Idiomatic Lingua Franca

Penguin recently published a new edition of The Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms. I'm rather disappointed it doesn't have any etymological information for these idioms but it is still enjoyable to browse through them.

It is amazing how much spoken English is idiomatic as you usually don't begin to appreciate this until you are stuck in a room with non-native or non-fluent English speakers and begin to notice that they are giving you the smile and nod of 'I have no idea what you just said'. Idioms are difficult to nail a definition or a single meaning to very often. The author of this dictionary does a fine job in spite of its incomplete and somewhat superficial treatment of the wide range of idioms in the English language. The index could be much better as well. A few entertaining idioms the Perl crowd might appreciate;

• to swallow a camel and strain at a gnat - to tolerate a great wrong while protesting at a minor lapse.
• like turkeys voting for Christmas - someone planning for his or her own downfall or destruction. "The standards at this school are extremely poor, but no teachers are going to complain. It would be like turkeys voting for Christmas as the school would then be shut down."
• as sick as a parrot - a cliche often used by football managers, meaning 'very disappointed'.
• warts and all - with all its faults and imperfections, a realistic portrayal. The phrase comes from Oliver Cromwell's statement that he wanted his portrait to show him accurately, 'warts and all'.
• there is method in his madness - although he seems to be acting illogically, he has, in fact, a purpose in everything he does.
• to cross one's bridges before one comes to them - to worry unnecessarily about something that may never happen.
• to keep something in purdah - to keep from public view. The idiom derives from the veil or curtain that kept Muslim women from view by separating their living quarters from the rest of the household.
• a mouse potato - someone who spends a lot of time amusing him- or herself by playing computer games, programming, etc.
• to know one's onions - to know one's job. to be extremely capable.
• the pumpkin has not turned into a coach - the early promise has not been fulfilled, and disenchantment has followed.
• to put in a nutshell - to explain in a few words, to give a bare summary.
• the ship of the desert - the camel.
• U and Non-U - upper class and non upper class, based on Nancy Mitford's system of distinguishing social classes according to the words they use. For example: it is 'U' to say lavatory and 'Non-U' to say toilet; 'U' to say napkin, 'Non-U' serviette; 'U' to have a bath, 'Non-U' to take a bath.
• a screenager - a teenage computer expert
• damned if you do, damned if you don't - it is impossible to satisfy everyone.
• remember Ozymandias - be humble, don't boast, for even the great will one day fade from memory.

permalink Ω 31 October 2001, Helsinki

History of Britain

All this week The History Channel is airing Simon Schama's A History of Britain II at 9pm EDT. Simon Schama, as you may remember, wrote A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World, 3500B.C. - 1603 A.D. and this show is based on his second book in the series A History of Britain, Volume II: The Wars of the British 1603-1776. Simon Schama is like the Carl Sagan of British History. The academic elite scoff at him but I find his writing enjoyable anyway. I also quite enjoy the BBC History Magazine which often has interesting articles and blurbs a bout history books that never seem to make it over to the states like Schama's books do. Anyway, the History of Britain series is worth watching if you have the time.

permalink Ω 30 October 2001, Helsinki

Wayback when isn't so way back

Wired News today has an article about a web archive called the Wayback Machine which is a 'digital library tool' to search for and view archived versions of web sites from 1996 onward. I wish this would have been available a few years ago when I was working on the Perl history as google was only in beta at the time and much of the early years of Perl-ish stuff on the web had already long since vanished. They say the average lifespan of a web site/page is 100 days and, considering how much URL maintainence I have to give to the over 500 URLs on the Perl Timeline alone, I don't doubt it.

When I went looking for perl.org and perl.com on the wayback machine, I only got as far back as a month ago. Well, I guess it's something. However, in between the 'come back later due to higher than expected load' messages, python.org has pages all the way back to 14 April 1997. I wonder if this is a python conspiracy :) I wonder if anyone actually saved some of the original pages from perl.org, pm.org, etc. since the wayback machine doesn't have them it might be nice to archive them ourselves for grins.

n.b. Well, I knew as soon as I wrote that I'd find everything....note to self, the trailing slash on the base URL in the wayback machine is important. However, I must admit it is a treat to compare the old CPAN FAQ to the new CPAN FAQ :) I guess I'll have to go snarf the older stuff and make .pdfs out of them for the Perl history archive since the wayback machine could use way more power. Way.

permalink Ω 29 October 2001, Helsinki

If the Man Show had a Magazine

In my quest for the new and/or unusual in books, periodicals and paper I discovered The Idler today in a Harvard Square bookshop. I'm surprised I've not noticed it before but it is quite snappy :). I laughed at The only bad things that haven't happened to the Kennedy's yet and The Idler Wage Slave Support Group which could make even a USPS mailcarrier love their job. I also learned two new terms;

• Cock Puppet - New phrase to describe the changing power dynamic in the recession-bound workplace, as it shed its veneer of civility, its lip-service to "the team". Use as in: "How's Tony getting on in charge of the new department?" "Oh, bill's wearing him like a cock puppet." See also: using him like a dirty bitch monkey.
• Metro Knowledge - New term to denote a superficial understanding of current news stories, coined in honour of the freesheet newspaper distributed on the London Underground. Usage: "What do you think of the situation in Palestine?" "I'm sorry, I have only Metro Knowledge of that. What's going on exactly?"

And the Hydrogeology of Guilt....All they need now is a chat show like The Man Show with some rather interesting interviews to surprise you.

permalink Ω 28 October 2001, Helsinki

But Wait! That's not all!

I know you have been concerned about the whole 'anthrax by mail' thing so now you can buy the anthrax exterminator for $99.99 plus shipping and handling and, if you order now, you get a free "EZ Biohazard Kit" complete with an antimicrobial hand!. Maybe I should start selling small bottles of chlorine bleach as special 'anthrax eradicator spray' for $19.99 per 8oz. bottle. Perhaps Ron Popeil will invent an Anthrax Cooker. America. You're soaking in it.

permalink Ω 28 October 2001, Helsinki

Gin and Tonic, Sweetie!

I've missed Absolutely Fabulous with Patsy and Edina living in absolute insanity but Comedy Central is going to start airing the new episodes on 12 November in prime time!

permalink Ω 27 October 2001, Helsinki

Passage to India

I've always wanted my very own Camel and National Geographic this month has a blurb about the Pushkar Fair;

"In the market for a high-load camel in beige? Even if you're not, the popular Pushkar Fair, November 23-30, is an amazing spectacle that attracts over 200,000 camel and cattle traders and tourists to Pushkar Lake, in the desert state of Rajasthan. In addition to more than 30,000 camels, highlights include camel races and tug-of-wars, a huge tent city and marketplace, and sideshows ranging from puppeteers to fire swallowers. The fair culminates in a group dip in the lake, during the festival's last four days. During this auspicious time of the Hindu month of Kartik, about one million pilgrims flock to Pushkar, one of Hinduism's five holy lakes, as they believe that a bath in the sacred waters confers special blessings on the pilgrim. The beginning of this ritual signals the end of the fair<92>s camel commerce."

Nomad Travels offers a tour to Pushkar and a Camel Safari too. Maybe we could have a Perl conference on a Camel Safari! :)

permalink Ω 27 October 2001, Helsinki

Do you have a paper bag to go with this?

