Hey, at least clothes are still allowed

Four and a half years ago I was laughing when certain people on Usenet were saying that soon the only things one is allowed to have on a plane is a passport and a wallet in a transparent plastic bag.

Well, much as I hate to admit it, it certainly looks like the joke is on me.

UK is on the highest terrorist alert, US is on a heightened alert too. The terrorists planned to blow up a number of planes going from the UK to the US. Since I travel that way failry often I sort of find it difficult not to take it personally.

18 terrorists have been arrested so far. I am sure they all represent, well, broad strata of British society.

In the name of all the air travellers I would like to thank the terrorists for not stuffing the explosives up their asses. Just imagine those checkups.

Well, peace does ensue when you kill off one party in a war...

...but I would not really call a demonstration calling for that a "peace demonstration". Not as such.

The Pysäyttäkää sota group nowadays has an anti-war demonstration every Monday. OK, they don't really even claim to be anti-war, their webpage says "against Israel's military action", but their name is "Stop the War".

I am not surprised that these people exist, that they picked a side in that war or that they are demonstrating for it. That's their right, this is a free country. What I am surprised about is that these fuckers try, and indeed sometimes manage, to pass for pacifists.

Yesterday I ran into these lovely people near Stockmann. The demonstration was led by a group of people sporting traditional Finnish big black beards and hijabs (mostly not both on the same person though), but there was also a number of Finns of a blonder and less bearded kind. Some of the bearded kind tended to carry portraits of the world-famous pacifist Hassan "It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth" Nasrallah.

One pacifist of the beardless kind wore a lovely pacifistic t-shirt saying "bomb Israel". The same guy also expressed his opinion with a poster.

They were screaming "down with USA", the favorite mating call of the moonbats worldwide, whether they are protesting Israeli military action or Danish cartoons.

According to the local tabloid Ilta-Sanomat the peaceful demonstration culminated in violence when the demonstrators ran into members of the Finland for Jesus organization who climbed on their bus and put up posters with quotes from bible about God blessing Israel. The pacifists started throwing eggs, tomatoes, flowerpots and bottles, screaming "Death to Israel" in Arabic and waving Hezbollah flags.

Tired

Lots of work lately, and lots of parties.

There are truckloads of stuff to do at work. Bosses have been acting a bit weird yesterday: either they are also stressed out, or overheated, or maybe I am just being paranoid.

Grilled with a couple of friends on Friday, and then we were joined by some of the Alter Ego's young generation. Young generation turned out to be very sweet, maybe should try to get to know them better.

Lasse had a lovely party on Saturday with a lot of cake and people from the game industry. It was a lot of fun and there were a lot of weird objects, such as a device for giving oneself electric shock.

Helped a friend move on Sunday. It was so easy with an elevator and a sufficient number of people.

Oops, where did that rocket go?

I realize that Israelis usually aim better than Hezbollah, but it still seems a bit unfair that when Israelis miss their target by 50 meters is causes an international outcry, whereas Hezbollah gets to fire their rockets into a wrong fucking sort-of-country with nary a peep from anyone.

(Yeah, I know that as an American I should probably be quiet about hitting the wrong country, remembering the occasional bombs that we dropped on Italy and Bulgaria during the war in Serbia, but it's still sort of funny in a morbid way.)

A few of Hezbollah's rockets landed in the West Bank near Jenin. "Even if it were to fall on our heads, it wouldn't have spoiled our joy. All of us here are praying for Hezbollah's success and victory," said a local Fatah activist. Wow. Talk about putting real friendship into the friendly fire. Hey, if the rocket falls on this particular guy's head I might even wholeheartedly share the joy.

Well, maybe I should not complain about the international community. If these clowns don't mind rockets falling on their heads, why should anyone else? Hezbollah, OTOH, should be more careful. With such good targeting they will eventually hit Damascus, and then say goodbye to half of their funding.

Mad Jad is just being himself

Iran's moron-in-chief presents his own, rather predictable solution for Middle East peace in our time: destroy Israel.

"Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate ceasefire must be implemented," he says. Hmm. How exactly do you reach a ceasefire with anyone if your stated purpose is to destroy them afterwards?

International and multinational

What is the difference between these two words, if any? I have always assumed that you use "international" normally and "multinational" to describe a big international company whose products you do not like, but they are speaking of a multinational force now.

Multinational force headed by whom?

The UN negotiations on the keeping peace in our time on Israeli-Lebanese border have come to the point where they are discussing a multinational force headed by France.

I don't share many Americans' and Finns' disdain for France - there must be at least something great about a nation that has bookstores on every corner - but keeping the peace in the Middle East? Aren't these the same guys who still haven't got a hang of keeping the peace in Seine-Saint-Denis?

Mel Gibson revisited, or "take me to your leaders"

Mel Gibson asked to meet with Jewish leaders to ask for forgiveness for his antisemitic remarks and to ask them to help with healing. Correct me if I am wrong, but aren't detox programs a much better place for healing than Jewish community centers? Unless you think that giving him a glass of Manischewitz will scare him off alcohol forever.

An apology was in order (and was offered) but now all this kowtowing is getting ridiculous. If I could draw I would draw a cartoon where in the first part drunk Gibson would be screaming "Jews made me drive drunk! Jews cause all wars! Jews own Hollywood!" and in the second part hungover Gibson would be horrified with the realization "oh shit, they really do own Hollywood!".

Besides, there really aren't any antisemitic insults that every Jew on earth hasn't heard by the third grade.

I don't think he needs to apologize in person to the Jewish community leaders, but now that he is apologizing to people in person I would like to know whether he has apologized to the Jew he insulted the most - the deputy sheriff who arrested him.

I hate communists

Met a communist at a party yesterday. (Which was, BTW, a really lovely party where we celebrated the visit of a friend of our who lives in the US. The company - the communist nonwithstanding - the cake, the wine, the conversation, everything was great.)

It is, however, a lot more fun to write about the weird creatures one meets.

Julie introduced us: "R., this is Vera. She is from Russia."
"Eeww," - said the man, - "I am Polish."

Later we talk some more. He turns out to have never lived in Poland, "but my blood is Polish", he says. He's moved around, lived here and there. For a guy who has never lived in Poland his historical grievances are fairly strong. Not that they aren't justified - Russia has been a really bad neighbor to Poland and much everyone else. I am just not sure that they are a very polite topic for conversation with someone you have just met, but then I am not a poster girl for social grace myself, either.

He tells me that he does not like Americans either (that's after learning that I am an American). After he's expressed disapproval for both my country of birth and my country of citizenship I sort of expect him to say something bad about Finland, too, but he does not go there. Maybe he is just rubbing me the wrong way, but at this point I feel like telling him that from my own historical grievance prespective there is no real difference between Russians and Poles, and elaborate on that.

Much later he start talking about how he believes in communism. I start wondering (not aloud) what kind of person would believe in communism in spite of apparently knowing what it has done to Poland about which he apparently cares. He gets to hear my opinion on communism and goes on to explain that I can't possibly understand anything about it because my mind is clouded by having lived in the Soviet Union.

Once again: there should have been Nurmberg trials for communists, just to show that they are evil to the kind of people that are not capable of understanding it all by themselves. There has been many communists countries in the last century; all of them failed, and for very good reasons, but we still find morons who believe that if a communist state were led by themselves as opposed to, say, Stalin, everything would be different.

The idea "from everyone according to his ability, to everyone according to his need" is inherently evil and cannot lead to anything else besides dwindling abilities, rising needs and the rise of a political elite consisting of the kind of people who enjoy defining everyone else's abilities and needs. When people say that they consider it a good idea I immediately start wondering whether they are, in fact, exactly that kind of people.

That's just the theory. In practice communism also usually involves mass murder committed by the state, and almost always involves closing borders to prevent the citizens from escaping the workers' paradise.

And don't even get me started on the people who say "communism is such a wonderful idea, too bad that the human nature is so greedy and selfish that it cannot be implemented properly". If a drug company made some drug that is supposed to do something good but does not work on humans, would you say "this is such a wonderful drug, too bad that human biochemistry is all wrong for it"? If an architect designed a building that cannot be built of existing materials, would you blame the materials for it?

I really feel like sending all communists to a re-education camp (hah, it shows that I was raised in a communist country) where they would live according to communist principles and actually try out what they preach. We could install cameras everywhere there and it would make for a great reality show, too.

The camp of course would have to be fairly large (there must be at least tens of thousands of communists in the world) and self-sufficient. They will just have to work together for the common good and distribute the fruits of their labors among themselves according to their needs. We'll pick up the bodies later.

The weekend

I've been very sociable lately, had some social event every evening since coming from Riga. It's fun but maybe I should spend at least one quiet evening by myself at home someday. I am sure that someday I will.

Lasu came over on Thursday and we watched a movie. He said that one of my hard drives makes a horrible sound (I am well accustommed to it so I don't notice), and I ran the diagnostic tool and it said that the hard drive that has the operating system is about to go boom. Bugger. If I had figured it out one week earlier I would have made space on it on the 320G drive I bought then, but now I did not feel like repartitioning it, so I went to the store and got another one.

On Saturday helped a couple of friends move. I wasn't an awful lot of help but did what I could. There were very few people, probably due to the fact that one guy's polttarit were on the same day. While I was carrying boxes the sole of my shoe disintegrated in an explosive way. Weird.

Had some wine with friends in the evening. Wine while dehydrated is a bad idea, but was fun anyway.

Had some soul-searching of whether I want to reinstall Debian AMD64 or install i386. Decided on the i386 version. It installed quite easily in spite of still failing to support my video card (had to get a driver from NVidia).

