I swear a lot. I think swear words are funny. I love to write and I need my swear words. Young Ralphie’s quote about his father from “A Christmas Story” sums up my feelings quite well…

He worked in profanity the way other artists might work in oils or clay. It was his true medium; a master.

A swear word can easily turn a boring sentence into a funny sentence. For example: “I gotta go to the store.” (boring) -or- “I gotta go to the fucking store” (kinda funny!). But don’t use swear words too often - fucking like when every other fucking word is fucking ‘fuck’, then you quickly sound like a white trash moron.

I began swearing even more when I moved to Finland - It’s got nothing to do with the welfare state, it’s just that Finns find swearing funny too! Well, swearing in English that is. I’ve tried switching to swearing in Finnish and suddenly the Finns start calling me a “white trash moron”. I guess swear words in your second language aren’t quite as obscene as those in your native tongue.

And therein lies the problem - The Finns find my swearing “funny” rather than “inappropriate”, leading to all sorts of moronic white trash comparisons when I return to the states. Swearing is like smoking crack, it’s addictive, and you can’t lay down the crack pipe even when kids are around. I was back in Baltimore for a few days in June and slipped the F-bomb way too frequently at a family BBQ, it was a little embarrassing for me. I kinda felt like some sort of…uhhh…caucasion, poor, idiot, or something.

But I think comedian Lewis Black speaks my mind the best…

I realize I use the word fuck a lot, and I’d apologize for that, but I don’t give a shit.

I used to say, “Why would anyone want to leave Finland in July? The weather is so perfect!” After yet another cold, wet summer, I say that no more…

July has been unseasonably wet in Finland this year. Northern Ostrobothnia and Kuusamo have been hit especially hard. [...]Meteorologists say July hasn’t been this cool since 1993, and hasn’t been this rainy since the years 2004 and 2007.

Let’s all put our patriotism and blind devotion on the shelf for one second and be honest with ourselves…Finnish weather is pretty much shit, all twelve months a year. We all just pretend it’s okay cause we’re stuck here, whether it’s because we’re born here, or have a serious boner for a Finnish girl.

The “summer” months are overcast and rainy, this year averaging around 15C (59F). April/May can have some deceivingly warm days, then comes a cold and wet June. September can have some nice days, but you can’t stop thinking about the six months of winter ahead - from October to March we have darkness and a consistent drizzly +2C every day.

During the six months of slush we partake in cold weather activities like skiing, skating, sledding, and drinking. I’m going to let you in on a little secret - No one actually likes winter sports, we just do them to pass the time and deter us from suicide. We’d all give up this shit to be outdoors in shorts on our bicycles with an ice cream in our hand.

It’s like asking an inmate what his hobbies are: the prisoner gleefully replies, “Gang rape”. Now he doesn’t actually like gang rape, if he were on the outside he’d prefer bike shorts and ice cream, but since his only other option is “Getting stabbed”, the gang rape becomes something of a hobby for himself, he might even take home a bronze medal in the activity.

But whatever…it’s still better than living in NEBRASKA!! LOL!!

Propganda video warns of U.S. jobs moving to Finland. So basically the message is, “Fuck other countries!!” ?? But point taken, the American education system is seriously messed up…

Hat Tip to z zz for the link!

Check this out - Longtime Finland for Thought reader and friend of mine, Vilja S., was at The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and he did a little bit on Finland! Cool!!

And check out this handsome devil introducing Nokia’s latest application…

Saw this while driving in Espoo today - I think Otto the bus driver from the Simpsons got way too stoned this time, and took a wrong turn… LOL!!

Haven’t posted anything in forever, apologies to all of you (and YOU’RE WELCOME to others ). I just received my portion of George Bush’s $145 billion economic stimulus package…well, $300 of it. I’m rich bitch! HONK!!! I think I’ll buy a big bag of crack, that’ll help the U.S. economy! Or maybe I’ll spend that $300 here in Finland, that’ll help the U.S. economy equally.

So you think the government is retarded for giving out billions while racking up trillions in debt, right? How could they make it even more retarded? By spelling “Espoo” with a ‘5′, check it out below…

LOL!!! I’ll be “laughing all the way to the bank” when I cash this thing. I’d like to think George Bush himself wrote that check. Reminds me of Mr. Burns’ illegitimate son spelled “Yale” with a ‘6′ in his Yale application. Too fucking funny, man.

