"...and then we'll try to get the vote, too..."

When I was a kid in Russia people used to joke about guerrillas who were hiding in the forests since WWII without realizing that the war is over. Part of the reason for the jokes was, of course, that such people were occasionally found.

Some of the participants in the war of sexes remind me of those jokes. Times change, life changes, their arguments stay the same.

A high school teacher of mine used to say, in 1990: "you girls can be anything you want to be, anything your mothers couldn't even dream of: doctors, engineers...". "Damn," I thought, "just how old do you think my mother is?"

My mother is in fact an engineer. So was her mother before her. My other grandmother was a doctor. Her own mother was a dentist, and her aunt a doctor. And I knew that it wasn't just a Russian phenomenon either: there were thousands of female doctors in the US before my great-grandmother was even born.

A few days ago I ran into a conversation about girls and math. (No, no link, the guilty shall remain unnamed, but I have run into that conversation many times before.) It always goes the following way:

Person A: Girls don't want to study math because they don't believe in their mathematical abilities! Schools must do something to encourage them right now!
Person B: Girls don't want to study math because they don't have the ability to do so, and no amount of social engineering from the schools is gonna change it!

Have those people even bothered to look up the statistics lately? Or ever?

The Univeristy of Helsinki has admitted 208 freshmen as math majors last year: 107 men and 101 women. The Statistics Finland's database doesn't have a listing of degrees by major, but in the "sciences" group, which undoubtedly includes math, 5947 degrees were awarded last year: 2891 to men and 3056 to women (that's 51.4% women). In the US last year 6594 out of the 14954 bachelor degrees in math were awarded to women (that's 44.1%).

Yes, the schools can apply heroic efforts to encourage girls to study math, and in a few years we might have an incoming freshman class of 104 men and 104 women. Yes, there is an innate difference in men's and women's math abilities, enough to account for the fact that no woman has ever won a Fields Medal - but almost six thousand people graduate every year with a BA in math in the US and only 2-4 people in the world earn a Fields Medal every 4 years.

And yes, there are fields with much fewer girls than boys. I just don't think that any simple explanation, be it nature, nurture, discrimination or general stereotypes, could easily tell us why, for example, in the Helsinki University of Technology chemical engineering students have a 48-52 sex distribution, and mechanical engineers 10-90.

BTW, one really interesting number is the number of women getting degrees in computer science in the US: it fluctuates wildly up and down. So does men's, but to a much lesser degree.

One thing that came to my mind while looking that the Finnish higher education statistics: women get 64.8% of all university degrees in Finland. The only areas of study where men get more degrees than women are engineering (75.7%) and painting (52.8%). The field with the greatest gender imbalance is veterinary medicine, with 92.5% degrees earned by women. Considering all of the above, if we are talking about encouraging somebody to study, shouldn't we be talking about encouraging boys?

Another thought: the real gender issue nowadays is not whether some particular feature of men or women is caused ny nature or nurture, but rather why are we discussing this in some particular situations, but not when the sexes are reversed?

And another thought: in 1850s there was quite a lot of talk about whether women are fit to be doctors. Today, women get 66.2% of all medical degrees in Finland. How long will it take before somebody with a strong liking for the natural order of things and weak grasp of history claims that men can't be good doctors on account of insufficient nurturing instinct?

A nostalgic poem

A really good poem in Russian. Those who don't speak Russian can look at the pictures, they are good too.

A new reality show?

After reading a conversation about communism today, I got an idea for a reality show. I am sure I mentioned the idea before, but now I think I'd refine it a bit.

There should be a lot of participants, at least 10 thousand, maybe 20. Judging from the number of people whom I hear say that communism was a badly implemented but basically sound idea, that number of people should be really easy to find.

Each participant is provided with rations for a few days, and some tools. They can grow their own food (the show should be filmed somewhere where stuff actually grows), forage for it, or produce goods and/or services and sell them to the outside world and buy food from there.

The participants can organize in any kind of groups and make their own rules. They can leave the area and the show freely, unless prevented from doing so by other participants.

I wonder what kind of communism they'd build in the end.

Yiddish in Swedish

Went to the Yiddish class today.

Surprisingly enough, yesterday's mysterious stranger wasn't there.

Even more surprisingly, the class was taught by a Dutch guy I sort of knew. Who addressed me in Russian. Very good Russian, too. I'd never heard that he knew any Russian before now.

My absurdity meter went through the roof, and I had a feeling that the logical conclusion for the evening would be for the Dutch guy and myself to mix vodka and beer, drink the resulting cocktail in the bushes next to the parliament building, and sing "Heveinu Shalom Aleichem" in Icelandic, thereby killing all the seagulls within the hearing range, but I did not quite have the heart to suggest this. Maybe next time.

I did learn quite a lot of Swedish, though.

My life is not like the lives of other people

I am a weirdo magnet.

Today a man came up to me and told me that I look like a person who would like to take a Yiddish class in Swedish. "But I don't speak Swedish," I pointed out. "I don't think this will be a problem," he said.

This happened in the Confucius institute, so i guess the man figured that somebody crazy enough to take a Cantonese class in Mandarin would also be crazy enough to take a Yiddish class in Swedish.

The funniest thing about it was of course that he was absolutely right. Now I signed up for the class.

Oh dear...

I have always predicted that one day this would happen, and now it did.

Some asshole (Abdullah Hassan Tali al-Asir) put explosives (half a kilo of dynamite, according to some sources) up his ass and tried to blow up a Saudi prince. The prince got slightly injured, and the terrorist died.

Can't the fucking terrorists be just a little bit more considerate? Does this idiot whose bowels now decorate the prince's walls even realize what he has done (obviously, not anymore)? Can anyone even imagine what is gonna happen to the airport security procedures after this?

And all that after they banned taking a full tube of AquaGlide in the carry-on luggage, too.

Shana tova!

Happy New Year!

And this is a really good lekach recipe.

Shit, this is really embarassing

Did Geert Wilders go nuts from all the stress?

He wants a 1000 euro yearly tax on wearing hijabs,

They used to have a beard tax in Russia, too, but at least they had two excuses: the year was 1705 and the czar who instituted the tax was, well, differently sane. What's Wilder's excuse?

Parents of the year, again (do they have them every month?)

Last year a couple was sentenced to a year and two months' suspended sentence for taking their 16-year-old daughter to the Democratic Republic of Kongo. Now a higher court reduced it to four months' suspended sentence.

Right. This will show them! Although, on the other hand, I should be, and indeed am, glad that those assholes were sentenced at all.

It never ceases to amaze me how some places are considered (sometimes quite rightly) too much of a shithole to return a refugee to, even too much of a shithole to return a convicted criminal to, but as soon as parents are trying to send their child there, it's their dear idyllic homeland where the wise relatives instruct the children in their quaint traditional ways.

Anyway, the fuckers had a 16-year-old girl, who had lived half of her life in Finland, they took her to Kinshasa by deceit (because otherwise she would have run away to the shelter, says the father) and they left her there up the shit creek without a paddle (I mean at some relatives' place without a passport). All of this because they wanted to keep her away from bad company and to teach her the African customs.

Let's see. The Democratic Republic of Congo is just as much of a festering shithole as anything else called a Democratic Republic. (Democratic Republic of Korea, anyone? Democratic Republic of Kampuchea, probably the most genocidal state ever?) The thing it is most known for is the Second Congo War, a partially-civil war that really lasted from 1998 to 2003 and has been sort of low-key since then. (The Parents of The Year sent their sprog there in 2006.) The war in question killed 5.4 million people, which was incidentally about 8.2% of the population.

Right now the war is primarily in the east. It's mostly characterized by raping everything that moves. Gang-raping, too, to the point where it causes rectovaginal fistulae. Which, I suspect, is what affects the brains of people who send their children there.

Kinshasa, where the girl was sent, boasts 112 homicides per 100000 people. Yep, that's 0.112% of population getting killed in a year.

In comparison there has been about 2.3 homicides per 100000 people per year in Helsinki in the 2000s.

What kind of local customs did they send the girl to learn? Homicide, group rape and genocide? I think these have been rather out of fashion in most of Europe for the last 60 years or so.

I know there are warm-hearted people somewhere in Africa, with great negotiation skills and all, but I think that when a country is recovering from a big-time genocide one really should go and learn the negotiation skills somewhere else. For example among the drunk teenagers in any mall in Helsinki. Not that they are the optimal teachers of manners, mind you, but at least everyone usually stays alive. In fact I can't really think of any demographic group in Finland that would even approach the 0.1% per year homicide statistic.

Luckily for everyone involved the girl was well-versed in the Finnish methods of negotiation, and contacted a classmate and a teacher by email. They and the police helped her to get home. I can only hope the police charged the parents for the ticket afterwards.

I am not even imagining that the punishment will deter the next parents of the year, but we can at least hope that the publicity will both warn the children and teach them how to get back when left by their parents in the midst crime and/or civil war.

Life

Been mostly at home on Friday and today. Some kind of evil is living in my throat and I am trying to exorcize it with tea, booze, garlic and rest.

This didn't stop me from going to Tallinn with the rest of my coworkers yesterday (it was not the kind of flu that makes me sneeze and not the first day so hope I wasn't too contagious).

We were specifically told that we can bring families and friends, but in the end Anu pointed out that I was the only one who brought an adult of the same sex. Let's just hope that this did not cause misconceptions about my sexual orientation among my single male coworkers.

The tour guide kept talking about how bad the Russians are, which was quite understandable, but not a nice thing to do in front of a Russian colleague (the driver was Russian-speaking). The driver, however, seemed to be unable to understand Finnish or Estonian, which was not nice either.