Sound card failed to install, and after unsuccessfully trying to search for it with all the kinds of software I remembered my dear father's advice: "shove it in really hard, then it will work". (My father is a hardware guy, and the advice concerned PCI cards and not what you perverts think.) I shoved it in really hard and suddenly it started working.

Pia came over yesterday. Was fun, should see her more often.

Disproportionate response

Israel has just committed an act of war during, well, a war, and the world is shocked, shocked. Surprise, during a war people tend to get killed. Even civilians. Especially if the local combatants have a nasty habit of hiding among civilians. Nevertheless every time Israel happens to kill civilians during this war there is a huge international outcry.

Partly this just goes to show that, as I wrote a year ago, war as such is very much against modern Western values and is usually only justified by appeal to necessity, and the thing about necessity is that it tends to seem a lot less necessary when it's somebody else's.

Still I don't remember there being quite as much of an outcry in 2003 every time when we hit civilians in Iraq, even though the necessity of forcibly bringing democracy to the reluctant Iraqis, and winning their hearts, minds and oil in the process is IMO a lot more questionable than the necessity of protecting the citizenry from rockets and occasional abductions. Being a cynic I suspect that it had to do with the fact the the US has a lot more nukes than Israel, and a lot more money, and therefore generally has to at least bomb a Chinese embassy to elicit a proper outcry.

Killing civilians, by accident or otherwise, is sad. The response of the politicians to this whole war, of the other hand, is full of dark humor. Chirac considers the war to be a disproportional response. Hmm, is that the same guy who six months ago promised to nuke any country that would sponsor a terrorist act against France? The funniest, however, was Putin. What did he mean by his "disproportional response"-comment? "It is not nice to attack a country just because they keep shooting rockets across the border and just kidnapped a couple of your soldiers and killed a few" or "500 dead civilians in two weeks of war is quite disproportional; now when we carpet-bombed Grozny we managed to kill 25000 of those fuckers in a week"?

"Your honor, evil Jews made me drive drunk! They pissed in my pants, too!"

Mel Gibson drives drunk, gets arrested, threatens cops, blames Jews, smashes a payphone and tries to piss in the cell.

Hey, we found the root cause of islamic terrorism!

It's the occupation of Spain by the Spanish, of course.

Al-Zawahiri is telling Muslims to to rise up in a holy war against Israel and join the fighting in Lebanon and Gaza until Islam reigns from Spain to Iraq. A lot of people have commented on the Spain part of this statement, but I am wondering: why does he limit the Eastern border of the area to Iraq? What about the current Muslim countries to the east of Iraq? Don't they get to join the happy caliphate?

Riga, day 3

In the morning Tiina and I go take a look at the local churches and Daugava. Very bright idea, checking out the churches on Sunday morning. We do the best we can.

It's really, really hot and sunny.

Later on we go to the History and Navigation Museum with Leena and Ville. The history part is interesting; the navigation part contains a lot of ship models but little having to do with actual navigation. The texts in the museum are in Latvian and occasional foreign languages: sometimes Russian, sometimes English and sometimes German. Again, none of the visitors speak Russian.

After the museum we want some lunch. We've been talking about pancakes for a while but Tiina seems to want "real food". We check out the pancakes nevertheles, after which I want real food too. We go to some grill place in the middle of Livi Laukams and get perfectly good beer and steaks. The waitress has a problem understanding my request for no onion - she does not know the word "onion". "Sipuli?" - I ask. "Ahh, sipuls," - she sighs happily and assures me there isn't any.

One thing that's weird here is that they don't ask you how you like your steak. They just bring it well done. I feel like asking for rare, but am not sure whether the quality of their meat allows it. (As an aside, why do so many restaurants in Helsinki ask you "medium or well done?" when they are perfectly capable of producing rare on request?)

Afterward I finish the church round by visiting the Dome church and the St. Peter's church. Both ask money for the visit, which is quite fine with me. St. Peter's has a small but worthy show of paintings, and an elevator to the tower. Lovely views.

Many museums here have separate prices for tickets that does not give you permission to take pictures and one that does.

I buy some amber jewelry and go to check out the synagogue. It is on a tiny deserted street which should probably be marked "under renovation" as a whole. There is a mobile police booth from where I hear a woman talking on a cell phone. While the policewoman is not watching I walk into the yard and pull on the front door.

The door is not locked. There is a sad-looking Jewish (these are not the same thing, even though some Jewish authors like to tell us so after looking in the mirror) man of about sixty reading a book and smoking.

"May I take a look?"
"Yeah. Come in."

There is something very Soviet about the place, but it's still pretty. The man comes in too.

"Where are you from?"
"Born in Russia. Moved to the US. Moved to Finland. Long story."
"Live in Finland now?"
"Yeah."
"How's your Russian?"
"Mostly fine."

He switches to Russian:

"Why did you start with speaking English?"
"I am not sure speaking Russian around here is polite, at least without asking first."
"Bullshit. Do you think that they'll like you better if you speak English? Well, maybe they will, but they will also give you the menu where the prices are twice the ones in the Latvian menu."
"Speaking English does not prevent me from reading Russian. Besides, they haven't done so yet. But this phenomenon is familiar to me from Prague."
"Argh, Prague..."

He starts a long and fairly entertaining story of having been mistreated in Prague while travelling there. Then he starts talking about life here. He does not like Latvians, even though he is a Latvian-born Latvian citizen. He feels more of a connection with the US, Israel and Australia. I get a feeling that he needs to move somewhere there.

"And now they keep celebrating "forest brothers" as fighters for independence..."
"Uhm, they were fighting for independence."
"Murderers is what they were."
"Who wasn't, back then?"
"Who cares about Latvians anyway? Riga has never really been a Latvian city."

What can you say to that? I've seen people like that before; they usually also tend to think that Latvia has never really been a Latvian country, and prefer things to remain that way.

"And you know, they even have a Holocaust rememberance day, July 4. But do you think they really care about our dead? They care about their own dead more!"

I try to explain that people generaly care about their own dead more than about the neighbors' dead, and I don't find this fact either surprising or objectionable. He does not buy this.

"And in Estonia they removed the monument of the Russian liberators!"

I abstain from saying that maybe they did not feel particularly liberated.

At some point he stops talking about the general evilness of the Baltic nations and complains that all the other Jews went to the beach in Jurmala and left him here to watch the synagogue and wait for the Messias. He also complains about New Yorkers who committed a crime against humanity (his exact words) by charging him $7 for a pack of cigarettes.

I go for a walk again. There is an ice cream place where they sell ice cream in waffle cups by weight. The girl speak no English but turns out to speak Russian, and sells me a cup of redcurrant ice cream.

The shopping center at the railway station is fairly big. There are countless shoe stores that require people to wear socks while trying shoes on, but do not provide them. There is also a jewelry place that sells a ring which is almost an exact copy of mine. I have a very strong impulse to buy it, I don't know why, but don't. Instead I buy some beer and a caramel product called variti iebiezinats piens and go home.

We all go out for some food and drinks and then spend the rest of the evening together at home drinking and chatting.

"Eek, eek, take me back into the land of the cartoon-drawing infidels!"

As soon as there is a war the kind of gentlemen who normally encourage the young Muslims to burn embassies, hate the West, become martyrs and enter paradise suddenly decide that they themselves are in no rush to assume their own rightful place in paradise, and run to the rebuilt embassies they had helped to burn in order to be evacuated to the horrible Muslim-oppressing infidel countries.

Ahmad Akkari, "the man behind the pig snout", one of the Danish imams who toured the Middle east with 12 Danish cartoons and 3 of their own, asked Danish embassy in Beirut (the one that has been burned down largely due to his own efforts) to evacuate him from Beirut. Since the embassies are supposed to assist in citizens' evacuations from the war zones, and since this clown is unfortunately a Danish citizen, they did. http://bibelen.blogspot.com/ has a lovely picture of him boarding a ship under a Danish flag, without even trying to set fire to it.

Riga, day 2

Tiina comes in the morning. We have some Baskin-Robbins ice cream, making me dream of a full-scale Baskin-Robbins invasion in Finland, and go to the apartment.

Later we all head to the Occupation Museum, located in a newish building wildly incongruent with its surroundings in the center of the old city.

The museum is extensive, as is its topic. Latvia has been occupied by Russians in 1940, by Germans in 1941, and by Russians again in 1944, until 1991, and they, like everyone else, describe their grievances in well-deserved gory detail. Their democracy was in quite a bit of a crisis even before the Russians occupied them in 1940, but then the thirties of the last century was not a particularly high point in European democracy and human rights in general. Considering what Russians were doing there in 1940 it is not surprising that many Latvians welcomed Germans as liberators in 1941; they were sorely disappointed, and so were also the people who met Russians as liberators in 1944. A sad story, really.

Most things are in four languages in the museum (Latvian, Russian, German and English), but some documents are left untranslated. Among them is a list of 70-something people shot by Russians on some particular day (26.6.41, IIRC) and their offences, for example "had a fire in his backyard, probably to attract the Germans; joined the army voluntarily in 1919".

They proudly display some German official's complaint that Latvians don't exterminate Jews nearly as enthusiastically as Lithuanians; I cynically note that they nevertheless did just as good a job of it as Lithuanians.

