My love is like...

This moring I picked a rose for my wife, and I recited Burns' Poem to her from the heart. I got stuck at the line as fair art thou my bonie lass and could not go on. Bonie lass is so scottish, and so full of terms of endearment. I nearly got a kiss for trying though.

O, my luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June
O, my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune
As fair art thou, my bonie lass
So deep in luve am I
And I will luve thee still, my Dear
Till a' the seas gang dry
Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
O I will luve thee still, my Dear
While the sands o' life shall run

Is there anybody out there?

Eddie Izzard was on a local radio station in Scotland. It was a chat programme. He waited for someone to call in. Nobody called. He said £5 to the first person to call. Nobody called. He upped the amount to £10. Nobody called.

He then offered a tenth of whatever fee he was getting for the show. Nobody called. He then offered the whole fee. Nobody called.

He upped the ante and offered all of the money in his current account. Nobody called. He gave out the precise details of his bank account. Nobody called

He came to the conclusion that the radio was broadcasting and nobody was listening.

I fear it is the same with Blogging. I write and nobody reads. I guess that is the fate of the majority of bloggers.

I made a new blog of complete nonsence called Gardener Guy

I have had two coments in it. Eddie Izzard eat your heart out

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

From "man was made to mourn"

But see him on the edge of life
with cares and sorrows torn,
then age and want - that ill matched pair
prove man was made to mourn.

So here I am unemployed in Finland and getting no money from Kela as yet. The season of mellow fruitfulness is closing in. The leaves of the lily of the valley flowers in the forest are turning yellow. The rose hips are turning red. Seeds are forming on flower-heads. Everything is ripening.

In England they will have harvest festivals in churches.

In Finland the summer-houses will be tidied up for the end of the season and the platforms will be pulled from the cooling water of the lakes. The rowing boats will be turned over and stored away for the winter. Everything is being packed up and stowed away.

Jungle of weeds or garden of Eden

Nature is wild if you don't get it under control. The green stuff just shoots up and the weeds and nettles and thistles swamp everything. But somethimes it does look lovely in its wildness. Weeds seem to get on well with each other. They leave space, they give support, they festoon, they garland, they bedeck, they spead. Weeds must have a purpose. It is just that we have never discovered it.



Then again there are some weeds that just seeth and spit at you. They are snarling nasty, with thousands of seeds ready to attack the earth and make your life a misery. They explode and shoot them selves in the air. They stick to your clothes. The have their own little parachutes and spread themselves afar. They are colonisers. They go to land that is free. Weeds are like refugees. Always being uprooted, and everybody attempts to irradicate them. They are always looking for new land.

But if you are an old woman from Irak you have grown beans that can compete with the weeds. You wear an apron and gather the beans into it. Beans are for old lazy gardeners. Beans are for people who understand weeds and leave them alone. Beans fix fitrogen from the atmosphere and improve the fertility of the soil. Bart Simpson knew all about beans. "Beans Beans the musical fruit the more you eat the more you toot" Beans have 28% protein in them as have all legumes. They are better for you than beef-steak says the man from the USAD as he chomps on his T-bone. Beans are good for refugees. Fillet steak for everyone else in the West.



If you are a muslim man from Irak you can rest under Koff sunshade, and be impervious to the fact that it is an advert for beer. Water the marrows plant the celery, harvest the radishes. Cook chicken in a hole in the ground and smoke a hooka. Embrace your friends with a hug and go into the bushes to pray to mecca. The sun is good. The weather is fine. The children will be fed with fresh vegatables. If only it was always summer and the nights long, and the air better than a meal.



If you are a hippy you can build an arch and decorate it with flowers. You can make it to frame the Jet petrol station, and every time you look though it another car will break down, and every time you walk though it ten more people will use public transport. An as the petals and leaves fall from the flowers another oil well will run dry.

Vile rodents

See this is what you get. Your potatoes eaten by some rodent. Some vermin creeping about in the dark of night burrowing in the ground and eating your potatoes. Not eating it whole but munching here and there. Nibbiling with their nasty little teeth. Eyes bigger than their bellies.

Naw they are lovely little things. Just like wasps and scorpions, and vampire bats and slugs and snails, and spiders and fire ants. Looks like nature takes what it wants and leave the rest.



But some preditors are bigger than others. They come with forks and dig up basketfuls of potatoes and carry them away. They will only let them rot is some damp basement and will never be able to eat them all. Greedy vermin these humans!!!

LWIII

Loudon Winwright III Cambridge Concert

The man himself performing White Winos and the Presidents song. Well worth watching. The first song about his dog is funny.

Why should you listen to Loudon Wainwright.

