Old Tall Ships

« A mast and sails on a Finnish Tall Ship during a 90 minute tour around Kruunuvuorenselkä on Helsinki Day. »

On Helsinki Day we got tickets for the Old Tall Ships Tour on the Inga-Lill. The Brits and the Dutch seem to titter at the Finnish tall ships since, of course, theirs are larger and they both had navies of some repute, but the Finns do like to remind them that without Finnish pine tar their boats would have sunk in rather short order. The day was as wet as it could be without it being a full monsoon which made it somewhat difficult to take pictures, but it was still a treat to ride out into open water under full sail without the help of an engine.

There is something terribly romantic about these wooden ships in an age of the giant metal cruise ships which insulate you as much as possible from the idea that you are on the water. The captain of the ship did give a reasonably long talk about the history of the tall ships in Finnish which I hope I have remembered correctly. The Inga-Lill was built in 1947, after WWII, as a cargo ship to transport goods around the Baltic and the archipelago. Most of the surviving tall ships were built around this period since there were a lot of idle shipwrights in the post-war slump and they needed work. When more modern cargo ships were developed these boats were left behind but have been restored to their original beauty in recent years thanks to enthusiasts and charter cruises. The crew mentioned that the Traditional Sailing Ships Association welcomes new members, which would be a really interesting thing to do, but I'm not much of a sailor. There is a very thorough tall ships website which has a lot of history and details on boats from many different countries and also the Maritime Museum of Finland which covers the history of the tall ships in Finland.

permalink Ω 30 June 2004, Helsinki

Catching up

I've got a bunch of pictures to catch up on and scan in, as well as photos from Juhannus coming later this week, so the people who seem to like my pictures have something to look forward to in the coming week.

permalink Ω 29 June 2004, Helsinki

The Future solution for SPAM

It's the doldrums of summer when everyone is off on holiday or surfing for porn on the internet with their laptop out in the park. I've got a short break between Finnish courses and I've been catching up on my reading a bit. I thought I'd read a bit of fiction for a change so I gave The Zenith Angle a try. This book was so bad that I would feel a pang of pity for Sterling if it hadn't wasted a few hours of my time reading such a pathetic excuse for a book. Oh, how I mourn the days of wonderful sci-fi with authors like Clarke, Verne, Wells, Burroughs and E. E. Smith who never, ever wrote crap like this:

We are attacking that Iridium satellite, said Tony. Right now. There is no visible beam. It is a very energy-efficient process. The adaptive beam has to penetrate miles of atmosphere with as little signal loss as possible. We don't even generate the laser pulses locally. we amplify them and collate them. We are beaming Internet traffic up into the sky, from the telescope, right now. Those Internet signals come from all over the planet.

Don't the people miss their Internet when you throw it up into outer space? said Sanjay.

It's all spam.

No.

Yes, I am attacking a satellite with laser spam.

No.

We are running a major Internet backbone across the Rocky Mountains here, said Tony patiently. We have spam filters. Nobody ever asks where the spam goes. We beam the spam into outer space.

Insert a Dr. Evil-esque RRRiiiiigggghhhhT in there, call it the "Alan Parsons Project" and it could almost be a comedy. And this is as good as it gets in the book. There is a glue gun that gets so much air time in the story that it becomes a motif and I think maybe that Sterling had been huffing the glue pretty hard while writing. Sure, it's peppered with references to people in this reality and, of course, 911, but this book is so bad I hope there is a way to deploy the remainders against the terrorists instead of vicitimising the unsuspecting bargain hunters at B&N with this monumentally craptastic attempt at a story. I think I'll just go back and re-read the classics instead of wasting my time and money on these horribly disappointing books.

permalink Ω 29 June 2004, Helsinki

Disbelieving

In the May issue of the Believer Magazine is an article that looks interesting from the title, V 4.0 - The dilemma of the programmer: How can the best and the brightest grow in intellectual maturity without becoming ensnared in eternal servitude and professionalized infantilization? I had hoped that it might be an intelligent discourse on the coming age of programming and the ensuing commoditisation of software, but it is an article so disorganised and so marred with inaccuracies that it makes me wonder if the magazine employs editors or fact checkers. This issue of the Believer is really the Disbeliever.

The author claims to be or have been a programmer, but within the first page his credibility is damaged by:

A true appreciation of programming culture means immersing yourself in these elephantine tomes, absorbing their cryptic cryptology as if it were some strange and unknowable potion. Where does one begin? I started with Perl--a tireless workhorse of a language that, despite its age (over twenty years old, i.e., positively ancient), continues to surprise with its durability, like a late-career Clint Eastwood.

