All independent paralyzed elderly, unite!

The Finnish Immigration Service has decided to deport Maria Kirbasova, a half-paralyzed senior citizen who was one of the founding members of Soldiers' Mothers organization in Russia, and who was hoping to get to stay with her daughter.

Because, you know, a mother is not a family member. Not to mention that a half-paralyzed senior citizen dissident in Russia is in less danger than a young robber in Somalia.

I understand all the people making fun of the officials who say that in other cultures people have a different concept of what a family member is, and the concern about third-world people bringing all their extended family here, but IME Finnish people usually do consider their parents and children to be family. Even when said children turn 18.

(As an aside, the third-world people will bring their extended families anyway, mostly by using various refugee and quasi-refugee statuses. I should know - you wouldn't believe all the variety of distant relatives we managed to bring in the US. Completely legally, mind you. Not that I am complaining - we have been very grateful for the opportunity, and the people we brought have all become law-abiding citizens, and mostly highly tax-paying ones, too - but I could never understand why we got to bring even the kind of relatives none of us had ever seen before, such as my father's cousin's new husband, whereas the citizens have to wait years to bring their parents, children or siblings.)

But I digress. The law, and the Immigration Service's webpage say that Finnish and non-EU citizens get to bring their non-family relatives if those are totally dependent on them. If an elderly person who has rheumatism, is half-paralized, lives in a country where services for such elderly are not available and has no other children there does not qualify, then who does? Does one have to be dead or something?

Yes, I share the skepticism of some commenters about the daughter's ability to support the mother if her condition gets worse, but that's not the point here. You can't simultaneously make a law saying that only the sick and dependent old people get to come here, and simultaneously complain about their being, uhm, sick and dependent and old. Not unless you want to look really stupid, anyway. Not that this consideration has bothered our lawmakers, officials and courts much lately.

A really interesting detail that Hesari doesn't mention is that these are the rules for Finnish citizens and most non-EU citizens. The rules for the EU-citizens (excluding Finland), and citizens of Switzerland and Liechtenstein are different. They get to bring children up to the age of 21, as opposed to 18, and parents that they are taking care of (don't have to be totally dependent), and also their mother- and father-in-law.

Where is the sense in this? Some EU-regulation, sure, but couldn't they write the law so that Finland's own citizens wouldn't be treated any worse than EU citizens? Kirbasova's daughter, if she is a Finnish citizen, can probably freely move to Sweden, and bring her mother there. And if Swedish laws are just as perverse, their citizens who need to bring their parents can move here and bring them here. Yes, this would increase the mobility within the EU, but is there any common or even uncommon sense in this?

Note to self: just punch them

Seppo Lehto got 2 years 4 months for many counts of defamation and libel (it seems to be the same offense here).

I don't doubt that Lehto has insulted and defamed pretty much everything that moved, and I do think that libel should be a criminal offense. But 2 years 4 months? In Finland?

For comparison, the Wikipedia article that refers to the statistics from the year 2002 says that for an aggravated battery, 62% got a suspended sentence, 2% got community service and 37% got a prison sentence, and the average suspended sentence was 12.5 months, and the average prison sentence was 18.1 month.

Aggravated battery in Finland is a battery that causes a serious injury, is dangerous to one's life, is done in a cruel and unusual way or is done with a deadly weapon.

OK, granted, those are sentences for one aggravated battery, and Seppo Lehto committed many defamations, but damn, there should be some sense of proportion. Something is seriously wrong when defaming people on the Internet brings a longer sentence than punching those same people in the nose would.

Better now

The crisis is almost over, the friend who had a heart attack had his artery cleaned and is feeling much better, though still in the hospital, his wife and son are here, and I regained my own bed.

I must say that although on the general policy level I really support the idea of "when in Rome, do as Romans do", in a real-life situation I totally failed to convince my Russians of the Finnish ways, such as "here in Finland, when somebody is having what appears to be a heart attack, we call the ambulance. We do not try to bum some nitroglycerin off random citizens. More specifically, we do not go into a cafe whose employees all appear to be under 30 and try to bum nitro off them, because most likely they don't have any."

The most amazing thing was that they did in fact manage to bum three pills of nitroglycerin (not from the young cafe employees, though). It didn't help much, and they let me call an ambulance.

The ambulance totally rocked, BTW. They had an EKG device that not only drew wavy lines, but actually said "looks like a heart attack". They also gave us all a ride to the hospital.

No rest for the wicked. No lunch, either.

The day started with a dentist, and making another dentist appointment. Went to work, had to debug an annoying bug and had nobody to blame for it, because it was my own. Then had to run to the general shareholder meeting of our apartment building. Was late.

After that, decided to have some coffee with a few friends visiting Helsinki from Russia. One of them had a heart attack right in the cafe. We just got back from Meilahti, he is feeling better but will have to stay there at least until tomorrow night, the rest of them are sleeping all over my place because without him they cannot get to their hotel somewhere 30km from Helsinki, his son is driving over from St. Petersburg overnight, and I have a feeling that the night is not over.

And now let's have a drink in support of alcoholics...

Lately I have seen several news items in the English-language media about people shaving their heads in support of some cancer victim (usually a family member).

Ugh, and I am not just saying this for aesthetic reasons. The whole idea just seems so perverse in a World According to Garp way. (In that book there was a girl named Ellen James, who was raped and whose tongue was cut out, and a group of feminists who called themselves Ellen Jamesians and cut their own tongues out in her support.)

I wonder if there are many cancer victims who actually enjoy that. "Oh, honey, we figured you don't see enough bald people in the hospital and in the mirror, so your father and I decided to shave our heads too for your viewing pleasure." Yes, I know that in many cases misery loves company, but IMO this is not an emotion that should be encouraged in oneself or others.

I was almost tempted to leave a comment somewhere suggesting what else might be cut off in support of, say, women who lost a breast to cancer, but then wisely decided not to give them any ideas. You never know...

BTW, my dear readers: you know I am afflicted with a horrible addiction to computer upgrades, and break my computer regularly in the process. Please don't show your support for me by breaking your own computers on purpose. It really won't make me happier.

Turkey

I am back. I was in Turkey, and after that for a few days in Paris.

Turkey was very interesting, beautiful, and damn cold.

The Evil Muslim Conspiracy didn't do anything highly evil, but they conspired to keep me covered and in the Muslim prayer position. The evil-doers arranged for the weather to be so cold that men and women, both Muslim and infidel, not only had to keep themselves covered but were all dreaming of long underwear. Visits to mosques required a hijab or some other hair covering (no, you are not getting to see a picture of me in that), and the WLAN modems in both hotels were so bad that the only way you could use the Internet was in the Muslim prayer position, at the door of your room in the direction of the modem. I think that from now on I will forever think of Mecca as a huge malfunctioning WLAN modem.

The population of Istanbul and Izmir doesn't seem to be particularly religious, and is mostly dressed like anywhere in southern Europe. There are some ferocious-looking bearded guys, but fewer than in London. There are also some women in shiny hijabs, and they are a lot more common than the ferocious guys. We were told that some of them are religious and some are just rural; the religious ones have the hijabs on tighly, so that you can't see a single hair; the others just have it any which way. Very few women were wearing something like a huge black sack pinned in front so that you could only see the eyes. Poor woman's burqa, I guess.

I must say that whatever the position of hijab- or sack-clad women is in the family, they didn't seem to yell at their husbands any less than anyone else, maybe more.

There are mosques everywhere, all over the place. The pretty ones in Istanbul are full of tourists. The really popular ones hand out scarves to visitors, for the others you have to bring your own.

Five times a day there is a call to prayer, the first one being at 5 am. The howling is very loud and most horrible, probably scaring the few faithful away from the mosques. Tourists are not supposed to visit during those times, and judging from the number of the people coming out of there the faithful don't either.

On Friday, however, there was some obvious attendance, with a lot of guys praying outside of mosques. Their average age was about 50; there were a few ferocious-looking young ones, but mostly the young guys looked like their parents brought them there, and instead of praying for heavenly maidens in paradise checked out the butts of the living ones in the street in a rather obvious way.

Statues of Atatürk are all over the place in a way that reminded me of Lenin. After a few days seeing a statue that did not feature Atatürk gave me a feeling that something is wrong. Also, baklava is all over the place, and is very good. The third thing that was all over the place was raki, a horrible anis liquor.

People are quite friendly. When they see tourists that look lost, at least on a quiet street, they immediately ask what they are looking for, or point to the nearest tourist attraction or toilet.

In general there is quite a lot of toilets, and almost all of of them have paper and a proper toilet bowl.

In all our time there nobody tried to cheat us, the restaurant bills were never more than they should be, and the street vendors have corrected me when I misunderstood them (my Turkish is quite bad) and handed them more money than they were asking for. Czech people should learn from this good example, and some Hungarians and Italians too.

People in Istanbul and Izmir speak of the population of the east of Turkey much like white Americans in Western movies speak of Indians. Or rather, much like white Americans in Western movie would speak of Indians if Indians had the right to vote and constituted half of the nation at the time. They also don't seem to be delighted about the eastern people moving into their cities.

Turkey must be the whitest country in the world. Every black or Asian person that I've seen there was an obvious tourist.

Turkey has the best cappuccino in the world, or at least the parts of the world that I've seen. Even Italy cannot compare.

Police is everywhere. Also, they search people and their bags in all the museums, public attractions and airport terminals (that's when you enter the terminal for any reason; when you are about to board a plane there is another search).