They also state quite clearly the current grievance:

"Of the original two conspirators against international law, who conspired to deprive Latvia of its independence and subject its people to lawlessness, one was defeated in World War II, and its successor state, the Federal Republic of Germany, has gone a long way to make amends to those against whom Nazi Germany committed grievous crimes. The successor state of the other conspirator, Russia, has failed to do so. Furthermore, it continues to adhere to Soviet myths and distortions by refusing to acknowledge the present Republic of Latvia as the continuation of the Republic that declared its independence on 18 November 1918; by refusing to acknowledge the Peace Treaty and its provisions of 11 August 1920 between Soviet Russia and Latvia; by refusing to acknowledge the true nature of the 1939 agreements between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; by refusing to acknowledge the fact of Latvia's occupation on 17 June 1940; by refusing to acknowledge crimes against humanity committed by the Soviet Union on Latvian soil and against the Latvian people."

This made me think, once again, that there should have been Nurmberg trials in Russia. I understand why there wasn't, but I think this is a loss for the world and for Russia. The word communist should have become a swear word similar to nazi, but it hasn't.

This museum is the first place in Riga where I don't hear any Russian spoken. I do hear German.

After the museum Tiina goes to the apartment and we go to the central market with Leena and Ville. Central market is huge, and cheap. One very distinctive feature is the almost-total absence of strawberries, while all the other common fruits and berries are available.

We find some tiny place that sells DVDs and I buy a few Russian ten-in-one DVDs. I am still not sure whether they are pirated or just Russian-quality.

Tiina comes back and we all go have a lunch/dinner in Livonia, a medieval restaurant. The food is good but we are not sure what's medieval about it. Then Tiina and I go for a walk.

They have their own statue of liberty here (not a copy of ours). They have a lot of security cameras everywhere; some of them are static, some move around frantically. They have pretty good ice cream. They have a lot of stands selling cheap amber jewelry. They have a lot of people speaking Russian.

There is a lot of women in tiny shorts and very high-heel shoes, which makes them look a lot like cartoon characters. The shorts are cute; the heels look ridiculous, especially when the women fall off of them. In general there are a lot of women in high and thin heels here in spite of the cobblestone streets.

We go outside of the old city and take a look at the Orthodox cathedral. There are lots of religious people there because the head honcho of the local Orthodox church is giving a sermon. We bugger off in order not to disturb them. The church is pretty, but everything is written in Russian, even stuff that clearly should be directions for tourists, like "women should have their head covered".

Outside we run into a young man in a t-shirt that I at first interpret as a sign "fucking doggie-style is forbidden". It also advertises the site nopride.lv, and I realize that it is some kind of anti-gay message. Tiina says that the picture of the guy on all fours had a tiny dick and makes fun of me for not noticing.

There are a few other guys in such t-shirts.

Bookstores are nice, and so is Stockmann. We buy books and beer and a cake and some food.

Hotels

My trip to Riga made me think: the hotels (or, let's say, the 1-4 star hotels in the industrial countries) are sort of an institution where certain things are expected and done, and certain things aren't, and which are definitely not optimal for the purposes or which most people use it, which is giving people a place to stay in for a few days. I much prefer renting an apartment, but they are usually bigger and only feasible for several people.

Hotels normally have uncomfortable beds, itchy blankets places on top of a regular sheet, and either no fridge at all or a little fridge full of silly drinks. I want a blanket properly placed in a two-sided sheet that you normally put a blanket in, dammit (damn, I don't even know what the thing is called in English)! I want a fridge where I can put some food in, and a kettle for boiling water, and some cups, and maybe teabags if they are feeling generous. (Some hotels do provide the tea paraphernalia, but this is way too rare.)

Instead of all these comforts the hotels offer extensive and absolutely unnecessary cleaning service every fucking day. I don't need new sheets every day, or new towels. I certanly don't need anyone to fix my bed every day and tuck the blanket's edges under the mattress so that it takes considerable effort to pull them out. Most of all, I absolutely don't need anyone going through my stuff and arranging it in neat rows. I find this, well, invasive. I want some fucking privacy.

Usually you can't even get rid of the cleaners by putting the "Do Not Disturb" card up for the whole day. At some point they usually do come and disturb. Possibly one can avoid the cleaners by demanding it at the front desk, but they are not going to provide me with useful things instead for the same money.

I am sure I am not the only person who feels that way. Why are there so few hotels that cater to us?

Does anyone actually like having cleaners come in every day?

Riga, day 1

(Been to Riga this weekend. Pictures are forthcoming.)

Gaah! Gaah! The plane is tiny and has two propellers! Scary!

Despite shaking all the time and being scary the plane arrives on time. The thought of being in a place where half of the population speaks Russian is terrifying.Eek.

The border guard is a friendly young man:
"You speak Russian?"
"Yeah."
"First time in Latvia?"
"No. Probably the third. But the last time was about 20 years ago."
"And probably with another passport?"
"Yeah... No, actually, no passport at all."

The bus to the city has just left the stop but the driver notices me and stops. I hop in. There is a granny selling tickets on the bus. She sells me the tickets, all the time saying something in Latvian.

I look out of the window. Soviet Union looks back at me, with occasional pieces of the West here and there. These are the moments when you thank capitalism for chain stores.

We enter Riga. It's full of wooden apartment buildings that I vaguely remember from 25 years ago and which surely have not been painted since then, or most probably since 1940.

Leena and Ville meet me at the Stockmann bus stop and we go to Stockmann to get some food. Much to my joy the place has sour cherries and good ice cream. Stockmann is much like Helsinki Stockmann even though the food is different.

The apartment is huge and lovely. It has steel doors sufficient to keep out a small army, but the entrance is from the inner yard and it does not have any kind of a gate.

We try to go to dinner in Rosengrals, a medieval restaurant. There are two guys outside dressed like monks and lazily swearing at each other in Russian. Nobody pays us any attention. When Leena asks them for a table for three, non-smoking, they show us to a table and give us menus. Five minutes later someone shows up to say that kitchen is closed.

During our stay we have no problem at all finding non-smoking areas in restaurants. At some point I realize that this is because Latvia has banned smoking in restaurants.

We go to Alus Seta, which has perfectly decent self-service food. When we go to buy drinks the bartender keeps ignoring us on account of our standing in the wrong place. Naturally he does not bother to inform us of it. When e finally shift to the right plce he gives Leena a wrong beer. Not that there was a lot of difference between it and the right beer. The service is almost Soviet, but not quite, on account of no swearing.

On the way back I pick up an advertisement paper. Steel doors seem to be very popular.

Bakri asks for British help

Our old friend Omar Bakri Mohammed, who declared war on Britain a year and a half ago, has begged Britain to evacuate him from Lebanon and at least take him to UK for a short visit.

The UK responded that his presence there would not be conductive to the public good. No shit.

Last week the organizations Al Ghurabaa and the Savior Sect, the offshoots of Bakri's Al-Muhajiroun, were banned in Britain.

Omar Bakri Mohammed is wanted in Syria for a number of crimes and for some reason does not feel ready to go to paradise.

I suspect that declaring war on every country one lives in is not a good survival strategy.

Music

Yesterday I was listening to some music at work. Suddenly one of the bosses tried to listen in on my headphones and asked whether I was listening to Prince. I said "Who"? Apparently it was somebody that I was supposed to have heard about, because the coworkers kept making fun of me till the end of the day, and the Wikipedia article about this Prince is fairly big.

This happens to me every once in a while. I don't know many musical celebrities. I know Beatles and can recognize a lot of their songs. I also know Doors and Rolling Stones can can identify a couple of songs by each. I know about Michael Jackson and Madonna and what they look like because I sometimes see their faces on Google News, but can't identify a single song by either of them. I have heard about Bruce Springsteen and Elton John but these are just names to which I can't connect any music or faces. What I wonder about is how the rest of the world manages to know all the famous buggers?

Part of it, of course, is that all the media I ever use is written. I don't listen to the radio and don't usually watch TV. But I think that a greater part of it is that I am not interested in new music, and I wonder what makes other people interested in it. Basically: does new music contain some useful new information for other people?

When I read a book or watch a movie an essential part of the fun is that the book or the movie contains some interesting information (true or fictional). One can't read the same book all the time. There are a lot of books and movie that I enjoy watching over and over but even then I don't normally do so in a row: a fair lot of time has to pass before the book or the movie regains its freshness. I think most people do the same. Therefore one wants new books and new movies all the time.

But music? As far as I am concerned it is a purely physical pleasure, like food, and, like with food, I can enjoy a lot of the same stuff in a row, and I am satistfied with a finite number of different dishes/songs. There is no desire to look for more. I gladly try new food if I happen to see it and it looks appetizing; in the same way I sometimes buy a song to which I get accidentally exposed and which sounds good (this happens quite rarely), but I never have any desire to look for new because the old gets old, because for me it doesn't.

Not that I never find anything new: usually I pick up a bit of new music from the movies, and sometimes by accident from bars or at friends' places. I generally resist people's attempt to have me purposefully listen to something new, but at least one such attempt was successful.

The music that I don't like is usually just noise to me, and I have no recollection of it afterwards.

So, my dear readers: do all the rest of you actively look for new music? What makes you want to do so? And how do you manage to remember the performers of the music that you don't normally listen to?

As tears go by

Went to see Wong Kar-Wai's As tears go by yesterday. Liked it, too. Wong used to make perfectly good movies before he became all artsy, and this one even has a plot and all. I highly recommend it, at least to the people who are capable of enjoying a Hong Kong gangster melodrama.

(And, no, I don't disapprove of artsy movies in general, but in particular case of Wong Kar-Wai artsiness was definitely not an improvement. See As tears go by, then see 2046, and see what I mean.

On the way back some guy tried to take the bus 64N to St. Petersburg, but was told that it only goes to Itä-Pakila.

"Eew, should never have moved there!"

When Israel and its situation are discussed and somebody raises the question of what Israel is supposed to do to defend itself, somebody else almost invariably says: "They shouldn't have founded Israel there in the first place. Should've taken a piece of land from Germany instead and founded it there."

