Musya

By popular request (blame Simo):

She was for all intents and purposes my third grandmother. In fact she was one of my grandmother's numerous elder sisters - the eldest, after WWII was said and done.

I'd never thought of her that way before I started writing this, but she was the only normal person in the family by the current Western standards. She would say a lot of things that one can normally expect to hear from a fairly well-adjusted and good-natured 20-year-old literature student in the University of Helsinki. This might not seem like much to you, but she was the only person like that around. I have no idea how a creature like that could have grown up on one of the nastiest borders in Europe in some of the most interesting times, but she did. I also have no idea how this kind of attitude can survive in a place where everyday interaction with strangers, such as buying sausage or returning bottles for deposit, required a lot of yelling, threats and general unpleasantry. In the 75 years of her life Russia did not stick to her much.

She was born in 1908 in the village of Kublichi on Russian-Polish border (the border has moved several times after that; currently Kublichi is deep in Belarus), the fifth child out of seven. The family did not pay much attention to the kids, and they did what they wanted. What Musya wanted was to read books, both in Yiddish and Russian. At some point the border moved and they never saw the oldest sister or brother again. (They were murdered in 1942 with all their spouses and children, except for one who escaped.)

Musya decided to become a Russian language and literature teacher, moved to St. Petersburg, went to the pedagogical university, visited her family when she got a permission (they were so close to the border that suspicious strangers, such as the children of the residents, had to have a special permission to visit), got married at 21, got a baby, graduated, saw Communists hound her father to death and kill her brother-in-law - in short lived like all normal Russian people at the time. Then Bella - her daughter - died of scarlet fever at the age of 3, and they got divorced.

At that point she had a job, two little sisters in St. Petersburg, a brother in Pinsk, a newly-widowed sister in Senno, two siblings in Poland whom she would never see again and a mother back in Kublichi.

I should probably write more about her and less about her surroundings, but on the eve of the Independence day I find it useful to remind my mostly Finnish audience what they became independent from. Although I think they kind of remember it without me.

Germans came and made Musya the eldest of her family without any regard of whether or not she was up for the job. She had two little sisters left, each of whom was very different from her: Fira, who was - to put it charitably - not the sharpest knife in the drawer but became a doctor because her boyfriend's father was Somebody Important in the medical school, and Rivka - my grandma - who was very smart and extremely harsh and became an economist. During the war they all evacuated somewhere near Ural mountains and Rivka was trying to take care of her more inept older sisters the best she could.

After the war they moved back to St. Petersburg (Leningrad, whatever) and Musya got married again, to a relative named Yakov Ryzhik. He was a good man by all accounts, but was fairly sick and died in 1962, after which Musya moved in with Rivka and her family.

Rivka's family consisted of a fairly obedient husband and a teenage daughter Lida - my mom. Lida was as harsh a person as Rivka, but with completely different temperament and interests. One could expect two such people to fight, but if they did they never told me. Rivka continuously told Lida how to live that included such little details as which university to go to and who to marry. Lida said "sure, mom", hanged out with her friends all the time and did whatever she wanted. Rivka almost never read books, but Lida rather liked them and was pleased with the mild-mannered aunt Musya who not only read books but also liked to talk about them.

Lida grew up, went to university (not the one her mother told her to go to), got married (not to the guy her mother told her to marry, either), had me, and so I inherited Musya.

My parents were young and liked to have a good time, and sometimes they left me home alone, but for more prolonged periods they left me with my grandparents and Musya. They lived on the other side of the city. I tended to slip into Musya's room as quickly as was politely possible.

She had a sofa that could be extended into a bed and a cupboard with way more books than grandma and grandpa. She was the only old lady I knew who had long hair, and apart from her own long hair she also had a hair thing that she added to her own hair in order to make a high bun.

She was really sweet. She did not yell when I sat on her glasses by accident or borrowed her hairpins on purpose. She really talked to me (and in general to people) and really listened. She had a strange fixation on making me write things and then correcting orthography and punctuation. I usually obliged. I've always wondered since then whether many retired language teachers do so or whether it was just her.

She gave me adult books to read and asked me what I think about them.

As I already said, she never yelled at strangers, even when the situation required it. And it's not like she was shy - she talked to strangers very easily, it's just that she did not like social conflict.

When I got older we talked about people, relationships, sex and stuff like that. Just exchanging opinions, that's all, but she never told me to bugger off and find out experimentally, like my mum, or shut up about this disgusting topic, like my grandma.

One conversation went like this (I was 9 or 10)

"Musya, what are homosexuals?"
"They are men who love other men, you know, the way a man loves a woman. With sex and all."
"But they don't have... do they do it in the ass?"
"Probably."
"Is there anything bad about that?"
"Not really. It's a fairly icky thought to me but that's probably because I am not a homosexual."
"Musya, why is that illegal then?"
"Dunno. Why is crossing the border illegal?"

For all her love towards Russian language and literature Musya did not want to stay there. Almost all my family wanted to leave, with varying intensity, but she was very upfront about this. We spent countless hours talking about life in other countries. She was the only person in my family besides myself to study English in spite of uncertain prospects for leaving, and considering that she was 70 and had no formal teaching she was really good at it. She knew a lot of words and managed to put them together with reasonably good grammar and a terrifying Yiddish accent.

She died three and a half years before we left. That was 22 years ago, and I still sometimes get those "Musya would have liked it here" or "Musya would have liked that" moments.

He had weapons of math instruction!

A teacher was disemboweled and ripped apart by motorbikes in Afghanistan for teaching girls against the Taleban orders. Very Mad Max-style. Mohammed Halim was 46, and he was the fourth teacher killed in Afghanistan's Ghazni province lately.

In the same article Fatima Mustaq, the director of education at Ghazni, describes the death threats that she gets regularly and that also extend to her husband and eight children, and how she and her sister got beaten up by authorities for teaching algebra to girls.

The Taleban are much into burning girls' schools anyway. They also threaten to cut noses and ears off teachers and students. In the first 6 months of this year they managed to disrupt or shut down about 300 schools.

A few girls's schools also gets burned down in Pakistan every one in a while. Muslim brotherhood used to burn girls' schools in Egypt and the revolutionaries used to burn them during the Islamic revolution in Iran.

In totally unrelated news, a new group in Gaza, "Just Swords of Islam", has warned Gaza women to wear hijabs or be attacked by acid, and said that they have already thrown acid on one immodestly dressed woman. These are the same guys that attacked a number of music shops and Internet cafes in Gaza last Wednesday with bombs and rocket-propelled grenades.

"We will have no mercy on any woman who violates the traditions of Islam and who also hangs out in Internet cafes," they said.

Hamas officials denied any connection to the group, noting that their movement does not resort to methods of "intimidation and terror" against the people. Hey, people, stop giggling.

All the Islam-advertising webpages (the same ones that never tell you about the death penalty for apostasy) usually say that Islam is totally for the equality of the sexes and if some Islamic countries (ok, let's face it, all Islamic countries) treat the women otherwise that must be due to some bad pre-Islamic habits that still remain. Sure thing. This leaves us two questions:

1. How come on average the more secular a Muslim country is the better women are doing? Compare, for example, Turkey and Saudi Arabia?

2. If the bad local habits and traditions in those countries are so strong that 1400 years of totally gender-equal Islam have brought so little in the way of actual equality, what are the implication of this for Western countries' immigration and integration policies?

People, we have the social skills winner of the year

"Beauty isn't on the outside, it's on the inside" is a rather trite and uninformative thing to say under the best of circumstances. When people say it they either mean that in human interaction physical beauty is not the only thing that matters, which is rather self-evident anyway, or that people should totally disregard physical beauty in looking for sex partners, which is, well, highly unlikely and generally causes resentment because people usually don't like to be told how to select their partners.

In any case, this is the kind of thing that you probably should not be saying anyway. One place and time where you really, really should not be saying it is when your son is on trial for throwing acid in two people's faces. When one of the victims is saying that her life is strongly impacted by having a badly scarred face, "beauty isn't on the outside, it's on the inside" is not the right thing to say. No, no, definitely not. It pisses off the victims, the jury, Miss Manners and the bloggers in faraway Finland. It elicits a "your momma" kind of comment from the judge. Besides, considering that at least one of the vicitm was a memeber of the local drug-dealing community, it just might lead to the situation where your bowels are not on the inside, they are on the outside.

Sheesh, I still can't believe that the bitch said that.

Another one gets poisoned

Former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar has recently become sick on a visit to Ireland, and now his doctors believe that he has been poisoned.

Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko has recently died of polonium-210 poisoning, and the Russian authorities have been hinting that it must have been done by emigrants who want to incriminate Putin.

OK, gotta admit it: it was me. Every time I want to write something really snarky about Putin I pull my trusted old mini-nuclear-reactor from under the bed, irradiate a bit of bismuth in a saucepan, stir with a big spoon and poison some FSB defector. If I have some of it left over I make a miniature nuclear weapon for entirely peaceful purposes, such as destroying Russia and unplugging my toilet. Preferably simultaneously.

(For the humor-impaired and secret agents: I do nothing of the kind, but if you want to look under my bed I recommend that you wear some clothes to which dust sticks well.)

Russia's nuclear chief said that all the polonium produced in Russia goes to the United States. Sure thing. I'd been hearing that ever since I was a little kid. "All the sausage that we produce goes to the grocery stores", etc.

Several airplanes (that have been flying between London and Moscow, what a surprise) have been contaminated, and a number of locations in Britain. 30-something thousand people who flew on these airplanes afterwards are advised to see a doctor just in case. I can just imagine the cleaning bill for all that. Makes you miss the good old times when they just shot people or ran them over with a car.