Turkish Airlines has big comfortable seats and great food. It also has, surprisingly, a Turkish name: Türk Hava Yollari.

The traffic is crazy, and people do unspeakable things, such as driving two ways on roads that can hardly fit even one car, coming face-to-face with somebody going the other way, and then having one of the cars back up until it can get away somewhere. They don't, however, do it very fast, and they seem to consider trams holy: as soon as a tram appears, all the cars performing unnatural acts on the tram tracks get out of the way.

Food is decent but generally unimpressive, apart from the baklava. Supermarket food is even less impressive (unlike, say, in Italy, where restaurant food is unimpressive but supermarkets have delicious goodies). Wine gives a rather negative impression; they say there are good ones, but we didn't find them. The beer was surprisingly good, though: Efes Dark was quite decent and coffee-flavored Efes was a very positive surprise.

Tea and coffee is everywhere in great quantity and quality.

Istanbul's public transportation is good, clean and runs often. In general Turkey is very clean.

The tap water was quite fit for washing fruit and brushing teeth, but not for drinking. It was so heavily chlorinated that probably tastes bad even after you boil it. We didn't try.

More later...

See you in two weeks

My blog is on break for the next two weeks. Unless I find a free evening and something very important to write about, which is an unlikely combination.

Now they got to the Air Marshals

Via the Agitator:

Oy vey, now the no-fly list strikes the Federal Air Marshals. Just like the regular citizens, the Air Marshals are occasionally denied boarding because they happen to have the same name as some terrorist has used at some point.

Those Federal Air Marshals probably look suspicious, after all. And their ID's can be faked. And they just might be armed. And dangerous.

One thing is not completely clear to me: if, say, a terrorist named Ayman al-Zawahiri from Egypt decides to impersonate a Federal Air Marshal, and has the resources to do so, wouldn't he also be capable of obtaining his fake Air Marshal papers in some name that is not currently on the most wanted lists of all the law enforcement agencies in the world? Once we are into people capable of producing fake documents, checking their names sort of loses its point.

Next step, pilots. "No, sir, you can't board this plane. There is some J. Smith on our no-fly list. What if it's you? What do you mean, it's not gonna leave without you? Not our problem anyway."

So that's where the spammers' penises come from!

It's funny how some countries just have the worst of luck. In addition to all the other plagues of its recent and current history, such as Belgians, two very bloody civil wars, the life expectancy of 51.46 years, corruption, etc., nowadays Congo (that's the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as opposed to the Undemocratic Republic of the Congo) is also plagued by penis thieves.

That's the sorcerers who use black magic to steal penises. The article didn't say what they are supposed to do with the penises afterwards, but I think that now we know where all the nice people who send me email offering to increase the size of my penis get their penis extensions from.

One would think that all the men of average intelligence, or even most men a few standard deviations on the left side of the Bell curve, could find out whether or not their penises has been stolen by simple empirical observation with a naked eye (ok, a few would need mirrors and a few would need magnifying glasses, but still...). The rest of them filed complaints with the police.

Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, had to order the arrest of the 13 accused in order to prevent mob lynchings. The police also detained 14 of the victims, probably because people that stupid should not be allowed to roam free.

Being Kinshasa's police chief gotta be the second worst job in the world. (The first worst job in the world is probably being Hamas's image consultant.) The man, however, seems to have retained a sense of humor:

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Goodbye Russia, 20 years ago

We left Russia exactly 20 years ago. I was very young, very happy and very hung over.

It was snowing, and pretty cold. I was falling off my shoes, which were not meant for the snow, and probably not meant for me either. There were friends and relatives to lean on, they had spent the night over our place.

After the customs and the passport control I had to wobble ahead on my own, because my parents had to make sure that grandpa remains vertical. But at least it was not snowing inside.

It was my first time in an airplane, too. We watched out of the window how at the next gate some guy climbed onto a wing of a plane with a broom and started sweeping the engine from inside. The Austrians in the plane were pointing and laughing.

The plane took off. A flight attendant brought people chicken and sandwiches. She also had plastic cups with juice and wine, and asked everyone "juice or wine". After taking one look at me she didn't ask anything but just gave me the wine.

Next, Islamic chemistry?

At a conference in Qatar Muslim scientists and clerics discussed adoption of Mecca time.

No, they didn't mean turning the clock back 1400 years, just using Mecca time to replace GMT. Because, of course, Mecca is the one true and real center of the world (accept no substitutions!) and is in line with the magnetic north pole.

Oh, dear. I knew that they had their own human rights, different from the regular human rights and highly reminiscent of the old untranslatable Russian joke about democracy and democratization [1]. But damn, now they have their own magnetic north pole too. Different from your regular Western imperialist magnetic pole, and apparently stationary.

Somebody should tell them the pole keeps moving. Imagine the endless hours of fun we could all have watching them put the city on little wheels (or, more traditionally, camels) and try to move it around.

The actual Western imperialist magnetic pole was at 82.7° N 114.4° W in 2005. If Mecca were at that longitude and its own latitude it would be located in the Pacific Ocean a bit off Mexico's West Coast. While this idea does have just a little bit of morbid attraction, don't try this at home, kids, or at least purchase sufficient number of lifeboats before trying.

Next step: Islamic chemistry. The best bombs in the world can be produced by mixing carrots and peas. I am sure this is written in some holy book somewhere.

1) The Russian joke from the democratization times:

Чем отличается демократия от демократизации? - Тем же, чем канал от канализации.

Constitution? What Constitution?

After 9/11 our government has in its infinite wisdom created a no-fly list, which contains the names of suspected terrorists who are not allowed to fly. While I can understand the purpose of the other list they established - a selectee list that contains the names of the people who should be searched more thoroughly when boarding a plane - what, exactly, is the purpose of a no-fly list? Wouldn't it be quite safe to transport even Bin Laden if he has been properly searched? What's he gonna do without weapons or explosives - pray and call Allah's wrath upon the plane? I am sure that hundreds of thousands of people, both terrorists and law-abiding citizens, have already spent tens of thousands hours praying to dozens of deities to strike the TSA dead, so the continuous existence of this agency can be considered a conclusive proof that prayer is not all that dangerous.

The evil-doers, in the meanwhile, have had the unprecedented gall to use fairly common names, such as T. Kennedy or Robert Johnson or David Nelson or John Williams. For the most part the list contains dates of birth, middle names, or suchlike, so all this means is that all the other people with the same names have to show some ID proving that they are not that particular person. Sometimes, however, there is nothing except the name, and everyone else by the same name is totally screwed.

In short, the government is keeping a secret list of names of people whom they don't have enough evidence to accuse, whose rights they infringe upon, who are not allowed to know why they are there and who are not allowed to know that they are in fact there until they arrive at the airport. Sweet.

The right to travel is a Consitutional right, not mentioned as such in the Constitution but very firmly established in the US law. It does not include the right to travel by the most convenient transportation, but that's an excuse that would work only if we are talking about the airline travel between, say, NYC and Boston. Between NYC and San Francisco, or Honolulu, there are no other feasible methods of transportation, and I'd love to see the government try to argue otherwise in court.

People in the US (Guantanamo Bay doesn't count, of course) are not supposed to be held to answer for crimes or deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law (Fifth Amendement). A secret government list does not quite constitute a due process of law. Not yet.

And now some people in Congress (U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Illinois) want to forbid selling guns to the people on that list. Mind you, I realize that evil-doers owning guns pose more risks than well-searched evil-doers flying on commercial airlines, but keeping and bearing arms is also protected by the constitution. Due process and all, you know. Besides, isn't it fun when you can't check whether or not you are on the list, but your friendly neighborhood firearm salesperson can?

And besides, isn't it strange that the people who are too suspicious to fly on airplanes and own guns are still allowed to hold public office? This should be fixed immediately.

In fact, let's start a whole new list for that. Now that the long secret lists of people not allowed to engage in various constitutionally protected activities have become the new custom of the land, can we also institute a no-government list? You know, a list of people totally unfit to hold public office?

Abu Izzadeen, I have good news and bad news for you

The good news is that you might still get a virgin in this life, without dying first. The bad news is that his name is Abu Hamza.

Yesterday Abu Izzadeen was convicted of terrorist fundraising and inciting terrorism overseas. He will be sentenced today, and is facing up to a life sentence.

"Don't blow up, we are running out of virgins!"

According to the Saudi cleric Omar Al-Sweilem, you only get 10 virgins. Did they have some downsizing in heaven, or are there so many terrorists nowadays that there just aren't 72 for everyone?

"What hair! What a chest! What a mouth! What cheeks! What a figure! What breasts! What thighs! What legs! What whiteness! What softness! Without any creams - no Nivea, no Vaseline. No nothing!" Wow. The man is clearly passionate about his sermon.

Oh well. The Heaven might have problems with downsizing, but at least these Heavenly Virgins did not forget to visit the Heavenly Alko.

Spring!

On Saturday, as I was walking by the Lepakkomies bar in Sörnäinen, I heard lots of horrible screams commenting on my breasts.

"Damn," I thought. "It's spring. Those fuckers are out already, and in a couple of weeks there are gonna be fruit flies, too."

Every once in a while I wonder what it would be like to play a psycho card on those guys: suddenly turn around with a crazy expression on my face, pull a wine bottle out of my backpack, charge them as if I am gonna hit them with the bottle, and see them try to scramble out of there, and with any luck spill their beers on their pants. But his probably qualifies as simple assault and is generally unwise, so I won't.

But anyway, it's finally spring.

