Eating Muffins in an Agitated Manner

Monaco, Albania & Armenia

Posted by jukkahoo

By now everyone has noticed that Hell has frozen over and Finland has won the European Song Contest. Hopefully Roy Hodgson sees this as a benevolent sign and steers us to the European Champs!

Bronze. Enough talk.

Other news: I finished 53rd at the Snickers Hockey Manager competition. Trashed our Risingshadow little league. Go Ambergris Squids!

All this is of course only a mere backdrop for the Real News of the Day: Martti Servo is back! By sheer coincidence I managed to notice this while watching re-runs of Madventures. Martti Servo is BACK!!!

This has been mostly about stuff in Finnish and of Finns in Finnish, erm.

Twentysomething days to FIFA Fußball Worldcup and about 90 to Finncon. Looking like a good summer this one!

Shame on Kimi and Mika and Kalle and the lot for not voting enough (you have money, guys! you could've done your bit). Armenia and Albania, hypätkää Carolan kanssa voltti.

Noux

Posted by Sari

Last week-end the weather was just so lovely that when my sister called and asked if I wanted to go camping for a night in Nuuksio, the national park next door, I surprised myself by saying yes. Of course, others had hit upon the same idea so we had to hike little further than we originally thought to find a free camp-site. It was too dry* to make fire, so we cooked with trangia and sat by the pond enjoying tea and gorgeous sunset. Next morning we took a shorter route back and stopped to grill sausages at Mustalampi cooking site.

The topics of conversation included
1) The geography of the old West and the newest reserach on Donner party.
2) How to film Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and the revival of Hapgood in NY with Stockard Channing
3) The possibility of building a base for a lean-to at our summer cottage
4) The unique position John Clute occupies in the field of SF critique
5) G.B. Shaw's Arms and the Man

A good time was had by all. And I have to say that the fact you can take public transportation from the centre of Finland's capital and be in "the wilderness" in an hour is way beyond cool.

* There is a Finnish word "metsäpalovaroitus", familiar from the summer-time weather reports. The only translation my dictionary offers is "prohibition on lighting fire in the open due to danger of forest fire". Honestly, there must be a better way to say this in English...

Pictures are at Flickr

Birthday Musings

Posted by Sari

There are pros and cons in having one of the big national holidays as your birthday. On the pro-side, my birthday is a national holiday. I remember being terribly shocked as a child when I realised that other kids had to go to school on their birthday, and the adults, they had to go to work!  Also First of May being a student carneval and spring carneval meant that there has always been lots of champagne, pick-nicking, balloons, streamers, male choir singing and general celebratory spirit on my birthday. Also marching and political speaches.

On the minus side, as people have started celebrating the previous evening, people tend to be really hung-over and tired on my birthday. There are also the friends who like to do academic Wappu with herring and singing and white caps on Ullanlinnanmäki and the friends who were rather dead than seen anywhere near that bastion of traditional mayday celebration. All of which means a birthday party is an idea which is not really going to fly.

So big, big THANK YOU to Jukka and Mekku who were industrious and clever and arranged a party for me on the previous evening. Company was excellent, food was great and I am head-over-heels in love with my present. So bucketfull of thanks also to all of you who contributed. I have totally forgotten to freak out aobout "OMG almost forty and not grown up" -thing :-)

And in other news, I got my mobile back! Actually I got it back already last week. Apparently it fell out of my pocket while I was travelling with My on a bus before easter. Some time back I got a mysterious letter from lost and found office saying they had my property, and when I got there they handed me the phone. The embarassing thing is I had not really noticed I had misplaced it..  So public apologies here for anyone who has tried to contact me in vain.