Honeybear: A retrospective

While I was finally cleaning out the office now that most of the dirty work of renovation has passed I ran across the cutest picture of HoneyBear as a puppy chewing on a tiny pocket pack of tissues. I had forgotten just how small and adorable he was when he was so young. He came into my life at a time when it wasn't terribly responsible of me to have a canine friend but he has proven to be the smartest choice I made back then.

Dean Allen has oodles of pictures of his dogs including a daily picture which makes me feel like a bad parent since I have so few pictures of HB. I went hunting for pictures of my best friend, taken over the past 11 years with a wide range of cameras, scanned them in and made a retrospective of his life. I hope there will be many more years and photos to come.

28 Jun 2003 at 11:43, Helsinki

Hietalahden Kirpputori

Apparently the 'blogerati' were in Helsinki last week for a meeting at Nokia with the new ventures organization. Of course, there were blog entries about what was presumeably a secret invite-only affair but one of them posted pictures of the Hietalahden Kirpputori which happens to be right around the corner from where we live. Strangely, the photos were mostly of himself or a woman with bleached dreadlocks instead of the gorgeous kauppahalli and few of them were in focus.

The Hietalahden Kirpputori [ Hietalahti Flea Market ] is a unique spot in Helsinki since it's the only outdoor flea market in the city. The Kauppahalli is a recently restored architectural treasure built in 1903. In February, Helsinki announced that they would close most of the shops inside the kauppahalli due to budget cutbacks. Inside there remains a tiny museum display of a circa 1940 grocery stall complete with vintage goods including Nokia toilet paper. The vaulted ceilings with airy pine supports and the beautifully aged wooden stalls lend the building a comforting warmth. I don't know what the city is planning to do with the kauppahalli but I do hope they preserve the interior since buildings today don't have the same character.

The one thing that fascinates me about the kirpputori is the ebb and flow in the span of less than 10 hours. By day the lot is teeming with people and kitsch and by night it is quiet and completely vacant. I put together a small selection of photos depicting a day in the life of the Hietalahden Kirpputori.

26 Jun 2003 at 12:40, Helsinki

Hyvää Juhannusta!

Juhannus. Midsummer. Traditionally observed on the Saturday between the 20th and 26th of June it is the celebration that marks the summer solstice. Jarkko's parents had us over for the weekend and we had an incredibly nice time. I took a bunch of photos some of which turned out but a lot of them didn't since the weather and the light conspired against me on many occasions. We didn't have the best weather but it was still a lot of fun anyway.

On Friday afternoon we had a fabulous lunch and relaxed with HoneyBear before going to Seurasaari for the bonfires. Erikki and Eila hadn't been there for Midsummer since 1967 so it was incredibly nice of them to go along for what must be terribly old hat for the locals but new for me.

It was crowded along the way to the far side of the island, an outdoor museum of culture and architecture, with local craftspeople lining the path. There was a cute young girl dressed in a traditional costume selling 'magic spells'.

One after another, each fire was lit and accompanied by singing. There were people crowding the shore, sitting up on the rocks along and in boats on the water waiting for the main fire to start. A long boat carrying the Juhannus wedding couple, married just hours earlier on the island, rowed out and back with a torch to light the largest and final bonfire. Afterwards there were several hours of music and dancing in the outdoor festival grounds nearby but it began to rain so we didn't stay.

» Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon!
» Koko kokkoko?
» Koko kokko.

» Kokko (name), gather the whole kokko (midsummer fire)!
» The whole kokko?
» The whole kokko.

We went to Porvoo on Saturday and walked around the old town though few of the shops were open. It's a town on the King's Road which is rich in history and I'd like to return some afternoon to see the markets when they're open as Eila mentioned they are quite good. One of the radio stations we were listening to in the car had a roving reporter with a microphone running around the deserted center of Helsinki which was pretty amusing. I finally got to try the Finnish makkara, a bratwurst-like sausage, and enjoyed them quite a lot but what's not to love about meat and fat grilled and eaten with mustard and bread? :)

It was a very quiet, restful and lazy holiday marking the time where we must now watch the amount of daylight wane until December.