On Sunday night I saw a guy holding his dick and running after a tram. (Yes, the dick was still attached.) This reminded me of the Helsinki Complaint Choir and the line "kolmosessa haisee kusi" ("it smells like piss in the tram number 3"). Especially since it was the tram number 3.

I wonder if we should blame the spring for that, too.

Cell phone providers and credit history

HS had an article on how the cell phone providers demand security deposits from foreigners, and Finns without a credit history.

According to the article, DNA, Elisa ja Saunalahti demand a security deposit for a year.

Funny. I've had GSM service from Sonera, Elisa (then Radiolinja) and DNA, and none of them asked for any deposits. Some other people say they were asked for a deposit. The thing seems to be quite random.

But the really funny thing about their "credit history" claim is that there is in fact no credit history in Finland, certainly not in the sense that they mean. Not a positive credit history, at least not officially. A credit history in Finland only contains the problems. If there have been no problems, it says that there have been no problems. It doesn't say "has had a credit card for 10 years", or "took out a car loan 5 years ago, has paid it back already", or "has a mortgage and has been paying it on time". The Finnish credit history doesn't really make any difference between a person who has just arrived and the person with a 30-year history of taking out big loans and paying them back on time. It just says "no problems".

And as to Finns that have just moved back to Finland: how do the cell phone providers even know that? The population register does not give out the info on the person's previous addresses; and DNA, Elisa ja Saunalahti are not even on the list of companies that get their customers' current addresses from there.

So, are they lying, or are they getting their info somewhere they shouldn't be?

Only live performances, please

Just as you think that there is some limit to human stupidity, the government of Ahvenanmaa surprises you. They banned all the officials from staying in the hotels that offer porn channels on their TVs.

Yes, they do realize that this leaves very few hotels outside Sweden (Sweden has a list of porn-free hotels). But do they realize how expensive a live performance is in comparison with those TV channels?

I feel sorry for the officials having to reserve their hotel rooms. "Hi, I am Mårån Idiotsson from Ahvenanmaa Self-Righteous Prick Office. I would like to reserve a single room from May 5th till May 8th. But first of all: do you have porn channels in your rooms?"

Somehow I have a feeling that whoever wrote this policy is having a good laugh thinking about exactly the same thing.

On the other hand, this might be a conspiracy by the porn video manufacturers. Or prostitutes. Or tent and camping equipment manufacturers.

Just don't tell them that there is some porn somewhere on the Internet. They'll ban laptops for sure.

Truth in advertisement?

Via Dhimmi Watch:

A primary school in Amsterdam organized a visit to El Mouchidine mosque, and the chairman of the mosque told a group of 10-year-olds that unbelievers are dogs.

The funniest thing is that the article starts "A primary school in Amsterdam wished to provide its pupils with an understanding for other cultures." I guess they succeeded, even though probably not quite the way the school intended.

Life

Haven't blogged for a while again, mostly due to a lot of work and a lot of social life.

Saw The Band's Visit and liked it quite a lot, although it seems to me that its makers have seen too much Kaurismäki.

Also saw the first season of Everest. Wow. I knew that people who climb big mountains are in general crazy, but those exceeded all my expectations.

Got a cool new coworker, who is Russian. Had some beers with her and her husband last week. Gonna introduce them to hot chocolate with rum sometime soon.

Listened to too much music. It's not healthy for me, not sure why.

Read a blog post about what women really want. It was written by a man who did not seem to know much about it, but it inspired me to look deep into my heart and ask myself what I really want. The answer was a 500G Seagate Barracuda hard drive, and I went to a store and bought it.

Community standards

When I was young we used to rent a summer place in a town named Solnechnoye (Ollila for those of you whom Russians chased out of there during the WWII). It was a very typical resort town, consisting of summer cottages, and with a huge beach. There were maybe a 1000 people living there all year round, 5000 people living there in summer, and 10000 people present there on the beach on every sunny summer weekend.

There was a paved path from the beach to a narrow highway, a grocery store and an ice cream kiosk on the other side, and a tiny road from there to the railway station. That was about it.

Like in all the Russian beach resort towns and all of the western ones I've seen, the swimsuit-clad people tended to go to the kiosk to buy ice cream.

One nice summer day I went there too, as usual. In a swimsuit. I was 12. OK, I also had D-sized breasts. (This probably explains a lot about my personality. One reason I don't believe the slogan "violence has never solved everything" is that for a 12-year-old with D-sized breasts violence solves quite a lot.)

When I was crossing the street a cop suddenly grabbed my arm.

"Where are you going? Are you not ashamed of yourself?"

The answer to that was obviously "no", but I knew better than to talk back to a cop.

"I am just going to get some ice cream!"
"No, you are not! You are wearing a swimsuit! If you want ice cream get back to the beach and put your clothes on!"
"But we always buy ice cream in swimsuits! It doesn't bother anyone."
"You are offending the community standards!"

During this exchange about 50 of the community safely crossed the street behind his back. Every single one of them was wearing a swimsuit. About a 100 more of the swimsuit-clad community giggled at us from the kiosk line. There was about 300 people in sight, and not a single one of them was dressed, apart from the officer.

"Where are you going?" he grabbed two young men in swimming trunks.
"To get some ice cream."
"If you want ice cream get back to the beach and put your clothes on! You are offending the community standards!"
"Er, dude," said one of them, whose mother clearly didn't teach him not to talk to cops, "if we are all in swimsuits and you are the only one dressed, aren't you the one offending the community standards?"

I never heard the end of this conversation, because I figured this was a good moment to go away and cross the highway 50 meters down the road. I joined the huge kiosk line, and continued watching the lone warrior for the community standards from there. He was totally overwhelmed by the community and its standards, but not giving up. It was a poignant sight, and highly symbolic of the whole country.

In a bar: cheery Russians and sad-eyed Leo

Went to a movie (10000 BC, was OK but nothing special) and a bar with a friend yesterday.

At some point I heard some Russians sitting next to us discussing me. It happens every once in a while; I usually ignore it. At some point, however, "I know her from somewhere" - "I think it was the linguistics department" - "no, I think it was the computer science department" intrigued me, and I realized that these might be the people who actually do know me. After this brilliant deduction I turned to look at them, and they introduced themselves, turning out to be a Sasha who has met me in the linguistics department, and a Viktor who was one of my student in the CS department.

"Do you know everyone in every bar?" asked Kimmo, the guy with whom I was drinking. This is not really the case, but his statistical sample seems to suggest that it is.

The Russians asked us to watch their stuff while they went for a smoke, came back, started a most absurdly funny linguistics discussion (which I didn't join for fear of boring Kimmo to death), addressed me in Russian in the polite plural (the last time anyone has done that to me was 24 years ago when a cop grabbed me for being too scantily dressed and insulting the community standards, but that is a whole different story), bought us some drinks, raised them with a very loud "L'Chaim!", suddenly got very angry at the guard at the door for some reason, and ran away.

A little while later a guy with sad eyes came up. "May I sit with you?" he asked. "For a while, if you behave youself," we said.

The sad-eyed guy was called Leo. He turned out to work in the same place where Kimmo was in the army, and they talked about the army things to the extent that made me slightly regret not joining the linguistics discussion earlier.

When Kimmo went to get himself another beer, Leo changed the subject.

"I really like your breasts. You have very big breasts," he said, with the same glow of a brave discoverer that Einstein must have had after figuring out the theory of relativity.

After realizing a second too late that "thanks, you too" might be a wrong answer, I added "thanks for the information, I'll keep it in mind". Leo got a bit defensive and tried to explain that this is a good thing.

Kimmo came back with his beer, and Leo changed the subject again. "Have you thought of going to a barber?" he asked Kimmo, whose hair is quite a bit past his shoulders. Kimmo answered that he had given short hair enough of a try, so no, the answer is "no". I suppressed the natural "man, have you looked in a mirror lately? You really shouldn't be giving people hairstyling advice", and settled for a polite "but men are so much sexier when they have long hair," looking rather pointedly at Leo's 1-centimeter-short hair.
"I don't know about that," said Leo, clearly trying to think what kind of men he might consider sexy and coming up short, "but I sure love receiving blow jobs from people with long hair".
"I don't think Kimmo would give you a blow job. Sorry."

After that Leo decided to change the subject again, to politics. Now, I don't generally consider it rude to discuss politics with total strangers, but I think you should start in softer tones, even if you are expressing extreme views. "Kokoomus are the fascist party" is a somewhat ill-advised start for a bar conversation, especially in an electoral district where it is the most popular party.
"Not really, but they are way too Social-Democratic," said Kimmo. Leo looked at him as if he had just grown horns.
"I've voted for Perussuomalaiset," said Kimmo.
"I'll probably vote for them next time around," I said.

Leo looked at us with eyes that were more terrified than sad and ran away, saying that he needed to go to the next place. Hope he didn't see too many nightmares.

Valtionsyyttäjäkin on eläin

Tänään Espoon käräjäoikeus tuomitsi Mikko Ellilän kiihottamisesta kansanryhmää vastaan 60:een päiväsakkoon, ja määräsi hänet poistamaan tämän kirjoituksen blogistaan.

Ilta-Sanomien mukaan oikeus oli sitä mieltä että ihmisryhmien ominaisuuksista tai maahanmuuttopolitiikasta on oltava oikeus esittää kärkeviä ja erilaisia käsityksiä, mutta Ellilän lausunnot olivat "selkeän panettelevia ja solvaavia" ja loukkasivat heidän ihmisarvoaan (afrikkalaisten, oletan). Tai, Hesarin mukaan, "mies on kirjoittanut väitteet blogiinsa vain panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa".