Tallinn, on the other hand, was as nice as ever. In spite of the rain.

No offense, but...

Jussi Halla-aho (a blogger, a politician and a friend of mine) got sentenced to a 330 euro fine for blasphemy, for mentioning that a certain prophet was a pedophile, and, as the court's decision says, generalizing it to the whole religion founded by that prophet.

The grounds for the sentence have some interesting moments:

1. The term "pedophile" that Halla-aho uses has a very strong pejorative meaning as such.

Hmm, would the court like to suggest some non-pejorative terms for the same concept? "The prophet had a very special kind of love for children"?

Seriously, the law uses such a concept as "intent to insult". I can well understand it in some contexts. For example calling somebody a faggot, a nigger or a whore, even if factually true, can be considered as doing it with intent to insult, because these are, in fact, the insulting words for the concepts for which there exist neutral words.

But how do you express the really negative concepts without the intent to insult? How do you say that somebody is a murderer or a pedophile, for example? I really wish the court would say "you can't call a murderer a murderer or a pedophile a pedophile, because it is always insulting" or, alternatively, "you should call a murderer 'a person who has illegally and intentionally caused someone's death' and a pedophile 'a person who has sex with severely underaged partners'".

2. You can't really apply sense and logic to religion.

Well, they got that right. If you apply sense and logic to a religion that encourages young men to fight and die in the name of their god, at the same time gaining more land and people for their community, all on the promise on heaven and 72 heavenly virgins, and on the other hand, allows the remaining male members of the community to have 4 wives per person, you might find an answer to the question "cui bono?". In, like, 10 milliseconds.

3. Blasphemy causes conflict between the parties depending on how important the religion is to them.

Is this some kind of admission that blasphemy against the religions whose representatives are more likely to riot is a more punishable offense than blasphemy against the other religions?

4. It would be different if Halla-aho were criticizing the mistreatment of some specific young Muslim girls.

I though he kind of did. We are talking about a specific girl here, right?

Linux

In response to my previous post Markku said that I make it sound as if Linux were but a constant source of grief for me, and ask to write some balancing thoughts.

In fact it hasn't. There is of course the factor that I, like everybody else, tend to write about problems, and not "my computer has been working so well and I am so happy". But most of all, the source of my problems is not Linux or any other thing in the outside world, but my own tendency to update, upgrade and configure everything to death. Although I must say that in spite of all the grief it gives me, it's quite a lot of fun. That's why I do it all the time.

As for Linux: I wish I could be really persuasive about how it is so much better than everything else. Problem is, I can't. All I can say is that I have been a very satisfied user for the last 15 years, and intend to remain so in the future.

The reason I can't easily praise Linux over everything else is that I don't know that much about anything else. I don't touch Windows every year, and the last time I touched a Mac was before the LCD displays became popular.

All my experiences with Windows so far have been rather unpleasant, and part of it was surely due to inexperience, but some of it was clearly objective - for example, the last time I spent a few days in front of a computer running Windows I asked people who had Windows of their own how to make window focus follow mouse, and they couldn't tell me.

Linux does everything I want it to do, and any grief is rare and far between. It is quite distribution-dependent, too. I tend to like Debian, which is great otherwise (lots and lots of packages and very easy updates) but tends to be a bit behind on hardware drivers. I also tend to run the less-than-stable versions of it, because, you know, new! shiny!

To the people who do not consider tinkering with their system to be a great way to spend an evening I'd currently recommend Ubuntu. I have two different Ubuntus installed on two of my home computers (the regular 9.04 on the desktop in the bedroom, and Easypeasy on the little laptop), and both installed without any problem and work like a charm.

Lessons of yesterday

1. It's really quite easy to make a new Ubuntu installation over an existing encrypted LVM:

- copy your /etc/crypttab to /home,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode,
- give the passphrase when the installer asks for it, use the partitioner in the normal way, install,
- boot from an alternate install CD into the rescue mode, again,
- copy the crypttab from /home back to /etc/crypttab,
- update-initramfs -k all -c -v,
- happy happy joy joy.

2. If your laptop's (in this case Dell Latitude E6400) screen suddenly goes black when you activate some display manager, and does not react to anything at all, try taking the damn thing off the docking station. Then boot it, find the power management setting and fix it so that it doesn't do it anymore (in this case, told it not to react to AC poweror closed lid).

How to deal with those pesky bloggers

When a blogger posts something you don't like, threaten her with a lawyer and make sure that whatever you did not like to begin with ends up in the country's biggest newspaper and in many other people's blogs.

Because this worked so well for a couple of restaurants.

On sex and/or relationships with friends

Most of the people I know find sex and relationship partners among their friends and acquaintances. As far as I can see with is the case for my friends in Helsinki, my childhood friends in Boston, my parents' childhood friends in St. Petersburg, and my grandparents. (Although I do know some people who have found their partners as strangers in the bars or on some Net dating service, and they seem happy enough.)

However, the people claiming that once a man is friends with a woman he has no chance are so numerous, that probably somewhere out there there must be a place (geographical or social) where this is in fact the case. I am just curious: where is it?

The Game

Lots of people seem to be writing about "the game" nowadays, meaning the techniques allowing the men to pick up more women. The idea is probably useful; the actual advice ranges from useful to ridiculous; the writers range from people who sound like they more or less know what they are talking about to people who are pick-up experts in the same sense as a guy who is always in trouble with his residence permit is an immigration expert (I know one of those, too).

The purpose of this post is not to bash the male sex as such for inventing silly rules for picking up women. Embarrassingly enough women were there first, at least in modern times, with The Rules and similar books, and I can't say that the quality of advice was any better when written by women and for women.

One of the main points that the male pickup advisers make is to never take any advice from a woman, because they are all lying or don't really know what they want anyway. If you want to heed this advice, stop reading this post now.

If you are still reading: take this with a grain of salt, anyway, because this is obviously seen through the lens of my life experience, and people in other places might behave very differently from the educated classes of Helsinki, Finland.

Also: I don't actively pick up women, so these are just the thoughts that came to me from watching men pick me up, or pick my friends up in my presence.

First of all, about "women don't know what they want: they want X, but not too much of X". Well, duh! Many qualities are distributed on a bell curve, and many people don't like the extremes of the curve in many cases.

Second, even though this sounds like an instruction on picking me up, it's not really meant as such, and just written on the reasonable assumption that I am definitely not unique.

Basically, there are only two really useful things in picking me up: a) be somebody whom I already know and b) be very attractive physically. A and B and interchangeable to an extent; a well-liked friend can well end up in my bed just by being reasonably cute, and a very beautiful stranger can have the familiarity requirement waived, but if you are neither attractive not previously known to me, just forget it.

There have been exceptions to this, when I was in the mood for experimenting and very young and very bored at the same time. The experimental mood is hard to detect, but you might want to find somebody young and really bored.

Familiarity has its degrees, as does attractiveness. My taste is farther out than most, but they all differ a bit. Remember that if women rate you on a 1-10 attractiveness scale some of them will give you a couple more points than you would receive on average. I don't know how one would go around finding them, though.

Being nice and decent doesn't help much, although failing to do so will hurt. The reason it doesn't help much is that everyone else is nice and decent, too. You are competing against the pool of my single friends and acquaintances, every one of whom is nice and decent. They are intelligent, too.

Sense of humor? Not a big plus, because I suspect all humans have it.

If I am up for casual sex, especially for casual sex with a man I don't know very well, the single thing I hate the most is drama. The worst thing you can show is drama potential. (Oh well, you can turn out to be the new Pol Pot, but I guess this also counts as drama potential.) Any man who makes me suspect that having sex with him once and failing to do so the second time will result in screaming, major depression or broken kitchenware is immediately off the list.

Here is where confidence enters the play. If you are planning on casual sex with me, especially if you don't know me well, you should sound like my "yes" or "no" is not a big deal to you, and if it is "yes", then a subsequent "no" the next time is not a big deal either. Any hint of worshiping is not good.

Negativity is not good either, if you don't know me well. Negativity in general only works with people who know you don't really mean it. Very light negativity might work with strangers, but most people, myself included, don't know how to apply it.

Too much confidence is a bad thing too. This is kind of difficult to notice, because it becomes a bad thing very easily and I am not likely to express it, I just withdraw. (My failure, not yours.) My manner with the people I don't know well is rather gentle; it is a kind of a so-called "shit test": if a guy interprets gently expressed movie/bar/restaurant preference as something he does not have to listen to and compromise with, he is out. (With people whom I know well it's different, we can play tug-of-war with those things.)

As for "being an asshole", which is a misnomer, since said behaviors don't always understand assholicity: ignoring me every once in a while is quite healthy, although this can be and has been overdone. Flirting (and having sex) with other women has practically no effect on me (and I know it's quite unusual). Trying to order me around... well, so far nobody dared.

Basically, be somebody I know, or somebody attractive, otherwise your chances are low. And don't overdo things.

One more thing, but I am not sure how common it is, even in my own circle: early hours of the morning is a really bad time to pick me up. That's the time when I don't usually want anyone, even familiar and attractive. Evening is much better.

Go stand on a highway

I saw a demonstration of environmentalists today.

It made me feel like buying a car. Not because I am a contrarian bitch, although I do have those moments, but simply because I wanted to get home and the fuckers filled pretty much the whole width of Aleksanterinkatu and the trams weren't moving.

Downtown Helsinki has enough open space for people to demonstrate without blocking all the traffic in some particular place. For some reason every time I see a demonstration blocking all the traffic it's either the environmentalists or the "youths" supporting some squatters. Even the "peace marchers" with Hezbollah flags and t-shirts saying "bomb Israel" had the decency to let the trams through. The environmentalist cause is apparently too important for worrying about the mundane things like the reasonably smooth running of public transportation.