It's Saturday night, the night for lovers ... and it happens fifty-two times a year!

Today on Amazon, I noted that the #2 bestseller in the e-books section was 52 Saturday Nights: Heat up your sexlife even more with a year of creative lovemaking . I thought it rather amusing that, for a country where just about anything with nudity can be considered porn, the e-book may be liberating people who wouldn't dare own a print copy but would be willing to discreetly download an electronic copy, rename it to 'business report 2001' and disavow any knowledge of this highly amoral act.

While I shouldn't be surprised at this since porn tends to drive a range of new technologies usually, I am wondering how fast e-book readers and their ability to render graphics will evolve considering porn just isn't all that interesting as black and white pixelated stick figures. I still don't know how useful it will be to take your palm to bed with you, armed with '52 Saturday Nights' to try and spice up your 'sexlife' but at least you won't get caught reading it on the train with a paper bag on the cover to conceal the title.

What would be really cool, instead of some clunky 'e-book reader' etc, would be a device a little thicker than a piece of paper and about 8.5 x 11" in size with a stylus that you could roll it up to carry with you or lay it on your lap or wherever to display magazines, the newspaper, etc all wired to it based on your subscriptions. I don't think I'll ever get rid of my treeware books but it would be nice to have serials, magazines and newspapers available like this to warm up to the idea. It would also be neat to have it use encryption to conceal some things from plain view with a visual encryption where only the person wearing glasses matching the pages' encryption scheme could see the information unencrypted. From boobies to the WSJ... Techno for Porno.

permalink Ω 25 October 2001, Helsinki

I wonder what flag she flies...

As you know, the father of Perl is Larry Wall, but who would have thought the Mother of Perl would be a 45' ketch?! Wouldn't it be cool to have Perl pirates, attach a camel figurehead to the bow and fly a Perl flag of some sort sailing around the Caribbean?

Avast ye FORTRAN programmers, use Perl and gimme that bottle of dark rum you have there! I could even get a sassy giant talking parrot, stylish black pirate fashion and a wicked cool eyepatch!

permalink Ω 23 October 2001, Helsinki

J - E - L - L - OH!

I know you lose sleep at night wondering which flavour of Jell-O you'll make for dinner, what Jell-O is actually made of and envisioning cute co-eds in thongs sliding around in a tub of cherry Jell-O and Cool Whip so I thought I would mention the newly published bookJell-O: A Biography by the same author who wrote Spam: A Biography. I'll hold out for her next title, Velveeta: A Biography.

Maybe I should pitch the titles Peeps: Icon of American Pop Culture and The Immortal Spork to Penguin Putnum afterall.

permalink Ω 22 October 2001, Helsinki

Pumpkin is a compound of pump + kin

Do you remember a few years ago the story buzzing around the net about the guy boning a pumpkin?

THE COMEBACK OF THE CENTURY? Police arrested Malcolm Davidson, a 27 year old white male, resident of Wimbledon, in a pumpkin patch at 11:38pm Friday. Davidson will be charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, public indecency, and public intoxication at the County courthouse on Monday. The suspect allegedly stated that as he was passing a pumpkin patch, he decided to stop. "You know, a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around here for miles. At least I thought there wasn't," he stated in a phone interview from the County courthouse jail. Davidson went on to state that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purposes, cut a hole in it, and proceeded to satisfy his alleged "need". "I guess I was just really into it, you know?" he commented with evident embarrassment. In the process, Davidson apparently failed to notice the Wimbledon Municipal police car approaching and was unaware of his audience until officer Brenda Taylor approached him. "It was an unusual situation, that's for sure." said officer Taylor. I walked up to (Davidson) and he's...just working away at this pumpkin." Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached Davidson. "I just went up and said, 'Excuse me sir, but do you realize that you are screwing a pumpkin?' He got real surprised as you'd expect and then looked me straight in the face and said, 'A pumpkin? Damn... is it midnight already?"

Well, I regret to inform you that Snopes debunked the story as false and dashed my idle wonderings of what kind of horny depraved Perl programmer would do this sort of thing.

permalink Ω 21 October 2001, Helsinki

I shall call him...Dick Soft!

I am crushed to find out that I missed the open casting call yesterday to play the young Austin Powers in the upcoming movie Goldmember . I hope they get Shirley Bassey to sing "GooolllddMembah, the man with the Midas prriiicck". Oh yeah, baby. Gold would be hypo-allergenic but I would bet it would be too soft to be..erm, effective. :)

permalink Ω 21 October 2001, Helsinki

Better pack Dr. Seuss next time

The next time you fly I highly recommend being very careful in selecting your reading material for the flight lest you be thought a terrorist. I wonder if airports will start issuing a banned book list or an Index librorum prohibitorum like the Catholic church has done for centuries.

permalink Ω 21 October 2001, Helsinki

Hail! Hail! Rock 'n Roll

Chuck Berry is 75 years old! I remember camping out with friends in 1986 to get tickets for a show at the Fox Theater to see him live. It was a sensational show and the movie didn't do it justice.

I grew up in St. Louis or rather, the very white affluent suburb that would later be called Chesterfield in West St. Louis County and it frequently fascinated me that a city, so well known for its racial segregation, would be home to so many famous and revered black musicians and entertainers such as Chuck Berry. The St. Louis Walk of Fame was created by Joe Edwards to honor and remember many talented St. Louisans. The Walk of Fame was my first web page project in 1993 when I was bored and wustl.edu was hosting the first 'official' St. Louis homepage and it needed content. So, armed with an SE/30, a B&W scanner and a friend less graphically challenged than me, I scanned about 1 photo an hour and created a simple web site. Joe seemed to be skeptical of the web at the time since few seemed to know about it or care, but in 1997 I gave a group of people he hired all the files I had and they snazzed it up into what it is now.

Joe Edwards is king in U. City. He started out with a little bar in The Loop, a crime ridden section of town, in 1973 called Blueberry Hill, a wonderful bar that a lot of students from Washington U. would frequent and where I bartended for a while to supplement my paltry research salary and eat once in a while. He has since revitalised the Loop with restoring the Tivoli, the Walk of Fame, various other projects and now The Pageant right across Skinker in St. Louis proper [ read 3am liquor license ]. Joe is the Bill Gates of the U. City Loop, some love him, some hate him. He works harder than any human I've ever met and whether or not he has a monopoly on the loop, what he has made of it can't be wrong as I have no doubt it would still be a forlorn slum had it not been for him. I miss this part of St. Louis since Boston doesn't have anything like it that I'm aware of. It had a good pub, theater, bookstores and a variety of international food all within walking distance of the U. and it had a cozy feel to it. Harvard Sq. just seems like a cross between a eurotrash shopping mall and a tourist trap.

I miss Blueberry Hill as they still have the best soup in town and before my butt can hit the seat at the rail, I have a drink waiting. And the regular crowd is still the regular crowd. Chuck Berry was and still is a regular feature in Blueberry Hill. I miss getting the coveted slot down in the Elvis Room bar pouring drinks and watching the show. Even now, the man is an incredible entertainer and is also courteous and polite. His 'entourage' of family and friends are also part of the show as they are so well dressed and colourful they make you feel like you didn't dress for the event. So, Hail to Chuck Berry, long may he entertain and hopefully I'll get back to the Hill soon to catch a show, and go to the Tivoli and .....damn, now I've managed to make myself homesick.

permalink Ω 20 October 2001, Helsinki

Every Hand has a Thumb...

