a flat relatively close to Rotherhithe. That's where the Finnish maritime church is located. There will be one of the very few proper saunas of the city, which means there will be my spiritual refuge whenever I will need one. I am used to take a sauna four or five times a week, and know for sure that if my new life won't include sauna at least four times a month I won't like living it. I was going to start regular avantouinti in coming winter, but apparently it was never to be. Or does Thames freeze up?

Therefore, my goal is that I will be doing great things and living relatively close to Rotherhithe. Those are the imperatives, the rest is varyingly insignificant.

Tuscan slip

2007-07-16T16:40:00.000+01:00

Giuliano Amato is one of those Italian politicians I have always considered both intelligent and decent, so I was indeed surprised to see him coming up with a gaffe like this. From Mr Daniele Clemente, my trusted informant in Bologna:

"No God empowers men to beat women. It’s a Sicilian-Pakistani custom which wants to show the contrary"

This statement declared today at a congress titled "Islam and integration" by our small professor provoked the rage of a number of PA representatives and, of course, of millions of people as well.

He furthermore said that only until the seventies there were in Sicily customs and traditions not very far from those introduced by some Muslims groups of immigrates today His aim was, or at least would have been, to set aside the point of religion on the integration of immigrants issue with the point of different cultural identities.

Well, draw your own conclusions.

How was your weekend, by the way? I hope you everyone had a great weekend. Myself I surely had a great weekend, and I just love Mondays like this, when you have had a great weekend, have charged your batteries and are ready to welcome the starting week with your arms open and a smile in your face. On Saturday I went to see a Finnish three-tier football game in Tammela Stadium. Sun was shining and the game was very exciting, and after the final whistle I and my friends continued the evening with a lovely picnic in an idyllic park in the centre of our city. A couple of drinks, tasty food, good music, peaceful conversations with friends...and even a dip in the pool when the temperature turned too hot for me to handle! When the night fell, I walked home, prepared myself a cup of green tea and slept like a small child. Sunday was very relaxing too, although in the morning I had a little bit of a headache. Must have been that sun...I never remember to wear hat when there's a picnic. (I know, it's so silly!) Good that my headache went soon away so I could continue my relaxing weekend.

It's the weekends like this, that make me feel that life is really like a box of chocolates - you never know what you are gonna get, but it doesn't matter because there are only nice things inside!

Oh perkele

2007-07-07T07:09:00.000+01:00

Viva Las Vegas. Who gives a flying fat seagullshit of football, really?

Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel
Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel
A bolt of fear went through him as they thundered through the sky
For he saw the Riders coming hard and he heard their mournful cry

Yippie yi Ohhhhh
Yippie yi yaaaaay

As the riders loped on by him he heard one call his name
If you want to save your soul from Hell a-riding on our range
Then cowboy change your ways today or with us you will ride
Trying to catch the Devil's herd, across these endless skies

Yippie yi Ohhhhh
Yippie yi Yaaaaay

Maalivahdit:
18 --- Tuokkola, Pekka
35 --- Laitinen, Jarno
72 --- Wallinheimo, Sinuhe

Puolustajat:
3 --- Kangasniemi, Miska
4 --- Saksinen, Esa
6 --- Leppänen, Erkka
7 --- Niskavaara, Jaako
8 --- Mäntymaa, Ville
33 --- Salmu, Juha
36 --- Forsberg, Henrik
56 --- Kaijomaa, Kalle

... Helminen, Lars

Hyökkääjät:
11 --- Sykkö, Tomi
15 --- Hytönen, Juha-Pekka
17 --- Jääskeläinen, Jari
22 --- Tenkanen, Valtteri
23 --- Louhivaara, Ossi
24 --- Mikkonen, Tuomas
28 --- Lahti, Miika
37 --- Niemi, Mika
38 --- Piiroinen, Samuli
39 --- Sipiläinen, Olli
40 --- Hannus, Tommi
42 --- Virtanen, Antti
49 --- Pihlman, Tuomas
81 --- Filppula, Ilari
91 --- Vänttinen, Tuomas

... Helminen, Dwight!!!

& Risto Dufva.

Indro Montanelli, my favourite dinner guest

2007-07-05T00:07:00.000+01:00

I was thinking about who would be the persons, dead or alive, with whom I'd most want to have a dinner, and realised that the first one to be invited would be an Italian. No doubt of that, actually, for a decent dinner needs decent stories and he'd be a man with a story or two to tell.

Indro Montanelli was a journalist who died in July 22, 2001, at age 92. (For an Italian obituary look here; for some reason I couldn't find the one by Corriere.) I heard about him and his life for the first time when Beppe Severgnini - a famous journalist/writer himself, and Montanelli's former mentoree - was visiting Tampere in May. He met the local Italian community over pizza and I, maybe typically, let myself to be invited. Instead of southern Italian, the pizza was western Finnish and thus rather bad, but the stories I heard were good - and that little I heard about Montanelli made me indeed curious.

This is a short version. He begun his career in the early-1920s. He sympathised the fascists until he volunteered as a conscript to Abyssinia and realised that it wasn't actually a very noble expedition. Upon his return to Italy, he became a correspondent in Spain, where he observed the Spanish civil war on the side of the Falangists. He shared his room with young Kim Philby, till the latter disappeared with Montanelli's socks and underwear. After the period in Spain, he was sent to Estonia and (then Italian) Albania. Then he went to Berlin to interview Hitler, and from there to Lithuania and Estonia, now the second time. After a stint in the Baltics he came to Finland, just on the eve of the Winter War. For Corriere della Sera back home he wrote strongly pro-Finnish articles, about the air raids of Helsinki and the battles in the front line, and was later thanked in person by Mannerheim. The articles were highly popular among the ordinary Italians but not among their leaders, who feared that they would hurt the warm Italo-Soviet relationship.

From Finland to Norway, which was being invaded. The Nazis didn't like his take on the current events and arrested him. The Norwegians (i.e. Quisling, in fact) helped him to escape and he fled via Narvik. Then he travelled to the Balkans, witnessing the mutual bloodshed there, and then to Greece, where Mussolini was trying, well...surely something. At this point he joined the Italian partisans. In the north Italy he was caught again by the Nazis, who this time condemned him to death - yet managed to escape, thanks to some mysterious conspiracy. Wikipedia knows the following, and if any of my Italian readers could check it from a book or something I'd be most indebted:

The identity of these conspirators remained a mystery until decades later, when it appeared that it had been the result of collusion by several agencies. Among them, Marshall Mannerheim allegedly put pressure on his German allies ("You are executing a gentleman" he said to von Falkenhorst, the commander of the German troops stationed in Finland) resulting in Berlin's opening of an inquiry.

Then the war was over and Montanelli continued with Corriere, writing in Italy and from abroad, till they got tired with his independent tone of reporting and sacked him in 1973. He founded Il Giornale, and stayed with his creation until its newish owner, Silvio Berlusconi, became a politician and concluded that he could do with gentler news coverage. (I understood that it was at this point when he took a group of young journalists, including Beppe Severgnini whom he sent to write from London, with him, or something.) Montanelli found up a new paper, Il Voce, which however went bust soon afterwards - and so he was back with Corriere. He had been among Italy's most prominent anti-fascists and anti-communists (for why he was shot at legs by the Red Brigades' gunmen in the 70s) and, lastly, he was given the same role as regards Berlusconi. It remained like that until his death, and I doubt Il Cavaliere went to his funeral.

A man who lived up to his ideals, I would say. Here is a long interview with him in English about Italy, the Italian civil society, corruption etc. - definitely worth reading, in case you find that country interesting. He's not being very positive.

But that dinner, who else would I invite? Well, besides Indro Montanelli, Ukki Väinämöinen is one who I'd be really curious to meet. His real name was Vasili Levonen and he was a Karelian vendor traveller, and the chief agitator in the East Karelian uprising. The pseudonym is of course a reference to Karelian folklore; Ukki's sidekick, Jalmari Takkinen, was then, of course, named Ilmarinen. (Yes, I would so much love to compare them to Mazzini and Garibaldi, the pen and the sword, but I quite doubt whether Ukki Väinämöinen knew how to write.) He was a short, extremely long bearded and a kind of rural mystic, if devotedly Greek Orthodoxian, whose speeches and stories were occassionally, say, ambiguous. I have only heard it at second hand, but what I have heard of him reminds me of what I've been told about some of my own ancestors.

And to fill the remaining seats I would pick Mufasa, Seth MacFarlane and - as for female guests - Margaret Thatcher, Hertta Kuusinen (whose dad was from our neighbour village; now within the Kremlin wall), Baba Yaga and that hot Montenegrin girl who gave me that red and white "Referendum 2006 - da, za vadzda!" t-shirt last summer and whose phone number I lost when I lost my phone in Georgia. Tsaritsa Alexandra Fyodorovna or Anna Politkovskaya to even it out, and that makes us ten - permitting that someone else than me will pick up the tab. Gabriel Knight and Felice Bauer to the standby list.

Petteri Koponen to NBA

2007-06-29T11:55:00.000+01:00

There was some Finnish sport history made last night. Petteri Koponen, Honka's 19-year old point guard, was drafted as the last player of the first round, or as the 30th overall. He was picked by Philadelphia who, according to a deal, traded him straight away to Portland - who had already chose Greg Oden at the very beginning. A first round pick means pretty likely that Koponen will make his NBA debut in the next season.

Hitherto, there have been only four other Finns drafted, and of them, only Hanno Möttölä, currently in Kaunas, has ever appeared there. Or, well, then there's of course Drew Gooden, who played in this year's finals with Cleveland, with a Finnish mother. She's from Sumiainen, the same village where I grew up, and met Gooden's father when he was playing for Huima of Äänekoski, a traditional basketball and paper mill town nearby.

(My regular readers may have been already slightly familiarised with the region's geography. And yes, I am obliged to mention that Pamela Anderson's great-grandfather is also from a place what is part of today's Äänekoski.)

Have a nice weekend, myself I'm off to Turku. There's the Veikkausliiga season's most important match so far and, besides, I haven't been to Turku for more than six years so this evening makes a decent night-time expedition too. Finnish football is a summer sport, and it's the very combination of midnight sun (or rather mere daylight, in these latitudes), warm beer with your mates and the game itself, which indeed allows it to punch above its weight as regards the atmosphere and enjoyability of the event.

I'll be secretly supporting TPS, by the way. As I am not from here Tampere United has never felt my club and TPS after all have Mixu Paatelainen and John Allen as their coaches. Mixu's father, Matti "Roto" Paatelainen is an old Finnish footy legend, who scored over one hunded goals in the first level and played over forty matches with the national team - and who, of course, had started his career with Urho of Suolahti (yeah yeah, where I was born, also part of today's Äänekoski) in the 1960s. As for John Allen, when he came to Finland in the 80s he kicked off with Huima's football section. So now you know.

