“Can’t you tell me those funny George Lucas’s Beard jokes again, Dad?” said Son.

“Sure I can,” I said.

Sometimes I don’t even realize how funny I am. Some of those times I’m funny because I make a “cute” mistake in Swedish, and Wife just can’t get enough of it. Or, I’m so scared on a roller coaster that I hold on to the car with my knuckles white as snow, my arms all spread out, so that I practically push Wife over board, and when she then sees me on the post-ride photo, she tells me that I’m “doing that funny thing with my face again.”

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“Oh, Sir, just one more thing.”
– Lt. Columbo, LAPD

Whenever I’m alone at home, with Wife and Son and Daughter away somewhere, I watch an episode of Columbo, the show about Lt Columbo, a homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Because I own every single Columbo DVD box there is, I have a pretty good collection to choose from, and it’s just a matter of mood whether I want to go for one of the early 1970s cases, in which Peter Falk looks like he could still run after a bad guy if he wanted to, and in which his old Peugeot still looks mostly European, instead of just old, or a 1980s style Columbo.

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Every time people tell me that “it’s a small world..” when I know somebody they also know, my shtick is to finish their sentence with “… and Finland’s even smaller.” (When the person in question is Finnish, of course, I realize it doesn’t really work otherwise).

I see evidence of the smallness of Finland if not every day, then every week, or at least every month, on Facebook, when a friend of mine friends another friend of mine, and I didn’t know they were friends, too.

And then I go and “like” their friendship, a cyberversion of me putting my arms around them both and saying, “now, isn’t this fantastic?”

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