Finns are extremely jealous and often bitter towards their westerly neighbors, but with good reason: Swedes have more money. Swedes have more class. Swedes dress better. Swedes are better at ice hockey. Swedish women are better looking. Swedish men have self confidence. Sweden has royalty. Sweden has ABBA. Sweden is better known throughout the world. Sweden has Volvo and Saab. Sweden is part of Scandinavia.

Ask a Swede, “What’s the difference between you Swedes and the Finns?” They’ll reply something like, “Well…Sweden has a long history of class, wealth and royalty, that had transcended on the Swedish people many centuries ago, to conceive a strong society and rich culture, which therefore has created a more advanced and superior country.” Ask a Finn that very same question, they’ll ponder for a few seconds then simply reply, “Swedes are gay.”

Remember the opening scene in Casino Royale where James Bond uses a dead body as a human shield to fend of bullets? The limp corpse continues to get mangled by gunfire while Bond maneuvers his way through the embassy. Well for about 150 years in recent history, James Bond was Sweden, that gunfire was Russia, and that human shield was Finland! Sweden sat carefree at the summer cottage while that buffer zone known as Finland protected them from imperialistic Russia.

So you can understand why some of the wartime Finns might still hold a grudge or ten. Search through any old-timer’s bookshelf and you’re sure to find, “Swedish War Heroes”. Open it to find a book full of blank pages. (FUNNY!)

Like a jealous neighbor, Finland is constantly playing “keeping up with the Swedes”. Sweden goes out and buys a brand new BMW, so naturally, Finland goes out and, slashes its’ tires.

But would you really give up a classless society for royalty? Would you really give up Volvo for Nokia? Wealth for a sense of humor? ABBA for Lordi? Dressing well for being called “gay”? Self confidence for being a douchebag? Well maybe you’d take ABBA over Lordi, but you get the point.

Even after an unsettling past, today’s Finland and Sweden are more like rival football clubs than anything else. It’s competition which keeps then jockeying for the #1 spot in various world indexes. And at the end of the day, they’ll kick back at the sauna, crack open an imported beer (which they both agree tastes better than their local brews), and talk shit about their REAL rival: Russia.

Tomorrow: Russia according to the Finns

Sweden just got their first ever all-English comedy club in Lund, and weeks later Stockholm has their own…

“Laughs At The Liffey” at the Liffey Irish pub in Gamla Stan brings together the hottest international and Swedish comedians performing in English.

The club is a place for both native English speakers to bust a move and for Swedish comedians to hone their skills in the Queens language. If you are a comedian in Sweden we encourage you to get in contact with us via the links to the right.

8th October 2009 is the premiere! Doors Open at 20:00. Entry is 40kr by donation. Visit their site for more info, and join their Facebook group for updates.

Laughs At The Liffey runs every Thursday at The Liffey Irish Bar and Restarant, Stora Nygatan 42, Stockholm. T-Bana: Gamla Stan

Every foreigner has inadvertently tried this experiment during their first day visiting Finland: Stand with a dozen others at a crosswalk. The light is red. Not a car in sight. You wonder, “why the fuck are we all standing here!?” You cross on red. Immediately the entire crowd follows your lead.

Supposedly it’s dangerous. But even more dangerous, is a lack of common sense…

One in eight Finnish pedestrians ignore the signs on light-operated crossings, according to a report published on Friday by Liikenneturva, the country’s central organisation for traffic safety work. Regional differences are large, to say the least. In the capital Helsinki, as many as 42% of pedestrians will cross the road even when no green light is showing.

In Mikkeli, meanwhile, they are conspicuously more careful: there 99% allegedly only cross on green. Similar figures of over 90% were recorded in Kouvola, Vaasa, Joensuu, and Rovaniemi.

Copenhagen city officials have launched a program to combat red light ignorance: Double red lights. It’s proved to be twice as effective as single red lights…

I’m in Denmark for a few days. Here’s a photo I took from the Copenhagen railway station, now we know why “something is rotten in Denmark”… LOL!

On a side note – Last month I traveled to Riga to see my all-time favorite band, Depeche Mode. Well the lead singer had emergency surgery and the show was canceled. Bummer. So yesterday whilst walking around Copenhagen, I keep seeing people with Depeche Mode t-shirts – I finally found out that Depeche Mode was performing that night, and I didn’t even know about it. Double bummer.

Great idea!! Finally someone challenging the state-run monopoly, Alko, with an improved service!!

Finnish health authorities are launching an investigation into a business that delivers Estonian alcoholic beverages in Finland door-to-door. For the past few weeks an Alko taxi, a van painted in a garish yellow, has been delivering Estonian alcoholic beverages to thirsty dwellers in the capital city region.

Customers place and pay for their orders online. To date some 50 orders—mostly in Helsinki—have been placed with this unconventional drink-dispensing service. Vasili Visnapuu, who’s in charge of the cab’s deliveries, says the business is legit as the alcoholic beverages are delivered for free and because the transaction occurs on the internet.

Oops, nevermind, no one better compete against our state monopolies!! Plus, it’s run by evil foreigners, even worse…Estonians!! SHUT’EM DOWN!! (looks like their website has been shutdown already)

Finnish health officials are, however, far from thrilled by the new service.

Kari Paaso of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health says the Alko taxi is driving down a grey road.

“The law is quite unclear on this issue, which is why the parliamentary ombudsman has requested an inquiry on the matter,” says Paaso.

