In this week's This american Life episode So Crazy It Just Might Work the second act is about a gay mormon. It's a really awesome story (not just because it's about a mormon but as a story it's just... cool), and the first act about curing cancer with sound is pretty darn cool too. Guys, I really love this radio show, and so that's why you should give it a listen:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/450/so-crazy-it-just-might-work

Now I go to sleep. It is 5 pm, and people who get up at 1:30 am go to bed now.

New boots are here! <3 <3 And they are exactly right. Now, the next little while my feet will cry, ache and hurt a lot, as I train them and these new boots to become inseparable. :3 And I can also retire my old boots. They have served me so incredibly well. It's like, they deserve a shrine. They took me from Coventry to Leicester, and from Solihull to Coventry. They took me all over Sweden. They were church boots and forest boots at the same time, they were a conversation starter, and heck, they just overall ruled. Now I am sure that this new pair of boots will do perfectly fine in taking this role and filling the spot (since they are pretty much identical :P) but I will miss these epic boots a lot. *sigh*

This also means that I am only waiting for the mail arrival of the interrail ticket, and Poptarty goodness from USA. :)

This morning at work I trained another person to do the same paper route that I do (he'd cover for my days off). I was waiting for him to do the stuff, and was sat on my bike. My legs touch the ground from the seat of my bike if I stretch them straigth. So I picked up both my feet at the same time, while clutching the handbrake, and tried to balance on the bike without moving. It of course would start to lean on either direction in less than a second, and I'd stretch my legs and catch the fall, then rinse and repeat (other things I did while waiting for my colleague was to quote Hamlet, sing in my head and at one point there was a most exquisite lehtikuusi that I stroked the branches of to make the dry needles fall off it).

I started to think how this is like life. Keeping a bicycle balanced is not difficult at all, yet you can make it difficult by clutching the handbrake. If you simply let go and maybe push off a little to get you going, you can quite easily not only stay upright on the bicycle but also get to places. What is the handbrake that you are clutching that stops you from rolling forward and from keeping in balance? What are the things you need to do to pedal the bike to keep it going?

http://www.matdolphin.com/play/all/one-plain-one-fancy/
One plain, one fancy. Really cool stuff. I want to submit, but I don't yet know what... Shall see.

In the August 9th 2011 'New Yorker Out Loud' podcast they interviewed a video game voice actor (Jennifer Hale from Mass Effect), and it's awesome and I think some of you might like to hear that. She does really nice grunts :) It's not very long, like 13 minutes or so...
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/15/110815on_audio_bissell

Oh and this is one of the most beautiful things I have seen in a while:
http://www.plan59.com/xmas/xmas030.htm

I maded a bunny!

I've come to the realisation that my English after-school club would be way more fun and overall better if I wasn't paid to do it, if I was just doing it as a community volunteer type of thing. I don't know why, but there's just something... irksome about the money-side of it all. But with the paper job the money is the best incentive.

There's a little girl in there who is a little... detrimental to the overall class environment. She is really negative ("no, let's not do that") and mouthy about it, she's really bossy and loud about that, and she influences the other little girl who is her "best friend" to behave in a not nice way too :/ She wasn't in the very first class that I held, and it was much nicer.

I'm going to bake pulla (cinnamon rolls) with the missionaries on Saturday. No, that is not an euphemism, and yes I mean it, that I will bake. Yes, me. Yes, bake. In the kitchen, that's right. It's going to be a Finnish culture thing for District meeting. Being in district meeting with six elders might break my heart though, just in time for me to heal from it before my Sweden trip which will for sure break my heart again (the heart break comes from the not being a missionary anymore and missing being one and missing the mission).

There is a new 3D Tintin film. I'm not sure how I feel about that... :/ But all the reviews are saying it's really good. Spielberg. Hmm. Wasn't it Spielberg who did Polar Express? And that was pretty good... I dunno, I'm not all the way into the whole 3D thing in any shape or form. Except maybe Pixar.