Hmm. Ellilä kieltämättä kirjoittaa aika epäkohteliaasti, sekä tässä tapauksessa että muutenkin. Voiko tästä kuitenkin päätellä että tämä artikkeli on kirjoitettu vain ja ainoastaan panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa? Silloinhan voidaan melkein sanoa että koko mies on olemassa vain panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa. Onko siis vapaus esittää kärkeviä ja erilaisia käsityksiä, niin maahanmuuttopolitiikasta kuin muistakin asioista, tarkoitettu vain ihmisille joita on siunattu paremmilla sosiaalisilla taidoilla kuin Ellilää?

En ole lainoppinut, enkä oikeastaan tiedä kuinka laillista tai laitonta voi olla ihmisen tuomitseminen siitä, että hän ilmaisee itseään rumasti niinkin herkästä asiasta kuin rotu, ja muutenkin kuulostaa ilkeältä. Sen sen sijaan tiedän, että ainoa asia mihin hän kirjoituksessaan varsinaisesti kiihotti - tai kehotti - oli afrikkalaisten maahanmuuton vähentäminen. Mikä on sinänsä vain eräs käsitys maahanmuuttopolitiikasta.

Hesarin artikkeli myös väittää, että hän vertaa oikeuden mielestä halventavalla tavalla afrikkalaisia eläimeen. "Halventavalla tavalla" on tässä tapauksessa aika olennainen seikka, koska afrikkalainenhan on eläin, kuten kaikki muutkin ihmiset.

Ellilän omassa tekstissä lukee "ihminen on kuitenkin eläin, homo sapiens", minkä luulisi lakanneen olemasta solvaava ja panetteleva tieto jo aikoja sitten.

En nyt jaksa kirjoittaa tästä sen enempää ennen kuin olen lukenut sen oikeudenpäätöksen, mutta Matias Turkkilan raportti oikeudenkäynnistä oli aika mielenkiintoinen, suostittelen kaikille asiasta kiinnostuneille.

Hooligans for Islam, part N

Abu Bakar Bashir, the Indonesian Islamic cleric best known for his participation in 2002 Bali bombing conspiracy, opened his mouth again, this time in an address to an Islamic youth organization near the home village of convicted Bali bombers Amrozi and Mukhlas.

In his sermon he compares the tourists in Bali to worms, snakes and maggots, and he also urges the Islamist youth to beat up foreigners and infidels. In East Java, where he was speaking, it is probably easy, because nobody in their right mind goes there. In Bali it might be a bad idea, what with 95% of population being infidels.

"If there were infidels here, just beat them up. Do not tolerate them." (There are in fact some Hindus in East Java.) If there is hell, I hope Abu Bakar Bashir will get there very soon, and get to hear all the lectures on tolerance that have been given in the Western world for the last 40 year. In a permanent loop. For all eternity.

"The youth movement here must aspire to a martyrdom death," said the cleric. "The young must be first at the front line - don't hide at the back. You must be at the front, die as martyrs and all your sins will be forgiven. This is how to achieve forgiveness."

Oh well. The man himself is 69, so he understandably wants to present the heroic martyrdom as something that young people should do, and that he himself is a bit too old for. It's hard to stop wondering how he managed to fail to achieve the glorious martyrdom in his own youth, though. I mean, it's not like he just found Allah in his old age. He was a Islamic youth activist when he was young.

On the other hand this article, which predicts a Muslim majority in Brussels in 15-20 years, mentions 65-year-old Abdullah Abu Abdulaziz Bastin (né Jean-François Bastin), who founded an Islamic Youth party 4 years ago, so maybe a true Islamist is forever young at heart?

In this case we can only wish Abu Bakar Bashir a most glorious martyrdom, as long as it doesn't kill or injure any innocent bystanders.

I often wonder how many of those young Muslims who listen to all this bullshit wonder why the guys who urge them to die young tend to be in their fifties and sixties.

The Belgian government

Belgium has a government now. Took them only 9 months and 10 days.

They seem to be pretty quiet on the Brussels-Halle-Vilvoorde issue, as well as on most other minor issues, such as the budget or absence thereof, but they promise to be for everything good and against everything bad, and to boost the confidence in government. Who would have thought...

Long time no blog

Too much partying is bad for blogging. Didn't have a single bloggable thought over the weekend, but had a very good time.

Other things that are bad for blogging are bugs (both of the software and common cold kind) and the final sessions of two RPG campaigns.

Personal violations

Some recent conversations about school meals and whether or not they should be obligatory made me wonder whether or not I value my physical self-determination more than most people (it certainly seems so), and if yes, why - or rather why don't many other people value theirs as much - and to what extents does the culture affect the attitudes towards it.

It seems like our society (probably all the Western societies, including Eastern Europe), and probably many others, considers a sexual assault a very serious violation of a person, but many other intrusions on a person's physical privacy much less so. I sort of understand the historical background for it, it's the people's current emotional reactions that are hard to understand.

I am not saying this to say that rape is not a serious crime - I'd rather other forms of assault be taken more seriously, too.

The reason I am writing this post is that I don't take personal violation lightly - and every time the subject comes up I keep running into people saying things like "but surely this cannot be that serious?". I can understand that for them it isn't (people can and do forgive some personal violations under some circumstances, and I have done so myself), but for me it is, and I am sort of surprised at their surprise.

To take one simple example, on the emotional level I don't see much difference between people trying to forcibly stuff unwanted penises and unwanted food into my mouth. It's my mouth, dammit. I decide what goes into it. If you try to physically override my decision - well, you just might get that fork in your eye. The law might well disagree, which I am sure will be a great consolation to your disembodied soul.

We had some obligatory meals in the daycare (you wouldn't believe what these people tried to make me eat, but luckily the actual violence was rather mild on both parts) and in theory in the first three grades in school. My first semester of the first grade was spent with every lunch break in the lunchroom, the teacher telling me that we are not leaving until I eat whatever is on my plate, and me pointing out that I am not in a hurry to get anywhere, and the class is not likely to start with her in the lunchroom anyway. After the first semester she gave up and banished me from the lunchroom to the great satisfaction of all the parties involved.

Anyway - when I hear Finnish people's rather numerous stories about being forced to eat in school I always wonder why they didn't employ this simple strategy, but I wonder even more about those who make those policies. Don't they understand that some percentage of people affected by them consider this a personal violation? Or don't they care? Or am I really that far out on this?

Ihre Papiere, bitte!

The police has started checking the legality of foreign-looking people in public places, and it has caused a lot of passionate response, both for and against.

I am not very passionate about it either way, but can anyone explain to me how the hell is the damn thing supposed to work? There is no obligation to carry ID in Finland; people are, however, obliged to say who they are if the police asks them, and then the police can try to check this out through some database (I assume the population register database) using their social security number.

Now, there are people who have a social security number. They are almost always citizens and legal residents, although there are very few illegals among them (former legal residents who failed to renew their legal residence). And then there are people who don't have a social security number: illegals and tourists, and also very short-term legal residents and newly arrived legal residents who haven't got a social security number yet.

The question is, how is the police supposed to distinguish the tourists from the illegals? The tourists don't have to have an ID with them. The police probably has access to the database of tourists who have visas, and possibly have access to the database of visa-free tourists who entered Finland directly from a non-Schengen country. I am not sure they have a database of all non-Schengen tourists currently legally within the Schengen area, and I am absolutely sure they don't have a database of all the Schengen residents who happen to be visiting Finland at the moment. So, are they just hunting the illegals who are too dumb to say "I am a tourist"?

A few days ago HS polled its readers on the question of "may the police ask for passports of foreign-looking people in the streets?". The question was somewhat strange in this context because a) this is not what the police was planning on doing, and b) nobody is expected to carry a passport with them at all times, and I think few people do.

(In the unlikely event they meant "should we make a law obliging foreigners to carry their passports with them at all times, and then can the police ask for them", my answer would be certainly not - a passport is an unwieldy thing to carry, and the police should damn better be satisfied with the driver's license they themselves have given me. I don't, however, have strong opinions one way or another on the laws that require everybody to carry some sort of an ID, whether they concern everybody, or foreigners, or people who don't have a Finnish social security number.)

Anyway, I suspect I am about to get the answer to my question. The police checked out two nightclubs last night. They checked 59 people, and took 9 of them to the police station to find out their identity and status.

9 out of 59 is a very disturbing number. It might of course mean that 9 out of 59 were really illegal aliens too stupid to pretend to be tourists, or that they told police to bugger off, or that they were simply unconscious to begin with. But it is also fairly likely to be the number of people who did not have any papers on them.

If - and it's still an "if" - the police is really dragging every foreign-looking person without papers to the station, it does, in fact, mean that you have to carry an ID with you at all time. And while it's not necessarily a bad thing in principle, it shouldn't be up to the police to decide. We have that thing here, called Eduskunta. It makes laws. If you want a new law about carrying ID, please ask them.

Hardware upgrade during a flu

To anyone who might have been wondering about my absence from irc and web forums, the blog not being updated, and my being unresponsive to email: I ain't dead, but bad flu and a broken computer at home were sure a bad combination.

On the brighter side, I finally understood what people mean when they talk about muscle aches during a flu. On Monday I felt hung over in spite of not having drunk anything on Sunday, and all my muscles hurt, especially the ass and lower back. By Tuesday afternoon I realized that I have spent most of the day in bed without having done anything about the computer hardware upgrade in progress, which in my book doesn't even count as sick, but rather as dead and buried.