• You too will be old one day
• You will know the things old people do to survive
• You will realise it is OK to be old
• You will know it is OK to be grumpy
• You will experiance the pain of getting old.
• You will realise that getting up to pee at three is normal
• You will come to understand the truism that you will be fired before you can quit.
• You will know the imposibility of keeping contact with those you used to care for.
• You can relax and think somebodies got a shittier life than me.
• He will make you smile.
  

Tree of life

Trees come into flower. Bees move pollen from stigma to stamen. There is fertilization  and the fruit ripens.

Someone or something will eat the fruit. Seeds will be spread. New trees will grow. New fruit will be formed.

Simple?

Clinging on for dear life

Lichen does not grow to be big and noticable. It is flat on the surface of a stone. The yellowish colour must come from chlorophyl. It gets its energy from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and perhaps some minerals from the rock.

Lichens love a sunny day,  as do most living things.

I will sit on my balcony and enjoy the sunset.

Life and death

The tree was covered with a grey web. Most of the leaves had been eaten by caterpillers. A colony of them had formed a grey sack like object. There must have been a few hundred caterpillers in the web. They had made a good job of killing off the tree.

A bird came and picked them off the web one by one. It flew back to its nest to feed its young.

Everything has a time to die, and there is a purpose for everything under heaven.

How did the white stone get here

Took a photo of a line of big heavy stones. They were all neatly laid out in a row. In the line up was a white stone. Different from the red granite to be found on Ahvenamaa.

Had the sea lifted it and gently placed it in line?

Life in the extreme

I took a photo of a daisy. It was growing on a platform down by the sea. It had no soil to grow in. No source of nutrition. Yet it was in full bloom.

Marvellous

Heart Dye

The nurses chatter amongst themselves... they break out a "pack of three". Catheters that is... not condoms. It is too exhausting to try and explain the joke to them. An inscision is made in my thigh and a catheter if fed upwards towards my heart. Its progress is like a tapeworm in my artery.

The procedure goes on for half an hour, at the end of which time the doctor says you will feel some hot flush now. I think middle aged women. A hot flush spreads across my chest, and a second later I feel it in my genitals. The sensation in my chest is like downing a shot of single malt whiskey in one go.

Now comes the time to remove the catheter and to stop the artery from spurting your life's blood over the operation room floor. We are talking big arteries here. They have come prepared with a bean-bag full of lead shot which they will lay on the artery to stem the flow of blood.

The doctor then says "This is going to hurt for 10 seconds" and what you feel is something like a three pronged hook from a spinning reel being sunk into your thigh, and with the hooks firmly stuck in your flesh someone begins to reel you in. The tension on the fishing line becomes stronger and stronger, and your leg is a salmon fighting for it's life. The hook feels like it is torn from your leg, and the angioseal is now in place and with any luck you won't bleed to death.

I am wheeled back to the ward and told to keep my leg staight. I can't do anything else since trying to move it in any direction at all gives me pain.

I sleep and have a vauge memory of the doctor saying you don't have any coronary heart disease.

All in the family

Blood was taken from me four or five times a day. They are looking for cholesterol and heart enzymes and anything that will give a clue as to why the ECG should be abnormal. We get down to the family history and I am asked to tell the story how my mother died at the age of 35.

I must have been about 8 years old or there abouts. My mother comes in from the pictures and goes into the kitchen to boil some water for a hot water bottle because she is tired and wants to go to bed. She comes to the mirror in front of the sideboard and runs her fingers through her hair. She looses her grip on the hot water bottle and it falls on the floor. My dad takes her to bed. I am whisked off to my aunts. A week later she is dead and buried. I don't attend the funeral. The last memory I have of her is her brushing her hair from her forehead with her fingers.

After the death I go and live with my grandmother.

Three years later whilst living with my grandmother, my uncle Andrew who is my mother's brother visits my grandmother. He is an electrician and my grandmother wants him to mend her iron for her. He sits at the kitchen table and begins to unscrew the bottom plate from the iron. The screwdriver slips off the head of the screw. His hands shake. Screws fall on the floor. He slumps on the table. An ambulance comes and takes him away. He is dead within the week. He was only in his forties, and had played professional football for Bradford City in the 50's

My grandfather died when he was 57 the same age as me.

The doctors decide to take a closer look at how my heart functions. On Monday they will shoot a dye into me and see how it moves around my system. I am feeling fine.

Horns of a dilema

Taken into Jorvi hospital with chest pains. I had them from last Thursday when I had gone out with Ilona for an Indian meal to celebrate her birthday. They persisted until Saturday morning so I drove into Jorvi. They took my blood pressure and it was 180/108. Not so good... and there was something wrong with the ECG... some irregularity.