Anyhoo, related to that, the newspaper did an article on Herge, the guy who wrote Tintin. And it was an eye opener, I was really quite shocked. The first Tintin adventure (about the Soviet Union) came out before WWII. He was working on the comics all the way through the wars, in a Belgium that was... not anti-Nazi. So there were blatantly anti-Semitic stuffs in his comics et al. Apparently through the course of the years the worst of it has been cleaned up from the later editions. Which makes me even more curious to see the old editions.

Then after the whole horrid play of war had acted itself out in Europe, Herge didn't come out clean. The newspaper he had worked for had a very strict reaction, basically Voldermorting Herge, so that his name was not mentioned in that paper for years, decades. Herge worked on with his stuff, but he had a really rough time. At one point he disappeared, just left without telling anyone. Then he came back until the stress became too much and he did a disappearance again etc... The Herge-shall-not-be-named thing was eventually overcome, and apparently even Spielberg discussed the movie with Herge before the artist passed away in the 80s. So kind of a happy ending.

I grew up reading and watching Tintin, and next to Asterix he was my favourite of those kinds of comics (BD!]. So it's very strange to now see this sort of a more grown up POV to Tintin and hear about the man behind it - and his struggles. It's kind of like that moment when you learn that Babar the Elephant is basically French colonialism for children. In hindsight, yes I can see that. But back then when we were kids, it was elephants and rhinos, good guys and bad guys, and I didn't grow up thinking "yay apartheid" or something...

In other news, I have lost my crochet hook and can't make bunnies anymore >.< Where the heck has it got to?

I had cake for first breakfast. :) And then I had pie for second breakfast.

You know how you see people on Facebook have a status update saying "thank you everyone for birthday wishes"? My goal today is to reply personally to every single happy birthday wisher. Because I care about every single one of them.

In more interesting news unrelated to Facebook (but still staying on the topic of my birthday since I'm obnoxious and self-centered donchaknow), today I should start the Perfect Date project. I still haven't quite made up in my mind what it... is. So this could get a bit challenging. In the process of pondering about it the concept of "date" has lost all meaning for me. Time does not go around, the seasons do not repeat themselves, dates do not return. They are all fabrication. Time is a never-ending line, and this very date will never come back. So I think this project's name should be more like "The Perfect [date]". Sort of like "The Perfect November 7th, 2011". Since if there is only one of them ever, then surely it is the best - yea, even perfect - at being that thing. I know this notion is very flawed and has a frighteningly Gaius Baltar-esque logic behind it, but it does will work for dates, if not for anything else. But perhaps there is something we can learn from this given perfection of dates. So let that be the proposed aim or objective (I always forget which is which) of this project, and we'll see where it goes from there. 

The concept of perfect pretty much closes out the notions of good and bad.

I love anecdotes.

I read in this book about blondes that Goebbels tried to tempt Marlene Dietrich back to Germany to star in films there, and she said she would on the condition that she could get so close to the Führer that she could shoot him.
(My bookmark says "you can live without books, but what kind of a life is that?")

Yesterday I walked with the missionaries and one of them was telling about an awkward drama situation involving a girl back home, and we stopped to part ways but he continued to talk, and at one point his companion interjected with really good timing, saying "she's a witch". And I was quite surprised, that was a somewhat strong thing to say about this girl back in America that he doesn't even know, so we both looked at him, and he looked past of us and pointed, and there was a little girl dressed as a witch.