23 Jun 2003 at 2:13, Helsinki

Observing Finland

Since arriving here in Helsinki, I've kept a little list of things I notice and manage to remember to write down. There are lots of things I've seen but forgot to make a note of that will have to wait for later. :)

• The eggs are not refrigerated. I went looking for the kanamuna several times before I realised that they were not in the refrigerated dairy section but near it on the shelves. I think the health department in the US would faint at the sight of them.
• Burberry scarves and plaid everywhere. All winter long, everywhere I looked, there were women in Burberry plaid scarves. I don't recall ever seeing Burberry worn in such concentration.
• Grocery stores are smaller and stock more whole foods. There are loads of cakes, bisuits and candy but very little selection of what would qualify as junk food.
• The majority of people I've seen are of a reasonable size which makes me think that the lack of fast food joints on every corner, no obsession with fat free/low-fat foods in the grocery and mostly whole foods in the grocery are somehow related to this. There is an obsession with lactose and gluten-free foods since dairy products are so much a part of the diet that lactose intolerance is very common.
• The Osbournes is un *beeped* which makes it more entertaining but somehow looses most of its cachet. Although nothing will help the strip poker show on after 11p it does make me happy to live somewhere that doesn't really get all fussy over a few dirty words and naked people on TV.
• Female TV news anchors actually have a few extra pounds. It's nice to see women on TV who aren't stick figures.
• Mannequins have perky, erect nipples and anatomically correct bulges. The downside is that most of us are not 17 anymore...gravity does have a price.
• Some movies which have English titles are translated and some are not though what the algorithm is for selecting titles for translation is unknown. I would guess that the ones with titles that can be translated are and the rest are just left alone, but I don't think that's correct.
• Finnish movie theatres all have reserved seating. This is so much nicer than the seating free-for-all in US theatres.
• Donald Duck, a.k.a. Aku Ankka, is very popular. I really haven't delved into the Finnish psyche enough just yet to understand this particular oddity.
• Kotipomo - literally means 'house boss' -- She who must be obeyed. I love this word and hope it makes its way into English slang. :)
• "The Wonderful K"! K is sublime. If Finland had the Wheel of Fortune TV show they'd have to buy K's. James Thurber would have loved writing about K.
• The anti-fur protesters would need to buy a paint plant to keep up with all the fur coats and accessories here. There are crowds of short old ladies who wear the full-length mink with matching pillbox hat and shop at Stockmann. Who can blame them as fur is warm :)
• Some Finnish words make me giggle. Such as 'puu' (wood) but is pronounced like 'poo' and 'mopo' (moped) which makes me think of a tiny St. Louis dialect that involves an array of 2 letter words all ending in o, e.g. FoPo for Forest Park, PoHo for poor ho and HoJo for Howard Johnson's...all in the state of MO :)
• Energy efficiency is apparent in many, if not most, appliances and lights.
• Portion sizes on the nutritional information panels are far more realistic than the ones in the US. Eating 100g of a 200g can of pringles is far more likely than 'approximately 8 chips'.
• My wardrobe fits in perfectly here as black is very fashionable :)
• Hay may be for horses but in Finland Hei is hello :) And 'ei', pronounced 'eh', means no.
• Street numbers are usually under 100 and the numbering between street blocks is not consistent, e.g. a building on the corner of one street may be 28 but on the next street over it might be 18 or 35. I've yet to figure how this came to be.
• English shows up in a lot of unexpected places, especially in advertisements, e.g. the entire text of an ad will be in Finnish but the slogan will be in English.
• Finland is a place of many superlatives yet is a quiet little Nordic country that even the BBC couldn't locate on a map.
• When Finland has a national holiday they mean it as there really aren't any grocery stores or anything else open...except for the pubs.
• Finns may avoid eye contact with people on the sidewalk but they nearly always will stop and talk to my St. Bernard and ask how old he is. A large percentage of Finns are dog people :)

20 Jun 2003 at 14:17, Helsinki

Who says the Finnish can't have fun?

On Saturday we went to see the Helsinki Samba Carnaval which was really amazing with so many colours and fabulous costumes. I put the pictures up in new photo album in two different sections, samba1 and samba2, as there were a lot of photos, many of which I had to weed out. I'm rather happy with some of the photos and am glad they turned out rather nicely.

17 Jun 2003 at 21:44, Helsinki

A Pleasant Afternoon

Jarkko and I went to his cousin Heini's confirmation party yesterday and I took some photos of our rather pleasant afternoon there. Jarkko has a really nice family and they, hopefully, didn't think it too strange when I took photos of the absolutely divine cookies for which I had to hunt the recipe down.

I decided to put the photos into a mock-up photo album of what I hope to have perl and mysql do for me soon but I wanted to get a feel for the presentation since I'm working in reverse. It was a good exercise as I have a much better idea of what I need to do and noticed small details from the one I am copying the layout from such as the thumbnails are carefully chosen bits from the picture instead of just a miniature version of the whole picture. I'll have to look into some of the graphics utilities to see if there is anything that will select a 50x50 chunk of a picture based on pixel variation.

Aside from its pleasantly austere display of the photos it really forces you to choose the best photos in a series and limit them to a small number since too many would ruin the effect. I really like this as I've been through far too many picture collections on the web where there is only 1 interesting photo in 25 or more which is a waste of time, especially since they are often not sized for the web.

