Pun based title, when I think of one

I was just looking at one of those music lists , best albums of the year and so on, on the BBC web site. They'd viewed the year via aggregation of lists from all over, including entities like Rolling Stone magazine in the US. To their credit, also a French and probably other non-Anglosphere sources. So, some interesting artists mentioned, some I'd heard of, some I hadn't. But no one I spent any time listening to in 2025. I'm generally decades out of date. Of course, nothing dates you more like your taste in music. New music I do like - which I'm going to mention here - isn't of any consequence in current music media. Sometimes because it's Finnish, often because it's by the sort of rock band who do their very exciting thing live, but isn't much liked by image orientated tv. Though Die Spitz ought to be, as attractive young women. This (right) is the first full album, just out this September, Something to Consume . I love it, especially how heavy i...

Valkoposkihanhi translates literally as 'white cheeked goose'; in English it's the barnacle goose. Supposedly there was a belief in the Middle Ages that they hatched from barnacles. Crazy, and I suspect they knew that perfectly well. But if they did come from barnacles, they must be fish, right? So you could eat them on Fridays. There's a happy coincidence (not for the geese). I've just enjoyed a rare summer trip to Finland, and I encountered this group of birds in a park while walking along the shoreline of the lake at Lahti . My first thought was, 'Those aren't Canada geese...' No they're not, in fact I think they have quite attractive markings. I haven't been to Lahti before - it doesn't have a major women's ice hockey team - but it's yet another very pleasant Finnish city. Internationally it may be best known as a winter sports centre . Two huge ski jumping towers are visible on the city skyline. It also has a notable Motorcycle ...

Moominsummer Madness and Vaarallinen juhannus ( 'Perilous Midsummer' - my translation!) are the same book, the first being the English translation, the other the Finnish. I've just read them together, in an exercise rather like that of a while ago when I read St Exupéry's Courrier Sud in French, English and Finnish. Note that while Tove Jansson was Finnish, she wrote in Swedish, and these two volumes are both translations of the original. Some day I'd like to chat to some one who's familiar with the original Swedish, because just like with Courrier Sud , I'm fascinated by how much translators can render the style, the tone, the nuance etc of their texts. I would like to know if the rich vocabulary of the Finnish translation in particular accurately reflects Tove Jansson's in Swedish. I fully expect a yes to that, by the way. I have no doubt of her genius. These may be 'children's books', but they tick all the boxes you want for literary...

Let me just say first that the picture below is indeed a really terrible picture . I'm not pretending for a moment that I'm providing a useful illustration of what these birds look like. The thing is, I was caught by surprise: I wasn't expecting to see any interesting birds at all when I walked up to the service area this morning, for a sandwich. The route passes the small pond where I used to see various species of birds, as written up (according to their Finnish names) in this ridiculous wildlife series previously. I only had my cheap smartphone on me, and taking bird pictures greatly exceeds the practical specs of its camera. You might want to check back through this absurd little series. Most of the pictures were taken at this pond, though any future pics are likely to be taken at the much larger fish pond over on the other side of the dual carriageway here. It just became a thing for me, when I began to spot interesting birds at the small pond now and again, other tha...

Remember the fad for fridge poetry ? Quite a while ago now. I think you can still get packs of words here and there but you have to hunt for them these days. Well, I picked up 3 or 4 packs around ten years ago in Finland , not so much to create masterpieces in verse, as to help with learning the language . At first I got a board suitable for moving the words around on, but I quickly found trying to make sentences was a non starter . Although I had a lot of words, they were designed for use in verse which was too restrictive; and the packs I had were limited in theme - I think one was for children, another for romance, and so on. Furthermore, Finnish as a language doesn't easily lend itself to this activity. It's not just the 17 cases , affecting the word endings, but consonant gradation , which can massively change the internal spelling of words. Here's my fridge today (it may help to click on the image, if it's unclear) . As you can see, the front is entirely devo...

Holy Ceremony by  Harri Nykänen is my first slice of 'Nordic Noir', from Finland. The narrative goes straight in on the first page with our detective contemplating the body of a young woman  laid out in an apartment. Her back is inscribed with a biblical text, prompting immediate assumptions about this being one of those cultish ritual stories. I'd think if you were one of today's very many noir murder mystery addicts, you'd be putting this scenario into a certain familiar box. Myself, I've only read the Stieg Larsson trilogy, but it feels as if I've read many more of this genre, because so many have been televised. So, does Holy Ceremony stand out in any way? Is it worth one's while to read? Well, Nykänen does subvert some of those initial expectations, and he does surprise the reader now and again. A nice detail in that opening scene is that when the medical examiner comes in, he immediately declares that he was only examining this self s...

Anu Partanen  is a Finn who moved to the US in 2008; in this book she examines the ways in which the country looks after or doesn't look after its citizens in comparison with the Nordic countries. Having become acquainted with Finland since 2006, though I've only paid occasional visits, and attended Finnish School, I'm naturally very interested to understand better the impressive social systems which I've previously only vaguely understood. Partanen is very methodical; her research and narrative is based on personal experience and interviews with friends and acquaintances both in the US and in the Nordic countries (ie. not only Finland); but above all on a vast array of academic surveys and studies . In fact although I've now finished the book, I was very far from the end. After the acknowledgements, there are substantial sections of footnotes, bibliography and index. I'll spare you any more than a brief summary, because the thought of an in depth analy...

Or, the frustrations of trying to follow the sport on the BBC It's the Winter Olympics, and now is that brief window of time, once every four years, in which my favourite sport, women's ice hockey , makes an appearance on British television. You would think that, as technology advances, the provision of sport on BBC media , paid for by a hefty licence fee, would get better and better. Unfortunately, that isn't the case, and this morning has been a perfect case in point. Right - From the IIHF web site, one of the very few pictures of the game which feature any Finnish players at all. They love the Canadians. Well, so do I, to be fair, but you can see that it's not only the BBC which treats everyone apart from the US and Canada as bit-part players. No niin (as the Finns say). I love women's ice hockey, and going to see some has been a central preoccupation of visits to Finland for some years. I go to Finnish Saturday School and study the language, and natu...

No, that isn't a spelling mistake. This really is about the Finnish in Blade Runner 2049 . There are a few spoilers in this, nothing big, but you may want to check out now. (NB - 2019 follow up comments in PS down at the bottom) I went to see the film a second time, primarily to immerse myself again in that world. Despite the intensely pessimistic vision it offers, its design and cinematography are wondrous and absorbing and I wanted it all again, while I could still get it on the big screen. And it was a big screen, a bigger and better one in Manchester. I went with a friend, which enabled some lively discussion afterwards. I'm glad to say she liked it too, and made several good points. The main one was about the 'glaring plot hole' towards the end (ie. how does so-and-so know how to find *cough* in order to effect a rescue): something's been cut out there, maybe only a bit of script, but something which might have explained it. There were other reasons t...