Category: Articles

From school shootings to Squid Game What is it with all these school shootings? Recently there were two in Serbia, another one in Pakistan, and a month ago an attack in Brazil — already the second or third one there. Also Russia, Germany, Denmark have all had school shootings recently. Not content with just shootings,…

My experience in Finland is turning out to be very different from the one in Sweden last year, and not just because of the different seasons. While superficially both places seem to resemble each other (a small village somewhere lost in the woods, near lakes), the similarities end there. Björkö was, or seemed, lonelier and…

Initial contacts with an alien race Finns are stereotyped as being extreme introverts who don’t like small talk — or even to talk at all. The series of cartoons “Finnish Nightmares” is a good general introduction to the Finnish psyche, and pretty funny too. But, so far, most people that I talked to have been…

The mystery in the rise of technologies that no one asked for Since no one is very much interested in my travel articles about Finland, I will go back to ranting about AI and automation — which interests even less people, but that’s fine. I get paid by the word… I’ve noticed that self-checkout is…

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…