Herewith follows the recipe for the cookies I could eat far too many of and still want more :)

Lusikkaleivät - Teaspoon cookies

Ainekset (ingredients):

• 200g Voita - 1 cup butter
• 1,5 dl Sokeria - 1 cup sugar
• 2 tl Vaniljasokeria - 2 teaspoons vanilla sugar or 3 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 tl Soodaa - 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 4 dl Vehnäjauhoa - 3 cups sifted white flour
• Omenasosetta - apple puree/jam
• Sokeria - granulated sugar

Ohje:

Kiehauta rasva kattilassa välillä sekoittaen. Kun vaahto alkaa laskea, kaada rasva kulhoon. Lisää sokeri ja anna seoksen jäähtyä. Sekoita jäähtynyt seos tasaiseksi. Lisää keskenään sekoitetut kuivat aineet. Painele taikinaa soikeaan, mielellään melko syvään lusikanpesään ja vedä tästä pellille leivinpaperin päälle kupera puoli ylöspäin. Paista 175°C asteen lämmössä 12-15 minuuttia. Pane vähän jäähtyneinä kaksi vastakkain ja väliin sosetta tai marmelaadia. Kierittele pikkuleivät sokerissa tai siivilöi päälle tomusokeria ennen tarjoilua.

Directions:

Brown the butter in a heavy saucepan. Cool. Stir in the sugar and vanilla and mix well. Sift the flour with the soda and slowly add to the butter mixture, mixing until a smooth dough is formed. To shape, press dough into a teaspoon and level off with a knife. Place oval flat side down onto a greased baking sheet. Bake in a slow oven at 350°F for 12-15 minutes. While they are still warm, gently roll cookies in a shallow bowl of coarse granulated sugar and/or sandwich 2 cookies together with a bit of jam.

note: I am told the jam is not often used as the cookies are very delicate and are difficult to eat when sandwiched together. I also suspect that it would make the cookies a bit too sweet so a jam that isn't overly sugary like apple would likely be better.

16 Jun 2003 at 13:54, Helsinki

Lumen Valo

Jarkko introduced me to Lumen Valo a few years ago. Their name is something of a pun since Lumen means light in Latin and Valo the same in Finnish :) We got a copy of their most recent album, Gravity, last night and it is utterly outstanding. It was performed and recorded in a church which really gives it an ethereal quality. As a 'recovering Catholic' I continue to find it odd that this genre of music still gets to me in a way I cannot quite explain. :)

12 Jun 2003 at 17:59, Helsinki

Reverse engineering

Last week, while waiting for a compile, I toyed with a few MT plug-ins and must admit that few of them interested me much. The weather plug-in is nice but completely pointless since it's a static web page and only updates when you rebuild the web page not when someone visits the page so I'll probably remove it. The book queue plug-in is a bit nicer but doesn't download and store the thumbnails and doesn't have a small synopsis field either. Maybe I'll rewrite it for a full books section.

The one thing I've really been wanting for two years now is a decent photo display application. Everything I've seen is either too busy, too complex, too slow, too annoying or too something or other. However, I did find PhotoStack a few weeks ago and got excited since it was an application made to emulate the texism photo gallery which I have always found very attractive.

The strength of the textism photo gallery is that it is very simple in its presentation and allows the photos to stand on their own. Sadly, PhotoStack is written in PHP which I simply could not get fully operational on either OS X or Solaris with Apache and mod_perl. I could use a lot of foul language to describe my 3 days of attempting to get the application to work but I feel somewhat vindicated that even Jarkko had a similar ordeal with another PHP application.

So, given the PhotoStack application and the HTML and CSS from Textism, I'm just going to reverse engineer the sucker in perl and mysql and see how it goes.

12 Jun 2003 at 12:38, Helsinki

Antti Ozzy

One of the first things I noticed about Finland when we arrived was that the Osbournes Show wasn't a video with a *beep* soundtrack. I was rather briefly entertained by actually hearing the entire family speak without censoring but it's odd how quickly the show it lost its cachet without the *beep*.

I guess Finland got bored of the Osbournes too as they are now going to air 8 episodes of The McCoys Show on MTV3. It's a very similar recipe -- a brain-fried former guitarist from Hanoi Rocks who can't enunciate or communicate clearly who was saved by his wife [ a yankee even ] and are now selling their daily lives on 'reality' TV.

I feel obligated to watch the first episode as though I'm some sort of expert on lame American pop-culture so that I can guage just how well Finland has been studying the airwaves. I'm really curious to see if Andy McCoy will be more intelligible in garbled Finnish than Ozzy is in mumbled English. :)

Reality TV is like blogging for the masses only less entertaining and much like watching a train wreck; painful, yet strangely compelling. I wonder how soon they'll air a reality TV show where all they do is film a bunch of bloggers tapping out their dull life stories on their laptops at Starbucks. How about an entire series of Warchalking and the quest for free wireless? Why not, they've had just about everything else except some of the more unseemly parts of suburban living.

