"They jaywalk across bike paths, swagger through crosswalks barefoot like the Beatles, preen in the parks and..."

"... sometimes strut between office buildings and cultural landmarks in the city center. In parks, the problem can be even worse, with the droppings matting the grass and squishing into the treads of shoes."

From "Finland’s Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop/Finns trying to enjoy beaches and parks during their all-too-brief summers have been vexed by legions of geese — and their droppings. The smelly mess has resisted even the most innovative solutions" (NYT).

The "innovative solutions" are ineffective pooper scoopers in the litter box that is the sandy beach. Outside of Finland, "officials fight the problem at its source: the birds themselves."

"I got off at the city center and walked to Helsinki’s main library, which looks like a ship made of carrot cake. It is called Oodi...."

"On the ground floor of the library was a cinema, a cafeteria serving beet lasagna and carrot soup and 22 children playing games of chess.... [T]he second floor... featured a 3-D printing station, a laser cutter, a large-format printer, an engraving machine, conference rooms... rocking chairs... electric and acoustic guitars — nice ones — to borrow, as well as a drum kit and multiple zithers. A podcast studio, an electronic-music studio, classrooms.... In the course of a text conversation with a friend... I rambled about my sorrow at watching the Finnish children rove and play, and told her about how mothers of all ages gathered spontaneously in the library to chat or rest or idly massage their feet. I explained that one of these mothers had placed her baby, a child of no more than 9 months, in a highchair at a library cafe table and handed him a vegetable purée to consider, then left for 20 minutes to fetch books. When she came back we exchanged smiles.... We talked about children and libraries and the relative safety of our nations. 'Every few years there’s a crisis where a baby is stolen but then it is returned or found 15 minutes later,' she said...."

From "My Miserable Week in the 'Happiest Country on Earth'/For eight years running, Finland has topped the World Happiness Report — but what exactly does it measure?" (NYT).

Here, I found this:

That video says a lot about why Finns may be the happiest people in the world. That man is warmly pleased with small things. The chess boards are credited with "keeping people smart and educated," the ceiling calls to mind the ceiling in a particular Rolls Royce you might remember.

"When you are half-naked or even sometimes completely naked, it allows for deeper discussion."

"You talk in a way that doesn’t happen when you are sitting around a table with a tie on or at some formal thing."

Said Mikko Hautala, the ambassador of Finland to the United States, in "'Whatever Happens in the Sauna Stays in the Sauna': Diplomacy, Conducted in the Nude/The Finnish Embassy offers one of the hottest invitations in Washington: a chance to discuss serious topics in a sauna" (NYT).

"In Finland, swinging your arms and other unnecessary sudden hand gestures are quite commonly interpreted as a sign of aggression, which should be avoided unless you want to get your ass kicked."

Writes someone in Finland in a Reddit discussion, "Do Europeans ever use their hand[s] to make 'Air Quotes' in a conversation, for example, to express sarcasm or a euphemism?"

Someone in Slovakia says "If you can't express sarcasm or a euphemism by you voice and tone, you shouldn't be allowed to do it. (I haven't seen it here, but maybe somebody does it.)"

An American says: "I did it in Italy once, and my little Italian cousins absolutely lost it laughing so hard, bc they didn't know why I was wiggling my fingers around (which I understand would look very, very strange if you don't know the meaning)." 

Someone in Italy answers: "We don't do it in Italy. Some people may know what it means because of American movies and TV series."

I know the TV series! It's "Friends":

"Back in the day when it wasn’t that easy to survive the winter, people had to struggle, and then it’s kind of been passed along the generations."

"Our parents were this way. Our grandparents were this way. Tough and not worrying about everything. Just living life."

Said Matias From, 18, quoted in "The Finnish Secret to Happiness? Knowing When You Have Enough.The Nordic nation has been ranked the happiest country on earth for six consecutive years. But when you talk to individual Finns, the reality is a bit more complicated" (NYT). 

This happiness does not look much like an America stereotype of happiness: 

Here are 9 TikToks, carefully curated for you. Some people love them.

1. Réttir — sorting out the sheep in Iceland.

2. The woonerf — a type of street.

3. The Finnish way to live through winter — on Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

4. If Arabic were English.

5. Choosing the boring life.

6. Overnight evolution.

7. White friend training.

8. Talking to the salad.

9. Hello, darkness, my old friend....

"Finland is applying for NATO membership. A protected Finland is being born as part of a stable, strong and responsible Nordic region."

