This piece of news from the Helsingin Sanomat really rang up high on the bizarrometer.

OK, so we have teenage angst and too much tv:

Police suspect that a 16-year-old Helsinki girl paid a 19-year-old man to kill her mother.

And what was with this “handgun ownership” so rampant in Finland then?

A moment later the woman felt a strong blow to the back of her head… One of the men had shot the woman with a crossbow - the kind that is used to shoot small game, police say.

Kinda… medieval this one.

Police say that the 16-year-old daughter had promised the 19-year-old man a cash payment for the killing. The daughter did not live with the mother at the time of the attack. The man had persuaded two 20-year-old friends to join him. The crime was planned at the Espoo home of a fourth man, who now faces charges of aiding and abetting. The suspects, all native-born Finns, do not have any prior criminal records.

Kids, don’t eat that yellow snow.

The Germans have gotten all riled up and tossing their Nokia handsets to the Rhine because Nokia has decided to close down its assembly lines in Bochum and move the production to a cheaper location, namely Romania(*). This spells out axing some 2000 people and effecting the related subcontractors. (Considering Nokia had 68,483 employees at the end of 2006, that adds up to 2000 people being as significant as a flys fart in the Sahara desert. Of course for the individual it is a tragedy.)

Why yes, it was a fully profitable factory… so why did the Germans then close down the “fully profitable” Fujitsu-Siemens assembly plant in Espoo in 2000? How does it feel to taste your own medicine now? Why do you cry now that you can have Oktoberfest every day.  After all is this “free movement of labor” in the EU not something the German government has been defending?

Meanwhile Stora Enso is closing its pulp plant in Kemijärvi, killing the town, so what should I do - if I boycott them, so where will I wipe? Most of the Germans frothing over the boycott don’t realise its probably them that own more Nokia stock than say Finns that own say.. was it 10%? Close by. So the Germans can have an 1% complaint edge over the Finns.

Lets face it fellow europeons. Its called Globalization. The pink-haired old ladies in Florida own Nokia, and as they need their pensions, so its Quarter Capitalism that rules the world, making the quick buck and sending your job somewhere else.

(*)As we need an evil conspiracy theory as the explanation, the Nokia HQ have been approached by the City Fathers worried about the Romanian beggars in town asking if there was any way the Romanian Question could be resolved.

Where do the biggest liars in Finland come from? Simple: Lohja and Porvoo. Why exactly? Ask them how long it takes them to commute to Helsinki. They’ll flat out lie to you every single time… “Oh yeah, it’s only like 20 minutes from Lohja!” or “I can be downtown in less than 30 minutes from Porvoo!”. BULLSHIT!! Maybe it is if you’re driving a Ferrari going 180 at 2am in the summertime

It’s all a big conspiracy that every resident of Lohja and Porvoo are a member of. They all move out there to save money on housing cause they were all told it’s just 20 minutes away from the city. So they move out there, discover it’s like two hours in the car each day, then realize they just make big fools of themselves, then lie and tell people it takes them just 20 minutes to cover up their huge mistake.

Other liars in Finland: People in who think Tampere is a nicer city than Turku or Helsinki. People in Vantaa who claim it’s a nice place to live. And people like me in Espoo who claim it’s a “city” (it is Finland’s second largest city haven’t you heard?)

…what other liars are there in Finland?