Perl isn't 20 years old and anyone has the ability to figure that out with a simple perldoc perlhist command if they have perl installed on their computer or a browser that can get to a search engine on the net. The year now is 2004 and perl was released on 18 December 1987. Doing the math would indicate that Perl is not yet 17 years old. And, in terms of computing languages it really isn't all that terribly ancient when you consider C, FORTRAN, BASIC and plenty of other languages that are still alive and well today pre-date Perl by as much as 30 years. Wired printed a nice timeline of computing languages [500k] a couple of years ago that does a good job of illustrating just how recent many languages are. And, a late-career Clint Eastwood does crap films like The Bridges of Madison County which make anyone who has seen his earlier films pity him for not getting out at the top rather than the bottom of his career.

He continues to ramble about how real [Perl] programmers love inscrutible compact code with a nugget of ugly looking perl code to prove it, how real programmers only carry O'Reilly books [and in his case, don't seem to read them] and how COBOL and FORTRAN are "extinct" with C getting there soon. I wonder if he ever bothered to look at the source code for perl or anything else.

The article rambles further with quotes and analysis from The Bug, microserfs, The Cryptonomicon and others but without any kind of cohesive thread. Sure, they're all geeky books, but this article wasn't claiming to be a geek book listing and review. However, the absolute end of credibility comes when he speaks of C as an FSF project.

For veteran coders, the open source movement is hardly news, frankly. (The C programming language and many other Unix tools were born from the Free Software Foundation's GNU project which was intended to create an entire operating system for free.) Sharing programs--and more importantly making their source code publicly available--is as fundamental to programming as cheese doodles and high-caffeine beverages.

I hope K&R manage to keep their teeth in when they come across that gem. The History of C and the History of the GNU project are both online and refute the egregiously inaccurate statement [and I really hope Brad Kuhn from the FSF writes a letter to the editors]. How does someone who claims to be a programmer write an article so clearly ignorant of the well documented history of his topic and doesn't obsessively check his facts 20 times over before publishing? The dot.com legacy lives on.

At the conclusion of the article is a revelation of disillusionment which does, in retrospect, tie a few bits of the article together.

Of all of the declarations of machine love in Coupland's novel, this steadfast belief in the salvational power of computing seems the most dated. As more undergrads flee the confines of engineering halls for the spacious atria of business schools, the future of the computer science appears increasingly sparse and anemic. And yet, attemps by Bill Gates and the like to promote the profession as fun and exciting ultimately belie a hard truth. Programming devours you. It maims, it scars, it cripples. It feeds vampirically on the minds of those who have dedicated themselves to its maintenance. If computing is in fact mankind's saviour, it demands sacrifice in return.

Jesus, if you're a programmer you better just go kill yourself now and spare yourself the protracted agony and suffering ahead of you if you believe the author. I mean, sure, programming in the dot.bomb age is a lot less sexy than the days spent in anonymity in the basement on a university campus somewhere while doing some really cutting edge stuff, but that's the price we pay for ubiquity.

I really do despise media that promote geek stereotypes and inaccuracies because we tend to do a good enough job at that ourselves with RMS, ESR and other fanatics who tend to give people the false impression that programmers are a largely insane, unwashed crowd with a love for handguns. I suppose that we'll have to wait until programming becomes so mainstream that it is no longer common to portray its practitioners as freaks whose minds have been crippled by 72-hour coding jags to read articles that don't have to rely on stereotypes to liven up the writing and make the profession seem, if not exciting, like a soul-sucking hellhole. In the interim though, would it be too much to ask the writers and editors to at least get the verifiable facts right?

permalink Ω 27 June 2004, Helsinki

Pack an umbrella

« A soggy Helsinki Day on a Finnish tall ship. »

Helsinki will be empty by evening as people flee to their summer cottages to eat, drink and dance around the Juhannus bonfires. The forecast calls for rain through Sunday so it's sure to be a bit soggy and chilly....just like last year. It is supposedly summer, but I prefer to call it the 'not-winter' season since this weather is what we get in March back home. :) But, at least it's not snowing and what's not to love about white nights, cold beer and grilled sausages with friends even if a bit moist? I'm looking forward to getting out of the city and not doing Finnish homework for a week or so. Happy Juhannus to all. :)

permalink Ω 24 June 2004, Helsinki

Berries, Beans and Birds

A few fun and odd summer reading titles. Finnish class is over and we have a week off before the next class begins so I'm glad to have a bit of a break and I fully intend to read something completely fluffy without any fuzzy a's or disappearing k's. :)

• The Berry Bible : With 175 Recipes Using Cultivated and Wild, Fresh and Frozen Berries ≈ Berries are big here. Real big.
• The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters ≈ I hope that there's an appendix for ways to deal with deciphering what the popular dishes really contain.
• Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Controversial Times ≈ There could probably be an entire book written on the usage of the word "Freedom" over the past 4 years alone. :)
• Field Guide to the North American Bird ≈ To complement The F-Word book.
• Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid ≈ The micro-topic history books just keep on coming.
• Twentieth Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape ≈ The US Interstates revolutionised travel in the US as well as altered the landscape of small town America forever.

permalink Ω 23 June 2004, Helsinki

Glowing Colons with Barium

« A mannequin in Talinn sporting a t-shirt that reminded me of Perl people with the added bonus that it would make a splash with the apostrophic jihad. »

Last week was YAPC::NA and I am sorry I missed Gnat's Lightning Talk entitled What the Perl Community Needs is a Good Enema. I've heard Gnat give this sort of talk before as repetition is often an effective learning tool, but this time he's getting closer to the truth. Mark Twain, a fellow Missourian and cynic, once said, "Familiarity breeds contempt...and children."