Apparently Amazon.com and its software that knows everything that you have bought and predicts what you will find interesting has recommended Thumb Wars , a send-up of Star Wars, now available on DVD. I thought that it had to be a joke and that maybe OBL and the boys had decided to take a different approach to terrorism, but IMDB confirms it's legit. This will fit well with the collection of Spaceballs and Park Wars which are free of Jar Jar Binks and funny as hell :)

I wonder if there is a chorus singing "Every thumb is sacred, every thumb is good, if a thumb is wasted..." Can Thumb Trek be far behind?

n.b. Oh, I had to ask..... Thumbatrix and Thumbtanic .

permalink Ω 19 October 2001, Helsinki

Pressed 4 Mail

I used to get teased by the kids on my block because my mother made me iron my jeans with a straight crease. I would often retort by asking my mother if I should iron my underwear as well which would always backfire. Never tempt fate when dealing with a German woman, you'll live longer.

Since leaving home, I can't remember the last time I actually ironed an article of clothing as I either don't care or am not qualified to iron the article in question and have it cleaned by the service at work called "Pressed 4 Time". Now ironing your mail is being touted as a possible alternative to having your own personal surgical autoclave to sterilize your mail. It's something straight out of a Howard Hughes biography along with ironing the morning paper for crispness.

So ironing my mail is probably out...hmm..I wonder if boiling all that junk mail is the way to go or maybe putting questionable letters in the mailbox of the family down the street with the obnoxious dog who likes to bully HB.

Confucius say "May you live in interesting times."

permalink Ω 18 October 2001, Helsinki

WADD QSSYJEC DQFSEQVUF :)

The US would seem to be making fast and furious backwards progress in the area of crypto these days in the name of 'homeland security'. I have a keen interest in cryptologic history and have collected quite a few volumes on Bletchley Park, The NSA, WWII codebreaker memoirs, signals intelligence, Station Y,Enigma and Purple among others. Since I'm working on several historical cipher Perl modules it makes me concerned as to just how far this 'anti-crypto frenzy' will go. I've asked the people at HavenCo to keep a non-public CPAN mirror just to make me feel better. I also received Cryptologia today in the post so at least there is some hope for the continued flow of journal and historical information.

Jarkko and I visited Kayenta, Arizona on our way to Monument Valley and Kayenta is home to the Navajo Code Talkers Museum. I was rather disappointed and sad that the museum was in the local Burger King until we learned that the owner of the Burger King was the son of a Code Talker. The Navajo language was still considered classified by the US Government until 1967. This year the codetalkers have finally, at long last, received recognition for their invaluable contribution to the success of the Allies in the Pacific Theatre and there is even a movie, Windtalkers , which was about to be released in November but has been moved back to June 2002. Another movie, Enigma about the Bletchley Park efforts to crack the German cipher, was moved back from October to sometime early 2002 as well.

Stay informed on the issues and shop at Bletchley Park for a very nice selection of books and your very own "BP Britain's Best Kept Secret Rubber [ eraser ]" :) And hope that the zeal to protect the US doesn't actually become a war on privacy, civil liberties and the academic freedom to study cryptography outside the boundaries of the NSA.

permalink Ω 17 October 2001, Helsinki

Beam up the male cow, Scotty!

A woman must be writing the episodes for the new Star Trek series Enterprise as not only are the two female officers far more attractive and intelligent than all the males but tonights episode featured the first male in human history to get pregnant! Just think of the immediate advances in contraception that would quickly ensue!

permalink Ω 17 October 2001, Helsinki

Exorcism anyone?

Salon is running a story about the spooky subject of exorcism just in time for Halloween. What's interesting is the mention of 'the exorcism' at the heart of the novel The Exorcist that would later become a movie.

The exorcism was performed in St. Louis at a nearby catholic hospital on a young boy from Utah who would leave with no recollection and live out the rest of his life in relative peace. My Parents used to have Jesuits over for dinner pretty frequently and one of them was a Jesuit still in training when the exorcism was performed. He wouldn't ever talk about it much but for a cynical man it was surprising to sense the conviction when he firmly believed that the child was, indeed, possessed.

Of course, one of the annual Halloween rituals at St. Louis University, a Jesuit University in St. Louis and home to most of the exorcists, was a drunken tromp up to 'the room' in the old gothic Xavier Hall to scare the crap out of freshmen. Good for a giggle but the room was creepy just the same. The power of suggestion is an amazing thing to witness.

permalink Ω 15 October 2001, Helsinki

Haiku Tunnel

I wanted to go see the movie Haiku Tunnel at the Kendall Sq. Cinema and have a pint of Great Pumpkin Ale at CBC tomorrow night as the movie is reminiscent of the comedy classic Office Space but no, one week after it landed at Kendall, it's gone. So, go see it soon if it is currently showing in your town as it seems to have evaporated around here.

permalink Ω 15 October 2001, Helsinki

Wherefore art thou innovation?

Recently I was thinking when the last really cool really new thing caught my attention and I began to realise it has been nearly a decade. Most of the features of the current internet were old news to me by 1992. Much of the software I use is the same, many of the OSs are the same just with larger footprints, nicer GUIs and more features. Ho Hum. The internet 'revolution' came along and while the number of people using the internet and websites increased the paradigm of using the net today is still much the same as in 1991 with my SE/30 and a SLIP connection.

So where is the innovation in computing these days or is computing doomed to be the like the combustion engine in an age with too much infrastructure and oil lobbies to consider innovation? I am not encouraged by the corporate world where new ideas can be a political minefield yet Jakob Nielson makes a point about open source innovation in The Register;

"On Linux desktops... Will Linux desktops innovate? No. I don't think of that as being the solution: because it's open source.

It doesn't lend itself to coming up with new paradigms. The one thing it's very good thing at is designing software for other hackers, for other nerds, really.

That's their skill and that's their strength - there's a thousand nerds to look at it. If something doesn't work it's going to be a debate on the mailing lists and it's going to be fixed.

But that's a bad method for complex decision management or business professionals or this next generation of home users, because that requires a very different project management approach, a clear vision.

They're great programmers and that's very nice, and it generates good stuff for that environment, but it's a little sandbox.

For example they're so proud once they've ported [sic] PowerPoint. But that doesn't give us a new way of doing presentations.

To do that you 've got to follow business people around all day and study them and ask them what they need.

Microsoft did that and finally got a feature I like out of that: where you get a preview of the next slide while you're giving a presentation. Everyone who's ever given a talk will tell you that: I have to print an extra copy of the presentation off - even with my 1Ghz computer I have no extra benefit, because I can only see what the audience can see.

But why did it take them years?"

I think it's interesting for him to say this as I think, in principle, that he's right. Software, both opensource and non-opensource, seems to be the same-old same-old these days. This is not to say that there aren't good things happening out there but when the internet and computing transformed from a research medium to a commercial smorgasboard of web applets and hype it seems like the focus, the fun and the excitement were replaced by greed and complacency of one form or another.