Moreover, thanks to its location, all good things have diffused to Finland via Turku. Like hard drugs, techno music and Sweden.

All Finnish journalists are either stupid, lazy or racist

2007-06-28T00:19:00.000+01:00

I would truly like to know how many Serbian newspapers, radio stations and TV channels finally accused Martti Ahtisaari (who is a Karelian, by the way) of accepting Albanian mobster money. My own guess is that they weren't very many.

As for Finnish media, it has been laudably noisy making headlines of "Serbian media" accusing, claiming, reporting, declaring and insisting (fi, fi, fi, fi & fi) that Ahtisaari is a corrupt crook, but so far it has escaped my understanding which "media" they are after all referring to. It's been mentioned that some small (so small that it was actually quite tricky to google it down) Bosnian Serbian paper named Fokus had printed it in their article, and that B92, a Belgradian radio channel, looking for a high-profile comment on the allegations, phoned the Speaker of the Parliament, who then said that it should be investigated. Apart from those, our media have also referred to Serbianna, or "a web portal opposing Kosovo's independence", as it has been described.

I've failed to dig up more sources than those three, and of those three, Fokus is insignificant, Serbianna is a hoax and B92 doesn't seem very interested. Their English site hosts Tony Blair's farewell letter to the Kosovars (titled "Ahtisaari's plan right way forward") and mentions that Olli Rehn and Boris Tadic went to watch Red Hot Chili Peppers in Vojvodina yesterday (yep, the EXIT - this was Olli's second time in row) but any Finn bashing pieces I can't spot there. The Serbian sections seem disappointingly neutral too.

If that constitutes "Serbian media" (and it of course does, since two mediums are media - or "kaksi serbialaista tiedotusvälinettä" are "serbialaiset tiedotusvälineet", as our linguistic gymnastics has had it - but the tone has been anyway that there's a serious information war and anti-Ahtisaari slander campaign going on, the Serbs are doing it again etc.) it must be said that I won't be raising the roof for media literacy among Finnish journalists, especially now that Serbianna has had its url printed in Helsingin Sanomat. (It wasn't a big article, but still.)

It's a goddamn propaganda site and, given that it's in English, not even closely followed in Serbia. Usually our dear gonzos love to remind the dark side of the new media, i.e. lack of rules and control, and preach how you shouldn't trust it as you are used to trust the smell of ink and the noise of letterbox in the morning, yet when it comes to making juicy headlines they are more than willing to forget everything and to regard a nutcase site like Serbianna as an influential foreign medium.

Just for your information: majority of Serbs are more or less sane people. The same goes for Serbian journalists. That kind of news coverage we have just witnessed is either stupid, lazy or racist news coverage. Take your pick.

Speaking more of Serbianna, by the way, its contributors seem an odd bunch. There are Serbs and Serbian emigrants - who obviously feel bad about giving away their southwestern province - and then there is that American online Russophile Averko, but apparently many of the others are right-wing yanks who are opposing the secession mostly because it'll be a Muslim secession. Or what else can you make of subjects such as "Kosovo Jihad - Muslim extermination of Kosovo Christians", "Wahhabis endangering Serbia" or "Bosnia - the birthplace of Al-Qaeda"?

Just for the fun of it, have a look at this on Bosnian Muslim terrorism:

At the time, Bosnia's Islamic terrorism was focused against the Serbian people, and therefore "justified." But if al-Qaeda could succeed in Bosnia, it could succeed anywhere in the world. Today, their terrorism is aimed at the American people. If only the Clinton administration had taken serious action against known Islamic terrorists in Bosnia when he had the chance, perhaps 9/11 would not have happened.

The above-pasted, criminally hilarious final paragraph notwithstanding, the article makes a point, of course. A kind of. There were many mujahideens fighting and training there and a good deal of the firepower the Bosniaks managed to smuggle in (still remember that UN arms embargo?), via Croatia, was from Islamic radicals - and what wasn't, was mainly from the governments of Saudi-Arabia, Iran and Pakistan. That is how they did it.

Yet then again, without those "terrorists" and weapon trafficking, there wouldn't be many Bosniaks left today. So attempts to portray the Bosnian War as the harbinger of Eurabia, let alone the siege of Sarajevo as a latter-day Siege of Vienna, include some extremely macabre irony. But never mind of that.

Mind those blogospherically illiterate journalists, for starters.

Ahtisaari, bribed by eagles

2007-06-26T16:58:00.000+01:00

Finnish media is obviously at serious pains to figure out how to combine the traditional What They Are Thinking About Us and Our Boys reporting paradigm with participatory journalism and the completely new scenario where Our Boys May Be Occassionally Disliked.

Of our two tabloids, Iltalehti generally has lower standards, but if this (fi) makes it to tomorrow's print edition someone should give them a lesson in blogging. For this time their source is no one less than Carl Savich and his unyielding mouthpiece, Serbianna:

June 25, 2007 -- The Speaker of the Parliament of Serbia, Oliver Dulic, is calling for a formal inquiry into allegations that the Finnish UN Envoy for Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, has received bribes in access of 2 million Euros from an Albanian organized crime figure in order to have Ahtisaari write a proposal that will recommend independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo.

A report alleging Ahtisaari took bribes was reported over the weekend by a Bosnian news agency, Focus, specifying that German intelligence, the Bundesnachrichtendienst or BND, has uncovered accounts held by Ahtisaari that received 2 million Euros and that on at least two occasions Ahtisaari was a recipient of cash payments totaling in access of 40 million Euros.

That is what they had translated more or less as such into Finnish, including references to "Focus". Always warms your heart to see a professional journalist citing a non-existent news agency.

Next time a phone interview with Mike Averko, ok?

Update: YLE (fi) has noted the same exposure, but at least they are linking directly to Fokus, based in Banja Luka, and B92, based in Belgrade. At first I thought it was Savich himself who had made this up, but instead it owes to Fokus, apparently based in Banja Luka. B92, to my knowledge a serious radio channel, then asked comment from Dulic, who said that if it's true it's bad.

Continues here.

Juhannus

2007-06-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

Last week we were voting on a Spanish photograph contest (still open), and this time I'd like to ask you to make the same clicking effort for a Georgian dj. So, in case you're idle...you can listen to him playing here, and then vote here; enter the site by clicking 'zdj', then scroll till Gio Shengelia and give him five Z's. I promise not to make these puffs a habit, but he's a brother of my friend and, you know - I happen to like Georgia and Georgians.

(Speaking of which, I noted from Statcounter that yesterday someone from Telford, England, bumped into this site by a search like this. Don't get any ideas, you stalking bastard, or I'll get you arrested!)

Have a good midsummer, everybody. This is certainly my favourite time of and, as I haven't spent it in Finland for three years, I'm quite looking forward to some sauna by the lake. All that sunlight in the middle of the night makes a nice contrast with our winter - reminding me of how great it really is to have four seasons.

PS. You can still get yourself a pint (or something adequately pintish) by knowing who Finnish Veikkausliiga player has a nickname "Kone".

More Shqiperia

2007-06-20T21:43:00.000+01:00

I almost forgot to link to this one, but as they say, better late than never. It's The Economist's correspondent's diary from Albania, and definitely worth reading.

On Monday, the author thinks back to his first experience of the land of the eagle, back in 1989, and to how When Saturday Comes trafficked a coach full of British journalists into this awfully isolated country, drawn to play England in the World Cup qualifiers.

The Tuesday article explains Albania's warm relationship with the US. It ain't a new thing.

The one on Wednesday points to Albania's multicultural past and present. When I for the first time heard that "The religion of Albanian's is Albaniasm" saying, I considered it mainly a joke, but it may well have some truth behind. Near Butrinti, and the river where we had our charming harpoon incident, there is a small village. Very small, with not much more than one hundred dwellers, and seemingly with only two public buildings: a church and a mosque. There lies a lesson.

Thursday is about Albanian civil society or, in fact, lack of it. Strong family ties and a great sense of hospitality may make you a nice person, yet a less-than-nice citizen. Sad but true. And 45 years of Hoxhaist oppression and paranoia haven't helped either.

And Friday? Well, as for me, the Friday invokes memories. It tells how things are looking today and how they may look tomorrow and, as a part of solution, mentions the guys and gals of MJAFT. 'Mjaft' is Albanian and means 'enough', and is also the name for a prominent (and well-sponsored) youth movement. When in Tirana, I visited the Mjaft headquarters with Egan, and they gave us a bunch of t-shirts - and a plenty of advice what to do in Tirana; a lad we met there, Aldo, was at the time about to start for Tirana in Your Pocket and knew his city accordingly.

Ever since that, I've been patiently awaiting the day when I'm gently stopped on the street by a group of expatriate Tirana women, who have spotted the Mjaft logo of my shirt from distance and are urging to know the story behind it. So far it has been in vain, alas, as it really seems that Tampere has no Tirana women at all. Only men who come to me, ask whether I'm an Albanian and, after I've answered that I'm but a friend, tell me that, should I ever need help, I can count on them. I sometimes wonder what they may mean by that.

Then we usually talk about Sinan Hoxha's music.

What Poland got right

2007-06-19T23:47:00.000+01:00

I am personally on intellectual hiatus, meaning that I prefer to avoid politics and, for the time being, won't be posting anything that requires me to open PDF files or to comperehend something that I don't already comprehend - as such would exhaust my limited academic capacity and provoke my exploited brain cells to mass emigrate through my ear canals (now perfectly recovered and thus brain cell accessibile, thank you), causing me to neglect my recently-somewhat-sluggishly-progressed master's thesis even worse - but I guess I am however obliged to speak my mind on this issue. [Insert a liquor-related metaphor and some carefully calculated self-irony here, ok?]

So, the whiskey sibbers and wine whiners had it their way, and the EU is to give a green light to tutti frutti vodkas? How surprising. I think that all these labelling regulations are usually rather petty business and shouldn't be applied so strictly, and often, but I just don't like this north vs. south bias either. Like Alex Stubb said (auf Finnisch, Damen und Herren): our Polack-propped Baltoscandic bloc produces 60% of Europe's vodka, and consumes some 70% of it. So why in hell we aren't let to define what vodka is, then? Yeah? There are rules for wine, whiskey and calvados, why not for our smuck too? Oh, because it's not so important? That's why? Not so European? Yeah, could almost have guessed that. Dionysos hadn't heard of it and Bacchus couldn't hold it. Merde, if I only still had some good Azerbaijanian cognac left, this would be a night of bitter protest...

Well, for Finns it actually should not be that important. Finlandia is almost the only vodka we have, and it's quite bad if drunk straight, if you ask me. Shelves in Alko are full of different deceitfully vodkaish Finno beverages but very few of them are in fact called vodka. Those bottles contain viina , which is basically Mary Poppins vodka, i.e. distilled with a spoonful of sugar. But then again, that's exactly why we aren't calling it vodka; because they're different things. Why for heaven's sake you others simply can't follow suit?