But anyway, now I am mostly up from the dead, but tired and sleepy and my nose is bright red. The computer works, though, and I also assembled another one from the extra parts. I've always dreamed of having a computer in the toilet; probably should buy a monitor.

The motherboard that my father has sent me (ECS NForce 570 Slit-A) turned out to be deader than Lenin. You know there is something wrong when the thing doesn't even say "beep" on bootup and rotates the fans at the wrong moments. So I bought a Asus P5K Intel P35, which beeped and generally behaved.

Note to self: next time, before you take the old computer apart, use it to create an installation CD. More particularly, make sure that the installation CD you have just burned actually works. Mine turned out to be corrupted.

I had another installation CD, made during the dark times when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and cavemen beat each other over the heads with AMD Socket 939 motherboards. It was too ancient to recognize my dvd drive. The damn thing had a hell of a nerve, telling me that I don't have a CD drive while sitting in that drive. Ugh.

Finally I got an installation CD, the newest Debian stable (I am not gonna tell you whether I had to sell my soul to the devil for that, or my body to the entire Debian project, or to assemble yet another computer).

The first install (and several others) failed, apparently because Debian is not fond of small partitions nowadays. The disk had 5Gb for /, 15 Gb for /usr and another 5Gb for /var, and the install kept trying to write past the end of the partitions. Once I combined them all into one 25Gb partition the thing started working.

Then it turned out not to have any drivers for the onboard LAN. I have a large collection of PCI Ethernet cards around the place, so I just stuck one in. It utterly and completely refused to work on account of IRQ conflicts. IRQ conflicts are a sort of black magic to me, so I performed all kinds of rain dances known to me, setting kernel options to noapic and noacpi, trying to reassign the irq, etc. Nothing worked. Then I remembered that I have an ancient laptop and a USB stick, and simply downloaded a newer kernel (2.6.22-3). Worked like a charm, the onboard LAN started working, and we lived almost happily ever after. "Almost", because the motherfuckingboard had no PS/2 connector for a mouse, and the separate connector I had was evil. I bought a new USB mouse and everything started working fine, except that it glows bright blue for no apparent reason.

I am usually very suspicious of NVidia video cards (my father sent me one of those too) and their drivers, but this one (GeForce 7300 GT) worked with the nv driver with no trouble at all.

At any price!

Lately there have been a lot of people saying that child pornography is the absolute evil and children should be protected at any price. Absolutely at any price.

I totally understand the feeling. There are a lot of things I'd like to do at any price, especially if the price is going to be paid by somebody else. I am always looking for volunteers for my "get Vera a free beer at any price" project.

Jokes aside, there have been already a lot of people trying to explain why the price (secret censorship) would be too high. I'd like to concentrate on what would be purchased.

Do any of the "save the children at any price"-people ever stop to think what exactly they would be getting at any price? I don't even mean all the ways in which the censorship doesn't work - I mean the hypothetical case in which it would, in fact work to block all the web pages in question from all the people who would like to see them from Finland.

Let's also assume that we are talking about the real clear-cut cases of child pornography, consisting of photos and videos of clearly underage children engaging in sexual acts.

By the time the Finnish viewer is seeing the child porn, the act of child abuse has obviously already happened. Somebody has for example had sex with a child and videotaped it. You can't protect this particular child from this particular event anymore. If the owner of the webpage puts child porn there with purely charitable intentions for the other pedophiles to see, the Finnish viewer is not really even contributing anything to the perpetuation of such crimes. However, if the child porn website is either charging the viewer for porn or lives by selling advertisement space, the Finnish viewer is bringing it some money and therefore encouraging creation of more child porn.

Now for the interesting question: how many users of child porn are there in Finland? Is there an estimate anywhere? Surely Suvi Linden must have at least some idea of the order of magnitude of this terrible problem. Somehow, I have never seen it mentioned anywhere. (I mean the actual users of child porn, not the people who just went through the police's list in order to count the child porn sites, and not the people who just generally jerk off to various legal pictures of children.) How many Finns use real child porn? How many of those contribute to it financially? How many of those do so on the web, as opposed to Usenet and mailing lists?

I'd like Linden to put an actual number to it, or at least an order of magnitude. As in, "we have created a secret censorship system in order to prevent the flow of N euros per year from Finland to the world's child porn industry". At least we'd know how much money we'd be diverting from child pornography at any price.

Modem

Got a new modem from Verkkokauppa today. When I brought it there last week they said they were gonna try to fix it, but obviously they failed, so I got a new one.

The modem used to die for unknown reasons, and need to be reset by hand, which is not fun when I am not at home, and not even when I am. Last Thursday a reset did not help, and I took the damn thing back to the store.

Now I got a new one, with a note saying that the old one works fine, but they changed it just in case. The new one seems to work fine, too.

The weirdest thing seems to be that I used to be unable to access http://www.freebok.net/ from home, and used to wonder whether the problem was with this site, my ISP, or my network settings. The funny thing is that it turned out to be the modem. The new one accesses freebok.net just fine, with the exact same settings.

Hangovers

The comments on the yesterday's post about hangovers made me wonder: how many people always get a hangover when they drink a lot?

I usually only get somewhat dehydrated and hungry and feel like it's hotter in the room than it actually is. Debilitating splitting-headache hangovers are quite rare, and when they happen they are not a result of drinking more than usually, but of some other circumstances, most often prior dehydration.

When I drink too much or too fast, which is also rare but happens more often than a severe hangover, I usually get sick immediately, and am quite fine by the next morning.

These evil pussyless demonstrators!

Reading Helsingin Sanomat web forums are usually bad for a person's sanity, even under the best of circumstances. I am not sure why I occasionally do so, but my theory is that it happens when my blood pressure is too low and I need to get it up a little.

Some of the debate about yesterday's anti-censorship demonstration was just unbelievable. Yes, I know that some people have a room-temperature IQ. Even in Celsius degrees. But this is going into the realm of the outside temperatures. In Helsinki. In March.

Besides the usual "but think about the children!" and "I don't understand what's wrong with censorship" and "you are all probably pedophiles anyway", there was a number of people who accused the demonstrators of having no pussy.

Yes, they were quite serious. Some of them meant that the demonstrators had no pussy of their own, and some of them meant that the demonstrators were unable to find any owner of a pussy to have sex with. The implication, I suppose, was that either a) having a pussy of one's own would make a demonstrator a person of a higher moral order, who would have the sense not to demonstrate against censorship, or b) having access to somebody else's pussy would drop the censorship down on a demonstrator's list of priorities. Real pussy-owners don't go to anti-censorship demonstrations, you know. A number of women mentioned that they were there, but it did not stop several people from claiming that there were no women.

Yes, I was there, and there was a number of other women. At home I checked my pussy, just in case. It didn't fall off, and seems to be in good working order.

Hangover at work

Now that the Hospital District of Etelä-Pohjanmaa has decided to fire everyone who shows up at work drunk or hung over, there seems to be some kind of debate on whether this is too much, and whether one should be allowed to work while hung over.

It's pretty much self-evident to me that this depends on the job they are doing. A floor sweeper or a system administrator can usually work when slightly drunk or hung over. A surgeon, better not.

Defining and proving a hangover is a bit hard, but that's not really the point. IMO the interesting point here is not so much that the Hospital District doesn't want hungover people at work, but that they want those people to take an unpaid day off, as opposed to a sick day.

What exactly is it that makes a hangover something other than a sickness in these and many other people's opinion? That it is self-inflicted? Well, guess what: half of my colds, and probably also those of other people, are self-inflicted and happen because I decided to hang out with some friend in spite of knowing that the friend has a cold. Probably more than half of my food poisonings happen due to my failure to check that the food I eat contains the one ingredient that causes me food poisoning symptoms. A lot of burns and broken bones happen because people are being careless.

Seriously: I understand that employers don't approve of employees making themselves sick. I just don't think it's an employer's business to define that some ways of making oneself sick (for example visiting sick relatives) is acceptable, whereas another (drinking) is immoral and therefore can't be considered real sickness.

One obvious difference between self-inflicted hangover and self-inflicted cold, however, is the former's potential for high frequency. There is only so many cold viruses going around during the same year, and only so many times you can get a cold in a given year. You can, in theory, be hungover every day.

While IMO it's not an employer's business to tell the employee the acceptable ways of getting sick, I think that the question of how much of self-inflicted sickness an employer should have to tolerate is not nearly as clear, and I don't have even an approximate answer. Forget the hangovers and the social stigma of alcohol abuse - what is an employer supposed to do, for example, about an employee who does some dangerous sports in a way that keeps him or her home with injuries one-third of the time?

"...and another 110% of us will vote for Lukashenka..."

Back in the old USSR all kinds of industrial and regional leaders took up various obligations that were supposed to exceed the official expectations of their superiors: "we were told to produce N tons of steel? we promise to produce 110% of it!".

I wonder whether anybody has told the next generation that this does sound a bit peculiar when applied to voting, as in "I promise that 100% of people in my region will vote for the candidate X".

On a related note: I noticed that a lot of people seem to believe that in the USSR people were somehow threatened with consequences if they did not vote the way the Party wanted. This was certainly not the case, at least not in my time. The voting was done in booths and nobody threatened anybody. This only difference between the Soviet election and a real election was that there was only one candidate on the ballot.