They gave me some nitrate and it brought my BP down to 120/60 and made me feel light-headed. After a few hours they decided to do a stress test so I climbed onto a bicycle and pedeled. After three minutes they increased the resistance by 50 watts so it felt as though you were going up a slight incline. They did this 3 times more, and I began to sweat. My pulse went up from 60 to 120 and my BP was soaring at 220/120 and I had a pain in my sternum. I stoped and they had me blow into some apperatus to measure lung capacity. The needle hit 700... top of the range. The medic cracked a joke... see how exercise is good for you... that exercise really opened up your lungs.

They put me in a room with a man of about 77.  One of his legs had been amputated below the knee, and now his other leg was giving him trouble. He had a scar running from his knee to his ankle. He lay on the bed drenched in sweat. He had lost the ability to speak properly, and his words came out as a croak. I was feeling OK. The nitrate does that for you.

Slept well and next morning the doctor comes in and says to the man in the bed next to me. "We will have to amputate your other leg below the knee... how do you feel about that"?  The man was silent. The doctor then says, "If we don't amputate then you may loose your life" The man's wife is there and she observes  "He has recently had a heart operation... do you think his heart could stand another major operation"?

So there you have it, the horns of a dilema. You are given two choices both of which are equally bad. Who wants to make decisions like that.

Cows with guns

See the video here
Cows with guns

The Monkey

THE MONKEY
(Written and performed by Dave Bartholomew in 1957)

Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree
Discussing things as they are said to be.
One said to the other,"Listen here, you two.
I just heard a rumor that CAN'T be true."

"That man descended from our noble race!
The very idea is a big disgrace.
No monkey ever cheated his wife,
Starved her baby, and ruined her life."

Yeah.
The monkey speaks his mind!

"You'll never see a mother monk
Leave her child with others to bunk.
Passing him off from one to the other,
Till the poor child barely knows his own mother."

Yeah.
The monkey speaks his mind!

"And here's another thing you'll never see -
A monkey build a fence around a coconut tree.
Letting good coconuts go to waste
While forbidding all others to come and taste.
Why, if I built a fence around a tree,
Starvation would force you to steal from me."

Yeah.
The monkey speaks his mind!

"And here's one more thing a monkey won't do -
Go out at night and get on a stew.
Or use a gun, or club, or knife
To take another monkey's life.
Yes, man descended, the worthless bum.
But brothers, from us HE DID NOT COME."

Yeah.
The monkey speaks his mind!

Clip by Dr John The Monkey speaks his mind
Original by Dave Dave Bartholomew in 1957 The Monkey speaks his mind

The wisdom of Janet.

A plate with two Karjalanpiirakka was presented to Janet. One was red (with carrots in it), the other was white (with rice).

Maija offered Janet the choice of which one to take.

Janet took the rice one and said.

"I'll take this one and you can choose whatever one you want."

Weeds and blight

If you leave your garden unattended for 3 weeks, when you come back it is a jungle. You look at all the other gardeners from China, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and you marvel at how neat their gardens look and how well the onions and marrows have grown.

You have chickweed, dandylions, thistles, ragwort, horsetailed ferns, nettles, buttercups, and a host of other plants that you don't know the names of. They smother and suffocate your onions and turnips and peas. You wonder if it is worthwhile trying to salvage anything, or just abandon everything to the weeds.

You examine the potato shaws and see that they are yellowed and withering. You dig in the ground only to find the shoots are slimey with a black rot. The potatos themselves a grey mushy mass.



The mother-in-law had heard on the radio that due to the long rainy summer season Finnish farmers are complaining that their crops have been hit by potato blight, but it is only when you put your fingers in that rotting mess that you understand that you are coming in contact with the fungus phytophtera infestans that caused the potato famine in Ireland and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people due to starvation.



Lilies of the Valley by David Byrne

Momma she had complications
There’s nothing very strange about that
Nuns said we can’t kill that baby
We’ll have to let your mother die

We are all just lilies of the valley
We neither reap nor sow
We need to get our hands a little dirty
To make our gardens grow, hey hey

Way too many people on this island
Getting way too crowded on this boat
Need someone to bail some water
If we’re gonna keep this thing afloat

I like a little sugar in my coffee
I don’t mean sweet ’n’ low
You don’t know what you want until you find it
I believe you’ll tell me so

I need a little water in my garden
I need a little sunlight on my head
I need someone to cover me with kisses
When I’m all alone and scared

We are all just lilies of the valley
We neither reap nor sow
We need to get our hands a little dirty
To make our gardens grow

I like a little sugar in my coffee
I don’t mean sweet ’n’ low
I'd like you to cover me with kisses
To make my garden grow

Sad Song by David Byrne

You may think I look sad
But I am just sleeping
It’s my facial expression
I’m probably dreaming

Would you like to be sad?
Would you like me to teach you?
Well, you can learn to be sad
But you must practice like I do

Na na na, na na na na ...