Perl has a seriously dysfunctional family at some levels; there are sacred cows; there are needless politics; people suffer sociopaths for their 'code' and other mystifying reasons. And, like any family with problems who don't want to be confrontational, they tend to focus on the abstract and far more benign symptoms of dysfunction instead which usually does little to fix the problems, but does succeed in shifting the uncomfortable point of focus elsewhere. CPAN is often a very popular target of this phenomenon since it's easy to do, generally vague and it carries little risk that anyone might actually force you to put your money where your mouth is. The problem is people, that's certain, but if there were any leadership in the community the problems would, if not disappear, would at least be far less destructive.

Let's return to July 2000, when TPC4 was in Monterey, CA and I was invited on short notice to attend what was billed as a meeting to attempt to draft something of a "Constitution" for the Perl community. I was intrigued since, at the time, the community was as bitter, ugly, and pissy as a crowd of open source nerds ever were. There were about 11 people in this meeting. After an hour or so of discussion about what could be done to effect some positive social change in the community, Jon Orwant showed up, tried to break the hotel stonewear mugs built to outlast puny humans and somehow the idea of Perl6 became the shining new light that would save Perl from stagnation and doom. I felt a bit betrayed since I had originally pitched up for something I felt was far more important and noone wanted to answer my question "Why?".

I told Jarkko and a few others on the way out of that meeting that they could count on P6 never coming to fruition until the deep and vast social problems in the community were addressed. It wasn't a popular comment, but I remained and still remain firm in my conviction. The P6 project, in spite of itself, turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to P5P since it drew most of the problem people to the 'community rewrite' and left the folks who actually wrote code to get things done. However, I don't think that was really the point of the exercise and it has taken what was a fractured community and simply added another gaping fissure which seems to belch sulphurous gases at regular intervals.

Perl6 presaged what I have come to call "the age of the press release" in the timeline of perl. People not only are legends in their own minds and believe their own press releases, but many projects since have been more concerned with the press release than the actual project itself. It is a culture that has seriously lost sight of what brought us all together in the first place. A culture so incredibly pleased with itself that it forgets that volunteering for a job used to mean that you did the work first without talking it to death. The Perl Foundation is the only place I've EVER gotten bitched out for pressing the issue of sending thank-you notes to donors. ALWAYS thank your donors and volunteers, I don't care if you are some hopped up nerd king who claims Asperger ate your social cortex. I'll admit that I was a real PITA about it, but after 3 years and little improvement it wasn't entirely unwarranted. I think the person behind that particular clusterfuck is on both of our lists of what Nathan calls "Oldbies" and I call "sociopathic MFs". This is the part where I start waving my arms, cussing wildly and ranting about TPF but it, too, is just a victim of the symptoms of a far larger problem.

I was on the White Camel Awards committee Gnat mentions and, with a few other folks, subscribed to the list late but arrived just in time to see the tail end of a rant followed by 2 or 3 people sending "I quit!" messages. I wondered what in the hell was going on, got the lowdown from someone in a private email and thought how typical for perl people to make painful that which could be so easy and possibly even pleasant. I had been prepared to stump for and debate over candidates when I agreed to participate, but the enthusisam was gone after that. I have, for many years, argued that the recipients of the awards should be selected by the people in the community instead of an awards cabal since they are touted as awards for service in the community. The awards are important and they should reflect the opinion of more than 4 or so people in a small cabal of friends who bothered to vote. However, I'm not entirely certain that the community at large could be bothered to care or vote these days. HJ gets it even though he identifies the absence of the inner onion entourage as a symptom in spite of the fact that the YAPC::EU conferences rarely get the 'names' and are the conferences to be at for the active developers in the past few years. He has noted well the necrosis.

While I think Gnat needs to repeat his talk more often and in a more pointed fashion, it needs to focus on the one thing that many of us have pointed at for a long while; Perl needs some strong leadership. It needs leaders who are less concerned about playing politics and making nice to everyone while quietly bitching in the corner and leaders who are willing to defile the sacred cows and who won't be left twisting in the wind alone. Just inviting people to rewrite web pages and join committees sounds a lot like the Perl6 "community rewrite of Perl" call to glory which did little to solve any of the social problems which are the soul of the malaise. Nothing will change until those who enjoy all the benefits of being leaders without actually leading, lead.

