Last weekend, I was in Minsk, Belarus, to see the Russian KHL’s All-Star Game. After the game, I was standing in the mixed zone, listening to former NHLer Ville Peltonen, also a Finnish national hero thanks to his hat trick in a World Championship final against Sweden in 1995, when some fans showed up.

They said, “pleez, pleez” and gave Peltonen some small flags, posters, and a pen. He said, “sure,” and signed a half a dozen autographs, and posed for a few photos.

(Some of my colleagues thought it was such a no-no that the KHL should be fined, but my story’s not going there).

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One of the great thrills of traveling used to be the different kinds of ice creams and candy you’d see outside your own country. Never have I eaten an ice cream as exciting and exotic as the Swedish popsicle with two wooden sticks instead of one I had in 1978 in Huddinge – a southern suburb of Stockholm, not far from the spot I landed in with my green Nike bag twenty years later.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that modern traveling makes us dumber. We’re not using our brains the way we used to, back in the, oh, 1980s.

Because we’re not forced to.

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It’s been twenty years since I last read Peanuts, but I used to be a huge fan. A huge fan. Reading about Charlie Brown taught me a lot about life, I discovered new words - “anxiety”, anyone - but mostly they just made me laugh. I could relate to all of the characters at some point in my life.

What a joy it was for a little pre-teen Finnish hockey guy to find a Zamboni on the pages of Peanuts, let alone strips abut Snoopy playing hockey. “Here’s the world famous hockey player winding up for one of his spectacular slap shots…”

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I can say that I pretty much compete with everyone, with the exception of three people and those three happen to share my street address and my love for the “Make’em laugh” scene in Singing in the Rain. (Although, to be one hundred percent honest, I think I love it the most. And I’d be perfectly happy to say I finish second in that race, but I don’t).

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I like my name. I like my initials. The letter R is a very special one to me. I used to love the blinking R that marked replays on sports broadcasts. I sign my emails with just a single R, and my little hand-written notes to friends and family with a backwards R, like the one in Toys R Us.

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I’m in the water. I’m telling myself to stay calm. Breathe. I inhale and move my arms and legs fast. I seem to be floating. Maybe I can do this after all. I move my limbs too fast. Too fast. No, too slow. I’m drowning. I move my arms faster. I kick the water as hard as I can. It doesn’t help. I. Can’t. Stay. Afloat. The water tastes likes shit. I spit. I close my eyes. I want to rub my eyes but can’t because if I do, I will go under water, and I will never get up.

“Risto!”

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“Who’s going to like a guy who’s just being funny and doesn’t even want to wear socks?”
– Son, a week before Christmas, 2009

Your mother, Son, your mother. And I’m not talking about your mother as your mother, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, let me explain. Your mother, my wife, the smiling little chickity that takes care of business in and around the house, once fell in love with a guy who was just being funny, and never, ever, wore socks in his shoes.

(He did wear shoes).

Yes, that would be me.

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Happy New Year ... and remember these words: A new law »

For ten days, I’ve been pulling stuff out of the archives, but as is the nature of these lists, I saved the best for last. Ladies and gentlemen, the Best of the Decade. The envelope, please…

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Almost there. Aaaaalmost there. Tomorrow, at 6:00 CET, I will unveil the Best Story of the Decade here at ristopakarinen.com. But now, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the runners-up.

Oh, oh, one more thing: remember, these are the stories that will assume the duties of Best Story of the Decade if the titleholders for some reason cannot fulfill their responsibilities.

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We've reached the final three in my Top Ten countdown of the best stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get the RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.


Ladies and Gentlemen, in the third place:

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Getting closer to the medal positions as I count down the Top Ten stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.

Ladies and Gentlemen, only 4 you:

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Five down, five to go as I count down my Top Ten stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.

Ladies and Gentlemen, mambo number five:

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Aaaaaand, here we go, approaching top five on my Top Ten list of stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the sixth best stories of the past decade.

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Zero days 'til Christmas Eve, but a few more to go on my Top Ten list of stories of the past decade. Get the RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve to see the best in five different categories.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the seventh best stories of the decade:

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Two down, eight to go, as I count down my Top Ten stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get the RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.