Nevetheless, it's a busy season for the Moon Thieves. The Poles, to my understanding, are quite proud of their sauce, so now they will probably get even pricklier with some other, mayhaps a little bit more serious matters. If the vodka kerfuffle had a silver lining, then it'd be that slight chance that a mutual nausea over the West's/South's self-righteous and arrogant spirit-ual ignorance could consolidate Russo-Polish relations, but I somehow doubt that. Putin's a tee toller.

What's the idea of this provided that it was appropriately labelled thing, by the way? That's why this silliness is called a compromise, I know, but what does it mean in practice? Will all "vodka" bottles just get a small print that is to specifiy how they differ from the canon? Like a long time ago, when Nancy Sinatra was bound to explicitly articulate that, as a matter of fact, her summer wine was made from a) strawberries, b) cherries and c) an angel's kiss in spring? Surely against some GATT rule, that one.

Na zdrowie, yet have also a round-up:

Edward Hugh has an extensive AFOE post of what The Economist gets wrong with European demographics.

Our Man in Tirana sums up my thoughts on Albanian hospitality, whereas Tomás Ruta asks whether they, however, stole GWB's watch. (I don't believe so.)

Nosemonkey posts about possible constitution referendums and Jon Worth ponders the Nice sequel itself.

Ari shows why Americans, let alone American neocons, should think twice before offering lectures on European history - let alone Finnish history.

Claus Vistesen compares net migration patterns of Eurozone's big boys (or girls - mind the fronts of our Great Vodka War) and Kosmopolit reminds me of the fact they are the Portuguese who will take over the presidential carousel in July.

Then I'd finally like to hint you to this promising Belarus blog I lately discovered, and admit that I was not a reader of Petite Anglaise until its landslide victory in Satin Pajama Awards. Now I am.

Football in Finland's Egan was harshly outed by Tundra Tabloids, which may or may not have been because Tundra Tabloids was harshly outed by Football in Finland, whilst the latter was honouring Sükrü Uzuner - the greatest contemporary footballer in Central Finland, as we know it.

Osmo Soininvaara cycled safely to Riviera, but that's in Finnish. A nice travel story anyway.

Covering suicides

2007-06-18T23:15:00.000+01:00

In year 1990, 1520 Finns committed suicide. In year 2005, 994. That means about 40 per cent less suiciders in 2005 than in 1990.

Helsingin Sanomat gives it a wonderful two paragraphs long online coverage. If there won't be more than that in tomorrow's paper version, I may well drop them a line.

It was in the autumn when I last time posted about suicides - because of a friend who had died recently - and since that have grown increasingly repulsed by journalistically incompetent coverage of suicides in Finnish media. They are mystifying the issue, and that is irresponsible.

Beginning of the summer showed a perfect example when a twenty-year old guy in Suomussalmi, Kainuu region, shot first his younger girlfriend and then himself. The tabloid bandwagon was slapped awake, so in addition to the background and most of the details we were naturally told that the area where it happened has terribly high suicide rates and that especially Suomussalmi is suffering from a "serious suicide trend". I would have been sincerely delighted to read how is the trend of the past, say, ten years, yet our great civilisers concluded that twelve or so months were a shot long enough to picture a "trend". And never mind that "the tragedy, to which the Finnish man is so sadly often destined bla bla bla" tone of reporting.

Yes, it's awful news. But don't make generalisations out of it if you don't know what you're talking about it, or if you are too lazy to find out. They are only breeding the junk-scientifically fatalistic cultural perception that killing yourself is somehow an "ordinary" solution and that this is what we do when facing a dead end, have been always doing, and that there isn't much to do about it. Such is rubbish.

All this is topical because today there was a big international suicide prevention conference in Espoo, and they apparently took a glance on Finnish experiences - the long-term prevention programme our government finished was the first in the world - and lessons learnt. More must be done, but a forty per cent drop in fifteen years shows, above all, that something can be done.

So, what exactly? Gun and toxic control - pesticide poisoning, committed typically by poor farmers in rural parts of Asia, is the world's leading suicide method - and therapy, medication. Those should make a difference. I'll read more, if I find more.

Good news

2007-06-18T21:56:00.000+01:00

Aapo's Elevator Watch - part III:

Antti Herlin, CEO of Kone, has become Finland's first euro billionaire ever .

I'll give him a congratulation call as soon as his company comes and repairs my elevator .

Bad news

2007-06-18T21:09:00.000+01:00

Aapo's Elevator Watch - part II:

This is the twelth day that the elevator is out of order, and I'm getting pissed off. Someone here called the contact centre and was told that it won't be functioning until next week. There's a piece broken and they must get it from Japan.

From Japan? I seriously hope this is due to some kind of logistical priorisation, because if this building were a hospital, a retirement home or a skyscraper this would be a real pain in the butt. I bet it already is for those families living here - donkeying infants to and from the seventh floor doesn't seem very fun.

Kone (Espoo - ay ay!) is the company taking care of maintenance, but the elevator is built by Otis (Connecticut) - so who's to blame here? I play safe and blame both. Boo Kone, boo Otis, you both suck!

But to bring our thoughts away from this deep misery and ruthless imperative of physical exercise, let's have a quiz. I ask the questions and you tell me the answers. One pint for each right answer, two if I can choose the pub. If your prize is to be delivered in Tampere, you'll get it basically whenever you want; if elsewhere, you'll have to wait an indefinite period of time.

1) A club in Finnish Veikkausliiga has a player who is nicknamed Kone and who has well-known achievements in show business. Who's the player?

2) A computer game has a character named Otis who is in prison and whose escape involves a mug of very hard liquor. What's the game?

Now tell me. Leave a comment or drop an email.

Kristian (Espoo), Finland's uomo universale

2007-06-16T13:41:00.000+01:00

If you're interested in Finland and things Finnish, don't miss this one. Kristian (Espoo), very possibly my favourite blogospheric thinker, just doesn't stop astonishing. If you have ever wondered whether social sciences can be considered real sciences, wonder no more. This spectacle of sparking wit is to tie many cerebrally loose ends.

Allora. Kristian (Espoo) has found a new reason for why Finland is the poorest country of Europe: we're too introvert. Market economy requires an outgoing, sanguine mindset and apparently we don't have enough of that; the silent and shy are doomed to live in socialism. (Though let it be admitted that, according to the guru himself, the correlation is more likely to be the other way around - all men are born free and equally talkative; socialism then socialises your tongue, economic liberalism liberates it.)

But do you think there’s a correlation between the amount of talkativeness and outgoingness in society and salaries in the general economy? But even more fundamentally, do you think there’s a correlation between the amount of talkativeness/outgoingness and the economic system of a country?

As there is, however, a tiny chance that there are two or three peoples, who - at the level of sterotypes - are regarded as rather extrovert creations, living on the face of the Earth, yet for some mystic reason can still be perceived falling behind Finland in terms of economic freedom, Santo Cristo elaborates his theorem in the comments section:

Cuba probably has a more capitalist system than we would expect. The Socialist system can’t meet demand, so the black market is reputedly huge. That requires barter and yes, also interpersonal communication; I suspect even more than is required in the western world. Eastern Europe had a structure that was similar to Cuba. I’ve discussed it many times with my eastern European colleagues.

Also this is spot on:

However, the difference between Finland and western Europe/US is that the latter have always had thriving business cultures, whereas Finland has been relatively Socialist during the past 50+ years. In Finland, talking wasn’t necessary—neither for business nor for black market barter.

He's serious.

El Teide photo contest

2007-06-14T21:46:00.000+01:00

Alright, dear readers, it's time for some voter mobilisation again. I have a Spanish friend called Jonathan, who is living in Tenerife and currently participating to one photography contest. The theme is Teide, his island's famous volcano, and for Johnny's picture you can vote right here . It's a great shot of a great mountain so, vamos, click your clicks. (Four clicks, to be exact - which is as much as it allows.)

Una selva oscura

2007-06-12T21:48:00.000+01:00

The greatest malaise of Italy, to my modest comprehension, is the fact that the Italians don't have the concept of accountability (meaning that they, generally speaking, are nauseously forgiving), but the times might be slowly changing. At least this old journalist prick was forced to resign.

From Spangly Princess:

Gustavo Selva, aged 81, promptly dialled 118 with his 'cardiac crisis' and an ambulance duly arrived, taking him to A & E. On arrival at the hospital he announced that he 'felt a bit better' and asked them to take him to his cardiologist, furnishing them however with the address of the TV studios. Upon meeting with reluctance on the part of the ambulance staff he revealed his status as a Senator, threatened to get them all fired and was 'offensive and threatening, insulting the professionalism of the team,' according to the report compiled by the director of the paramedics' service.

Putting my love for Europe's worst, and the most senile, politicians aside, I think this is a classic example of how Geert Hoofstede's power distance factor works in practice. Higher the power distance, the more normal it is for fathers to know best, for superiors to show off their superiority and for the finest of society to enjoy privileges. Italy's power distance index isn't breathtakingly high, yet still a good deal higher than for example Denmark's or Austria's. And then again, he was ousted.

For once, unprecedentedly, I find myself in agreement with Roberto Calderoli, the Leghista, who commented: let's just hope that next time Sen. Selva has a heart problem he doesn't find that all the ambulances are too busy ferrying politicians around to their appointments to come and take him to hospital.

Hey, who else remembers Calderoli? When those power-distanceless Danes were having hard time because of their Muhammad cartoons scandal, Roberto Calderoli, then a minister, decided to help them by printing cartoon t-shirts and introducing them on telly. The day after, demonstrators tried to storm the Italian embassy in Tripoli, clashing with the riot police, and eleven people lost their lives. At first Calderoli strictly refused to resign, or even to apology, but was eventually smoked out of the cabinet.

Where eagles dare

2007-06-10T15:15:00.000+01:00

It had to happen some day. George William Bush is the first American president ever to visit Albania, and Our Man in Tirana reports that he's been also welcomed accordingly.

It's just after 10am and we've been watching the gun salute from our balcony - I assume it was 21 but I lost count. None of that feeble blank ammunition here - this was the real thing.

Yep, they take visitors pretty seriously. This visit, in particular, is a Big Thing for Albanians and Albanians, for that I have experienced, may well be the most hospitable people of Europe. Guest, any guest, is a sacred thing for them, and GWB is expected to give some extra boost to their NATO membership process. Call it closing the circle; it's not an awfully long time ago when the Illyrian nation was still fortifying herself with those crazy mini-bunkers, numbering more than 700 000 and aimed at hindering the inevitable invasion - either by President Bush's predecessors or their Soviet counterparts or, who knows, by Josip Tito, Hoxha's (that is, Enver's not Sinan's) evilly bourgeois neighbour.

