Ilta-Sanomat and other evening newspapers are at their yearly exposé again:

So do you want to know who is who in Finland? Its all there. Eat the rich.

I always hear Finns make the same comment about their own Reality TV shows: “I’m so embarrassed to watch the Finns!!” Why is this exactly?!? Here’s a few ideas…

1. Finns don’t share their feelings – So when they need to profess their love to The Bachelor, it sounds so forced and artificial. Finnish is NOT the language of love.

2. 5.3 million people is a small pool – When you have hundreds of millions to choose from, you’ll get a dynamic bunch. But Finland’s small, homogeneous population runs thin quickly – any random idiot will do. I couldn’t imagine reality TV in Iceland.

3. Little original content – Most of the reality shows are just localized from the United States (and as I saw from tonight, Japan as well). How about some original content, made by Finns, for Finns?

4. Cheaper production – A smaller audience means smaller budgets. Nobody named Jussi has a million euros, it makes the whole thing so unbelievable.

5. Finnish “celebrities” are lame – You know what they call a “tango stars” in other countries? “Joe” or “Bill” or “Jennifer”…but in Finland, even the retards fucking them are “celebrities” and worthy of television appearances. Lame.

6. Finnish pride – Finns are the proudest nation on the planet. So when you see Americans make asses of themselves on TV, it’s funny. But to see your fellow brothers and sisters make asses of themselves, it hits too close to home.

…what else am I missing?

My friend Esa hasn’t been to our weekly board game club in weeks. Each week I try to vote him off so he’ll return to our club.

God damn we’re pathetic in Finland sometimes. First we have an American astronaut who received a phone call in space from Finnish President Tarja Halonen, simply because one set of grandparents were Finnish..!?

President Tarja Halonen spoke on the phone on Monday with astronaut Timothy L. Kopra, at his post on the International Space Station. The 46-year-old Texan’s grandparents moved from Finland almost a century ago.

(Presidents of Germany & Poland: I’m still awaiting my phone call)

Then we have the authorities shutting down airspace and waterspace while ignoring noise disturbance violations to surrounding neighborhoods – and the news media goes apeshit over the past few days because of a pop concert!!

Who does this girl think she is, some sort of prima-donna? (-OR- Who does this girl think she is, Jesus’s mother!?)

“We are out here out of principle. It annoys me that the sea area is closed off just like that. In my opinion noone can say that the waters are now a no-go area or exclusion zone just because some gig promoter so requests”, Lehtinen says sharply.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in an African village and a Coke bottle just dropped from the sky. Thank God I didn’t meet an Icelandic girl instead.

Snagged from mayamai26 on Flickr

So many people lately have written about the macho male culture in Finland. So I have to agree, we have the best looking men as the HS writes

The drag duo Showhat is going to be on tour this autumn. Bring some brutal burlesque into the doom and gloom!

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…

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.

Few people know that Finland—Helsinki, in particular—is probably the gothiest place on Earth. One might ask, did Finland’s Goths arrive centuries-ago seeking refuge from Attila? Or did they move directly from Gotland? Nobody really knows their origins, but Saturday nights downtown can be a real costume party.

Sadly, the inventor and inspiration of this macabre fashion statement, the goddess of gothic garb herself, died recently in Hollywood. Maila Nurmi, the former TV personality known as Vampira, was 85.

Her real name was Maila Elizabeth Syrjaniemi (later changed to Maila Nurmi) and she was born in Petsamo, Finland (now Pechenga, Russia) on Dec. 11, 1922. At age 2, she and her family emigrated to Ohio, in search of a better life.

RIP, Vampira.