Muammar Gaddafi: “Women, like men, are human beings. This is an incontestable truth. . . . According to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/07/111107fa_fact_anderson#ixzz1co5Lxa3h

So I tried to buy boots from Germany and they never replied. So I tried another place, a more direct online-shop thing (with a basket and all this stuff) and I had to make an account and crap - all in German. Did I mention that I don't know German? Thank you kindly Google Translate for all the help, for, despite the whole "your translations suck hilariously", they unsucked enough to help me understand what was meant. So let's see if this one works in the end. This is the blooming European Union, I have to be able to buy crap from other countries! >.<

And then I shopped for travel :3 Trip to Sweden is real! I can almost taste the sweet taste of Julmust and mjuk pepparkaka already :9 Oh it will be so cool. I facebooked a Sundsvallian friend as well to ask if I could stay at their house (and if not, I'll just ask someone else and someone else and someone else, because I was there for such a long time that I will be able to get someone to let me stay with them!) The plans between Sundsvall and Gothenburg are a little shaky still. I'd rather stop at Örebro than Stockholm, but we shall see... Looking at train times and stuff in Swedish (which I do know, yay! :P)

*edit*
Hey my town is cool! This week they are having Fredrikshamn veckan, where you can go in to shops and do your shopping in Swedish :D It's sponsored by the historic society, because back in the day, the official language for trade and stuff would have been Swedish. So I went and bought bunny-stuffing material in Swedish. Then I did a detour to the health stuff shop and came out with Bambu coffee substitute and two kinds of herbal tea, one of which is gingerbread. And it tastes like gingerbread and it is so omnomnom delicious! :9

So I discovered scribd.com, which seems to be some kind of a non-peer-reviewed Jstor kind of thing. A whole lot of texts there. And they have it set out pretty well, you can connect it with your Facebook and whatever, you can read it on the screen and zoom and all that, and they also offer downloading. And when you click to download, it gives options: "pay this much, pay that much, or upload something instead." I think that is an amazingly brilliant idea: in order to have something for free, please provide something for free for others. Now I didn't, and I haven't looked at their copyright policy or anything so I'm not exactly sure how that works. But I love the idea, it's going back to trading :)


You know that feeling when you wake up after having had a really sweet dream, but you've kind of forgotten what the dream was, and all that is left is that sweet giddy hazy feeling of "there was something really sweet... somewhere" and you just wake up a little bit happy.

So you know when I said I've had two weeks of work without a night off and Monday morning would be my rest day? (I don't remember if I said that at any point or not. Doesn't matter.) Well. Monday morning at about quarter to three a.m. I get a call: "could you please come do the other round (that you've only practiced twice oops) tonight because there's been some kind of a cock-up and I have no one to go out there." So I say yes, because there is really no real reason to say no (other than "oh ffs I haven't had a rest in WEEKS" or "noooo it's RAINING" or whatever). All I said was "it'll take me like an hour to get there, you know I live in the sticks, right?" and he said "I'll come pick you up." So I went, and I didn't actually get quite totally soaked, which was strange. It was also kind of a warm night. I got lost a couple times towards the end, because apparently numbers on houses are optional >.< (numbers on houses are not optional!) But overall not bad. It does make it a straight three weeks of work without a break. Which means moar pay, plus the "emergency call pay" for tonight... (I might go over the amount of income I guesstimated to the taxman before I started any of these jobs >_> I wonder what happens then? Bigger tax? Maybe I should just take all of November off...)

Well, next Sunday is All Saints' Day and no paper will even be printed, so I deff. will have that day off :P And Saturday as well I hear.

You know that feeling when you draw something, and it starts to turn out so good, better than you actually can draw, and you get scared of continuing because you are afraid of ruining it? I think this is why we invented Photoshop *wants an identical copy of the unfinished drawing to magically appear to act as a back-up in case of a mess-up*