Apropos polonium-210: lovely stuff, used for nuclear weapon initiators, 0.12 millionth of a gram is enough to kill a person when ingested. Aren't you all happy that Iran now produces stuff like that on its own for whatever peaceful purposes it might have? Thought so.

Ahmadinejad's letter to Americans

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has written an open letter to Americans. The basic idea: "aren't we all for everything good and against everything bad, and isn't everything Zionists' fault anyway?".

It's an interesting letter, and fun to read, especially if you are reading it simultaneously with State Department's human rights report on Iran. The basic idea of the latter: "holy shit!".

I mostly just felt like presenting these two documents together, but maybe I should answer the man, at least on some points:

"Hundreds of thousands of my Iranian compatriots are living amongst you in friendship and peace, and are contributing positively to your society. Our people have been in contact with you over the past many years and have maintained these contacts despite the unnecessary restrictions of US authorities."

Yeah, I've met a few dozens of your, ahem, Iranian compatriots, although they would have probably punched me in the nose if I called them that. They told me everything about escaping Iran in a truck through the mountains and being pursued by the Guards of the Islamic Revolution, who were undoubtedly put there the by US authorities.

"Palestinian mothers, just like Iranian and American mothers, love their children, and are painfully bereaved by the imprisonment, wounding and murder of their children. What mother wouldn't?"

Mahmoud, meet Umm Nidal.

"Let's take a look at Iraq. Since the commencement of the US military presence in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed, maimed or displaced. Terrorism in Iraq has grown exponentially."

You should know, you have financed half of it.

"I consider it extremely unlikely that you, the American people, consent to the billions of dollars of annual expenditure from your treasury for this military misadventure."

You are absolutely right, it's a waste of money that could be spent on much worthier causes, such as destroying your nuclear facilities.

"You have heard that the US administration is kidnapping its presumed opponents from across the globe and arbitrarily holding them without trial or any international supervision in horrendous prisons that it has established in various parts of the world. "

As opposed to, say, issuing fatwas that call for killing your presumed opponents all over the globe? Or, say, organizing terrorist acts in Argentina?

"The US administration's illegal and immoral behavior is not even confined to outside its borders. You are witnessing daily that under the pretext of "the war on terror," civil liberties in the United States are being increasingly curtailed. Even the privacy of individuals is fast losing its meaning. Judicial due process and fundamental rights are trampled upon. Private phones are tapped, suspects are arbitrarily arrested, sometimes beaten in the streets, or even shot to death."

Oh, dear. Truly, as Mark Twain has said, "Who write the temperance appeals, and clamor about the flowing bowl? Folks who will never draw another sober breath till they do it in the grave." Just fucking look at yourself, or better at your own civil liberties and judicial due process.

"It is possible to govern based on an approach that is distinctly different from one of coercion, force and injustice."

Go for it, man.

In somewhat-related news, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Fazel Lankarani has issued a death fatwa for the Azeri writer Rafiq Tagi, for portraying Christianity as superior to Islam and Europe as superior to the Middle East. I just hope the poor guy did not say that Islam is a violent religion that calls for killing its dissenters and opponents, or some other outrageous Islamophobic lie like that.

As to Ahmadinejad - well, it's a free country (the USA, not Iran), and the USA's human rights record did become worse in the last 5 years, and this is a fact that does not depend on whoever says or does not say it - but if you lecture a person who is having a drink on the dangers of alcohol while you yourself are lying drunk under the table in your own vomit, expect people to laugh and point.

Move over, Religion of Peace! The People of the Book are coming, and their books are heavy!

There was a Jewish riot a few days ago in New York. Not Jews against infidels, of course, and not even regular Jews against regular Jews, but rabbis and yeshiva students (rabbis-to-be) against other rabbis and yeshiva students. It was about some obscure theological topic that is beyond the ken of a simple laywoman like myself. Hitting each other with benches and prayer books. During the Chabad Lubavicher annual conference of emissaries.

Chabad Lubavicher is the biggest Hassidic sect. There are about 200 000 of them.

The coverage is here and here.

In the end the police arrived and took the esteemed theologists to the nice cells in the station house, where they have surely continued to discuss important points of Hassidic theology without the help of any dangerous weapons.

This is kind of embarassing. I know a couple of Lutheran theologists, and I cannot imagine them trying to hit each other over the head with prayer books. Mind you, I always knew the Lubavicher were weird, but not that weird.

OTOH, these people should probably go help Israel. Just tell them that the Arabs have been saying bad things about rabbi Schneersohn, and Arabs will flee in terror to avoid being beaten to death with a prayer book. On the other hand, the Lubavicher will probably also scare the Jews, the Christians and the camels.

Hypocrisy, identity, nation state, nomadism and life

In my thirties I have discovered my inner hypocrite. (What is a polite and politically correct term for a hypocrite nowadays? "A person of inner contradictions"? "Complicated-American"? Whatever...) I discovered that I am ready to believe in one thing and want another, to preach something and do something completely different, etc. I wonder if that is why young people in the Sixties used to say "never trust anyone over thirty"? I wholeheartedly agree.

It started on 9/11, when I realized that I would glady have a billion or so people die just so that my plans of going back to Finland would not be disrupted. Not, mind you, "have a billion or so people die" in the sense of ordering anyone to kill them, or voting for them to be killed. Just, you know, wishing for them to be dead, without any actual action to bring that about. There was some soul-searching, both about why I might have such evil desires, and why I wouldn't act on them if I happen to have them. I settled on the comforting thought that my feelings are one thing, my decisions are another, and I have so far usually been able to keep them apart fairly well.

Except that it does not quite work that way, now does it? It works well enough for me when I feel like breaking a bottle on somebody's face but settle for saying "bugger off". But in politics feelings matter, even the feelings of the folks with reasonably good impulse control. I am not in a "kill a billion people now" kind of mood nowadays, but sometimes I want fairly radical things to be done. For the most part I want them deep in my heart, I don't demand them, wouldn't vote for them, and would not give our leaders permission to do them - but I would probably forgive them afterwards, and they probably know it. And this by itself changes the political landscape quite a bit, especially when there are a lot of people wanting the same thing.

Lately I also realized that I would like the people of the civilized world to have a little more children. This makes me feel vaguely hypocritical too, considering that I am certainly not having any myself.

The third thing that I have been thinking about lately: a number of people have been saying that the erosion of the nation state and the emergence of supranational identities are a bad thing, leading to citizens who have no loyalty to the state they live in and instead are loyal to some global entity - say, Ummah - and that the current problems with Muslims are just a first big one in a series of coming problems with supranational identities, and that it would be good to streengthen the nation state and to weaken the supranational identities. I sort of agree with them for the most part, in that I much prefer my neighbors to be loyal to Finland than to the Ummah, but damn, should I even have the nerve to say so out loud? I think I should be at least blushing saying this, considering that I am a descendant and a part of a culture that has been a rather strong supranational identity for at least the last couple of thousands of years.

Obviously Jews are usually much better integrated into non-Jewish societies than Muslims in non-Muslim societies, but it still feels weird and sad to say about Muslims exactly the same things as many people in Russia were saying about Jews (they have no loyalty to our nation and are more loyal to Jews/Muslims everywhere, etc.,etc.). When I was 14 and the newspapers started writing things like that my parents showed them to me and said that all this talk about the loyalty to the nation means that we gotta go sometime soon. Truly I have become one of those people that my parents have warned me about. (I am still mostly right, and the polls of Muslims at least in the UK confirm it. Incidentally those people who were saying those things about us were also right, at least as far as I was concerned.I have no loyalty to Russia whatsoever, nor ever had. I tend to think of it as a lesser problem, though, because first of all we are talking about me, and second, when we are feeling disloyal to a nation state we have a tradition of packing up and moving to the next country rather than trying to fix the old country one bomb at a time. I can recommend it.)

I am very much a descendant of a nomadic tradition. There are few countries in Europe where my ancestors have not lived, and few moments in my family history when three generations of the same family were born in the same country. We come, we learn the local language, we find jobs, we live there, then at some point the going gets tough, we pack up and we go.

Naturally not all of us like it, as is evidenced by the creation of the state of Israel - although even there Jews come and go. I am very glad that the Jews who want a nation state of their very own have it, but it's not my thing, and not just because Israel has hot weather and bad neighbors. I am kind of accustommed to living among infidels - having a large Jewish community around would be a nice bonus but I would not know what to do with a nation state of our own.

The degree of individual adjustment varies, but in general we know the drill. Learn the language, don't piss off the locals, try to meet new people, get an education, get a job, watch out for trouble, pack fast if you need to, know when it's time to move, although on the last one a lot of us did not perform too well in the last century.

Personally, the nation-statey thing has never caused me much of a headache. I say that I am an American when somebody asks who I am, because I am an American and have a passport that says so. I am not particularly bothered about whether or not I am worse American than somebody who speaks English with one of the American accents and likes baseball and apple pie. At some point I hope to become a Finn too, and am not going to agonize over whether I have become too Finnish, or not enough. I have never gotten around to agonizing on whether or not I am a good Jew, either. I am fairly loyal to the US, Finland and the Jewish people as a whole, and to a certain degree to the Western civilization as a whole, too. Any serious conflicts of loyalty are not very likely to arise and will be decided of a case to case basis. I have no loyalty to Russia, where I was born, and see no reason why I should. (Uhm, is somebody seeing a parallel between me and the young angry Muslims born in UK who say they have no loyalty to it? Shhh! Seriously, though, when Jews started feeling disloyal to Russia more than a million of them packed up and left without planting a single explosive device on a single subway train, whereas some Muslims in UK did just that, and I can't fail to notice that Muslims are mostly moving into the UK and not out of it.)

