On the road again, so to speak. Like Doc Brown said, "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." Technically, I'm not on the road right now, as I sit in a cabin on a ferry to Finland.

I did it once, and I'll do it again. I'll "live blog" this trip so come back, refresh often, and keep those questions and comments coming.

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Dagens Nyheter, ("Daily News"), the biggest Swedish morning paper, had called the Swedish Elite League GMs to get the inside scoop of any upcoming trades. The trade deadline is January 31, so there are only a few hours - but no players - left.

One of the questions they asked the GMs was: "What has been the worst trade in your club's history?"

Modo's Erik Holmberg was in a positive frame of mind and replied: "I haven't made that yet."

I love it.

I love jeans. I remember taking the bus down to downtown Helsinki with one of my best friends - a.k.a. The Coolest Guy in the Class - to go to that Mic Mac store to get our first Levi’s 501s.

Only, they didn’t have them in my size, so I had to buy another kind. No idea what the type was, but I do know that the label on the butt was not red, but orange. And if you had asked me in school the day after, it was a flaming orange label that could be seen blocks away.

It was supposed to be red.

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My son is working on a magazine of his own, and you know what? I made the cover! We had the photo shoot last night. Here's the cover shot:


Having seen that, I must say that I am a little curious to see what he did with the interview.

No, no, no, no, against the advice of my manager, I haven't founded World Wrestling League.

No, that title is just something out of a story I wrote for the International Ice Hockey Federation this week.

This is what the season looks like for MODO: w, l, l, w, w, l, w, l, w, l, l, l, w, w, w, w, w, l, l, l, l, w, l, l, w, w, l, l, l, w, w, w, w, w, w, w, l, l.

You can see the story here. And here are the week's columns on the Finnish Elite League's site, if you like to read Finnish or want to print out a photo of me and stick into your wallet. Don't like that photo? Here's another hockey blog, still in Finnish. And, here... Well, you're already here.

What do you do when your father-in-law sends you a meme and challenges you to tell Seven Truths about yourself?

That's right. Keep reading.

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My daughter keeps referring to herself in the third person. At what age is that just annoying? Risto wants to know.

Modo published an interview with Peter Forsberg, who's practicing with the club's junior team his old team. He says that...

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There's no such thing as free lunch? Maybe. But there sure are free breakfasts, I just came back to the office from one. Not only did I get breakfast, I also got material for Scanorama's Web & Tech, a soccer ball for my kids, and a calculator for my wife.

Gotta love Canon and their wonderful EOS 450D camera, recommended price of just 900 euro, including the 18-55 mm IS lens!

(There, now we're all happy).

I'm off to play another game of rink bandy. Missed our last game, due to "scheduling problems." I came there an hour too late.

Anyway, below you'll find an nhl.com column about the sport and the team. And if you like that one, I've got a whole book – Off The Post - of columns for you.

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My cousins are wizards with cars, just like their father, my uncle, who shares the name with a famous Finnish rally driver. When I was out shooting pucks and throwing a ball, my cousins were in the garage, fixing their mopeds and helping their dad.

So I was surprised when the younger one of them told me, years ago, that he was going to be a chef.

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This just out: "The Finnish journalist calls for a more civilized version of hockey where goons have no part in the game."

When I was ten years old, I had a classmate who was a little hyperactive. He was an annoying little guy, always teasing others. Me, as well, although we were pretty good of friends.

Once, he banged my head against a brick wall.

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A freelancer is always pitching stories or he'll be out of business. Or, he'll slide into a business he really doesn't want to be in.

Pitching stories is actually a lot of fun. It can be stimulating on many levels. One part Sherlock Holmes, one part Stephen King, two parts Home Shopping Network spokesperson.

First you need the idea.

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The Hockey News has identified the "glue guys" in each NHL team. You know, the guys that may not be the biggest stars, but who are important to the team and hold it together. Two of the thirty glue guys were Finns.



Jere Lehtinen was the other one.

Whoah! I went deep into the archives, and see what I found! This profile on Jarmo Kekäläinen, St. Louis Blues' assistant GM.

Here's a pdf but that's mostly just for looks.

Click below to get to the story without the photos. (Although, Susanne's photos are pretty sweet).