Today during Primary time in Church I was with the Nursery kids (3 and under) just kind of child-minding. Which was nice, I was so pooped that I just wanted to be able to chill, so the request to be in Nursery was a Godsend (you get to just sit on the floor with your shoes off in there). And it went fine, except that the little one-year-old girl had a little event. She kind of sat stupid on her chair, and ended up stuck in the back of it. I very gently eased her out of the chair (by basically making her stand and lifting the chair through her - this sounds strange but it was the most sensible way to get her out) and she was of course screaming her head off all the time, because she was scared by the strange turn of events. But then she wouldn't stop shouting. >.< She went into this giant hour long epic tantrum, where she stood and waved her arms and stomped her feet, when I asked what she wanted she pointed up at the wall, and I had really no idea what it was or what she wanted (at this point nothing would have helped anyway). She sat and screamed, she stood and screamed, I helped her back on her chair and she screamed against the table. Eventually she slid under the table to scream there and there she stayed until time was up and her mum came back down. She wouldn't have any kind of consoling from me (holding or hugging or talking or anything), so eventually I just gave up and tried to think of the other two children there. Sometimes she took breaks and was quiet for a long time, and then started again seemingly out of nowhere and for no reason.

Ah well. When her mother came to get her after class, we seemed to have a mutual understanding of what was going on: when she starts screaming there is nothing you can do to stop her, this is a phase and it will pass, she needs to learn to be down here without her mum coming running when she screams (that must have been hard for the mother, because you can hear it upstairs - heck, you can hear her in the moon, probably :P) and we were both sort of "c'est la vie, hope no one gets traumatised" :P So it went surprisingly well, all things considered.

Much appreciated the extra hour received today, thank you Daylight Saving Time for having kept that one in reserve there. Did you know that Russia has decided "we hate changing clocks! We are staying in summer time forever!" and they are not changing their clocks back. Strange stuff that made a mess of train timetables (Finland-Russia ones). I think it is really rather cool that you can get a train from here to Russia. I should do that sometime, just roll into St. Petersburg. One day I will. Maybe when they make the border visa-free.

"Faith is as trumpet." ~Mishearing Shakespear.

I haven't had a day off work in almost two weeks. I'm pretty sure you are supposed to ever so often. Because it shows. I can't do my round in four hours anymore, today was a perfectly regular day (as in, no ads or crap to put in every door, like it will be tomorrow >.< but today no reason to be slow) and I was still fifteen minutes overtime. I feel bad for the people who live at the end of the round, they're the ones who always get shafted. Perhaps tomorrow I will do them before the shops, so that they won't have to wait 'til half seven for their morning paper :/ Unless there is someone to help me, somehow (the boss-fellow said something about Mia being there as a helper, but I don't understand how... she will help, exactly. >_> Would she take part of my round, or would she go with me, or what?) But the boss-fellow apparently has his night off (it's alright for some >.< ) tomorrow, so I don't actually know who to bring this up with or how. Or how bout I just do my round late again? It won't be that much overtime. On Sundays you have 'til seven. And by golly this better be my last Sunday of work or... I will work on Sunday and feel miserable about it again >.<

When I come back home in the dark after work, I like to not have my bike light on. The light is one of those "pedal-and-light-turns-on things that creates its own electricity from the bike wheel, so it's harder to pedal when the light is on. Also in town the street lights are on by this time (yes, they are off in some parts in the middler part of the night, it's pretty ridiculous) but then when I get to my road, the pitch black part where lights don't even exist, I still like to leave the bike light off. It is amazing what darkness looks like when your eyes get adjusted. I spook myself over imaginary things quite often on these dark rides, when something looks exactly like something ("was there a man behind that tree? If it was it's gone now...") And then when a car comes I go absolutely blind and can hardly stay on the road :P But it's so nice, darkness is kind of rare these days.

Yesterday I tried to take my dog for a walk, and my neighbouress (a sour, quiet woman) came to talk to me as I was going down the driveway (my dog is fat and goes slowly, okay). And she said she wanted to be friends with my dog, because he always barks (he can see her on her yard from our yard, and, well, he's a dog, he will bark when he sees things). So she held out her hand and the dog smelled and then did that stupid thing that my dog does, being all antisocial and overall horrible, and, well, he didn't bite her but it was that kind of a motion and sound (sudden growlbark with bared teeth and forward motion) and she yanked her hand away. I felt awful, as I always do when my dog behaves that way, and we walked. And being old and fat, my dog doesn't always want to go very far. So we went a bit down the road and then came back. And she was still there. And we stopped to watch her from our side, to help the dog feel more normal about the situation, and she fetched a bite of something for him, and we talked for a long time. Mostly her talking, being a little incoherent and slow of finishing her sentences, and smelling of alcohol somewhat >_> It was a very strange "I don't know what to do, so I will do nothing" situation, so I just stood there, listening to my drunk neighbour (who hardly even says hello) go on - like how they were afraid of our previous dog, and how much she loved her cat - and be kind of emotional and stuff. And bare-footed. o.O She was raking leaves, then she went inside to fetch that something for the dog, and she came out without any shoes on, and we stood there and I was getting a bit cold, and she... didn't have any shoes on.