You must follow directions
And learn it right from the start
There isn’t a short cut
It must come from your heart

Well there are those who are happy
And there are those who are wise
But it’s the truly sad people
Who get the most out of life

Na na na, na na na na ...

You may think I look sad
But I am just sleeping
It’s my facial expression
I’m probably dreaming

David "big suit" Byrne was the psycho killer with the group "Talking heads" I liked his style of singing especially on "once in a lifetime". He has advanced the career of Jim White, because both are grotesque gothic mystics. They both know that in this modern world.

"Now you're paying top dollar
For what you used to get for free."

I don't want no part of it.

Good noise... Evil noise

---

When we read and absorb ideas from a book, it is the words that influence us, but what happens if you listen to music that is without words. Music in the form of chants. Primitive sounds from Islam and the Sufi tradition. Zulu war chants, Joika from Lapland. The sound of water falling on stones, the bleating of a lamb. A fire roaring and sparks flying. The bubbling of blood in your own aorta. Grains of sand falling on a piece of aluminium folio. Pebbles in a tin can. Teardrops falling in a pool of water. The snore of a bear in a cave during winter hibernation. The song of a whale. Lonesome bells. Reeds rustling in the wind. The rumble of a train along a track. Two matchboxes being rubbed together. Footsteps in a tunnel running beside a canal. Metal scraping agaist metal. Chalk on the blackboard.

Having got Jim White out of the library. I also picked up Kimmo Pohjonen's Kluster and Bobby Mcferrin's Circlesongs

Pohojonen uses the accordian and fearful sounds of droning monks. There is alot of energy in his music. For me it is dark and frightening most of the time, but some of the tracks like Voima start out peaceful as an eagle soaring in the clouds, then move onto a hunt with yelping dogs, then goes all subteranean with monkish chants and hooting owls with glassy yellow eyes staring at bubbling lava in a dark cave. Huge spiraling sounds that seek to engulf you. Then you get Avento that could be part of Barber's Adagio for strings by William Orbit if it was not so long and repetitious.

On Real player it is listed as 15.56 minutes and on the CD it is only 4.15 minutes. The last bit sounds as though the CD player has got stuck in a continious loop. You would have to concentrate very hard to find out if there were indeed any differences in the repeated phrases. I hope I have not fried my brain listening to it.

Mcferrin on the other hand is joyous and uplifting and he talks about the effects of communal singing. Apparently at his concerts he will invite audience participation in Circlesongs. It is said that he is a practicing Christian and I wonder if the type of chanting that he does puts an acceptable face on glossilia. I was making wordless noises to his songs as I drove into work. It was good. I wonder if Maija would think I was singing in tongues. Mcferrin is of the belief that wordless songs is a form of deep calling to deep.

---

Seedy Character jailed

From the sleeve notes of Jim White's album No Such place

A man who robbed several savings institutes armed with a cucumber received a 5 year jail sentence yesterday...

... the famous line from William Faulkner's "the wild palms" which stated between grief and nothing I will take grief. I confided this sad truth to my friend Diego Riewald. He laughed an replied Okay man, but for me the prospect of nothing is much more interesting! To this day Diego's laughter rings happily in my ears... Thank you Sir.

The sad irony of Love is how seldom you feel it, yet it's all you dream about , night and day. Sometimes you throw yourself in the sea of faith and the sharks of doubt come and they devour you. Other times you throw yourself into the sea of faith only to find the treasures lost in the shipwreck inside of you.

White has appeared in a BBC Arena documentary about the poor white population in the southern states of Merika. It is a fourway collision at the crossroads, between poverty, violence, religion, and salvation.

Searching for the wrong eyed Jesus on the BBC
Searching for the Wrong eyed Jesus... the documentary

He is the wide eyed madman in rags standing at the junction shouting at the traffic Are you going my way??? Nobody in their right mind would stop and pick him up... except perhaps another madman.

AlcoPork

There was a course pizza on the last night of the course in Trieste. At the Pizza restuarant the muslim student from Sudan ordered a tuna pizza. The waiter brought him a pizza and he got stuck into it. The pizza was the wrong one, and it had ham in it. He had eaten half of it, and had remarked several time how good it tasted, before the waiter came and said he had given him the wrong pizza.

A good natured Italian at the table offered him a bottle of beer to wash the taste of the ham away. Pork and alcohol are forbiden for muslims. He spoke in arabic to his friends at the table. Obviously he was greatly concerned that he had somehow defiled himself by eating pork. From their hand gestures I could see that they were telling him not to worry. His tuna pizza was delivered to him and he eyed the fork and knife he had used to cut the pizza with ham in it, as though they were contaminated. He asked for new knife and fork. He wanted a clean start.