Also for some reason they tend to demonstrate right in the places where a lot of trams run (oh well, the places where the trams are supposed to run and usually do when the environmentalists are not there blocking the traffic). Has anyone ever heard of environmentalists demonstrating against the climate change on Kehä III? Me neither.

Not that I would really want them to block the traffic there either, but at least it would be more consistent than blocking the public transportation in the center of the city.

Could it be that they find it difficult to get there without cars? Maybe the effort of doing so would teach them why people who live there usually own cars in the first place.

A felon refugee camp?

One of the problems with the refugee admission systems in Europe is that if a refugee or even an asylum seeker turns out to be a serious criminal, you can't send them back like any other foreigner: either they might be in danger in their country of origin, or the return is for some reason technically impossible.

I think that the solution for this problem can and should be provided by the UN, in the same spirit of cooperation in which the countries accept refugees from the UN refugee camps.

The UN can establish a separate camp for the refugees whom their host countries have chosen to deport for being convicted felons. It should be separate from the normal refugee camps, and preferably far away from any local populations.

This should not be a punishment or prison camp. The idea is to provide convicted felons who have already served their time with a reasonably safe place to live if their country of citizenship is too dangerous to go to, and their habitual country of residence has kicked them out for being too much of a criminal. The standard of living should be about average for a UN refugee camp that's not in war zone. The residents should of course be free to leave at any time if they decide that their country of citizenship is not that dangerous after all, or if some new idiots decide to take them in.

I am sure this would greatly improve the goodwill of citizens towards the refugees.

Responsible adults

From a certain forum (link omitted to protect the guilty):

"We didn't use any birth control, because we are adults and know how to avoid an unwanted pregnancy."

- a woman asking advice on obtaining an abortion, referring to a coitus interruptus that turned out to be somewhat uninterrupted.

A thought for the day

Friendly teasing only works with actual friends.

Relatives are weird creatures

One of my cousins contacted me on Skype about six months ago, and we've been chatting occasionally ever since. Today was one of those days, and it brought a revelation.

Him: Hey Lida!

I do actually answer to that name, due to having had an elderly grandmother who used to confuse people's names. Here, however, after a minute of reflection I remembered that he is neither elderly nor my grandmother, and made a brilliant, though, as it turned out, erroneous deduction that he actually wanted to talk to Lida and clicked the wrong line in Skype. I decided to set him right.

Me: Hi! I am not Lida.

Him: Oops... Who ARE you?

Me: Vera.

Him: Oops... I thought you were Lida all that time.

Mind you, Lida does not share my last name, which also happens to be my Skype username. Go figure...

It must be contagious, because this cousin's wife has recently sent me a couple of emails under the mistaken assumption that I am my father.

Next year, a special program for Martians...

The Foreign Ministry says that more than half of the diplomas of the West African students who have applied for residence permits in June and July on order to study in Hamk are in fact fake.

The applicants are mostly from Ghana and Nigeria, and were selected in a test that was given in Ghana after 4 out of 5 Hamk's English-language technical programs turned out to be almost empty.

I am not asking why the students faked the papers. I'd probably do the same. I wanna know why the hell Hamk has 5 English-language programs, 4 of which are almost empty.

Hamk or Hämeen korkeakoulu is a technical college of about 7000 students in the historical province of Häme, which is now three smaller provinces. It has five degree programs in English, out of the total of 25: Automation Engineering, Construction Engineering, International Business, Mechanical Engineering and Production Technology, and Supply Chain Management. They are starting the sixth this fall: Industrial Management.

There are 1301 English-speaking people living in Häme, out of 22192 foreign language speakers, and a total population of 854593. Does this maybe explain why they are having a bit of trouble finding folks willing to study Supply Chain Management in English? Maybe somebody in there should also study demand a little bit? Maybe having 20% of the study programs in English is not such a bright idea in an area where 97% of population are Finnish speakers?

Finland offers free education to foreigners, including non-EU foreigners. It's very nice of them to do, of course, and I have myself benefited from that in my own time. However, from Finland's point of view I can see only two purposes in such generosity: getting some new educated workforce, or spreading and promoting the Finnish culture around the world. I don't see how having foreigners in their own separate English-language programs can benefit either of these.

It's even worse if those programs are meant for the foreign-born young people who are already living in Finland. How do they expect them to integrate and find work if their college environment is all English-speaking and if they don't speak Finnish in the first place? Yes, high-tech fields do accept non-Finnish-speaking employees, but in general this is Finland, and people speak Finnish here. OK, they speak Swedish in some places, but Häme isn't one of them. Not speaking any Finnish is a serious disadvantage, and not speaking any Finnish after having graduated from a Finnish college is even more so.

I don't mind it if some Africans with a genuine interest in Finland come to study something useful in some normal Finnish study program and stay to work, or even go back. I do mind spending the taxpayer money for a number of absolutely useless programs that the school cannot even fill without a hunting trip abroad.

At least it's not a capital offense...

A friend of mine is on trial tomorrow. For blasphemy, among other things. In Finland.

That's one thing I'd never expected to say outside of the role-playing game context, but it does unfortunately happen to be the case in real life.

The blasphemy consisted of saying that a certain prophet (police be upon him) liked children in more ways than one. I'd rather not be more specific, lest the holy inquisition thinks that I harbor some impure thoughts as well.

Instead I'll quote from Ayatollah Khomeini, the respected Shi'a religious authority who married a 10-year-old girl at the age of 27 (Clarification of Questions):

#2410. If a person contracts for himself a girl who has not reached puberty and before she finishes her ninth year enters the girl he must never have intercourse with her in case he causes her path of urine and menses or that of menses and stool to become one.

#2459. It is recommended that one hurries in giving husband to a daughter who has attained puberty, meaning that she is of the age of religious accountability. His Holiness, Sadegh, salutations to him, bade that it is one of a man's good fortunes that his daughter does not see menses in his own house.

And lest we forget the Sunnis, Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh: "It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger. A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."

Khomeini is dead, but I am sure the Finnish authorities can try the Grand Mufti if he ever visits here. For defamation of his religion.

I can't brain today. I has the dumb.

I forgot a beer in the freezer, and the ice cream outside of the freezer. Three times today. I also forgot the butter somewhere, and am still looking for it. I was supposed to do some things, and I am sure I forgot half of them.

Usually this happens to me under severe stress, but currently the level of stress is just somewhere slightly above average. I guess sleeping five hours a day is starting to get to me.

I rarely manage to fall asleep before two, and at seven the evildoers start doing their work. Evil work. For whatever reason all the buildings in our yards decided to fix their yardward surfaces right now, and each hired a team of manic workaholic sociopaths who start their work every morning at seven with some very loud drilling.

Incidentally, if you read in the news that a naked woman attacked some construction workers with a steak knife, cut their hands and other useful organs off, and drilled overy one of their teeth with their own drills, remind the police that I would never do anything like that.

I took some work home over the weekend, and have been on call, too. Imagine my suprise when our VPN told me to bugger off. I don't know who broke it again, but currently the only thing that stands between our sysadmins and a heinous act of sadistic sodomy is the idea the sick leave resulting from shoving all our media object backups up their collective anus will further delay the VPN repair.

Hurrah!

One of my favorite blogs is active again.

The parents of the year and bad English

A few weeks ago there was a girl raped in Arizona. An 8-year-old girl, raped by 4 boys aged 14, 13, 10 and 9. All the participants were from Liberia.

This is quite a newsworthy event in and of itself, but it made really big news when the parents of the girl disowned her for dishonoring the family. They also said that they don't think anything should be done to the boys.

Now the parents are denying it, saying that they were misunderstood because of their poor English. I think they are lying, because the girl's older sister said pretty much the same thing, two different police investigators said it was not a misunderstanding, and various Liberian powers-that-be behaved like it was an unfortunate cultural feature, rather than shocking news.

If the family tried to avoid whatever shame having a raped daughter brings in Liberia, it didn't work. If the parents of the year had at least pretended to be real parents, the story might have never gone far beyond Arizona. Now even the Liberian president got to comment on it, so at least all Liberia knows what happened and probably who they are. Hope the child protection services find the child some better parents. Also hope that at least some Liberian parents - I am not holding breath for these particular ones - drew sensible conclusions from the event.

Anyway: the whole bunch of fuckers is suddenly unable to speak English. The parents, who say they came to the US 5 years ago, also claim thet they thought that "it's her fault" and "take her, I don't want her" actually meant "we love our dear girl and want to help her". Steven Tuopeh, the 14-year-old who is being tried as an adult, has come to the US in 2005 and "has limited understanding of English". The uncle of the two youngest boys, aged 9 and 10 (in some sources, 9 and 9) says that they came to the US 6 years ago and speak very limited English.

What the fuck is wrong with these people? I went to high school in the US; everyone who'd been there for 2 years understood English well and spoke it tolerably, regardless of whether they were from Russia, Iran, Israel, a Cambodian refugee camp, someplace unpronounceable in China, or Texas. And those were older kids (14+), for whom learning a new language is an effort. How the hell do you get a 9-year-old who'd lived in the country for 6 years and doesn't speak the language?

I understand that something like that might happen in a sufficiently big town where everyone around speaks the kids' native language. But we are not talking about Spanish-speaking kids in the most Spanish-speaking parts of El Paso. We are talking about Liberians in Phoenix, Arizona, a 1000-2000-person community in a city of 1.5 million. Not to mention that English is in fact the official language of Liberia, even though only a minority speaks it as their native language.

On a related note: there were a few discussions on IRC of whether the family was Muslim. They are not; they are Christian.

