"The continuing struggles in Arab countries are seen (by many Russians) as a battle by those who wear neckties against those who do not wear them. Russians have long suffered from terrorism and extremism at the hands of Islamists in the northern Caucasus, and they are therefore firmly on the side of those who wear neckties."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/opinion/why-russia-supports-syria.html

Well darn, when you put it that way... I know I like people who wear neck ties... :/


This is pretty giggly :3 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/opinion/our-political-black-hole.html


I'm really really interested by the LIBOR scandal, and finally yesterday learnt how to write it (I've been listening to BBC and heck, it sounded like they were saying "the liable rate" - y'know, because it's... liable? And now it's not anymore? >_> No? Just me then?
"Britain and America have reacted to the Libor scandal in completely different ways. Britain is in an utter frenzy over it, with wall-to-wall coverage, and the most respectable, pro-business publications expressing outrage."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/opinion/libors-dirty-laundry.html



And one more, this one really kind of sad: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
The blog of the author of the new novel Redshirts which I really really want to read.
(This one http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/07/books/in-redshirts-john-scalzi-gives-expendables-a-life.html )

Colloquial Finnish 101

Talviturkki (talvi = winter, turkki = fur coat). Used to refer to the change in colouring that some animals (hares, squirrels, weasels etc...) experience between winter and summer 
Heittää talviturkki = to throw or cast off the winter fur coat.

To throw off one's winter coat, a colloquial expression for the first swim of the year in a natural body of water, during which the swimmer dives or is at least one point fully immersed in water and the so-called winter coat is fully washed away.

Examples:
iippo: I threw off my winter coat this morning!

This is a big deal because I haven't actually swam in any kind of body of water in over ten years.

Yes, it was kind of cold :B

I'm struggling with one of these practical everyday things that seem to be so impossibly difficult for me: exchange rates. So I want you to tell me if I've got this wrong.

If the pound is 1,25 euros, and/or the euro is almost 0,80 pounds... That means that if I get paid in euros and then change them over to pounds, that is a good rate for me? Given that the pound has been like... 1,40 euros before? I understand better how this works if the euro was 75p and is now 80p, then that is good because the pound is the stronger currency, so getting more of the stronger stuff for less euros is good, yes?

I was good at this in Sweden, because we were given our allotment in dollars, everything was in Swedish krona, and my personal monies were in euros and pounds. :P

Payday's two weeks away anyway, so I'll keep an ear out how the rates go.

"Have a nice trip. Welcome to the United States."

^_____^

A headline in the New York Times today was "A Clear Declaration of Intent Is Now Even Clearer". The NYT has started to speak lolcat.

Electronic Frontier Foundation et al are working to get the Declaration of Internet Freedom recognised. Halp?

https://action.eff.org/o/9042/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=8750


The radio interviewer asked a scientist whether the world will change with the discovery of the Higgs boson like it did with the discovery of the electron. And the scientist agreed that the world did change with the electron, and how we get electronics from the word electron-- guys. We are about to invent bosonics! :O :D


I also feel like an awful person, but there was a man speaking on the radio whose r's were l's. Unfortunately he was interviewed to talk about the bank stuff going on in England right now, so he kept saying things like "legulatols legulating" and I didn't hear anything that he was saying 'cause I was too twitterpated over that ^_^;;;

I love my tresaurus tumblr a lot and what I've been doing with it, but this one is my favourite even though it's not exactly in the right pattern:
http://tresaurus.tumblr.com/post/26344591942/221b-here-dwell-together-still-two-men-of-note

PS. Silvie, I've been reading that Final Problem thing too, now. It's a terrible place to get lost in.

Here for safe keeping because it might come in handy some time:



Also: http://youtu.be/J4oQbrLtu7o


Edit: This too, courtecy of Triola:

 
My mum considers me her personal greeting card maker. So I made one for my second cousin's kid for her confirmation

I also realised that chunky gold ink on white card would make pretty sweet Christmas cards too, so I decided to take a head start and start making Christmas cards :D


In other news.
I like being up-to-date on news, but more than the news themselves I love the little funny things that happen on the side of the news. Like this: "Supreme Court Health Care Ruling Prompts Foot Race in Press Corps" :D
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/06/29/155972981/supreme-court-health-care-ruling-prompts-foot-race-in-press-corps?ps=sh_sthdl

One more diary, this one a happy :)