Ei oo helppoa

The list of people whom I will order publicly flogged as soon as I become the queen of the world is growing. I have added to it:

- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware, and believe that the same manual suits all of them, when it clearly doesn't,
- the people who manufacture several slightly different kinds of hardware and never tell you which one of them you are holding in your hands (as in "this motherboard comes with either 10/100 Mb LAN or with gigabyte LAN. We are not gonna write it on the box, so take a wild guess."),
- the people who say "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series", meaning "this motherboard works with all the processors of the XXX series manufactured up until now, and we are not gonna bother listing them",
- the people who make modems that appear to work in a routed mode with a static IP, and let you put that IP in the confs, but have no place in the confs for the netmask and the gateway. At least not anywhere findable.

Do I sound a bit stressed?

Saw some weird nightmares lately. One on them involved a small airplane, a huge dick with balls, and a number of palm trees.

Went karting with coworkers, stressed a bit about that in advance. It was even worse than I imagined but nothing acutely evil happened. I could never understand the fun of driving little carlike things when you can drive actual cars, and I feel uncomfortable in the open vehicles in general (note to my army of admirers: you won't impress me with a ride in a convertible, so don't even try). In addition to that the karts had small seats that heat up under you until you become seriously concerned about your ass becoming a smoked ham, horrible smell, weird steering wheel, and the helmets, while obviously necessary, were very unpleasant to wear. On the positive side: the thing constitutes a very efficient ass massage.

My modem croaked yesterday morning. It died on me and needed a reboot and sometimes a reset several times before, but yesterday neither reboot nor reset helped. The amount of stress and rage with which I reacted to it surprised even myself. Anyway, the modem went back to the store. Instead of giving me my money back or a new one, they decided to fix this one (why? why? it never works! every time some company takes some piece of hadware back to "fix it", it ends with them giving me a new one back), and let me borrow another one in the meanwhile. Of course theirs did not support Annex M. Worse, it didn't have a manual. "You just stick it into the wall and into the computer and it will work." - "I have a static IP and it needs to be configured." - "It's work anyway, just wait and see."

Well, did it work? Right... Luckily I had a manual of a similar modem, but even that wasn't of much help.

On top of that, gynecological unpleasantness. No, nothing dramatic or dangerous, just routine maintenance. The routine maintenance in this case involves removing a metal object from the cervix and sticking a new one up there. No fun.

On the brighter side of life:

A nice dinner with coworkers in a Greek place called Minos in Kamppi, and some beer afterwards.

Saw the new Rambo. Very violent, very therapeutic for a person who just had a major fight with her modem, and went for a beer with a friend afterwards, which was also fun.

The motherboard and video card that my parents sent me finally arrived, so can perform unnatural acts on my computer.

Nebula customer support rocks! They really helped me with the evil modem, so now I have the Net connection again.

Friday! Hurrah!

Young Pioneers meet un-Easter Bunny

Palestinians' democratically elected terrorist organization Hamas has apparently got tired of being known only for blowing up Jews, shooting Fatah members and saying "our proud people will never listen to any demands from the West, but please give generously". Now they decided to produce TV shows for children, too.

The series is called Pioneers of Tomorrow and features Assud the Bunny, who promises to eat the Jews up. Now he wants to eat some Danes, too, while simultaneously boycotting Danish food.

Sheesh. Is it properly Islamic to have a character that so suspiciously resembles the Easter Bunny? Can't they have a more Islamic animal? (I wonder what a proper Islamic animal would be, though. A camel?) And what's with the name? Pioneers of Tomorrow, for fuck's sake! Doesn't Hamas have any sense of style? Do they have to sound like Soviet Union in the seventies? Wouldn't Martyrs of tomorrow fit their style better?

Life and Cuban democracy

Haven't written for a few days now: had a lot to do at work, a rather intense social life, and was generally tired.

The intense social life included, among other cool things, a game session (finally! finally! it's been centuries since the last one!) where my character engaged in animal abuse and long for the quiet and peaceful life she used to have as an assassin, and a party with those thick pancakes that Finns call blinis and believe to be Russian, but I have never seen in Russia. They are a great invention though, and the party was great. I should ask for the recipe. Except that I am not eating anything ever again. Or drinking.

In the meanwhile Fidel Castro retired. His brother Raul was elected as the new president by the National Assembly of People's Power, the Cuban parliament. He got 100% of the vote. The Cuban democracy is working as usual.

Now that's what I call a real gay capital!

Tel Aviv has long been known as the gay capital of the Middle East, but I did not know that they fuck so hard that they cause earthquakes.

That fills me with so much ethnic pride... Go Israelis!

But this is evil, evil speech!

As I have said earlier, the biggest threat to the freedom of speech is, of course, us. Some, however, are more so than others.

I wanted to write something about the current scandal with child porn Internet censorship, but I couldn't find a single printable word, so you better read a summary by Kai Puolamäki.

The Powers That Be have been just lovely lately. First, the state prosecutor Mika Illman (of the "criticism of foreigners is OK as long as it's not pronounced out loud" fame) wants to moderate forums, blogs, chats and IRC after the fact, like radio or TV, revealing not only a total lack of understanding of the technologies involved, but, a lot more disturbingly, a total lack of understanding of the difference between the public and the private conversation.

Man, we obviously can't even afford a moderator for the state prosecutor's office. How do you expect every IRC channel to have one?

The the Minister of the Interior Anne Holmlund informs us that chat forums are like all other places of entertainment, and therefore need to have somebody who'd keep the order, like in all other places of entertainment. Don't know where Ms. Holmlund hangs out for fun IRL, but if that place has people who keep order by telling everybody present what they are allowed or not allowed to talk about, I am sure glad I don't hang out there.

And now the Minister of Communications, Suvi Linden, is saying that talking about spreading child pornography as a test for freedom of speech is unacceptable. By this she is referring to the webpage of Matti Nikki, which is about the Internet censorship and has the list of sites banned by police's secret lists.

One thing I am curious about: if somebody puts up a site that lists all the stupid things the politicians have said lately, how long will it take for it to go on the secret child pornography list?

Lust, Caution (mild spoilers)

Saw Lust, Caution yesterday. It was very good if one likes the kind of high-quality melodrama that Ang Lee is good at - and I do.

It starts out almost comically, then gradually moves through darker to very dark.

The translation was not very good (no, I don't understand enough Chinese to know, but I've seen a more detailed translation of this movie). First of all, they omitted all reference to Chunking, where some characters were getting their orders from, making the viewer guess whether our young patriotic heroes were Communist or Kuomintang (not that it has any bearing on the plot, but in spite of sounding like young Communist heroes in the Russian movies they are most likely Kuomintang).

Also: what is it with using the title Tai-Tai in the Finnish texts? I understand using well-known foreign titles like Mr or Mrs or Madame or Frau, but since I really don't think that Tai-Tai is a common knowledge here, why is it not rouva?

The moral of the movie, if any: being a spy is bad for your sex life, and the other way around, too.

Good-bye, Viking

I do not, generally speaking, travel on the Finland-Sweden ferries to eat. I know that some people who have discussed that issue on various web forums, as well as the owners and managers of said ferries, might disapprove of it, but in general I don't. I have nothing against the fact that many people regard those ferries as giant floating eating and drinking establishments, but I regard them as transportation to and from Stockholm, and to a certain extent as somewhat-cheaper liquor stores.

I don't mind eating in those restaurants if people I am with want to, but if not, I am quite content with sandwiches and suchlike that I bring with me. Yeah, I know they sell sandwiches there, too. I, however, make better sandwiches (I used to do that for a living, and when I am making a sandwich for myself I am obviously a lot less concerned about the price and a lot more concerned about my own taste than Viking Line is). Moreover, I don't think I have any moral obligation to shop or go to the restaurants on the boat if I don't feel like it. I do shop quite a lot, but that's because they have cheaper booze. Their food is not any better or cheaper than in Finland.

Viking Line seems to disagree. Sometime last fall they started confiscating sandwiches from passengers going onboard. For the sake of security, you know. Their PR person, Johanna Boijer-Svahnström, said that there have been cases when people were heating up their food on camping stoves.

I understand the problem with camping stoves, fire safety, and suchlike. However, how likely is a passenger to heat up a sandwich on a camping stove? Especially if he doesn't have an actual camping stove?

"We don't allow it. You can't bring your own food onboard. One could say that if you are going on a cruise, then you should eat there."

She also says that the cruise lasts from the evening till the morning, that during the night the sandwiches can go bad, and the epidemic caused by bad food would be a nightmare to them. I wonder whether she thinks that a person with a few sandwiches can do the Jesus fish trick and feed them to all the other passengers, or that a food poisoning is a contagious disease, or that people bring plague sandwiches with a side order of Ebola.

They have to be careful with the security out at sea, she says. Not as careful as an airplane, but more careful than in a hotel.

That was in September. At the time, a certain web forum quoted Viking Line's rules: "3. Elintarvikkeiden, ruuanlaittovälineiden, alkoholin tai huumeiden tuonti laivalle on kielletty." (It is forbidden to bring food, cooking devices, alcohol or drugs.) This is quite a bit more restrictive than an airplane: I've brought food, cooking devices and alcohol many times on an airplane without any problems whatsoever. The only restrictions were that the cooking devices could not have fuel in them, and nowadays the liquids have to be in the checked luggage.

Viking line was sorely in need of a reality check, such as a reminder that they are in the business of transporting people from place A to place B, and that people might want to transport stuff with them, including, yes, food, alcohol and cooking devices.