Finland has no mandated “minimum salary”. Someone asking that question will get the question back - “what will you be doing?” as the minimum salary in each job is more or less mandated by the comprehensive union agreements that differ a bit if you’re working in the public or private sector and also between industries (A lot of strikes recently have been about a job being outsourced and the new company having a different union agreement, cooks of bank cafeterias and cleaners at the paper factory come to mind). So everyone gets “union wages” in Finland.

But what are the wages then like? Taloussanomat did a survey on the average wages in Finland according to the average salary statistics by job classification and by gender, and compared the lowest rung of the ladder to the higher within the same profession. (The categories are by the Finnish Statistics Centre). Now it is said that the “wage differences in Finland are not that big”. Lets rephrase that, about as like the “cars are the cheapest in Finland” it makes everybody laugh as you need to remember the taxes on top. So the wage differences of the bring-home-pay are not as big in Finland - due to the progressive income taxation.

So who has the suckiest average salary doing a regular 9-5 workday your 38-40 hours a week? (Military not included.) A fraction under the 1600 euro limit would be for women a “farmhand” and for men a “laundry worker”. Thats about the lowest you can get… even a “cleaner” gets in the ballpark of 1700 euros average. But does education help? Do specialists get more salary? Do managers? That again depends on your profession. The lower rung of the specialist ladder is again farm work, a seminologist is in the 1700 euro ballpark. And if you get into mismanagement, the worst salaries are in the hotel- and tourism business.

Now as we’re talking of average salaries the survey also looks into the highest salaries. A stock and currency exchange banker or then your chief surgeon might get into the 5000 -6000 euro category, but thats the top end of the average “rich guys” salary. So what is the salary difference like? According to the nifty tax calculator provided by VERO ( just ballpark figures counted with 13 mo salary ):

1600e/month your income tax% is 16,5, take home pay ~ 1336 euros a month
6000e/month your income tax% is 36,5, take home pay ~ 3827 euros a month

So before taxes the income is 3,75 times, after taxes only 2,8… yay, socialism! BTW the SDP party secretary makes 6900 euros a month… yay socialism!

Travelling especially to the USA got a bit more interesting now that all new passports should be biometric. When I heard first of this biometric thing I was wondering if they had a strip of my DNA there like in every half-decent sci-fi movie or at least a retinal scan like they have in every spy movie, but the “biometric data” is as boring as a mugshot, and starting later next year fingerprints.

Or are fingerprints boring? They’ve been used for over a hundred years in forensics to identify people, as fingerprints are unique to each person. You have every other crime movie out there having someone dusting for fingerprints, even in CSI they still do it though it requires super glue and and hot air. So its definitely something even your average joe on the street recognizes whats it for.

The Aamulehti today ripped a headline over the newly appointed Police Commissioner Mikko Paatero wanting to form a fingerprint registry of Finnish citizens. Within ten years all adult Finnish citizens would be fingerprinted as fingerprinting would be a prerequisite of getting a passport (and probably ID card as well) The reason given is that with the registry it would be impossible to use forged passports and of course it would enable the police to find out their perps quite effectively. The Data Protection Ombudsman Reijo Aarnio is all against the idea of establishing a national fingerprint register.

In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Growing up in Finland I heard a lot from the politicians “its a lottery win to be born in Finland”. When I had grown up I realized “you require a lottery win to be able to live in Finland”.

Things are expensive in Finland - maybe not that expensive in comparison with the other Nordic countries with a similar taxation and geographical structure, but expensive to the average consumer as the purchase power in Finland is low. The Finnish financial magazine Taloussanomat wrote about the purchase power in Finland earlier this month. According to the article , “Finns are paying themselves sick” for goods and services. Lack of competition is given as one of the a reasons why for example groceries in Finland cost one fifth more than the EU average. Finland has been quite notorious for keeping foreign competition out, and now that there are no more barriers it seems nobody is really interested in coming over as the volumes aren’t there. So Finland remains a keskolandia.

Now being somewhere at the EU average is one thing, but starting to compare things globally doesn’t make the prices look any better. When Phil goes to buy a chicken in Finland, his cousin in the USA can buy four chickens with the same price! The Iltalehti had a comparison of prices for groceries in Helsinki, Stockholm, London and New York, and it seems in the UK and USA (and London and New York are expensive cities), you can get by with about half of what you pay in Stockholm or Helsinki. Of course one explanation is the sheer volumes that bring the prices down, but it still is peculiar while milk or potatoes cost approximately the same, in some products, like meat, the price differences can be quadrupled.