Whether or not he's just another gassy pompous windbag like so many others in this business today , the truth is that my browser is much the same as 7 years ago, my email application is nearly 15 years old and I surf the web far less than ever these days due to a lack of content and annoying presentation, opensource or not.

The Ford Model-T automobile evolved and we have nice cars like the Porsche 911 but the basic concept, design and engine remain largely the same. I am beginning to suspect the computer and applications are doomed to the same stagnation.

The bubble burst on the internet boom when stupid ideas lost billions of dollars and noone could actually say what they did in the last 5 years sitting at their desk doing but remember a profound sense of boredom and have moved on to a exciting new career in landscape architecture. Well, who really needs middle managers anyway, really.

Maybe the tanking tech economy will clean out the cruft, make people lean and hungry again, and spur some new ideas to change the way we think about the computer finally.

permalink Ω 15 October 2001, Helsinki

Good Things™ for Halloween

Halloween is my favourite holiday of the year probably because it involves candy and no family or religious obligations. Last year I carved up a pumpkin and extorted a few photos out of Jarkko for fun and giggles.

This year I thought I'd embrace the Martha within and share how I made the 'Perl pumpkin' so you too can terrify everyone on your block :).

1. Purchase a resonably large and smooth skinned pumpkin. This is a key step :)
2. Remove guts of pumpkin. Save goo for later to torment the obnoxious kids in the neighborhood or drunken adults trick-or-treating when they show up at your door.
3. Print out 2 copies of the pattern and tape one copy on clean and dry pumpkin. You may need to make vertical slits along the sides to make pattern lie flat on pumpkin.
4. Get out your tools. You will need an exacto or box knife, sharp utility knife and a speedball linoleum cutter found at most art stores (unless you live in MA which seems to be devoid of linoleum cutters) or you can order a really deluxe set of tools from Martha. I'll confess to owning this and it is a really nice set if you are into carving pumpkins. Some stores carry a cheap-o set of tools from the pumpkin masters but they are frustratingly cheap and you are better off carving the pumpkin with a dremel.
5. Use the exacto or box knife to trace around the white areas. Do the inside of the P and the E first, then the others. After these are all done, leaving only black paper, trace around the edge of the black.
6. Look at your 2nd copy of the pattern and take a black marker to mark the parts that are black on the pattern as a reminder which parts are going to be scraped.
7. Get out your speedball linoleum cutter and start from the right side of the design and, in clean vertical cuts, start removing the skin. You need only make one pass per cut since you seek only to remove the orange skin and give it a woodcut-like appearance.
8. When done scraping the marked areas, use utility knife inside the pumpkin to carefully cut away a bit of the rind in the area of the design.
9. Use drill or other instrument to create air holes in back or on on the bottom of the pumpkin for the candle
10. Insert candle, display and watch those neighborhood kids run screaming from your house.
11. If a guy with long hair calling himself "St. Ignucius" shows up at your door, hand him an AOL CD and point to the pumpkin before shutting the door. :)

permalink Ω 14 October 2001, Helsinki

Buy a piece of history....:)

Jarkko submitted to iBook envy and is now autioning his Powerbook on eBay. Most of Perl 5.8 development was done on this powerbook. You know you want it :)

permalink Ω 14 October 2001, Helsinki

Shades of Grey

The Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition is often an informative newspaper both for getting an idea of how Finnish media sees and reports on the world and what Finns find interesting enough to find newsworthy. Tonight I read The Rhetoric of Good and Evil that articulately expresses my growing dismay at the current situation often distilled by our President, the British PM and news media around the world as a conflict between Good vs. Evil.

The Finns know something about war. The little known Winter War began on 30 November 1939 between Finland and Russia when Finland refused to give up the Karelian Isthmus between Lake Ladoga and the Baltic including some strategic islands and Suomenlinna due to the proximity of St. Petersburg to Finland. After months of fighting and with the Spring approaching [ mud and other tactical difficulties ] Stalin conceded defeat. Here's a tiny little country who nearly ran out of bullets and kicked some serious ass. There was also the "continuation war" against Russia with the help of Nazi Germany and the "lapland war" with Russia against the Germans at the end of WWII. Good and Evil are far too simple to describe the politics in how lines are drawn in war. Not black and white but a million shades of grey. Unsurprisingly, the Finns earned their independence as well as a fierce pragmatism towards politics and government.

Amusingly enough, the US didn't offer to help but the son of Roosevelt, Kermit, formed an 'international brigade' called the 'Finnish Legion' totalling 230 people and managed to arrive just in time to be too late and a major civilian pain in the ass. Roosevelt also made a loan of $10 million dollars to the Finns under the condition that they not buy arms with it. So, the Finns bought food which they then traded to blockaded Britain for Pounds and bought arms from....surprise, America.

Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40 is regarded very highly for its balanced viewpoint as well as being a marvelous read since the author has done an enormous amount of research and tells the story with some life instead of desiccated facts.

permalink Ω 13 October 2001, Helsinki

Postcards from Finland....

Last spring I traded in my old camera for a new Canon Elan 7e since I knew we would be travelling over the summer and trying to develop hobbies that aren't Perl related. :) I know, I know, it's very low-tech to still own a film camera but I like film and I can even get them put on Kodac CD at the time of processing or scan them in with my Canoscan 676U.

Perhaps it is a function of age that I started to think of all the countries I have travelled to and all the events of my life that I had no pictures to peruse when I'm even older and more a curmudgeon than I am now. So, risking being branded a tourist, I lugged along my camera to Helsinki and Turku last August to take some pictures I could enjoy. I must admit that I am not that terrific of a photographer but the Elan 7e is a camera that makes up for much of my inexperience. All of the following photos were taken using Kodak Portra 400VC film and if you have a slow modem be warned that all of them are ~80k or so.

Jarkko's parents Eila and Erkki [ this was taken in Boston Commons in May ] whom we stayed with for two weeks at their lovely home in Espoo, a suburb of Helsinki or, really more precisely, one of the 4 cities that make up the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

We slept late and went out to eat a lot as people do when on holiday. The Art of Star Wars exhibit was in town at the time and managed to catch it though it was mostly unappealing stuff from Episode I. The display of Darth Vaders costume was fun since you had to walk into a completely dark booth when you would begin to hear the heavy breathing....and lighting would illuminate the visage of Darth. I was hoping he would say something like 'Luke, I am your father' or another equally cheesy line but no, he just kept on with the heavy breathing. I managed to drag Jarkko to just about every bookshop in town as well as to Stockmann's Department Store a few times too. Stockmann is everywhere and sell everything from underwear to automobiles. If you need it, Stockmann likely has it.