When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, but later we find that is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's. -- Mark Twain

I have, rather unexpectedly been getting a lot of quiet support and praise for this piece, but the best quote of all was:

I think the Perl 6 announcement is where Perl jumped the shark.

I suppose that noone is really saying much publicly because, well, few really give a damn anymore, but it's like watching something die a slow, theatrical death and it makes me sad for the days when things were good. I don't know if those for whom I chose my words most carefully for have read this but I can hope that I'm not just preaching to the choir who could fill a large cathedral at this point.

permalink Ω 21 June 2004, Helsinki

Around the Solar System in an afternoon

« The pavilion where Uranus lives. »

A few weeks ago, Janne "Butt Ugly" Jalkanen mentioned a scale model of the Solar System in Helsinki which I hadn't ever heard about. I am, apparently, not alone in this as just about everyone I asked about it hadn't ever heard of it either, expat and native alike, which was rather surprising since it has been around since 1992. Jarkko found the Ursa Aurinkokunnan Malli website for me and I was fascinated by such magnificent nerd porn only a few kilometers away. :) After some prodding, he translated the directions for me and I rode the bus up to Pajamäki one afternoon with a map and my camera. Perhaps I'm just an easily entertained nerd, but this is the coolest thing since the MIT dome was adorned with a complete police car.

You can bicycle or walk around the model as a car tends to be rather cumbersome since the planets are situated in some out of the way places. The model was especially well placed for a long walk in the woods and around a few islands. Take a picnic and a big bottle of bug repellant. The Ursa pages frequently mention the visibility of the model of the Sun from the other planets but, maybe I'm getting old and going blind, unless you have x-ray vision or a pocket telescope it seems to be a bit of a stretch of the imagination.

Since I decided to make an English version of the pages, I also took the liberty to breathe a little love into the HTML and pictures since they've likely been the same for a decade. It's difficult to sex-up pictures of bits of metal atop grey concrete pillars, but I made an attempt anyway. The information guides have a really nice bicycling map with the locations of the planets, but I included one that I made since their map isn't available on-line. I moved the pages into XHTML 1.0 and kept much of the original design while bringing it into W3C compliance and added a few links and the navbar on the left. Jarkko did much of the translation, but I gave up torturing him and translated most of the guidemap texts at the bottom of the pages. I've got a tarball of it all which I'd like to offer to the Ursa folks if they're interested.

• The Scale Model of the Solar System
• A few extra photos and the rest in A Walk Around the Solar System

It seems a pity that such a neat installation should go so unnoticed, even when in plain view. I'd like to help replace Pluto and maybe get a day set aside during the dark months before the snow arrives where we can get dressed up as comets and ride around the model on our bikes, ending up at the Sun. The possibilities with day-glo, glo-sticks and battery powered lights could really make for a fun event. :) Bring back Pluto!

n.b. - Check out this scale solar system model in Maine with the nicely done planets and the "Spaced Out" plan for a scale model in the UK which would include Halley's Comet. Thanks Paul! :) And yet another one in Boston! How did I manage to miss that?!

permalink Ω 20 June 2004, Helsinki

Bamford gets in the game

I've refrained from buying one of the hundreds of books about 911 and the "war on terror" over the past several years because I think much of their content is speculation and conjecture. However, James Bamford has recently published a book that has my full interest: A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. Bamford is an excellent researcher and superior analyst which is apparent in his previous books on the intelligence community. Especially now that the 911 commission appears to be making more progress in getting at the truth than I had hoped, I am looking forward to reading this book and watching the 911 reports expose the largesse and corruption which ultimately are responsible for the success of the attacks and support for a war that should never have been allowed to happen.

On a side note, my connectivity has been about as zippy [when it's actually functioning] as sucking cold molasses through a straw lately and, along with Finnish classes and spam clogging my .mac inbox, if you've sent me an email and I've not responded yet please don't despair as I'm not ignoring you. :) We're getting ADSL in a few weeks so this may help things along.

permalink Ω 20 June 2004, Helsinki

Nature so close, it'd bite you in the arse if it could

« A wooden platform path over marshland at Villa Elfvik. »

A few weekends ago, before the weather went to the cold rainy pattern we've been having lately, Jarkko and I went to Villa Elfvik, a nature reserve and beautiful English-style Jugend home that has been beautifully restored. The house is gorgeous, but the nature paths along the Laajalahti nature reserve/marshes are the most astonishing feature. As we walked around the grounds, I kept thinking how unbelieveably close to downtown Helsinki it is and how it would have been made into strip malls decades ago if it were situated close to a city in the US. Finns are so lucky to have protected the natural habitat in and around the metropolitan area before strip malls became a permanent feature on the global landscape. Of course, like anything you grow up around and see every day, it takes a fresh eye to appreciate what you've got.