With the global food shortage being blamed on the biofuels is causing food prices to go up, it still doesn’t quite explain why in Finland you need to pay your ass off just to buy your basic stuff. Then again if Norwegians come to buy “cheap booze” from Finland, we can say theres a place where things are worse. Or are they - the purchase power in Norway is higher than in Finland . Your avarage consumer is faced with the problem of rising prices and already now the shopping habits of people are changing. Maybe next year this time I’ll be sharing a potato and brown sauce recipe.

One small piece of news in the Iltalehti today struck me as a reminder of a past era. I guess it was the so-called “IT boom” in the late 1990’s in Finland that drew me along, so much I decided to change careers. Of course those guys who were in the forefront starting it went much higher up catching the stars - but they also burned in re-entry. According to the IL Jaakko Rytsölä was sentenced for more or less for “deliberately misallocating money from his debtors - read: tax office” to a year and six months in jail (probational) and 50 hours of community service.

Now you might ask “who”, but the Rytsölä brothers, Antti and Jaakko especially were branded as the icons of the new success story Finland was launching in the late 1990’s. Two brothers from a regular family had started from scratch in 1995 establishing DLC, one of the first ISP’s. Jaakko had started his own IT business when he was 16 selling computer parts, and when his little brother Antti joined him in Helsinki, he was selling hotdogs at the Helsinki Railway station to make the ends meet while the ISP business was in its fledgling state. A few mergers later the Saunalahti was formed and the young men in their twenties were all of a sudden millionaires, remembering that in 1992 the whole country had been more or less bankrupt. Of course the press hounded the new IT millionaires - after all a Lamborghini Diablo as a “company car”? The two young men were favorites in the tabloid headlines. Finnish envy nonwithstanding the flamboyant lifestyle annoyed some, so the police found a red Ferrari in Helsinki traffic a red flag and Jaakko Rytsölä was fined a whopping 100 000 euros for speeding in his Ferrari (oh, he had about seven cars at one time).

The laws of physics say what goes up must come down, unless the escape velocity is fast enough. A Lamborghini is too slow in Finland. When the “IT-boom” as the “dot.com bubble” was called in Finland turned into the bubble that burst, Jaakko Rytsölä lost overnight a record 6 million euros of his calculated wealth of 10 million in the autumn of 2001 when the Jippii group stock crashed 90%. By the spring of 2002 the tax office had filed him bankrupt, but the tax office was still after money, and the result of the trials that followed was handed out today. Jaakko Rytsölä has claimed innocence and stated that the money wasn’t hidden anywhere but was invested and thus was lost in the stock crashes.

The boom/bubble era had a lot of similar from rags-to riches-to rags stories. Many of the people were young and maybe perhaps been hearing from their parents the “no money” saga growing up so once money was coming from the doors and windows the “crazy years” of the 1980’s came back overnight. It was an era to seize the moment - but there were other people running away with the money. As the dot.com bubble burst in the USA, the flash downed several Finnish companies who had gone venturing to Europe such as Jippii and Sonera which lost huge investments in Germany. And the aftermath was bankrupcy trials, insider trading suits… USA had Enron but we had our own scandals we remember the 2000’s for.

Comparing to the “crazy years” of the 1980’s the dot.com bubble years in the 1990’s could be called “riot years”. If you haven’t seen it before, try to find the documentary Riot On!, its about a small Finnish gaming company Riot-E which got 20 million dollars of venture capital… and ” where the f*ck did it all go?”.

But at the end of the day - regardless of how far the frontier is - the tax office is the last man standing.

I’m trying to do a community service and clear the spamtrap moderation queue that got a bit out of hand due to the database glitches. So yeah, theres been a few genuine messages there, some of which I’ve found, and some that have been flushed as the finger was faster than the brain. Now I am still facing about 10 000 messages in the queue, which I noticed my first one is dated 2007/10/28 and the last one 2007/10/18. So ten days worth of spam, thats like a thousand comments *a day*. Sweet Jebus on a dinosaur. No wonder people like me would like to go chop off the fingers of nimble little “electronic marketers”. The approved comments queue is riddled with spam that got through the trap, but I think the one we are using is pretty good in catching the drivel. One thing to implement would be to disable commenting on old posts, just today theres been about a hundred spam comments added to a post made 31.8.2005. It seems viagra and porn are still winning over insurance quotes and kayak passage walden… really obscure links. I used to gather real businesses and send the people extremely rude abuse back in the day you got email spam… seems futile. I still just hope a bear shits into waldens kayak. 9800 to go…

As it is summer we need to dig up old crap according to the best journalistic traditions of Finland.

