Top of the morning

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Risto

For about six years, I’ve had a theory about what makes certain people sleepyheads, and what makes others get up early – way too early – in the morning. For my research, I have used human guinea pigs.

Exhibit A, “Son”, gets up at the crack of dawn and refuses to go back to sleep, fearing that he will miss something while asleep. What that might be is a topic for another study for which I don’t have funding yet.

Exhibit B, “Daughter”, refuses to get up at all, kicking and screaming everybody and everything within, well, a kicking distance from her bed. Once up, though, all sunshine.

“Son” was born in the middle of the night, 2.58 am, and “Daughter” in the evening, at 6.30 pm.

Here she's just six years, 11 months and 12 days old.

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Culinary time travel

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Risto

Erik Haag and Lotta Lundgren went time traveling and spent time in the 18th and 19th century, in the 1940s, and the 1970s. They didn’t use a DeLorean. They used food.

Maybe this is the last year we all walk around carrying takeaway coffee cups, sipping our lattes, and using coffee shops as our offices away from our home offices. It doesn’t seem likely, but surely there must come a time when our nutritional habits have changed so much that even an idea of somebody eating on the run seems odd, let alone that they would carry hot, addictive liquids with them.

“Food is culture,” says Lotta Lundgren, a Swedish food writer, and one of the two stars of Historieätarna, a TV show about Swedish food – and culture – in different eras.

And since food is culture, it’s apt to change.

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Small Things of Joy

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Risto

According to a Finnish proverb, “if sauna, tar and booze don’t cure the disease, it’ll kill you”. I’ve never had to try all three to feel better, so I’ve always simply assumed it to be true, which is why I keep spreading the words of wisdom to Wife, and Son and Daughter.

Fortunately, those three aren’t at the top of the list of cures in our household. Fortunately, because we haven’t been sick very often, and because I’m not sure how to use tar as medicine.

Anyway, at the first signs of a cold I turn to another holy trinity.

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The one that got away

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Risto

On the top shelf in our basement, there’s a brown cardboard box with dozens of baseball hats in it. I don’t know the exact number, but if I say forty, I won’t be off by more than five, either way. And those are hats that aren’t in active rotation, because those forty or so, are in a metal basket next to our front door.

On my way out, I grab the one that matches my mood, if not always my clothes.

Nobody needs close to hundred baseball hats, of course. I didn’t want a hundred hats originally. All I wanted was one.

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He believes he can fly

Posted on February 28, 2013 by Risto

Like many, or most, small boys, I, too, had ideas about the future, and what the world would look like when I grew up. Well, I had one idea. I thought it would be neat – that is the technical term for it – if the roads and streets of Finland were covered by a similar electric ceiling like the bumper cars at Linnanmäki, the amusement park in Helsinki.

I also thought it would be neat if all the streets in Helsinki would freeze over so I could just skate to school every day.

Anoher one bites the ice chips.

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Frozen

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Risto

It’s never cold in the beginning. My fingers still work, so I can take photos with my mobile, and do a Facebook check-in. The cold doesn’t hit until the last ten minutes of the hour, and by then, I’m so close to going home I know I’ll make it out of there alive.

I look down to my feet, and I see that I’ve managed to stomp a perfect square into the snow, and that makes me happy. I’d smile, but the muscles on my face won’t move anymore. I look out to the ice to see if Daughter is still skating around in circles. She is. I look at the clock at the other end of the field, and note that I still have seven minutes to go.

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Awkward non-silence

Posted on February 20, 2013 by Risto

When I was a kid, and home alone after school, I sometimes stood in front of the mirror in the hall holding another mirror, and gaze into the mirror tunnel I saw in front of me. I used to stand there and think it was an entrance to another world.

Decades later, when I was a single man living the single man’s life, it sometimes happened that on a Sunday afternoon, while watching a rerun of “Friends”, I realized that I hadn’t spoken with another person since Friday night when I had left the office.

Now, that didn’t mean that I hadn’t spoken at all, or opened my mouth one bit. I’d most likely been singing along classic 1980s hits, or laughing out loud – back then nobody LOLed – and speaking to the talking heads on TV, even arguing with them.

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Fasth goes mental

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Risto

Anaheim Ducks goalie Viktor Fasth had a lot of physical work to do to overcome a knee injury while playing in Sweden.

He also had some mental changes to make.

Fasth told Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter he once threw his goalie stick 17 rows into the crowd. When his former AIK goalie coach Stefan Persson tells the story, he stops at row 7 — but you get the picture.

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Fasth’s road to the NHL

Posted on February 16, 2013 by Risto

When goalie Viktor Fasth signed a two-year contract with Stockholm AIK in 2010, it was barely news in Sweden. The biggest morning paper, Dagens Nyheter, had a three-line blurb about it, and Aftonbladet, the biggest daily, pulled the general manager’s comments off AIK’s website.

No wonder. AIK played in the second- and third-tier leagues for years and had just then, in 2010, earned promotion to the Swedish Elite League. Fasth, too, spent his career in the second- and third-tier leagues, and had just signed his first SEL contract at 27.

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Kekäläinen

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Risto

Seemed like a good day to dust off this profile on Jarmo Kekäläinen, the Columbus Blue Jackets new GM, who at the time of the story was the St. Louis Blues’ assistant GM.

Click below for the story. Here’s a pdf version.

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