"We gain security and we also share it. It’s good to keep in mind that security isn’t a zero-sum game."

Said Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö, quoted in "Finland formally confirms intention to join Nato/Nordic country that shares 800-mile border with Russia looks to end decades of non-alignment" (The Guardian).

I've made 7 selections from TikTok for you today. Let me know what you like best.

1. A teacher rates the insults he received from students today.

2. An impersonation of Amber Heard.

3. How America pictures a workday in Finland.

4. How Finland pictures a workday in America.

5. Follow the simple instructions and you, kids, can make a nice image of a horse.

6. The first half of the show was fashion for adults, the second half the toy version of those things.

7. Office jobs are kind of fake jobs, aren't they?

"In 1993, when I was living in New York and still fresh off the boat, 60 Minutes featured a segment on Finland, which opened with this description..."

"... of Helsinki pedestrians going about their business: 'This is not a state of national mourning in Finland, these are Finns in their natural state; brooding and private; grimly in touch with no one but themselves; the shyest people on earth. Depressed and proud of it'” As far as facial expressions of the Finnish people, not much has changed since then. We are still just as reserved and melancholy as before. If happiness were measured in smiles, Finnish people would be among the most miserable in the world.

From The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness/It’s not hygge, the welfare state, or drinking. It’s reasonable expectations" a Slate article by Jukka Savolainen (reacting to a study that rated the Finns the happiest people on earth).

"Consistent with their Lutheran heritage, the Nordic countries are united in their embrace of curbed aspirations for the best possible life. This mentality is famously captured in the Law of Jante—a set of commandments believed to capture something essential about the Nordic disposition to personal success: 'You’re not to think you are anything special; you’re not to imagine yourself better than we are; you’re not to think you are good at anything,' and so on.... If I had to pick a Scandinavian word to capture the correct cultural ingredient in Nordic happiness, it would probably be the Swedish and Norwegian term lagom, which can be translated as 'just the right amount,' i.e., neither too much nor too little."

FROM THE EMAIL: Paul writes: 

I'm a German-American Lutheran, and I find this unrecognizable. Martin Luther was, famously, an irascible sort who enjoyed the beer his wife, Katie, brewed; teaching; preaching; music (he composed several famous hymns, of which "A Mighty Fortress Is our God" is the best-known); and wrote, and published, pamphlet upon pamphlet upon pamphlet, often in explicitly scatological terms. Whatever you might say about Luther—and there's plenty to be said, and has been—"curbed aspirations for the best possible life" are not among them. On a guided bus tour of New Orleans, in fact, our guide told us that when the Lutherans arrived in New Orleans, they were declared "honorary Creoles," because, unlike the Protestants of America's Second Great Awakening, they liked to drink and dance and have a good time. So whatever is going on in the Nordic countries, it doesn't have anything to do with Lutheranism.

"Sanna Marin of Finland to Become World’s Youngest Prime Minister/At 34, Ms. Marin will head a coalition made up of five parties, in a government led by women."

The NYT reports.

Of the five women in leading ministerial positions in the coalition, four are under 35. Asked about her age after it was announced that she would be prime minister, Ms. Marin reiterated what she has said numerous times: Age doesn’t matter.

“I have not actually ever thought about my age or my gender,” she said, according to the national news outlet YLE. “I think of the reasons I got into politics and those things for which we have won the trust of the electorate.”

Alexander Stubb — Finland’s prime minister from 2014 to 2015 — tweeted:

My party is not in government, but I rejoice that the leaders of the five parties in government are female. Shows that #Finland is a modern and progressive country. The majority of my government was also female. One day gender will not matter in government. Meanwhile pioneers. 👍 pic.twitter.com/dW8OMEOiqb

— Alexander Stubb (@alexstubb) December 9, 2019

"There's Swedish death cleaning and there's Finnish forest raking."

Said Meade, as I was reading "Trump Says Finland Prevents Wildfires by 'Raking' Forests. Finland Isn't Sure What He's Talking About" (Fortune).

“You’ve got to take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forests, it’s very important,” Trump said amid the ruins of the town of Paradise, which was entirely razed by the Camp Fire. He added that President Sauli Niinisto of the “forest nation” of Finland told him “they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.”...

(For a post about Swedish death cleaning, go here.)