Fellow of Eagles is another interesting expat blog I've run across, whereas here you can watch some nice photos from Albania's communist era. Browsing them gives me a funny feeling - I recognise some of the places, and the fact that Hoxha's Albania was so isolated corner of the world then makes it feel as if the pictures were taken in some kind of parallel reality. Here is the university; there we entered an empty class room and, cathartically to me, wrote an extensive list of Finnish swear words on the blackboard. As I never enjoyed such mischief when in school, I had to do it in Tirana.

It's an odd, somehow a very special country. I can't describe why and how, but it just felt really different from any other place I've been to. Here there be strange things to happen.

Like when we were going out in Tirana and, looking for a bar, walked pass one hotel. There was a big crowd of people gathered by the entrance so we, curious to know why, asked one of them what was going on. He was wearing suit and smoking a cigarette.

We: "So what's going on here?"

Man in suit: "We're going to shoot the final episode of the Albanian blind date show, and I'm the host. You guys wanna join the audience?"

We: "Well, we were actually thinking of going to a bar, so maybe some other time..."

Man in suit: "There's a bar upstairs."

We: "Sir, you may count us in."

That was the beginning to a very strange night out. The first thing I did in the morning was to brush my teeth three times, for it was the only way to get rid of the taste of home-distilled raki. The second thing was to find some ice-cream.

I ended up in the student village. One of the dormitories had a plate with a seemingly interesting quote on the wall: "'Intelligjenca pa vullnetin nuk vlen asgje' -Anne Franc." I went in to ask what it meant. Inside I found a group of girls who defined the meaning as "intelligence without courage is nothing", or something like that. Then I was kicked out by an old man, probably the dorm's warden. It was a girls' dormitory and since I was not a male relative to any of them, I was not allowed to be there. But the ice-cream was good.

And if you ever go to Albania, try not to miss Saranda - or in fact Butrinti, an archeological site close to it. It's damn beautiful. Across the river there's Ali Pasha's fortress, that can be reached by an old, pontooned ferryboat. When we took a ride, the ferryboat was stopped by one of those occassional blackouts that still bug the country, at least outside the capital, and besides us there were a few locals aboard. They had been fishing and one of them, a lad a bit younger than me, was holding a harpoon gun. All of sudden he turned it at us and, pointing to his mates, told us that "these people want your money".

A point-blank harpoon gun is a nasty looking weapon, believe me, and I was cursing in my mind that oh-no-not-again, at least not when I'm sober, and that my Italian friends, whose hysterically racist prejudices and warnings I had considered so infantile, had been apparently right - sons of the eagle were going to rob us, harpoon our heads off and dump our lifeless bodies in the bottom of the Corfu Strait. Before I managed to open my mouth and tell the guys that they were surely kidding, they all cracked laughing and the harpoonist said: "Just kidding."

Bashing cartels

2007-06-10T11:20:00.000+01:00

I live in the sixth floor and this is the fifth day that our elevator is out of order. It's an Otis, its maintenance is outsourced to Kone.

Sweet 16

2007-06-05T19:12:00.000+01:00

As the first European country, Austria has lowered the voting age to sixteen.

The measure — which was backed by four of the five parties represented in parliament but opposed by the rightist Freedom Party — was approved as part of a larger package that also introduced absentee ballots and extended the country's legislative period from four to five years.

Austrians already were allowed to cast ballots at 16 for some local elections before Tuesday's vote in parliament.

The voting age in most countries is 18. Nations that allow voting at 16 include Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Isle of Man, a British dependency in the Irish Sea.

That's sensible, given that right to vote has no upper age limits. Some time ago we discussed how the contrast between the elder and more numerous, usually economically passive and parliamentary active, citizens and the younger and less numerous, usually economically active and parliamentary passive, citizens will pose problems to democracy in the future, and this might be one way how to facilitate it. It won't make a huge difference, but will anyway soften the demographic bias at least a little bit. Now you just need to make kids interested in politics.

It ain't easy, but everything should be possible; witness yours truly finally discovering the Blogger's blockquote icon.

"You've got ear infection."

2007-06-04T21:49:00.000+01:00

I'm not very used to go see the doctor, but would like to stress that I can still perfectly comprehend if the likelihoods of the following sentences to be heard was somewhat low in the first place:

a) Now, Sir, as you probably understand, it is most awkward to ask about this, but for the diagnosis to be as accurate as possible, it would be important if you could reveal at which port cities your galleon has recently dropped anchor, and, where it has, have you personally succumbed to any form of carnal indulgences, and, if you have, how would you delineate the circumstances and, if you do remember, the potential providers of those indulgences?

b) Now, Sir, it must indeed grievous for you to recall the events in the queen's lair you have just unfolded any further, for so many brave marines have fallen there, but are you completely certain that the same explosion that killed your comrades, destroyed the lair and knocked you down, eliminated not only the queen itself, but the queen's eggs as well, and that there were absolutely no second-stage xenomorphs present during your unconsciousness?

c) Now, Sir, while my profession naturally prevents me from believing in existence of such practices, would you nonetheless let me inquire whether there has been even a slight chance of your former Beninese associate been able to collect and possess any four objects that somehow might relate to you, and could be described as something of the body, something of the head, something of the dead, and something of the thread?

But an ear infection - come on, that's a children's disease!

Though a very disturbing one. The antibiotics have now started to kick in, but there were a couple of days when it really felt like there was some tiny yet grisly lifeform trying to escape my skull through my ear drums, especially at nights. Quite easy to see why it makes kids cry.

And as my contribution to the blogosphere's ever-devoted Finnish Health Care Watch, let it be added that my visit to Äänekoski municipal health centre, without an appointment and after nine o'clock on Thursday evening, took approximately an hour and fourty-five minutes, of which an hour and half was waiting, five minutes registration of a new and non-resident client, another five minutes examination, and another more five minutes finishing an unfinished newspaper article I had started approximately three minutes prior to the examination. If some more vigilant and better educated citizen-taxpayer knows whether this is good or bad, he or she is encouraged to share his or her opinion. The service fee was €15 and the service was friendly.

The newspaper was Keskisuomalainen, health centres at those latitudes usually don't subscribe Helsingin Sanomat; there were also various women magazines and a few medical brochures available, and the latter category left generally a positive impact on me - "How good for me, at least I'm not one of those restless legs people", in case you have ever experienced the same sensation.

The antibiotics prescribed cost €24.75 at local pharmacy, of which the Social Insurance covers 42 per cent; that is, €14.40. This partial reimbursement I must request afterwards, via mail, as my Social Insurance Card is apparently somewhere in Tbilisi, Georgia - which, however, did not cause unbearably much inconvenience and economic uncertainty, since it was my mother who paid the treatment. It's a children's disease anyway.

[Update: Oh those Finnish health centres, homes of havoc and carnage. Ari has taken a glance at a night-time happening that took place in Lohja's municipal health centre last weekend. Matti Vanhanen and his girlfriend, Green MP Merikukka Forsius, were being insulted by some old geezer. According to tabloids, Forsius went berserk and hurled him with a toilet roll; it's still rather unclear whether it hit his head, shoulder or torso. Helsingin Sanomat adds that after the incident the man sent the couple a text message, to which they replied from the bride's cellphone - always an appropriate climax for these sort of stories. Content is unknown.]

Farewell to ashtrays

2007-06-01T21:37:00.000+01:00

It's a good weekend, this one. We're having a double matriculation at home, as both my sister and father graduate from gymnasium - she took the ordinary three year school, whereas dad finished his evening version in four years. A nice and rare occassion.

Moreover, Finland will play Serbia on Saturday evening, and these summer matches are the ones I like most in any qualification. Three points tomorrow, and another three out of Belgium on Wednesday, and the spring cockup in Baku shall be forgotten, or at least forgiven. The Belg bashing I'll witness at the place but tomorrow's clash I must watch in a pub - which then happens to involve the weekend's third great piece of news.

I've to say that I've been waiting for this moment. From yesterday night and onwards, restaurant smoking is finally forbidden in Finland. No stinky clothes and passive smoking anymore, from now on all my headaches will be totally self-inflicted; one pint tomorrow to the nanny state, or the bully state, should you find it more accurate. It's a classic case of what governments are supposed to do with markets - to correct market failures that sometimes occur. The market got its chance to provide non-smoking public houses, but failed to deliver them - if there were any in Tampere, I at least missed them - and thus deserved a slap in the face.

When I lived in Italy, one things to really surprise me was the fact how well their own smoking ban seemed to work in practice. Eyeties are said to be allergic to the rules they don't like so obviously they liked this one; I never saw absolutely anyone lighting a cigarette anywhere it was forbidden. The non-smokers liked it of course for the same reasons as I did (i.e. the selfish wish of being able to go for a drink or a meal without having to suffer from any unordered poisons) and the smokers seemed to have problems with it neither. Many said that this way they "were let" to smoke less, and the ban had also resulted in one positive externatility: a new piazza.

Going out for a cigarette had created a new arena of meeting and socialising with new people, and quite often there were more bar people outside the bar than inside it. The Italians let you to take your drinks with you, and have warmer winters and...eh, a city culture that tolerates noise better (i.e. a city culture) but I believe it'll work just fine also in Finland. And if it won't then I won't care, really.

Start doing snus, dear smokers; it looks disgusting but is healthier to everyone.

Oh, sorry. It's banned.

Salary caps and football - incompatible?

2007-05-28T19:43:00.000+01:00

A small cross post from Football of Finland:

As I wrote last week, the EU is about to release its white paper on sports in July. Among the illnesses it is expected to address are the difficulties related to clubs' financial and leagues' competitive imbalances - in other words, the clubs are spending too much money and the leagues are being dominated by too few clubs. The former makes European football economically unsustainable, the latter makes it boring to follow.

It is also widely acknowledged that the root of the problem are salaries - which have skyrocketed ever since the Bosman ruling. Independent Sport Review 2006 (PDF, check e.g. the page 73) prescribed the introduction of salary caps as a cure, and everybody from the UEFA to the game's oligarchs seems to agree. So the caps are good, aren't they?

Well, not necessarily. It really depends on which form they would take. The G-14 proposal, for example, would stop the arms race by tieing the wages to the clubs' overall budget - which would certainly ease the financial conditions of the clubs (including the G-14, of course) are facing, yet, as academically proved by this economics paper, just worsen the meritocratic side of things, by entrenching the existing hegemonies. So don't take their views at face value, at least if it's more balanced sport that you're after.

Perhaps there's something to learn from the other side of the Atlantic, for salary cap is after all an American invention. In the NBA such has been applied since 1980s, and also the NFL has had one for quite a while; the NHL introduced its a couple of years ago, after a season-long labour dispute, whereas the MLB uses a different type of balancing restriction, i.e. a luxury tax, under which the big spenders must pay a compensation to a league's fund. The NBA cap is "soft", or the one with several exemptions; the NFL and the NHL are using "hard", or uniform, limitations. All the caps are absolute, having no relations to budget sizes.