Inside the house is a small exhibit on natural resources in Espoo, a cafe (open only on the weekends), some history about the house and its inhabitants and beautiful art nouveau appointments. The house was built in 1904 for baroness Elvira Standerskjöld and there are some events planned to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The paths outside on the grounds are maintained and scenic and there is a narrow path of wood planks that leads south through the marshes towards Otaniemi that even has cows and sheep along the way. One bummer about wading through a swamp during the not-winter season is mosquitos so it might have been a good idea to have carried some repellant. There are bird observation towers at either end of the path which offer a nice view of the area, too.

• A small map of the nature reserve
• A small map of the location of Villa Elfvik
• Getting there: Take the train to Leppävaara and either walk or take the 52, 57, 106 or any number of other busses that stop at Ruukinranta crossing and follow the signs.
• Free entrance. Open every day of the week during the summer and closed on Saturdays during the winter months.
• Take bug spray. :)

permalink Ω 16 June 2004, Helsinki

Baltic Jugend

« A Jugend building on Korkeavuorenkatu painted with a castle-like shadow in the late afternoon sun. »

Helsinki has some of the most beautiful Art Nouveau, a.k.a. Jugend, architecture in abundance. Much of Katajanokka and Töölö were designed and built during the few years that Jugend was popular and so hold the greatest concentrations of the style. The Finnish Museum of Architecture is currently showing and exhibit titled Architecture 1900 - Baltic Art Nouveau which explores the collaboration of Jugend architects from Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga and St. Petersburg. The years between 1890 and 1912 were likely the most interesting years in modern history and the buildings and designs reflect the meeting point of old and new. The exhibit is full of photographs, drawings, old postcards, currency designs and other bits of interest from the period in all 5 cities. Out of the sample, I'd have to say that Finland had the most beautiful overall style. There is a book to accompany the exhibit that is nicely designed, although it doesn't include all of the photos and drawings from the exhibit. Entrance is only 3,50€ and the book, in English, is 26€. All of the captions are in Finnish, Swedish and English as well. It will be at the museum until 29 August when it moves on to Stockholm.

The Musuem is also sponsoring a number of lectures and guided tours on the topic of Jugend architecture. It doesn't state what language the lectures are in, so it is likely safe to assume that they are in Finnish. There are, however, a few guided walks/tours that are in English.

• Wednesday, 18 August 2004, 6pm, MFA ≈ Finnish Architecture and Interaction around the Baltic Sea in the Early 1900s - Prof. Pekka Korvenmaa and Metropolitan Models - Town Planning in Finland - Timo Tuomi, Head of Research.
• Wednesday, 25 August 2004, 6pm, MFA ≈ Patrons from St. Petersburg Sponsoring New Finnish Architecture - Anna-Lisa Amberg, Ph.D. and Bonds around the Baltic Sea: Finnish - European Networks - Prof. Marjatta Hietala
• Thursday, 26 August 2004, The Night of the Arts, 6pm, MFA ≈ Architectural office of Usko Nyström-Petrelius-Penttilä: apartment building for six sections of the city in Helsinki - Eija Rauske, Researcher
• Saturday, 21 and 28 August 2004, 2pm and Thursday, 26 August 2004, 7.30pm (free entrance after 4pm) ≈ Guided Exhibition Tours
• Tuesdays 10, 17, 24 and Wednesdays 4 and 11 August 2004, 6pm, MFA ≈ Guided City Walks - Tuesdays, Facing the Stone City - Art Nouveau in Helsinki (Suomeksi) and Wednesdays, Art Nouveau Architecture in Helsinki (in English). Fee is 5/3€. Call (09) 8567 5100 for more info.

permalink Ω 15 June 2004, Helsinki

Hit the road Ray and dontcha come back no more

Ray Charles is dead. His music is timeless, unlike most of the forgettable music of the 80s, 90s and today. Of the few things that might make me feel proud of the country I have disowned, Ray Charles and his music are at the top of the list. I'm sure even the aliens who find the Voyager probe message and listen to his music on the disc will enjoy it. He may be gone, but hopefully we'll always have his music. So long Ray, and thanks for making the world a better place just by having had you in it.