A friend to her (American Jewish) son who went to work in Kiev: "Sweetie, Ukraine is one of those places where Jews come from. It's not one of the places they should go to!" But I digress.


Anyway: nowadays I sometimes think that a lot of problems in the world comes from the fact that a lot of people are moving from country to country without any idea how to do it right. Muslims are the most visible case, but they are by no means the only one. Nowadays it's easy to move, easy to maintain contact with the old country, easy to live without ever having to meet people and easy to get hung up on the identity issues. Maybe I should give prospective neonomads some of my learned advice:

- Learn the damn language. Now. Today.

- The locals have the numerical advantage, and don't you ever forget it.

- The locals will probably want to maintain their numerical advantage.

- The locals really can exterminate you, even if both you and them imagine otherwise. Don't give them any reason to do so. If they start doing so anyway moving away from them might be a good idea.

- If the locals and their country truly suck, move elsewhere.

- Changing the place one bomb at a time is not likely to make you popular.

- Demanding that your religious laws be adopted in your new country is not likely to make you popular either.

- Get an education, and a job. This is probably a good advice for anyone.

- Meet the locals. It's good for you. Try to make it good for them, too.

- No matter what you do the older generation will tell you that you are doing it wrong. They should be packed safely for the trip and preferably appeased with nice food.

- If you are wondering whether it is a good idea to exchange all your property for a ticket out, it probably is.

- Don't agonize over identity. If you are wondering whether you are A or B, you are obviously both.

- Don't agonize over finding balance between your identities. It will eventually be found. Your children, if any, will find it too. Mind you, it probably won't be the same as yours.

- Do all your paperwork properly and don't expect immigration officials to be nice to you.

- Don't get too hung up on nature. You might miss Finns or Germans or Eiffel tower, but they probably have forests and rivers and what-not in the new country.

- If you've been at it for a couple of thousand of years, be extra respectful in your people's cemeteries. Some relative of yours is buried there anyway.

- Again: if the locals and their country truly suck, move elsewhere. I can't understate the importance of this, and I don't only mean it in a "put up or shut up" way but also in a "don't be unduly optimistic" way. Some places are just bad.

"...and lightning shot out of her ass."

"Lightning exits woman's bottom"

Ouch.

Now that's my kind of a seminar

Sosialidemokraattiset opiskelijat SONK ry. are having a seminar on immigration, integration and xenophobic right. I sort of have a vague feeling that I should go there and say something, what with being an immigrant, integrated, xenophobic and right.

OTOH I already have better plans for tonight and the Social Democrat students are not gonna listen to me anyway.

"Bombs are flying, people are dying, children are crying, politicians are lying too..."

In the news:

An ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko has died in London after being poisoned by god knows what. Russia is, as I said, is back to basics.

Lebanon is back to basics too: an anti-Syrian politician, industry minister Pierre Gemayel, has been assasinated. He was 34. Damn, and I thought that it was bad when 5 years ago I ran into a doctor younger then myself. Now even assasinated politicians are younger than me. Anyway, there was a lot of "Lebanon is standing on the brink of civil war" headlines yesterday. I hope there won't be any "Lebanon has made a great leap forward"-headlines tomorrow.

Iraqis has also been rather more back to basics than usual and blew up about 160 of each other yesterday. I think it was the Sunnis' turn this time. Who the hell put the Sunnis and the Shia in the same country anyway? Uhm, the Ottomans and then the British.

In a way more novel development there was a tear gas attack on the Stockholm subway yesterday, in the vibrant multicultural neighborhood of Tensta.

In weird news: an ink factory blew up in Danvers, MA. (This is fairly "close to home" for me - sort of like Kerava blowing up.) Luckily there were only minor injuries, but about 100 homes were damaged and about 25 totally destroyed. Eek, I am not buying ink from those people.

OJ Simpson has crawled out from whatever rock he was living under and tried to publish a book describing how he would have done the murders if he had done them. The publisher has cancelled the book due to public criticism.

Microsoft to Iran: our leader is crazier than yours

Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer says that Linux uses Microsoft's intellectual property and that venders and users should pay up. Of course he makes no mention of what exactly Linux uses, and where.

In tomorrow's news:

"Microsoft declares insanity its intellectual property, tries to charge Ahmadinejad."

Democrats trying to make Republicans electable again

Representative Charlie Rangel (NY-D) has proposed to reinstate the draft. I know that his does that every time he has a bad day or is constipated or something, and his proposals tend to get defeated 402-2, but this is really a bad fucking time for stupid draft proposals that even in better times would make 70% of electorate want to burn you at the stake. I somehow suspect that the man has the IQ of George Bush and the situational awareness of John Kerry.

Yeah, we might not have enough soldiers to attack everyone we want. This probably means that we should either attack only some of the countries we want, or pay our soldiers better salaries. You, know, this works just like packing for a vacation: think about how many countries you want to attack and how much money it will need, and then attack half the countries with twice the money.

Speaking about John Kerry: he says he is gonna try running for president in 2008. Ugh. I thought the man should have figured out by now that joking in public is not good for him.

You just can't parody them

Iran has complained to the UN that Israel was threatening it.

"Iran's activities have prompted speculation that Israel might launch preemptive strikes to destroy its nuclear facilities, as it did in Iraq in 1981 when it bombed a reactor at Osiraq.

The speculation increased after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year threatened to "wipe Israel off the map," a statement Iranian officials have argued was not a threat."

You hear, Israel? Don't say anything about considering preemptive strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, just say that you will wipe the whole fucking thing off the map. It's not a threat, officially.

Back to basics

It looks like Russia is back to basics: mom, denaturated alcohol and assasinating dissidents abroad.

On not writing

Haven't been writing for a while now. The last post might give the readers the idea that I was working on my relationship or on ending it, but in fact that all happened just tonight.

I have just been pretty sleepy lately, and had rather low energy. Part of it was work stress, but I am not sure what the rest of it is. Just sleepy and very unenergetic all the time. I am not feeling sick or sad, nor have any issues with it being dark outside. Weird. The only thing I managed to do was working and occasionally being sociable in person.

Another thing is that I am afraid I am turning into a 24/7 jihad bore. I write about it a lot; I think it is the most important issue of our times and well worth writing about, and yet I sort of feel bad about boring my readers with it all the time.

Oh well. Soon I am gonna finish writing about my US vacation and then everyone will be so bored that they will say "bring back the anti-jihad ranting!".

Been to a lovely party yesterday. The party featured some wonderfully absurd elements like a dance mat and a video call to (or from) Japan on Skype. It was great to see Yoe, and there is something inherently wildly absurd about having a big screen that talks to you in the middle of the party.

Blaah

That's it for this relationship, then. Killeri and I are not together anymore.

I don't feel particlularly in need of congratulations or condolences (or maybe just a little bit of both). Nothing particularly dramatic happened, I just guess many relationships have a beginning and an end and the end was overdue. One can still freely invite us to the same places at the same time without a fear of any incivility or drama happening. Even to the same orgy, although orgies have been unfortunately rare lately.

Hey, it was pretty good while it lasted.

Migraine

Had a rather colorful (literally) migraine episode yesterday. I was feeling bad all day, for which I unjustly blamed the salad eaten in the morning, and then I started seeing the zigzags.

This happens to me on average once a year, and I hate it with a passion, although I feel a little bad about complaining since so many people get real mega-migraines, fairly often and with severe headaches... I guess mine are mini-migraines. They are amazingly consistent: a zigzag line shaped like a horseshoe with its open end facing right appears at my 11 o'clock and starts shimmering, pulsating and being very annoying. Then it gradually moves to the left until it disappears from my field of vision, leaving me with a vague suspicion that it still exists somewhere where I can's see it.

Yesterday was different in the sense that the thing was colorful. The zigzag line consisted of very bright geometrical shapes shimmering, changing into each other and changing colors. It was sort of like having a screensaver in my head. I closed my left eye and watched a dance of art deco diamonds and triangles on my nose with my left.

It was entertaining in a way, but I am glad this kind of thing does not happen often. I wonder what kind of auras other people see, although googling seems to suggest that most of them are quite similar to my own.

Elections

Long time no write. Been too sleepy, have too much to do at work and have been rather sociable in my free time.

A couple of weeks ago a true miracle happened: I got an absentee ballot from the election commission my old hometown of Newton, MA. Just got it by asking for it, without having to ask several times, yell at anyone and threaten anyone with lawsuits. Amazing. Everything works. In Newton. Go figure. They must have learned from the previous scandals.

Voted, too. Barney Frank (D) for the House (he was the only candidate and besides I happen to like him) and Kenneth Chase (R) for Senate (the man sounds like a weasel and has no chance, but this was just a "bugger Kennedy" vote on my part).

Voting feels rather futile when you are registered in Eastern MA. No matter who you vote for you end up with a Democrat. However it feels nice to vote just because I can. Even if it's just for our Barney who has no competition.

(No competition is not strictly true: the ballots have an empty space when you can fill in any name and vote for that person.)

Every federal election seems more and more frustrating than the last one, and not just because my vote does not matter. It's because of Democrats and Republicans. Can't stand them. Don't like Libertarians either. And Green-Rainbow will be the first guys against the wall if I ever become the queen of the world.

Nowadays it seems like everyone who has an opinion on anything is a Republican - no matter how contradictory their opinions might be - and everyone who has no opinion about anything (in the "we are for everything good and against everything bad" way) is a Democrat. You have no idea what the Republicans stand for and a fairly strong idea that the Democrats do not stand for anything, except maybe "We are not the Republicans and we hate stupid Bush". If a Democrat does stand for something, he generally gets kicked off the ticket and has to run as independent from some party named after himself, such as Connecticut for Lieberman (that's Joe Lieberman, not Avigdor).