These people definitely have a point there, although their rather belated advice is obviously not helpful at this point in history, and, as we all know, hindsight is always 20/20 and I can sort of imagine Jews in 1948 not wanting to settle next to Germans. What I would really like to know is whether these people realize that what they are essentially saying is "civilized people should have known better than to settle in an area full of Arabs".

"War bad. Tree pretty. And violence has never solved everything."

One more observation of the last few days: it's very easy to be a pacifist when it's not your own war.

OK, it's not exactly the observation of the last few days. Nor does it concern the Middle Eastern wars in particular - on the opposite, you find even more pacifists who are against the low-profile wars that they do not know anything about. Nor is it a just Finnish problem.

It's easy to be against a war if you don't have a stake in it one way or the other. It's also easy, and I think quite fashionable, to say "both sides are equally guilty" to show how impartial we are, even if they obviously are not. Hell, I've heard that said about the 1994 events in Rwanda. Many times. (For those who still think Hutus and Tutsis were killing each other: no, they were not. Hutus were killing Tutsis.) Somehow, nowadays it is also common to express desire for killing both parties in a war in order to stop it, which makes me feel a bit of doubt about the person's commitment to pacifism.

I wonder whether this "war is evil and all the parties are equally bad" thing is just a way for people to say "War bad. Tree pretty"?

Another thing is the people who say "violence has never solved everything". This is so obviously untrue that I always wonder how they can believe it themselves, but most of them seem to be quite sincere. Even Finns, the vast majority of whom tend to believe that it was a good idea to fight against Russia during the Winter War and the Continuation War.

It's obviously not a good idea to solve everything by violence, especially since most things are obviously not solvable that way, but violence has solved a lot of things, and had good potential to solve more. To take the most obvious example, violence has solved the problem of Nazism in Europe. Violence (the invasion by the Vietnamese) got rid of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. Violence (a bullet in the head of a certain old pedophile in the 60s or in the 70s) would probably have prevented Islamic revolution in Iran. The threat of violence is what prevents robbers from taking your money, rapists from raping you and people who just like to fight from punching you in the nose.

The latter problem, is, BTW, only solvable by violence so far. There are countries who for some geopolitical reason don't need an army (I can almost imagine Icelanders feeling all morally superior about having had the foresight to locate themselves in the middle of the ocean, as opposed to in the middle of the Middle East), but I have never heard of a country without police or some kind of a penal system.

Everyone is, obviously, for peace. The fighting parties in most wars are also, for the most part, for peace (there are some who are for the eternal war or for the end of the world, but they are in a minority). Of course, each one of them is for their own peace, and therefore they are waging a war in order to make the other party accept their version of peace. That is natural. The so-called peace movements who are clearly for one party's version of peace in a particular war, but who pretend to be "just for peace", however, smell of cheating. Nowadays, every time I see a demonstration for peace, I feel like asking "whose peace?".

If I were one of the leaders of a country at war I would certainly finance the peace movement on the other side.

I don't think the war in Iraq was a good idea. I have chosen a side, and as an American I think that a war in Iraq was a bad idea because if most likely does not serve American interests sufficiently in comparison to our investment of resources, and possibly does not serve our interests at all (remains to be seen). This was one of those wars where I was, in fact, participating in a demonstration against it. But I still have a very strong impression that quite a lot of people demonstrating against it are not really against the war, just for the other side.

Random thoughts on the Middle East situation

Israel still misses Nasrallah, but their aim is getting better.

When Israel hit Nasrallah's home he declared a war on it. What does he imagine he has been doing up till now? Friendly fire?

Q: Can Israel win a war on terrorism in Lebanon?
Radio Beirut: Syria is a very good country too.

I'd been wondering how come the people of Gaza behave like fucking teenagers, and finally it dawned on me that part of it might be because they are in fact teenagers (fucking or otherwise). The median age there is 15.8. This is a scary thought, not just in case of Gaza but in general, that somewhere in the world the median age is that low. Uganda's median age is 15. The words "inmates are running the asylum" come to my mind.

I've also been wondering what would Finland do if one of the political parties in Estonia took up a habit of shooting rockets into Finland on a regular basis.

Estate tax

People who support the estate tax (I don't, but that's beside the point) tend to say that the estate tax is good because it prevents a lot of wealth from concentrating within the same family.

So why is it that both the estate tax law and the inheritance law try to prevent people from leaving their money to heirs outside their family? If this society wants money to circulate, rather than to stay in a family, what is the point of charging double or triple estate tax when people inherit from distant relatives and friends? And what exactly is the point of the law that says that half of one's estate goes to one's children?

It's not nice to attack an independent country peacefully shooting rockets at you

Today a coworker suddenly informed us all "hey, Israel has attacked Lebanon!". I stared at him incredulously and said that it was the other way around, but I should have asked him where he had read something like that. Some of the stories in the media somehow fail to mention small details, like Qassam- and Katyusha-rockets shot at Israel from Lebanon.

(Of course it might be that it's not the fault of the news source and the coworker is just the kind of person who does not consider a few wee rockets to be an attack, but he seems otherwise quite normal.)

Lebanon's prime minister Fouad Siniora says that Lebanon and its government had nothing to do with the attacks. Heh. Imagine Kokoomus shooting rockets at Russia across the border and Vanhanen saying that the rest of us have nothing to do with that.

And the big question is: since the Party of Allah is financially supported by Iran and Syria, which one of them has ordered this circus - or both, or neither? Hmm, Hamas's big honcho nowadays lives in Syria too.

"We don't talk about things like that in public, dear"

The DVD region code was an exceptionally useless invention to begin with. One could think that at a time when a) one can buy two DVD players with two different region codes for under 150 euro and b) a lot of people torrent movies from the Net without the benefit of buying a DVD of any region this stupidity would be long forgotten. But no, never underestimate stupidity.

Manufacturers nowadays make most players so that you can in fact change the region by feeding the player some code, drawing a pentagram, jumping in and out of it and howling at the full moon. I know this. You know this. DVD manufacturers know this. Tribesmen from Papua who have not invented fire yet know this, and maybe even our dear Minister of Culture knows this. However, most manufacturers refrain from putting this information on the player, the box that it comes in, the manual or their own homepage in an apparent desperate attempt to convince any aliens who observe our Earth in an extremely cursory fashion that they have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the players that they make actually can change the region code.

When I was young I used to know a number of young Russian women who claimed that they never masturbate and never fart. I never imagined they would monopolize the DVD player manufacturing, but apparently they did.

Since pretty much everyone wants to buy DVD players that can play any DVDs they want one would also think that all the stores (online and otherwise) that sell them would compile the region-unlocking instructions of all the models that they currently offer for sale and put them somewhere visible. However, most of them don't. As the result you usually cannot just buy a player normally but have to look up the unlocking instructions on the Net first.

The funniest thing about it is that most DVDs don't have a real region code either. A lot (I would not vouch for most) of DVDs sold as region 1 are indeed region 1. Most of the ones sold as region 2 are in fact region-free (which you can easily notice by putting them into a player set for region 1 and having them play quite normally. Most of the region 3 are also simultaneously available as region 0, and I've never seen anything that would come from the region 6 and was indeed region 6 - they were all region 0 and marked as such. (Region 0 is the same as region-free.)

Service nowadays (rant)

I have been buying more domestic equipment than usual lately, and noticed an amazing trend: salespeople in stores (most notably Anttila and Veikon Kone, but not limited to them) not only don't know the answer to my questions, but they actually have the gall to suggest that I do my research on the Net rather than bother them with these questions.

Listen, dumbfuck: I don't do my research for myself on the Net because that is what you are here for. They are paying you money to find things out for me, so that I don't have to look up every one of those 20 devices and compare them on the Net.

Sometimes I actually do look things up on the Net, but then I also buy them from the Net, where the prices are lower because they don't pay for your sorry ass. Are you absolutely fucking sure that you want all your customers to switch to buying from the Net?

Peace in Mumbai

Religion of peace has paid a visit to Mumbai yesterday. Ok, ok, it's early to say, and nobody has claimed responsibility yet, and it might yet turn out to be Militant Methodists (as Robert Spencer usually puts it), Al-Buddha Buddhist Brigades, Catholic Brotherhood or People's Front of Judea, but it probably isn't.

Which makes me wonder: does Al-Qaeda have some kind of fixation with the number 11? New York and Washington DC 9/11, Madrid 11.3., Mumbai 11.7., or are these just a coincidence?

Sex, taboos, and young people

Yesterday in a tram I saw a group of boys of about 13, one of whom looked extremely fuckable. Obviously I am aware that actually having sex with him would be illegal, and I would not even think of trying it. Still it made me wonder why is it such a taboo to say that they sometimes look quite fuckable (as opposed to, say, expressing a wistful desire to rob a bank in a situation where everybody knows that there is no question of the person really doing so).

One thing I've always wondered about with pedophiles: the media always tells us that people who have such desires can't help it and will always be a danger to society. I wonder whether that is true, and if yes, why? I think most of us have a certain number of sexual desires that cannot be realized due to being illegal, immoral, expensive or physically impossible, and most of us manage to live with that without getting ourselves in trouble. How are pedophiles any different, and why? Of course it could be that media is talking about the pedophiles who actually have acted on their desires and gotten caught, and therefore already proved to have less self-control than the general population, but are these people really less likely to learn from experience than, say, rapists and people who like to make sweet love to their neighbors' sheep or hamsters?