A much more traditional intervention in all of the league's then is the draft system - which has it that the young prospects from junior leagues, and from Europe, are reserved in an annual draft event where the previous season's losers are generally let to pick first and the winners last.

The systems aren't flawless but it's nevertheless safe to say that they have secured more volatile competitions for the spectators - as a glimpse on the recent playoff trees of any of those leagues can confirm. Dynasties are very challenging to create and uphold.

Many reasons prevent the Europeans from doing the same with football. The North American leagues are closed from relegation and promotion - and all of them are also enjoying a prestige monopoly over their game, having no other competitions to match their appeal. The European football leagues are understandably built in the shape of a pyramid, and have their top players spread across several countries - meaning that if there's a group of leagues to agree on a wage restraint, there's also a very strong incentive for one of them to opt out and snatch the best players. The national leagues are largely autonomous from their UEFA umbrella, which causes coordination to be pretty challenging.

And then there is taxation. Capped gross wages would give British (let alone Russian) leagues an advantage over their Italian and French counterparts - or, when speaking of the Championnat, what about AS Monaco vís-a-vís Lyon or PSG? There have been occasional musings about EU-wide tax harmonisation but that is (most fortunately, if you ask me) out of options. So the same gross will never mean the same net, not either to footballers.

Nonetheless, the review I linked speaks quite optimistically about the pay regulation plans. It points out that, through its licensing power, the UEFA did manage to unify different leagues' accounting methods, thus forcing mainly the southern clubs to play by the same balance sheet rules as the northerners. So where there's a will, there might be a way; as for the form of possible regulations, the paper is in favour of luxury/payroll tax, a scheme that would punish the exceedings but still allow them.

Stefan Wallin is ignorant

2007-05-25T16:31:00.000+01:00

Ben Zyskowicz, a Coalition MP and a staunch anti-communist (a trait that, as for Finnish convervatives, can't be taken for granted) is angry for Matti Rossi receiving a state literary award.

Matti Rossi is a translator, specialised in Shakespeare, and the only reason why I know his name is the incident that happened in 1975. Dénes Kiss, a Hungarian author, was visiting in Finland, and during his stay made some outspoken comments about his home country's regime to his Finnish colleagues, describing communism as "eastern fascism" - and among the hosts was Matti Rossi, who soon after informed Hungarian authorities of their cheeky dissident. It's not certainly known which sort of feedback they gave to Mr Kiss, yet we all acknowledge that it was probably nothing overwhelmingly positive.

Nothing about Mr Rossi and his case right now (at least those who have followed this blog for a longer time can possibly guess my opinion), but what is quite curious to me is that Stefan Wallin, the Minister of Culture and the (nice) guy who gave the award, didn't know of his past as an informer. Is he stupid or doesn't he read newspapers, other than Vasabladet? What kind of civil servant does he command? I'm dead sure that some five years ago there was a long debate about the issue in Helsingin Sanomat's culture section and I find it truly surprising that we apparently do have a Minister of Culture who wasn't aware of it. Uncle Joe damn us, even I knew about it - and I'm not really your greatest expert on Finnish literature scene. Herregud.

Stefan Wallin is a nice guy

2007-05-23T23:00:00.000+01:00

Guest posting - everybody's doing it. Right now I am guest posting for Egan, and in the spring had of course my own guest blogger, Ari - who is currently a nominee for the Most Underappreciated Weblog in the Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards, organised by A Fistful of Euros, to where I have once guest posted. I reckon it'd be somewhat banal to tell your readers to go and vote for your old guest posting crony but...hey guys, let's at least give that Kosmopolit (a damn fine Euroblog as well, by the way; my favourite for keeping me up to date on Transnistria) a good run for his money!

Of Ari's archives I'd like to pick up this fresh piece, simply because it gives attention to someone who very much deserves it. Phil, of Finland for Thought, hasn't been all that lucky with his own guest blogger, Kristian - also known as Kristian (Espoo). If Finland's English-written blogosphere is a virtual village then Kristian (Espoo) is its virtual village idiot. When I read his visions for the first couple of times, I got an impression that he was kidding, surely taking the piss of...something. Early Kristianity was occassionally funny stuff.

But apparently he's not kidding, and that makes him just absurd. My favourite used to be this story where Kristian (Espoo) goes to buy a chickenburger and gets fatefully disappointed - in a true D-Fens (or maybe Gordon Gekko) fashion, as someone there reminded. No one - absofookinglutely no one - rips off Kristian (Espoo), at least without regretting it after an inconveniently short period of time. "But, I had enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. Also, I was dressed rather well yesterday, so that probably gave me some credibility."

Yet now there's even a better one available. It's a hilarious manifesto on paternity leave, social engineering, Sweden, evolution, biology, sexual minorities, and what else - well, yes, on Stefan Wallin, the leader of the Swedish National Party and our Minister of Culture, who has said he wouldn't mind seeing more fathers making use of their share of parental leaves. How all those themes mentally merged into one grand theory of everything un-Kristian is still one grand mystery, but the main point is probably that no one - absofåkinglutely no fåking one - tells to Kristian (Espoo) about paternity leave, at least without being D-fenslessly ridiculed by search engines later. There are 95 comments, though I guess you can after all sum it up best if you ask Google.com for Stefan Wallin; Kristian (Espoo)'s policesquadishly titled Cross Dressers, Nancy Boys & Stefan Wallin ranks fifth. Not bad at all.

Kristian (Espoo) surely isn't Finland for Thought's worst guest blogger, however, for that undisputed honour belongs, from here to eternity, to FinnPundit. He was too repulsive to be a village idiot.

So, everyone interested in Stefan Wallin and nancy boys go there. But who are the googlers that come here? Well, for that I have followed from Statcounter, at least those surfers who are after Ilkka Kanerva, Helsinki Complaint Choir lyrics and (as I admittedly planned it) Sinan Hoxha's women. More elusive, understandably rarer hits then include for instance this, this and, of all things, this.

Osmo Soininvaara in Kaunas, Kaunas in Lithuania

2007-05-16T23:17:00.000+01:00

Here is an interesting blog to follow, though only for a month and your Finnish skills permitting, about Osmo Soininvaara's bicycle tour to the Mediterranean. Soininvaara is a former Green leader, retired from the Eduskunta this spring, and he is going to show how lovely way to travel cycling can be. He started from Tallinn about a week ago and his plan is to make it to Nice by mid-June. Sounds nice indeed.

Osmo is now somewhere in Lithuania. The latest entry is from Lithuania's inter-war capital, the...hmmh...exciting city of Kaunas. I've been to Kaunas, but won't bore you now by telling what I was doing there.

It nevertheless gives me a suitable excuse to bring you up to date on Lithuanian basketball playoffs. The league's two absolute dominators are once again in the finals. BC Lietuvos Rytas is named after the country's biggest (and the most decent one; the second biggest, Respublika, was the one who printed that slightly controversial series of articles about Jews, homosexuals and how they are ruling the world in secret) newspaper, their main sponsor, whereas BC Zalgiris, from Kaunas, has of course got its name from the Battle of Tannenberg. That's where the Poles and the Lithuanians, led by the arsekicking archduke Vytautas (plus some Polack called Jogailos), kicked enough Teutonic arse to became a medieval superpower. Zalgiris is also the label of a strong, approx 70% by its volume, alcohol beverage and in such form can be most conveniently enjoyed by appropriate toasts to the memory and legacy of the good man Vytautas - or Mindaugas or Gediminas, or why not to all archdukes you just happen to remember. (Yes, I am getting nostalgic and will stop it here.)

The finals, best of seven, are now two-two; Lietuvos tied it at home, after a fantastic performance by Martynas Gecevicius, their supertalented shooting guard, who turned 19 yesterday. It may give me a bad name among my fellow dukes in Vilnius, yet am personally rooting for Zalgiris, and not only because of my sudden boost of nostalgia - or because of our Hanno Möttölä, currently playing there. Above all it's the team of Sabonis, and Sabonis was always my favourite player when I watched basket tournaments as a kid, together with my basketball enthusiast father.

The 1992 bronze may well have been the single most important medal of the Barcelona Olympics, considering what the nation to win it had just experienced, and then the 1995 world championship final against Yugoslavia is probably the most unforgettable basketball match I've seen. Djordjevic was scoring three-pointers like crazy, and in the thrilling end Sabonis was sent out after a technical foul - to which the Lithuanians protested by almost leaving the field. The audience was booing and cheering at the same time and no one seemed to know what was going to happen, yet then they continued playing and the Serbs/Montenegrins won 96 to 90.

Sabonis, Marculionis, Kurtinaitis, Karnisovas, Einikis - Djordjevic, oh oh oh. Yep, that's how you make friends without knowing their language. And, naturally, in Serbia you can put it other way: Divac, Danilovic, Bodiroga, Savic - Djordjevic, ooh ooh ooh! Being a civilized European man is really simple.

Therefore, if you so desire, through those links I recommend you to follow Osmo Soininvaara's way to Nice and Zalgiris' way to...well, back to Kaunas, at least. This is Bicycle Race by Queen, and this is Trys Milijonai by Marijonas Mikutavicius. The former is a legendary cycling song, the latter is the Lithuanian basketball anthem. Trys Milijonai I used to have among my cellphones ringing tones, until the same phone got lost in the winds of Georgia; the name, as the smartest of you possibly guessed, means "three millions" and is a reference to the (then) population of Lithuania. They are/were actually about three and half millions but, when you're watching basketball and toasting to archdukes, you can by all means ignore an odd bunch of Poles and Russians.

The exciting city of Kaunas is also the home for FK Kaunas, a football club. I once saw them playing a Champions League qualifier against Faroe Islands' HB Torshavn, but can't remember what was the score. Football isn't really a big thing in Lithuania, so who cares? Labas, i sveikata, kirpykla.

[Update: Zalgiris cleared the finals 4-2, Soininvaara got out of Lithuania as scheduled. Right now he's in southern Poland.]

Aapotsikko demands: Sinan Hoxha to Eurovision 2008

2007-05-14T00:31:00.000+01:00

Now that the Serbs have won the Eurovision 2007, Aapotsikko can reveal to you which country is going to rock it in Belgrade next year, given that they will understand to send there the right artist. If they will, there's nothing to stop another Balkan triumph. But hang on first.

I think Finland and YLE put up a good show. I liked especially the postcards between the songs; I had had disturbing nightmares of smug clips about the welfare state, technological innovations, or the cabinet's female majority, yet must admit that the ones broadcasted were nice, telling about this country pretty much what I had told myself. Good job.

I naturally voted for Georgia, though after listening it twenty times in row today have started to realise the potential ingenuity of the Ukrainian entrant. Its Eurovision spirit verges on psychedelia. Sieben, sieben, ay lo lo! Lay lay la la la, la la la la la. Ruki, ruki, ruki!