12 Jun 2003 at 11:14, Helsinki

Gimmankanto

In the fine Nordic tradition of pillaging villages and carrying off the young women Finland has the annual wife carrying championships in Sonkajärvi.

Today there was a gimmankantu event in downtown Helsinki so I strolled down the street in search of amusement and maybe some decent photos. I went an hour early and found the park already crowded. The bandstand was mobbed with people eagerly awaiting the start of the festivities. There was even a torch to lend an olympic air to the scene [ I love this photo as the kid looks like all she wants is ice cream while behind them is a giant poster for the official event in Sonkajärvi that almost looks real instead of a photo. ] :)

I lamented not bringing beer with me as it seemed like everyone was enjoying some sort of fun enhancing beverage, including the contestants. There was one couple who I watched guzzle down a litre of koskenkorva before running, or should I say walking, the course. They were so hammered that the crowd cheered when they finished. :)

There was a wide array of contestants, some of whom were in costume. I liked the costumes as they added a bit of fun and I thought they should have given extra points to those who went to the trouble. There was easy rider, Casper and Wendy, chicken little and the bunny, the hippies and the mod squad [ the winners ], the troll and fairy and the sisu footballers.

The course was pretty wimpy compared to the official course but the contestants started at the far end, met the water hazard, turned the corner through the tyres, lept over the hay bales and made a mad dash up the ramp to the bandstand to finish. There were a number of different styles of carrying the women; piggyback, upside down, on top of the shoulders as well as lying across the shoulders. I don't know what prize the winners recieved but they seemed to have a lot of fun.

In the background was a guy making a sculpture of unknown artistic value with a chainsaw which was mesmerizing to watch since I've always been a bit scared/respectful of chainsaws. Some of the professional photogs kept slyly looking over at me and passing by to see if I was new competition with the fancy camera which gave me a bit of a giggle. An afternoon of completely wacky, harmless fun. :)

7 Jun 2003 at 0:29, Helsinki

Feenish Him

Finland recently had a story about a fine entrant for the Darwin Awards: A drunk driver run over by his own car.

The unlikely incident took place in the parking lot of a store. The man was attempting to get his car started, and having failed to do so using the traditional key-in-the-ignition method, he got out and opened the hood, jump-starting the car from there. Unfortunately, the vehicle was apparently in gear and it lurched forward, running over his lower legs before it collided with two other parked vehicles.

Brilliant. At that level of BAC though I have to hand it to him for being able to hotwire the car at all since he likely could have fueled the car with his breath alone. :)

5 Jun 2003 at 22:27, Helsinki

The Cautionary Tale of Crake

I recently read Margaret Atwood's new book Oryx and Crake and found it to be an excellent read in spite of the lukewarm reviews it seems to be getting from the critics. I collect post-apocalyptic fiction and have since I found a liking for it when I was 8 or so. Perhaps I have always had a dark view of humanity and Oryx and Crake touches a very particular potential future for humankind should the unbridled hubris of scientific 'progress' continue.

Margaret Atwood did her research for the subject matter of this book very diligently as it is not simply one event that brings about the dystopic future and it lends the story a realistic texture and dimension. So many post-apocalyptic stories tend to focus on just one event that it makes them less credible. I cannot imagine one single event, apart from the Sun going supernova, that would effectively eradicate all human life.

The story opens with Snowman in the aftermath who tells the story in the frame of flashbacks. His name was Jimmy in his former life where he grew up in a series of corporate compounds, enclaves erected to protect biotech researchers from the pleblands outside the walls. All of the coastal cities have been submerged by this time and the weather in February is like summer in the Sahara. It's an astute observation for her to make that global warming will come but it will merely force adaptation rather than extinction. The real story begins when he meets the precocious Crake who foreshadows the shape of things to come.

In a time of near obsession with technology and biotechnology I think Oryx and Crake should be essential reading because it could be our future not very long from now. I have worked in biotech laboratories and I wouldn't bank my future on the validity of the results from most research conducted today. Many academic labs are giving way to corporate research funding which also tends to have an effect on the direction and tenor of the work.

Humans know so little about the world around them yet seemingly have the hubris enough to believe that the genome which took billions of years to evolve can be understood enough in 50 years to be manipulated without dire consequence. Margaret Atwood understands the precipice upon which we now stand and the dizzying fear at the thought of the intentional misuse of what powerful little we know. Many of the physicists at Los Alamos regretted the consequences that followed the creation of the nuclear fission bomb but there are much greater risks and consequences in trusting scientists and megacorps with the one thing we all have in common; our DNA.

3 Jun 2003 at 17:38, Helsinki