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Moving on, counting down my Top Ten stories of the past decade, in five different categories. Get the RSS feed, or check back every day until New Year’s Eve.

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The Aughties are almost over, and what a decade it was. We lived through Big Brother, reality TV’s emergance in general, the Bush era, five Olympics, and were disappointed by the true 2001 Space Odyssey.

None of those things made the Best of the Decade list here at ristopakarinen.com. Instead, I will count down my Top Ten stories in the last ten years, in five different categories, between today and New Year’s Eve. Get the RSS feed, or check back every day. Now, you can search the archives for your own favorites if you want to, but the Official List is here.

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Specialists from New Zealand plan to recover two crates of Scotch whisky left more than 100 years ago by the polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and trapped deep in Antarctic ice.
– New York Times, November 17, 2009

Ladies and gentlemen,

Well, who am I kidding? “Ladies”? Good one. Gentlemen, welcome to the New Zealand Explorers’ Club. It is that time of the month again, and I am happy to see so many of our distinguished members here tonight. And even happier to see all the rest of you! HAA!

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Dear Hannes,

Last night after you’d fallen asleep, I had one of my hockey games again. We lost, which is never fun, but I scored a goal which is always fun, so all in all, it was more fun than not.

Skating is so much fun. When I was eight or nine, a little older than you now, I used to dream that it’d get so cold in Helsinki that all the streets would freeze over and I could skate to school. Skating was so much more fun that walking, or running. (For some reason, inlines don't do it for me).

But I did have to to walk to school and back. If I didn't walk with my best friend, I was always kicking pieces of snow and ice, and after school I’d play ball.

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Ten years ago today, I put my hand on J’s knee when we were sitting at a bar just around the corner from the office. The bar, Krokodil, was a gay bar that served cold beer and good food for the people that could fit in the eight tables it had.

We were there, a group of us, and at some point, late that night, I rested my hand on J’s knee, a gesture that - I have been told later - sent shock waves through her body. At the time, I was unaware of this.

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Today, Dec 6, is Finland’s Independence Day. I will spend it on a ferry to Sweden. How appropriate.

I have never been as Finnish as during my first two years living in Sweden. I moved to Sweden in April, and by Christmas, I was an ultrafennomaniac. I read only Finnish classics, I listened to Finnish music, and I basically spent my weekends on those ferries, going back to the old country, to the old hood and the old buddies.

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They say that the more something changes, the more it stays the same. In case you’re wondering who “they” are, the answer is Huey Lewis and the News, who had that line in “I Know What I Want“ on their Fore! album.

I can now tell you that the reverse is also true. The more something stays the same, the more it changes.

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Who came up with the ‘all you can eat’ concept? It’s a very dangerous one, that’s for sure, for two (obvious) reasons. First, there’s the financial aspect. The price is fixed so that just one portion of rolled salmon doesn’t seem to make any sense - especially since the buffet is all pizza. But even with all-you-can-eat-pizza, eating just one slice is madness, when the unit price of one slice is a fraction of the buffet.

So, the more you eat, the cheaper it gets.

(Or, as with my old company which arranged a ‘bonus lunch’, the more I ate, the bigger my bonus).

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Remember a while ago when I wrote that “[t]here is no place - and this is no exaggaration, simply a fact, so I repeat it: no place - a Swede can’t set up a bench, or hasn’t already done so"?

Yeah, the other day I went for a walk and thought about how I said that, and how right I was. I think I may have even said it out loud, “that thing you wrote about the benches last summer, on July 14, that was so right on, it was so true.” The thing that made me remind myself of that piece was a bench that I saw on my way to the mall.

This one:

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Apparently, I suffer from some kind of an early winter blues. That’s not very unusual around here, and I am sure there are physiological reasons for that. The lack of sunlight, the lack of warmth, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, the lack of the cold, too, the cold that would make it a real winter, and give us snow which would make everything a little lighter again.

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In 1959, Paul Anka played at the Linnanmäki theme park in Helsinki, and the country went nuts. "Paul Anka at Linnanmäki" became a catch phrase to describe a wild and crazy herd of people. It was Beatlemania before there were the Beatles. He was a teen idol, a pop star in an era when there weren’t any.