On a somewhat-related note: Liberia's ex-president Charles Taylor is on trial for rape, murder, mutilation and cannibalism. Maybe those Liberian boys just want to grow up to be like the president.

Tattoos

Am I imagining things, or am I seeing a lot more tattoos on people's bare arms and legs this summer than there were last summer?

Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition

When I was a little kid 30 years ago, I read books about the Spanish inquisition, and how it burned people just on the mere accusation of blasphemy. I did think then that people must have been stupid and crazy in the middle ages, but nobody warned me that I'd be reading similar stuff in the news 30 years from then.

Not in Spain, obviously. In Pakistan. They burned 8 Christians accused of blasphemy.

According to Henningsen-Contreras statistics, Spanish inquisition executed on average a little over 5 persons a year during the years 1540-1700. Not that it's really relevant here.

It's called race, stupid

A little while ago I read a YLE article about how racism is hard on bicultural children.

The basic point is that people easily assume that bicultural children are not Finnish, even if they have lived all their lives in Finland, and sometimes speak English to them.

I certainly don't doubt that this is the case. I could dispute whether this is a manifestation of racism or just an educated guess on the part of the person making the assumption - this depends on whether you define all the assumptions on the basis of race as racist, on how justified the assumption is in a particular case (an area with a lot of non-white Finnish-speaking children vs. an area that doesn't have any), and on how insistent the person making the assumption is in their mistaken ways - but my point isn't about that. It's about the gross misuse of the term "bicultural", and indeed of the term "culture".

I know a number of Finnish people who grew up in bicultural families: Finnish-German, Finnish-English, Finnish-American, Finnish-Polish, etc. So far I have never observed strangers trying to speak English to them on the assumption that they must be not Finnish. I wonder why is that. Could it be because - gasp - they look like they are Finnish? Like, they look northern- or central-European?

The whole point of the article is about race, pure and simple. It's about people who are Finnish but don't look like that. And it's not about any controversial race topic, either. It's about race in the sense in which everybody not totally divorced from reality knows it exists: that the people with genetic heritage in different parts of the world tend to look different.

It's kind of funny that the author uses the words racism and racist quite easily, but avoids the word race completely.

The other rather mystical thing is that the author is writing about this as a problem affecting specifically biracial (or rather, as she says, "bicultural") children, although almost all the problems that she has mentioned - except the adoption assumption - would affect any non-white children growing up in Finland, as well as the darker varieties of white. Makes one wonder whether she herself considers monoracial non-white children growing up in Finland Finnish.

(To the more ethnically-oriented folks reading this: yes, I am aware that the word "Finnish" has an ethnic meaning as well, and that in that sense monoracial non-white children are not Finnish. I am using the word "Finnish" here in the sense of "carrier of Finnish culture", which one can obviously be regardless of race and ethnic origin.)

I wouldn't bitch about one badly written article that much, but it seems to me that more and more people, regardless of their political positions on race and/or immigration, have started using the word "culture" as a substitute for "race". It's not. Race is that thing you are born with. Culture is that thing that you learn when you are little, and learn more when you are bigger, and you can choose to learn other ones later, or not.

Hand disinfectant (gross topic warning)

The company where I work is kind of concerned about swine flu. They lecture us on washing hands all the time, and they put up the bottles of various hand disinfectants all over the place.

I probably benefit the most from the disinfectant. Just sit in front of the computer, rub it on my hands and enjoy the smell.

The one they put up in the women's toilet (LV) is really weird though. It has the exact consistency of the lubricant that comes out of a vagina during masturbation, and it is slightly sticky in the exact same way, so every time I come out of the toilet my hands feel like I've been jerking off for half an hour.

A teaching moment

The Gates-Crowley scandal has pretty much come to an end. A call to the police about the possible burglary in progress, the police's attempt to check it out, the resident freaking out and yelling at the police, his arrest - ill-advised or not - the president's comments - ill-advised or not, etc. Our peacemaker-in-chief managed to reconcile the professor and the officer with the help of a sufficient amount of beer. The nation had its teaching moment.

What exactly did we learn? Not being an officer of law, a professor of African-American studies or a president, but just a simple American woman with a computer and Net access, I have followed the story of the woman who called the possible burglary in, and learned the following things:

- don't ever mention the race of a possible suspect to a 911 dispatcher, even if they are asking about it. To be on the safe side, don't mention the sex, either. Or the species. Or the number. "N beings are trying to break down the door." Or, to be on a safer side, just don't call the police when you see somebody breaking into somewhere,
- if you have exercised bad judgment and called the police, record the call yourself, so that you can have immediately available proof that you have not in fact mentioned race or anything else that might possibly describe the suspect,
- if the suspected burglar turns out to be a sufficiently privileged person, retain an attorney.

A little media review

A horrible crime has happened in UK this month: a group of thugs attacked a man, stabbed him twice, poured acid over him and into his throat, and smashed his face with bricks. According to some sources, he lost both eyes; according to some sources, only one. Sme sources estimate burns at 50% of his skin, some 90%, and all of them say he lost his tongue.

Thoroughly unpleasant business. The public naturally wants to know who would do such thing and why. I decided to see what kind of coverage the press provides, and chose as my sample the first Google News grouping of that story that I found by googling acid+attack. The first 20 links that came up.

The actual facts of the case appear to be: a Danish Muslim man of Asian (in the British sense of the word) origin was friends with, or possibly had an affair with, a Muslim woman who was born in Britain and is of Pakistani origin. A group of people (in the loose sense of the word) consisting wholly or partially of the woman's relatives did the deed, seven were arrested, five of those released on bail, then one of those rearrested.

I have an unexplainable gut feeling that origins of the participants are not entirely irrelevant to the way the thing went, and should be mentioned. Let's see how good my 20 sources are at it:

Out of 20:

17 mentioned that the man in question was Danish, clearly the most relevant fact,
16 mentioned that there was a married Muslim woman involved in there,
9 said that the Danish man was Asian (in the British sense of the word), but only 3 said that he was Muslim,
13 mentioned honor, as in "honor crime",
4 mentioned the Pakistani origin of the woman,
3 mentioned that at least some of the perpetrators were the woman's relatives.

Of course you can make the case that they don't need to mention religion or culture, either because this is one of those unfortunate events that can happen to anyone with approximately the same probability, or quite the opposite: that anytime a man gets brutally attacked after spending time with a Muslim woman everybody with two brain cells knows who did it. I am not however sure that I approve of such journalism.

The honorary mention goes to BBC: here and here the only origin or motive detail they offer is that the man was Danish. No mention of Muslims and/or honor at all.

Oh my God! The racist police came to check on a break-in! You bastards!

When I was young and my parents bought their first home the police came over a few times to check on a possible burglary in progress. The reason was a malfunctioning alarm system. They came over, asked a few questions and left. Everything was very civil. After a few times we disconnected the alarm system altogether.

Later, in their new home, this happened again, this time due to an overly concerned neighbor. The last time she called the police was when my parents ordered an air conditioning system delivered. They weren't even home, and the police came and somehow managed to figure out that the workers delivering the air conditioner were not in fact burglars.

Happens all the time, really. Happens to the white, the black, the Asians and the Hispanic, and probably the Native Americans. Surely happens to the blacks more often than to everyone else, but usually everyone, including the black people, manages to sort it out with the police perfectly well.

It really takes a professor of African-American studies at Harvard University to fuck it up.

Henry Louis Gates was trying to force his own front door for some prefectly good reason, which was not, however, ovbious to a casual observer. A neighbor called in a possible burglary, which is not an unreasonable assumption to make if somebody you don't recognize is trying to break into a house. By the time the police arrived Gates and his driver already got through the back door and managed to force the front door.

At this point the cop usually says "hi, I am investigating a report on a possible burglary" or something along those lines, the owner/resident says "oh, my name is whatever and I live here", papers are checked if the police finds it necessary, both say "oops" and the cop leaves.

"I live here" is the right answer. "Why, because I am a black man in America" is the wrong answer, and so is "you have no idea who you are messing with". He is not messing with anyone, he is doing his job, which, among other things, includes investigating burglaries in progress. Whether or not the neighbor would have called it in if those were two white men forcing the front door is something you can speculate about in your African-American studies class, but for the sake of all our front doors I certainly hope she would've.

You especially don't follow the officer outside and keep screaming at them. This is what gets you arrested for being disorderly, which is exactly what happened to Gates.

Now the incident has made the national news, the mayor has apologized, the charges have been dropped, the officer has refused to apologize and he-who-cannot-be-called-chimp-in-chief has also criticized the police.

One thing is not entirely clear: what does Gates want the police to do if there is an actual burglary in progress? Come there, see if the burglars are African-American and decide that asking them about anything would be an undue act of racial profiling?

Jewish rage boy

There've been riots in Jerusalem lately, by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and in a way that makes me think that they are also trying to contend for the title of the religion of peace.

The original reason for the riots was The Most Unholy Parking Lot, which the city decided to keep open on Saturdays, which the ultra-Orthodox were a bit miffed about, partly because the Lord doesn't allow parking cars on Saturdays (surely must say so in the holy book somewhere), and partly because most of them can't afford a car.

The second reason was a differently sane ultra-Orthodox woman who did not bother feeding her three-year-old son. He is in a hospital now, and she is in a different hospital. The protesters maintain that she is not insane, she is ultra-Orthodox. The city is too polite to elaborate on the difference.

The city is, however, suing the protesters for vandalism. The city has also suspended municipal services to them (live and learn, France).

So far they have only burned 250 dumpsters, smashed 70 traffic lights and damaged some municipal vehicles. Sounds like a regular night in France, sure, but then Meah Shearim is a lot smaller than France.