I'm not kidding when I say that the contest in question does have its own important role in nurturing pan-European awareness and identity. I sincerely believe so. That Saturday evening is one of the few things we all really have in common - once a year it unites Europe's living rooms in a way the EU's parliamentary elections just can't. Everybody loves to hate it and complain about it, but it is anyway our thing. Much more than Ode to Joy is. Our own inside camp joke.

I still remember this one year's show, in the early-90s, when Bosnia and Herzegovina participated for the first time. Sarajevo was under siege and the video signal through which they gave their points was really bad. I was quite young but had followed the news enough to know what had been going on there. I have no idea what their song was, but I do remember the sensation I had while watching it. Distance from Central Finland to Bosnia felt rather small that evening.

Considering that the Balkan voting bloc is currently this powerful, I find it odd that we've been so far spared from the greatest of their musical assets - i.e. turbofolk. It combines traditional folk tunes and lyrics with a varyingly heavy techno beat, and in my very humble opinion can cause a permanent brain damage if listened sober. Older stuff has also its political dimension, and for instance in Serbia is linked strongly to the Milosevic era. The local turbofolk queen is the widow of Arkan.

Remember what happened to Serbia-Montenegro's Evropesma dreams last year? The Montenegrins won the qualifier vote and the Serbs concluded that it had been rigged. Then they fought over it for weeks and finally withdrew from the final altogether. The runner-up song to raise all that passion was this one; the old guy rapping in the end is not an Orthodox priest but Luis, a Serbian jazz legend. When I was there about a year ago, Montenegro and her beautiful daughters seemed after all quite happy with it, though, at least for what I could grasp by infiltrating their nightlife; a version with new lyrics (Podgorica-Beograd, Budva-Bar-i-Novi Sad...) was played almost everywhere we went.

I don't wish to exaggerate this year's result, yet am nevertheless happy that Serbia won. It's a country where good news are an alarmingly scarce resource, and it is all these small things and gestures that are mentally linking it to the rest of Europe, bit by bit, hopefully contributing to a healthy sort of national self-esteem. At least I hope so. And coincidentally, now they have finally a new government too.

But about that next year's winner. Albanians should finally see reason and send there Sinan Hoxha. He rocks. He rocks like no Albanian has ever rocked before. There should be an online movement to campaign for his attendance. Europe must hear about Sinan Hoxha.

See yourself. That many Tirana women can't be wrong. If you fancy more, then here is an excellent site hosting Albanian music videos. The Sinan Hoxha section has four songs, and my personal favourite is that last one. Sinan Hoxha is cruising his jeep full of Tirana women (who aren't wearing seat belts) in the middle of nowhere. I'd probably locate it somewhere between Durres and Vlora, if asked. Then they stop and start singing and dancing - intentionally or unintentionally as the title, Me Hir A Me Pahir, has it. In the end the Tirana women steal the jeep and leave Sinan Hoxha and his mate in that middle of nowhere somewhere between Durres and Vlora; the sons of the eagle will have to walk home. Be careful with those Tirana women next time.

As for Croats, I advice them to participate with their lovely Lana Jurcevic, preferably without that Luka guy. I can recognise a talent when I see one.

Resting in peace?

2007-05-11T23:15:00.000+01:00

Dust is settling and heads are cooling, but the bizarre kerfuffle over Aloysha the broze soldier stil lingers. The world's first country to introduce online voting has been under strange cyber warfare, and Edward Lucas points out that this has drawn serious attention from NATO's own computer wardens too. Thanks to the hackers, the Estonians are gathering some valuable lessons how to handle such attacks in the future.

In another article, Lucas raises the question what may happen if Russia will stop being so clumsy and erratic. Estonia did finally receive support from its allies, yet this happened belatedly and only after Moscow had bungled its hand - what if they suddenly learnt how to play smart?

And of those allies, as full of pan-European solidarity as ever, this great SPD statesman thankfully gets his own, making me truly wonder how history will judge him one day. Call it Deutschlandisierung:

Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who now chairs a Russian-German gas pipeline, said Estonia had contradicted “every form of civilised behaviour”. Given that at the time of his comment thugs were blockading—and threatening to dismantle—Estonia’s embassy in Moscow, it would be interesting to know Mr Schröder’s definition of “civilised”.

The case is also continuing in form of diplomatic correspondence, and that is being covered by Ari. I'm secretly awaiting the EU foreign offices to show some historical sense of humour, and to return with a modern Cossacks' reply.

Justin has written an extensive post of how the Soviets dealt with the Estonian state builders, after the so-called liberation. Check also this a little bit older piece, about Estonian demographics and much-discussed minority issues in perspective.

Botanist on Alp and All About Latvia both offer wise thoughts on history and attempts, or accusations, of rewriting it. I have often pondered this striking disparity between the Russian propaganda machine and the reality, when it for instance comes to paying tribute to the fallen. Every myth, anniversary day and historical gesture gets cynically exploited, as in the case of the bronze soldier or the Victory Day, whereas outside the parades veterans are left in deprivation and cemeteries must give way for highways and shopping malls. To officialdom humans still have mainly a numeric value and memories are a handy way to keep drones happy or, perhaps preferably, conveniently angry towards The Others. Fascism is just a word.

Or as the Botanist concludes:

So, the macabre dance on the graves goes on: the millions of victims are not named, not listed, not honoured, not remembered, not mourned. A huge moral collapse is thus celebrated and exalted: iron has entered the centre of a great state's soul, poison lingers about its political elites and public discourse. As long as this goes on Russians will be viewed by their rulers not as individual citizens of independent value but as nameless cannon fodder of power politics, as perpetual pawns of history to be thoughtlessly sacrificed whenever needed by the elite organs.

Félicitations, et bonne chance

2007-05-06T23:56:00.000+01:00

Some years ago I was in Hendaye, a small border town in the French Basque country, with an intention to catch a train to Biarritz. I was wearing my blue and white football jersey, and a silly hat. It was early morning, I was at the train station, the train was just about to leave and I was running to the platform. In the doorway to the platforms, I accidentally blundered with rugsack into one old gentleman, about 80 years old. I stopped and mumbled an apologise, letting him to go first. He didn't move but looked at me, grabbed my arm fatherly and said something in French. I cursed in my mind that now I'm probably going to receive one of those long lectures of how to behave in Europe and will miss my train, telling him that unfortunately I don't understand any French but am anyway sorry that I pushed him. He looked me into my eyes and replied back with a very good English, that "son, that was very kind from you to let me pass first" and asked where I was from and to where I was travelling. I told him that I was from Finland (can't tell for certain whether I pointed the blue and white of my jersey, but let's pretend that I did) and that I was trying to get to Biarritz, to which said that then I should hurry and run to my train, adding that he can show me the way. The station was really small so I really didn't need any guidance, but he seemed so devoted to help me out that I just decided to follow. When we reached the platform he shouted to the conductor that they should wait till I was safely in, and wished me bon voyage. I answered with the only polite French sentence I at the moment recalled, Viva la France. The train took me to Biarritz, my feet took me to the airport, an airplane took me to Stansted, and a bus took me to Colchester, Essex. From Colchester, Essex, I returned very soon back to Finland, though without the blue and white football jersey, and the silly hat, which both I left in the island. But that's another story.

So, Sarko's the winner. I'm quite happy with that. He can't be worse than the previous leader coq, and may indeed come up with a rupture or two. We'd be all much better off with an economically sound, growing France, than with a stagnated, uncertain moaning show that can't make up its mind of what it wants to be, or can be. France has a relatively low median age and also a relatively high fertility rate, meaning that doing the right thing is still more a matter of will there, than it is for example in Germany, which is more or less doomed to decline. There's a real chance to make things better, now take it.

And moreover, If he'll manage to shake up the economy he will cure those famously troubled banlieues too. It may appear frustratingly dull and boring to some, yet those carburning kids there don't exactly need the love of Kärchers but, simply, jobs. The same logic goes for Turkey; Sarkozy is supposedly strictly against anything scenting of a membership, though I believe that if he will give the French a new future he can afford some European responsibility as well. Fingers crossed.

Anyway, not even in evenings like this, let's not forget this well-known quote:

"Over the past 20 years, little by little, the French people have divorced themselves from France. An economic crisis seemingly without end has broken for many the link of confidence that tied them to society. There is anxiety over unemployment and the risk of exclusion...Disquiet over a future that casts doubt on a belief inherited from the Enlightenment: that tomorrow will be more glorious than today, and sons happier than their fathers. It is not a matter of fatigue, nor malaise, but a veritable collective depression."

By Jacques Chirac, before the 1995 election.

About that Finnish blogger with strong opinions

2007-05-03T15:50:00.000+01:00

[Disclaimer for a hasty reader: this post and its comment section contain quotations of idiotic written statements made by somebody else than me. I have translated them merely in informative purposes, as they were originally written in Finnish and most of my readers don't know that language. I personally think they're rubbish and my intention is not to give them extra publicity. If you wish them to be removed, leave a comment or use the email available on my profile.]

I'm not awfully proud of giving this lad the attention that he's seeking, but if this case is going to catch some international observation (that is, also outside the Gates of Vienna) I'd have to give it anyway a word or two sooner or later. So I do it now.

Mikko Ellilä is a Finnish blogger who is to be under investigation from the Finnish police, for incitement against an ethnic or religious group, or something like that. He has, to put it euphemistically, strong opinions and he tends to speak them out; someone didn't like them and has reported an offense.

Yep, it has to do with Muslims. I've scrolled through some of his posts, and didn't find anything that, to my understanding, could be excplicitly be regarded as hate speech or incitement to violence by a prosecutor, yet have to say that I'm not really acquinted with that part of our legislation either; some pieces are certainly on the verge of it, so this might make an interesting precedent. Since the law that attempts to combine the freedom of expression with the protection of beliefs is rather vague, there's perhaps a new line to be drawn.

These are my own translations, of the bits that drew my attention:

Muslimien valtaannousu tappaa Euroopassa 20 vuoden sisällä enemmän ihmisiä kuin toinen maailmansota. Muslims' rise to power in Europe, within the next 20 years, will kill more people than died in the WWII.

Maahanmuuttajista vuositasolla joka tuhannes syyllistyy raiskaukseen. Suomalaisista vain joka 20 000. syyllistyy raiskaukseen per vuosi. Of immigrants one in a thousand commits a rape on an annual basis, of Finns only one in a twenty thousand.

Islamilaiset maahanmuuttajat ovat jo nykyisin Suomessa ym. Euroopan maissa samanlainen pysyvästi ongelmallinen etninen ryhmä kuin neekerit USA:ssa. Muslim immigrants in Finland and other European countries are already a similar, permanently problematic ethnic group as the niggers in USA.

