Slap in the face

Normally I don't pay a lot of attention to hockey, but ouch.

The Christmas Goat

I know Christmas is over but I had a Finnish Christmas song I used to hear ad nauseum stuck in my head so I Googled the Finnish word for Santa...and learned this fun fact.  One downer about being part of a community with almost no representation in the United States (or the world, really) is that you don't have opportunities to absorb facts like this at a tender age where you would still have sufficient wonder and imagination to be unfazed by the idea of a Christmas Goat.


Joulupukki is a Finnish Christmas figure. The name Joulupukki literally means Yule Goat. 


Wikipedia: Joulupukki

More camels

This time in India, and less likely to be dinner. The captions mention a mustache contest but sadly there don't seem to be any pictures from that event.

Christan Science Monitor: India's Pushkar Camel Fair

Calling it like it is

When Finland became the first country in the world to declare broadband internet access to be a universal right, a lot of tech blogs oohed and ahhed at their enlightenment. The Economist, on the other hand, was the only source I saw that stated the obvious motivations for this declaration.

"Finland undoubtedly has fewer problems than America. But would you want to live there? It's nothing like as exciting or diverse as America, and it's wretchedly cold and dark in the winter.

No disrespect to the Finns, who were all extremely nice to me the only time I visited the place, but one reason why they have such outstanding levels of broadband penetration is that there is not much else to do during a Finnish winter except sit indoors and surf the net."

Lexington's Notebook: Finland is the best place on Earth

Maximum City by Suketu Mehta

One of Suketu Mehta's themes is that the physical infrastructure of Mumbau is so awful and overcrowded that only immaterial attractions could persuade people to live there. Maximum City is crowded, but not unpleasantly so, with people who embody some of the forces that give Mumbai its character- the leader and the footsoldiers of a Hindu nationalist movement, a dazzling and tragic dancer, her cross-dressing colleague, and a teenage poet, among others. Some of the people Mehta interviewed seemed eerily familiar, and in a few cases it was with good reason. First there was a whole chapter about the police chief who is portrayed in the movie "Black Friday"; during which I learned that Indian censors will bleep obscenities (I couldn't understand the dialog and there were no captions so I assume that's what was happening), but have no problem with showing beatings of such ferocity that the subject's fingernails fall off. Then in the chapter "Black-collared Workers", I began to notice a lot of similarities between the gangsters Suketu Mehta interviewed and the characters in Vikram Chandra's "Sacred Games". Then I see this sentence: "I am with my friend Vikram, who is writing a novel about the underworld and who has asked to come along." Synergies! There were things I found mildly irritating about this book about Mumbai- when he uses four letter words I could just imagine his face from the book jacked smirking slightly as if to say "Look what I did there!"- but on the whole it was sufficiently gripping that I started arriving places early just because then I'd have time to read it while I was waiting.

How to make anything unsexy: just add chart

While reading about a study comparing male:female ratios to female receptiveness to sex outside committment (you heard right),which country did I notice with the highest level of loose women? Hint: not Latvia. So proud.

Marginal Revolution: A Theory for Why Latvian Women are Beautiful