IMO there is only one important issue in this election, and this is the War on Isl... I mean Terror. As far as I can see the Democrats are in denial of the whole thing, and the Republicans try to do random things with unpredictable results. Bugger them all.

A terrorist state

Argentine prosecutors asked federal judge to order the arrest of former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani and seven others for a 1994 bombing that killed 85 people and wounded more than 200 others and was the worst terrorist attack ever in Argentina.

Iran, as usual, described the accusations as a "zionist plot".

"And if you don't do your homework, you will become our courageous men and women"

Putin seems to have gotten serious competition as far as making dumb jokes is concerned: John Kerry.

In a speech at the Pasadena City College in California, Kerry said: "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Later he claimed that this was a) a botched joke and b) orchestrated by assorted right-wing nut jobs. Yeah, and the selfsame right-wing nutjobs shat in your pants, too. Please, senator, make up your mind.

Mind you, I do share some of the Senator Kerry's stereotypes about the educational attainment of what politicians normally call "our courageous men and women". However, I am just a right-wing nutjob with a blog, whereas Senator Kerry has tried to get elected to be, among other things, the Commander-in-Chief of those who do not study hard or do their homework.

The sick man

A lot of politicians suddenly get sick when they get caught doing something unseemly. There should be a name for this horrible disease. What should we call it? Getcaughtitis? Shithitthefan syndrome? Any suggestions?

Apparently this horrible affliction has already spread from the politicians to the religious leaders. (Of course we have seen the first signs of that during the Catholic pedophile priest scandal in the US a few years ago. All the pedophiles suddenly got sick. Go figure.)

Now the mufti got very sick too, which by an amazing coincidence happened during the meeting with the Muslim leaders that would have decided his future. The terrible disease made him postpone his plans for destroying the White House and ask for an indefinite leave of duties at the Lakemba mosque.

The Australian circus continues

The Mufti & Co are still claiming that he was taken out of context. Here is the full text of the sermon as provided by The Australian.

He has lovely things to say about the disbelievers as well: "Those who disbelieve amongst the people of the Book and the polytheists, where will they go? Surfers Paradise? Gold Coast? Where? To the fire of hell. And not part-time, they'll be in it for eternity. What are these people? The most evil of God's creation on the face of earth. The issue is clear."

Australian politicians (being, as al-Hilali says, some of the most evil of God's creation on the face of earth) have already started asking the most ancient question in the world: "whose fault was that?".

Currently it appears that Paul Keating and Leo McLeay of the Labor party have lobbied to give al-Hilali a residence permit. Here are the details.

The whole thing is made even more embarassing by the fact that in 1984 the intelligence reports warning that al-Hilali had been linked to extremist groups in Egypt and could pose a threat to Australia were sent to the federal government and promptly ignored

While al-Hilali and some Muslim groups in Australia are busy explaining that the mufti has been taken out of context, totally misunderstood, did not mean it anyway, and was just using colorful oriental language beyond the understanding of the Western unbelievers, Abduljalil Sajid, one of the senior figures in the Muslim Council of Britain, said that he was absolutely right. But quoted out of context anyway.

All those respected religious scholars that keep getting quoted out of context all the time give me all kinds of mean thoughts, such as "they should be put back into context" and "their proper context is somewhere outside the civilized world".

NSW opposition leaders call for withdrawing government funds from the Lakemba mosque, but NSW Premier Morris Iemma has refused to do so, saying that a move like that would penalize the whole community for for the words of the leader.

Guess what, Mr. Iemma: this would be the whole fucking point. The community is in fact guilty and should be penalized for the actions of the leader. Note that we are not talking about the whole Muslim community of Australia or NSW here: we are talking about the actual parishioners of this particular mosque, people who go there and listen to his sermons. What exactly is the point of funding this activity with taxpayer money? What kind of people are those? Would you attend a church or a synagogue whose priest or rabbi were saying things like that? What would you think about the kind of people who would?

The weekend: first party, then hangover

The party yesterday was very nice - thanks, everyone!

It was quite painless too - I was a bit apprehensive in advance because of no door code and an unreliable toilet. But people helped me out with opening the downstairs door, and the toilet behaved itself, or if it didn't, this wasn't reported to me.

Some people brought lovely flowers, and I had no vase. Somehow I have a feeling that next year I am getting many vases. Now the flowers are standing in the blender glass and juice bottle.

Now I am a little hung over, and suffering from a severe chocolate cake overdoze.

Headline news

"Matti Vanhanen: North Korea has its own special kind of freedom."

"George Bush: We are not at war with Iraq. We are just teaching it to be more democratic."

"Vladimir Putin: We've been teaching our journalists our own special kind of freedom of speech, too!"

"A professor of Islamic studies: All Muslims have misunderstood Islam."

"Kim Jong-Il: Our great nation have made a great leap forward! We have succesfully tested a nuclear weapon inside a mountain. Next leap forward: luring the enemy into the damn mountain."

"New Jersey Supreme Court: The new chapter in American history: separate but equal."

"Fox News: Foley was a closet Democrat"

"The German Army: Alas poor Yorick..."

(For the humor-impaired: I made these up. If any of these people actually said any of these things, I do not accept any responsibility.)

"We ain't no delinquents, We're misunderstood. Deep down inside us there is good!"

I guess I was a bit too optimistic yesterday about Australia's most senior Muslim cleric and the response to him.

The Islamic Friendship Association of Australia defended the man, saying that all his good work in support of law and order (hmm, was that when he was encouraging Palestinian children to blow themselves up in Israel or was that when he supported the 9/11 terrorist acts?) is forgotten as soon as he makes one ambiguous comment. I don't think they really get it: his comment was quite unambiguous.

His daughter also supported him, although this is quite understandable.

"Leave him alone. He is a sick man," she said. Yeah, you can say that again.

"He was just teaching women to be modest."

Sure he was. After all, if I were to say to the cleric "stop issuing misogynistic statements or else I shove a cactus up your ass" it would be teaching him to behave himself, in a way, and an actual cactus would be even more efficient. Whether such words and actions on my part would be a) legal or b) acceptable for a religious leader to do or say is a totally different issue.

And I am sure that when he said that Jews control the world through sexual perversion, he was only trying to teach Jews to be modest. And when he said that Palestinian children should aspire to the martyrdom he was, of course, just trying to show them the quickest way to Paradise and those 72 virgins (although nowadays they say that due to the shortage of virgins you get only one, but she is 72 years old).

(As an aside, doesn't anyone find it strange that people who are the most active in encouraging Palestinian teenagers to blow themselves up in Israeli pizzerias tend to be 66-year-old men living in Australia, or at least 56-year-old women sitting in the Palestinian legislature?)

Al-Hilali has apologized for his comments (all together now: "taken out of context"). "I unreservedly apologise to any woman who is offended by my comments. I had only intended to protect women's honour," he said in a statement published in The Australian. Would that, incidentally, be the same "honour" as in "honor killings"?

When asked by the reporters whether he would stand down, he answered "after we clean the world of the White House first".

Teaching Americans modesty, or perhaps better architecture? OK, I am retracting my words about the cactus. This man will never learn.

The Australian Lebanese Muslim Association, which owns Hilaly's Lakemba Mosque, has suspended him from preaching for three months, but says no further action will be taken. Too little and too late, but better than nothing. Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Pru Goward is saying this is not enough.

One thing I would like to know: when 9/11 happened, and many times afterwards, we were told that the guys who do or support things like that have misunderstood and misinterpreted Islam. Did Australia's senior Muslim cleric misunderstand it too? Must be an awfully complicated religion.

The wall

French Foreign Minister Phillippe Douste-Blazy (of the recent "Iran is a stabilizing force in the region") fame has recently said that he has changed his (previously negative) opinion of Israel's separation barrier after realizing that it works pretty well.

I am all for people changing their minds when new evidence becomes available, but I must admit that for a second I had a rather mean thought along the lines of "hey, the guy wants to have a separation barrier between Paris and certain suburbs and would like to learn from Israeli experience".

Meet Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric

Taj el-Din al-Hilali, Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, has just compared uncovered women to uncovered meat..

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside... and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat?" he asked.

"If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred," he added.

OK, since he obviously failed to notice any of this in his 24 years in Australia, let's explain this to him very slowly: most women in Australia do not wear hijab, nor do they stay home all the time. If you are bothered by this fact, I am sure you will be more comfortable in some other country. For example Pakistan, where I am sure all the women are happy and safe due to the widespread wearing of hijab.

After a number of officials publicly expressed rather strong disapproval of the sermon, the cleric apologized to all women and said that his remarks were taken out of context. Here is a lovely selection of his other comments taken out of context. And here is a bit of the actual context.

Both officials and people are calling for the man's deportation. I am, for obvious reasons, a bit concerned about the idea of countries starting to deport their own naturalized citizens, but I can understand the feeling.

I think somebody should take a closer look at how the man got to be an Australian citizen to begin with. People should know their heroes.

Taj el-Din al-Hilali arrived in Australia in 1982 on a tourist visa, which he overstayed. Why anyone would give a tourist visa to a member of Muslim Brotherhood will forever be a mystery. People, if a place like Egypt is persecuting someone for Islamic extremism, chances are that the person is indeed an Islamic extremist.

They have repeatedly tried to deport him for inciting hatred, but failed. Inquiring minds want to know: how do you fail to deport a person? You grab the guy, who is not exactly hiding, and put him on a plane to whatever he is a citizen of (Egypt, in this case), or, if he is stateless, to wherever he came from. What's there to fail?