I feel like my mission prepared me very well for these kinds of encounters :P I didn't flinch, I didn't even blink at anything that she said or did. Just listened and nodded along. Hooray for neighbourly relations spurred on by alcohol! :D

I'm fixing the gaping hole in my education when it comes to all things Shakespeare by listening to his plays read out loud on iTunes Uni while drawing :) Not that I don't have a kazillion podasts to listen to already, but since I'm on the whole Rosercrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead -roll, I might as well do it now. Heaven knows I have no time to read any such stuff. I wish I could read it and listen to it at the same time, but I just don't have that kind of time on my hands. Especially when art is so much fun :) *has been drawing a diamond-and-pearl studded crown* Oh the detail <3 Don't know if colourfuller studded items should be in it too or not. But it is a pretty effect so far :3

Me again, because Silvie is at work.

So today I was delivering papers in the middle of the night (which is what I do and I'm pretty good at it) and my bike broke down. You see, it looks like this (when it's not broken):


(disclaimer: this is not my bike, there is no snow here yet, this is a random picture from the internets)

And the leg, that metal tube that goes across under the front wheel that makes it stand while I'm inside the building, it broke in half. Just, by itself. It was really strange. When I stopped to inspect it, it broke even worse with one half of it falling off. I wasn't exactly sure what to do then, so I called the boss in the office. And he just said "okay, I'll come there now with a new bike." So he did, I swapped bikes and I was off again like nothing had happened. When I got back at the end of my route, I saw the bike in the garage (barage? is it called a garage even if it's not for cars but for bikes?) The broken bit was on the front shelf-thingie and a note saying "there seems to be something wrong with the leg of this bike..." :P

He's growing on me. Y'know what I've noticed is actually helping a lot? That we serve each other. I ask him for help with something and he helps, when he has no one to do the route on Sunday and he calls me as the last resort I don't give him a hard time over it and just do it as a favour to him, we do small acts of kindness that, y'know, people do...



Yesterday I watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I love it muchly. I think I shall watch it again today (it has no subtitles in any language so I could hardly understand what anyone was saying, never mind understand when they are having their amazing lingual gymnastics all the way through the movie).

Today in the newspaper there was an article about the water footprint, which is like the carbon footprint, except more important because without water there is no life, so if we rich fat white people waste all clean water, everybody dies, not just the environment. Great -_-

The article gave a lot of interesting information: everything we buy is drenched with hidden water. So it's not just about not letting the tap run while doing dishes, but it's about how much water goes into growing one tomato, or into making a pound of beef and all this. So you can become very aware of water and prefer products that will use less of it.

What I still don't know is why, or maybe how. How will my not using water help those people who don't have clean drinking water? Why does it matter? This country gets a lot of rain, there's tons of lakes and rivers and the underground drinking water is plentiful. We have no shortage of water - is there a way to make our water go over to the place where they don't have enough? I mean other than loading it into big containers and shipping it over to Africa?

The article said that water is spent mostly by a) farming (rice growing being the worst one since the plant needs to be drowned in order for it to grow) b) industry c) regular people. So isn't it just a hilarious stab of irony that the places where it rains alot are losing their industry when all the factories close or move to China, and only have a short growing season so you can only get one harvest per year. -_- It seems that this entire planet was designed to be a huge puzzle. And perhaps the reason we are failing at solving it because it takes the equal effort of everyone working together to solve it.