» Continued

Thank you for all your emails and comments regarding my liveblogging day on Thursday. It was a lot of fun to do so I'll do it again in about two weeks. However, here are some answers to the questions you sent my way.

Why did you do it?
At first it was really just a test to see what that does to the traffic. But once I hit the road and started to write and update the blog, it became a way to record the trip for future generations. In 50 years, that entry - this entry - may be used as an example in a classroom somewhere, to show how people communicated in the old days, and what Helsinki looked and feeled like back in circa 2010. Thirdly, it was a way to send secret, coded messages to my wife stuck in her cubicle somewhere.

» Continued

Alpo's the word of the week. Here's something I wrote for the IIHF.com.

While he’s worried about Finnish hockey - “we have truly professional organisations only in two cities” and “how could the Finnish league be one of the best ones in the world with 200 of our best players are playing in other leagues” - he’s not just shooting his mouth off at the sidelines. He’s back in the saddle in Pori, and he was recently elected to the Finnish hockey association’s coaching committee.

More here.

Today, Finland just leaped over the day part completely and went from the evening of the January 17th straight to the evening of the 18th.

I think.

This is what it looked like in downtown Helsinki at noon.



Tough.

I'm about to hit the road, going on a quick trip to the old country. I thought I'd update this blog as I go, so .. stay tuned.

12.25: "No, I don't live in Sweden," I said to her. Not that there's anything wrong with it - naturally. I just didn't want to hear her pitch about the benefits of having an American Express card.

I had one, a long time ago. I think I used it once.

» Continued

Just got off the phone with Alpo Suhonen, Finnish hockey coach, and a free thinker. I'm working on a piece about him - soon, soon - but I know already that I'm going to use parts of the interview in several occasions. His every sentence held an insight, and I kid you not.

Speaking of kids, Alpo compared himself to the kid who was standing by the road when the Emperor came wearing his new clothes that were made of a magical fabric that you couldn't see if you were stupid or unfit for your job.

You know, Keiserens nye Klæder

Alpo has a lot to say about a lot of things, and he's never been afraid to speak his mind or do whatever he thought was the right thing to do.

But you know what the last line of the story is?

[The emperor] carried himself even more proudly, and the chamberlains walked along behind carrying the train that wasn't there.

Good luck, kid.

I'm puzzled. Confused, even.



See, I've got these two friends. On Facebook, that is. On the same day that I connected - on Facebook - with one of them, let's call him "Austin Powers" (why not?), the other (Dr. Evil) had joined a group called "Send "Austin Powers" to Siberia."

Do I need to do anything? What's the code of conduct in a case like this? Should I tell Dr. Evil to back off or leave the group? Unfriend him? Should I care?

What would I do in real life? Yeah. We'd laugh and laugh and laugh. Austin and I.

Back in the 20th century, I worked at a hockey pant factory in Canada for one summer. Or, right next to the factory, because I, being a business graduate, almost, I was sitting in the office. I also happened to be boarding with the boss.

One afternoon, the boss packed his extended family, that being his wife, two kids and myself, into their van, and drove up to the cottage country in northern Ontario to meet up with the company lawyer in a casual setting.

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My name is Risto Pakarinen, and I'm a freelance journalist. A mid-evil mercenary. Judging from all the emails I get every day, many of you dream of being freelancers, too. "How did you get your very own blog?" people ask me. Well, let me tell you.

» Continued

When I first met Jessica, we emailed each other. But if you're in love, you reeeally have to email each other. How much? A lot! (Life of Brian is also her favorite movie to the point that she can recite the entire movie, line for line, by heart. No joke.)

Well, we did. When we celebrated our first year together, she gave me two huge binders with every single email we had sent each other in the first six months of dating.

» Continued

When I'm not working on this blog - writing new entries, adding links to the sidebar, spamming my buddies with links, selling ads, chatting with celebrity bloggers, designing T-shirts to be sold on the blog and so on - I work.

I write.

Like this:
» Karalahti in limbo (iihf.com)
» Hey, ref! (nhl.com)
» Suhostelua and another column about the European league (sm-liiga.fi, in Finnish)
» Belfour carries Leksand (iihf.com)
» The one below, Where's Hankenstein?, on nhl.com.

and then another column, another story about Belfour, but those were for real magazines, the kinds that are printed on paper, so I can't link to them.