The reality check arrived, one way or another, and now the same rules say "3. Viking Line ei salli matkustajien tuoda mukanaan elintarvikkeita, joista on tarkoitus valmistaa aterioita matkan aikana." (Viking Line does not allow passengers to bring foods which are intended for cooking meals during the trip.) This is, BTW, a change from yesterday, when they said "3. Matkustajat eivät saa valmistaa omia mukanaan tuomiaan ruokia laivalla." (Passengers are not to cook foods that they have brought onboard.) The rule proceeds to give examples of stuff you can bring onboard: baby food, food for allergic people. "Uncookable food for those who either don't like our stuff are are not willing to pay for it" remains unmentioned, but I don't see how it could be against the anti-cooking rule.

Except that a few days ago they confiscated cookies, chips and bananas from some family. Sorry, but if they consider cookies, chips and bananas to be foods exclusively or even primarily meant for cooking, especially in the absence of a cooking device, this means that Viking Line has gone, well, bananas.

I think I'll switch to Silja from now on. They might have higher prices, but they don't have stupid rules that they change every day and break every time they feel like it. Besides, IIRC they have a better tax-free.

They called that a millet system in the Ottoman empire

I wish the people who call for using Sharia (or, god forbid, Halakha) in the West checked out how well it works before trying it.

There is a more or less first-world country where civil law is handled by religious communities: Israel. I know that in most of the western media Israel is just an evil country to blame wherever Jews are killing Arabs, Arabs are killing Jews, Arabs are killing each other or anything else bad happens in or around the Middle East, or, in case of the more conservative media, a brave little democratic country resisting Islamic onslaught. But there is more to the place than their bad relations with Muslims, and I think that everyone who is interested in immigration and multiculturalism issues, from any perspective, should study their experience.

Anyway, one thing that they have is that the civil law is handled by the religious communities. Check out how well it worked out for them. Also check out why thousands of them get married in Cyprus every year.

"That's our dragon! He'll protect us from other dragons!"

Hannu's and Pasi's recent comments on my blog made me think:

It is fairly common nowadays among the anti-jihad bloggers, both religious and secular, to partially blame the current problems with islamism on secularism, and to believe that a new rise of Christianity would help us against it. (The issue of other religions is usually best left unmentioned in this context.)

That seems somehow very wrong to me. Usually I prefer not to write about the issue, because I have a very strong prejudice against religion and am aware of it. But OTOH a lot of people are quite prejudiced one way or another, and most of what can be said about this, especially with regard to the future, is just guesswork.

The question is not whether or not Christianity is nicer than Islam. It is rather self-evident that it is. It's not whether or not it has always been nicer than Islam, either. The problem with such thinking is that the current versions of Western Christianity are obviously insufficient to keep the unwanted influences of any other religion out, and the versions that were in force during the times of Charles Martel or Isabel la Católica are unacceptable to us. (OK, to me, anyway - it might be acceptable to you, but that just means that we want very different things.) I am not convinced that there is any usable version of kinder, gentler but tougher Christianity between the two.

The other problem is that I, sorry, just don't trust the fuckers. (Not the Jewish ones either.) There is a lot of perfectly nice members of clergy, but in general I don't trust clergy as potential defenders of religious freedoms. Think about all the Islamic trouble is the last few years, starting with the blasphemous cartoons. Some of the clerical voices rose in defense of the secular society and the freedom of speech, but there was just too many of "respect for religion? yes, yes, please, us too!".

When the Archmoron of Canterbury called for use of Sharia in the UK, there was a lot of angry voices reminding him that he is, basically, arguing for empowering imams and disempowering, for example, 18-year-old Pakistani girls brought into the country for marriage with some relative. I wonder whether he envisions a similar power for himself, and whether the natural next step after Halakha and Sharia courts would be the courts where Christian clergy could decide on the affairs of Christians in a Christian way, whatever that is.

Flu moves in mysterious ways

Why does rest make flu/cold better, even though most people, certainly myself included, are not lacking any physical energy to burn? Is there something about the resting heartbeat rate that helps? Is it unhealthy to masturbate during a flu?

Why does it always start with some sore spot in the nose, or the throat, and then moves around there? What determines where it starts, and where it goes?

Are you looking cute for me?

A lot of men seem to believe that women dress to impress men. Not just in some general evolutionary sense that women generally want to look good because men generally like it, but in a very specific sense that when a woman leaves her home and looks sexy, she has done it on purpose in order to impress the men who happen to see her.

It's obvious that nothing that a woman can say would make them believe otherwise, but I have a question to the men who hold the belief stated above, if any of them happen to read my blog:

To which extent do you dress to impress women? When you put on a pair of fairly tight jeans, do you actually think "mmm, women probably like the way my ass looks in those"? When you open your ponytail, do you think of all the women who'd love to run their hands through your hair? When you wear a tight t-shirt, or a shirt with short sleeves, is that specifically so we could check out your muscles? When the upper buttons on your shirt are open, is it so we can take a look? When you wear shorts, is it to show your legs to us?

(No, I don't attach a particular moral value to either answer, I am just curious. I don't particularly care whether you do it for us or for yourselves, as long as you do it.)

Is there something in the water?

(Via Juha Kettunen):

I've always suspected that the Finnish Islamic party is mostly the result of insufficient mental health services, and this totally confirms it. Abdullah Tammi wants death penalty for sex outside of marriage. Of course, the majority of Finns should first convert to Islam, or know Sharia well. In the long run, Tammi wants to replace Finnish laws by Sharia law.

Helsingin Sanomat of course decided to omit such insignificant details and instead concentrates of Tammi's intention to make changes in sex education. It doesn't really give any details of the proposed changes, which makes my prejudiced mind conjure all kinds of possibilities, from "how to beat your wife" to "how to check your daughter's virginity".

The party intends to run in the municipal elections, if they find enough signatures to get themselves registered.

In other news of the weird, a Somali woman tried to hijack an Air New Zealand flight to Australia, stabbing two pilots in the process. Didn't anyone tell the idiot that a) Australia probably extradites hijackers, b) it would be cheaper to buy a ticket, all things considered, and c) stabbing pilots during a flight is not very conductive to successful landing, in Australia or elsewhere?

"And justice for all..."

The UK has to face up to the fact that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system, says the cleric. Adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion. The argument that "there's one law for everybody... I think that's a bit of a danger". Sharia law in UK is unavoidable.

No, it's not Abu Izzadeen, Abu Hamza, or Omar Bakri. It's Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Having one law for everybody is a bit of a danger now. In the UK. I didn't think I'd live to see the day. Damn, I didn't even think that Britain would live to see the day.

Yeah, I know he is just one more crazy cleric, and one doesn't have to listen to what he says, but the fact is that this is the senior leader of the Church of England. In case of the crazy imams there are always people thinking up some excuses of why they shouldn't be responsible like real people. What's his excuse?

"No, your Honor, I didn't do any of the stuff you saw on tape"

I've been wondering what out old friend Abu Izzadeen has been up to and why hasn't he been in the news for a while.

Turns out he has been waiting for his trial, and apparently, unlike some other fundamentalists, has been quiet for a while.

Now he is trying to explain to the court that when he said "we are terrorists" he did not really mean it. It's kind of hard to explain that he did not mean to incite terrorism and raise funds for it when they court has just seen videos of him doing exactly that.

On a related note, there was a lot of weirdness in the UK lately, and I wanted to write about it, but Jussi Halla-aho already did, and very thoroughly.

But even the British sometimes get something right, and for once they decided not to let an extremist cleric into the country. On the grounds of peace and security. Muslims are - surprise? - outraged, and sources close to al-Qaradawi blame the Zionists just in case.

The attack of Vegetable-Americans

A few months ago I visited a doctor in the US. That was covered under my travel insurance, and I told them (let's call them the New Moron Medical Center) to bill either my insurance or myself. "But you are in Finland and so is your insurance!" - they said. "That's OK, there is a Post office there." - "But we don't know how to bill you there!" - "That's quite easy. Much the same as in the US, except that you write this address here as the address." - "No, we can't. Too complicated. Can you pay with a credit card or something when you are done?" - "Sure, whatever."

A few hours later I am done, and so, unfortunately, is whoever is supposed to accept my payment. The credit-card-taker went home for the day (it's 3pm on Friday), and there is nobody else capable of accepting my payment (the medical center is only about the size of Meilahti hospital). I go back to the same woman with whom I talked in the beginning. "Can't you come here and pay on Monday?" - "No, I am gonna be in Finland by then." I make sure that the woman has my address, instruct her again on the billing procedure: put the bill into an envelope, put the address right here, mail, and then I go away.

Last week I get a bill from a Scary Collection Agency. I call the New Moron Medical Center and ask them WTF. The New Moron Medical Center swears that all the $485 are for the doctor services, and I am not paying anything extra for the collection. Because, you know, they are using the collection agency just because they still haven't figured out this mailing bills to Finland thing. I call my insurance, they tell me to send them the bill and forget about it, which I do. Then I call the Scary Collection Agency and tell them that they'll get their money as soon as the insurance company manages to pay it. They say OK.

The other day I get a similar bill from some Weird Lawyer. Weird Lawyer tells me that my bill is totally overdue and threatens with dire consequences if I don't pay it Right Now. The bill should be paid through him. Suppressing the urge to answer that considering the New Moron Medical Center's amazing skill in mailing abroad, I am quite sure I don't need to be afraid of their suing abroad, I call the New Moron Medical Center again. They tell me that the Scary Collection Agency was supposed to ask for the payment, and the Weird Lawyer is supposed to accept the payment. I point out that both are in fact trying to do both. They tell me that it doesn't matter because they get the payment either way. I warn the Weird Lawyer that the payment will not be going through him.