My boyfriend and his best friend work in the same office. I used to work there too and am good friends with his friend. My boyfriend is not on Facebook, but his friend is. Yesterday it was a big storm in the city they work in. The friend made a Facebook update that said "thunder and lightning, I'm scared and I want a hug." I suggested to him to go find my boyfriend and hug him as a mediated hug from me. He said he'd wait 'til I was back in England, and I made a sad because that's 77 days away. During this my boyfriend texted me saying there's a huge thunder storm in the city. I texted him back telling him to go give his best friend a hug. There was some more Facebook banter with the friend, who then said "nevermind, your boyfriend just gave me a hug in front of the HR Manager" :D So I texted my boyfriend again thanking him for that and saying that I owe him one awesome, and asked if his friend had explained the whole thing to him yet. He said he hadn't (and he was pretty astonished that I knew already - bless him he knows not the instant power of social media), so I explained the entire thing, and rejoiced in the fact that he's so willing to play along :3 I forget how chill he can be, I'm so used to seeing him keep cool...

And pretty much the entire yesterday I talked to various friends from around the world and got nothing useful done, and that's great. And then this morning I woke up to find that Nehirwen had evolved into a Wheehirden :D It was a serious "and thy cup runneth o'er" moment of joy <3

Uhh, Google, WTF? Come on, try to be not-evil, will ya? >.<;
http://www.youtube-mp3.org/help-us

The euro-zone leaders stayed up all night in Brussels and hashed out some kind of a plan to diffuse the crisis in Europe. Considering how many generations of students have learnt the effect of pulling an all-nighter, are we surprised that they do that in their professional lives too? :D I wonder if this idea of "don't rest until it's finished" is some kind of a way to tap into some human brilliance that lies dormant until it is forced out by sheer stress and need...

The wife of Egypt's new president. I kind of like her?
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/world/middleeast/naglaa-ali-mahmoud-an-egyptian-everywoman-in-the-presidential-palace.html

Also, I found something incredibly dull and I kind of like it too?
http://www.dullmensclub.com/blog/24-blog/825-breaking-news-boringoregon-votes-to-twin-with-dull-scotland-.html
I might join this club.

You're more likely to be killed by a bee or a wasp than by a terrorist (says recent research). And people think I'm crazy for being afraid of buzzers!

Couple of nights now I've seen this small spider hanging out near (or in) my bed when I wake up. There's an old belief in Finland that it's bad luck to kill spiders, that if you kill a spider it means someone in the house will die. Apparently this is because when a person sleeps, their soul goes wandering around in the form of a spider. Now my sleep pattern is wonky because I work nights (I think of it basically that I'm living in the Chinese timezone :P) so maybe my soul is still making its way back when I wake up.

Those Russians who actually saw the tests found themselves staggered, overwhelmed, awestruck, just as the Americans at Eniwetok had been. Ideologies differ, but the impact of raw physics is universal. The effect of the earlier atomic bombs had not necessarily been so great on those who saw the explosions, but it was on those who actually witnessed the explosions of the vastly more powerful H-bomb. These explosions were so profound as to have a psychological effect; the Soviet scientist Andrei Sakharov said 'something within you changes.' Another key Soviet scientist, after seeing the actual effect of a thermonuclear explosion he had worked to produce, vowed to work on it no more.

From "Two Americans" by William Lee Miller

Planet Money gave me a sad - but a funny at the same time:





Angela Merkel: "Never as long as I live." :(

So some time ago I noticed with alarm that I only listen to American podcasts (This American Life, New Yorker, Planet money and essentially all things NPR) and read American news (NY Times, New Yorker...) though sometimes I do read the paper in Finnish (but not recently). So I started to listen to BBC Radio 4 again in the mornings (hooray iPlayer!), their Today show that's on from 6-9 in England (it's working great, actually, it forces me to not waste my morning by clicking things on the internet, I have to do hand-eye things like knitting and drawing so that I can leave my comprehension nodes open for listening). But I still kind of realised that UK and USA still not a broad range of things make. But I also realised that I'm not particularly interested in listening to anything in Finnish or Swedish (okay, sometimes at work before the KySa papers arrive I leaf through the major Swedish language paper too, but it just mostly makes me jealous that I'm not finlandsvensk >.< Stupid cool people with better everything, bah!), it's all about the English language to me.

And then This American Life did it once again :) They did a show on Americans in China, and they talked to a man called Kaiser Kuo (famous man, I'm sure you've heard of him :P) who - among other things - does an English language podcast called Sinica, of conversations with a couple of other people about Chinese current affairs. The recentest one is about the one child policy, the one from week before that I'm listening to now is about the lack of civic morals in China.