10 Days of Photography - Burning/On Fire


Future Tense

In the contest manipulation is not allowed, so I wanted to put the photo with manipulation up here.
My camera didn't capture the red like I wanted it to, so Photoshop had to help >_>

Hi. Yeah, another diary from me today.

So I'd like some moar feedbacks since it worked so well last time.
There's this web icon design contest that the http://vineyard.lds.org is doing. Basically it's a website for the LDS Church members to help out with stuff when it comes to handling a massive international church. It's a relatively new thing this, where they just invite people to help in many ways. Anyhoo, in the contest they have five sections, General Helping in the Vineyard, Translation, Photography, Image tagging, and Church Technology. I got carried away and did a set.



I must admit, I have no idea what they are looking for. But since I felt inspired and had fun with the concept, then hey ho, let's go.
There's a lot of symbolism that'll be completely obvious to all mormons, so I'll explain that briefly la:
-Three grey triangles at the back: Salt Lake Temple
-Vineyard (of the Lord): the field of labour in building the "kingdom of God", reference from the Bible and the Book of Mormon (so the branch, leaves, flower and grapes are something akin to what a real grape vine looks like)
-Beehive + bees: very common symbol for coöperation and industry. That specific beehive design is yoinked straight from the Salt Lake Temple door handles. Also, deseret means honey bee, and the word deseret is used all over in all kinds of stuff, like company names in Utah and such, so it'll be really familiar.

The size restriction was 225px wide.

My main concern is the way the images look. Placement of the elements (how to make more harmonious design?) Would it be snazzier without colour (or if maybe only the bees had colour)? Anything else that comes to mind?
Also anybody know stuff about vectors-to-raster stuffs? I saved the lineart straight from vector to the 225 width and it looks really pix'ated to me. Would it look just as pix'ated if I saved it big first, then resized in PS or such?

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/10/population-seven-billion/100176/

A beautiful picture gallery. I know it's point is probably to highlight some kind of issues with population, but I just find it a beautiful celebration of humanity. Look how varied we are! People live everywhere! In so many different ways! And sea gypsies, what the heck? That's just so cool "they only go on land to bury their dead".

I love people. <3
Welcome to the world baby #7,000,000,000

I may have mentioned the DDR army boots before some time. In case I haven't (or you can't remember) here's the deal: I own a pair of used NVA boots. They are cool and amazing. Me and those boots have been through a lot together (I walked 30 miles in them one time, and 15 miles another time), they can be worn to church or to the forest. They aren't sweltering hot but there is space for a woolly sock for cold weather. So pretty perfect, right? Right you are. I had them with me in Sweden, as being the active missionary that I was, the boots were actively used - and thus they passed away in Sweden. Well, right one did. Left one is still kicking. But the sole of the right one cracked all the way across the foot and it shall be no more. I showed it to a number of shoe smiths and they all said "no can do". I tried to glue it together myself, but it's no go, it won't keep. This boot has come to the end.

So when I returned I knew it's time to start scouting for new boots. But I couldn't find an online shop in Finland that would sell such boots. I found one that came pretty close, but they only sell huge man-sizes of these SS boots (which are possibly cooler than NVA boots, but yeah, only men marched in the SS, NVA had lady-soldiers too (if I understood correctly) and therefore have smaller sizes too).
And how long did it take me to realise that I could buy these boots from Germany? Long time. But I did get there eventually. So with the help of applied Swedish and Google Translate, I searched for DDR army boots in German. And found. Oh how I found! :D
http://nva.4mg.com/shopshuh.htm

Basically the summer fight boots are what I have, but I fell in love with the tall, commanding Officer's paradeboots and I do believe those are the ones that I shall go with. A German-speaking friend of mine (thank you mission experience and Facebook) will help me email the place to ask about paying and posting it to Finland, but having worked in Salpakirja, I'm pretty sure they'll have no gripes sending to other EU countries, and since the currency is all the same, transferring the money will be a piece of kelp.