At the same time, he was still rooted in a tradition that was different from the one that the Beatles and the Stones and the rest came from.

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In a couple weeks, a K-1 tournament is going to be held somewhere in Sweden, Stockholm, or the surrounding international waters. Now, the fairly new combat sport has a lot of fans, and it attracts a lot of people, and I guess it’s gaining in popularity.

On the advertising posters that you can see in the Stockholm subway cars, they run a few quotes from papers to add creditibility to the event.

One of them is by an evening paper columnist and it goes like this: “… this is the future.”

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Moving is huge. Moving in with another person even huger. Helping out with that moving in is not as huge, but can be pretty interesting, especially if you only really know half of the couple now moving in together and if you’ve never seen the other person’s apartment before.

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In the last five years, I’ve conducted more interviews than I ever imagined I would. Somehow, while I do (kind of) like people, and am (kind of) curious to learn about new things, and get (kind of) excited (kind of) easily, I’ve never really seen myself as an interviewer - because somewhere deep down, I still (kind of) know that I’m (kind of) shy.

And when you think about it, the interview person is holding all the cards, really, unless you happen to know something that he doesn’t know you know, but that’s never happened to me.

Straightforward postgame interviews can be frustrating and exciting at the same time.

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Just like it’s difficult to keep up with the changes in a child growing up in front of our eyes, the world around us changes so slowly and fast at the same time that it’s hard to overlook how big some of the changes in the last 50 years have been. Fifty years is a long time for a person, but not for mankind.

Sometimes, Son and I play a game called, “Tell Me What Didn’t Exist When You Were Little, Dad”.

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OK, I can see now that several of Master Risto's wunderful texts have been snatched to other sites, so, this is what I'll do. I'll take that old RSS feed, and snap it into two pieces over my knee. Here's the Feedburner feed that - according to my long experience of googling stuff - should help.

You'll still get the texts to your client, but the rascals at the fake sites won't.

Thanks, amigos.

- Webmaster

Webmaster has been fired, for incompetence. His trick didn't work. Still, grab the feed here.

You gotta hand it to ABBA. They wrote some pretty amazing songs back in the 1970s, songs that we still listen to - and love - here in 2009. I was listening to Mamma Mia this morning, thinking about this, and how Björn and Benny tapped into something universally human pool of emotions that still resonates with us.

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Here’s the joke of the day.

“What do you get when you throw a mobile phone in a bathtub?
Answer: Speech bubbles."

Pretty good, right? Before you scroll down and start ripping the joke apart - as is the custom on the Internet - let me add this tiny bit of information: The joke was written by my son, six years old.

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People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

I suppose that would be you, dear reader, at the receiving end of my emails, blog entries, tweets, and text messages. Please don't try to read them all at the same time, and at least please don't try to listen to my puckcasts while reading this.

All kidding aside - but still, don't do it - I found that study fascinating. Today, I finally listened to (while driving a car) the On Point podcast with the professor behind the study trying to convince a couple of twenty-somethings that those who try to multitask actually are worse at focusing than those that don't multitask. The high multitaskers also had worse memory and were slower to switch from one task to another than those who didn't multitask as much.

"They couldn't help thinking about the task they weren't doing," Ophir said. "The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can't keep things separate in their minds."

The brain is not made for multitasking, the captain said. And well, I think I've known that all along, even though I can chew gum and walk, even run, at the same time. But I cannot listen to CNN and read the ticker at the same time.

Can you?

Here's a fact I'm 100 percent sure you didn't know: You're reading the collected works of the speed reading champion of the Oulunkylä Elementary School, circa 1976.

One day on third grade, each of us had to leave the classroom at some point, sit down with the teacher, and read as much of a book as we could in 60 seconds, out loud. I can't remember how many words I read, or even what the book was.

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Hear the one about Ville Koistinen?

No? See here.

Or, click on, I've pasted my NHL.com story below.