Old news from around Easter - I think we were out to lunch when this happened, but Phil mentioned he got RickRolled… I guess he can count himself in good company.

The “minister of information” is saying “it is not a (security) breach before we have confirmed it is a (security) breach ourselves”.

Don’t know how far the “primitive system” has evolved from that, but its almost been… 4 days from the last time any “problems” were reported.

There is an old saying: “The manure pile won’t stink unless you go poking it.” and it seems there is nothing better to do than go poking during the summer. In the beginning of the summer there were some remarks made of doping in Finland, and as a few former skiers denied vehemently the use EPO-hormones or any knowledge of blood-doping - last week the ex-coach Kari-Pekka Kyrö came forward making a number of statements implying that the Finnish Skiing Association wasn’t as clean as they presented themselves during the 2001 Lahti Hemohes scandal. And his stories have been corroborated by others, so the story is opening up daily. As the Finnish News Agency chief editor and reporter were convicted of libel in 1999 due to claims of doping that were at the time “unfounded”, the NBI has reopened the investigation. Better late than never I guess.

Another case not as ancient re-surfacing is the infamous Sonera-book which the supreme court returned to the assizes overturning the inadmissibility of evidence. Now the public opinion on the case would be rather than trying to find the author to find “Where disappeared the money of Sonera” as the book title reads. They bought some air in Germany if I recall it correctly.

Maybe I should start a properly to go with the retro feelings and buy a Jopo.

When I was a little boy, I got to play in old trenches that were virtually in my backyard. And no, I didn’t live in Suomenlinna. Back in 1914-1917 the Russians fortified an important naval base, Helsinki, against the German threat. The fortress was never used in action, except for some skirmishes during the civil war and parts of the underground bunkers used by the army and some locations as AA-turret bases in WW2.

So, if you have a day to spend in Helsinki and you think you’ve seen it all, go see the Patterimäki between Pajamäki and Pitäjänmäki, take either the bus 14 to the terminus and or the commuter train to Pitäjänmäki station and take the bridge over the tracks towards the paint factory and continue straight up the hill, there are two AA turret bases on top along with trenches and bunkers. The Helsingin Sanomat has a number of pictures in a reportage they made of the current remains of the fortress along with maps, and theres a website, also in English, dedicated to the fortification with more old pictures Krepost Sveaborg. The fortress line winds more or less along what now is Ring I, so a little off the road into the forest there might be something interesting.

And I’d say this is a pretty remarkable piece of news. Traditionally the combination of alcohol and boating has resulted in at least half a dozen drownings. The statistics this year weren’t looking good as the thin ice caused a whole lot of fishermen to get into peril. The least drownings during Juhannus was in 2003 when the toll was four.

Otherwise the death toll so far has been 6 people. The most violent incident was in Kouvola, where three army conscripts were stabbed, one fatally and another in critical condition. A middle-aged couple had a beer-fuelled argument and the woman stabbed the man dead in Helsinki. The heavy holiday traffic went relatively safely but with several accidents, two fatal, and the police otherwise has been kept busy by drunk drivers. In Keuruu two men were found in the sauna, one dead and the other unconcious - possibly from cabon monoxide poisoning. Another man was found dead on a beach in Lappeenranta ant the police state they’re not suspecting a crime.

Otherwise the country has been doused with rain and hailstorms, maybe inhibiting the partying a bit. The police has had its share of domestic calls, and a man was shot in the leg while threatening the police with an axe. While the police say the amount of calls has been regular for a midsummer, the Coast Guard has stated it has had approximately half of the amount of calls to assist boaters than usual.

Update: By Sunday the death toll has risen to eight with another stab victim, and of a boating party one man found drowned and another missing - so that makes the inevitable drowning statistics. The Finnish swimming and lifesaving association’s spokesperson says that the bad weather did contribute, but he says he hopes that the downward trend is due to the efforts in public awareness as well. The return traffic is expected to be slightly congested even most people have started their summer vacations.