All this talk of screwing the young reminds me of a funny blog I found recently (via Ilkka). The guy has all the straighforward-rough-realism style of Danimal without really having Danimal's grip on reality. He has figured out the basics sexual market value theory, for example that both youth and money have market value, and one can be exchanged for the other, meaning that a Western man in his forties can attract a number of women in their twenties if he moves to a much poorer country. He did just that, and now he enjoys a very good time with very young women in the Philippines, and good for him (and them, I suppose). So far, so good. But where it gets really hilarious is that after pages and pages of describing how young girls are beautiful and sexy and how horrible it would be to have sex with old hags his age the man has absolutely, absolutely no idea why on earth women might want to have sex with young boys. Heh.

In the news

Shamil Basayev has been successfully dispatched to see Allah in person. Funnily enough I see no celebrations of the same kind that we see every time somebody goes to Allah accompanied by slain infidels. In general the we-love-death crowd only seems to celebrate other people's deaths, and appeal to human rights every time the death applies exclusively to themselves.

Which reminds me: last week Ismail Haniya appealed to humanity, which is almost too funny to be true, and asked the international community to intervene and put some pressure on Israel. Is this incidentally the same guy whom I saw on TV this May saying that he will not let himself be pressured by foreign powers (aka the international community) and that bugger the international community anyway (but please give generously)? Thought so.

Kim Jong-Il threatened United States with war. One would think that the glorious leader of the country with no food would behave more modestly towards the people he gets food from (OK, US is not the only one but he managed to piss off everyone else too) and that even a Communist understands that biting the hand that feeds you might be a bad idea, but no.

A moment of absurdity

Yesterday we were sitting at one of the three tables outside Pikkulintu, which is quite an improbable place in itself: a small watering hole at a shopping center in Puotila with an unbelievable selection of whisky. Suddenly an American man in his seventies came up to us.

"Does this place serve kaurapuuro?" - he asked us in Finnish.
"I don't think so," - one of us answered.
"Do you know where I can get some?"

We pointed at Valintatalo, but the American grandpa said that he wants to buy some ready-made warm kaurapuuro, and that 30-something years ago this place used to sell it. We encouraged him to go inside and ask, but he said that he did not have time, showed us a bag of frozen vegetables and walked away.

Hurrah! Hurrah! Toilet!

They fixed my toilet now! I haven't tested it the hard way yet, but at least the water comes through.

This morning I had a plumber come in and install the dishwasher connectors. He was supposed to come at 8, and finally came a bit after 9:30. He looked like a British football hooligan, only a lot more so. He was a small young guy, covered with tattoos, with an almost-shaved head, and his face looked like somebody gave him a good beating yesterday. I just hoped that the beating was not a disgrunted customer's comment on the results of his work.

To his credit I must say that his facial expression did not remind of the football hooligans but of a regular guy in the end of a long workday. He also did everything he was supposed to do, and fairly quickly. Haven't checked if it works yet, but I see no reason why it shouldn't.

Paska juttu

The toilet in my new apartment completely broke down. I am dreaming of a knight on a white horse with a full set on plumbing devices.

Mind you, I am an American. We might be a great nation, but a nation of great plumbers we definitely aren't. I am accustommed to having to use the plunger almost every time I shit, because in the United States of America the toilets are designed for the lesser need only.

In Finland usually the toilets are better. So much better, in fact, that I hardly need to use the plunger even once a year. So much better that in 1994, when my parents first came to visit Finland it took all the strength Benka and I had to detach Oska from the toilet bowl that he saw in K-Rauta and grabbed with intent to purchase it and carry it back home on a plane.

A shitty toilet in Finland is a rarity. When I noticed that my new toilet was not quite as good as others here I was a bit upset, because even though I feel a bit homesick after not having visited the US for almost 2 years, the toilet design is not on the list of the American things I would like to see in Finland. But then I figured I can always use the plunger like in my younger years.

Well, it turned out I can't. I mean, it worked for a week, but then, sorry for the details, the Sunday morning shit apparently turned out to be a bit bigger than the weekday ones, and the toilet got plugged completely. Well, almost completely: if you pour water in it in 3 or 4 hours the water has seeped away somewhere.

After pumping the damn thing with the plunger failed to produce results I went to Stockmann and bought all the toxic chemicals that had any chance to dissolve the shit. I poured some kind of a green bottle in the toilet bowl. It utterly and completely failed to dissolve the shit, but gave the whole mess a poisonous green color and the smell of raspberry essence mixed with shit.

I stared at the whole undogly mess for a while, and decided that this might be the time to call talonmies.

Talonmies turned out to be a smiling youngish man reminiscent of the plumbers in the Russian comedies of the 1970s, and he carried a long and thick thingie with which he tried to pump the toilet, with no success whatsoever.

The plumber is coming today. Till then, no shitting.

R.I.P. grandma, part 2

Grandma was buried on Friday, in the normal way of nonobservant American Jews (Jewish cemetery, funeral home, lots of people, a rabbi who does not mention god too often and keeps his speech short, a Hebrew prayer no one understands, speeches by relatives, and a party afterwards). I was obviously absent; my aunt less obviously so.

My father spoke about her at the funeral, and he mentioned that she was one of the few people who have never stopped changing and learning new things.

I told him what I wrote here. He answered that the moral fiber was not completely absent from grandma's life: one thing she has always refused to do, for moral reasons, was joining the Communist party. Even though her career almost required it and they pressured her about it all the time.

R.I.P. grandma

Grandma went and died yesterday. Rather surprisingly so, she was quite fine the day before. I mean, she'd been saying that she is gonna die real soon now for as long as I remember her, first rarely and lately a lot more often, but I didn't expect her to actually do it. She was 91.

One should not write bad things about dead people, and I am coming up short on good ones, but I feel like writing anyway. Well, for one thing she was fairly bright. She was not very nice, was very deficient in social skills and even more so in moral fiber, and never had anything good to say about anyone, but she was mine. She loved us all (her family) very much, but she never liked us. I think that for the most part the feeling was mutual.

I have always wondered what's going on in her head, kind of tried to understand her point of view, but never could. What was it like to grow up as the seventh and youngest child in a family where nobody had much time to pay any attention to children, and then watch that family being ripped apart by various fluctuations of Polish-Russian border? If we are concerned about what children learn from violence on TV, then what does a 6-year-old child learn from watching Polish officers torture her brother in front of her?

She spent her childhood in a border zone on the Russian side, in a village called Kublichi. Her older brother and sister lived just a few kilometers away in other villages, but then the border came between them and she never saw them again. Her other four siblings eventually went to study to various cities and always needed a special permission to come home to visit their own family, because it was too close to the border.

I guess harsh times often make harsh people. Places, too.

She went to St. Petersburg to try to get into the university to study physics. Why physics, she has never managed to explain to me. It's not like she ever expressed any interest in physics during my lifetime. She did not get in, but was offered a place in the department of biology, which she didn't take. She worked for a year and then applied to the university of technology to study economics, and got in. (In Russia there is a M. Eng. economics degree for some reason; I am not sure if there is anything like that in any English-speaking countries; I suppose the closest Finnish equivalent would be tuotantotalous in TKK).

She had a boyfriend. I know very little of him. I know they lived together for seven years, and then he was killed during the war.

The Russian-Polish border moved again in the beginning of WWII, and after that nobody ever saw grandma's mother or four oldest siblings. All that remained of them was the two oldest children of the two oldest sisters, who somehow made it over the border under the cover of the night.

Grandma worked, was evecuated somewhere (somewhere fairly close to where her only two surviving sisters were avacuated), came back to St. Petersburg, married my grandfather, and started what was a very impressive career for someone who is female, Jewish and from a very wrong kind of a family. She had my mom, and was disappointed that the kid did not turn out exactly like she wanted. Not that my mom turned out badly in any way, grandma was just a bit of a control freak.

When I was born she retired, and wanted a second try at raising a perfect child. I turned out to be even more of a disappointment than mom. Mom would nod reassuringly to whatever grandma said and cheerfully trot off to do whatever the hell she wanted; I would actually argue with grandma all the time, and then do whatever I wanted, too.

She had a very strong mental picture of what is proper and right and how the world should work, and then tried to bend the world to her influence. It did not necessarily work. When I was a kid I liked to put a lot of salt on my tomatoes. Grandma always chewed me out for that, because that much salt is unhealthy. At the same time she tried to make me put salt on my cucumbers, although I did not want any salt on them. My attempts to explain to her that putting double salt on tomatoes and none on cucumbers would result in an accpetable total, but she did not quite get it (the difficult part being how can anyone eat cucumbers without salt). That was grandma at her most classic. "You do this like this, and that like that because it's the right way".

When I was a kid grandma lived with grandpa and her sister Musya. Musya deserves a separate post, which I will write someday. She was everything that grandma was not, and had a rather big formative influence on my mother and myself. Musya, I think, was the only person that grandma could talk with about abstract things and life in general. After Musya died when I was 13 grandma gradually learned to talk with me, but I am afraid I was a rather poor substitute.

I remember talking about God with her (not sure why, because neither of us believed in him). She said that she does not believe in God, because if a God existed he would never let her mother and four siblings and their families be murdered. I found this to be a rather weak argument against the supposed existence of an omnipotent being and said: "But haven't you considered that maybe a God exists and maybe he just hates you?". (Yes, grandma was not the only one lacking social skills in our family.)

She was an extrovert with poor social skills, which is an unfortunate combination. She also sort of did not believe in friends, even though she had some. In the last few years she kept telling me how family is very important, and friends are not at all, and simultaneously complained about how lonely she was in spite of being constantly visited by all the family and how nice it would be to have somebody to hang out with. I urged her to call her friends, but she would say that they surely have something better to do and that she does not want to be forward and force herself on them.

