I’ve gone retro. I’ve gone back to using a pencil. Trying to, at least.
Pens have always been my luxury item. I’m not big on rings or bracelets. I’m not a shoe collector, and the odd days I wear a watch, it’s my ten-year-old plastic watch with The Phantom’s face on it, and the text, “The Phantom, the man who never dies”. I like watches, but I’m too cheap to get the really nice ones.
When I first met Wife and we started dating, she lived not far from where we live now. It’s a ten-minute drive from our house to the cul-de-sac where the other yellow house is. My place across town, on the south side, about a five-minute walk from our first apartment together, was an 18-minute drive from her. But that’s in the middle of the night, with no traffic, and with some speeding.
“I don’t think driving five hours a day for weeks would be fun. You’re the one who loves to drive.”
– Wife, over dinner, talking about vacation plans
I heard somebody say recently, in the aftermath of the restructuring of the American and Swedish auto industries that he felt that having a domestic auto industry was one of the signs of a nation being a true industrial power. I can’t remember who it was, or the actual phrase he used, but I know I heard it in my car, driving to an interview about an hour from my office.
I also remember thinking that the man had a point.
After all, the Americans had their big old cars, the Cadillacs, Fords, Chevrolets; the Germans had their Audis, Volkswagens, Opels; the Brits the Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, Aston Martins, Jaguars; the Italians the Ferraris, the FIATs, Alfa Romeos, Lancias; and, of course, the Swedes Volvos and Saabs.
The characters in Enid Blyton’s The Five Find-Outers and Dog series (and Blyton’s Famous Five and the Secret Seven series and all the other detective books, like the Three Investigators, or the Girl Detective, all very popular at the Oulunkylä Public School library) always found things. They found something that got them started on a case, and they found stuff during the case.
To find something on the street has always fascinated me. Finding something requires more than just luck. Not a lot more, but a little. You have to be alert enough to see that something, and not too lazy to leave it lying there.
“The affable Helge Berglund claims there are more than a hundred thousand active players and about seven thousand hockey teams in Sweden. How fitting, he reflects, that the Johanneshov isstadion should be the scene of the world championship competition. “The stadium’s fame as the Mecca of ice hockey,” he continues in his own bouncy style, “is once more sustained.”
– Mordecai Richler on the 1963 hockey world championships in Dispatches from the Sporting Life
Call me crazy, call me weird – just call me – but whenever I travel to a new city, I like to go see the hockey arena there. I used to also buy a hockey hat from each city, but stopped doing that after my trip to Rouen, France when I walked a good five kilometers in rain mixed with snow to find the one store that carried hockey hats. So, these days, I buy the hats only if the store that I happen to go into – and I always go to one – has them.
Last night, I held a pretty decent speech to Son, about owning up to things. About how it takes more courage to stand up and confess a mistake than it takes to … do something else. I can’t remember what the other stuff was, but it was something very macho, and tough, like to do a jedi jump.
I went on a good ten minutes about the importance of being a great loser, and then of course, told him how, at the Olympics, all the players had to walk through the mixed zone and talk about the loss they had just been delivered.
And for good measure, I threw in Henrik Lundqvist’s name because I know it carries some major weight around here. So, if Henke Lundqvist can come ut and talk to the press right after he’s faced four shots and made just one save in one period in an Olympic quarterfinal, then Son can surely muster up some courage to tell me who it really was that spilled that glass of orange juice onto the carpet.
Right?
Great losers aren’t born. They’re made.
So I went to a place called “Olympics” and the next thing I know, three weeks just flashed by. I hope you had your “risto+pakarinen” Google alerts on, and caught at least some of my stuff on IIHF.com during the games and the Games.
Like this blog entry, about an event of which I wrote here earlier.
Twenty-five years ago, a friend of mine received a tape in the mail. It was a black, regular tape he had got from a friend from home, including the hottest hits at the time. For my friend, Terry, home was Canada, and that tape had the keys to Canadian Rock Wonderland, namely Bryan Adams’s “Reckless”.
Wake-up call: 5:55 am. Get dressed, walk out the door, meet a colleague at the edge of Stanley Park. Mission: To witness Arnold Schwarzenegger carrying the Olympic torch. Why the Governator would be carrying the Olympic torch in Vancouver on the last day of the relay was a mystery to me.
Sure, “The Austrian Oak” is a six-time Mr. Olympia, but he’s never participated in the Olympics. He’s not Canadian, he’s Austrian American with no special connection to Canada as far as I know.
But, run he would, and that had to be seen.
And that’s why I headed out into the darkness, and that’s why I was ordering a tall latte at 6:15 am. I had five minutes to kill – I was supposed to meet Lucas at 6:20 – and, well, Starbucks is never far in this city.
Greetings from Vancouver, the host city of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. It’s a long way from Stockholm to Vancouver (via London), and my total travel time, door to door, was 21 hours. I spent ten of them on the plane from London to Vancouver, sitting next to Victor Droop, a Dutch fellow on his way to the Olympics as well.