At the long table where we sat, wine was drunk, and beer consumed, and at the end of the evening the bill was divided up between everybody who had eaten. It came to 10€. Not at all expensive. The student from Sudan said he would not pay for the alcohol that the others had been drinking. He did not want his money to be used in any way to break the laws of the Koran. His money would not be used to help people commit sin.

He stood up for his principles and beliefs and refused to pay more than 9€. Many of the Arabs thought he was being foolish, and contended with him furiously. He could see that the other students were looking at him arguing, and every so often he would use the english phrase "it is a matter of principle", which was for their benifit.

The Italian girls thought he was being courageous, and would have smothered him to their boosoms, if he had allowed himself to be touched by mini-skirted girls who wore skimpy tops and had their belly buttons pierced by diamond studs. The western boys thought he was being stupid, they rolled their eyes and took another swig from their beer bottles. I offered to pay the extra euro for him, but he would have none of it.

Was he a captive of his own conscience? If you write of speak your opinion on any matter, some people will think you are being foolish and will argue with you, others will respect you and come to your defence, while others will swig their beers and ignore you. You can expect nothing else. There is no universal acceptance or universal rejection. The world walks in the grey areas of public opinion. The Koran is of no consequence in the disco bars of Trieste.

To hold a clear conscience was the most important thing for the muslim student from Sudan. But I wonder as he walked away alone from the table did he think to himself, if it is a sin why did that pork taste so good.

The future belongs to us

Sudan

In Italy I talked to a student from Sudan. Crazy things are going on in the Darfur region. Famine rape and murder. A different culture and a different country. We know so little about the way other people live and die.

I just finished reading "Life is not all ha ha hee hee" which tells about the lifes of three Indian women living in modern Britian. Culture and tradition still influence their lives. Chila who enters an arranged marriage to please her parents. Sunita who rebels agaist her Indian culture and tradition and marries the man whom she loves, only to find later that she has thown her life away, and Tania who is a career woman and has no time for husbands or children.



Chila is married to a very rich man who betrays her. Her mother has this to say to her. "To love in the times of harvest is easy... to love in the times of famine is true love." Life it seems is all about sacrifice. Laying down your life for others.



When you look at some of the pictures from the Sudan. Starving children who are all skin and bone, they are all being cradled in the arms of their mothers. No matter how wretched their lives are, some spark of human kindness still exists, and has not been extinguished.

Famine in Africa

Black square in snow

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

The rinky dinky way, is really a space elevator

Dave has a habit of giving new names to everything that he cannot pronounce. The Rilke Way in Trieste is called the Rinky-Dinky way. Duino is called Deuodenum. The Sistiana campsite is called the sinister campsite. The cave in Slovina called Skocjanske jame is renamed the Jamy Scotsman. We all know what he means, and we rename everything according to him.

So we have to book the campsite at Mare Pineta and he searches for it on the web and he even comes up with a webcam of the campsite.

Mare Pineta

The road looks fimiliar. The bushes and hedges look the same. The stones and the flowers are all Italian, so he books our accomodation online.

He then arrives at Sistiana and wants to book in, and they have no record of him ever registering online. Unreal, he has emails to prove it.

Mare Pineta Trieste

He carefully explains that he went to their website and looked at their webcam. They say they do not have a webcam. He shows them the email records of his registration. They say they have not sent him anything. He is totally confused, and tells the receptionist that she does not want to see a big angry man who is drunk being refused accomodation.

To cut a long story short there are two campsites called Mare Pineta. One in Trieste and one in Tuscany. Dave had booked the one in Tuscay... but he can't believe it because of the video evidence of the webcam. The strangest thing is that when you look at the Webcam of Mare Pineta in Tuscany it is almost an exact replica of Mare Pineta in Trieste. Everyone is dumbfounded that two georaphically seperate places should look the same.

Dave is convinced that he has discovered a parallell universe. A worm hole to a new world. A break in the space time continum. He believes there is a worm hole in a trailer park in Trieste that will transport him to a trailer park in Tuscany, and when he arrives there he will be 40 years younger. He wants to step into that other world where he is a sleek 13 stone Adonis, instead of a 20 stone old man who huffs and puffs when he has to climb stairs.

He is of the opinion that with time travel that you can never get anything right. What happens is you can get the exact place you want to go to but never the right time. If he were to transport himself back to Cambridge, he would arrive there but not in the present time. With his luck he would land about the time of the black death.

The other possibility with time travel is that you get the time exactly right but the location is out of whack. So when you want to transport yourself to the Red Sea for a bit of scuba diving, you end up being blown to bits by an Israeli rocket launcher in Gaza.

I am half convinced that the Sistiana campsite really is the Sinister campsite after all, and that Dave is drinking too much water which is bad for him.

Dave wants to step on the space elevator that is the Rinky Dinky way

He just wants to be taken away from here.