permalink Ω 14 June 2004, Helsinki

Dalí Centennial

Salvador Dalí, were he still alive, would be 100 years old this year. There is an anniversary exhibit of some of his works until the end of June at the Vanha Satama in Helsinki which, if you admire his work, will be very appealing. I managed to get a free pass for 2 at the Helsinki tourism office when I noticed the passes sitting next to the brochure for the show, so if you want to save yourself 10 or 20 euro, a stop by the tourism office is a good idea. The exhibit has a lovely mixture of lithographs, sculptures and tapestries, including the Gargantua and Pantagruel series which is really clever and brilliant if you're familiar with the book. However, all of the works are for sale, so if you think that paying 10 euro for a high-end museum cum art gallery of reproductions is a bit much, you're probably right. Get a free pass or just visit some of the local galleries who seem to always have Dalí artwork for sale and, as far as I know, don't charge you to browse. Of course, if you have 444,000 euro burning a hole in your pocket, you can purchase the above sculpture and not really dither over the entrance fee. :)

permalink Ω 14 June 2004, Helsinki

Conan O'Brien needs more postcards

« An old postcard of the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki from 1953 that I bought in the Hämeenlinna tori a few weeks ago. It turned out to be a postcard sent to Erkki's, Jarkko's father, grade school teacher when she was in the UK. What an incredibly random and small world this is. »

A few weeks ago, Conan O'Brien started a "Conan O'Brien Hates My Homeland" postcard campaign by asking people from around the world to send him postcards and Finland was the first to send a card with a mildly profane greeting on it. :) Apparently, many other Finns have followed suit and the show airing tonight on SubTV should be fairly amusing for those of us here. Someone has a rather large [31mb] mpeg of the segment where he admits that Finland is his core audience and, to offer succor to his insulted fans, tells the world that Sweden does, in fact, suck. Now, I don't know that I have enough motivation to get Conan's head put on a stamp from the Suomen Posti as the earlier web page suggests, but what about sending Conan a postcard per week until he relents and promises to come do a show in Helsinki for a week like they did in Canada?! Maybe we can beg the Finnish Consulate, Finnish expats and other friends we have in NYC to go see the show and sing the "Finland, Finland, Finland" song until he agrees. It probably won't happen, but it sure would be fun to get him to do a show here. Think of all the things he could do: take a sauna, eat makkara, make fun of drunks on the trams and subway, attempt ordering coffee and korvapusti in Finnish, bring some Budweiser along and finally determine if Lapin Kulta is even more of a king of bad beer than Bud is, try salmiakki, wear something Marimekko, visit Santa, and sail to Stockholm to personally deliver the message that Sweden does, indeed, suck. :)

Finland, expats too, grab your pens, postage and postikorttit and direct your witty goading to:

Conan O'Brien hates my homeland Must Come To Finland
NBC
30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA
New York, NY 10112
USA

Extra bonus points for those who can communicate to him in his native dialect, Masshole Townese. Tell him we have wicked good Dunkin Donuts in Finland and massively large packies but that we gotta go to Talinn, our equivalent to New Hampshire, for cheap stuff. His family lives in Belmont, just over the road from where I used to live so he's still a townie. :)

permalink Ω 11 June 2004, Helsinki

He likes to watch

Every evening, when the old gimpmeister is feeling up to it, we slowly make our way over to the park so that he can lie on the grass [or snow] and roll around for a while and then watch the rest of the world going by. He used to do this when he was younger, too, but now he is simply content to be an aloof observer. Now that the weather is getting warm again, the park gets pretty busy in the evening with kids having picnics, walkers, joggers, bench bums and, of course, people walking their dogs. I don't blame HB for wanting to hang out for a while as sometimes it gets pretty interesting. It's also is a great way to avoid doing my inscrutable Finnish exercises for a little while.

I've been getting to know the residents in the neighbourhood by their pets since I don't know their names. I don't know why it is that dog people always remember the names of the dogs, but not the person's on the other end of the leash. A neighbourhood I used to live in had so many dogs that people were commonly referred to as "Spot's Dad" in conversation since it was likely that it would be more recognisable than "Mark". The personality of the human becomes subjugated by the charm of the cute, furry puppy with the wagging tail at their feet. There are quite a variety of people and dogs around our block of pavement: There is the nice older man with a pipe and a wee white puffball who has never barked at HB but often gives him a frightened look now and then when his eyes are visible through all the hair. He's the kind of man who is secure enough in his masculinity to have a frilly girly dog. It must be the pipe and the grey hair that does it. There is another guy who takes his shepherd mutt for a walk on his bicycle with the dog running along behind him. I often see him in blue coveralls which might mean he is in a trade of some sort. A year passed before he ever sort of nodded in my direction to acknowledge HB and I. There are the two sheepdogs who are aggressive and seemingly never on the leash but impeccably trained. I suppose the owners have to remember to feed the end that barks. At one point, I remember hearing a ruckus around the corner which sounded like a car crash but was the sheepdogs colliding with the dachshund trio resulting in a great deal of protest. And there is the old woman with 3 dachshunds who I keep expecting to pull her off her feet and drag her down the street someday in spite of how sprightly she walks. There are countless others who seem to appear at random in the dog area in the park that we've been getting familiar with, too. Jack Russell, Dachshund, Wheaton Terrier and various other terriers seem to be the most popular breeds. Mostly snack food, but there are the occasional big dogs who are well behaved with the microdogs. One is even bigger than HB which certainly got his attention after so many years of being the biggest dog on the block. Size matters, even for dogs. :)

