It was a hot and humid Swedish summer night, I was up, translating a book. That was the night when Michael Jackson died. I saw the news first in a friend's Facebook feed, as he had posted a link to a Finnish site that ran a headline "Michael Jackson dead".

And it turned out they were right, even if the status in LA media at that point still was either "rumored dead" or "in a coma".

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“Hejdå, good old apartment, thanks for everything,” I said, and if you had been standing where J was, you would have heard what she heard: that my voice did crack a little. When J took a step back inside she saw the same thing I saw, looking at her: A tiny little tear in the corner of the eye.

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Beatles’ lost tweets uncovered

LIVERPOOL – Jimmy Sutton, Chief Support Engineer at Clean-IT Ltd in Liverpool, England, recently made a discovery that changed his life. Called in to repair damage after a networking company’s server crash, Mr. Sutton discovered a compressed file, apparently not accessed in decades, and containing hundreds – maybe thousands – of Twitter messages.

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Today I learned that sometimes just a small change can turn an ordinary thing into a very funny one when my son, the bilingual genius, accidentally turned the word "eyebrows" into "broweyes".

I also learned that sometimes even the funniest things don't translate very well from Finnish into English.

Sitting at the real estate agent's office today, the nice lady selling her old house to us was telling us what a pain it was to move. But that, fortunately, she hadn't had to do that very often. That's when my wife jumped in with the facts*.

(* Still unverified).

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You may have noticed that it's been a few days since Mr. Pakarinen updated this page, and let's be honest here - as we always are here at RPlog - his last real update here was almost two weeks ago. I see he's been posting some old columns here. Oh well.

But, in all fairness - and we're nothing if not fair around here - he hasn't been slacking off, no, no, sir. In fact, I just put in the last details on a new page Mr. Pakarinen has been working on the last few weeks. That's right, a new page.

It's got nothing to do with hockey, although, hockey may also come up in his work. What it is, is a collection of "news clippings" he's "found". That means he makes them up and thinks he's being funny.

"It's a little different kind of writing," says Mr. Pakarinen.

Is it different or "different"? I'm not saying I like all of his pieces, but I have laughed at some of them. Especially the one about the ... well, see for your self.

The Risto Twist-o at www.ristopakarinen.com/home/twisto/

Get a free lifetime subscription, while you're there. I know I did.

Oh, to have the power of the sports execs.

Here's my column from the April issue of Scanorama. Enjoy!

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Lost and found:

Just as this year's Stanley Cup winners are graduating, I found this little speech I've never been invited to give. And never will be. So, you can read it here. (Here's a pdf, to print out and read on the train/bus/hammock).

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Just to let you know: I finished both Monday's and Tuesday's crosswords this week. And correctly, too, not filling the blanks with random letters – like I'm known to have done in the past.

Filed under "true story".

Apparently, self-control is a good thing:

Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly [to get marshmallows now instead of waiting and getting two later], seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.

[T]he ability to delay gratification ... was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. In other words, “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”

That's my problem. I would have failed the marshmallow test. I've always been the kind who eats all candy right away, hand to mouth until the bag is empty. The upside is that I would have been just fine with getting only one marshmallow now. No regrets, either.

However, I always did well in school, I had the patience to learn those German verbs, and work my through the math problems. Maybe I'm a genius?

But I can't get up at 5 am to work out, I'm no good at dieting, and I generally prefer now to later. Which is why I can never have projects just lying around. I've published three books, two of them were collections of my earlier articles, the third an oral history of a hockey team.

I would love to have "work-in-progress". When I picked up painting, I loved it - the actual work - but I always had to finish everything in one sitting. (Standing).

So, now I'm actually trying to practice having unfinished work lying around. I go to bed in the middle of a sentence instead of burning the midnight oil and working my way to the end of the story. I would love to have a half-finished crossword puzzle folded inside my notebook, so that I could add a word every now and then, over a course of days and weeks.

And this weekend, I did something that may be a step to the right direction.

This:


Although, I chose Monday's crossword because it's the easiest, and I finished it in one sitting.

Upside: I should have been working instead. I feel like a better person already.

Music can transcend time and place like nothing else (except apparently smell). Hearing a song can bring back memories that you didn't know you even had. And then make you wonder why you have them.

Here are my two examples. Except I know.

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Oops.

Huan and Hui stuffed the money in a duffle bag, closed down their gas station, and hit the road, in pursuit of a better life as millionaires.

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Below is a fairly long thing about running.

Get the printer-friendly pdf here or keep reading the 3 000-word beast below.

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The small path to the gym goes through a tiny piece of recreational area. I want to say forest, but that's just too grand a word for what is a very tiny green spot on the map, but yes, the path goes through the woods.