Basically all the posts are dealing with themes like Finnish rape rates, Eurabia, islamofanaticism, multiculturalism, the appeasing establishment etc. etc. - and always from that certain perspective. Freedom of speech is of course something inviolable, everyone should have the right to his opinion, you don't fight unpleasant things by banning them, and all that mantra, yet in my own, hopefully inviolable, opinion the civil liberties in Finland won't be compromised very brutally if Mr Ellilä is to receive a modest fine for his "thought crime". I'm not absolutely sure if such would be the right outcome, but my gut feeling is that we might be able to live with it. Call it pragmatic indifference.

Nevertheless. Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or to cry in this country. The size of our foreign population is among Europe's smallest and even still you can find these gene pool defenders who're afraid that the entire society is already falling to pieces. It really makes me wonder how they/we will cope with the future - as we've discussed earlier in this blog.

Speaking of genes, can you tell which nation has the highest homicide rates of Old Europe? Well, have a look at here. (And while you're having your look, you may well have a laugh at The Guardian. Or am I the only one who finds the fourth para somehow amusing?)

Back to the Urals, you inherently murderous barbarspawns.

[Update: Aha, so it was the Ombudsman for Minorities who filed the report. Mikko Ellilä is to be heard on Monday, let's wait and see. On one hand, wankerness is still not a crime and my hawkishly Orwellian eyes could indeed spot nothing that unmistakably qualifies as incitement to violence - if you don't count the comment on French elections, where he first praises Le Pen and then quotes the Marseillaise (no camp at all, eh?) or his implicit "they kill, they rape" (...so what the hell are we waiting for?) flow of thought - but on the other, if there's even the slightest chance to see Mikko the Martyr on Fox News I reckon we should seize it. Albeit just for the sake of amusement.]

[Update 2: A refreshingly unblogospheric take on the issue, by Ontario Emperor.]

[Update 3: No Fox News, apparently. Mikko Ellilä (aka "One of the Foremost Finnish Immigration and Islam Critical Bloggers", as they had already babtised him) is to be questioned over his rants about Africans, not Muslims; "According to Africans, robberies, rapes, nepotism, corruption, tribal wars, superstition and spontaneous, wantonly committed murders are business as usual. If Africans will become a majority in some non-African country, this country will become Africa." His fellow freaks probably won't mind, or know, the difference, but I'm worried that the neocons may have to abandon their newly-adopted Wunderkind. What a pity. Read a translation of the complaint and causes of action here.]

Thoughts about tomorrow

2007-04-26T03:28:00.000+01:00

I had a pleasure to attend one interesting seminar (yes, Messrs Vanhanen and Kanerva were there too) in our Eduskunta last week and was given a bunch of books. They are publications by the Committee for the Future - which, as far as I know, is internationally a rather unique institution, set up simply to predict tomorrow - and include a demographic forecast, Russia in 2017 and then two about the future of democracy and parliamentarism.

In the following I'll sum up a few things about the latter theme; the book in question is Demokratia tulevaisuuden myllerryksessä (Democracy in Turmoils of the Future), written by Mika Mannermaa and and approved by these fellows.

As a sort of summary, Mannermaa has included "the future theses of democracy by year 2017" - they are over twenty in total yet these are the ones that caught my extra attention. They are not translations or exact quotes but my own interpretations.

- The ageing electorate will elect ageing representatives, and ageing representatives will make decisions that are in interest of the ageing electorate. This will deepen the intergenerational gap.

One of my favourite themes indeed. You can see the generational conflict of interests already today; take the recent pension reform ("new entrants only"), the two-tier labour market, or for example the new copyright law - which had been hardly possible had there been more members of parliament who actually use MP3 players. There will be more in the near future.

- To deepen the gap further, the electorate will consist of the babyboomers, whose view is that voting is the only appropriate way to participate, and of younger citizens, who don't share it. This will also largely ensure that there won't be changes in party typology - which will however start happening eventually, after 2017.

Sounds plausible. The traditional parties will hang on to power and those who will be voting won't see any reason to change them. This however is not the point; either the generational gap will be accomodated by the party system, when it becomes a divisive issue, or it will be not - when more and more voters must vote against their own interests. The former option will bring the system in turmoil, the latter will undermine its legitimacy.

- The younger generations will have control over technology and economy, so they must be listened to. They may start ignoring the official decisions and find instead their own ways to push their interests. Their loyalty towards the nation-state will be considerably lower than it is among the elder citizens.

Well, yes, if I find the system unfair and my tax burden too heavy I consider it even my moral duty to vote with my feet. I do have altruism and solidarity towards my fellow citizens, but supporting their privileges and vested interests just isn't my favourite way to express it; if I want to contribute to greater things, I may well move to Georgia - there's a country to save.

Curious asymmetries, nonetheless. The creative class will be crucial for the economy, but may not have enough power to enjoy the fruits of it. As well, their own context will be increasingly global so ties to some certain place may not make that big a difference anymore. How will you commit a project nomad? Mannermaa also predicts that politics and participation will increasingly often happen online - which is where the minority will have the power to define.

Immigration, likely to increase, will diversify the values, cultures, religions, ideas of society, and so on. A multi-valued society may lead to the reality of neotribes, where the people network, participate and interact in small groups and in contexts they happen to find comfortable. Discussion about "societies", as plural, will begin.

Here I'd first stress that if immigration won't increase - and to a much much larger extent than we've seen, or even imagined - we will go bust. As it appears today, and according another of these books I got, in order to balance the impact of ageing Finland should invite in so many new citizens that in year 2050 one third of the population would be foreign-born - which of course is impossible, but gives you maybe an idea of the scale. And we're anyway a country with a relatively high fertility rate; whereas Germany will need one million new immigrants a year, approximately from year 2020 and onwards.

Think about what multiculturalism will mean for the welfare state. A multi-valued society is a society where people have different opinions and, indeed, may even disagree with each other. It was in the eve of the latest election when I read an article that interviewed some ethnically non-Finnish candidates and - surprise, surprise - their views to me seemed economically clearly more liberal than those of their Finnish peers. They came from cultures where the concepts such as the state, individual, family and self-reliance may be perceived very differently than in ours. Indoctrination won't work anymore?

They can be certainly excluded from the electoral process, by stricting the conditions for citizenship and treating them as mere Gastarbeiters, but that would then worsen the scenario pictured earlier - the growing power asymmetries between the economically "active" and "passive" residents.

I'll see you in Tarnova

2007-04-24T18:33:00.000+01:00

It was through the newest Euroblog roundup, temporarily hosted by Siberian Light, that I spotted this post about the Moldovan online awards, or one of the nominees. It's the village of Tarnova (or Tirnova, as it apparently fits into English), home for 2105 people, and their superb website. The Romanian version is readable enough if you know some other Romanic language, yet no worries even if you don't - it's in English too, of course.

This is certainly one of the most extensive municipal websites I've ever visited. It has the list of the oldest inhabitants, Tarnova's founding history, the opening hours of the shops, the number of bicycles, many pictures, extra-curricular activities (and achievements) of the school and its pupils - and for example also this motto of the local kindergarten:

“If you want to have success a year- grow wheat
If you want to have success 10 years –plant trees
If you want it have success 100 years – bring up children”

Translations seem a litte bit funny here and there, but if you compare it, say, with the website of Äänekoski, where my family is living, still available only in Finnish, there's no point to complain.

Damn good job. You'll have a (real-life) visitor from Finland someday.

More of Moldova, Kosmopolit and Edward Lucas both hold views that the likely deal between Moldova and Russia over the status of Transnistria deserves no applauds. This from Kosmopolit:

Of course “democratisation” sounds attractive but without an agreement on a truly free and fair electoral procedure (including international/non-Russian election observers) it will not work. Moreover, the plan does not seem to touch the problem of the Transnistrian security services/ military structures. The plan also gives the impression that the Transnistrian elite would just be ‘transferred’ to the Moldovan parliament/government (where they would enjoy immunity?). Another important issue for further negotiations are the numerous constitutional problems of this plan.

Also, the planned withdrawal of the Russian army in two years sounds familiar: Russia announced in 1993 to withdraw its troops by 1996 and again in 1999 to end the presence by 2002. Since this plan has been developed outside the official 5+2 negotiation format, it remains to be seen if it will be more successful than the ‘Kozak-Memorandum‘ that was also negotiated bilaterally.

Europeanness - not for permanent markers

2007-04-23T18:50:00.000+01:00

It's St George's Day today. Nosemonkey has an excellent post about how pointless it is for some Britons to cherish him as a symbol of national exceptionality and splendid isolation, since he after all is possibly the most pan-European character you can name. I'd add that, besides Euroskeptics, also those who call themselves Europhiles should take note.

He was born in Anatolia, modern Turkey (although probably more like present day Armenia - with his mother having been born in what is now Israel/Palestine), showing how the links between Turkey and Europe have stretched back for millennia - and is the patron saint of Istanbul as well as of England.

He is venerated as an Islamic martyr as well as a Christian one, showing once again the links between the two faiths that so many on both sides seem to have forgotten in recent years (but hey, if you believe in a great big bearded fairy living up in the clouds, don’t expect too much rationality, eh?)

One could say the same about St Nicholas, the patron saint of Russia - yet I'm not sure if he has any significance in Islamic tradition. (Probably not as he was a Christian bishop.) He was born in Turkey, his bones are in Apulia and his commercial transcension resides in Finnish Lapland.

I usually don't understand Euroskeptics - especially if they're Finnish, because by disregarding the European integration, and the single market, they greatly disregard the very lessons of our own economic history - but can't always get along with so-called Europhiles either. I refer to those kind of philes who love to muse about "common European identity", "the need for greater social integration", "EU as a counterbalance to USA", and all that rubbish. They are irresponsible.

It probably derives from the oldest of all logics - that the more exclusive your club is the better it is. Being an insider always boosts your ego and gives you confidence when more relevant things go wrong. But the fact that it's somewhat understandable doesn't make it less ignorant, for this club's boundaries, were they mental or physical (Europe is not a continent, stupid! Eurasia is.), are so very vague. You cannot measure, or feel, where it ends. Europe's story is a story of armies that looted and killed, and as a positive side-effect make peoples and ideas mix and mingle, and armies - at least when in war - have never really obeyed borders.

I got real shivers when the Austrians last year spent a considerable of the political capital of their rotating presidency on attempts at defining who we are. Charlemagne of The Economist summed it up once quite well:

At a recent gathering of the panjandrums of politics and the arts in Salzburg, they did so by making three claims: that there is a distinctive European identity, enshrined in a common European culture; that European culture inspires people in ways that boring things such as markets and trade do not; and that a common European culture should be embodied in common European institutions, that is, in the EU.

