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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