I love Finnish food..then again, I love English food so this may be some indication that I'm a little odd :) I never met a loaf of bread I didn't like and Finland has *excellent* bread and these little karelian pies I can eat by the pound. They are made with either a rice or potato filling and, on one occasion, carrot. McDonald's has the McRuis which is a hamburger with trimmings on a rye bread bun. I'm nearly drooling on the keyboard just looking at the web page for it. I'm jonesing for my McRuis fix. Their cheese is also delicious. There is Aura or, as it is marketed in the US, Midnight Blue cheese named for Aura, the area with the river Aura where it is made and Finlandia Swiss Emmental. You don't need to understand Finnish to grasp the power of cheese. The Finns have some weird things I won't eat though....a mixture of butter with either chopped egg or roe mixed in. These people use roe like butter. My lip curls at the thought of fish roe but it's everywhere....I guess I'll try to aquire the taste for it. :) I'm slowly warming up to the idea of Baltic herring.

Jarkko decided to book a cruise on the Silja line cruise ships to visit Stockholm for a day and, while we were there, see Artur and his lovely girlfriend. On our way to the terminal I took a shot of the Tuomiokirkko [ Lutheran Church, literally "Doom Cathedral" ] which looms large on the landscape of Helsinki and is visible from nearly everywhere you look. The Helsinki Town Hall is right next to the port and another prominent feature. You can't really see it in the photos but the streetlights are beautifully designed and they take quite a bit of care in interior as well as exterior lighting and design.

So, I didn't really tell Jarkko about my deep fears regarding cruise ships and general lack of 'sea worthiness' and just decided to give it a go and try to have a good time. Before the boat left the the South Harbour we got an excellent view of The Helsinki Yacht Club along with an amazingly bright red sailboat, a blue boat and a sailboat that I wouldn't mind having for myself. We took a walk around the deck and the boat moved on out of port towards Suomenlinna [Finland's Fortress], the sea fortress built by the Swedes in the late 1700s. There is a ferry that takes tourists to the fortress that we had taken a year earlier. It's quite an amazing fortification, half of it is still in use by the armed forces. We cruised by the Kings Gate and past the parapets and bastions and out into the Baltic while Jarkko assumed his Finnish national pose :) Once we were cruising along I got a reasonable sunset photo or two before the sun retired for the evening around 9pm and we went to find food and drink indoors.

The cruise ship indoors is like a hotel with a shopping mall, a casino, a bunch of restaurants and a duty-free shop where every alcohol and cigarette depraved nordic citizen shops in a crazed frenzy. We had dinner at the seafood restaurant after I spied what looked like a very appealing baltic seafood platter. When it arrived on the table it was filled with a variety of crustaceans but after a while I started noticing that the baltic crayfish were covered in roe...not just a little but covered in roe. It was unexpected and unusual but, sans roe, it was rather good. Afterwards we went up to the top deck to have a few drinks in the bar before going to bed and happened to be just in time for the karaoke. Now, there is nothing quite so disturbing after a few Finlandia Vodka, lakka and cranberry cocktails as a bunch of drunken Swedes and Finns singing karaoke to Willie Nelson and other such American music classics. One act drove us to another round and the bartender giggled showing off his airport quality ear protection for such occations. One ray of hope was that not one person sang an Abba song.

Above and beyond the call of duty, Artur Bergman and his girlfriend picked us up at the terminal when we arrived at the awful morning hour of 8am or so on a Sunday. We dropped our stuff at the hotel and wandered around the old town section of Stockholm while I took pictures of a manhole cover and a fountain before feeling a bit too touristy to take more photos. The Vasa Museum was very interesting and I enjoyed spending a few hours there. I'm still in awe of it's size and that it was successfully raised and preserved after 333 years on the bottom of the sea. I think it should be a required study for PHBs to illustrate that no matter how important you are or how much money you spend on a project, it can still sink straight to the bottom if you don't let the engineers do what they do best. The rest of the day we just hung around and ate lots of food while talking little about Perl. If travel to and in the US weren't so unrecommended I'd love for them to visit Boston and show them around town.

On the return trip to Helsinki there was a freak storm that made for very rough going with 10 foot swells. Needless to say I was a bit green in the morning and having a breakfast of coffee while watching people slather roe on their karelian pies was almost enough to make me run to the railing. We slogged through a driving rain through downtown to the bus station to catch a ride home. I haven't changed my mind about giant cruise ships but I survived and enjoyed seeing a side of Nordic culture that a tour book wouldn't satisfactorily cover.

Jarkko borrowed his Father's car for a day and we took a scenic drive 2 hours west to Turku. Turku was recently in the news for giving Microsoft the shove and switching to Linux. We wandered along the river in downtown and visited the Turku Cathedral, the largest gothic cathedral in Finland first built in 1286. Outside stands Mikael Agricola the first Lutheran Bishop of Finland and is also credited with creating the written Finnish language. It's he whom we can blame for all the bloody double-consonants. The Finnish Historical Society has a biography of Agricola and a host of others. The front door of the cathedral exudes gothic age while below it on the river banks is rent-a-canoe. Turku also had a lot of public art including a fountain, spider web and Turku spelled in pink impatiens to remind people where they are if they've managed to forget.

We left Turku in search of Snappertuna, yes, it's really named that, and Raasepori Castle, the castle on the rock, built in the late 13th century and was surrounded by water when it was built. This is the sort of place kids would love to have to play pirate games in. I caught a shadow from one of the windows that looked just like an Atari space invader, or a jellyfish or...something. It was nearing sunset and the light inside the castle was casting long and, at times, creepy shadows. From the tower I saw a house that is pretty typical for Finnish homes. A wood frame house with vertical slats and a flush ladder, no shutters on the windows, modest design and a sauna. The New England Saltbox style is similar.

In the last couple of days in town before heading home we took a cruise around Lauttasaari in a friends' old trawler that he is making a hobby of fixing up and one last day where I took my camera along to be a tourist. While getting a picture of a seemingly rather perturbed carriage driver and his steeds on the esplanadi, we saw this group of kids carrying pails and squirting each other with mustard, flour and other goop. They looked like an interesting group so we followed them down to the harbour fountain where they began to rinse off the goo and freshen up. One girl whom I dubbed bat girl was particularly interesting. We still don't know what the event was all about but it was certainly amusing to watch. :) One thing that I thought was rather odd in Finland was the abundance of graffiti everywhere. There is a pedestrian underpass at one of the metro stations that could be mistaken for a Bronx mural. Finland is very serious about its coffee, so serious in fact that King Kong himself scaled the YLE building to behold a magnificent mug of the national drink. I think he's missing a bottle of Finlandia though. And, if you ever wondered of what became of the Leningrad Cowboys then your search is over as they run a Russian Tex-Mex Restaurant in downtown Helsinki.

So, if I've made Finland sound appealing, Winter is coming and is a perfect time to visit The Ice Hotel which is just what it sounds like and Santa Park where Santa really lives. Reindeer is good eatin'! :)

permalink Ω 13 October 2001, Helsinki

Dean Jones is Bob Dobbs?!

After having a few cocktails to ease out of a less than terrific week, 2am rolls around and finds me channel surfing on the TV desperately trying to avoid news or anything remotely resembling the news. The only thing cable TV does for you is give you a much larger selection of nothing to watch.

But I caught an image while flipping through the channels of a face burned into my memory from watching too many Walt Disney movies as a kid; Dean Jones!. The movie was Monkeys Go Home! with an absurd blurb about an American who inherits a farm in France, is disliked by the locals and hires monkeys to work the farm. I thought it must be some hopeless B-movie until I noticed that Maurice Chevalier was listed in the cast so I decided to stare blankly at it for a while.