I have only two questions: how much of these $485 is gonna end up as the payment to the lawyer and the collection agency, and what is the politically correct name for an idiot in the US nowadays? Vegetable-American?

Tolerant America, intolerant Europe

Today I saw a headline in Helsingin Sanomat, saying that by 2025 almost one in four students in Helsinki schools will be of a foreign background. Later they changed it to say that one student out of ten is an immigrant.

By "foreign background" they meant that their native language is not Finnish or Swedish.

"Argh!" - was my first thought. I can imagine... On the second thought, I don't need to imagine - I remember attending such a school. It was a rather large high school, and about a quarter of its student body was foreign-born. There were some classes of English as a second language for the new immigrants, but most kids already spoke enough English to take part in regular classes. The immigrants did not have classes in their native language, unless it happened to be one of the five foreign languages already taught there. There was, of course - it being an American public school - no religious instruction for anyone.

And there were no problems, really. Many people tended to hang out with those who spoke the same language, but they were quite friendly to outsiders, too. No ethnic tensions, and no ethnic crime.

It wasn't some multicultural utopia. It was Brookline, MA, late eighties.

People in the US are usually quite tolerant towards immigrants. Not everyone - there are the kind of people who sort of dislike foreigners by definition, there are people who are afraid of competition for jobs (sometimes rightly and sometimes not), there are also people who are concerned specifically about the Mexican immigration, due to the fact that its numbers are very high and Mexican immigrants are on average extremely badly educated, there are people concerned with immigration of Islamic extremists, and then there are people who are specifically concerned about illegal immigration, on the general principle that we should be able to control our borders better, but in general people are not very concerned. At least up North, far from the Mexican border, if you say that you are afraid to walk, live, or send your children to school in some place because there are a lot of foreigners, people will give you a very strange look, and that's not because of the political correctness.

Meet Brookline, a town with 26.6% of foreign-born population. Median household income $66,711. Unemployment 3.5%. 76.9% of adults have college degrees. 2002 crime index is 171.8, a little over half the national average. Obviously, both the native and the immigrant (including the refugee) population tends to be highly educated professionals employed in the local universities, hospitals, and high-tech companies. The town has some poor people, too, as a proper liberal town should. They tend to be senior citizens. Senior citizens rarely engage in violent crime, and you can freely walk around their neighborhoods at night.

On the other hand, Helsinki is not Brookline, and somehow I don't think that everything is gonna go just as well over here.

Americans often say that Europe is intolerant, and that anyone who moves to America can always become an American, whereas in Europe an immigrant is never really accepted. This is not quite true. Americans have understandable problems accepting a jihadist screaming "Death to America!" as a real American, and Europeans - or at least Finns - don't seem to have any problems accepting an immigrant who can speak Finnish, works, and doesn't do anything particularly disturbing. It has been my impression, however, that there is a gray area in between where Americans are ready to accept an immigrant, and Finns aren't, and, more importantly, where Americans expect an immigrant to make some effort to become one of them, and Finns don't.

My visceral reaction to the American accusations of European intolerance is "no, they aren't". My other visceral reaction to the American accusations of European intolerance is "well, you'd be intolerant too, if you had immigrants like that".

I don't even mean the country of origin as such. You obviously get better results admitting immigrants from Germany than from Pakistan, but that's not even the point here. The point is that the US gets better results admitting immigrants from Pakistan than Europe does. Whether this is a wise thing to do, even for the US, is questionable - Islamic extremism, honor killings, etc., are a problem in the US as well - but there is no perpetually unemployed criminal Pakistani underclass in the US. Or Arab, for that matter, or immigrant African.

US Census has fairly detailed demographic, social and economic information on foreign-born people by country. The information is as of 2000, but enough to give you the idea. For example, 13.8% of civilian Somalia-born workforce is unemployed, which is more than twice the unemployment rate of African immigrants, but still doesn't come even close to their unemployment rate here.

African immigrants to the US have an unemployment rate of 6.4%. 42.8% of them have college or university degrees.

Not that the US doesn't have immigration-related problems, but in general it is doing much better than Europe. Which makes me wonder: how come all the people who like to advertise the joys of immigration in other countries rarely mention the US, and never mention Israel? These are undoubtedly the two first-world countries that have accepted the most immigrants with the best success.

One can wonder whether the better integration is the result of higher tolerance, or the higher tolerance is the result of better integration - I suspect that both are to some extent the case - but I think that both ultimately stem from the fact that the US doesn't usually take shit from its immigrants. Public assistance for refugees is not for life, unless the refugees are elderly; the immigrants who commit more or less serious crimes are deported regardless of what awaits them back home; and if you want to teach your children your native culture, language and religion - well, it's a free country, your time and your money. Americans will often welcome the immigrants and mean it, they will hire the immigrants, but if the immigrant cab drivers decide that their religion doesn't let them transport passengers carrying alcohol, Americans will also explain to them in no uncertain terms that this is unacceptable.

Europe, on the other hand... I know the situation firsthand in Finland, but I follow it in the rest of Europe, and it's quite similar, with some differences, but the general impression is that Europe wants to accept the most unacceptable things and tolerate them through the clenched teeth. Nobody seems to expect the refugees to integrate, or to work, and many of them don't, because the public assistance is forever. Half of the population of some immigrant groups don't have jobs, or know the local language, but damn, we gotta teach them their native language, culture and religion, and arrange their own time in the swimming pools. Europeans keep the violent refugee criminals here, because to deport them is somehow considered equal to death penalty (why? most refugees are not in an imminent danger of death), and then complain that refugees commit a lot of crime.

Normal immigrants (of the kind that work and don't commit crimes) are the majority of immigrants, and well tolerated, but somehow invisible, at least here. The problematic minority (I don't mean any particular group, just the permanent underclass) is a large minority, and growing fast.

It is, IMO, an immigrant's responsibility to integrate into a new culture, but if you feed them indefinitely, don't deport them for serious crimes, and try to encourage them to retain their culture as much as possible, is it any fucking surprise when many of them live on welfare, commit crimes, and don't even bother to learn the language? Europe's passive-aggressive mix of coddling and resentment is not doing any favors to Europe, nor to immigrants.

Suck my dick, adult-woman

In her article The child-man, Kay Hymowitz writes about the immaturity of modern young and youngish men. They are very, very immature, you know. Whereas in 1965 a 26-year-old man was married with children, nowadays 26-year-old men are - horror, horror! - partying, screwing around, going to bars, hanging out with friends and playing computer games. "Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?" So immature!

In this article Hymowitz chooses to define adulthood as being married with children, and calls unmarried, childless, fun-loving men immature. Considering how much fun she makes this immaturity sound, she is not doing her cause a great service.

It's weird how some people consider fun, or at least the kind of fun that they themselves do not enjoy, immature. Hymowitz sounds exactly like my mother when she finds my father and myself watching some movie with a lot of shooting. My maturity can be questionable by Hymowitz's standards, what with being unmarried and childless and all, but my father is, after all, married, and has a child, and has his own company, and a house, and all the other paraphernalia of American Dream, except a golden retriever. But he is still obviously immature for openly enjoying the kind of entertainment that both Hymowitz and my mother consider beneath them. So see, guys - getting married and having kids will probably not grant you immunity from the accusations of immaturity, not until you learn to avoid all kinds of fun that Hymowitz - or your own very mature woman - doesn't like.

Hymowitz is of course not the only one. I've run into a number of articles by women about how thirtysomething men are all immature boys and just want to have fun instead of doing whatever the woman tells him to do, which would obviously be a mature and responsible thing. The corresponding articles by men about women tend to be a bit less numerous, but even more silly, usually threatening the single fun-loving women that if they don't get serious and get married right now, nobody will marry them in the future, and at the same time proclaiming that the author himself has no intention to get married ever, what with all the women being so immature and all, and who needs marriage anyway.

The reason I chose Hymowitz's article for the purposes of this post is that only a few months ago she wrote an article The New Girl Order about young women who just want to have fun, rather than marriage and children. Surprisingly (what, are you not surprised? I am shocked, shocked!) she does not condemn that trend as immature at all. She actually sounds like she finds it empowering, and fun. Damn. If you only read the article about child-men, you'd never imagine that Hymowitz, of all people, can approve of anything that anyone can consider fun.

Or on the second thought, she does mention fun in a positive way even there: "With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding." OK: shopping, traveling and dining with friends is maturity, drinking, hooking up and playing Halo 3 is immaturity. Whatever.

And hey, it is fun. I like traveling, parties, hanging out with friends, good wine, good food, games, books and technical toys. According to Hymowitz, I am an empowered New Girl. Single men who like the same things are, on the other hand, immature child-men. Whereas married couples who have fun are... but no, don't mention to her that there are married couples who have fun. She might have a heart attack or something. And certainly don't mention to her that there are married couples with children who have fun.

Seriously, she (and most other authors of such articles, regardless of sex) comes across as a kind of person who understands fun perfectly well when she is having it, but heaven forbid the man wants to play his computer game or hang out with his friends when she is either in the mood for a deep romantic conversation, or wants somebody to do the laundry right now. And of course it's always the fault of the opposite sex and their immature desire to have fun. Gee, is it any wonder that this kind of people can't find anyone to marry them? "I am mature and empowered and a real adult, but you are just an immature kid who wants to do some immature stupid things that you consider fun. Wanna marry me?" Way to go with the advertisement, sister!