It can be scary in the winter, especially when I'm listening to music on my Apple® iPhone™ music player, especially after J told me that the urban predators look for people just like that.

It only takes me a minute to cut through the "forest" - with real living animals such as roe deer and hares - but a lot of different thoughts rush through my head. I know, there's nothing in the dark that isn't there in the light, and all that, but yesterday, I walked to the gym in full daylight, and saw three of these shady beasts hiding by the side of the construction site, and my heart missed a beat.

Then I turned on the music and cut through the forest, knowing that I'd be able to outrun the 'saurs.

Four weeks ago, I was sitting in the same chair I am sitting in now, writing an article, when I once again looked at the Bobby Orr photo hanging on the wall in front of me. It's funny that the photo is such an inspiration, even if I never saw the game, didn't grow up idolizing Orr, and don't really know that much about that particular final series.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 12, 2009

RISTO PAKARINEN TAKES A DAY OFF

STOCKHOLM – Risto Pakarinen, writer, hockey writer, blogger, and the CEO of ristopakarinen.com, announced today his plan to take off an entire day. Pakarinen said he will not be working on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, “not even a little bit.”

“After almost 350 different articles in the last year, and having just covered 32 hockey games in 17 days, I feel it’s time for a break,” Pakarinen says.

“It is my firm intention that this blog entry will be the only thing I write today. I will not check my email or spend hours online idly chatting with people, will not text people or sit on the phone all day, but instead I will just buy some food, make some dinner, watch TV, and sleep, possibly read a book,” he adds.

Mr Pakarinen recently returned home from Bern, Switzerland where he had been covering the hockey World Championship since April 24. While the tournament was a huge success for Mr Pakarinen, it was also a trying experience physically and emotionally. He’s confident, though, that a 24-hour break is enough to restore his vigor.

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says.

----------------------------------------------------
For additional information and photos of Risto Pakarinen, please see www.ristopakarinen.com or contact

Hannes Pakarinen, hannespakarinen at gmail dot com

I like beef and veal. I like steamed vegetables, and I like beans. Rice, pasta, noodles, bring it on, I'm game.

But eating the beef or the veal, with the veggies, maybe some rice/pasta on the side, twice a day, for 17 days, has made me want for some pasta a la Risto, or pizza. And a fresh salad.

There are several things that I like about this writing business, but one that really suits me well, is the fact that I don't have to have an office that I have to go to write. I can just open my laptop cover and start typing. Well, sort of.

Here are a couple of my offices during this trip. The first one is the one where I typed the iihf.com game reports, and the second one is my hotel room. Not much glamour in this line of work, believe it or not.

First off, exactly a year ago, I had no idea how little I knew about Switzerland. Now that I have been here almost a dozen times in the past 12 months, and find myself halfway through a three-week stay, I can see that I didn't know anything.

What I have learned recently is that the fact that I didn't know a lot about Switzerland (but thought I did) is exactly the most Swiss thing there is. They're hard to pigeonhole, those Swiss.

It's difficult to describe what the Swiss generally look like - they seem to be very outdoorsy - and I get no direct visual association of "Switzerland", like I get with, say, "France", "Spain", "Germany", or "Italy". Not immediately anyway.

If I think about it for a while, I can see a huge Toblerone chocolate bar, then cheese fondue.

Which, interestingly enough, I have not seen a glimpse of here. Yet.

Part of the charm with working at an international event like the hockey World Championships is seeing (and observing) people from all over the world. True, with hockey, it's mostly the white, male part of the population I can observe, but even in that sample, there are some fascinating observations to be made.

Really.

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Traveling can be a lonely business, even if you're surrounded by people all the time. The biggest number of people I've been surrounded by on this trip is 11 417 (capacity crowd) but of course it'd be nice with some familiar faces.

There's a family legend about one of my father's hockey trips. It's not about him, but I think it nicely captures the human need to feel at home. My Dad's' hockey team was in the Oldtimers' World Championships in the UK somewhere. I may confuse this with his trip to the Edinburgh tournament but it doesn't really matter.

There they were anyway, seeing the sights when a teammate of his said, "Look, there's a sign in Finnish!"

And indeed there was. The sign said "Coca-Cola."

Well, see this sign! It says "me". Made me feel welcome in Bern, Switzerland.

The suitcase is wide open on the living room floor, pretty much packed. I've got my essentials, my T-shirts, jeans, underwear, suit, shirts, shoes, and books to take me through the hockey world championship extravaganza in Switzerland.

How many pairs of jeans would I wear at home in the next three weeks? Probably 1.5. How many T-shirts? Probably just six different ones, but with a good rotation, and yes, washed in between uses. Why do I then pack 4 pairs of jeans and 15 T-shirts?

Because you never know, that's why. Better safe than sorry.