What is most disturbing about Dean Jones is just how squeaky clean this guy looks. I mean, I grew up with this guy in That Darn Cat!, The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit and all of the Herbie the Love Bug movies only to find he made a terribly convincing villain in the St. Bernard movie Beethoven. But the more I stared at his face last night the more I began to see the visage of Bob Dobbs, spiritual leader of The Church of the SubGenius and man of slack. All this time Dean Jones has been a subversive force in bad B-movies while looking like the most bland plastic white guy I've ever seen?!

Surely this must be a sign that the end of days is near so maybe I should become an ordained minister in the Church of the SubGenius!. Slack, slack and more slack for Bob!

permalink Ω 13 October 2001, Helsinki

Poppies....poppies....

When PM Tony Blair mentioned that 90% of the heroin on the streets of London originates from Afghanistan it made me wonder where the other 10% comes from. I had a friend appear on the doorstep of my flat one night dressed like boy george and white as a sheet. I had heard he was having problems though I'd not seen him much. I knew immediately that he was doing heroin and wondered what in the hell had become of this nice 18 year old kid who was a pretty good programmer and fun to go clubbing with. That was 15 years ago and I imagine there are others much like him who are now faced with the supply of their addiction dwindling.

Afghanistan, however, is not the most prolific producer of heroin, Burma, nee Myanmar is though Afghanistan does appear to have increased production significantly after the war with Russia ceased in 1989. Making heroin from poppies, or papaver somniferum is a somewhat risky and often tedious process. A concise historical timeline of heroin is rather interesting and it's quite ironic that heroin was introduced to help morphine addicts kick the habit.

Opium: A History is a well crafted history of the drug and the events surrounding it from 4000BC to the present. Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey is a classic account of addiction. Ben Stiller also gives an amazing performance as a heroin addict with a perfect life but who can't escape the drug in Permanent Midnight.

permalink Ω 12 October 2001, Helsinki

A lexicon for current events

Last night Jarkko dragged out his copy of The Official Politically Correct Dictionary & Handbook to help us wade through the language of the times.

• accidental delivery of ordnance equipment - Bombing something other than the intended target--a civilian hospital, for example, or one's own troops. See also: friendly fire, incontinent ordnance, collateral damage.
• arbitrary deprivation of life - Murder. A 1984 term designated for use in the US State Deptartment reports describing friendly governments such as those in El Salvador and Chile, because, as Assitant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams put it, "we found the term 'killing' too broad".
• career-change opportunity - A phrase used by a Vermont corporation to explain why its dismissal of fifteen employees was "not a cutback or a layoff"
• decruit - Fire. Also could be a noun as 'decruiter' for the HR creeps who decruit.
• energetic disassembly - An explosion, especially an accidental one.
• engage the enemy on all sides - Get ambushed as defined by the US Department of Defense
• equity retreat - Stock market crash.
• executive action - A CIA term that lexicographer Hugh Rawson defines as "getting rid of people, especially the leaders of foreign countries and especially by murder"
• force package - One or more warplanes or bombers.
• good-neighbor policy - Invading a neighboring country. For example, George Will wrote of the US incursion in Panama that "this effect, administering a recount on last May's elections--is an act of hemispheric hygiene..."
• health alteration - Murder, as defined by the CIA, who, according to writer David Wise, refers to its assassination unit as teh "health alteration committee"
• illiquid - Insolvent. The term was coined by the California Historical Society to describe the situation it found itself in after a decade of multi-hundred-thousand dollar deficits.
• involuntary conversion - An accidental fire, explosion, collision, or any other "act of God" that "converts" a piece of property from its original state into a pile of rubble. For example, when National Airlines received a $1.7 million insurance payment after teh crash of one of its planes, it announced in its annual report that it had received the money as the resule of the "involuntary conversion of a 727"
• meaningful downturn - Recession.
• not necessarily unconstitutional - Wrong, but the rules don't cover the offense.
• selective strike - A term for bombing designed to produce, in the words of lexicographer Hugh Rawson, "something less than total annihilation"
• service a target - Drop bombs on something or somebody. [ Also see George Carlin's bit about 'servicing the customer' ]
• subholocaust engagement - A relatively benign nuclear conflict; a nuclear war on a scale insufficient to destroy all life on earth.
• terminal episode - Death.
• very large, potentially disruptive reentry system. - A nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, as descirbed by US Air Force Colonel Frank Horton.
• visiting a site - A bombing attack. See also 'servicing a target.

permalink Ω 11 October 2001, Helsinki

A terrific PBS program

WGBH just aired Islam: Empire of Faith tonight, a 2 hour look at the history of Islam. Definitely worth finding your local listing or calling up your local PBS station to request it. Also, if you can't bear to read the complete history of Islam, The Modern Library has a new series called The Modern Library Chronicles which are short, well done books and they have a volume Islam: A Short History.

permalink Ω 10 October 2001, Helsinki

Planet of the Cockroaches

I collect Academic or 'campus' novels and Atomic or Nuclear fiction and have for a number of years. My latest addition to my campus novel collection is The Cheese Monkeys: A Novel in Two Semesters which has an irresistable title and a cover/binding that you'll have to see to appreciate.

I haven't seen any good Atomic fiction around lately but This is the Way the World Ends may be worth pulling off the shelf for rereading. I woke up this morning vaguely remembering a dream where cockroaches, not Apes were the dominant society after a nuclear holocaust [ but I really don't have latent anxieties about the entire Middle East going to war with the US and beginning the first and last thermonuclear holocaust. no, not at all ] thinking the movie would have been much more interesting. Instead of a gun and dirty apes it could have been a can of Raid or a Roach Motel and creepy crunchy giant cockroaches.

In June I made an effort to find an Atomic short story that I remembered reading back in grade school but couldn't [ and still cannot ] remember the title or the author. The only thing I remember of the story is the protagonist sets off on a journey on the 'God Roads' [ highways ] and eventually finds a city where he enters what I recall sounding like the WTC and learns that the 'Gods' were like him. It has vague hints of Ballard but I have been unsuccessful in finding it. I even wrote to Paul Brians who published the book Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction who, unfortunately, hadn't heard of the story. He also has a delightful Nuke Pop collection of pop culture images of Nuclear War. He sent me an HTML copy of the book which I then made into a PDF as his book is out of print and seemingly impossible to find even via Abe Books. If you are interested in having a copy drop me a line and I'll share it as long as you don't put it up on the web anywhere. Also, if the story I describe rings a bell, definitely let me know.

I also went looking for a set of CDs from Voyager Co a company that used to make really cool CDs in the late 80s and early 90s for both Mac and PC. A particular documentary series called Our Secret Century in 4 sets and Ephemeral Films contained a wealth of all the cheesy public service films we were all forced to watch in school. Unfortunately, the company sold its assets to someone else and Rick Prelinger moved on to other things but all of the movies are available from the Internet Archive movie collection. It was most amusing to go to a coffee house movie theatre in Helsinki this summer to see 2 movies comprised of this sort of stuff including some naughty bits. One title that is still available from the original Voyager catalogue is The Day After Trinity which I have and admire for it's presentation as well as it's accurate historic content.

permalink Ω 10 October 2001, Helsinki

The Euros are coming!