If you do, then maybe you want to run out and get the latest issue of HOCKEY, a magazine published by the Swedish hockey federation, and curiously enough, the only magazine covering Swedish and international hockey in the country.

So, grab your coat, and get the mag. Look for these two spreads:



Have fun.

Here's my latest from nhl.com.



Peeved? That's right.

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I've only won in the lottery once. It was 1982, and I won 85 Finnish markka. It was so much money that even though it was pouring, I rode my bike to the post office to collect it. I'm not surprised that I haven't won since, though. The last time I bought a lottery ticket was in 1984.

The iPod shuffle is like lottery, and I think I won last night. I was on my way to a hockey game and decided to do the shuffle. And I hit the jackpot. Here are the seven songs I got, and I didn't even have to jump over any songs. This is gold.

» Continued

This post replaces another one, a great one, the one with wit and brilliance. The one with Britney and Hanoi Rocks and the man with a body like mine who still plays hockey at a professional level.

Maybe you saw it. It disappeared thanks to my incompetent service provider, and if you're reading this in your cool server room, you know who you are. No names, but Mike and Larry, you know it's you.

Having watched the first season of Heroes this week, I really wish I could pull a Hiro, go back in time, make a copy of the brilliant post, and come back.

Instead, this is what you get.

Solly.

Here's another column from nhl.com, right after the jump. So, you can get it here, or you can get it at nhl.com.
Oh well, you get it.

» Continued

If you really believe in what you do, if you really believe in who you are - and let's face it, if you don't, who does? - if you have a vision, you have to stay the course, regardless of what others say. People may tell you you'll never be anything, that you're a slacker. That your way of life will never get you anywhere.

Don't believe it.

Let Stan Friedman, a New York librarian, be your guiding light. Be like Stan. Never. Give. Up.

There she was, sitting at the office in the middle of the day. The boss was in one of his moods again, don't even get her started on that. She was hiding behind her computer, waiting for him to just go away.

When the boss finally - finally - turned around and locked himself in his office, she lifted her keyboard to see the clipping again. There it was, the short story of the Boston Bruins' hot new goalie.

» Continued

Here's a link to a little conversation I had with The Dish on Sports's Andrew Findlater about Off The Post, the collection of my blog entries on nhl.com.

Listen to Andrew and me here. It's a good 15 minutes of hockey talk you may enjoy.

And then, get the book here.

KITCHEN INT. - DAY

A couple is preparing lunch in the kitchen, the husband working on a kick-ass hotdog, while his son, Hannes, is looking on, licking the ketchup off his own hotdog. The wife, Jessica, looks out the window and sees the neighbour walk to his car.

» Continued

Is there anybody out there who doesn’t like gadgets? New inventions? Things that do stuff automatically.

When I was about five – and I remember this vividly – I wrote a sign above the door of the playhouse at my grandparents’: “The Lab.” In the lab, I conducted all kinds of experiments, such as spreading four kinds of glue on a piece of paper to see which one of them dried the fastest.

» Continued

I thought this was interesting.



Simply because it's something I have suspected for a long time. I mean, when I was a kid and walked the ten miles to school, barefooted, in the snow, uphill both ways, those polar bears were always waiting for me somewhere, wanting to take my lunch, but I haven't seen them for years.

In fact, not since our igloo melted back in the 1980s.

Looking out the window, I see a man changing snow tyres to his car. About time. We got 20 cm of snow this morning.

This is the same guy who two years ago came home in the middle of night, and parked his car on a big rock next to his/our house. The car only had three wheels at that point. And no, he's not changing snow tyres to that car, he traded it for another one. And that to another one. And that one to another one. And then once more.

So, what does this man do for a living?

That's right. He's a truck driver.

He's a pro.

There was a great snowstorm in Boston two weeks ago. I know because I was in it. That wasn't really a lot of fun, but a couple of days later, it was time to go sledding.

And when you go sledding, you need to dress accordingly.

» Continued

New Year's is the time for new beginnings, and restarts. Here are my New Year's resolutions for 2008.



i. I will appear in Roxette's new video.
ii. I'll spend more time outdoors.

I remember this game as if it was yesterday. But it wasn't. It was 30 years ago.

Happy New Year!