A dog is much like a child in the respect that you identify with and are friendly towards other people in your common dogness and there is a social order that forms. I would take HB into the dog park but he is too tired and gimpy to play with the younger dogs and, in spite of being reasonably free of teeth, too fond of taking a chomp on the snack food-sized dogs which doesn't make many friends of the owners or the pets. So, we are content to sit in the shade, roll around on the grass and watch the other dogs chase each other and bark at the leviathan on the other side of the fence. Most of the dogs, in spite of their differences in size, seem to get on pretty well until a yip-yip-yapping in the distance begins. The owners look at each other, start collecting their best friends and clear the area post haste. As the yapping gets closer, you begin to contemplate justifications for canine barkectomy or doggie downers. When you locate the direction of the sound you see a person with two microscopic dogs on hopelessly tangled leashes being dragged behind them as they race towards the dog park while incessantly yapping at nothing in particular. Apparently they are brother and sister, one of whom tried to kill the other and they had to be separated for a while. I call them the 'twin rats on crack'. HB just eyes them with a rather blase curiosity while determining if they are food or not. I wonder sometimes if the dogs bark in Finnish and if he understands them.

permalink Ω 9 June 2004, Helsinki

Embracing Dead Trees

I've started noticing these totem pole-like sculptures around Helsinki and, I presume given the Finnish fondness for wood, that there are plenty of others around Finland. Perhaps Finland and Alaska could trade artists and Helsinki could get a Native American totem pole and the Inuits could proudly display a totem featuring Finnish ice hocky or giant makkara. :)

Updates may be light for the next few weeks as I get my brain flossed by the nuances of louna, loukse, louta, kanssa, mukana, mukaansa, itse, the plurals, et al. After 3 or 4 hours of homework every evening, I'm not much for anything save staring at the TV. Pääni on täysi.

permalink Ω 8 June 2004, Helsinki

Mitä on viisikirjaiminen

When you move to a new place to live there is a myriad of things to get used to; where to shop, where to eat, where to have fun, customs, etc. Moving to a different country adds a decidedly different dimension to this and when that country doesn't have English as a first or second language it becomes a whole different order of adjustment. Everything you once took for granted becomes a challenge. There's nothing like feeling proud of posting a letter at the post office to make you feel 12 again. Perhaps becoming an expat is the real fountain of youth.

Finland has a very small number of foreigners and it certainly isn't because it isn't an attractive place to call home, but it might be largely due to the language. Anyone who claims that Finnish is easy is either a linguistic savant, hasn't tried to learn it or moved here before the age of 18 or so. An American who managed to get into Helsinki University recently, and who asked what Yliopisto meant afterwards, seems to think that he'll be able to manage classes taught in Finnish after attending a month of language instruction before the fall term begins. It's unlikely he's a linguistic genius so we're going to enjoy every drop of schadenfreude we can get when reality sinks in. Learning Finnish is the 'Sisu Test' for foreigners as those who have the sisu to learn it will stay and those who don't will bugger off back from whence they came.

I'm back in Finnish classes for the summer and it's interesting to notice that I'm always one of very few, if any, other native English speakers. People who don't speak English at all have a lot more incentive to learn Finnish quickly, but even then they seem to be having as much trouble with the language as I do. I don't quite understand the English speakers who, after more than 2 years of living here, have never taken a class or manage to read a Finnish menu at a restaurant. I mean, I may suck at Finnish, but I like to eat and the food words were the first ones I learned. It seems like there is a giant gap between those who are fluent and those who can't read a menu and I think I'm starting to understand why as I waver between despair and the edge of hope on my prospects of merely being adequate in a few years.

Finns, of course, usually say that Finnish is easy. I've often thought English, insane language that it is, is easy, too. Native languages are like that since you don't really have a choice when you're a kid and need to learn language so that you can tell your parents to piss off, make friends and heckle the class nerds in school. However, when you arrive in a place where 8 years of Latin classes delivered by a nun with a ruler and the wrath of god doesn't do fuckall for making any sense of Finnish, it makes you want to learn all the swear words first. What compounds the difficulty of learning Finnish is the fact that just about everyone under the age of 35 in Helsinki knows enough English to make it easy to get by without learning Finnish and often Finns will start speaking English automatically if they hear that you're not a native speaker. Unless you're really determined to learn Finnish, you won't. I've even had Finns ask me "Why?" when I've said that I'm studying the language. Well, gee, maybe it's because 95% of everything is written in Finnish here and I doubt that English will supplant the official language anytime soon.