Trump is getting mocked for using the word "rake," but I'm thinking it's not rake rake. (I'm deploying a Whoopi Goldberg style locution.) Everyone seems to be acting as though they don't know what Trump was talking about, and the image of lots of Finns with rakes out in the forest is silly. It made me think of "The Walrus and the Carpenter":

The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"
"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

If seven Finns with seven rakes raked the forest for half a year, do you suppose, the Trumpster said, that they could get it clear?



But if anyone is inclined to give Trump a sympathetic reading, consider that "raking" is simply a description of gathering underbrush together for removal, which might be done with some larger-scale equipment than the leaf rake that springs to mind. I googled for a few seconds and learned that there's something called a ratchet rake that attaches to a tractor.

Laughing at Trump and picturing Finns with rakes in the forest is a distraction from the real question of whether the Finns have anything to teach us about resisting and controlling forest fires. Trump said they're "raking and cleaning and doing things." What things? According to the Fortune article, what's working in Finland is "the country’s extensive forest road network—which helps firefighters move quickly and also slows down fires—and the fact that so much of the Finnish forest is privately owned. That means many small sections of the forest are cleared or thinned out, and therefore don’t easily let fires spread. Finland is also full of rivers, lakes and wetlands."

How are the small sections cleared or thinned out? Maybe it looks something like this.

ADDED: WaPo put up a piece titled "Trump suggests Californians can rake their forests to prevent wildfires. (He is wrong.)" Then it added this update:

Since this article originally published, some have suggested that Trump had in mind a more esoteric form of raking, such as perhaps an excavator rake; or a McLeod tool (a.k.a. a “fire rake”); or the 19th century European practice of removing organic topsoil known as “litter raking;" or — as a reader put it in a profanity-laced email to The Washington Post — “He didn’t mean literally raking with a rake, like some guy with a little rake from Home Depot, it’s a term meaning to clear underbrush and rotted forest floors with control burns which California does not do.”

The White House has not responded to a request for clarification on what Trump meant by “raking," so the above possibilities cannot be totally discounted.

However, it’s worth pointing out that when the president spoke of watching firemen rake beneath a little nut tree, he moved his hands back and forth as if he were miming a garden rake.

They love writing "He is wrong," but they hate saying "We were wrong."

"In much of the world, the concept of basic income retains appeal as a potential way to more justly spread the bounty of global capitalism while cushioning workers against the threat of robots and artificial intelligence taking their jobs."

"But the Finnish government’s decision to halt the experiment at the end of 2018 highlights a challenge to basic income’s very conception. Many people in Finland — and in other lands — chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work," the NYT reports. "The basic income trial, which started at the beginning of 2017 and will continue until the end of this year, has given monthly stipends of 560 euros ($685) to a random sample of 2,000 unemployed people aged 25 to 58. Recipients have been free to do as they wished — create start-ups, pursue alternate jobs, take classes — secure in the knowledge that the stipends would continue regardless."

“There is a problem with young people lacking secondary education, and reports of those guys not seeking work,” said Heikki Hiilamo, a professor of social policy at the University of Helsinki. “There is a fear that with basic income they would just stay at home and play computer games.”...

The Finnish government was keen to see what people would do under such circumstances. The data is expected to be released next year, giving academics a chance to analyze what has come of the experiment....

Norway will not give Finland a mountain for its birthday.

It's Finland's 100th birthday next year, and there has been a social media campaign to get Norway to give Finland the summit of Halti mountain, which is already partly in Finland, with the summit just 66 feet inside of Norway. It would hardly change the border at all to redraw the map to put the summit on the Finnish side.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Norwegian constitution bars giving up any territory and the Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg said no to the cute birthday idea.

I made a screen grab from Google maps:

In Finland, the mailman will mow your lawn.

You have to provide the lawnmower and pay a fee, but the mailman (or woman) is required to mow your lawn if that's what you want.

The postal workers themselves came up with the idea, according to Anu Punola, the director of Posti, Finland’s postal service. “We believe many customers will be happy to outsource lawn mowing when we make it convenient for them to do so”.... The mail carriers will do the job each Tuesday — a light day for mail in Finland, Posti says, with fewer ads and periodicals to deliver ....

I learned that while taking a pretty interesting test "10 Questions on Global Quirks" (in the NYT). The question was "For a fee, postal workers in Finland, in addition to delivering the mail, will...." I guessed "Let you read your neighbor’s magazines."

I only got 4 out of 10 right.

