[Professor Hood’s] researchers convince the pre-school-age subjects that their special item will be put into a machine that can produce a copy of the object which is identical in every way. The infants, who are offered the choice of having the original or the "perfect" copy returned to them, strongly prefer the original. – BBC, 2004

Every once in a while, when I’m writing longer pieces, my fingers seem to swell, and I take off my wedding ring. It’s something of a pause to collect my thoughts as well, and a minute or so later, I slip the ring back on because I’m worried that I might lose it.

Before Wife and I got engaged, we were fake engaged for a while. Or, I know that I was. We’d only been together for about a year when we moved in together. She had sold her apartment wanted us to take a really nice, long trip somewhere with the money she had made so we took a trip to Mexico. For a week, we traveled around the Yucatan peninsula in an air-conditioned bus with an active group of mostly retired people.

» Continued

I’m a simple man, with simple needs and simple pleasures. Like food. I like food, but because I’m a simple man, I don’t need a gourmet dinner to be happy. After all, I grew up on Finnish lihapiirakka, a deep-fried pie with ground meat and rice inside. (Add ketchup and mustard).

When our family moved from Helsinki to Joensuu, a rural university town in Eastern Finland, one of my biggest fears was that there wouldn’t be a good burger joint in Joensuu. It may sound weird now, but back then, there were no McDonald’s restaurants in Helsinki, and there was just one “real American” burger place in town.

It was a Carrols. And we went there on Sundays.

» Continued

I was exactly where I wanted to be. I repeat: exactly where I wanted to be. I wasn't in front of everybody because if you’re in front, it’s easy to start looking back. When there’s nowhere to focus on in front of you, you tend to take off too fast, and use too much energy in the beginning.

Some people prefer to run in the middle of the pack, because they feel the power of the crowd carrying them on, and I suppose they feel safe in the middle, when the masses begin to stampede.

I don’t.

» Continued

I might as well start by confessing that I’m one of those people who, back in 2000, walked around saying that having a camera in a mobile phone was idiotic.

Today, I’m one of the idiots that make the rest of the family wait for me, while I take a snap shot of a beautiful building – or a pile of dog poop that I think looks like Darth Vader.

And I love it.

» Continued

Sometimes life really imitates art. My life real art. The other day, visiting Dad, Son and I walked to the car to get his flashlight, so that he could sleep in a little playhouse in the backyard. On our way back, I thought it’d be smarter to walk around the house and go straight to the backyard through the back door.

» Continued

I didn’t even notice the first note myself. My buddy did. We were running late to our next class so I just shoved my jacket into my locker and grabbed my biology book, then locked my locker, when he picked it up from the floor.

“Hey, you dropped this,” he said, and handed me a piece of paper that had been carefully folded over a couple of times, just enough to conceal its message, but keeping it thin enough to fit through the small opening under the locker door.

» Continued

It’s been such a long time since I went to school - any school - that I don’t even get the urge to go back to school anymore. I always liked school, almost as much as Son who burst into tears the other day when Grandma tried to high-five him, saying, “no school tomorrow!”

I liked school, I liked most of my teachers, and I’d like to think that I learned something during all those years. Well, I know I learned a lot but I also know that I’ve probably forgot most of it. It’s like going back to the gym after a break. I always put the same weights as always, “because I could benchpress that much last time.”

» Continued

Vincent: Yeah, baby, you'd dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Europe is?
Jules: What?
Vincent: It's the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that we got here, but it's just... it's just there it's a little different.
– Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction

Last night, as we were driving home from Legoland in Denmark, Daughter started to draft a list of all the countries she’s visited in her five-year long life.

“Finland, right? Italy … Sweden … Norway … the US, what else?” she yelled from the back seat.

» Continued

In the winter of 1998, Sweden was all abuzz about a movie about two young girls trying to deal with life, and growing up, in a small Western Sweden town called Åmål.

Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin. Åmål is a small insignificant town where nothing ever happens, where the latest trends are out of date when they get there.

Everybody saw the movie, everybody (said he) loved it, so in the spring of 1999, the writer-director Lukas Moodysson got on stage at the Swedish Film Awards to collect his loot: Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Actress awards for the two young ladies who played Elin and Agnes.

» Continued

There was a time when I thought I had actual superpowers. Not for long, but just a fleeting moment, I did think I could see through things. I wasn’t even ten years old, and had just recently been introduced to the world of superheroes, thanks to a Batman/Superman combo comic book I had read.

» Continued

I’m sitting at a coffee shop in downtown Stockholm, and some three meters from me, right in front of me, there’s Patrik Isaksson, a Swedish pop star. Whenever I see him on TV, or hear any of the songs on his first album, I think of the winter of 1999 when I often drove down to my apartment late, late at night, listening to his songs, singing along, practicing my Swedish, and finding hidden messages in his songs.

