Author Archives: Risto

The Coral Island revisited

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Just like Son and Daughter, I, too, had a lot of books when I was a kid. When I moved out, the books got to stay on the shelves for a while for the first few summers I returned home, and then they were taken to storage, and then, with a few exceptions, they were gone.

Among the exceptions, there are a few hockey books – biographies of Tretiak, Kharlamov, and Gretzky – the collected fairytales of H.C. Andersen, The Story of Robin Hood by John Finnemore, and The Coral Island by Robert M. Ballantyne.

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The Ghost of Utra

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My great-grandmother had always told her daughter that when she died, she’d come back as a ghost, and she’d haunt their home.

“But in a good way,” she’d said, “like a house sitter.”

By the time I was born, my great-grandmother had already passed away but she had, by my grandmother’s account, found her way back into the house. Whenever my grandma couldn’t find her keys, she blamed her mother. When the windows were open when she got home from the store – her mother’s doing. When people were walking their dogs outside her house, and the barked, they could see something not any human couldn’t: her mother.

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School of hockey

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Dear class of 2016,

Let me start by saying that it’s a great honor for me to be the one that sends you off to the big, wild world with these few words of wisdom. Sure, it would have been even a bigger honor to get invited to a school to deliver them in person, but hey, it’s 2010, who does anything in person anymore? In fact, send me your phone number and I’ll text the words of wisdom to you. There’s only five of them, six tops. Maybe seven.

But, alas, you’re there and I’m here and we need to get this done.

Good luck, be careful out there

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My big break

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People often ask me how come I’m always so happy. Now, nobody’s always happy and I wouldn’t even dream of saying that I’m always happy, but it is true that I often seem to be smiling, even when I’m not. I can say, though, that there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been smiling going to work, and then I just keep smiling all day long.

I think that helps. It’s hard to be unhappy when you’re smiling.

And it’s hard not to smile when you’re riding a rollercoaster all day long. Literally.

Thanks Flickr

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Dad jokes dadsplained

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About 53 percent of searches Americans make for jokes are for light or corny jokes — searches like “fun jokes,” “kids jokes” or “dad jokes.’”
— New York Times, May 14, 2016

Hey kids,

Dad jokes are the best, don’tcha think? You know that nothing makes me laugh like dad jokes, because they’re always funny, because dads rock – oh yeah! – and because they’re mine.

But you already know dad jokes are the best, that’s why you spend so much time on Google, searching for dad jokes, and I can only assume that you do it to “snap” them to your buddies. But while Google is fine for basic research, it’s got its limitations so for true understanding of dad jokes you need to get it from dad. And here I am.

How do you come up with your dad jokes, you ask? How can dad always be so funny? What is a great dad joke? Glad you asked. Let me me dadsplain them to you.

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When I’m president

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I don’t think I ever wanted to be the president of Finland, and I certainly didn’t know what a president did. Just goes to show that while sixth-graders know a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of stuff they don’t know about the stuff they know. What I did know, though, was that it was the highest praise the school nurse could have given me, and that made me feel good.

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The great escape

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She woke up with a short gasp. A silent one, but a gasp nonetheless. She wondered how long she’d been holding her breath in reality. In the dream, she’d raced through long corridors until she had come to a dead end and then she had heard a door close behind her, and then the walls had started to close in on her, and she had screamed and then she had tried to push back with everything she got, before she had blown a bubble with her gum and hoped it would hold the walls, but the bubble had burst and the walls got closer and closer, and then there was … a circus and … she had flipped a bird at a guy watching her at the ceiling window and … just as the walls had touched her on both sides, she woke up.

She didn’t need to analyze the dream all too long to figure out two things about it. First, it was nonsensical like most of her dreams seemed to be. They didn’t feel that weird to her when she was having the dreams, but when she told them to him in the morning, he always laughed, and told her they didn’t make any sense.

And second, she knew what had made her brain produce the image of walls closing in.

You can do it.

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Inside the box

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Jens Bergensten, the lead creative designer of the hit game Minecraft, doesn’t mind being boxed in sometimes. It’s a challenge that just keeps his creative juices flowing.

It’s been a whirlwind of a spring for Jens Bergensten. Not only has he seen the release of Cobalt, a game that took six years to develop, he also ­became a father for the first time.

And as lead creative designer of Minecraft, the award-winning, first-person sandbox video game, he is also kept busy ­overseeing its development.

It’s been less than six years since the lanky redhead started at Mojang, the game development company behind Mine­craft, which had been released about a year earlier. Bergensten was hired to work on Scrolls, another Mojang game. But over the Christmas holidays, when his colleagues left the office for vacation, ­Bergensten added a few things to Minecraft, such as a way to add color to wool blocks in the game.

Jeb

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Finding Phil

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“Hey,” he said, startling me. We had been sitting in my room silently for so long that I had forgotten that Mikey was there. I’m pretty sure he had been there, sitting in my room, reading comics and listening to music, while I had gone to the kitchen and made a sandwich (ham and cheese, my favorite).

“Hey,” Mikey said again.

“Hey,” I said.

We were up to three heys there, and I’m not sure even one was needed.

mankka

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A loser never quits

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The players on my table hockey game were made of steel. I think one of the teams was Team Finland, but I’m not sure anymore. I am sure, though, that even a 7-year-old kid could grab those flat tin players by the head and bend them into an S shape, if they, for example, wouldn’t shoot the puck right, or if the goalie let in a soft goal.

It was also easy to curve the blades on their sticks so they were exactly like the real players’ sticks.

The little metal guys did their best, and so did I. My Dad, however, probably didn’t bring his best game to the table, but even his second-best was a little too good for me.

You win some, you lose some

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