Here is a picture gallery (flash). And hey, we got our own Jewish rage boy: making a speech, running away, caught.

Liikaa viinaa, munat kadoksissa

Lauantaina tuli juotua sen verran, että nyt on munat kadoksissa. Kananmunat. Neljä munaa, tai pikemminkin neljä valkuaista.

Muistan sen illan varsin hyvin, paitsi että en sitä, miten munille kävi. Jos olen vahingossa kaatanut ne pois, niin se ei ole suuri menetys, mutta jos ne on siellä jossain ja niissä kohta kehittyy älyllinen elämä...

Stereotypes

Somewhat in connection with the previous post:

IMO it's natural for people to form stereotypes of various groups of people: one extrapolates from the evidence available, and uses those rules in the absence of the further evidence.

Moreover, if the issue in question is something really important to the person forming the stereotypes, they tend to be stronger: it is really important to all of us not to be attacked in the street, and we avoid the kinds of people that we deem to be the most likely attackers, even if we are fully aware that most likely they aren't. We just don't want to take the risk.

Going from the specific to the general seems quite natural to me. What I don't understand about the stereotypes is some people's tendency to go from the general to the specific, especially in the presense of the evidence to the contrary. Surely people must realize that not everything in the world conforms to their stereotypes, and that stereotypes are just guidelines, and not always good ones. Many of them are rooted in reality, but quite a few aren't.

What is this tendency to ignore the evidence based upon? Surely can't be evolutionary.

What women like

Recently I read a few net discussions where men were discussing what women like and want in men. The dissenting input of any actual women was, as usual, summarily ignored.

These discussions are rather common, and what always strikes me about them is that the real subject of the discussion is usually not what women in general want, but what kind of things are most likely to improve a man's chances with women.

These are not the same thing, of course. If 60% of women want the feature A and 50% of men have it, and 5% of women want the feature B but 0.01% of men have it, then the feature B is a lot more useful in attracting women than the feature A, but women still on average like the feature A a lot more often than the feature B.

What never ceases to amaze me is that the vast majority of the participants usually fail to see this difference.

Work and shopping

Been very busy at work for the last two weeks, with the feeling that I am being fucked in every hole, and not in a positive way. It is an interesting project, mind, but I wish I had more time for it and less other urgent stuff to do at the same time.

I firmly believe in the soul-healing power of shopping (twice the healing points if done on the don't-buy-anything day). Also, it's sale season right now.

Yesterday was a good day to shop for shoes, apparently (did I mention that my real name is Imelda Marcos?). I like funky shoes, but I usually buy sensible ones. This time I figured that I have enough sensible shoes and I want to buy something funky. This is pretty hard, because my other requirement for the shoes, besides funkiness, was that I'd be able to put them on and walk at least 15 thousand steps in a row without socks, blisters, pain or band-aids.

Usually I buy Eccos and Clarks and Lacoste, now I wanted something new. I have wanted a pair of El Naturalista for a while, but the fuckers don't make them in my size. Bought a pair of Art, which is a sort of El Naturalista ripoff (or is it the other way around?) which actually fits. We'll see if it works for me.

BTW - has anyone tried Fly London? This is another shoe company that appeared here during the last year or two. They cost like real shoes, and feel like you can hammer nails with them. Does anyone actually buy them?

Next time I am going shopping to Verkkokauppa. Easier than the shoes.

Today is not my day

Had to go to work today, and decided to shop a little before that.

Ran to the bus. Fell, hit my leg in several places, and my head. The leg is sore. The head is perfectly OK, probably because it's empty.

Went shopping. All the shoes were too small and almost all the clothes (except a pair of capri jeans) were too ugly. Bought a kettle instead.

Then my pants suddenly disintegrated. Just at the same moment I realized that the bus that comes close to my workplace doesn't run on Sundays. Had to walk to work in disintegrated pants.

Report on non-alcoholic red wine

Just like several people said in response to my question, the non-alcoholic red wine turned out to be bad. However, it was much improved by a shot of vodka (the shot of vodka was poured into the wine, not ingested by me before the tasting).

Mommie dearest

I am rarely bothered by other people's custody battles, international or otherwise, and always use sufficient birth control to avoid having any of my own. Usually I just assume that the sprog has two loving (if not necessarily very sensible) parents in any case, and the court will sort out the rights of the adults somehow.

Lately there has been an exception to that:

Natalia Zarubina, a Russian woman, came to Portugal illegally in 2001 in order to work. There she met a Ukrainian man named Georgi Tsiklauri, started a relationship with him, and in April 2003 a little girl was born. They called her Alexandra.

Soon after Sandra's birth they broke up, and the child stayed with her mother, who, according to witnesses, did not take particularly good care of her. The father didn't either. Another Russian woman said that she knew a couple that would take care of the child, and so Natalia left Sandra to Florinda Vieira and João Pinheiro. She was 17 months old and weighed 5.7 kg. They took her in and raised her as their own child.

The father was told about the arrangement, and wanted nothing to do with the kid, financially or otherwise.

The mother visited the daughter sometimes, often drunk. The daughter did not speak any Russian.

Anyway, at some point the authorities noticed that Natalia was there illegally, and tried to kick her out. At that point she remembered that she had a daughter, demanded that the daughter be kicked out together with her, and Florinda and João tried to demand the kid for themselves. A custody battle ensued, along with a pause in deportation proceedings.

The first trial resulted in custody being given to Florinda and João. After that Natalia's mother wrote to Putin, and the Russian embassy interfered in the next trial. A Russian citizenship was arranged for Sandra, and the representatives from the embassy started pestering the judge, promising that in Russia Sandra will have the same living conditions as in Portugal.

What the fuck was the judge thinking? (This is pretty much what the judge himself is saying now.) Even apart from the fact that Russian diplomats are not the kind of people that you would want to buy a used car from, or give a used child to, for this girl you can't arrange the same living conditions in Russia (or the US, Finland or Spain, for that matter), as in Portugal. The reason being, there are only two people in the world whom she calls "mom" and "dad", and they happen to live in Portugal.

During the custody battle Florinda and João claimed that Natalia was a prostitute, alcoholic, and drug user, and that she was gonna take Sandra to a place where there is no toilet, and everyone drinks vodka and eats spam (not the email kind).

The claim about prostitution and drugs could well have been just a baseless custody war weapon, especially since I find it very difficult to imagine that some human being would pay real money for Ms. Zarubina's company. The stereotype of Russians living without toilets and drinking vodka all the time pissed off quite a lot of Russians, since most of them don't really live like that.

What is, however, a matter of public record, was that Natalia had to be removed from the roof of a bus by police and firefighters while being drunk and aggressive, and had to be taken to a psychiatric facility. Also, that the psychologist who used to supervise Natalia's visits said that ever since the visits became supervised the child is not afraid of the mother's verbal and physical aggression anymore.

The was also a demonstration of the members of the local Russian community in Braga, the city where Natalia lived. The basic point: "we know that bitch, please don't give her the poor child".

Anyway, the judge, whatever the fuck he happened to be thinking, gave the child to the, uhm, mother, and she took little Sandra and her dog to Russia.

Now the Russian TV made a report on her. Several, actually, this is just one. Holy shit! They really don't have a toilet, or indeed a real bed for her. They really are all drunk, except possibly the grandmother. There really is spam on the table. And most importantly, the mother is obviously neither decent enough not bright enough to abstain from hitting the child on national TV.

They live with Natalia's parents, brother and other daughter. This other daughter was never supported by her mother financially, and and hadn't seen her since 2001. She is 14, and already pronouncing death threats on national TV.

Florinda and João were invited by a Russian TV program in the end of May and tried to come to Russia, but for some reason were refused a visa.

The Portuguese are negotiating for Natalia and Sandra to come back, and Natalia is trying to get some money out of them. We'll see how that develops, but so far looks bad.

Portugal: demonstrations, zoophile union, and fado in Chiado

Portugal was quite pretty. Before going there I was a bit stressed out about the language, mostly because I used to be able to speak it and had forgotten most of it. As usual, it was not worth stressing about. I could read everything I wanted to read, and could say everything I wanted to say. Understanding was a bit more difficult, because the Portuguese don't speak Portuguese like normal people from Somerville and Watertown. They eat almost every vowel that's remotely edible, and don't palatalize t's and d's where they should. They do, however, speak English better than most of the southern Europe.

Lisbon is full of places that are very retro and give you the feeling that you are inside some Italian neorealist movie of the fifties. Usually I only like the fifties on screen, but it was all right for a short vacation. And it was certainly unlike any other place I'd seen.

The city is situated on a bank (not both banks, really) of a huge river called Tejo. They have an unbelievably long bridge over it, 17 kilometers or so.

We stayed in Chiado apartments (well, one of them), and I highly recommend the place to everyone who goes to Lisbon for a week or more. Beautiful apartment, spacious, well-equipped, great location, great view, great everything.

Except for fado. But it's not the apartment's fault. You can't escape the damn thing anywhere in Portugal.

In fact, everywhere in Europe musicians of dubious quality like to play outside in the center of the city in hope that somebody will give them some money to go away, but in Portugal the extent of the problem was orders of magnitude worse than elsewhere. They have fado.

Fado is the Portuguese version of the common folk music topic "I am a redneck, and nobody wants to have sex with me", mostly - or so I heard - with the added theme of "I am a redneck lost at sea, and if anybody even wants to have sex with me, they surely aren't here on the boat". But whereas other peoples of Europe sing of their horny redneckitude to cheerful or at least melodic tunes, fado tunes sound like the cries of a donkey that is being raped to death excruciatingly slowly.