The quote from that period: "The Jews try to control the world through sex, then sexual perversion, then the promotion of espionage, treason, and economic hoarding." That was said while delivering a lecture to a group of Muslim students in the University of Sydney.

Jewish sexual wiles have obviously proved insufficent to get him deported, and in 1990 he was given a residence permit. The minister of Immigration at the time was Gerry Hand. A few years later al-Hilali has applied for and received the citizenship.

His achievements since then have included smuggling, driving uninsured and unregistred car, supporting suicide bombings in Israel (by children, no less), praising 9/11 as the work of God and calling Holocaust a Zionist lie. For the latter he finally for kicked out from Prime Minister's Muslim Community Reference Group.

Now it looks like he's finally done it with his rape comments, and even though he is unlikely to be kicked out of the country, with a little bit of luck he might be kicked out of every position of authority.

The weekend

Been celebrating all weekend and will continue the next one. Had some most amazing creatures over, such as linguists and an African pygmy hedgehog. Drank too much, but at least managed not to eat too much cake.

An amazing discovery: pancakes made with corn flour actually taste of corn, and are yellow.

Reread Speaker for the Dead and was actively bothered by the fact that the characters (in a fairly high-technology society about 5000 A.D.) seem to have no cell phones, no laptops and no PGP. For some reason this did not bother me when I first read the book about 5 years ago. This is weird in any case: the cell phones already existed in 1986 when the book was written.

Mad Jad forgot his medication again

Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened Israel again, and all the countries that support it as well. Considering that this includes all of Europe his standards for what constitutes the support of Israel must be fairly lax.

I am sure that soon we are going to hear that this is just a fine example of typical Middle Eastern political discourse, that he cannot really mean it, that ayatollahs won't let him do it, that this is just a justifiable reaction to Olmert saying a couple of days ago that Iran will have a price to pay if it does not back down from its nuclear ambitions, and that it was a total mistake to form a new nation-state there as late as in the 1948 among all those ancient nation-states that date from 1920s.

So far Iran has been working on its nuclear program in spite of all the finger-waving from the UN, and repeatedly threatening Israel. UN dignitaries can of course afford to wait and see whether he really means it, because their headquarters are located in New York out of range of Iran's missiles. Israel's government obviously cannot, because you do not normally want to conduct experiments whose possible result is a nuke in one of your cities.

The question is: can Europe? How far do the newest Shahabs fly?

Putin's sense of humor strikes again

Putin envies Katsav's manly power. Hope is not going to actually try to compete with him.

35

Turned 35 today. Bugger. No matter what I do I just keep getting older.

OTOH, some day I might be 90 and look back at 35 and think: "I was so young then!"

Differently able

Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen said that Russia has a different kind of democracy. Sort of reminds me of the time when my late professor of English history bought a book that said "for specially gifted children" for her little son, only to have him comment "mom, this is a book for retards".

Heh, and here I thought that only in the US the political correctness has reached the point where we call the disabled people "differently able", and even then not very often.

Speaking about the actual disabled people: Helsingin Sanomat has an article today saying that according to a study made by Invalidiliitto most people have problems relating to the motion-impaired people in a perfectly equal and neutral way. I am not sure why this should come as a surprise to anyone. Disability is just not a neutral thing. It is a bad thing. I don't see why we should have to relate in a neutral way to a condition most of us dread. Yes, we should strive to make it less dreadful by providing good access for the handicapped in the buildings, etc., but physical disability won't become a neutral thing until human bodies become totally irrelevant. I can certainly see the point in pretending to relate to it as a neutral thing in the presence of the handicapped people (it's probably boring to hear expressions of pity all the time, and they probably have other things to talk about and are generally annoyed by people calling attention to their disability, etc.). But can anyone tell me why we are supposed to pretend to relate to it in a neutral way when answering a questionnaire for a study about attitudes towards the motion-impaired?

"Holy shit! What's a Shiite?"

New York Times has published an article about the fact that many of our counterterrorism officials can't tell the difference between Sunni and Shia. (Here it is, but I think it requires registration.)

The journalist, Jeff Stein, has been visiting the officials with the question "Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” He did not really expect a theological analysis, he asked people things like whether Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah are Sunni or Shia. Some people answered his questions, but a lot didn't. He, of course, mentioned some (?) of the ones who failed by name in the article, but none of the ones who answered properly.

OK, the state of general education (hmm, can't come up with a proper English word for yleissivistys) in the US is unfortunately no news. Neither is the state of general education among our elected and unelected officials. What is news, however, is that NYT is finally saying that the differences between the Shia and the Sunni are more relevant to the subject of terrorism, than, say, the differences between the Militant Mennonites and the Aggressive Amish.

But we really should have some obligatory tests on the subject for our anti-terrorism officials.

"We are ready to fight for our independence! Please give generously!"

North Korea considers UN sanctions to be an act of war and is warning that it is ready to fight for its independence.

Independence is very nice, of course, but what exactly does it mean for a state that does not even have enough food to feed its citizens? I mean, isn't North Korea afraid that its neighbors will actually decide to grant it full independence and will stop feeding it?

"We are a fiercely independent nuclear state! Please send us 1 000 000 tons of rice or else we'll starve. Independently."

Boyfriends

Lately I have been occasionally thinking "maybe I should get myself a boyfriend", but then remembered that I have one already. This is probably a sad comment on our relationship. (In principle it could also be a sad comment on my memory but I don't think this is the case.)

So, maybe I should get myself another boyfriend. (No, this is not a call on my readers to submit resumes, I am just thinking.) Of course I only do open relationships and the two boyfriends would know about each other, but if all of them are as busy as Killeri I could probably have four at a time without any undue scheduling conflicts or them ever running into each other.

Maybe this is the way to go. Although with my luck I will probably find one who will want to spend all our time together, and then I'll get all annoyed and distant and will run away really fast.

Vacation pictures

Here.

Something is wrong in Sweden too...

I think at some point in the future the newspapers will switch to the headlines like "today no Swedish politicians got caught doing anything illegal". I am sure this headline will appear about the same time as "today no Muslims anywhere were outraged by anything", "freedom of speech has finally been achieved in Russia" and "George W. Bush has been admitted to Mensa".

Anyway, today a Swedish minister resigned, yesterday a Swedish minister resigned, and if they keep at it they will be all out of ministers in early November.

Not being a minister does not stop one from breaking the law, of course - Social Democrat Anna Sjödin has been recently convicted for assaulting a bouncer.

Finnish journalists (or rather STT) started asking Finnish ministers about what they have and have not done. Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen told the ministers that they should not have to answer these questions. I agree with that - I would not answer if I were them - but still find it funny that he felt the need to tell them so.

He thinks that people (even ministers) should be assumed to be law-abiding, which is what I am gonna answer the next time some official asks me about my tv tax.

Something is wrong in the Promised Land...

Israel's president Moshe Katsav decided not to attend the Knesset winter session opening ceremony due to numerous allegations of rape and sexual harassment aginst him. Hear those metal sounds, feel that wind? That's the 120 members of the Knesset taking their chastity belts off and sighing in relief.

See, people, that's where it leads when you have a figurehead president: he has enough time on his hands to try to fuck anything that moves, and not enough power to attract any volunteers. If Israelis had a real president he'd probably only accept blow jobs from willing young interns and would still have enough power left to redefine them as non-sex.

Israel's president is supposed to perform important moral and educational functions. I am sure "avoid being alone in a room with the president" is in fact a thing that the people around him need to be educated about. Israel's previous shining moral beacon, Ezer Weizman, resigned amid allegation of taking bribes.

How come the man is so frisky at 61 anyway? I am afraid manufacturers of Viagra have a lot to answer for.

Regardless of Katsav and his moral standing: why do so many countries have figurehead presidents? I mean, what's the point? At least figurehead royalty has some glamour about it, but what is the point of a figurehead president? Nobody even remembers who they are until they rape somebody. Hey, anyone here remember who is the president of Germany? Without looking it up on the Net?

Flu and (no) fever

Got some kind of a stupid flu: really sore throat, and hard to breathe while lying down (not hard to breathe in any medical emergency sense, just unpleasant enough to keep me awake all night). No other symptoms.

I find it weird that I almost never have a fever nowadays. Maybe once every several years. Didn't use to be that way - until 15 years ago or so I tended to have a low-grade fever with almost every flu. I think it's me who changed and not the flu viruses, because a lot of other people still seem to have a low-grade fever with almost every flu.

I wonder what causes changes like that. Not that I miss the fever, but when I was a kid and being above 37.3 meant being allowed to stay home instead of going to school, I would have been pissed off if I ran out of fevers.

Luckily I am an adult now and can stay home because of other flu symptoms just as well. In fact, what am I doing here at work today?

Belgium

I started wondering what happens when Belgium falls apart (IMO this is not a question of "if", but of course I might be wrong). Will both halves inherit a EU membership, and will they even want it? What are they gonna do about Brussels? Will the royal house remain with Wallonia or Flanders, or will they share? Can Wallonia balance its budget without Flanders?

I am also wondering whether this is currently the only separatist movement in the world where the ethnic majority wants to cecede from the ethnic minority. Can't think of any other example offhand.

Interesting how the kind of people who normally support every kind of separatist movements everywhere never speak out in support of this particular one. Might be just because the separatist movements that happen at the voting booths are not as exciting as the ones involving bombs and shooting.

In any case I hope both parts keep producing chocolate.

Nuclear treshhold

Many Americans of my age have told me stories about their fear of nuclear war when they were kids. This surprised me: I grew up in full confidence that it is not gonna happen, and so did everyone I knew. The Soviet propaganda occasionally tried to scare us with America's nuclear capability, but even then it was not as much "they might attack us" as "they would probably want to attack us if we were not as mighty as we are". And I don't think anyone believed even that.