Anyway, that was a really long intro to the main point that I wanted to say (I paused the podcast to get this out after shouting at the computer screen for a bit). In the discussion they were comparing China today to USA in the early 18th century, where all sorts of scoundrels were running around and it was a dog-eat-dog world indeed. And someone suggested that maybe China will grow up eventually. Then someone else pointed out that China is way older than the US, it's been there in that position of biggest economy in the world and had all that in the past, so you can't really say that China will grow up to be USA. At this point I paused. Because. The paradox is that China hasn't actually been a country for that long a time. The country that was China died in the culture revolution or the rise of communism. They threw out everything. Including people's kitchen sinks. And their moral code. They started again from scratch. So this country that we now call China can't claim to be standing on the shoulders of its past giants, because they have rejected them all. China is a tree that was cut down, and now the shoots are growing from the stump. USA is a relatively young country, but when you compare China to another civilisation that is properly old - mainland Europe for example - they are drastically different. Things have changed very slowly in Europe. The Roman empire wasn't overthrown in a revolution, Christianity wasn't declared an official religion at its inception, and the past was constantly revisited all the way through history with renaissance going back to the antiquity etc...

So while admittedly it is easy to think of China as a new country on the surface because you kind of just clump it together with the third world countries (all those baby nations in Africa who are doing much better at age 70 than our countries did at that age...) and it's highly offensive to such an ancient civilisation - it's still not totally unaccurate to do that nonetheless, because this second China is still in its baby shoes.

But. On yet another hand, it might be too optimistic to say China will grow out of it because USA did, because China is a whole different kind of culture, something that they highlighted a lot on the podcast. They are being raised on a whole different kind of diet than USA was. Even the scoundrels were aware of the Judeo-Christian tradition of "be nice to people or you go to hell" -morals. The Chinese don't have that. They don't have an anything. And no matter what that cynical foul-mouthed Jeremy person kept implying about religion, it's pointless to deny that religion played a significant role in the history of western civilisation, and being so cynical as to claim its role was nothing but negative is just sillyness.


I probably know nothing about this topic and am talking out of my box. I will go back to the podcast now.

English language, Y U NO follow pattern!?

horrible - terrible
horrifying - terrifying
horrific - terrific! ???

-_- *goes to mime palace*

Ah-hahaa! :D
http://finalproblem.tumblr.com/post/25475192400/mime-palace

For the first time in yonks I am actually into this midsummer business. :D Just had the summer's first new potatoes with butter and sill (the not-rotten fish from that comic you saw in [Triola]'s diary, as advocated by the Dane), some home made bread, and sour cream on the fresh green salad :9 This is the only time you see me gush all foodie like.

I was thinking earlier today about midsummer and how it's celebrated, and I had to admit that I know of no way that I would want to do it. For most people it's about getting shit-face drunk and that's not really my thing. Then there's the silly aspects like midsummer magic stuff (involving nakedness in fields or lakes) and I'm just not pagan enough to find that exhilarating. Then there's proper stuff like the maypole and the bonfire and a flag but that's not very... common round here. I'd do it if I was in Sweden, or anywhere else than here, really.

So I've decided to celebrate it my own way: I'll give Ray a call, and then stay up late watching football on TV :D

Overall today has been an appreciation day: I've appreciated carrot sticks with sour cream, and I've appreciated not having a compulsive liar in my life (I listened to an old This American Life episode about liars and man @_@ messy bad things :/ )

Choose the right.
http://thetrichordist.wordpress.com/2012/06/18/letter-to-emily-white-at-npr-all-songs-considered/

Yes, it's tl, but do read.

So you can't watch tv on BBC iPlayer if you're foreign, but you can listen to the radio programmes. Leaving the "wtf is up with that" comments aside (because "some cats just prefer radio" says Ira Glass <3 and I am such a cat)... I listened to the Today show today (haha pun) on BBC4. I need to learn to listen to it live, since it takes forever to get onto the player afterwards. But it did raise a question again, the same one I've had about newspapers: which stations lean which way? Is there a radio station version of the Private Eye? Which was does LBC lean? Or Free Radio (network)? Or Gold (radio)? There should be some kind of a political media guide, colour-coded mayhaps that shows what are in connection to what else, are they lefty or righty etc... At least in Finland all the media conglomerates have a tv station, a radio station and a newspaper each and their stuff correlates.

I guess I'll just stick with BBC and... hope to see/read/hear through the bias.