(Speaking about the raped donkeys: they (the Portuguese, not the donkeys) have an organization called União Zoófila. It is some animal protection organization, but the name is suggestive.)

And they sell it. To masochists, I assume, or maybe to the Deaf community. We had a fadomobile parked right on our street all day, an ancient car that played fado all day and had a human being sitting in it and selling the CDs. Every time we walked by the fadomobile we discussed various ways of sabotaging it, but there were too many witnesses.

When the fadomobile left for the night live musicians came out, even though every time they did so they risked becoming dead musicians. The worst were a couple of guys that played one night right under our windows. Their music was composed as atrociously as the fadomobile's, and played even worse. I considered throwing eggs, rotten tomatoes and other similar tokens of appreciation at them, had to remind myself that I am a cultured and law-abiding Western woman, and also that the area is probably monitored by security cameras. Then Benka came out of here room, where she went to escape the sound, and reminded me that we don't have any eggs.

Benka has become a total jock in her advanced age. Good for her, but I am not sure the rest of us will survive it. Every time she sees any steps, her reflex is to run up them. I am afraid to visit the Empire State Building with her.

The Portuguese have obliged her and built a great many steps. They also built Lisbon on a number of hills.

Anyway, this time she brought a step meter with her, and it became a bane of our existence. She holds a very firm opinion that a person who hasn't walked 25 thousand steps during the day does not deserve any lunch, and the problem with that is that after you walk 25000 steps it's usually time for dinner. My parents also disapprove of such human needs as coffee, water, or sitting down for a minute, so every time I feel in need of any of the above I get to hear a lecture about my weaknesses. I am, however, allowed to piss without a lecture.

BTW - the public places in Portugal are usually rather well-equipped with toilets.

The favorite hobby of the Portuguese seem to be demonstrations. On the day we arrived, there was a demonstration against "fortress Europe". On the day before we left, there was a demonstration of teachers against bureaucracy. One of them asked us to send them an extra Obama, if we have one. I told him that I'd be glad to send them the Obama that we have in the White House, and he found this rather generous.

In between those two big demonstrations there was a number of smaller ones. On the days when the government failed to do anything objectionable and thus provide a good reason for a demonstration, folk dancing was substituted for it.

More later.

I am back

I am back after three weeks of various adventures and misadventures in Portugal and the Netherlands. Despite dire warnings by my father, I was not eaten by a goat, and did not fall off a mountain. I must have also gotten old, because nowadays the words Amsterdam and "coffee shop" produce a mental image of an establishment that sells actual coffee.

I'll write more on this after I get some sleep.

Eek! Alle bagage is gelost!

Reading "Alle bagage is gelost" is shocking for a second, until the English translation comes up on the screen and you realize that 'gelost' means 'unloaded'.

Traumatic memory loss

I'd never believed one can forget a traumatic event, but apparently I have. When I was 4 (and this was an age from which I remember a lot), two people got killed by a train a few meters from me. I sure remember the adults talking about it, but until now I didn't know that I was actually there.

I have no memory of the event whatsoever.

How do you make love to a porcupine?

Carefully. Very carefully.

This simple wisdom was lost on a couple of Russians, as well as the really sad experience of their countryman with a raccoon.

Incredible. Fucking incredible (pun intended). If one can imagine a person of a certain kind of sexual inclination wanting to make love to a raccoon, which at least looks cute and fluffy until it starts giving you a blow job, one would think that the very sight of a porcupine makes one realize why fucking one is a very bad idea indeed.

The lawmakers of the state of Florida thought otherwise, and made having sex with a porcupine a crime. This did not deter two Russian tourists, who wanted to know why it was a crime.

Well, they found out. Porcupine needles in the genital area were not fun.

Juden verboten

Haus Sonnenhof, a hotel in Serfaus, Tyrol, Austria, decided to provide its customers with some of that old-days Austrian retro when they told a customer that due to bad experiences in the past they are not willing to take Jewish guests.

I should probably skip all the tempting little jabs about Jews' and Austrians' bad experiences in the past. Everyone else is doing them, anyway. I do remember an Austrian war museum, which, unlike any war remembrance I'd seen in Germany, considered the local (Salzburg) regiment great heroes. Their most heroic deed, incidentally, was to burn down Rovaniemi and to steal a Finnish soldier's boot. But I digress...

And before anyone asks: no, the owners of the hotel are not Muslim, or atleast they have perfectly German names.

What's really interesting is the stuff that is not mentioned:

1. How did they know that the guy was Jewish? Asking ethnicity or religion is not a standard operating procedure in Austrian hotels (not since they lost the war, anyway), and Austrian Jewish last names are not all that different from other Austrian last names. And the guy was an Austrian (and his wife a Belgian). Or did the guy ask for some particular Jewish accomodations?

2. Assuming the hotel just wanted to avoid Jewish guests, what made them stand up and say it? They must have known it would cause a scandal, and it is a lot easier just to say "sorry, we are full". Considering that there are a lot of hotels renting to Jews in the area, nobody is likely to notice or suspect anything.

If the man actually asked for some Jewish accommodations, getting rid of him is even easier. "Sorry, we are unable to provide..."

So, what is to be gained from an antisemitic grand stand? Do the owners actually want a scandal? What for? Did the owners even really write the email - my first thought was that some disgruntled employee did?

Breaking news: pigs evolved from Jews

A new fatwa published in Egypt determines that the source of all pigs is Jews, and therefore it is permissible to slaughter all the pigs, and eating them is forbidden.

Does this mean that eating Jews is forbidden too? Nice to know.

Sheikh Ali Osman from the Egyptian Waqf ministry, who has issued this fatwa, says that he is still waiting for response from the Al-Azhar fatwa committee. The Al-Azhar fatwa committee is apparently still looking for a Jewish psychiatrist to introduce to Sheikh Ali Osman.

Vanity

It's always been a mystery to me why people accuse each other of vanity, or lack thereof.

I don't mean, obviously, the hardcore extremes like somebody making sure the makeup is quite right before leaving a burning building. I don't mean expression of dislike for some particular article of clothing, either. I mean the animosity that some people show to others for adorning themselves, or failing to do so.

Market value theorists will probably point out that it does make sense, as far as the market value theory goes, to encourage self-adornment in the opposite sex and discourage it in one's own (for heteros, anyway. I am not even going into gays.). They will undoubtedly be right, too. It doesn't however explain why people do it just as cheerfully the other way around. For every Finnish woman saying that Russian women dress up too much and use too much makeup, there is a Russian woman saying that Finnish women dress up too little and use too little makeup.

(This phenomenon is fairly common both ways, among all nations whose languages I understand, and among both sexes, but the worst offenders tend to be men disapproving of other men trying to stand out of the crowd. Men doing so are of course a small minority, but a rather vocal and occasionally violent one. I am not sure whether they know how pathetic they sound.)

The accusations of vanity and lack thereof usually involve a lot of amateur psychology, usually accusing the other party (whoever they are and whatever they do) of lack of self-esteem, and, in case of dressed-down women and dressed-up men, guesses at their sexual orientation.

The reason the whole thing came to my mind was the truly weird dimensions the conversation takes when talking about facial transplants. (The first facial transplant in the US, and its owner, were revealed a few days ago.) Now, like during the time the first facial transplant was planned, there were discussions about whether this is worth doing "just for the sake of vanity" and how everything is the fault of our evil, evil society that judges people based on their looks.

What the hell is wrong with those people? Can't they for once leave the poor buggers who need a transplant in peace, and the society as well?

One can discuss endlessly in which ways the society pays too much attention to appearances, but I certainly don't think that the reason one is not comfortable living without a face is the fault of any particular society. I think people have evolved to recoil and stiffle a scream at the sight of a person who does not have most of his or her face, and I don't think any amount of societal change is likely to do anything about it.

An adult person should obviously do their best to suppress the visible reaction, but one really cannot. One can and should try to be polite, but there is really no way to act naturally around those people, and it is quite obvious to them. And yes, young children do get scared. And no, people without a face should not have to apologize for being so vain as to want one.

That said, the woman in question said that she used to get nasty comments from (I assume technically adult) people. What the fuck is wrong with those people? Are they sociopaths or just plain stupid?

While we are on the subject of really stupid sociopaths: the dumbest thing I have ever heard on the subject of vanity was "beauty isn't on the outside, it's on the inside", said by a woman whose son was on trial for throwing acid into two people's faces. In court, at the sentencing hearing.

Art demands sacrifices

Actor Sasha Baron Cohen decided to bleach his hair for an upcoming movie. Yes, all of it.

Dear children, when it says on the package not to get that stuff on your mucous membranes, they do mean your anus, among other things. The anal bleaching practiced by porn stars does not involve hair or hair bleach.

Crazy rabbis are waking up, must be the spring

We Jews don't have very many crazy clerics, but the ones we do have are really trying very hard to get in the news.

(OTOH, how do I know that there are only few? The vast majority of Jews make do with very few rabbis; for all I know the most religious 10% might all be rabbis. Whatever.)

Anyway, Rabbi Nahum Gortald from a rabbinical court south of Tel Aviv urged the authorities to limit the number of female foreign workers, lest the men run away with them. They are stealing our men and jobs! (Well, probably not the rabbis' men and jobs.) This request comes after a woman lodged a complaint at the court after her husband had an affair with a Filipina employee. The government will summarily ignore the request, just like it usually does.

Mind you, if I were married to somebody who goes to Rabbi Gortald to complain about me, I would probably have an affair with a Filipina employee too.