Her friends (the few that she had) were, of course, self-selected from the kind of people who would keep calling and visiting you even if you never call them back, and were in fact pretty nice.

She was all for sexual morality and often claimed not to have had sex ever. (Mom was apparently born with the help of the Holy Spirit.) She was much against premarital sex and premarital relationships too, which was kind of funny from a person who lived with a guy for seven years in the thirties without the benefit of visiting the marriage office. I suspect that for her living together was sort of like being married, so she did not regard that as premarital sex. When I turned 23 or 24 she suddenly turned from being concerned about me spending too much time with men to being concerned about spending too little. She disapproved of all my boyfriends on general principle, although she has only ever met one of them, and tried to set me up with other guys, to the point of giving my phone number to strange young guys that she happened to like (Russian interpreters in hospitals and suchlike).

She was passionate and vengeful. She hated Germans to the point where I would not trust her with a gun in Germany. She also hated German shepherds for some reason. She also hated Communists, but less so, because they have managed to kill only a few of her family members whereas Nazis killed a lot more.

She had a strong anti-intellectual and even anti-abstract streak in her, which grandpa shared. They did not own a lot of books, and grandma has often suggested that we should burn most of ours, too. When they borrowed books to read, grandma wanted to read only about the things that she knew already, and read only the books set in Russia during the time she lived there. She scoffed at my suggestions that she try to read for example Shakespeare. "But this has nothing to do with our life," she said.

In spite of mostly not being interested in things outside of her normal realm she liked to travel. Too bad she was too old to see much of the world after she left Russia, because she would have liked to. She's been to Israel and Canada and New York and Florida and California, though.

In a strange contrast to her usual anti-intellectualism she was quite interested in all sorts of new inventions. She liked to surf the Net. She asked me how TCP/IP works a few years ago, and mostly understood the explanation. She talked quite often about how one of the main reasons for her to live now is to see what kind of new things will be invented in her lifetime. She also often told me how the first radio came to their village when she was 10, and how far we have come from there.

Now I pretty much know that something really important that she would have liked to see will be invented in the next few month. Murphy's law or whatever.

Rest in peace, grandma. Although, knowing you, it's extremely unlikely.

Still alive

Moved. Tired. Sore. Working on making the new place livable. It has already a bed, phone, Net but no proper computer (I have to find all parts of my computer, plus the table to put it on, and two lamps.

My throat is sore as hell (don't know whether it's flu or allergy) and I dragged my ass to work today just to make sure that I don't spend all day at home doing physical things.

Haven't used my stove, my washing machine or my brain yet, but gonna try in the near future.

Moving, cleaning, and Arabic flag

The young whippersnappers who sold me the apartment were a bit unfamiliar with the concept of cleaning it first, which led me to buy and use more cleaning fluids than during all my previous life. Hmm, maybe it's all for the better.

I am not sure why one of the closets was full of soil, but being a mostly charitable person I should assume that they were growing roses in there.

The packing is in full swing, 23 boxes packed, 27 to go. 6 terrifying torture devices purchased, on the off chance that one of them might be installed in the living room ceiling to hold the lamp. The final lamp solution for the bedroom has not been found yet, but there is no way I am having the ceiling lamp over my bed, since changing the lightbulbs would be hell.

Today in the Stockmann bread department there was a saleswoman who was obviously an Arab (she had an Arabic name and spoke Arabic with a customer) and I noticed that there is no flag on her advertising this fact. (Stockmann employees usually wear flag buttons so that the customers know which languages a particular employee can speak.) Then I remembered that the guy in the fish department who seems to be an Arab too does not have a flag either. And then I realized: which flag? There are about 20 Arab countries. You can use English flag for English, Spanish for Spanish, etc. just because that's where the language originally came from, but something tells me that using the Saudi flag by the same token might be unpopular.

Now I feel like calling Stockmann and asking them which flag they would use if they had to. If I were them I'd use the flag of the country whose dialect the particular employee speaks, but that's just me.

Stuck in my head

People often complain about some song just being stuck on a constant replay in their head. It happens to me too, and often not just with songs but with quotes from books.

The quote that's been lately in my head every time I hear Lenin mentioned:

"And remember, children: grandpa Lenin is not dead. Grandpa Lenin lives. And he is VERY, VERY HUNGRY!"

Brain drain

I wonder if anyone has ever made a study of brain drain from the countryside to Helsinki (or a similar brain drain in any other country) by sampling the IQ of the population of different towns and cities at the ages of 15 and 25. Probably not, but it would make interesting statistics.

Eek! Eek! Panic!

Argh. My throat is sore and I feel feverish but there is no actual fever as indicated by the thermometer (Killeri has suggested buying a new thermometer but I am not quite sure it will help). Lately (during the last 8 years or so) I have had very few fevers, even when I am actually sick and feel like I have a fever. I wonder what's up with that.

Moving next Sunday, 25.06. Eek. Feel like should be packing something but the boxes will only arrive on Wednesday. A bad day for moving - most of my friends will probably be somewhere in the middle of nowhere feeding mosquitoes and eating grilled sausages, but I assume Friday and Saturday would have been even worse. And yes, this is a cry for help: if you know me in person and don't have anything better to do on the Sunday afternoon, please come.

Still haven't got the keys to the damn place, and can't get hold of the current residents. Ugh. Stressful.

"Bombers don't kill people. Bomb kill people."

Fron The Australian, via Jihad Watch:

Abu Bakar Bashir, an Indonesian Muslim cleric believed to be the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah and convicted of conspiracy in 2002 Bali bombings, has been released after serving 25 months. He maintains that he is innocent. He also maintains that he is innocent in 2000 Christian church bombings all around Indonesia and in 2003 bombing in a hotal in Jakarta, of which he has also been accused.

He suggested that the Australian Prime minister should convert to Islam and that families of Bali bombing victims should convert to Islam. I am starting to suspect that the guy thinks pretty much everybody should convert to Islam.

"He said the families of the dead should understand that they were killed by bombs, not bombers, and that it was "God's will"."

Bombers don't kill people. Bomb kill people. Hey, sometimes we get really stupid criminals in the US who claim that their gun aimed and fired all by itself, but the only people who actually expect to be believed on that are the kind of people who only have four biological greatgrandparents, one of whom is a goat, one is a sheep and two are siblings from West Virginia. Such people don't get to become spiritual leaders of anything, not even Westboro Baptist church. But I guess in Indonesia not everyone can afford to have theit spiritual leaders and/or mass murderers to be up to Western standards.

American health system and damn stupid users

This is not a post about the American health system, although I think a lot of Finnish people have fairly serious misconceptions about it. It's very good, but it has its problems (genuine problems, not ones caused by dumb users). However, allowing for such a high rate of dumb user failure is a problem in itself. This post is in particularly about the stupid users.

OK, I understand that Finns, Canadians and suchlike who grew up with the idea that the state provides health insurance for everybody may recoil at the idea that one must pay for one's own treatment and if one does not have health insurance one can receive a bill that one is supposed to pay, and that the bill might have a number with many zeroes on it. The morons who do not buy health insurance are, however, mostly American and one could think that they grew up accustommed to how things in America work, but no.

About 15% of Americans don't have health insurance. Most of them can afford it. A lot of them also bitch about the state not providing it. I can understand preferring to have public healthcare, although I do not share the feeling. Healthcare, however, is a very valuable commodity when you need it, and one would think that people would provide for their own within the existing system, but 15% of Americans obviously disagree.

I was raised with the idea that health insurance is the number one priority, approximately on the same level as taxes. You just can't avoid paying it. You pay it, no matter what, and only then you think about the secondary problems, such as having or not having enough money for rent or food.

A lot of people don't share this opinion and prefer to spend the money on something else: rent and food, but also clothes, toys, etc. - some people even save money while not having health insurance. I kind of understand the feeling - paying $250 a month (that's how much my private insurance cost back in 2001) while living on an unemployment check was quite unpleasant indeed, but so is paying taxes, and few people decide to stop paying those.

People's usual explanation for that behavior is that they don't expect to get sick and they have some better use for the money. Some of them even have a backup plan, for example unmarried couples where one person has insurance and the other one doesn't and they figure that if the insurance-less party gets sick they will just get married and the other person's insurance will automatically cover them. This is a perfectly good plan if you get cancer, but a rather unfortunate one if you get into a car accident and run up $50000 in hospital bills before you can even say "I do".

Mind you, if you have some serious medical problem that requires immediate medical attention they will treat you, insurance or not. It's just that you are really not gonna like the bill you'll get afterwards. And in most (all?) big cities there are free clinics available for non-emergency care for the uninsured, but you have to wait in line for hours. Oh, the horror!

The funniest thing is that the very same people who can't be bothered making paying for their health insurance their first priority tend to blame the state, the society and the insurance industry really loudly, demanding that the state provide health insurance to everybody. Just where do they think the state will get the money? That's right, taxes. Their taxes, usually, since most of them are not poor.

I can understand people considering themselves too weak to bother buying insurance for themselves and wanting the state to forcibly buy it for them out of their money. But somehow they never say "I am a silly shmuck who will blow the money on something else anyway, I'd rather the state collect it as taxes and buy the insurance for me", they tend to say "our system is evil and rotten for not providing us with free insurance." Whatever...

I am very curious to find out what will come out of Massachusetts's new health insurance law. Massachusetts is planning to do exactly that: force the people who don't have insurance to buy it. Surprisingly enough, the same people who usually complain about not being forced to buy it were mostly against the new law.