Above all things that make me irate about trying to learn Finnish and finding it difficult is how impossible it is to actually speak the language with actual humans. The courses at the university focus almost wholly on grammar which, while excellent to have, isn't terribly useful for people who actually want to speak and use the language. I never had to speak Latin so I'm very self-conscious about saying the wrong thing or having someone roll their eyes at me in response to a stupid foreigner. I listen a lot and sometimes get the chops to try asking for something without sounding like too much of an idiot. Two steps forward, one step back. I understand a lot of what I hear, if not literally, at least in context so when I get confused looks or the dreaded "Mitä?" I get pretty frustrated. This happens particularly often at cafés and on the telephone.

scene: coffee shop
players: clerk and customer [me]

• clerk - Moi
• customer - Moi. Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti.
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Saanko iso kahvia ja korvapuusti?
• clerk - Mitä?
• customer - Uhhh...a large coffee and korvapuusti?
• clerk - Ah. That will be 3 and 40. Here you are. Hello.
• customer - Kiitos. [with confused look and skulks off into a dark corner trying not to look so much like a idiot.]

Aside from my getting the case wrong, what part of the context of that transaction could be so difficult for the person to understand? I've been told I don't butcher the language pronunciation so horribly to be impossible to understand so what part about being a clerk in a shop that sells coffee and bakery products with someone asking for iso kahvia and korvapuusti makes it so damned difficult to click? Maybe English is simply far more forgiving when Finns apply the phonetic rules of their language to English and it takes me a moment to figure out what they're saying to which I usually repeat the word in the sentence as it should be pronounced without saying, "WHAT?!" I mean, c'mon, I'm in a coffee shop ordering a coffee and a pastry, WORK WITH ME. It's not a random experience, so either the language is a lot more rigid than the difference between the spoken and the written forms would lead one to believe or this is Finland's way of telling foreigners to fuck off to somewhere other than Finland. It's incredibly difficult to go from being pumped full of grammar to actually speaking a language with any kind of confidence, especially when you've never heard the language in question before you set foot in the country. "Mitä?" is a 5-letter word which dashes what small amount of confidence we might have.

So, while there is a wide variance on how quickly and easily people learn Finnish, it seems pretty common for English speakers to be the last group to pick it up since Finns make it easy in some form or another not to bother or to give up in despair. When given the choice between working hard at something and failing versus embracing the sloth within and just speaking English, it's a pretty obvious path of least resistance. I refuse to give up though and I'm going to start fighting back. The next time someone can't figure out in a coffee shop that I'm ordering a large coffee and a korvapuusti and says "Mitä?" more than twice, I'm going to give them something worthy of such confusion: "Ilmatyynyalukseni on täynnä ankeriaita!" I will practise this phrase in front of the mirror until it is perfect and then I shall deploy it at will. I'll either get another "Mitä?" or a smile from a fellow Douglas Adams fan.

Finland, cut us English speakers some slack as at least a few of us are trying to learn Finnish even though your English sucks less than our Finnish.

permalink Ω 3 June 2004, Helsinki

Honey, you're scaring the kids

« People enjoying Tulireki [fire sled], the new rollercoaster at Linnanmäki. A few photos from Jarkko's birthday at Lintsi »

Jarkko decided that he wanted to spend his birthday at Linnanmäki, so we and two friends helped him try to feel a year younger instead of older for a day. :) They all spent the day getting me onto various rides that I likely wouldn't have tried in my slightly hungover state coupled with a fear of heights. The first one we tried was something called kieputin [the spinner] which rates high on the vomitronic scale. I kept expecting to be drenched either in my own vomit or someone elses, but I was happily disappointed.

Finnish clowns are still as creepy and scary as other clowns around the world. Perhaps there is an EU commission on the scary clown standard along with everything else, since Lintsi the clown should send little kids running. There's also the clownish orange globule known as the plop-plop guy who haunts the park with sinister eyes. I sat on the opposite end of the Viking Ship, another bad hangover ride, from the plop-plop and watched him smirk at me as I was laughing my ass off while trying not to lose my lunch. "Honey, you're scaring the kids.", Jarkko informed me as a group of girls in the row across from us was apparently eyeing me rather cautiously. They weren't facing the plop-plop guy.

Aside from all the spinny, whirly, puke-o-matic rides in the park, there are several roller coasters that are small in scale, but still a lot of fun. We went through the arcade, too, and I won a little Winnie the Pooh doll for Mari. Near the end of the day they finally agreed to ride my first choice which was the carousel. :) It's an antique and rotates slowly, but the slightly naughty designs, wooden animals and classic punch card organ make it a fixture in any carnival. Jarkko agreed to sit on the camel and let me take a picture of him, but a man sitting on small bactrian camel leads to a bit of a pitiful grimace. It was a fabulously fun day of frivolity.

Hopefully, he won't ask for bungee jumping next year. :)

permalink Ω 1 June 2004, Helsinki