FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May 12, 2009

RISTO PAKARINEN TAKES A DAY OFF

STOCKHOLM – Risto Pakarinen, writer, hockey writer, blogger, and the CEO of ristopakarinen.com, announced today his plan to take off an entire day. Pakarinen said he will not be working on Tuesday, May 12, 2009, “not even a little bit.”

“After almost 350 different articles in the last year, and having just covered 32 hockey games in 17 days, I feel it’s time for a break,” Pakarinen says.

“It is my firm intention that this blog entry will be the only thing I write today. I will not check my email or spend hours online idly chatting with people, will not text people or sit on the phone all day, but instead I will just buy some food, make some dinner, watch TV, and sleep, possibly read a book,” he adds.

Mr Pakarinen recently returned home from Bern, Switzerland where he had been covering the hockey World Championship since April 24. While the tournament was a huge success for Mr Pakarinen, it was also a trying experience physically and emotionally. He’s confident, though, that a 24-hour break is enough to restore his vigor.

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow,” he says.

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For additional information and photos of Risto Pakarinen, please see www.ristopakarinen.com or contact

Hannes Pakarinen, hannespakarinen at gmail dot com

I like beef and veal. I like steamed vegetables, and I like beans. Rice, pasta, noodles, bring it on, I’m game.

But eating the beef or the veal, with the veggies, maybe some rice/pasta on the side, twice a day, for 17 days, has made me want for some pasta a la Risto, or pizza. And a fresh salad.

First off, exactly a year ago, I had no idea how little I knew about Switzerland. Now that I have been here almost a dozen times in the past 12 months, and find myself halfway through a three-week stay, I can see that I didn’t know anything.

What I have learned recently is that the fact that I didn’t know a lot about Switzerland (but thought I did) is exactly the most Swiss thing there is. They’re hard to pigeonhole, those Swiss.

It’s difficult to describe what the Swiss generally look like – they seem to be very outdoorsy – and I get no direct visual association of “Switzerland”, like I get with, say, “France”, “Spain”, “Germany”, or “Italy”. Not immediately anyway.

If I think about it for a while, I can see a huge Toblerone chocolate bar, then cheese fondue.

Which, interestingly enough, I have not seen a glimpse of here. Yet.

Part of the charm with working at an international event like the hockey World Championships is seeing (and observing) people from all over the world. True, with hockey, it’s mostly the white, male part of the population I can observe, but even in that sample, there are some fascinating observations to be made.

Really.

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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