Bollocks

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So, what is the deal with the apparent Finnish obsession with Texas? American TV and film present only certain small parts of the landscape and so it tends to focus the stereotypes on New York, Texas/Dallas and California with a few other locales thrown in for variety. And all of these shows get exported for reruns to the far corners of the globe so that foreigners everywhere can watch them and build their (mostly false) impressions of the US. Fortunately, I didn't have any such exposure to Finland before moving here so I didn't have any unlearning to do once I arrived, but I do watch with fascination how the everpresent American pop culture tends to form really odd ideas about the US and the people who live there. I'm a Yankee, so I get the urge to run whenever I see a 10-gallon hat and continue to think that not allowing Texas to secede from the Union in 1845 was a big mistake. Granted, Texas does have certain very easily recognizable traits that, say, West Virginia with its barefoot mountain men doesn't. Still, the US is an enormous place and the entire middle of the country gets short shrift when it comes to the media. I think the last time the Midwest was featured in a major movie was Capote's In Cold Blood and, well, that was a gruesome true story. America is so different from state to state that it remains a fascination to me that it hasn't split into a few separate countries. I've given up on the hope that pop culture will reflect a more accurate picture of the US and so when I see the image of the US consistently represented as Texas in Finland, I feel violated in some way as I don't belong here and I don't even belong to the stereotype of the place where I technically do belong. I suspect that Finns in the US would feel similarly if Macy's in NYC always portrayed Finland in the windows as drunken hockey fans pissing on buildings and lying in pools of their own vomit or reindeer herders fawning over Santa Claus.

I took Otava to work yesterday afternoon for a few hours and, while he was quite the charming puppy, I don't think he's a suitable office dog just yet. I'm hoping that by taking him to work, he'll know where I'm going in the morning and not whine when I leave anymore since he seemed to be rather bored with the experience. :) We walked most of the way home through some rather lovely scenic forest which wore him out. When we got to the house we both froze as there was a guy drunk and pissing on the door. It was just before 7p and I thought that it was a bit early for such an encounter until I realised that there were keys in the door and it was one of our neighbours. So, here was a neighbour with his wiener hanging out, pissing a leviathan pool on our front steps, who was so drunk he couldn't speak which gave me thoughts of calling a medic as he must have been drinking for days, not merely a few hours. I was at a loss for words as what do you say to such a person? Even Otava stood unusually still. After about a minute of slack-jawed amazement, I grabbed Otava and ran around to the back door before the guy collapsed into his own pool of urine. I ruminated about this for the rest of the evening wondering why I had been so shocked when I generally see this sort of thing everyday and have become inured to it. I suppose it's just a little discomfiting when it's a neighbour who couldn't hold it in for a few more minutes until he got home to pee in the toilet and so just whipped it out on the front door. There is something so essentially gross and dysfunctional in it's being commonplace. This is supposedly the nice part of town, too. I'd hate to think what drunks do on the bad side of town.

Someone needs to give slacker Alan Burlison a job as he has synergized the Solaris version of /dev/bollocks that he wrote way back when and taken it to the next level by releasing a mobile bollocks version of it for the young and mobile. I used to use /dev/bollocks to generate the tag line for my blog for the first few months. :) One can enjoy it vicariously via a java emulator version [hint: press menu->default phrases if it doesn't work straight off and then menu->next to keep going]. "Coordinate 24/7 infoeconomies." I think Alan needs to go see the movie In Good Company as I think the screen writer had access to /dev/bollocks, too. :)

It snowed every day of this past long week. Snow in late April is a never failing source of amusement since new expats always freak out at the prospect thinking that it surely must be a fluke as, how could it possibly be true that Finland has 9 months of Winter and 3 months of Not Winter which rarely approach temperatures that many of us would consider Summer? We all seem to fall victim to a sort of optimistic delusion that the weather can't possibly be that cold when moving here, that Finns wearing t-shirts in 10C weather exclaiming that it's bloody warm is merely them fucking with us for a laugh. Welcome to Finland. Keep your coat on. :)