While Rabbi Nahum Gortald is concerned about the Israeli women not having enough men, Rabbi Yaakov Yosef has the opposite problem. He wants to banish hopeless old bachelors (the ultra-orthodox men over 20) from Jerusalem. This will encourage them to find a wife by 19, because, as the rabbi says, "any man who reaches the age of 20 must hurry without tarrying," or else he won't find himself a wife. You heard, men? Hurry up, for tomorrow you might turn twenty and then it will be too late! No woman will ever want you again!

Hold on, I thought they had a massive problem with leftover women whose husbands were stolen by Filipina employees?

The rabbi might have a point, though. If I were to take a husband who'd just read Talmud all day instead of performing marital duties, he better be very young and very pretty. And then we'll talk about those marital duties. Maybe by the age of 20 they are too old to be persuaded to have sex.

On the other hand, what is the rabbi thinking? If some morons listen to him and actually leave Jerusalem, there will be even fewer religious women for them elsewhere. Then they might be lured into bed by secular women. Or, god forbid, Filipina employees.

Päivän quote, aka "it's not a bug, it's a feature"

"Kyseessä ei ole mikään bugi, vaan on normaalia, että kun äänikomento näppiä painaa ja vaikka et sanoisikaan mitään puhelin yrittää hakea lähimmän mahdollisen "taustamelua" vastaavan nimen osoitekirjsta ja alkaa soittamaan siihen numeroon. Puhelimesi vaikuttaa toimivan oikein."

Nokia Care, vastaukseksi kysymykseen siitä, miksi mun Nokia 6555 soittaa satunnaisille ihmisille mun osoitelistalta jos vahingossa painaa ääninumerovalinta-nappia. Edellinen kysymykseni koski sitä, miten ääninumerovalinnan saa pois päältä, ja vastaus oli "ei mitenkään".

Nyt kyllä tekee mieli opettaa tämän featuren keksijälle mitä sanat "cell phone penetration" oikeasti tarkoittavat.

Spring and wine

The neighbor's bulldog seems to like me. She has invaded my apartment three times already, although nowadays the owner tends to be on a shorter leash and has learned to extract her from my place really fast.

I am not sure how I managed to earn such attention.

Spring is coming. It's getting warm, which seems sort of noteworthy.

Vappu is coming too. Objective: not to drink too much sparkling wine. Gonna be an epic fail.

While we are on the subject of wine: I bought a bottle of non-alcoholic red today and the salesperson specifically warned me that it was non-alcoholic. Which makes me wonder: why is there so little non-alcoholic wine around? Is it bad? (I am about to find out.) I have a feeling that people tend to think of non-alcoholic wine as something fake and unworthy - including the people who actually dislike alcohol and drink wine for taste only. Oh well, maybe it is bad. We'll see.

Went to the zoo yesterday. I tend to go there on a sunny day and then remember why cloudy days are better. Anyway, it was a disappointment: no more seals, no more arctic foxes, most of the animals asleep somewhere. The only things that saved the day were a couple of camels kissing like young lovers, and a very determined otter that was trying to give itself a blow job.

A story

Finally finished the first draft of a story I was writing.

It's semi-humorous semi-violent science fiction. It's fairly long, but if somebody bothers to read it, comments are welcome.

Pant crisis

Pant crisis is upon me again, and this time seriously.

Pants can't stand me. I, on the other hand, can't stand skirts. We have a problem.

Bad habits die hard. I tend to walk a lot, walk with my legs touching each other, and sit in weird positions with my legs wide open and/or crossed. All of this leads to occasional violent disintegration of pants, resulting in excessive ventilation in the crotch area and involuntary indecent exposure.

Buying bigger pants doesn't help. The pair that disintegrated on me a couple of days ago was so big they tended to fall off completely, and once actually did so when I forgot to wear a belt.

Anyway, yesterday I realized that I am one rather flimsy pair of pants away from having to run to a pant store wrapped in a towel or a jacket (yes, happened to me once before) and went shopping.

Shit. The Eighties fashions - may their inventors forever wear shoulder pads in their condoms - came back with a vengeance, and most of the pants are really tight in the lower leg. Apart from the ugliness of it, the problem is, they don't fit. At all. It's quite natural that some pants are too small and don't fit my ass, but I try the pants meant for my size and can't fit them over my calves. They never even reach the ass. The ones that do reach the ass are so big that they don't want to stay on it.

In my experience this is not a problem that can be solved by gaining or losing weight, the proportions stay the same.

This time I found a pair of jeans that actually fit, but if this Eighties thing continues and spreads, what the hell am I gonna do?

"Community, paging community!"

Lately there has been a problem in Rovaniemi. A group of young Kurdish asylum seekers has been harassing women. More specifically, a 22-year old Iranian-born woman, her sister, who was harassed in front of her small child, some other foreign-born women and some Finnish women. The harassment mostly targeted foreign-born women, has lasted for four months, and consisted of shouting obscenities, following women, spitting on them, and at least one death threat. The harassers were somewhat fewer than a dozen young Kurdish men. The asylum seeker center is not sure who they are.

Excuse me? The Rovaniemi asylum seeker center has 100 places. Is it really hard to find who those people are? How many of the residents exactly are young Kurdish men?

Now Astrid Thors, Finland's immigration minister, is hoping that Finland's Kurdish community will take responsibility for the actions of the young men.

She is aware that there is no Kurdish community in Rovaniemi.

WTF? More specifically, what the fuck does she expect them to do? It would be of course nice if Kurds in general disapproved of the aforementioned behavior, and some surely do, but what does she expect them to do about it, especially if they live elsewhere and don't know the guys in question?

She also says that those are isolated incidents. Let's see. There are 86 Kurdish-speaking people resident in Lapland (not including the asylum applicants). I am not sure what exactly is meant by "young Kurdish men", but 19 of them are men aged 15-29. If there are, say, 10 harassers, and if they are the only young Kurdish men in the asylum seeker center, they constitute about a third of Lapland's young Kurdish men. To me this sure looks like a significant part of the community is in fact trying to teach values to immigrant women, and rather actively - the are just not the values that I, or Astrid Thors, would like to be taught.

On a more general note, every time the official authorities say they are "working with the community" it gives me cold shivers. Yeah, I understand that sometimes the police, for example, needs to know something about some community, and then they ask somebody they know. But every time there is talk about negotiation with a community, or a community taking responsibility, or a community demanding this or that, some kind of "community leaders" tend to arise.

Who are my community leaders? I have no idea, but I know that I have not elected them, have not empowered them to speak for me, and have no means of making them answer to me. If they tell me that they have agreed on something on my behalf, I will answer with a one-finger salute.

Yes, if the authorities wish that Russians/Jews/Americans stop doing some illegal thing (for example, mooning the immigration minister), and I know some Russians/Jews/Americans who are doing it, I'll tell them it's not nice. On the other hand, I would say the same thing to the Finns I know, and I certainly wouldn't approach strangers of any ethnicity or national origin to tell them not to do it.

We have police here in Finland, and other Powers That Be, including the employees of the asylum seeker center. They should be capable of a) explaining to people what is allowed and what is not and b) punishing them if the need arises. Without calling on an ethnic community, especially one that is not even present in the city in question.

If I am doing something the state doesn't like, I want to hear it from the state itself, in whatever form is appropriate.

And if the state really needs the community to explain to its members how to behave, it means that the state is already in pretty serious trouble.

Can we have a war on idiots? Please?

We have a war of drugs. And a war on terrorism. And on child porn. Can we have a war on idiots?

I don't have much of an opinion on drugs. Don't know much about the balance between the individual rights and the public interest, especially since it is quite different for different substances, don't have any ideological stance, don't know enough about long term effects, etc. Don't know whom to trust, either, what with so many people having very strong feelings one way or another.

I do, however, know a real idiot when I see one. Especially if the idiot has enough determination and drive to make his or her idiocy known to the Supreme Court of the USA, and a number of major news services.

In their infinite zeal to fight drugs a number of schools in the US have banned, well, drugs. Not the illegal kind that you (well, some people. Not me, perish the thought!) used to buy from the three kids hanging out behind the library - those have always been banned. The kind that you buy from a pharmacy.

This started back in the mid-nineties. Since then nobody has ever managed to explain with any degree of coherence what this bright idea is meant to accomplish and why.

In 2003 the Safford Middle School in Arizona has received an accusation that a 13-year-old girl named Savana Redding had been distributing prescription-strength ibuprofen.

For those who don't know, ibuprofen is an over-the-counter painkiller. Prescription strength, in the US, is anything with more that 200mg in one pill. A person of any age can freely buy a bottle of 500-1000 200mg pills, usually for $10-15. There is no recreational opportunity, but taking too much of them might irritate your stomach. Or not. And yes, most normal people offer those to a friend if they have the pills and the friend has a headache.

In any case, Savana Redding was called to the vice principal's office, where the little criminal denied the accusation. Her backpack was searched with no results. Then the school officials in their infinite wisdom decided to strip search her.

The strip search found no ibuprofen, either. The young yet hardened criminal had surely hidden the terrible drug up her ass, and the school official wisely decided not to go down (or up) that road (now I understand what all those zero-tolerance policies on touching children are really for).

Anyway, the girl took the school district to court, last year the full 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in her favor, and now the school district is appealing this decision in the Supreme Court.

"School officials said the court was "wholly uninformed about a disturbing new trend" -- the abuse of over-the-counter medication by teenagers," says the article.

So explain to me, Einsteins: how does one abuse ibuprofen? Except by taking a ten-kilo bag of it and beating insane school officials over the head with it, I mean.