I've read two books in the past three weeks, which - on a rotating weekly average - is a record for the 2008-09 season, but for the trip, I've packed three novels, magazines, and hockey stats books.

Because, let's face it, covering 32 games in 17 days - with two off days which aren't really off days because those stories won't write themselves - is a walk in the park and I'll mostly be just reading and changing clothes.

So, for the next 20 days, I'll be blogging, twittering, and skyping from Berne, Switzerland about all that, hockey, and how to travel light right here, a little here, twittering here, and blogging some more on THN's site.

But right now, I'm already looking forward to coming back home in 20 days. And I imagine walking through those huge doors at the Arlanda airport, and seeing Jessica and the kids waiting for me, she holding a fresh caffe latte in her hand, and the kids dancing and singing songs about the best dad in the world. (Me.)

In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell writes about an experiment where people were given fifteen minutes to examine a student's college dormitory to gather information about him. Afterwards, they were interviewed, and it turned out that they could describe the subject’s personality more accurately than his or her own friends.

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In the blue corner, 95 centimeters, weighing 14.5 kilograms, at three years and 40 days we have Hilda who read this sign at a store yesterday.



Or at least the top part of it. She said, "Mother dear" - no, not really, but wouldn't it be great? - "the signs says 'stop'."

And as you can see, it sure does. So the girl can read at 3, tying the family record. That's what you get for doing everything your big brother does – if your big brother is the self-proclaimed "Reader Boy".

When movies get pirated, often the subtitles are missing. Or, if the subtitles are there, they’re as Chinese as the guy whose head you can see a couple of times between you and the movie.

And where there’s a will, there's a way. Demand meets supply, simple as that. There are several actors in the underground subtitling business in Sweden, for example, but they’re not all in it just out of the goodness of their hearts, making subtitles available on the Web to advance foreign films’ status in Sweden.

No, no.

Swedish Dagens Nyheter ran a story about just that the other day, with this quote from “Jimmi” at Swesub, one of those companies.

“If we upload new subtitles on [our site] at Swesub, they’ll be available at Undertexter in just a couple of minutes. It sucks that somebody’s making money off of our work, without giving anything back to us.”

It’s a crime, I say.

Sometimes it's difficult, even impossible, to see cause and effect in things and I suppose it may be meaningless as well. Since Doc Brown's DeLorean did get destroyed, we can't go back in time, and what's left is just a game of second-guessing.

The other day, I made a short trip to Finland on Finnair. I always check out the in-flight magazine out of professional curiosity and courtesy and this time, what caught my eye was a column about Finnish architecture.

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Yesterday, I interviewed a Finnish wind energy expert who gave me the name of another expert to talk to, this guy a Swedish one.

Nothing special, at all, you're right. I made a note of the email with the guy's contact info, but not much more. Today, I copied his email address off the email, typed a message and sent it off. Another day at the office, another interview booked. Five minutes later, I got an error message about the message being undeliverable so I had to send the message again. And because the address was wrong, I had to edit it.

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In my previous entry I wrote that "I was slow again", which is actually not really true. I'm not a slow person, at all, but when I typed that I was making a mental reference to one instance where I came late into the picture. I can't seem to find it anywhere on this blog, even though I was sure I had written about it.

Anyway. This is what happened.

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Here's my childhood hero, Lucky Luke, circa 1979.


And here's Luke in 2009.



Turns out he's not just lucky, he's smart as well. And, turns out I'm slow again. Apparently, Luke quit smoking and switched the cigarette to a straw in 1983. (Then again, of the 73 albums, only 21 have been published in 1983 or later. I remember him always having that cigarette in his mouth.)

Or, thereabouts. But never losing it.

Helsinki airport, April 4, 7.30 a.m. Temperature: +1° C

Boarding a plane to Stockholm, temperature at destination: +5° C.

But this is a Finnair flight:

Last night, a friend of mine was talking to a friend of his about me. And he said that I was from Joensuu, which he knows is a bit of sore point to me, then corrected himself and said, “Well, really, he’s from here but he…” and he glanced at me.

I was born in Helsinki, I lived here until I was 14, and moved back to Helsinki when I was 18.

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Probably the next big thing to come out of Finland: Liquorice. It's amazing that it hasn't conquered the world already but I predict that its time has come. It's delicious, it's delicious, and it's delicious.

There's already a great liquorice store in Stockholm, but if you ever get to Finland try to get your hands on Kouvolan Lakritsi (Kouvola Liquorice). It's the best liquorice in Finland. And they say so themselves.

I don't know how many times I've driven through Varkaus on my way to Joensuu where I went to high school and where my father lives, but it must be in the hundreds. And each time, and especially since meeting Jessica and making that trek together with her, I always say out loud: "This city is tops my list of 'cities I don't want to live in'".

Varkaus.

The word means "theft."