While the US news media is too busy hyping the Anthrax case in Florida to cover the biggest economic happening in European Union, I thought I would note that on 1 January 2002, 13 of the 15 member countries will officially begin to use the Euro in circulation. In Finland, everywhere you go, everything is marked in both Finnish Markka and Euro. So much history is behind many of the different currencies that it's a historic moment that so many countries can set aside their attachments to their respective identities to agree on using one single currency.

The logistics of this task alone is amazing. The Suomen Pankki [ Bank of Finland ] has a plan on-line of how they will change to using the Euro. One interesting situation will be what the bars and other businesses open prior to and after midnight on New Year's Eve will do at the stroke of midnight.

I've always thought that the US banknotes are bland and bordering on ugly when compared to the rest of the world currencies. The Euro notes and coins are beautiful both in their design and colours with each country getting a country specific design on the flip side of the coins. The notes vary in size and have an architectural theme ranging from the classical on the 5 Euro note to the modern on the 500 Euro note.

The History of Money and Sterling: The History of a Currency [ The UK is not one of the countries changing to the Euro and this helps illuminate some of the history behind the Pound ] are both enjoyable books for those interested.

So, all you currency module writers, and you know who you are, better make sure you are all prepared for the Euro. I know I'll enjoy travelling without 13 different currencies in my pocket from now on :)

permalink Ω 9 October 2001, Helsinki

*pssst* Hey Guy, Wanna Aeron?

I recently, after many years of having a cheap desk even a college student would scoff at, decided to purchase a desk from Herman Miller as their new RED line is both stylish and reasonably affordable. I purchased the RED Spider with no frills and a modest rolling chair which shipped for 'free' and I didn't have to pay tax on it either. I must admit that I really love having a real desk for a change and sometimes think I maybe should have gone for the Aeron but I tend to be too pragmatic on big items like that. But, today, I received a letter from Herman Miller thanking me for my purchase and inviting me to save 10% on anything in the store...including an aeron. Bastards! :) Well, I'm not going to take the bait but if anyone else wants to go for the aeron they've always wanted, go to the website, shop and when you check-out enter the code oneofthefirst. Don't tell them I sent you :)

permalink Ω 9 October 2001, Helsinki

The Sarah Dessert

I've been a long time reader and fan of Verbatim, a language quarterly that remains quirky and fun to read. Recently the editor, Erin McKean, published a book titled Verbatim with some of the best tidbits over the years. Once of my favourites is an article by Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, among others, where he pastes together a 'history of the world' from genuine 'student bloopers' collected by teachers throughout the US from 8th grade to college level.

"The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain."

and another article Assing Around

"The word ass appears in American slang in multiple ways with multiple meanings. It has a rich and varied history and can signify anything from good to bad to more. A mildly transgressive word, ass is not quite as serious as shit or fuck--it is more of a humourously vulgar word, but certainly 'dirty,' especially when paired with the anatomical specicficity of -hole. And because ass is so short is is easily combinable with other words, making it quite versatile. What also lends to ass's character, especially as a curse word, is its sound. The almost hiss of the ss allows for particularly colorful emphasis in many expressions...."

The note about the sound of a curseword is something I hadn't quite considered before...a successful one has a particular sound to it, harsh even. This is true in German and even in Finnish where the 'r' is hard and rolled so it sounds mean and angry.

Definitely a fun read for those who enjoy wordplay and certainly beats watching CNN these days.

permalink Ω 9 October 2001, Helsinki

It ain't easy being green

Since the economy is tanking and there's even a slight thought that non-us citizens are getting hassled in customs by the INS, I have started getting the green card paperwork going for Jarkko. Nokia issued a warning recently to any non-us employees in the US, which is a large percentage here in Boston, to be prudent in their travel and have all paperwork especially in order as a few people have been through some difficulty lately. Now, besides having to fork over nearly $500 in fees which do not include legal counsel, there are a few questions that I find not only completely retarded but insulting and irrelevant. A few gems from the I-485 form are;

• Have you ever engaged in, conspired to engage in, or do you intend to engage in, or have you ever solicited membership or funds for, or have you through any means ever assisted or provided any type of material support to, any person or organization that has ever engaged in or conspired to engage, in sabotage, kidnapping, political assassination, hijacking or any other form of terrorist activity?
• Do you intend to engage in the US in: a. espionage? b. any activity a purpose of which is opposition to, or the control or overthrow of, the government of the United States, by force, violence or other unlawful means? c. any activity to violate or evade any law prohibiting the export from the United States of goods, technology or sensitive information?
• Do you plan to practice polygamy in the US?
• A few other assorted questions asking if you have ever been a prostitute or a communist, etc.

Now, I suppose anyone stupid enough to tick the 'yes' box on any of those questions deserves to have their application sent down but who in their right mind will sit there, filling out the application, and think, 'oh, yeah, you know I do intend to engage in espionage so I had had better tick the yes box on that one'? What happened to this vast network of information on people that the US is supposed to have? I'd like to know what other countries similar documents are like for the sake of comparison.

permalink Ω 9 October 2001, Helsinki

Time to buy RAM

It seems outrageous and terribly self-indulgent to have a Gigabyte of RAM in an iMac but for just a little over $100 you could do the same. I remember when I bought a few megabytes for my SE/30 and thinking it cost almost as much as my car.

permalink Ω 8 October 2001, Helsinki

Cool software of the day

Stimpsoft has a number of freeware titles that I have started to use and fallen in love with. Son of Weather Grok is a utility I've used for a few years for my up-to-date weather obsession. Now, I've fallen in love with the carbonized smell-o-mints periodic table of the elements. Besides offering a very pretty and informative program, if you turn on the sound and then run your mouse over the tiles you can make your own funky kind of music :) I didn't need a t-shirt from his store but finally decided to send him a few bucks anyway just because I hope he keeps on making cool stuff. I even used his Bob Dobbs icon with iControl for my HD icon. I feel better now :)

permalink Ω 8 October 2001, Helsinki

We come in peace [ shoot to kill ]

We heard about the bombings in Afghanistan yesterday on NPR as we were heading North to take part in the annual leaf peeper pariah parade. We drove along admiring the exuberant beauty of the reds and oranges while listening to Dubya tell the Afghans that while we may be bombing what little is left of their country that we are their friends. I would have trouble, were I an Afghan, believing that especially after being pretty damn scared by the HUGE transport planes that flew over the house on Saturday night. It all seems so odd that the US goes on and on and on and on about how we were 'attacked' yet we sit on the couch and watch the destruction of other countries on CNN as though it were theatre of the absurd and macabre crusades from the 6th century. We say that they 'asked for it' yet noone has mentioned what we did to 'ask for' their attacks. I suppose it's easier to label a minority as angry, crazy freaks than figure out what the problem might really be to start with. "Kill them all for surely...." History continues to repeat itself. How boring and banal, no wonder aliens don't come to visit for long if at all.