I was a little surprised to see this piece in the NYT. The perspective seems old fashioned and politically incorrect: The peoples of the the world are weird in ways that we can chuckle over.

"Hundreds of predominantly Iraqi migrants who have travelled through Europe to reach Finland are turning back..."

"... saying they don't want to stay in the sparsely-populated country on Europe's northern frontier because it's too cold and boring."

"You can tell the world I hate Finland. It's too cold, there's no tea, no restaurants, no bars, nobody on the streets, only cars," 22-year-old Muhammed told AFP....

Too cold, with the temperature only going up to about 50°, which is 10° colder than Iraq in the dead of winter, so the prospect of winter in Finland must be terrifying. The fear of a lack of crowds is harder to understand, but think about it. There are Americans who live in New York City who would be freaked out by Nebraska. Factor in the temperature change, and it's like moving an American man from Miami to North Dakota. He'd probably complain just like 22-year-old Muhammed.

Why a man in Finland was fined $58,000 for driving 64 mph in 50 mph zone.

Because he's a millionaire, and fines are calculated based on your wealth, so everyone is equally pained by the punishment and equally deterred.

Given the speed he was going, [Reima] Kuisla was assessed eight days. His fine was then calculated from his 2013 income, 6,559,742 euros, or more than $7 million at current exchange rates.

Someone committing a similar offense and earning about 50,000 euros a year, or $54,000, none of it capital gains, and with no young children, would get a fine of about 345 euros, or about $370. Someone earning 300,000 euros ($322,000), would have to pay about 1,480 euros ($1,590).

"I have yet to meet an American who doesn’t dread the awkward silence."

"A lull in any conversation is to be avoided at all costs—even if it means talking about the latest viral cat video or celebrity breakup. The Finns I’ve met, on the other hand, embrace the awkward silence. They understand that it’s a part of the natural rhythm of human interaction. Sure, Finns know how to have conversations, but they’re not driven by a compulsion to fill time and space with needless chatter."

From "5 Bad American Habits I Kicked in Finland." #1 is "I don’t fear awkward silences."

Finland issues stamps honoring an artist whose "sleek sado-masochistic drawings with abundant amounts of beefy male nudity" portrayed "a sensual life force and being proud of oneself."

The first quote in this post title is the way the NYT described the work of Touko Laaksonen, AKA Tom of Finland, and the second quote is from someone in Finland who chose the particular images for the stamps, who added: "There is never too much [sensual life force and being proud of oneself] in this northern country."

I'm showing more of the stamps than the NYT saw fit to print in its pages, though it did link here, where I got this:



The NYT just had a cropped image of the man on the left, in the center. The cropped image includes the emphatically glistening nipple. As for the image on the right, the NYT says it "depicts a mustachioed man staring out from below a pair of muscled naked buttocks." 

Staring out from below, indeed. "Why is that mustachioed man staring at us from behind a naked ass, Mommy?," I imagine a child asking, as she picks up the mail somewhere in Finland. Mommy says: "Why, darling, it's because we're living in a northern country, and our government cares very much about our life force and our pride in ourselves. Doesn't this make you feel alive and proud, sweetheart, in spite of having to live in Finland?"

I'm sorry. That's a very unrealistic scenario. No child would use the NYT-y phrase "mustachioed man staring out from below a pair of muscled naked buttocks." 1. "Mustachioed" is a silly word, particularly silly when — from what I've seen so far — every man Tom of Finland depicted has a mustache. 2. Are those buttocks particularly "muscled," or is the NYT just mindlessly crediting Tom with making his men even more attractive than he was obviously straining to make them? 3. The bodiless head isn't really in a "staring out from behind" relationship with the headless body. It's more of a surreal image in which the head takes the place of what would be a very large scrotum.

Those are my insights from the northern country of Wisconsin, where blogging random items early in the morning is enough to stir my sensual life force and make me proud of myself.

"Old Finnish People With Things on Their Heads."

Here.

Via Metafilter.

"The last ice age in the area of the modern-day Finland ended c. 9000 BC."

"Starting about that time, people migrated to the area of Finland from the Kunda and - possibly - Swiderian cultures, and they are believed to be ancestors of today's Finnish and Sami people in Finland."

The oldest confirmed evidence of the post-glacial human settlements in Finland are from the area of Ristola in Lahti and from Orimattila, from c. 8900 BC. Finland has been continuously inhabited at least since the end of the last ice age, up to date.

Finland is today's "History of" country.