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On Wednesday, September 30, 2009, on the day that the NHL teams had to file their rosters, and make the final cuts, Mats Sundin announced his retirement at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, Sweden. Grand Hotel is the hotel where the Nobel Prize laureats spend their time in Stockholm when they come to town to collect the award in December. That’s where the stars stay when in Stockholm. Across a small bay, there is the Royal Palace where the King of Sweden has his office.

Some 15 kilometers north of Grand Hotel, there is Edsbacka krog, one of two restaurants with two Michelin stars in Sweden. The inn is in the heart of Sollentuna, next to the Edsbergs castle, which in turn overlooks Edsviken, the Baltic Sea bay, a beautiful public park where Swedes go for picnics, and walks and runs, and, on the other side of the water, a hockey arena.

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Quiet here?

This is why:

Sean Simpson channels Herb Brooks?
Sulander gets belated respect
"No love for Hallenstadion"
"We underestimated them"
"ZSC on top of the world"
For Sulander, it's now or never

And now I'm in Finland, my old country.

Just a reminder: my hockey stuff is now at Puckarinen (www.ristopakarinen.com/hockey/)

Three years ago, I claimed a word. I coined a phrase. A few weeks ago, I saw a Finnish version of the word in a paper. Was I the first one, really, or did somebody else’s brain produce a similar gem?

I’m sure it was the latter.

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A part of hockey’s lure has to be in the equipment. There’s something magical in the ritual of putting on all that gear that looks nothing like anything in the real world. Nothing.

Gloves are so padded that when the players do the now-ubiquitous gloved hand-clap to thank the fans after a game, it looks bizarre, unnatural. Same goes for the helmet, the socks (yeah, right), and the pants.

When I was four years old, following my father to hockey games in Helsinki, I was fascinated by goalies who, to me, looked like freaks of nature. I mean, where did these people live? I had never seen such creatures - with their wide legs, their chubby upper bodies, and their big, blocky hands - out on the streets.

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Where I live, honking is a lost art. I’m not going to tell you where I live, out of paranoia, but I will tell you that it’s getting pretty dark pretty early around here these days. And that people are polite and fairly quiet, and don’t wave their arms and hands when talking.

That’s why honking is often interpreted as something hostile, like a rude gesture, or a shove in the back. An elbow to the ribs in a crowded elevator.

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INT. ITALIAN GROCERY STORE - DAY. CHECK-OUT LINE NUMBER 7.

WIFE, SON, and DAUGHTER lift a lot of groceries from a basket onto the conveyer.

WIFE
Put that pasta on there, please, Daughter. Thanks, good job. And Son, don't pile all the stuff in one spot, OK?

WIFE, SON, and DAUGHTER keep adding groceries onto the belt.

WIFE
I wonder ... I wonder which side the bar codes should be. Oh, see, over here they have the bar code reader installed facing up, in the same place where we at home have the scale, so we should probably turn the groceries so that the bar codes are facing down, OK, Son?
Husband, can you give me that divider bar so that that lovely and picturesque Italian couple - don't look now, but he looks just like Rocky's brother-in-law - behind us can put their stuff on the belt.

HUSBAND
Here.

WIFE
No, wait, the bar code reader is where it is at home, so everybody, turn the groceries over so the bar code faces us.

INT. ITALIAN GROCERY STORE - DAY. CHECK-OUT LINE 6:

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Now I know what the opposite of "very funny" is. It's "And then we came to the end," a book I finally managed to finish,which is mostly a great testimony to my perseverance and will power, since it took me two years and three tries to get to the end.

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It was very subtle, actually, but the signal was there. Something about the man was a little off. Not the hat, it was fine. It was an old NHL hat, last season's design, but OK. It wasn't the windbreaker - we were on a boat, after all - and it wasn't the pants, although they were kind of big, and baggy, and not in the cool way. But I didn't notice that until afterwards.

After I had seen the subtle signal.  

He smiled at me which was a nice enough gesture for me to forgive him for cutting in front of me in the line. Besides, I could tell he was traveling with friends who were already standing in front of me.  

But. What made me do a double take was this:

The man had his shoes on the wrong feet. 

He was lying on his side, supporting his head with his hand, stroking Wife’s hair gently. She was lying on her back, reading a magazine. 

 

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