The US is also, apparently, dropping humanitarian aid along with the bombs in the form of MREs with peanut butter and jam. Jarkko, however, discovered the absolutely perfect food which to airlift to the Afghans that is sure to make them sing "God Bless America, home of the fast food and land of the strip mall with 24 hour grocery stores except in Mass. due to some funky blue laws..."; Hostess Scary Cakes! complete with S'Cream Filling! Not only do they have enough preservatives to keep them fresh for decades but the bonus cake would be a symbol of American freedom and bounty. Maybe a few twinkies couldn't hurt either. Well, if nothing else, the kids sure will love us :) They can have a new hero too, Captain Cupcake and his ho-hos....

And if bombing the rest of the planet in the name of some non-existant deity or ideology wasn't enough to lift my spirits I read an article about other people who have gone through the outsourcing circus.

permalink Ω 8 October 2001, Helsinki

And if you like Umberto Eco

get on down to your local bookshop and snag a copy of Five Moral Pieces if you don't have a copy already especially in light of the 'new war' we are all supposedly being dragged into. The five essays are;

• Reflections on War
• When the other appears on the scene
• On the press
• Ur-Fascism
• Migration, Tolerance, and the Intolerable

It's outstanding and I think the publisher pushed up the printing due to its timely content.

permalink Ω 6 October 2001, Helsinki

I live with a man obsessed

with the whole Lord of the Rings movie, et. al. So, when memepool had a link for finding your secret Hobbit name of course it had the gravitational pull of Jupiter for the man who thinks it romantic that we now have matching iBooks.

He's Sancho Bleecker-Baggins of Fair Downs and I'm Camellia Knotwise of Michel of Delving. Personally I like Mr. Jark better and had Tolkien lived to know more Finns I'm sure there would be an entire clan of Jarks somewhere in his books :). And did anyone catch the Finnish dwarves with Swedish names who like tag team sex in Zoolander?.....

permalink Ω 6 October 2001, Helsinki

If you thought Bat Boy the musical was bad...

Brace yourself for Lady Di the Musical. I wish I were joking. The thought of Charles and Camilla singing in German is enough to send me whimpering into the corner. Is the producer smoking crack?

permalink Ω 4 October 2001, Helsinki

Mundus Vult Decipi

You know you are bored when you spend an afternoon organising the several thousand bookmarks you have accumulated over time and find a few that defy explanation as to what ever prompted you to bookmark them to begin with. A few fun oddballs from my bookmark-o-rama;

• I don't like to shop much but I have a sort of macabre fascination for the US 'shopping clubs' where you can buy 200 rolls of toilet paper to stock your bomb shelter. Am I the only one who finds the name BJ's Wholesale hilarious? I mean...c'mon.
• I don't cook but HappyCookers must have gotten bookmarked because it makes me giggle. I wonder if they have seen the cult classic The Happy Hooker?
• Health conscious? Since 11 September you should eat like there is no tomorrow and Blow health out your ass!. Besides, noone cares if you are fat when you're dead, right?
• I went looking for the 'things' in the Linens 'n Things site and still haven't found anything remotely useful. It should be renamed 'Linens and lots of crap. The marketing department would shoot that down though I'd bet.
• Sometimes the truth is more naked than we can bear. If this were socially acceptable in public I wouldn't be surprised to see men gazing at their euphamism frequently and with great pride. :)
• I thought that bat boy was a joke and had it filed under humour. Now that it's really an off-broadway show I'm scared and even more convinced than ever that the end of the world is nigh.
• I don't have a fetish for cold butter so I can't quite figure out why I fancied the butter dispenser. If this thing fetches $17 then I really need to start selling paper clips for $10 as 'a special macintosh tool'.
• Perhaps I noted the page of clerihews to plot a scheme to replace the haiku meme.
• Friends shouldn't let friends create pages like this one. Keith, stop with the blinking!
• It is a tragedy that New England doesn't have a single White Castle. I could really go for a bag of 12 with a tall iced tea. Maybe I bookmarked this just to torture myself.
• As something of a casual historian I knowI sleep better at night knowing that someone is archiving all of the annoying banner ads on the net. Why Mangos, indeed.
• Have you noticed lately that there are little books on just about every niche topic in history possible? Now we have a web site and museum run by a man [ because a woman probably finds it too mundane ] on menstruation. Most interesting is the list of euphamisms for menstruation around the world. Finland is not represented, but the French have 'the English Navy has arrived'. I wonder if a travel agency could book a tour of the Museum of Menstruation and then fly you off to iceland for a visit to the Penis Museum.
• I bookmarked the Disgruntled Housewife long before I was married and it still is hilarious. The Meals Men Like make me think of pudge and giggle :)
• The completely useless yet wicked funny masshole site.
• If you think bailing out the airlines is expensive you should check out the Big Dig. Billions of dollars and more than 10 years later they still aren't done, raising tolls on the pike and it won't improve traffic through downtown when they are done. But hey, it's visible from space!
• The Journal of Mundane Behaviour proving there is a journal for everyone. They are looking for papers on 'mundane sex' for their next issue so...
• Now even your dog can be a flag waving freak!

I owe my bookmark organising sanity to URL Manager Pro, a terribly useful little utility.

permalink Ω 4 October 2001, Helsinki

Operation Endless Ennui

Well, I figure if Graham has started writing in one of these blog things, the apocalypse is upon us and I should maybe write a few words before the world comes to a complete end :)

Mac OS X v.10.1 was released this weekend and shows signs of being a major improvement over 10.0 and is helping to get me into working with Carbon and Cocoa for fun and killing time.

I recently had my Airport Basestation replaced by Apple due to a random bit of luck leading me to the Airport Power Supply Repair Experience site where it mentions that Apple is quietly replacing airports within a range of serial numbers due to bad capacitors. I felt a little guilty receiving a new airport after I had gotten over 2 years of reliable service from my original airport but...free beats $300 any day of the week. I also was a bit disappo
inted not to do the repair myself since my soldering iron is getting kinda rusty but...Thanks Apple :)

For any old farts who had macs back in the mid-80s and who remember 'Dark Castle' I recently found Color Dark Castle which has been ported to run on MacPPC. Try the demo and it will bring back all those hours of squinting at a 9" b&w crt trying to master rock throwing :) I'm still stuck on 70s and 80s arcade games while JHI is having fun with Diablo II and Summoner.

Since 11 September I've been trying to find something to read about the Middle East that is interesting to read and not written recently and I came across 2 titles Knopf has just re-released; "The Valleys of the Assassins" and "The Southern Gates of Arabia : A Journey in the Hadhramaut" by Freya Stark. I highly recommend them both as her writing is brilliant, engaging and a pleasure to read.

I bought a DYMO label printer with my tax refund from the US gov. There, I've done my patriotic duty of spending money on something I didn't really need. It was either that or a gas mask from the military surplus store...;)

There's an interview with Larry in the October issue of Linux Magazine. I read it in Borders and thought it was a nice interview if a complete rehash of the same old same old...and raised an eyebrow at the use of 'Perl guys' ...:)' Not worth paying for but if you see it on the rack have a browse and I'll make a pdf of the article once it makes it online.

email is 30 years old and is *STILL* the killer app.

....and Jarkko has iBook envy :) I've grown to love my little chiclet of joy so I think you'll soon see Mr. Jark hacking away at ugly Perl on a cute little iBook..:)

permalink Ω 2 October 2001, Helsinki