How not to spend a night (probably a bit of overshare)

22:30 Oh, god, how come I am so drunk? Especially since had only 4 glasses of wine spread over three hours. The wine must've gone bad. Or maybe should have had something to eat before that.

Everyone else is moving from the park to a bar. Maybe should go home instead and get a proper night of sleep. Gotta piss first, though.

Marja calls me while in the toilet. I answer guiltily, imagining a huge line outside. She and Hannu want to pick up the table I promised them and ask if 8:00 in the morning is OK. It's OK. Can't imagine Marja herself being awake at that hour. She must be drunk too.

00:30 Falling asleep. Still drunk. Big mistake. Should never fall asleep while drunk, always wait for the hangover.


04:00 Argh! Argh! Horrible, horrible nightmare! Woke up.

Am never drinking anything again. Or at least never going to bed before sobering up. Bad. Bad.

Need a cup of juice (pomegranate juice is very good for hangover), a slice of sausage and some cherries.

Hmm. Horny. Very horny. Maybe should masturbate a little,

05:20 Argh! Can't spend all night wanking, because Marja and Hannu are coming at 8 and I have to work in the morning. One more time, though...

Hmmm. Maybe should check email and Google News and say hi to whoever is awake in IRC.

Whee! Coffee protects liver from alcohol damage! Having 4 cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of alcohol-related liver damage by 80%! I have nothing to worry about!

Ugh. Remembered I don't drink coffee. Maybe should start now.

Eew. The prospect of drinking 4 cups of coffee a day is a lot more terrifying than the prospect of reducing alcohol consumption. Maybe should get back to bed and try sleeping.

Neighbors are strangely quiet. Haven't heard a sound from there since early Saturday morning. Maybe I was wrong and they did kill each other and now there is a decomposing dead body behind that wall? Wonder if it will start smelling before I move out of here?

06:00 Should really stop wanking and go to sleep now.

06:45 Peep! Peep! An SMS from Hannu asking if it's OK for them to come at 8:30 instead of 8:00. Couldn't they find a better time to ask? Grr!

Back to sleep!

07:00 Kaboom! Explosion. It's not Islamic terrorists, it's not Tamil Tigers, it's not Maoist guerillas. It's the fuckers who are building a tunnel from our yard to Kamppi terminal.

07:30 Drrrrrr! Drrrrrr! Now they are drilling something.

08:15 Bzzzt! Marja and Hannu. I open one eye and one door and look at them blearily. They take the table, thank me and go, advising me to go back to bed. I go back to bed, wondering whether Marja awake at eight is reality or nightmare, and if nightmare, then is it my nightmare or hers?

Back to sleep.

08:15 Bzzzt! Alarm clock. Forgot all about it.

09:40 The world is bad but I just might make the 10:05 bus to work.

In addition to the skype idiots, there are always IRC idiots

Any kind of chat medium seems to have the kind of people who try to start random chats with random people. For the life of me I can't understand why. I mean, if one wants to meet new people IRC has a lot of channels that one can join and talk with people on them. What on earth makes people send private messages to total strangers, and what do they expect except "bugger off"? How do they even choose random strangers to send messages to? Grep for what sounds like the names of opposite (or otherwise desirable) sex?

I am on IRC mostly to keep in touch with my real-life friends. Sometimes I get messages from strangers who either read my blog or something I wrote on Usenet, and this is quite OK. The most typical person sending the messages, however, is some Italian who can't even speak English and either does not know how to use /whois or for some reason assumes that everyone in Finland speaks Italian. I usually tell them to bugger off in Finnish, they swear at me in Italian and bugger off.

Yesterday, however, I got an English-speaking specimen who obviously can use /whois, since he is trying to insult my family, my (in a way) country and my ISP in passable English:


[consuelo has address ~eed@adsl-1-110.37-151.net24.it]

Jun 12 19:04:09 <consuelo> hello
Jun 12 19:04:20 <vera> hello
Jun 12 19:04:29 <consuelo> how are you?
Jun 12 19:04:40 <vera> fine. who are you?
Jun 12 19:04:51 <consuelo> im Davide from Roma italy and you?
Jun 12 19:05:21 <vera> why do you want to talk to me?
Jun 12 19:05:42 <consuelo> maybe i disturb you?..
Jun 12 19:06:07 <vera> yes
Jun 12 19:06:21 <consuelo> ok,so bye and ti saluto stupida ciao
Jun 12 19:06:58 <consuelo> fuck you and all finland
Jun 12 19:07:43 <vera> I don't think you can fuck anything, but that's beside the point
Jun 12 19:08:28 <consuelo> surely,you are the most antipatic girl on the net
Jun 12 19:08:36 <consuelo> so fuck you again you and all your family
Jun 12 19:09:05 <vera> hey, newbie, you ain't seen nothing yet
Jun 12 19:09:16 <consuelo> elisa fuck youu


Hmm, any guesses why Davide from Roma might be having trouble meeting women?

And yes, I am being mean to him, and anyone else would be too.

White is beautiful

Every time there is some talk about black people straightening their hair or Asian people having cosmetic eyelid surgery, there is always somebody expressing concern for those poor people so brainwashed by the dominant white ideals of beauty that they feel the need to change themselves to look more white instead of accepting themselves as they are, yadda yadda yadda...

Funnily enough, I have never heard a similar argument applied to white people trying to get a tan. Even though in the long run it's way more dangerous than straightening hair, and possibly also than eyelid surgery (depends on how much you tan and how white you are to begin with).

Not that we need even more busybodies trying to analyze tanning as white people's self-loathing in silly magazines. What bothers me more is that it is not considered to be politically incorrect to disapprove of white skin, at least in the US. It's usually done with a facial expression of disgust and using the word "pasty".

It's weird. One can - sort of, and fairly carefully - express a preference for people's looks that favors some race or leaves another race out. One is not supposed to express it in the form of disgust for some racial feature, at least not unless one wants to be banished from polite society and be left without a dessert. The only racial feature that you are still allowed to say "eeew" about is white skin, at least for as long as you are disapproving of the color of fair-skinned white people as opposed to the color of all white people.

This is kind of weird, considering that everyone probably knows about skin cancer and its connection to sun exposure nowadays.

Maybe next time somebody says something about pasty skin I will either ask them "don't you find that white is beautiful" or chew them out for racism.

I have no problem with people either tanning themselves (it's their problem and there is no second-hand tan to worry about, as opposed to second-hand smoke) or preferring tanned sex partners. It's just the strong and public disapproval for white skin that piises me off - when people tell others that they are too white when they would not think of telling anyone that they are too dark.

(This problem is fairly rare in Finland for the obvious reasons, but not completely non-existent.)

The assholes that call people in skype

What on earth makes people want to call total strangers in skype? I mean, people don't normally pick up a phonebook of some faraway place (or an online equivalent) and start calling random numbers, now do they? Or of the same city, for that matter.

What do they expect in response except "bugger off"?

May all our enemies wage war that way

Three prisoners have committed suicide in Guantanamo.

"I believe this was not an act of desperation, rather an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us," said Rear Admiral Harry Harris, commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo.

Suicide without murdering anyone in the process? Assymetrical warfare? The only reason I can imagine for making such a statement is the attempt to encourage the particularly aggressive enemies from the wrong side of the bell curve to commit more such acts of assymetrical warfare. Not that there is anything wrong with it. Personal choice, you know...

If that was not the thought behind the statement the Rear Admiral should probably be renamed as the Ass Admiral.

Mikko's and Meira's wedding

17:00 Gaah! Gaah! Clothes! I don't have anything to wear! Gonna wear some ordinary clothes and put some makeup and huge earrings on to look all festive. Also probably socks or something.

17:10 How come I own 28 lipsticks and none of them look right on me?

17:20 Where are all the ordinary clothes though? Where? Where? And where is all the underwear?

18:00 Am there. Elevator is broken as usual. Bugger.

Mikko and Meira look lovely and also quite happy. I figure the actual ceremony must have gone well. Everyone else (other than myself, I mean) is nicely dressed, and there are relatives all over in scary numbers. The kitchen party is already in full swing, and there is some really good chocolate cake. Meira! Meira! Post the recipe!

Sampo is supposed to have our gift with him, but he is not there yet. Bugger.

Risto is awfully cute when he is taking care of the cat. Almost like from some advertisement featuring a mother and a baby, but much cuter.

Laura (Mikko's sister) is very beautiful. She is not the only very beautiful person in there, but apparently I see her rarely enough to be impressed every time.

18:15 Sampo is still not there. Tiuku says he was supposed to come about 6. I guess 6:15 is sorta about 6.

Rita is also not there, so I can't ask her to catch all the theologists who are supposed to sign the gift. This, however, is a problem secondary to not being able to locate the actual gift, or Sampo.

The Harmonia people come in. Having Nea and Ronja and Sauli's kid (I still don't remember whether he is Titus or Tiitus) and later also Taika and Lumo around reminds me once again how the five of them together make about three orders of magnitude less noise than one particular kid I could mention but probably shouldn't.

Am very proud of myself for not commenting on Teemu's new hairstyle, especially since everyone else did. People should always mention new dramatic hairstyle changes on IRC, so that one can brace oneself and avoid commenting. (Or, in the case of some people, for example myself, should always mention new color oon IRC because otherwise nobody would ever notice.)

18:30 Sampo is still not there. Panic! Panic! Need a drink. Except that should not get drunk until all the participants signed the gift.

19:00 Sampo is still not there and not answering the phone. Panic! Doom! Gonna get eaten by 40 or so people waiting to sign the damn thing. Feel a lot of sympathy for Leena who usually organizes group gifts.

Gonna spank Sampo publicly if and when he arrives.