» Continued

It was a must-win game. A must. Winning was the only option, because a loss would end the tournament for the home team. In fact, losing would also bring the humiliation of having to come back and play another, meaningless, game.

"For the fans."

The house was packed, people were wearing their flag not only on their sleeves, but also on their foreheads, bellies, cheeks, their pants, their skirts, and their hats. The team was full of homegrown Slovak stars who had returned to Bratislava to win, together.

People were hopeful but worried, confident but afraid, they were both optimists and pessimists at once, going from one end of the emotional range to the other as the puck moved from the end of the rink to the other. They screamed, they sang, they stomped their feet, they laughed – and, when they lost the game, they cried.

He did, too. He listened to the Finnish national anthem, then quickly wiped the tears from the corner of his eye, and walked away from the rink. The tournament may have been over for the home team, but it wasn't over for him.

He disappeared into a small room, then re-appeared with a hose in his hand. Carefully, he walked onto the ice. He still had a job to do.

The show must go on.

I’m on Twitter. I tweet a few times a day, posting links and very, very short stories. Most of the links take you to my stories, either here, or to some other site that has published my writing. The short, short stories are all mine, as are the fake news I sometimes post.

I created my first Twitter account on May 1, 2007, so I’ve been tweeting almost four years now. I got on Twitter, because at the time, I wrote about the Web and technology for Scanorama, and thought I’d have to know what was going on.

At 10:22 that night, I told the world … this:

just spilled a cup of coffee

I think my second one was along the same lines. What can I say, I spill a lot of coffee. A few tweets later, I started to look around, to see if I could find people to follow, but basically, I stopped tweeting for a few months. Nobody was following me, nobody was listening to me, so what was the point?

» Continued

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
– Cheers theme song

All the cool guys in all the cool movies always have their regular hangout, and when they get in, all they have to say to the bartender is “the usual”, or maybe not even that. Maybe they just nod, and get what they want. Even Homer Simpson.

» Continued

Across the table from me, an aspiring alchemist is working on a potion. His formula includes four teabags, hand-washing dish detergent, and nails. The kind you hit with a hammer. The purpose of the potion is still unknown, but it’s also beside the point. He just wants to be a wizard – not unlike a certain Harry Potter, the latest of heroes in Son’s life. And if he was happy to think that Han Solo’s real name was Hannes, just like his, like I told him, he’s also delighted to be “HP”.

» Continued

I have a love-hate relationship with cab drivers. While behind the wheel myself, I find their driving mostly arrogant and obnoxious, yet sloppy and careless, and have recently started to add mock admiration – “Oh, sorry, you must be right since you’re the professional driver here” – to my litany of insults and honking when I try to put them in their place in traffic. Gently, but firmly.

That changes when I’m in the backseat myself. Now, I’m the kind of guy who knows exactly what Wife meant when she came back from a massage last week, glowing, and raving about the masseuse, who was “so good, and didn’t say a word.” I never chit chat with the masseur, either, and when I get my hair cut, once a year, or so, I try to fall asleep in the chair. (And succeed).

But I do like to speak with cab drivers.

» Continued

Despite the fact that Wife and I shared an office space, and despite the fact that we were two of only about ten people in the office, we hardly exchanged a word during those first summer months. I would see her sit behind her desk, get up every once in a while to go for a cup of tea - tea is her cup of tea - and do whatever it was that she was doing.

» Continued

I’ve never been in a fight. Not once in my life. Not as a five-year-old, not as a rowdy teenager, not even as a hockey player. I’m a lover, not a fighter – at least if those two are the only alternatives.

I can imagine that a couple of times I’ve been closer than I realized. Especially that one time when I happened to spit a guy, on other other team, of course, on his visor during a hockey game. At least he said he’d wait for me outside after the game, and that he’d beat me up.

Well, I didn’t see anybody as I ran to my car in the dark.

» Continued

I’m in the kitchen. I’m making a hot dog, I have bought the buns and the sausages just an hour ago. They’re the Swedish style, in which the bun is only about a third of the length of the dog so when you eat it, you invariably have to start by biting off the ends that hang outside the bun on both sides. And then I hear the horns of the song, and my feet begin to tap. Then comes Dean Martin’s rich voice, and my feet start to sweep the floor in front of the sink.

» Continued

Guys,

I could barely get out of the bed this morning. That loss last night, that hurt.

So did my back, my groin, and my arms this morning. It’s never easy to get up after one of those late night games, but this time, after I rolled out of the bed, it took me fifteen minutes to get up from the floor. That’s what a loss after 50 intense minutes of shinny does to you. Or me.

» Continued

As I write this, I also have three chat windows open on my screen. One, opened this morning, five hours ago, is a MSN window to Wife, who’s sitting at her office. Another one is a Skype window to a buddy in Vienna, Austria, and a Canadian friend just popped up in a Facebook chat window. With the exception of Wife, a chat window is often my preferred method of communication.