Moreover, even if some over-the-counter medication were really usable recreationally, what's the point of banning it in school? We ban illegal drugs in school - I assume - because if we don't, the school can become an easy distribution point, where the people who don't otherwise have access to a drug buy it from the ones who do. What is the point of the banning a drug to which everyone has easy access in any drugstore and foodstore? Are the school officials afraid that people will start using it recreationally during the lessons? Not that some lessons couldn't benefit from that.

Can we have a war on idiots? Please? I promise to bring a heavy bag of ibuprofen as a weapon.

A morning surprise

I opened my door in the morning, and a bulldog walked in.

It was followed by a very apologetic owner on a long leash, who removed it (actually, her) from my premises. It was pretty damn cute.

Note to self: violence is not always the best solution

Especially is the other party happens to be an espresso machine.

Now I am sore and coffee is everywhere.

Dear Lord,

Thanks for the long weekend, and for Easter and Passover coinciding this year, so that thy faithful servant has had four days to sleep off the hangover.

Thank you for Verkkokauppa and the new hard drive. For it is thy law that the data expands to fill all available space, and then more hard drives are needed, and then hard drives expand to fill all the slots in the case, and then you have to take out the smallest one and replace it with the biggest one you can find, and thus the cycle of life continues.

You really shouldn't have tempted me to upgrade to Debian unstable, but now that you've done so, please don't tempt me with the experimental.

Please smite the fuckers who write NVidia graphic card drivers, for even thy Divine wisdom would not be enough to figure out all the ways those drivers fuck up the irqs. Don't smite them too much, though, because they need to fix the damn things. Forgive me for installing one of those damn things on my computer, for I know that they are an abomination in thy eyes, but if you want me to avoid the temptation, please find some other way for me to use Google Earth with an nv driver that does not involve having an eternal life. Or, alternatively, give me that eternal life, so that in the mist of centuries I can see Google Earth running without a proprietary driver.

Thanks for the spring. keep up the good work, and let us hope for an eventual upgrade to a summer.

Please fix the economy if you can. Especially if you can do so without inflations, deflations, huge unemployment rates, stock market crashes, electing any members of Green-Rainbow party, tsunamis, or other calamities that would change life as we know it into something horrible.

On Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh, the grand mufti who thinks it's OK to marry 10-year-old girls, please bestow 72 male virgin elephants, and may their romantic union be long, and very entertaining for the onlookers.

I heard there are pirates in the Indian ocean taking a real-life version of The Pirates of the Caribbean a bit too seriously. Do you think you could arrange a slight change of genre? For example, The Pirates of the Caribbean meets Jaws?

If you really are omnipotent, please fix my espresso machine, or better yet give my employer the idea to buy an espresso machine for the office kitchen. Thy chosen people are suffering at work without proper espresso, and so do the infidels, too. The machine should have a milk frothing thingie, too, preferably one that works unlike the one that my previous employer had.

Is it too much to ask for world peace at this point? Thought so. But if you have some extra common sense lying around somewhere, we have a few politicians that might need it.

You know that there is something wrong in your kingdom...

...when Yemen is progressive in comparison to you.


Last year an 8-year-old girl was granted a divorce in Yemen after her father sold her to a 30-year-old man. Emboldened by such an example, a couple of other girls, aged 9 and 10, got a divorce. The government then tried to do something to prevent such marriages from happening. Where they have been successful or not, I have no idea, but at least they tried and maybe scared a person or two into waiting till their daughter is 12.

In Saudi Arabia, they aren't even trying.

Saudi judge Habib al-Habib has refused for a second time to annul a marriage between an 8-year-old girl and a 47-year-old man, on account of the girl being too young to represent herself in court, and her mother being a non-custodial parent and therefore ineligible to represent her in court. The father, who is the custodial parent, was the guy who arranged her marriage to the 47-year-old man to settle his debts ($8000, says Al-Arabiya), and therefore, I assume, does not wish to represent her in court.

The judge, who obviously thinks that an 8-year-old is not old enough to tell the court what she wants, nevertheless thinks that she is old enough to be married to somebody 39 years her senior, without her consent (by which I not only mean that she is too young to consent, but also that she is clearly not interested).

On the brighter side, the judge did make the man promise not to have sex with the girl until she reaches puberty, and also did tell the girl that she may apply for divorce upon reaching puberty.

The church, I mean mosque, has added its spiritual word:

"It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger. A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her," said the kingdom's grand mufti. For a second there I thought our old friend Khodr Chehab got a part-time in Saudi Arabia, but then I read that the man's name was Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh - may all his 72 heavenly virgins be virgin male elephants.

Being a law-abiding person, I wouldn't even think of connecting any religion's institutions with child molestation, but I suspect that being the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia does connect one to some religion's institutions, in a way. Oh well, at least he did not say it with the intent to cause offense.

Happy Passover!

Happy Passover to everyone who celebrates it. Don't get as drunk as myself.

All Hail the Mighty North Korea!

As we all know, North Korea has just launched a satellite (strictly for peaceful purposes, of course) over Japan.

According to the North Koreans, the satellite is now safely in the orbit, where it is happily singing "the immortal revolutionary paeans "Song of General Kim Il Sung" and "Song of General Kim Jong Il"". According to everyone else the damn thing just fell into the ocean.

The great achievements of the people of North Korea are not limited to singing satellites. They have also invented the time machine. According to the Korean Central News Agency, "the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union released a statement on March 31, in which it expressed deep apprehension over the reckless moves being made by the United States and its followers to hinder the launch of the experimental communications satellite "Kwangmyongsong-2" by the DPRK".

Now that is really an accomplishment unrivaled in the Western world! Considering that the Soviet Union, along with the communist party thereof and its central committee, has been disbanded in 1991, visiting them and eliciting such a statement from them must have been the crowning achievement of the North Korean time-travel science.

For those who doubt that the site quoted above is the real Korean Central News Agency: yes, it is. One can only hope that they can use some of their mighty science to repair the buggy JavaScript, invent the concept of layout and just maybe get themselves a server that's actually within the North Korean domain. Or maybe at least get themselves a country-level domain.

Seriously, though: have they forgotten to mention to their citizens that the Soviet Union fell apart 18 years ago, and even if they did, why publish the same bullshit in English?

"If they can bleed, they can breed"

A few days ago Khodr Chehab, the imam of the Finnish Islamic Society, said that he has officiated at the wedding of a 14-year-old girl and 20-year-old man in 1996, and that the Ministry of Justice has given its permission for the marriage. The Ministry of Justice has no record of such permission.

Khodr Chehab insisted that he obeys all the Finnish laws, and that's really very nice to know (I am saying this without any sarcasm). However, he says, 13 years is a good age for marriage. "It is legal to go to bed here at that age - it's better to get married" - he says. He thinks it would be quite fine to get married even at 11, if the law permits it.

He says he doesn't understand the difference between starting dating and getting married.

Oh, dear... The man is 46 - one would think that by that age a person would figure out the difference between starting dating and getting married, even if he or she has never done either. Especially a member of clergy - I've heard some people go to them for marital advice, although I am not sure it's a good idea.

IIRC even at 13 most people do have some kind of a vague idea that there is more to marriage than sex and that fuzzy feeling that you get after someone you like turns out to like you, and you start dating.

For the differently-intelligent (or maybe just overly horny) folks among imams and commenters: forget about pedophilia for a second, enough has been said about it during these few days. Think about marriage. It's a legal contract that involves a lot of obligations, some degree of commitment, in most cases a common home, in quite a lot of cases children and in general building a life together.

A 13-year-old is not ready for this. Not even if there are no icky pedophilia issues involved (for example both parties are 13) and not even if the kids are mature enough to handle sex and birth control.

Seriously, if you cannot see the difference between a 13-year-old having sex with a classmate and then going home, where her parents take care of her, provide for her, yell at her for having sex and/or teach her about birth control and interfere on her behalf if the other party in the relationship becomes too controlling, and a 13-year-old making a lifetime (though terminable) legal commitment to another 13-year old and starting living together with him - well, at least you shouldn't be advising anyone on marital or sexual affairs.

Khodr Chehab also said that there is no sexual abuse of the underage in the Islamic world. To this I can only quote Nojoud Muhammed Nasser: "Whenever I wanted to play in the yard he beat me and asked me to go to the bedroom with him. This lasted for two months." Nojoud was divorced at the age of 8 from a 30-year-old man, in Yemen in June 2008. As soon as she was divorced another Yemeni girl, aged 9, also filed for divorce.

The really amazing thing about Chehab's statements is not that he thinks what he thinks - whoever hasn't ever wished for some illegal thing to become legal may throw the first stone - but the fact that he says it in a public interview without, apparently, having any idea that this kind of statement would cause an uproar in Finland. In spite of having lived here for about 20 years.

The next day the imam said that he remembered wrong: the girl wasn't 14, but 16, and it didn't happen in 1996, but in 1992. He also showed us all the true miracles of integration: it took him only one day to become unsure that getting married is such a good idea for somebody under 14.

Later on the same day he was unsure whether the wedding in question took place in 1992 or in 1993, said that a 13-year-old might be ready for marriage, but some are not even ready at 16 (think of those bachelors and old maids!), and that 15 is maybe a good age, but he himself wouldn't marry somebody younger than 20, or in fact somebody younger than 30.

In only two days. Now if that's not a mircale of integration, I don't know what is!

This would all be funny if he were just a lone nutcase. He does not represent all Muslims in Finland, might not even represent the majority, but he is the imam of what is, by Finnish standards, a fairly big mosque. And I certainly don't believe his own mosque did not know about his views.

There are perfectly sensible Muslims writing perfectly sensible things about this matter - for example Husein Muhammed. The sad thing is, Khodr Chehab is the kind of guy who gets invited to the President's Independence Day's party, and Husein Muhammed AFAIK isn't.