Indeed. How distinctive should it be? Should my country have a role in this masterplan? If so, I demand Russia to be included too. Our national epic, Kalevala, consists of poems and songs that were collected from the areas of which most have never been part of Finland. Not during the grand duchy, not during the independence. Kalevala is a tale that defines our cultural identity to a large extent, but it ain't a Finnish tale. It's a tale from rural parts of Ingria and Eastern Karelia. The same tales were once told in western parts of Finland too, for sure, but there they had got forgotten eons ago, when protestantism took over. (Being a protestant may prevent you from several sins and vices, but above all it curiously often prevents you from being interesting.) So if you exclude Russia, you exclude a good deal of our roots and heritage. And I'm not gonna like that.

Charlemagne continues, this is a part I found particularly worrying:

In Salzburg, Dominique de Villepin, France's prime minister, used as his measure of a common cultural identity a notion borrowed from George Steiner, a polyglot professor: “Europe is made up of cafés”. But as Mr Steiner himself admitted, this Europe would not include Britain, Ireland, most of the Baltics and Scandinavia—and is thus hardly a useful way of asserting a common identity in an EU of 25.

Exactly. I don't like cafés. Cafés don't stimulate me. I'm fine with pubs and bars and Georgian wine taverns, but cafés are boring. I don't like drinking coffee and I don't like eating cakes, least of all publically.

I haven't counted them but I've visited more than thirty European countries, ranging from Azerbaijan to Norway and from Portugal to Belarus, and I've had had a damn great time everywhere. If people are nice they are nice no matter where they come from, so why would you want to categorise them? Very simple. Kindergarten stuff. So what's so difficult about it? Outside Europe (sic!) I've never been, but I've heard rumours that people are adequately nice there as well.

Finally, if you're a subscriber I hope you didn't miss this survey of European Union in March. The very reason why I started to read The Economist regularly, was that I found their European idea matching my own, almost entirely, and this latest was no exception. It ends with a prediction how things may look in 2057:

The other cause for quiet satisfaction has been the EU's foreign policy. In the dangerous second decade of the century, when Vladimir Putin returned for a third term as Russian president and stood poised to invade Ukraine, it was the EU that pushed the Obama administration to threaten massive nuclear retaliation. The Ukraine crisis became a triumph for the EU foreign minister, Carl Bildt, prompting the decision to go for a further big round of enlargement. It was ironic that, less than a decade later, Russia itself lodged its first formal application for membership.

At the same time politicians in Brussels and Washington, grappling with the blocked Middle East peace process, had a eureka moment. EU membership had worked, eventually, in Cyprus, which was reunified in 2024; why not try it again? So it was that Israel and Palestine became the EU's 49th and 50th members.

The big challenge now is what to do about Russia. Its application has been pending for 15 years. Some say that it is too big, too poor and not European enough to join. But now that the tsar has been symbolically restored, Russia has an impeccably democratic government. A previous tsar saved Europe from Napoleon nearly 250 years ago. It would be apt to mark the anniversary by welcoming Russia back into the European fold.

Paavo Väyrynen, Finland's new Foreign Trade Minister

2007-04-17T19:28:00.000+01:00

Now we know all 20 ministers of our brand new XL-sized Vanhanen II cabinet, and also this second round of revelations brought one controversial surprise. I'm a transatlantic pro-NATO airhead, so after seven years with one left-wing socdem occupying the President's palace, and another holding the foreign office, it was indeed a delight to see that the latter institution will be finally taken over by someone a bit more likeminded. As for the issues themselves, I'm still scenting the wind of change - yet now it's the new wind section itself that is making me nauseous. There's a nasty stink in the air.

Putting his libertine tendencies aside, Ilkka Kanerva is a domestically experienced and internationally mediocre former KGB-informant; I think he'll be adequately competent in his job and probably won't screw up anything, at least irrecoverably, but I don't believe that he's the best person to hold it either. If you worry about his juvenile opportunism, do remember that it's been Ms President herself who has often stressed that we should not pick on those things and times. Such would be nasty.

But after reading who will be the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development, this foreign office joke starts to get a little bit too wild for my taste. It's Paavo Väyrynen - nothing more, nothing less.

If Ilkka "Ike" Kanerva is a political boy wonder of the Coalition, then Paavo Väyrynen is something similar to the Centre. He was born in 1946 and was elected to the Eduskunta at the age of 23. He was Kekkonen's protégé and, like Kanerva, had always very warm relationship with the Soviets. (As an anecdote, when he defended his PhD thesis in 1988, his theme was Finnish foreign policy and one of the arguments that that there will be no changes in Finno-Soviet relations in the foreseeable future. But oh well, he wasn't the only believer.)

He was the Foreign Minister when Finland left its EU application in 1992. Then he resigned as a protest. He was the Centre's presidential candidate in 1994; he lost, and blamed the "media games". He was also the biggest critic of Finland's accession treaty, campaigning against it on a CAP-ticket, but lost that race too. Then he was elected to the European Parliament, where he even became the liberal bloc's debuty chairman, and has stayed in Brussels/Strasbourg up to date. He threatened, or promised, to go back were he not given anything important in Helsinki.

Paavo Väyrynen is a die-hard protectionist and possibly Finland's fiercest Euroskeptic/phobe, and I have a feeling that his nomination is meant to tame grassroot centrists, who have always been at odds with the party leaders what comes to things European. Whether this will tame Mr Väyrynen, remains to be seen. Responsibility may have such effects, so let us hope so.

[Update: Ah, now this announcement might explain something. Paula Lehtomäki, our next Minister of Environment, is pregnant and soon off to maternity leave - which probably had its own impact on the Centre's negotiation priorities. Babies make a difference.]

Ilkka Kanerva, Finland's new Foreign Minister

2007-04-16T20:58:00.002+01:00

Now we know 12 out of 20 of the ministers of our brand new XL-sized Vanhanen II cabinet. Ari has posted on the first list of names, and tomorrow we shall know the remaining eight of the Centre. So far there has been one pick that can be perceived as a surprise (or a mere barrel of laughs, to some) and that's the name of the Foreign Minister.

He is Ilkka "Ike" Kanerva, from Turku, and he's the very reason why I was sincerely hoping that the Coalition would give up the post to the Centre and Paula Lehtomäki. That didn't happen, so I put my hope in the tiny chance that the "talent party" (as they, for some forsaken reason, are sometimes dubbed) might be sane enough to give the vacancy to any coalitionist other than Ilkka "Ike" Kanerva. That didn't happen either.

Ilkka who? Well, start with this one, as it's the most relevant piece of news written about him in English, according to Google:

National Coalition Party chairman Jyrki Katainen says that Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Ilkka Kanerva (Nat. Coalition Party) had not shown due consideration when he sent SMS text messages late at night to the mobile telephones of certain young women celebrities.

You probably got the point, so I don't have to share any off-the-record nuances. Mr Prime Minister is no more the government's womaniser number one, not even when it comes to the delicate art of SMS love. (Speaking of which, today's tabloids told a) that Merikukka Forsius spent the yesterday evening in his official residence, "cosily" waiting her premier fiancé to return from the cabinet talks, and b) that Merja Vanhanen, the PM's ex-wife and the Centre's first back-up MP in Helsinki, is dating her ex-husband's ex-bodyguard.) My Italian readers might find it particularly interesting that Ilkka Kanerva's lady record covers also Paula Koivuniemi, a singer who has sung Loretta Goggi's Maledetta Primavera into Finnish - titled as "Grown-up Woman", and regarded as a traditional last dance of the night in Finnish gay discothèques.

The well-known fact that Kanerva doesn't get along with Sauli Niinistö (dating back to Niinistö's first weeks in the parliament, in 1987, when Kanerva snubbed him as a "typical one-term MP") makes me wonder whether it's simply about personal shenanigans of the latter, aimed at Kanerva's very potential self-humiliation, or did Mr Speaker really consider this the best outcome for their party, let alone Finland.

Ilkka Kanerva is nevertheless a creation of the National Coalition Party. He has never had a job other than a politician. He became the chief of their youth league in 1972, at the age of 22, was elected to the Eduskunta in 1975, and has stayed there ever since. Till the late-80s, it was common that the KGB - or the CPSU, at least - had some extra ears within Finnish parties, and Ilkka Kanerva was one of their keennest informants among the Coalitionist ranks. Not out of ideology, of course, but of pure opportunism; those kind of compromises used to be smart career moves until the great collapse.

It is for this former moral pragmatism of him, that Ilkka Kanerva has had problems getting along, not only with his fellow southwesterner Niinistö, but with party colleagues such as Ben Zyskowicz as well, which used to belong to the Coalition's spinal fraction during the Cold War. Time is apparently a great healer.

Consequences of cowardice

2007-04-12T19:47:00.000+01:00

Ari has made a good point hinting who's Finland's leading fiscal conservative. Sauli Niinistö, Jyrki Katainen? Jan Vapaavuori? Of course not, stupid, for they're politicians and must get elected every fourth year. The man in question is Raimo Sailas, the top official of the Ministry of Finance, and a social democrat as his party alignment. He doesn't need to please voters.

Sailas is most famous, infamous even, for the Sailas Paper. The Sailas Paper is a mythical scroll that can tell those brave souls who dare to gaze upon it everything there is to know about the state of Finland's finances, from the beginning of time to the day the sun grows cold and dim. Rumor has it that going against the sage advice contained therein will lead to surefire financial ruin, breakdown of societal order, and dogs and cats living together in abject poverty. To put in less flowery terms, when Sailas makes recommendations, politicians listen.

Without getting into what he has said this time, or earlier, I'd like to make you think what problems this kind of approach - that the truth is heard from bureaucratic mouths - to societal challenges may involve. Sailas is certainly not the only civil servant who has taken role in defining what Finland should do. In 2004 it was his former colleague, Anne Brunila. Jukka Pekkarinen, from the same ministry, raised his voice in this January to say that, in reality, the dear candidates won't be able to afford anything that they had been promising; and on the eve of the election day it was Kari Raivio, Helsinki University's Rector, who in his higher education report concluded that the country does have lousy universities, and must reform the crap out of them. The tragically died Kari S. Tikka made more comments about defects of our taxation than our parliamentarists altogether. The OECD has been doing the same, and for quite a long time already, but I guess their reports are shipped to pulp mills when they reach the Finnish soil.

You never hear those openers from democratically elected leaders; they're always from professors or officials, and when the politicians finally comment their ideas, they awkwardly mumble something like how "this must be taken into consideration" but will forget it by the next campaign, where they will be once again making promises which they know they won't be able to deliver. We can of course introduce changes and reform the system by this technocratic tactic as well, but, if thinking about how sustainable it is in the long run, I find it nonetheless very worrying. There are reforms but there's no social contract behind them - which means paving the way to populists.

Below there's a good checklist. I guarantee you that it is this simple.

- So, you want to have more services or benefits? Fine. Which taxes would you like to raise?
- So, you want to pay less taxes? Fine. Which services or benefits would you like to give up?
- So, you want more good things without more bad things? Fine. How much debt will that be? Who will be paying for it?

[Ari back with more on Mr Sailas and the relation between politicians and technocrats.]