Month: April 2023

Or just Vappu in Finland German might not sound as musical or romantic as French or Italian, but it is a great language for solemn, intriguing, seemingly fateful words. Take Walpurgisnacht, for instance. It may sound like a curse or an omen, but it just means Night of (Saint) Walpurga (or more exactly, if less…

And warming up to Finnish sauna So today I went to a Finnish sauna at the Museum. Sauna at the Museum? Well, this is Sparta! I mean, Finland. There’s sauna everywhere. Who would think that sitting in a steamy room at 75 degrees Celsius then submerging into a lake at 5 degrees Celsius would be…

The Happiest Country in the World? Well, happiness is subjective It was quite a shock teleporting from the sunny beaches of Catalonia to the still half-frozen lakes of Finland, and I wondered for a while if I had not made a terrible mistake. To be honest, I still have not recovered. Today it’s not cold,…

Some final thoughts on the “Reset” stuff — mine and de Tocqueville’s There is a short animation that came out recently about the “Great Reset” aka Covid operation and how it could evolve into some kind of permanent totalitarian dystopia. The film has some moments, but I think that, in the end, they get it…

Taking life as it comes day by day Cats and dogs love routine. They must eat at every day roughly at the same hour, take a walk or play at roughly the same hours, sleep at the same hour, etc. They find it strange if people or places around them change too much. Cats in…

I’ve written about movies, books, politics but I haven’t written as much about Barcelona as I would have liked. But I’ve been here several times already and I’m not really doing tourism, plus I’m not exactly in Barcelona, but in a suburb coastal town thirty minutes away. People in this suburban town don’t tend to…

Maybe both – an analysis of two versions of “Dune” I re-watched the other day “Dune” — not the recent version, but the 1984 version by David Lynch. Then I watched only the first 20 or 30 minutes of the new “Dune” (2021) and could not go on. I had disliked the previous movies that…

The decade when everything changed I am a child of the 1980s and 1990s, so the sixties were already a distant memory when I was growing up. Perhaps a stronger memory than it is now, as it was closer in time, but still only a memory. A few things, such as certain rock bands, or…

A time of discoveries, from Tintin to MAD Magazine The recent death of Al Jaffee at 102 years of age (who retired at 100, after a record-breaking 73-year long career) brought back to my mind the time I read old and new numbers of Mad magazine at the Library of the ICBNA, or Brazilian-North American…

A reflection, a Latin Mass, and a dream A reflection Today is Easter. I am here in Barcelona, or rather in a smaller place in the coast near Barcelona. It is sunny and warm enough, around 20 degrees Celsius. In fact, too sunny. It seems it hasn’t rained in Catalonia for several weeks or perhaps…