19:30 Sampo has been located and will be there in half an hour. I won't believe it until I see it. Should probably leave spanking him to Tiuku, although I'm afraid he will like it.

Remind me never to organize anything with the help of a mathematician. Even a cute blond one pretending to be a biologist.

20:00 Sampo finally arrives, and the gift gets signed and I check that it gets signed by everyone. Oooh. Can relax and get drunk now.

The rest of the party was very nice and a lot more relaxed for me. The sheer number of people was overwhelming, but it's a big apartment. Did not get any allergic reaction to cats, either.

The chocolate cake kept being resurrected every time it got eaten. Delicious... Got some cake and some wine and did not even spank Sampo, so there.

Too bad forgot all about having a camera and did not take pictures of Meira in her wedding dress, Mjr in a really cute t-shirt and Risto with the cats.

Die, neighbors, die!

Why can't my neighbors finally kill each other, as opposed to waking me up with totally unproductive knifefights at 4 in the morning?

Was awakened at 4 by blood-curdling screams, demands to put the knife away and the sounds of furniture breaking and a body falling. Considered calling the police, but then the fallen body unfortunately got up and started bitching at one of the other participants for using the knife.

This post probably cannot be considered as urging neighbors to commit crime as they surely cannot read.

Another one bites the dust

Goodbye, Zarqawi. Enjoy your eternity in heaven with 72 horny virgins, and may every one of them look like either Mother Teresa or Idi Amin. Or both.

Broken technical toys, again

The mp3 player that a got a few weeks ago as a replacement for the buggy shit I owned before turned out to be an even buggier shit, and I took it back to the store. Now they gave me another one, let's see how it works out.

It jumped from one song to another all the time, and sometimes also imitated a broken LP record.

Dumb and dumber

Did Toronto Star hire Iowahawk to write for them, or what? No offence, I like Iowahawk, he often writes great satire. It's just that I did not expect to find so much satire in a news article (via LGF).

"In investigators' offices, an intricate graph plotting the links between the 17 men and teens charged with being members of a homegrown terrorist cell covers at least one wall. And still, says a source, it is difficult to find a common denominator."

For fuck's sake, people. This is getting pathological. The same page lists profiles of 11 adult terror suspects. Fahim Ahmad, Zakaria Amara, Asad Ansari, Shareef Abdelhaleen, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, Mohammed Dirie, Yasim Abdi Mohamed, Amin Mohamed Durrani, Steven Vikash Chand alias Abdul Shakur, Ahmad Mustafa Ghany and Saad Khalid. Do you need a Sherlock-fucking-Holmes to figure out a fucking common denominator?

I can understand perfectly well the normal healthy manifestations of political correctness, like reminding your readers that roughly 600000 Muslims live in Canada and only 17 of them are believed to be involved in this particlular plot. What I don't understand is the denial of the obvious to the point that it starts sounding like fairly good satire.

All rise against falafel and sanity!

The latest from Iraq: falafel is the new enemy of Islam. Yeah, Iraqis also thought this was a joke until two of them were shot for selling it.

Can anyone remind me again why we are trying to build a democracy there and drag them kicking and screaming into the Century of the Fruitbat? It certainly looks like they have enough fruitbats of their own.

Fuck that. Can we convince as many people as possible that the prophet was agaist all food on general principle?

"There are no biological differences whatsoever between men and women."

... or "American education is getting dumber".

First of all, a bit of a background.

Most colleges and universities in the US teach liberal arts. Liberal arts, as used in American higher education, is a term that usually groups together humanities, social studies and natural sciences (including math and occasionally computer science).

Colleges that teach liberal arts tend to have so-called distribution requirements, which typically means that if your major is in one of the three branches of liberal arts, you have to take some courses in both other branches as well. I don't really see a point in it, but it's no big deal. When I was in Boston University we had fairly typical distribution requirements: 6 courses outside one's branch, with at least 2 of them in each of the others.

Since I changed my majors a few times, and some were in humanities and some were in natural sciences, getting at least 4 courses of each was trivial. 2 social studies courses were quite a bit trickier. I did them in my senior year, when I already knew that you can get by with less work taking senior classes than taking freshman courses. I ended up taking the Sociology of Science, which turned out to be pretty much a course on epistemology, and a very interesting one at that, but had absolutely nothing to do with any sociology, at least as I imagined it. The other one was an introductory course on women's studies, which was not very hard and reasonably interesting. I enjoyed both but they did not ignite in me any desire to study any more social studies.

Anyway, we were talking about education with Sophia and Jenny yesterday (they have both just graduated from college, Sophia in biology and biochemistry and Jenny in mathematics) and it turned out that the things have changed a bit since my times: nowadays you have to take normal humanities and social studies classes for your distribution requirements, but in science they have special dumbed-down science-for-morons classes that humanities and social studies students can take for their distribution requirements, but science majors are not allowed to take for credit.

The finest moment of the higher education conversation came when Sophia remembered the women's studies class she took for the social studies requirement. The teacher started the class saying "There are no biological differences whatsoever between men and women". Being a biologist, Sophia wanted to correct her, but then she figured that if the teacher still does not know any differences while being in her fifties, it's better not to tell her, she might get upset or something.

Q: What do you call a 27-year-old man who fucks a 10-year-old girl?

A: Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini, of course.

OK, he was not yet a grand ayatollah back then, and she was his lawfully wedded wife. Besides, he really believed in giving other men all the opportunities that he had and one of the first things he did after coming to power was lowering the marriage age for women from 18 to 9. His mother married his father when she was 9, too, so I guess pedophilia runs in the family.

(I am reading his biography by Amir Taheri now, hence the trivia.)

Life, lately

Satu is in town, and Juha came back, so we all went out drinking on Friday. Ran into other friends while we were at it, too. I kind of like accidentally bumping into friends while walking around town, it cheers me up even when I am not feeling particularly sociable. Ran into four of them this morning too, which is pretty good for one morning.

On Saturday went to measure my new apartment. Was a bit overwhelmed with the amount of things that had be measured, but I think I got at least most of them right.

Sophia and her friend Jenny have been staying over at my place since Saturday. I am trying to show them the city and probably am not doing a very good job, but they seem happy enough. They are very sweet and young (21) and seem to be enthusiatic about their science(s), and I am trying very hard not to be openly cynical about academic careers. Although I am probably wrong (not about being cynical but about trying to conceal the cynicism) - one should not hide the realities of life from young people. I think I would have been more openly cynical if they were 16 or 18, but at 21 they are either about to notice everything for themselves very soon (if not already), or actually happen to like the academic life in spite of all its drawbacks.

(I was very enthusiastic about my science at 21. By 23 I was having doubts and by 25 they became a certainty. And then I lived happily ever after, chewing the granite of science at my own very slow pace and making my living in a much easier field. When I was 18 I thought that if I ever do something like I will regret it every morning for the rest of my life. So far the regret has mysteriously failed to appear. The only thing I ever regretted was spending quite a lot of my parents' money in the process.)

Meira's bachelor party was also on Saturday, and was a lot of fun, at least until my allergic reaction to the cat (it was at Killeri's place and I am quite allergic to Zenya and they have carpet floors downstairs) reached some ungodly proportions in spite of the amount of drugs consumed earlier in the day. Still coughing. They should really invent some better drugs.

I hate crying

Crying for emotional reasons is not too bad, because it somehow feels satisfying on some level, but I really, really hate the kind of crying that comes from eye irritation. It's just very unpleasant, physically. Ugh.

Money, revisited

Somebody on Usenet (yeah, I know, the world's most reliable source) mentioned that the Porvoo church damages are about 10 million euro. I decided to count, just for the fun of it, how much it would take the three little arsonists to pay for it.

Assuming that they are making 2300 euro a month (somewhere around the median salary, and yes, please suspend the disbelief), and are allowed to keep 800 of that for their own living expences, therefore paying, all together, 4500 euro a month: about 185 years. That's if they don't have to pay interest. If they do have to pay some normal mortgage loan interest it would take forever, because 4500 euro a month does not even cover the interest much above 0.5%.

If, on the other hand, the taxpayers get to pay the bill, it will mean that the whole lifetime earnings (assuming a median salary and 40 years of working) of 9 people will pay for those morons' moment of drunk fun. 18 if they pay a 4% interest.

No, I am not suggesting any solutions, I am just awed by the extent of stupidity.

Added later:

Damn, forgot that evildoers pay taxes too, and other taxlike things, so from the brutto salary of 2300 they would probably get 1600 or so, and if they have 800 for a living then they can only pay 2400 a month all together. 347 years, then.

Fantasy come true

When I was a kid I read the silly but hilarious Russian book Mess Mend, which was something of a mystery novel and speculative fiction at the same time. Among other things (I don't think I'd ever seen so many plot lines in any other book) it features a mysterious disease that turns really bad people into animals, literally, making them unable to walk upright and turning their hands into paws.

For some reason this book always comes to my mind nowadays when I hear anything about George Galloway. When a few months ago I read that he was walking on all fours and meowing on some TV show the feeling was quite surreal, and it didn't go away.

Money

The burning of the Porvoo church apparently turned out to be just an idea that came to the mind of three drunk teenagers.

I would like to know how much the arson cost, how much of the damages will be paid by the guilty, how much by the taxpayer and how much by the insurance company. And whether the teenagers realize that they have just burned more money than they will probably able to earn during their lifetimes.

It's weird. I have never heard of anyone getting drunk enough to purposefully burn all the bills in their own wallet, or their own cellphone, and yet people do thing for which they are highly likely to get caught, and to pay enough damages to buy quite a lot of cell phones.