Here’s the joke of the day.
“What do you get when you throw a mobile phone in a bathtub?
Answer: Speech bubbles.”
Pretty good, right? Before you scroll down and start ripping the joke apart – as is the custom on the Internet – let me add this tiny bit of information: The joke was written by my son, six years old.
A part of hockey’s lure has to be in the equipment. There’s something magical in the ritual of putting on all that gear that looks nothing like anything in the real world. Nothing.
Gloves are so padded that when the players do the now-ubiquitous gloved hand-clap to thank the fans after a game, it looks bizarre, unnatural. Same goes for the helmet, the socks (yeah, right), and the pants.
When I was four years old, following my father to hockey games in Helsinki, I was fascinated by goalies who, to me, looked like freaks of nature. I mean, where did these people live? I had never seen such creatures – with their wide legs, their chubby upper bodies, and their big, blocky hands – out on the streets.
Doing the post-game interview can be tough, especially after a loss. But, being the professional that I like to think I am, of course I was ready for one … even if the walk upstairs was a long one, made even heavier by the weight of the loss on my shoulders.
The winner was already sitting in the booth when I got there. I saw the door with the sign, “Announcer / head referee”, at the end of the room. When I opened it, I saw her sitting in a special chair, smiling, and chatting with the said announcer, a legend in his field, mind you.
When a baby is born in Finland, it is customary for the godmother (or father) to buy him (or her) a spoon that has the baby’s vital stats engraved in it. At that point in time, the stats are height and weight at birth as well as the date and time of birth.
And – naturally – the name.
When I was a small boy living in Finland, my teacher told my class that despite Finnish being a small language with only about five million speakers, there were, in fact, two words that the rest of the world had adopted from us: sauna, and sisu.
For emphasis, that story was then followed by another one about Finnish UN soldiers in the Middle East, and how the first thing they did at their post was to build a sauna.
(For sisu, and sauna, see here.)
About nine years and eight months ago, I received an email from a pretty, young lady. The subject of the email was, “I hope you visit this site every day”, with the appropriate link attached to the body of the message.
The link took me to a site which I obviously hadn’t ever visited – the Hunger Site which helps to feed the hungry in Africa – but which I just as obviously visited right then.
It’s become painfully obvious to everybody that I am no handyman. I’m not somebody whose idea of having a great time is to disappear into the garage and fix stuff. My idea of a good time is to hang around that person and talk and maybe play ball.
I can think of at least five meetings I’ve been invited to sit in just because I am Finnish. Not that I didn’t enjoy sitting in – I’m pretty fond of the Swedish meeting culture with the coffee and the bullar, the cinnamon buns – and not that I took it as an insult or so, I just thought it was pretty obvious to everybody that I was there just so our company could show the prospective (Finnish) client that we had intimite knowledge of Finland, and Finns. We had one sitting right there in the office. Me.
I just bought a new bike, and realized, again, how much fun riding a bike is, but then I read Christopher McDougall’s “Born to Run,” and I think – I think – that even though I have said (many times) in the past that “Running Is The Devil“, I may give running one more chance, just because I also like the idea of running barefoot.
After all, I ran barefoot to school and back, ten kilometers, uphill, each way, through the snow, when I was a kid.
Good times.
