Ten years ago today, I put my hand on J’s knee when we were sitting at a bar just around the corner from the office. The bar, Krokodil, was a gay bar that served cold beer and good food for the people that could fit in the eight tables it had.
We were there, a group of us, and at some point, late that night, I rested my hand on J’s knee, a gesture that – I have been told later – sent shock waves through her body. At the time, I was unaware of this.
Today, Dec 6, is Finland’s Independence Day. I will spend it on a ferry to Sweden. How appropriate.
I have never been as Finnish as during my first two years living in Sweden. I moved to Sweden in April, and by Christmas, I was an ultrafennomaniac. I read only Finnish classics, I listened to Finnish music, and I basically spent my weekends on those ferries, going back to the old country, to the old hood and the old buddies.
They say that the more something changes, the more it stays the same. In case you’re wondering who “they” are, the answer is Huey Lewis and the News, who had that line in “I Know What I Want“ on their Fore! album.
I can now tell you that the reverse is also true. The more something stays the same, the more it changes.
Who came up with the ‘all you can eat’ concept? It’s a very dangerous one, that’s for sure, for two (obvious) reasons. First, there’s the financial aspect. The price is fixed so that just one portion of rolled salmon doesn’t seem to make any sense – especially since the buffet is all pizza. But even with all-you-can-eat-pizza, eating just one slice is madness, when the unit price of one slice is a fraction of the buffet.
So, the more you eat, the cheaper it gets.
(Or, as with my old company which arranged a ‘bonus lunch’, the more I ate, the bigger my bonus).
Remember a while ago when I wrote that “[t]here is no place – and this is no exaggaration, simply a fact, so I repeat it: no place – a Swede can’t set up a bench, or hasn’t already done so”?
Yeah, the other day I went for a walk and thought about how I said that, and how right I was. I think I may have even said it out loud, “that thing you wrote about the benches last summer, on July 14, that was so right on, it was so true.” The thing that made me remind myself of that piece was a bench that I saw on my way to the mall.
This one:
Apparently, I suffer from some kind of an early winter blues. That’s not very unusual around here, and I am sure there are physiological reasons for that. The lack of sunlight, the lack of warmth, and then, at the other end of the spectrum, the lack of the cold, too, the cold that would make it a real winter, and give us snow which would make everything a little lighter again.
In 1959, Paul Anka played at the Linnanmäki theme park in Helsinki, and the country went nuts. “Paul Anka at Linnanmäki” became a catch phrase to describe a wild and crazy herd of people. It was Beatlemania before there were the Beatles. He was a teen idol, a pop star in an era when there weren’t any.
At the same time, he was still rooted in a tradition that was different from the one that the Beatles and the Stones and the rest came from.
In a couple weeks, a K-1 tournament is going to be held somewhere in Sweden, Stockholm, or the surrounding international waters. Now, the fairly new combat sport has a lot of fans, and it attracts a lot of people, and I guess it’s gaining in popularity.
On the advertising posters that you can see in the Stockholm subway cars, they run a few quotes from papers to add creditibility to the event.
One of them is by an evening paper columnist and it goes like this: “… this is the future.”
Moving is huge. Moving in with another person even huger. Helping out with that moving in is not as huge, but can be pretty interesting, especially if you only really know half of the couple now moving in together and if you’ve never seen the other person’s apartment before.
STOCKHOLM – We all love winners, and many a book has been written about what exactly makes a winner, without a definite answer. They come in all shapes and sizes, and they come from the east and the west. They’re nice guys and they’re tough guys, and they’re forward, defensemen and goalies.
Looking at a young player, it can be difficult to predict, or tell, who the true winners will be. They’re competitors, sure, but a lot of people compete without winning. There’s something special about the players who always seem to be able to win.
Naturally, they’re easy to spot after the fact – just look at their records – but none as easy as Mats Näslund, the former Tre Kronor and Montreal Canadiens star, who turns 50 on Saturday.
