Only slightly bent

I used to have lots of fun watching how people were directed by Google et al to my old homepage with the strangest of search terms. Search phrases leading to this blog have been somewhat more boring, but below are some examples of the more interesting search terms from this month, comments to them and in the case of questions, answers.

considering how fast and easy it is should e-mail replace meetings

No, it should not. It should replace, and has replaced, a lot of stuff sent in physical letters. But it should definately NOT replace meetings – I mean e-mail is after all a rather slow communication channel capable of delivering emotion and other non-verbal messages in only a very limited fashion.

baltic surf surfing

I hope whoever this was meant windsurfing. That there is, surfing there is not. None. Ok? Well maybe very rarely, but it’s a pain to hunt after and not that great when you find some.

gastronomic food delivery helsinki finland

I don’t, unfortunately, do this yet. But check out Gastronautti who do exactly what you were looking for.

grenadine drink

Okay, you do not start making a drink by thinking about grenadine! It’s not a basis for anything but rather an addition.

magners cider calories

Who knows. One does not count calories when looking for a good cider! And you don’t drink so much that you’d need to.

is hofstede still relevant today

Yes. What a strange question. His studies may not be 100% applicable nor as accurate today as they were some time ago, but by all means they’re still relevant!

hugging your crush

Yeah, I’d say that’s okay. But be careful if the other party doesn’t know you have a crush on her/him!

This morning, about an hour ago, we noticed that light stuff like leaves and paper were flying around in the backyard in distinctive circular and upward pattern. Soon heavier stuff like big branches followed – and after some 30 seconds or so, it was gone. There didn’t initally appear to be a lot of damage – until we look out the other windows; there are multiple big fallen trees, one blocking the road. Of course this warranted an outdoors excursion, which revealed that more than a dozen trees had fallen down in our local small park alone!

The phenomenon is called trombi in Finnish, a sort of a local variant of tornadoes – although they are usually less much destructive, they can lift roofs and create flying cars and other interesting stuff. Nothing that big here this time, but I’ve never seen that strong a wind this close. Exciting.

It apparently came from the direction of Tali, where some people were even hurt.

Update: clearing

Surprisingly soon the fire department came to clear up the tree blocking the road. Efficiently and fast they cleared up enough so that cars could pass:

But then some hapless semis came in and it turned out they couldn’t quite get through, so some heavier equipment was needed to further clear the way:

Update 2: Sarita also took a couple photos of the damage, available here.

Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that so-called professional movie reviews aren’t generally worth the paper they’re printed on. More than once or twice it has happened both that I have gone to see a movie because the reviews were great and then hated it and that I have skipped seeing a movie that was bashed in the papers, only to see it years later and lov it.

I don’t know why this is – maybe the “professionals” have seen too many movies and start to appreciate very different kind of thing from the rest of us or then they simply have no clue as to what’s good and what’s not. And in any case – you can’t argue about taste, so why bother reading the pro reviews at all? (This is not to say that mine are any more reliable, just that I don’t agree with any of the “pros”)

Upside of Anger

An interesting story of a situation developing after a husband leaves his family, the mother developing into a real alcoholic and her four daughters trying to hold the family together and add some humor – and, well, life – into the family’s life. And then there’s a single, middle-aged neighbor (Kevin Costner) who half-forces himself to the family’s life. Starting out as drinking buddies, the relationship(s) develop into semi-predictable directions. Some good laughs, kind of light on the drama part other than for few exceptions. An average 3 out of 5.

The Interpreter

A U.N. interpreter (Nicole Kidman) happens to overhear a short conversation suggesting that the not-well-liked leader of one particular country is about to be assassinated during his visit to the headquarters. She gets “protection” in the form of a secret service agent (Sean Penn) who doesn’t really believe her and instead starts digging up her past. That is, doesn’t believe her until more things start happening and the race to find the potential killers and their weapons begins..

Overall a nice thriller that manages to create some decent moments of suspense. 3½ out of 5.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

A summer action flick with a story to suit the genre: a couple, both contract killers unbeknownst to each other, get sent to hit on the same target and end up becoming each others’ targets. The efffects are nice enough and while realism is obviously out the window (towards the end too much so), the movie has it’s moments and just flows fairly smoothly along without activating too many braincells. Something like 3- out of 5 considering appropriate disclaimers (i.e. basic summer action flick).

The Princess Diaries 2

Sequels are always dangerous. Typically they’re horrendously worse than the originals. Princess Diaries 2 doesn’t quite stoop down to that level, but it’s a step down from the original regardless. Here “Princess Mia”, thanks to some enemies applying an archaic law, has to find a husband within an entirely unrealistic timeframe to be able to stay in power. Obviously there are plenty of terrible candidates, one really nice but without the sparks… and then the perfect one. Only trouble is that the perfect one is classified as an enemy. Quite predictable, occasionally funny, not great but not terrible. 2½ out of 5.

Life Aquatic

Finnkino, the main Finnish distributor, is describing the movie as containing “Huikeita merenalaisia maisemia tarjoavassa seikkailukomediassa…” (roughly transleted as “An adventure comedy offering spectacular underwater scenes..”) which really makes me wonder if they watched the film at all. The underwater scenes were like a badly drawn cartoon and seriously fake-looking. I mean terrible, even nauseating.

I’m sure it was supposed to be a comedy, but I missed what was fun about it. The adventure? Not really there. Maybe it just wasn’t the right genre for me, but this must’ve been one of the worst movies in a while. 1½ out of 5 and that’s stretching it.