And the image of the city goes downhill from there. Varkaus is mostly hiding under the smoke - which is probably not real smoke but just steam - from the paper mill which is right in the center of the city. There's a unpleasant smell, and the buildings look a little run-down. I just want to keep driving.

Well, now I have spent a night at a local hotel, and I'm afraid my list stays unchanged. Time to hit the road.

But enough about me. Where would you never want to live?

Kuopio, a city in the Finnish heartland, some four hours north of Helsinki. Four hours and maybe a couple of years. It used to be about ten, but news travel fast these days.

Kuopio, a city in the heart of Savo, a region known for sneakiness and twisted humor. As the old Finnish proverb goes, "when somebody from Savo talks, the listener bears all responsibility." And like most clichés, this one is true, and very much alive.

As I arrived to the rink tonight, I was told to go to the door and ask for tickets that had been left for me there. I walked to the door and introduced myself, and said that there should be two tickets for me. The man at the door looked at me and goes, "no tickets here..."

My jaw dropped.

"... but I have your name on the list," he said, laughing so that his entire body shook.

Talking with these Savo people on April Fool's Day is just asking for it.

Being a Finn living in Sweden, I'm in the privileged position of always being right when there's a question of these two countries. "How dare you question my patriotism for Finland?" or "How dare you tell me that you know better what Swedes are like, I've been here for ten years – and my kids are Swedish." (Or Finnish, depends on who's asking).

A friend of mine always says I'm living behind the enemy lines. Well, I'm going back to the old country for a few days again, and I thought I'd blog my way through it. So come back and refresh often. (Really, grab that RSS feed while you can).

I'm going deep, too. Kuopio. Rhymes with nothing.

Since I have been working from my home office for over five years now, I'm not a regular commuter, and therefore, not a regular subway train passenger. I'd (almost) like to be, I find the subway to be a great place to read and listen to my precious podcasts.

And to get a feel what "they" think. And judging by the trip I made today, people don't read newspapers as much as they did five years ago. Which is naturally no surprise, we knew that. But now I've seen it with my own eyes.

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Just a reminder: Puckarinen has updated his blog today. It's just under this one, have a look:

I took the train yesterday. Nice, environmental choice that also gave me an opportunity to work the full three hours it took for me to get transported from Stockholm, the “capital of Scandinavia”, as the city’s tourist council wants us to call it, to Gothenburg, the .. something of the something on the “front of Sweden”.

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I've never been a smoker so if I sound obnoxious here, please forgive me, and just shrug it off. Just think that I'm ignorant when it comes to these things.

(Full disclosure: Back in the 1970s, I did think it was cool to smoke the liquorice pipes now banned by the EU, and the long gone liquorice cigarettes, wrapped in Camel paper and all – and in fact, I smoked a liquorice pipe as recently as today. Not endorsing that habit, either, though).

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I'm not one to make cool entries or exits. I know one when I see it, but I don't think I have the ego to pull them off. Sometimes I do something that seems like a great idea at the time, or I lash out to someone in a way that is really witty, but also mean, and then I feel bad about it for the rest of the day.

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Time truly flies. In just 105 days, it’s time for another edition of Island Games, the sports event for the island nations. Or “nations”, depending on your view on autonomous parts of independent countries. It seems like yesterday that Greenland’s Kim Godtfredsen stopped the clock at 33.27.60 to win the men’s 10 000 meter race.

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It's not easy being man.



Just look at man's life in the headlines, and that's just today.

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The six-word memoir of the day:

"Waiting for the phone to ring."

Here's my six-word memoir of the day:

"You still ain't seen nothing yet."

There are two things a true professional never does.

1. He never works in his underwear. There's something about underwear that makes any activity seem less professional, no matter how fine the final product is. I'm sure F. Scott Fitzgerald didn't write Great Gatsby in his underwear. That's why I'm writing this entry fully clothed. In this case, Speedos are also considered underwear.

2. He never goes to a meeting without a bag. A suitcase, a messenger bag or the like, but never a backpack. It doesn't matter what's in it. It can be a lunch sandwich, a newspaper, notes, even underwear (as long as it stays in the bag), it doesn't matter, but the bag has to be there or you might as well yell, "I don't know what I'm doing" when you enter the meeting room.

Now, go take over the world.

Here's this week's "I on Europe" from The Hockey News.

Here, that is.

I think I need an intern. It's not an easy job, but it may be a fun job. My previous assistant moved on in 2000 to pursue other challenges in the US collegiate world, and I have been looking for a replacement ever since. (He only lasted a week).

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There seems to be a lot of confusion about the current global economic disarray. The Chicago School says one thing, the Harvard people another, and the IMF analysts yet something else. Nobody seems to know what is going on, and why.

Not to mention the most important question: whose fault is this?

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