I love you European Union. Please don't collapse simply because greedy people don't know how to work together. ;_;

So I've been reading a lot about blondeness through the ages, from a book that talks about exactly that. I've read up to the Victorian era, but it's been basically the same information repeated in every chapter: prostitutes would bleach their hair because blonde hair drives men crazy, rich women used all sorts of nasty crap to make hair lighter or would buy wigs, and blonde hair in art would be either 'treacherous, dangerous woman like Eve' or 'innocent and pure like virgin Mary' and context is the only way to tell which one it is. It did mention history's first ever 'dumb blonde' Rosalie Duthé, who was a very wealthy courtesan and she was the subject of a satire 'Les curiosités de la foire' (Market curiosities), where one such wondrous thing was "a machine human, a very strange apparatus that looks like a beautiful woman, and acts like a living being: eats, drinks, dances, sings, and it can strip a man down to his undergarments in a matter of mere seconds. But it cannot produce speech, and they say this problem can never be fixed." Mme Duthé was there when this play opened, and she was outraged. She promised a kiss to any person who would write something that would return her honour, but the task had no takers.

So first blonde hair (and indeed all hair) was all evil and sinful and causing lusting etc etc... then the setting is thrown a little by Virgin Mary appearing blonde as well (and general loosening up in society where having your hair showing didn't automatically mean you were a hooker). The next surprise in the story is fairy tales. All the fairy tale heroines are blonde bar Snow White, and this whole culture of fairy tales had nothing to do with vain rich people doing all they can to be pretty nor with prostitutes (rich nor poor kinds), but with regular people. These were stories told when people sat around doing the kind of work that makes your hands occupied and mouths and minds unoccupied. Stories told to reinforce a value or a virtue (or a taboo). People like H. C. Andersen and the brothers Grimm didn't make their stories up: they listened to these stories when growing up, they went around to the places where such story tellers lived and recorded the stories and published them. And then you move to things like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (the real life Alice wasn't blonde, but the book-Alice is) where blondeness has more to do with youth and the innocence of youth (you lose your blonde hair as you grow up and get older, just like you lose your innocence - I found this to be a very cool symbol, since my hair behaves that way).

Another interesting curve ball was Queen Elizabeth I (not the boat). She had brown hair, but during her long solitary reign (she never married) she created this public image of herself of being this ever-beautiful, blonde queen of amazing and oompf that people could worship and love (in a patriotic way). All the portraits painted of her had to be approved of her, they were all young and beautiful and blonde and probably looked nothing like her :P But her blondeness wasn't about seducing men nor about virginity. It was about... royalty and power and inspiring awe. Being larger-than-life (which the portraits are). So that's cool and relevant.

Then I got to the literature of the 1800s and we're back to seducing and virginity. Stuff to look forward to in the coming pages: aryans, Marilyn Monroe and the conclusion (that is always the most fascinating part of any such book).

This isn't helping much in terms of the work since the pictures are drawn and the hair is coloured and it was decided from the start that they would be blonde. I am having fun though with different shades of blonde and this is something that the book also highlighted. The whole hair = sex is pretty irrelevant to me and it's really boring how the book seems to really dwell on that. So as far as research goes, this was not incredibly seminal or even all the way useful, but it was a good read and enables a wee bit of discussion and referencing. So not all a waste. But who knows, maybe it presents the Hitlerian love of pale and blonde so badly that it'll cause me to reject the whole shebang and go back to machines :P (oh wait, the nazis or communists loved machines too, didn't they? >.< If reductio ad Hitlerum was a valid point, all art would have to be rejected).


Last comment: I did enjoy the fact that I was simultaneously reading about the renaissance ideal female in this book, renaissance culture in another book and about Botticelli (again) and they all talked about Savonarola. I might have to research this guy, he sounds pretty interesting.