I wonder if any Finns were afraid of a nuclear war?

My confidence has been seeping away for the last few years. I wanted to write a few thoughts about the nuclear treshhold, but this person has done it better.

In the news

We really do live in interesting times.

Russian schools are getting requests to compile lists of schoolchildren with Georgian names. This rings the bells in more ways than one. Russia is also applying pressure on Georgia in ways that would cause massive protests if it were some civilized country doing this.

Politkovskaya got murdered. Putin promised to find and punish the killers. Oh my God, why does this remind me so much of OJ all over again?

(For the record: I am not really sure that Putin did it. Could have been anyone among the high officials and officers that she dug up dirt on. Not that it takes much digging, mind you.)

North Korea tested a nuclear bomb, or pretended to. Less than one kiloton - hey, they have probably managed a better explosion with trains in Ryongchon. Although, what do you expect from a country that still hasn't mastered the highly technological skill of growing enough rice to feed the population? And now they are threatening the US, saying that full-scale sanctions (such as closing Kim Jong-Il's offshore bank accounts, I guess) will be interpreted as an act of war, and North Korea will retaliate. They will probably shoot a missile with a train attached. Or, as a friend of mine suggested, they will go and sit somewhere in the Middle East with a sign "Will bomb Great Satan for food". Speaking about that - let's stop sending them food. Let them eat their bomb or whatever.

Somalia and Ethiopia have started a war with each other, or according to some reports Somalia - or the Islamic fundamentalists who have power over most of the south - started war with Ethiopia. Since things don't usually happen very fast in that part of the world, the war has been declared but there has not been any real shooting action. Maybe it's better that way.

In the much brighter news: France has banned smoking in public places, to be implemented in phases in 2007-2008. Go France!

Now Putin already has a very good idea who killed Politkovskaya: the Russian emigrants. (Don't look at me, I am absolutely innocent.) Somehow, the stories from Russia nowadays resemble more and more the stories my grandparents used to tell me.

Göteborg riots in the news, and sarcasm

Heh. Just got censored on the Helsinki Sanomat web forum for the first time ever.

There was a smallish riot in Göteborg on Sunday night. There was a power outage and some "youths", as the media put it, have started rioting, breaking windows and throwing stones.

I rarely write anything there, but sometimes (maybe once in 1 or 2 months) it's hard to resist. When a couple of people in Hesari's web forum expressed surprise at what's wrong with the Swedish young people - our young people don't behave like that - I just had to suggest that it must be hunger, what with the Ramadan. Since I usually try to be polite in the public forums that do not happen to be my own blog, I did not even mention the obvious reason why such things occur less often in Finland than in Sweden. I also said that I am probably a bad person for making such guesses in the absence of hard evidence, but I am also probably right. (Hard evidence is still missing, but the location of the riots and comments of people who claim to be Göteborgians on various forums suggest that I probably am in fact right.)

Anyway, that got censored. This is quite fine with me - Hesari does not owe me a forum for my rude if probably correct guesses - but strange, because I have seen similar opinions expressed there before, and made me wonder whether different threads are moderated by diffrent individuals with vastly different standards. Apparently my message was not the only one censored out, because the whole thread deteriorated into an unbelievable sarcasmfest. (No, I don't really recommend following the link. Any five-seven messages from there are fun to read, but any more and you get a feeling like you are eating a bowlful of whole lemons.)

DC, 19.09: the Library of Congress and the White House

The Library of Congress and the White House are places where you get in by appointment. The easiest way to get the tickets is writing to your elected representative's office. You can get into the Library of Congress on your own too, but then you are not gonna have a guy with a beard show you all the interesting details of the building and tell about their history.

The Library (the Jefferson building) is very beautiful and the guy with a beard is telling all the kinds of interesting things about it. At some point in some corner he points at writings on the ceiling and says that these express universal human values for all times and peoples. I find it amusing because they clearly express the values of European Enlightenment, which are in no way universal.

(And yes, I do prefer the Western values to any others and would consider it good if they were universal - but this is no reason to claim that they actually are.)

In any case I am very pleased with the library - both the main building and the collection are quite worthy of the National Library of the world's only superpower. The organization, well, reminds you of the fact that it is owned by the Federal government, but could be worse.

Any person who has an ID can get a library card and read books in the building, but only members of Congress can check books out of the building. We are told not to get the cards as souvenirs, only if we want to read something.

During our stay in DC we see Marine One all the time (it's like Air Force One but belongs to the Marine Corps and not the Air Force). I think any Marine Corps craft that is carrying the President is called Marine One, but the normal physical instance of Marine One is a big Sikorsky helicopter. I have no idea why presidential planes belong to the Air Force and helicopters to the Marine Corps, but in any case the First Helicopter seems to shake so much that the president is probably using the First Barf Bag all the time.

Our tickets to the White House are at 12, but they let us in earler. The security is much like in the library, except that you have to show an ID. A sleepy security guy takes our passports somewhere, comes back with them and clearly cannot remember whom he took them from. We wave to him, get them back and go through security. My belt seems to ring everywhere, and then I have to take it off, and then my pants are falling down. Annoying.

The White House tour is self-guided and they show you only a small part of it, of course. Feels like a small historical museum. Interesting but not very impressive.

We have lunch in a place called Ebbitt Grill right near the White house. It's overcrowded and mentioned in our guidebook, and such places are usually overrated, but this one is excellent. They don't have a place in a non-smoking section and convince us to sit in the smoking section claiming that nobody smokes, and indeed nobody does.

We decide to check out the nearest supermarket, which in on 11th street about 8 blocks to the north of our hotel. Around the 1000-block the neighborhood starts becoming vibrant and multicultural (in fact sleepy and Black), not in a ghetto-scary way though. The supermarket, when we find it, hint more at a Hispanic neighborhood and is rather poor. Benka says she has never seen such a poor supermarket in a Western country, but that's because she has never shopped in Hispanic food stores in Boston.

Later in the day we check out the modern art part of the Art Gallery. Its a lot less impressive than the older part, mostly because it has fewer paintings. They are getting ready for some big party right after the closing. I am considering stealing a glass of wine just for the thrill of it, but don't.

News of the peaceful

Ok, folks, this is a bit too close to home. Even though I don't have a habit of going to the synagogue on High Holidays.

DC, 18.09: Holocaust museum and Air and Space museum

All the museum visitors are searched, in all museums. Didn't use to be that way when my parents have last been here 16 years ago.

All kinds of anti-car barriers everywhere, and security cameras. Oska, who is in the security business, growls that the security does not seem to be sufficient.

In the morning we turn the TV on and see that some guy managed to break into the Capitol and that on this account the Capitol is closed not only for visitors but for the staff as well. In the evening he turns out to be some gangbanger on crack. I almost feel sorry for the fucker - imagine waking up from some crack hangover and finding out that you have attacked the US Capitol while high.

Holocaust museum is very good and covers a range of topics and times - from Hitler's rise to power to Jewish pogroms in Poland right after the defeat of Germany, and from Mengele's experiments to the problems Nazis had in inventing appropriate clothing symbols for a person who was gay, Jewish and Communist simultaneouly. The most interesting thing from my point of view is a screen which runs the history of Nazi anti-Jewish legislation: looks like they had some new anti-Jewish law every week, and some of them were quite absurd, like not allowing Jews to join Hitler Jugend.

"Hitler would probably be turning in his grave if he knew that in 2006 the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world would be in Germany," - I tell Benka. "You don't know what's gonna happen 50 years from now," - answers the old cynic. I am reminded of my great-uncle Yefim who believed that being friendly with infidels is a good thing but one should have a good horse in case things do not work out after all. He exchanged all his parents' property for a horse when things really weren't working out (as in, Germans were approaching their village in 1941) and rode away on it together with his parents, his sister and her two little sons, which would nowadays probably be considered animal abuse. I have always wondered what everyone involved would have said if they knew that one of those little boys would yet happily live in Germany many years later.

The Air and Space museum feels small because many items are huge. There is the lunar module on Apollo 11, lunar rocks, all kinds of airplanes including one whose wings seem to be backwards, one pedal-powered plane, a wide variety of astronaut food (looks almost as bad as KLM), space toilet, a little model of aircraft carrier and lots of other things. Including many countries' money from WWII times for some reason.

"Is Enola Gay somewhere here?" - I ask Benka when looking at the WWII airplanes. Two minutes later Oska comes into the room and asks "Where is our Enola Gay". Benka notes that we must be related.

We did not find Enola Gay, but later it turned out that it is in the same museum's other building across the river.

I still want Chinese food and we still don't see any. I suggest we go to the Chinatown. Oska says it is full of all kinds of evildoers (15 years ago Boston Chinatown used to have a number of drug dealers and a few sex shops of doubtful quality, and by association Oska thinks they are all like that) but we go there anyway. Evildoers are not in evidence, and neither is Chinese food, at least of the kind that my parents would consent to eat. The Chinatown is a small but lively area (but certainly not vibrant or multicultural in a scary way) full of nice and somewhat pricey restaurants none of which are Chinese. We settle on a lovely tapas place called La Tasca. The food and the sangria are great, but they add tips to the bill. Which is not immoral as such, but I believe that when you do that in a country where it is not normally done, you should warn your clientele in big friendly letters.

We hang out a bit more and look for a belt for Oska. His belt broke and his pants are falling down. A few times he hints that I should cede my own belt to him because he is older and my father, but I don't like my pants falling down either. We don't find a belt. He wants a beer from a convenience store as a consolation prize, but we don't find a beer. Or a convenience store, for that matter.