Spanglish

A story about a Mexican immigrant mother and her young daughter, trying to live their new life in the US. A very “clean” story about cultural differences (the social commentary could have been much more harsh), the movie really starts when the immigrant gets hired by an upper-class family as a maid. One problem I had with the plot was that almost everyone is really nice to the beautiful immigrant, Flor, and her daughter, Christina; she gets a job without speaking any English whatsoever and a quite decent salary too. The hard times as an immigrant are discussed in maybe two sentences and even then mostly everyone is smiling. So not exactly a very realistic start, but that doesn’t ruin the movie – as it’s supposed to be a comedy/drama, after all.

Emotions develop between the family’s husband and the maid and the family’s wife’s episodes of varying degrees of craziness do not help the situation. The slowly melting language barrier provides some laughs, as do the numerous and evident cultural differences. Overall a cute, fun and not an entirely brainless romantic comedy. 3½ or even 4- out of 5.

War of the Worlds

A strange movie in that it had, in any real sense, neither a beginning nor an ending. Or rather both were very abrupt and, I’d say, poorly executed. The story basically is about one broken family escaping the invaders and trying to survive amidst some family discord. There are no superheros where a single person would save the world, which I think is a refreshing exception in catastrophe-movies. Special effects are for the most part very nicely done. The plot, however… well, we all know the plot, right? Good eye-candy and decent acting, but nothing spectacular here. Maybe 3- out of 5.

Monster in Law

This is really what sparked the comment at the beginning. This has been universally bashed by critics so I didn’t have too high expectations; perhaps the lowered expectations helped, but I found it to be quite an okay movie. The name really tells it all – a battle of wills between a to-be-mother and daughter-in-law. Jennifer Lopez is quite good and Jane Fonda isn’t too bad as the evil mother-in-law either. The supporting cast is also professional and so the viewing experience from that angle is quite pleasant. The plot is nothing to write home about and is quite predictable, but it’s supposed to be in these kinds of movies. Overall a pleasant surprise that I’d rate 3½ out of 5.

Tonight I enjoyed my seasonal dose of high culture: seems like it’s becoming a habit of going to a classical concert in the summer, ballet or opera in the winter and occasional other events opportunistically in between. We went to hear (and in the case of Mustonen, see) Helsinki Festival Orchestra & Olli Mustonen play Respighi, Mozart and Schubert at the Kallio church. Mustonen obviously needs to be anchored to the ground when conducting an orchestra as he was quite vivid, excited and one could almost say fanatic.

The concert was great, very enjoyable. The audience started out as good, too, in the sense that nobody was making unnecessary noises during the concert. After it ended – and we all know that concerts never end after the officially “last” composition, right? – first portion of the audience leaves. LEAVES! Like before even applauding. Second wave of quitters is after some applause. Have these people never heard of encores? Those remaining, some 2/3rds, applaud just long enough to get an encore. But after one high-spirited encore, all magically disappear soon afterwards without even trying for a second encore. Yet, even in Finland, I have witnessed three encores at an András Schiff concert, so it is possible. Guess we just had a mediocre audience tonight.

Of course, that doesn’t lessen the fact that the concert was good. For someone who understands absolutely nothing about music and has no natural sense of rhythm, I enjoy classical music a lot. There’s something wonderful about a full-blown orchestra playing without any electrical things, no amplifiers, no microphones, no playback, with instruments that have been in existence for up to hundreds of years.

And walking away from the church in the warm, pleasant evening, reality of Kallio reaches us – some poor drunken soul sitting on a bar terrace yells “Whas it a ghood shermon?!”. On the tram stop, people are getting arrested. Somehow ‘high culture’ and Kallio just do not mix.

Most humans, as individuals, have their priorities screwed up a lot of the time. Thus it’s not really surprising to find that humanity as a whole also has its priorities screwed up. But individuals often have at least momentary instants of clarity, when they realize what is really important and what in turn doesn’t really matter. Humanity, as a whole, doesn’t often get these moments of clarity – perhaps the latest fleeting one was after the Tsunami last year but that faded away pretty quickly too.

Here’s one example of exactly how screwed up the priorities are: in 2004, the worlds military expenses were a whopping 1,035 billion US dollars. Over a trillion dollars. And that’s every year! That is a lot of money. So much, in fact, that it’s really unfathomable. Now think how much good comes out of world military expenses. Not much. For comparison, below are some estimates of what certain truly beneficial projects would cost:

• The World Food Summit proposed in 1996 that world undernutrition be reduced 50 percent by 2015. The total cost would be $60 billion over 15 years, or $4 billion per year in increased spending.
• The UN estimates the overall price to bring low-cost safe water and sanitation to all those who need it today (and will in the next decade, given population growth) in rural and low-income urban areas at $23 to $25 billion per year over eight to 10 years.
• UN Labor Agency study states that child labor could be eliminated and replaced with universal education by 2020 at a total cost of $760 billion.
• The costs of implementing nuclear weapons dismantling and processing of plutonium and enriched uranium into non-weapons grade material would total $7 billion per year for ten years.

For the price of last years’ military expenses alone, we could do all of the above! Instead, we do things like this. Inspiring, eh? I mean really, let’s do some real cost-benefit analysis for a change!

One interesting source for different strategies is “What the World Wants” at World Game Institute. UN is another good source.

Photo by freefoto.com

Saturday was an unexpectedly warm day, so I had to take advantage of it by hanging around downtown and enjoying the day. One thing I like about the Helsinki summer is that there’s often something interesting or semi-interesting going on; this time it was the beach volley Finnish championship competitions next to the railway station where they had brought a big heap of sand for the occasion. Until Friday, I had no idea this was going to happen and by Saturday had forgotten all about it – until I bumped into it wandering around downtown. Semi-finals were ongoing when I stopped to watch:

Other targets included the new small additional parliament building and a small new fountain in front of it:

Some other photos have been added under the Helsinki 2005 gallery.