It’s nothing personal - naturally, since I am, indeed, chatting with some of my friends throughout the entire day - it’s just that this way we cover a lot of topics and yet, each one of us is free to do other things as well.

» Continued

When I was a young university student, I often spent weekends at a farm some 40 kilometers north of Helsinki. That was where my grandparents lived, sharing a yard with my uncle, my mother’s brother who was a half-time farmer at the time.

I had made that same trek on weekends as a child, when my parents and I would drive up to see Grandma and Grandpa. The town was a 40-minute drive from Helsinki. Close to the action, but completely in the countryside. Claim to fame: a mental hospital.

» Continued

On my desk, there’s an envelope addressed to Santa Claus, on its way to Korvatunturi, Finland. Inside, there’s a handwritten letter.

“Dear Santa,
I would be really happy if I got the following things. (NB: All items are Lego). “

The items are listed by category – Harry Potter, Prince of Persia, Toy Story, Power miners, Atlantis, Racers, Space Police, Star Wars, and “Other stuff” – with a product number next to them, neatly copied from a Lego catalogue.

On the bottom of the page, it says “turn”, on both sides of the letter, then signed by Son.

» Continued

Seeing people fall down is funny. It is, admit it. They look so helpless, and out of control, and that’s hilarious. Sure, you don’t want them to dislocate their hips or break their shoulders, but that’s not what you’re thinking when you see a big dude run as fast as he can and then slip and fall into the swimming pool.

I didn’t used to be a slapstick kind of guy, but hearing Wife laugh at all the people falling in movies, and in America’s Funniest Home Videos - why AFV, and not AFHV? - has made me appreciate the genius of looking stupid.

» Continued

The bus was parked on the church parking lot, and the kids were running around, throwing their bags into the storage under the bus, laughing and swapping stories about what they were going to do once they got out of their parents’ sights.

I sat in the window seat, biting my lip. And I cried.

» Continued

I’m not very good with conflicts. Never have been. It doesn’t matter which side of the argument I’m on, or whether I think I’m right or wrong, I feel almost physically ill when I’m stewing in conflict soup.

My personal problem is, though, that my brain is almost too quick to cook up pretty good oneliners to strip my adversary. Even worse, my mouth is just as fast to spit them out.

» Continued

A few years ago, it may even be a full decade ago, time goes so fast that I can’t really be sure just off the top of my head like this, so I’ll just say that it wasn’t “recently” which is a word Wife uses often to describe any event she can remember, it seems, most often when she talks about movies that she’s seen even if I it’s been, say, three years, or so, although in this case, I’m not even trying to say it was recently, and now that I think about it, it must have been a good ten years ago because Sister-in-Law was probably single and since Wife and I celebrate - every day, mind you - now eleven years together, I was in the picture ten years ago, too, when, and I am slowly getting to the point here, she, Sister-in-Law, had this Sunday tradition of having brunch, or afternoon tea, I can’t be sure, with this one special fellow.

» Continued

Ever since I was five, Dad and I have been going to sports events together, mostly hockey and soccer games.

My earliest memories: the smell of the arena, a young boy selling popcorn by yelling “pooooooooooooop cooooooooooorneeeeeeeeeeee”, goalies looking weird, wooden benches, ads being projected onto the ice during intermissions, a huge cloud of cigarette smoke hovering close to the ceiling that was supported by thick cables, and a friend of Dad’s buying, and eating, ten sausages.

Ten.

» Continued

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of old Finnish pop in the car. So much so that the other day, I heard Son and Daughter sing one 1975 song in their rooms. This song, to be exact. And I can’t say I don’t like it, because I do. I remember exactly how funny I thought that song was myself, back in, well, 1975, when I was the same age Son is now.

» Continued

”The bike sure is a great invention. It may just be the best of them all.”
– Son, riding his bike

Wife and I have a fairly long list of movie quotes that we use in our everyday conversations. When she shows me an ad for wonderful cruises in the Caribbean, I reply in a dreamy voice, “Someday, Jennifer, someday” just like Marty McFly told his girlfriend in "Back to the Future".

» Continued

In Finland, each day is associated with a name, a custom that's apparently a leftover from the Catholic and Orthodox calendar of saints, when people celebrated each saint's feast day.

Today, August 7, is the name day of Lahja, Finnish for “present” or “gift”, a name that is mostly a female name, especially these days. According to the statistics by the Population Register Center of Finland, no baby boy has been named Lahja since the 1960s – and only a little over 500 baby girls, of the total of over 12,000 people.

My paternal grandfather was one of 97 Lahjas born in Finland in the very late 19th century.