NYC-DC, 17.09

We leave early and drive into the great unknown to which I usually refer with the words "South of NY".

Verrazano bridge is huge. You are not allowed to take pictures on it on account of terrorists. A few years ago some wannabe Islamic terrorist was caught trying to saw one of its cables. The cables are about a meter in diameter, so the poor thing would still be sawing today if they hadn't caught him. Hope they gave him some sawing job in prison.

The landscape looks even more boring than New England, especially in New Jersey. Except for a couple of rivers there is not much to see until we arrive in DC.

Oska wants me to get his GPS device to work, but all my attempts to find Washington lead to a variety of towns by the same name in New England. Finally we establish that he forgot to load the map of anything to the south of NJ into the device.

DC is divided into 4 quarters: NE, NW, SE and SW. The Capitol is the origin of this coordinate system, so that NW, for example, means "northwest from the Capitol". The east-to-west streets have letters; the north-to-south, numbers. We are staying on the corner of 11 and E. There are also some streets in this city that have names, usually the names of various states.

The city is monumental. Very monumental, huge porticos and columns eveywhere. Somebody was trying for a new Rome, and not entirely without success. Now I understand why so many demonstrations are held here - not only because most politicians hang out here, but also because this is the one city with enough street space for a proper demonstration. The streets are huge, which probably looked stupid back when they were buit, but surely comes in handy with the current traffic. The city also seems to have a functioning public transportation system but we do not test it and just walk everywhere.

The museums close way too early (5pm-6:30pm), but we make it to the National Gallery of Art anyway. It turns out to be quite pleasant, big but not too big.

The Mall is a huge wide street with a lot of grass in the middle (the kind you walk on, not the kind you smoke). The strip of grass is so wide that it is a national park and has park rangers lurking around the edges. A few blocks of it are covered by tents to be used for an upcoming anti-cancer demonstration. You can see the Capitol on one end and the Washington monument on the other. Lots of planes are flying around very low - one of the airports is just across the river.

We want to see the Lincoln memorial, which is somewhere far behind the Washington monument. The Washington monument is a huge obelisk with a pointy top and two red eyes (warning lights for the airplanes, probably), which immediately makes me think of some giganic alien Ku Klux Klan member. The Lincoln memorial is a Greek temple-like building which for some reason reminds me of the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome although it is not particularly close to it architecturally. Inside is a huge statue of Linclon, much bigger than I imagined from the movies.

In front of the memorial is the Reflecting Pool. It does not reflect anything any more than any other pools. Or maybe this is a pool meant for reflection? It's quite pretty, in any case.

The national WWII memorial is there too. There are pillars representing all states and territories. I am amused at my immediate urge to search for Massachusetts.

I want Chinese food but settle for some steak-and-whatever restaurant near our hotel. We finish early enough for me to go to the room and watch the Amazing Race season 10's first episode. It feels weird watching TV on TV, which I haven't done for years. I don't like it: the show keeps being interrupted by some stupid ads and the picture is much worse than on the monitor.

Helsinki-NYC, 16.09

KLM food is evil. All airline food is evil, but KLM's has become especially vile in the last few years. Don't know why, they used to be better than average. Why did they have to get so much worse after 9/11? I mean, security surely does not require awful food, does it? Or are they trying to scare the terrorists away with it?

Schiphol, on the other hand, is the most tolerable airport in Europe, foodwise and in every other way.

The security line for the NYC flight is unbelievable. An hour.

Flying is boring. KLM food is still evil. Somewhere below us the dear old country is crawling into the night Maine-first. The Eastern seabord looks like one big city from the plane, although it really isn't.

Finally the airport (JFK has much improved in the 18 years since my last visit), parents, hotel and food. And wine and tea.

Good luck, and pass the popcorn

The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened to kill Hamas leaders. Hamas responded that it won't show mercy to the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. This should be interesting.

I am back, and have seen all kinds on natural wonders

Gonna write about the vacation later, right now I just don't have enough brainpower to work and write and the same time (jet lag and hunger are a bad combination).

KLM has competelely run out of edible food, and Northwest is only marginally better, but the in-flight entertainment was amazing yesterday. Aurora borealis all over the sky all the way from Greenland to Iceland, and for a while after that. Green with little bits of red. Wow. I've seen it before but never that much of it. From now on I am always gonna try to get a window seat on the left side on all US-Europe flights. Maybe they'll show aurora borealis again.

Also saw a big thunderstorm from above. Looked sort of fake, like a special effect.

The third wonder of nature was a huge rain just as I got back to Finland. Anu came to the airport and we had to wade in almost ankle-deep water just to get to my place.

Argh

Grr. I go away for a few days and one of my favorite blogs disappears.

It is quite disturbing. He used to write fairly sarcastic things many of which were out of line with the politically correct line of thinking (and sometimes quite wrong, but who isn't, sometimes?), and at some point concerned citizens became, well, concerned and alerted the Powers That Be.

Suddenly he started sounding like a Stepford wife, saying that he has realized that he has been mean and wrong, but has seen the light now, and that he is doing this completely of his free will in order to become a better person, without any pressure from anyone, and deleted his blog.

This is scary. It would have been less scary if he wrote "shit, can't write anymore, gonna get in trouble". I kind of feel bad about questioning Ilkka's sudden change of worldview and personality, but you gotta admit that a radical personality change right after one's boss suggests sensitivity training might lead onlookers to draw a number of cynical conclusions.

In any case, he does not want any free speech campaigning on his behalf, and we've got to respect his wishes. I've seen people urging him to fight, but fighting is exactly the kind of thing that is easy to cheer on but sometimes hard to do. But I'll really miss the damn blog.

Somehow a quote from Walter Williams comes to my mind: "You say, "Williams, how can you get away with such political incorrectness?" It's easy. I'm a tenured professor, and I have diversified sources of income -- plus, I don't have much longer in this world." Not having much longer in this world does not sound like a good idea, but I sincerely wish Ilkka tenure and diversified sources of income.

Weirdos in the street

Lately there has been a lot of weirdos trying to talk to me in the street. I have no idea why. Usually the most severe weirdo season is early summer, but this week there has been a line of men trying to inform me that I have big tits.

Last night's weirdos:

1. "You have very strong hair. Reminds me of Samson and Delilah. Like, if somebody cuts your hair you are weak."

Great pickup line, moron.

I consider some of my standard psychotic responses along the lines of "why, I would still be strong enough to catch the guilty party, slash all the flesh off his face, dip the rest of it in acid and cut off all fingers one by one", but look at the guy, and he looks very small and sad and I don't quite have the heart. Usually saying things like that scares potential sex partners quite efficiently, but it has its risks: some are actually looking for a psychotic girlfriend and sometimes it leads to embarassing situations, like that Irish guy running after me in Amsterdam once and demanding that I beat him up or at least humiliate him properly.

He turns out to be an American. Me too. He thinks we should drink to such an incredible coincidence sometime, and gives me his email address. I rate my chances of ever contacting him as "highly unlikely" and don't give him mine. He asks whether I have issues with foreigners, or with men. I feel like explaining to him that any contact with strange men who meet me in the street and try to be my friends usually deteriorates into the tedios "please?" - "no" - "please?" - "no" so it's best not to waste time.

"Please? I have been here 3 years and I know very few people. You know how hard it is to meet Finnish people."
"Uhm, actually I don't. I meet Finnish people all the time."

He expresses doubt. I ask him whether or not he speaks Finnish. "Of course not!" "Uhm, maybe you'll have an easier time meeting them when you learn the language."

I almost feel like sending him the URL of the forum where foreigners complain to each other that Finnish is hard and Finns are hard to meet, but don't really feel like contacting him.

2. "Excuse me? Do you have a cigarette?"
"No."
"You have a very nice body."
"Thanks." (I really don't, but here it is a prettier euphemism for big tits.)
"I wanna try it."
"No way."
"Why."
"I already have a boyfriend, and if I were looking for a new one it wouldn't be you." Not to mention that I wouldn't think of doing it with a man who has some use for a cigarette.
"Is this because I am black?"
The race card should be answered appropriately. "Yes, that too." (I don't really mind black guys but the race card should always be punished. Besides, it's fun to see people's jaws drop.)

All that weirdness within ten minutes. Huh.

Security risks

A couple of weeks ago a guy was not allowed to board a plane at NYC's JFK airport while wearing a t-shirt with an Arabic text ("we will not be silent"). They even bought him another t-shirt. Hey, if you get a new t-shirt every time you wear an Arabic t-shirt, where do I sign up?

A few days later another guy was not allowed to board a plane at the Birmingham airport in a t-shirt with a picture of pistols. Security risk, you know. He is gonna make pictures of gunshot wounds on other people's t-shirt with those gun pictures. Or something. Don't the security guards in Birmingham have some real work to do? Like, say, checking every woman for gel bras, which are forbidden there?

Air Canada Jazz, on the other hand, kicked out a guy who was already inside a plane. For praying in a rather conspicuous way. And he wasn't even a Muslim, he was a Hassidic Jew. But he was making other passengers nervous. (As an aside: where did they find a Hassidic Jew who spoke neither English nor French?)

Making other passengers nervous is not allowed? Hey, let's ban screaming babies! And airline food made of beans! Not to mention hijabs.

Anyone who follows my blog regularly knows that I don't underestimate the threat of Islamic terrorism and the need for security. Security, however, does not have to mean idiocy. If you really believe that antique pistols pictured on a t-shirt are a security threat to the point that they should not be allowed on a plane, it makes me wonder whether you are also checking people's luggage with a x-ray machine that is drawn on a wall somewhere.

