No. If there’s no reason to believe they will torch another church, flee or destroy evidence or disturb the investigation in any way, they must be released. The actual punishment (a prison sentence, I hope) will be decided later in a court of law.

It is not up to the police to make the decision. They have to go to a judge for a hearing. The judge has the flower hat then.

Why haven’t the press managed to publish these clowns photos on the front pages yet?

How on earth did the police decide that it was OK to let two of them free?

I agree Shoal that the arsonists should participate in rebuilding. They proved to have some spine though, as they turned themselves in to the police.

They should be placed in public for everyone to see and every Porvoolainen should be allowed to walk by them and say exactly what they think.

Public humiliation for such an idiotic act would be suitable in my eyes.

Plus I think they should be involved in the rebuilding efforts as part of a sentence of thousands of hours of community service.

Is “narsissipipo” actually any better, as it has reference to a hat, used by rastafaris and people living in cold climate.

Sure, the war was there but in a generation or two it won’t affect the statistics any more. Yes it was a big thing for the war generation.

There are more old ladies than old gents, sure. But my guess would be there are disproportionately more of them in cities than in the countryside, since women were more active than men in the big wave of people moving from country to city.

When there was all this discussion about Lordi and “flower-hatted aunties” being enraged about Finland sending them to Athens, so what do we do with all the male conservatives who said negative things about Lordi? Is such a person then Mekko-Einari or huru-ukko or both?

It’s not at all uncommon that an elderly Finnish male thinks that hard rock or heavy is something negative. I had a very hard time believing that it would be elderly women who were specifically appalled of hard rock being connected with Finland. Then again I guess Eurovision is more of a pastime of elderly women than elderly men, so in this sense the idea of women being affected might even make sense.

I don’t know, whether Anneli Tempakka or Maija Dahlgren wore flowerhats, but they definetely qualify for making big deal about Sex Pistols gig in Finland (which never happened then) or “Rappiolla” (Decaying) piece by Hassisen Kone.

My personal experience of the real flowerhat aunties are actually quite positive. In the 70′s, I was many times seeing my grandma in Helsinki and many times some old, swedish-speaking ladies with huge glasses and a flower hat came to speak with my mom in a bus or tram. Mom spent the wartime in Sweden and speaks fluent swedish, so these ladies thought I was some gulliga lilla Magnus.