Chaos theory at breakfast time

Dave laid the table under the pine trees and we had youghut and muessli for breakfast, together with peaches and green hot pickled chilli peppers. We talked of ants and their sociobiological significance. The individual sacrificing themselves for the benifit of the community. Where do you get the energy or the power to do good to others.

Well Dave has discovered that the first prerequisite is to be sober. The pickled cucumbers and chillis for breakfast are a legacy from the past... something he needed to kick start the day and rid him of his hangover. This year he is accompanied by his son Paul who has a moderating influence on his excessive drinking habits. Everyone behaves better when they have children to look after. Every parent should be forced to take one with them when they travel.

Indeed I forsee a future where companies will hire out children at airports to adults who want to behave themselves while travelling abroad.

I remarked to Dave that Sandor was interested in General Carl von Clausewitz and that it was not a major battle that resulted in the defeat of Napoleon but a series of presistant small attacks over a long period of time. That is the ruin of all of us.



"Who could ever calculate the path of a molecule? How do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by falling grains of sand?"
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Instability and tension causes systems and people to collapse. There is a well known experiment where grains of sand are droped one at a time onto a flat surface. This results in a pyrimid/cone of sand particles being built up. The system is under considerable tension, and one grain of sand falls and causes an avalanche. In itself one grain of sand is a small and insignificant particle and the event of it falling is no more different from every other grain of sand that has fallen before it. Yet it causes a breakdown of the system.

The question has been asked many times. Does a butterfly flapping its wings in the Brazilian Jungle cause a hurricane in Japan. Dave says of course it does... have you seen the bloody size of those butterfly wings in Brazil?

Getting past Ryanair when you are 15kg overweight

You arrive at the desk and they weigh your bags. They tell you that you are 15kg overweight and will have to pay £52 pounds for the pleasure of flying with them.

You excuse yourself and say that you will just pop around the corner and give some of the baggage to the wife of a colleague who will be flying out with Ryanair tomorrow.

You rush to the toilet and put on 6 T-shirts, various jumpers and tops and a couple of jackets, into the pockets of which you stuff socks, more T-shirts, aftershave, computer peripherals, shavers, batteries, backup disks, and any object that feels heavy.

The rest of the stuff, from the big heavy bag that Ryanair weighed, you transfer to your backpack, which now weighs a ton and you saunter back to the checkin desk, and give them the big bag, that is now under the weight limit.

With as much dignity as you can muster, and adjusting your balance so that the enormous weight of your backpack does not topple you over, you casually walk off, but before you go you can wink at the lady checkin attendant and say.

When Rob Harper checks in tomorrow I would carefully check his bags for overweight, because he will be carrying some of my stuff.

Get out my way... Blind boy running

What do you do when you are big and fat and cannot see very well and are forced to play football at school. Well you run about in a very confused state with everybody shouting at you and calling you stupid.

Things are further complicated by the fact that you are colour blind and you can not tell the difference between the strip you are wearing and those of the opposition, so you tackle your own team members and pass the ball to the opposition.

When you do get the ball at your feet and everybody is screaming at you to do something, all you can do is kick the ball forward and in a very loud voice shout to all the other players. Get out my way fat blind boy running.

Things are further complicated by the fact that you do not understand the rules of football. You are under the impression that if you are running forward and you have the ball then if anybody is foolish to get in the way of you bulk then you can steamroll right over them. They should have the common sence to get out of the way. It is their own stupid fault if they get trampled, especially since you have given them very explicit verbal warnings

You are dismayed when everybody cries foul, and the unfortunate person who has stood in your way is strechered off with a trail of stud marks from his groin to his missing teeth. Your confusion is compounded by the fact that the person on the strecher is in actual fact a team mate who illadvisedly got in your way whilst trying to direct you towards the oppositions goal rather than your own.

Football is not for fat colour blind people who do not know the rules

Saddam

Saddam was a man who ruled Iraq. He spoke and his armies obeyed. He had palaces, he had mansions, he had untold wealth, and riches gained from oil. He smoked fine cigars.

Today Saddam no longer rules. He is in prison. He may speak, he may plead, but who will listen to him. Gone are the palaces, replaced by a prison cell. Even if he had money it would not buy him his freedom. If he is lucky he might get the odd cigarette.

This morning I woke up in my own bed in my own house. Saddam woke up in prison. I had pineapple for breakfast just cause I felt like it. I don't know what Saddam had but I bet he did not have any choice in the matter. I walked out the door and went to work. Saddam remains in his cell and can go nowhere. I will fly to Italy on Friday. Saddam will remain in captivity.

I expect Saddam spends alot of his time wondering how he, who once was so high, has been brought so low. He who once commanded poeple to come and to go, can no longer command anyone or anything. He sits in his cell powerless. He will wait, for others to determine his fate. He is a captive and has no freedom. I wonder if he lives in dispair. Does he rant and rave and demand his release. Does he abuse his guards and threaten and curse them. Does he pass the days away in a sedated coma.