Banning things just because they make people nervous is understandable but problematic. If you actually poll the passengers on what makes them the most nervous this will probably take you to square one on the ethnic profiling issue.

Banning realistic toy weapons is a good idea. Counting a gun's depiction on a t-shirt as a realistic toy weapon makes one wonder about your connection to reality. Texts in Arabic, objectionable or not, have rarely attacked anyone. The flight is not likely to last long enough for a passenger to convert others to Islam by showing them the Arabic text on the t-shirt. And good luck with getting the security employees to distinguish between Arabic, Farsi and Urdu by looking at it.

I have nothing against banning public prayer on a plane (very generous of me, seeing as I have no use for it), but in this case it should be written somewhere in big friendly letters. "No praying". As opposed to first letting somebody pray and then kicking them out of the plane.

Where were you back when...

Helsingin Sanomat's web forum has a thread now where people tell where they were on 9/11. Reading it made me think that one should always have an irc channel (or several) full of friends available when something big happens.

Well, technically I was asleep when It Happened. Woke up in my apartment in Brighton about nine in the morning, did whatever it is one normally does in the morning, pulled my pants on and opened the door to go to work. The phone rang. The caller ID showed the workplace of my friend Anya, but I decided not to answer it and to call her from work. So I ran to the bus slightly pondering the mystery of Anya being awake enough to dial a number before 10am.

In the building where I worked the combined receptionist/security guard named Felix was listening to a radio and waving his hands at me. Felix was a graduate student from Ghana who was writing a thesis on Islamic extremism. He used to tell me that if Islamic terrorists are not stopped/watched/hunted well enough they are going to blow up something big in the US, for example try WTC again like they did in 1993. I usually listened to all that in a politely incredulous way. On that day he was waving his hands frantically and screaming "See? See? I told you they were gonna blow up the World Trade Center and now they did it!"

"Felix," - I said, - "this is not funny. Especially at this hour in the morning." He started saying something but then my cell phone rang and I answered it.

"Have you heard what's happening?" - my mother screamed in my ear, - "they blew up the WTC!"

Suppressing the paranoid thought that my mother and Felix must be pulling my leg together in a coordinated way i realized that it must be true, and that the first implication of it must be that I owe the guy an apology.

"Shit," - I said, - "I am really sorry. You were right and I was wrong and I could not believe it at first and what's going on?"

Felix filled me in on the only details that came from the radio, which was that two passenger planes hijacked from Boston crashed into the two towers and that there probably are more hijacked planes. I thanked him and went to work. While I walked to the second floor the following thoughts came to my mind:

1. "Eek, tens of thousands of people probably died there!" (I did not realize yet that the towers did not fall immediately on impact.)
2. "Are we gonna nuke somebody?"
3. "I want us to nuke somebody! Please?"
4. "How is this gonna affect my plans to go to Finland for job interviews next week, and the outcome of said interviews?"
5. A dawning realization that no matter what my stated beliefs are, or how wrong I consider this to be, to me my plans to move to Finland by the end of the year are infinitely more valuable than lives of, say, one billion of strangers on the other end of the world, and if my plans could be fulfilled only by killing them all I wouldn't really mind it. Of course I would say that this is the wrong thing to do and even believe it, but I would still be glad that it is being done. Which means that either I am an unusually bad person, which is not a comforting thought, or the feeling is mutual and common, which is even less of a comforting thought. I was not used to this kind of cognitive dissonance back then.

At work nobody was working. The bosses were at the door, all ready to go find some bar with a TV, and the developers were reading and watching news on the net all the time. I called Anya and she told me that they were all sent home on account of terrorism (her workplace is right in between Boston's two tallest towers).

Rumors abounded and nobody was sure of anything. 3 hijacked planes? 4? 5? 7? Which planes? Where are they gonna fall? Anything falling into Boston? Was it a plane in Pentagon, or a car bomb? How did the fuckers hijack the planes anyway? Where the fuck are the family friends who live in NYC?

Reloading CNN took ages until they removed everything besides the terrorism coverage. Often the first news we got were through the net version of Helsingin Sanomat.

Irc provided a lot of comfort that day. Friends and news are both comforting in such moments. It provided some discomfort too, when I realized that one person was openly glad, but all in all it felt really good to share news and speculations with friends on the other side of the world.

How did people cope without irc?

When I was watching United 93 I realized that if 9/11 happened today there probably would have been people ircing from the planes, and sending hijackers' pictures, and god knows what. Not that it would have made a lot of difference...

No more smoke

From June 1, 2007 Finnish bars and restaurants will become smoke-free. The restaurants that have made structural changes in connection with the previous anti-smoking law a few years ago will get a two-year transition period, which is only fair.

I remember that only 5-6 years ago some people were saying that Europe would never have no-smoking-in-a-restaurant laws like the US. Now I'll get to laugh at them all the way from one bar to another.

I wonder who is next. France? Netherlands?

An unappetizing observation

If you drink enough tea and throw up often enough, the tea starts tasting exactly the same going up and going down.

One more interesting thing about vomiting: bulimics are often warned that vomiting will damage their teeth (I assume because of the acidity), but we never hear any such warnings issued to people who are eating or drinking acidic stuff. Is vomit on average more acidic than, say, carbonated beverages or citrus juices?

What does a flag mean to you?

To me a country's flag doesn't mean anything much. It's a symbol of a country, just like a company's logo. When i am in a country I expect to see a number of local flags, although the number varies rather widely with the country. In some places, for example the US or Norway, people display local flags a lot, in some countries much less.

I have never once imagined that displaying a local flag should be an affront to myself as a foreigner. In fact the whole idea was quite unfamiliar to me until this article.

In short: there are people in Turku, volunteers invited by one guy from the city council, patrolling the streets. They are dressed in blue-and-white vests with Finland's flag on their chests. Apparently some people find the flag suspicious, and there are comments like "no foreigner would dare ask them for help with these Finnish flags on their chests", "the attitude is clearly xenophobic", "this is provocative and racist".

What is so provocative and racist about displaying the local flag? Am I missing something, or is this some new trend, or did the paper just find some really weird people to interview?

Absurd Russia, part two

Somebody stole a water tower near Pskov.

How do you steal a water tower, how? And what do you do with it afterwards? Put it in your backyard? Sell it? To whom?

Riots in Kondopoga

Last weekend there were riots in the city of Kondopoga, Russian Karelia. Very big riots, considering that the city is only about 35000.

On Wednesday night there was a fight in a restaurant owned by Chechens between ethnic Chechens and ethnic Russians. It is unclear who started and who won, but in the end of the fight the Russians left. The Chechens asked for reinforcements, who arrived somewhat later with knives, pipes and similar weapons that properly belong in Lunch Money, found no trace of the original Russian adversaries, and attacked some Russians who had absolutely nothing to do with the original fight, since Russians are quite numerous in Russia anyway so you can always find some, and since one really shouldn't travel all the way to the restaurant for nothing.

Two men were killed. There were rumors of a third one who died later, but nobody is still quite sure.

The population was quite shell-shocked, the night was quiet, people were discussing things on the local web forum (in Russian, and half of the messages are censored for swearing, calls for violent crime, or both). The main gist of the conversation, both among the people calling for genocide and among the people who considered it a bad idea, was a total and probably well-founded belief that the authorities are not going to do anything useful in any way.

The next night - or was it Friday night - large groups of local Russians burned down the restaurant in question, as well as pretty much all other businesses owned by Chechens, as well as the businesses owned by people from Caucasus who were not in any way or form Chechen. The forum was full of people calling for deporting all Chechens from Russia back to Chechnya, although some undoubtedly disloyal citizens did point out that the problem with this approach, apart from the usual ethical and logistical problems associated with ethnic cleansing, is that Chechnya is in fact in Russia.

On Saturday there was a meeting of about 2000 people demanding kicking all the Chechens and preferably other Caucasians (in the sense of a person from Caucasus, obviously, and not in the sense of "white") out of town. It was a bit late since by that point all the people from Caucasus had already left town (the tendency to stay in town during ethnic riots has been culled from the gene pool in Russia a long time ago).

Eventually the enraged citizenry ran out of things to burn, whereupon the fearless leaders banned alcohol sales and sent in some OMON troops who arrested 100-something rioters and two Chechens or other Caucasians.

Observation 1: things easily get ugly when the population does not trust the authorities at all.

Observation 2: Russians currently have ample reason to hate Chechens, and the other way around, too, but from the times of my childhood I remember very well that a lot of Russians used to hate people from Caucasus for reasons totally unrelated to terrorism, religion of peace or crime. In fact I still have no idea what they hated them for. They spoke with funny accents, sold overpriced produce, tended to have more money than the Russians (or maybe just flashed it more) and harassed women in an annoying but usually nonviolent way, which does not quite explain the amount of hatred. Also, a lot of other people from Caucasus tended to hate Chechens.

Observation 3: my mother's friend Rita sometimes says "I would believe anything about Russia, even if you tell me that all the people there suddenly grew horns", and the more I read Russian news in general, the more I think of her.

Urgh

Throwing up a lot of bright-red bits is a rather scary experience. At least until you remember having eaten six tomatoes.

Sick

Blaah... Spent all the weekend at home sick. Went to a party but it was a mistake even though it was a very good party, and I had to leave early.

I hate flu, especially the nasty varieties thereof. I am actually doing quite OK as long as I am sitting down, drinking tea and eating pseudoephedrine, but doing all of the above continuously can interfere with sleeping a bit. Kind of hard to sleep when you have to be vertical, drink a liter of tea an hour, and the tea also has to come out somehow. Somebody should invent a vertical bed/toilet kind of thing, which should also include a kettle.