» Continued

Frankly, amusement parks don’t give me much amusement. I can see all the happy people running around, sprinting back to the end of the line to ride the same rides over and over again, but like Steve Butabi told his brother Doug in “A Night at the Roxbury”:

I can't taste it, Doug! I can't! I'm so scared right now I don't know what to do!

Of course, I never say that out loud. That’s just something I tell myself when I’m leaning against a wall somewhere, guarding everybody’s bags, clothes, cameras, while updating my Facebook status, looking as cool as I possibly can.

» Continued

“What an honor that the amazing Markoolio was born in my fatherland”
– Son, July 15, jumping up in joy

You can take the boy out of Finland, but you can’t take Finland out of the boy. Even if the boy sometimes does everything to keep Finland deep, deep, deep down in the dungeons of his soul. All you have to do is trash talk Finland - or tell the boy everything you know about the country - and the boy will come to the country’s rescue, or answer in mono-syllable sentences.

Unless you’re a Finn, of course, in which case the boy will join you in trash talking Finland.

» Continued

Don't know much about history
Don't know much biology
Don't know much about a science book
Don't know much about the French I took
– Wonderful World, Sam Cooke

Yes, I do know that I love her - and since it looks like a wonderful world to me, she must love me, too – but still, I can’t get over the fact that I really don’t seem to know anything.

Well, I have no problem with that, it’s been a slow but steady process since the day I laughed when our high school biology teacher told everybody in the class that we’d be at our smartest when we graduate.

» Continued

I guess that just like we all like to think of ourselves as great drivers - or at least better than average - we all probably think we’re the ultimate neighbors. Because - realistically - who wouldn’t want to live next to me, right?

» Continued

Of all the superpowers, invisibility is my favorite. I used to love the 1970s show, The Invisible Man. There’s a Finnish children’s book I adored in which the protagonist eats some invisibility powder and walks through walls. I was a fan of another 1970s show the name of which escapes me, but in which the star, named “nobody”, would tug on his scarf, and turn invisible.

» Continued

COLOGNE – The hotel room is nice. Small, but nice, and the view over the Cologne cathedral to the left, and the hockey arena to the right keeps him focused.

“They’re my two cathedrals,” says Risto Pakarinen, a Finnish hockey reporter, in Cologne to cover the 2010 IIHF World Championship.

To the uninitiated, that means the hockey world championships.

Um, ice hockey.

Starting tomorrow, Mr. Pakarinen and his three IIHF.com writer and two photographer colleagues will cover all 56 games, ending in the final that will be played on May 23. By then, Mr. Pakarinen will have used every piece of clothing in his suitcase.

“Probably, yes. But most of it just once,” he says, sitting in an armchair, examining his media accreditation.

“Next year, I have to get a better photo. I’m not really that fat, am I? It’s the fisheye lens they have in them web cameras,” he says.

Outside his hotel, the euro could be crumbling, the Crown Princess of Sweden might break her engagement, and ABBA could announce a secret comeback, and he wouldn’t know.

Some 1408 kilometers northeast of the hotel, garbage cans were emptied today, because Mr. Pakarinen lifted them to the curb in the morning, but for the next 19 days, for him, days will have no names. He goes from game day to game day, in a haze.

He says he likes Germany. Or, the little he’s seen in a day. A tram, a McDonald’s, a hotel, and a hockey arena.

“I saw people offering free hugs to strangers in the old town. That’s nice, right?” he adds, and looks at his accreditation.

“And I get free food with this. That’s nice, too.”

A friend of mine was in Paris for the first time last week, and fell completely in love with the City of Light. Understandable, as it is one cool city, with the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Seine, and the rest of it.

Like London, Paris is way too cool and way too close for us to not go there every year. It’s right there, a two-hour flight, and well, even if my French isn’t what it used to be - those two years of French I slept through, literally, at college, have been reduced to a funny anecdote - I hear the French speak English these days.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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).

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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”.

» Continued

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.

» Continued

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:

» Continued

Apparently, all signs in the economists’ magic 8-balls point to recovery and it looks like we missed Great Depression: The Sequel, after all. But for somebody who remembers the recession in the early 1990s, the past year has been an unwelcome flashback.

» Continued

Quite recently, there was an interesting - and comforting - article about parenting in the local paper. The one thing that stuck to my mind about it was that some research expert - probably a Fellow at some Institute - noted that we, human mothers and fathers, tend to forget - and overrate at the same time - our own childhood by the time we’ve become mothers and fathers.

When we also overrate our own children’s abilities.

The result: We rush our kids into doing things.

» Continued

We may all be brothers and sisters, and on some level I kind of like that idea, but, honestly, I just can’t feel it. I’ve never had a friend, or a teammate, that I’d say was “like a brother” to me.

Then again, I’m an only child, so how should I know what it feels like to have a brother.

I never even had an imaginary friend, let alone an imaginary brother.

» Continued