Photo snagged from Darren’s Flickr account

I’ve covered Finnish custody/abduction battles in the past (remember Outi Koski or this strange fellow?) – Here’s one about how the Finnish father abducted his son from the Russian mother, then the Finnish consulate in Russia drove them back to Finland…

In the interview, Anton’s mother describes how she met the boy’s father 15 years ago in Tallinn. After a few years she moved to Finland, but when Anton was born, over five years ago, his parents had already separated. The mother said that the Finnish father promised to take care of the boy after the divorce.

A few years later, relations between the two parents deteriorated, and the mother decided to leave Finland to live with a friend near Moscow, along with her son. While in Russia, she got her son Russian citizenship.

Izvestija wrote that in April this year Anton’s father decided to do as the mother hand done, and abduct the son and take him back to Finland.

The mother said that she was walking on the street with her son when the father, wearing dark glasses, abducted Anton. Father and son spent time at the Finnish consulate in St. Petersburg, until they fled to Finland, in a car driven by a Finnish diplomat.

Wow! From YLE…

Finland has received more judgments handed down by the European Court of Human Rights than the rest of the Nordic countries together over the past 15 years.

According to the newspaper Turun Sanomat, Finland has received a total of 75 binding decisions, of which all but one have been made over the past 15 years.

Sweden, for example, has received a total of 22 court judgments, Norway 19, Denmark 9 and Iceland just one.

In April, the European Court of Human Rights reprimanded Finland over the eight-year long case of a Helsinki man. The court intends to hear nine Finnish cases concerning questions of freedom of speech.

Finland has, so far, lost three-quarters of its cases before the court.

Well we know that basic freedom of speech is often lacking in this country. Here’s some other human rights concerns in Finland, from Wikipedia…

1. Conscientious objectors to both military and civilian service are jailed for six months. There are about 10-20[citation needed] conscientious objectors every year. Most are in minimum security, open facilities, and objecting is not entered on criminal records.
2. Charges of racist/xenophobic treatment of ethnic minorities by officials, and that refugees are hand-picked by the Ministry of the Interior on basis of country of origin citing “security reasons”.[citation needed]
3. A case in which agitated asylum seekers were drugged, for deportation.[citation needed]
4. Unfair court action in the light of the verdicts of the European Court of Human Rights.[citation needed]

* Handling time has been unacceptably long particularly in civil cases or criminal court cases relating to bankruptcy, e.g. eight years in the court of first instance and 12 years in total

The Knäckebröddansen:

I always thought figure skating was so gay, sorry Brian Boitano! And hey – Imagine if this happened in the states and not Finland – the Americans would have started the Cold War all over again.

Figure skating is all about landing the “triple lutz” and the “triple axel”, if you nail those, you win, if you don’t, you lose. They run around the ice, everyone just waits for these failures to happen, the rest is such a waste of time.

They should just line’em all up, make’em do their triple jumps, then release the hounds. They don’t make the ski jumpers dress up like strippers and dance around to shitty 80’s music before they do their jumps.

And give’em ski jumper-style helmets for God’s sake, some of those Eastern European guys are fugly!

Check out the pictures that go with this story!  Apparently, a new Lapland Christmas theme park in the U.K. opened to dismal reviews, and hundreds of complainers are demanding a refund for their £25 per ticket.  How much would you be willing to pay to experience the pristine white Christmas that we naturally have in our very own beautiful Lapland?   I suppose 25 quid is a lot cheaper than a VR ticket or flight up to Kittilä, but, would you sell out and settle for something like this for the kiddies if you didn’t live in Finland?  Lapland is still on my to-do list, but you can be sure that there is no substitute for the real thing.   I wonder what the Sami think of this!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/dorset/7758112.stm

I don’t know if that is so original of a thought, but the past few weeks’ news as well as the Finnish politicians’ reactions to the conflict in Georgia have on the one hand surprised me as it seems the politicians aren’t quite as Finlandized as they were in the 1970’s.

Maybe its due to the fact that the foreign minister Stubb is a triathlonist. Back in the 1970’s the ministry was pickled, as a recent book bluntly reveals “the things everybody knew but nobody talked about”. So how about the foreign minister passing out while negotiating with his French colleague… (Interesting change in the morals of the time – being drunk was accepted but a divorce was a huge scandal. These days its the total opposite.)  And as we’re not living in Kekkoslovakia the president doesn’t “take care of foreign affairs” as directly as before.

The Russian operation in Georgia also didn’t show much along the northern border. Back in 1968 the situation was totally different as a great article in the HS Int’l Ed details.  But still we can see some reflections of the “old days”. Apparently Halonen still has a direct line from Moscow and the politicians still keep their rhetoric… “politically correct”.

And why is this – well if you look at the numbers. Finland has huge trade with Russia – we remember what happened when the trade stopped after the collapse of the USSR. St.Petersburg is a huge market area with more people than the whole of Finland. Russian tourists bring in a significant income – a quarter of all money brought in by tourists. And of course then there is a few other deals like the Baltic gas pipe the Finns are involved in like the former prime minister Lipponen. So the rhetoric can’t be too strong. Then again the old codgers like Paavo Väyrynen have done some amazing hardline rhetorics especially regarding the wood tariffs and the truck queue problems, so its not all suck-up either.

The new reality also is that Finland is a part of the EU, and we cannot do as much solo flying as in the 1970’s… the EU formation flying seems to be a bit of a challenge in itself, but the destiny is not in Tamminiemi.

What comes to the conflict in Georgia in itself I’m not only sorry about the destruction and death but more worried of the escalation of things and the destabilization this causes – not only in the Caucasus region but even here up north. I am not looking forward to another cold war, let alone a hot one.