Does he dream of being in the desert and releasing a hawk from his arm, to delight in seeing how it soars freely in the air. Does he long for a night by a campfire, where he can look up and see all the stars in heaven.

On the 30th of June Saddam will be handed over to the Iraqi government and will stand trial as a war criminal

Time rolls on for all of us.

Time is up.

Called into the office today and told that Kimmo Mattila is coming back to work at CSC, which means I am out of a job. I was asked had I found a new job, I said no, and I explained that if there was anything going at CSC then I would be willing to take it. But I was politely told there is no budget at the moment.

So that is it by the end of July I will be out of a job and unemployed.

Keys

Returned at midnight from Football match. Put my car keys on the table. In the morning got up washed, shaved, and had some breakfast. Looked for my keys, but they were not to be found. Searched in the bedroom, on all the shelves, and flat surfaces, looked in all my pockets, of all my jackets hanging up in the hall. Hunted behind the sofa. Lifted cushions, searched the toilet and bathroom, looked in all the nooks and cranies in the kitchen. I was totally confused, since I could plainly remember that I put them on the table so they would be easy to pick up in the morning.

Maija helped me to look for them, and asked me helpful questions, that would retrace my steps. We went through everything I did from the time I came home. I thought this is ridiculous I must be getting old since I can't remember where I put my keys. This would never happen to Maija she remembers everything.

It was now past 9:00 and I was late for work. God in his heaven did not reveal to us where the keys were. I asked Maija if she had seen them when she had gone down to the laundry, or could she have pick them up and put them somewhere else. But she had not seen them, and hadn't moved them.

Then the miraculous happened. She put her hand in her pocket and there the keys were. They had suddenly appeared in her pocket. She was astonished and all she could say was How did those get there???

Isn't God marvelous?

Gonna tear this junk yard down.

A letter on the notice board of the allotments said that the council would be coming to remove any unsightly "hot-houses" "toolboxes" "platforms" "benches" "constructions" so Sammy's lovingly constructed polythene tunnels to protect his precious plants have disappeared.

What is being said here is that the visual aspect of the allotments is more important than the ability to grow food. Plants need to be protected, nurtured, and cared for. With some of the Asian foods that Sammy is trying to grow, it is folly to strip them of protection.

Perhpas it is a subtle hint that refugees should only grow crops that are suitable for the Finnish climate... peas, beans, potatoes, carrots, lettuce, and to steer clear of the exotics that are not ment for this country.

I have been away from the plot for a couple of weeks and the potaoes are up and the peas are showing their heads. I noticed that the ground was wet even though it had not been raining for a few days. The Palastinian in the next plot told me he had watered my plot for me since my garlic was looking a with withered. I thanked him for it.

I talked to a man from Afgahnistan. He was wearing a dark suit and cream shirt. This is the way he dressed to do gardening. He offered me a cigarette. I said not thanks. He told me he had escaped from Afgahnistan with his wife and children over the border into Iran and had been held in a refugee camp for 2 years. At the end of that time he was given the choice of going to Canada or Finland. He choose Finland. I think he associated Canada with the USA, and did not want to have anything to do with them, because of the war that had raged in Afgahnistan against the Taliban.

I tried to put him straight regarding Canada, and how it was a glorious country with very friendly people. I think that made him unhappy that he may have made the wrong choice, and he left with mud sticking to his bright and shiney shoes.

Kalevala and Vladimir Fomin

Vladimir Fomin: Aino

Visited Akseli Gallen-Kallela's house and was amazed by his drawing for the Kelevala. I think it was his ambition to produce an illuminated Kalevala to rival the Book of Kells He relates that as a young child, an old man came to the door of his house, with woven birch shoes on his feet and a birch rucksack on his back. He proceeded to sing softly at first and then gradually with more power and strength until his voice was shaking with emotion, his feet beating time on the floor. At this early age he understood he was hearing a song from the Kalevala which was passed on through the oral tradition, and his soul was captivated by poetry.

In his house certain runes from the Kalevala are illustrated... mostly naked young women floating on their backs in the water with their hair splayed out like seaweed. I think he had a thing about long hair.



The Kalevala has Väinämöinen singing a boat into existance so he can persue and young girl who is trying to escape from him. This reminds me of the Silmarillion where it is said that God sung the worlds into existance, and where the devil was expelled from heaven because he wanted to sing his own song. Tolkein who wrote the Silmarillion was a great fan of the Kalevala but perhaps both have borrowed from the gospel of John which says, in the beginning was the Word.

Now what are words but the expression of thoughts. It was when God spoke that he created the world. I wonder what God is thinking at the moment and what will happen when he speaks.


Vladimir Fomin: Who is bringing the Word

Vladimir Fomin is a Russian Artist who has done a series of paintings based on the Kalevala. They are bright and luminous in style. When I looked at them my heart popped with joy. If art can do that for you then it is good

Tom Pöysti - How to be a success by making mistakes.

Tom Pöysti is the son of Lasse Pöysti. It is strange that he has an anglisised name. He was called to give a talk at a CSC seminar. The rough title of his talk was "How to be a success by making mistakes" It was like a two hour comedy show. He was very entertaining ananalyzed the Finnish psyche. Why is Nokia a success?

At a seminar you expect power-point presentations, but he talked for 2 hours without any visual aids. All that he had to express himself was his body, face and language. He talked about shouting at your boss... something the bosses at CSC might not have been too comfortable with. He swore alot. I think it was more theatre than a seminar presentation. At the end of the session he was sweeting with his exertions. He had given something of himself.

At the dinner table people went over the things he had said. Most of them thought he had been funny and entertaining. He told jokes and used stereotypes to illustrate his points. All of the male voices that he used belonged to Finnish men who were drunk or violent, and usually both at the same time. The women's voices were like twittering little birds, and their hands and eyelashes fluttered in synch with their nervous chatter.

He told the story of men going to a cabin by a lake in the early spring, of how men take their clothes off in a strange way. Undo the buckle, unzip the trousers, thumbs in the underpants or longjohns, and in one swift movement from the hips to the ankles, trousers, underpants and socks and removed and left in a neat crumpled pile on the floor.

The same is true when they remove their tops. Both hands are raised above their heads then lowered to grab the back of the jacket, pullover, shirt, and vest, and with a mighty heave all of the garments are removed at once, and are place on top to the crumpled trousers,underpants and socks. They form small concertina like packages on the floor

Women on the other hand are able to remove a polo necked sweater without messing up their hair. Their arms are removed from the sweater one by one, so both arms are inside the sweater. They then move their hands to either side of their neck and stretch the polo neck so that the sweeter can be removed without displacing a single hair on their heads.

When it comes to going into the cold sea for a swim the men though none of them want to do it grit their teeth and jump in. The women see what they think is a dead fish, and refuse to go in, or complain about blue green algea in the water, or they have strained their muscles in an aerobics session and don't want to go in

The men laughed and the women laughed when he performed the different ways of removing clothing because we were all responding to the fact that we see little of ourselves in the stereotype. The men see the hero who braves the icey water the woman see the heroine who waits to be rescued. Both of them are untrue.

In a drunken angry voice he proclaimed that the Finns have a compulsion to succeeed but not by conventional means. Hot shit this year Finland is going to win the Eurovision song contest, and we will do it by sending a homo to sing a song about angels and demons having sex and of course they do not succeed and they slope off into the forest once again to get drunk and lick their wounds about being rejected and being no good.

He talked about many things. Ski lifts in lapland, gutting fish in Norway, of coming to the end of his tether, when he could not face acting anymore. That life did not have any taste for him anymore. It was just day after day of monotonous meaningless repetition, and then he ask himself the simple question.

Does the work I am doing really satisfy me, and if not what can I do to change it?

The talk was alot of froth... funny froth that made people laugh, and at dinner people were asking the question what was the take-home message from the talk. Some people said we had to be adventurous. Some people said we had to believe in our own convictions and have the courage to express our own ideas and carry our dreams through to completion. We should shout at our bosses. We should commune with nature and take a break from the stress of work.

For me the message was that a man with energy and wit and talent can hold an audience captive for two hours without a computer in sight, and that we are more open to learning through theatrical performances, where words roar out like the surge of the sea, and ideas are like the waves hitting a rock and throwing spay heavenwards.

He ended on a serious note. He talked about the 200 people killed in Madrid, and how the Finns felt that it might have happened at Pasila. He talked of 20 young people being killed when their bus was hit by a truck. He mentioned that he had talked to a priest from the Orthodox church who had said that he had been surprised by the outpouring for grief at a National level. That Finns were expressing empathy for the suffering of others.

To care for others is about the best you can do in this life. That is how firms succeed. That is how families survive. That is how nations are just and righteous. Those are the thoughts you get from laughing for two hours at an actor, who dredges up stereotypes, and politically incorrect ideas, and swears like a angry drunk Finn.

Open the book

Streach out your hand and open the book that is nearest to you. Open it at page 27 and write down the words from the third paragraph into the comments section of this posting.

After that you can take the AQ test.

AQ test

Raisa does a knees up with her graduation hat

Classic Raisa pose with knee lifted to one side

This is the bestest feeling

Raisa stars with a smile

Raisa graduates

Raisa gets her white hat and some pink roses