Descending from Heaven

A bungee jumper coming down in Kaivopuisto. Suomenlinna sea fortress is in the background.

Bungeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

During the past summers there has been a bungee jump site in Kaivopuisto. This year you jump towards the Baltic Sea from 110 meters.

I’ve done this once in Queenstown, New Zealand and only because I was in the home of commercial bungee jumping. Now I know what a free fall fells like but a second time wouldn’t be worth the money. There were all sorts of combos of different activities but I think I my “awesome twosome” was one of the most extreme as before my jump I went to a dentist.

There were really bad shadows in most of the photos so I decided to take a photo where the shadows are not a problem.

Ruokolahden leijona (The Lion of Ruokolahti)

Remember you saw it first here – a photo of the Lion of Ruokolahti (Ruokolahden leijona) published for the very first time.

During summer 1992 Finland was talking about the sighting of a lion at Ruokolahti in Eastern Finland near the Russian border. Naturally there are no lions in Finland so the explanation was that it had escaped from a Russian circus. Except that there were no reports of missing lions. Well, it took a long time for the Soviets to report about Chernobyl and lions are a minor nuisance compared to blown up nuclear reactors.

In July nothing happens in Finland when people are having their vacations but news organizations still have to publish news. And if something even slightly interesting has happened or might have happened, it will get a lot of coverage. The Lion of Ruokolahti has became a term for such news.

Surprisingly the lion was never found. It was also a bit surprising to read now that there are some credible people who think that there actually was a lion. Some of the theories were also pretty wild: the lion returned to Russia where the locals, suffering from the collapse of the Soviet Union, ate it.

Musiikkitalo Construction Site, July 2009

At the moment it seems that this is going to be a bit boring serie but let’s see….click here to see photos of the construction site from other months.

Sleepyhead’s Day

Were you the last person in your family to wake-up today (27th July)? If so, others can call you a sleepyhead (unikeko) till the next year’s sleepyhead’s day.

Finns have been making fun of the sleepiest person since medieval times. In the city of Naantali they throw their sleepyhead to the sea at 7am while (s)he is still in the bed. The sleepyhead is always someone notable, for example in 2002 the husband of the Finnish president got the wet wake-up.

The tradition is based on an Seven Sleepers’ Day when seven martyrs of Ephesus from about 200 AD were being remembered.

Jaakko and the Cold Stone

This year Jaakko’s cold stone was cooled using organic methods i.e. a wet towel. Everybody knows that if you are on a beach and put a wet towel over you, you will soon be feeling cold.

See the alarm clock that is always 12 o’clock. Their water temperature meter was also fixed at -49 degrees Celsius.

Read my yesterday’s entry about Jaakko throwing a cold stone that cools down the waters if you are lost what this is about.

Jaakko Threw the Cold Stone Again!

Today the Unscientific Society of Finland threw a cold stone to Cholera Basin and the stone will eventually cool down the whole Baltic Sea. According to an old Finnish belief on 25th July Jaakko will throw a cold stone to a lake and as a result our lakes start to get colder and colder every day.

This year the traditional stone was from Switzerland and it was cooled down organically. The society admitted that their actions have caused problems with a Swiss (CERN?) particle accelerator: When you pick a stone it will be replaced with a black hole. And black holes will attract all kinds of objects towards them.

I know that next year Jaakko won’t be able to ruin the swimming season on the shores of Baltic Sea anymore as I captured his soul with my camera. On the other hand, we could throw more cold stones to our oceans to stop the global warming!

See another photo of Jaakko and the stone in my other entry.

Veni, Vidi, Vic (20)

I was so excited to see a Commodore VIC-20 after many many years that I forgot to check why it was put on a window and whose window this actually is…

Back in the 1980’s VIC-20 was my very first computer. And for many others like the Finnish creator of Linux operating system Linus Torvalds. VIC-20 used a regular tv as its monitor and the display size was about 20×20 characters. It had 1 MHz processor and 5 KB RAM memory. Software was loaded from cartridges or C cassettes using a tape drive that you can see behind the VIC.

In Finland VIC-20 was very visibly advertised using Julius Caesar’s Veni, Vidi, Vic (I came, I saw, I conquered). Unfortunately our VIC-20 was sold. Probably for a very small sum.

A few years after VIC-20 came its successor Commodore 64 that really brought computers to homes on a larger scale thanks to its gaming capabilities and large (pirated) game library.

Going to Stockholm

They are about to board a ferry that will go to Stockholm. Since they are going to such a suspicious place, I can only show their silhouette.

EDIT 23-Jul-09: This entry was scheduled earlier this week and was in no way “inspired” by the ferry accident that happened today in Stockholm.

Rewriting Finnish Mythology

Hold on Aino, we are going to save you!

You can see her better in my earlier entry that also describes what is happening in the one of the best-known Finnish paintings. The poster was gone for a long time but now it was put back probably because the Kalevala exhibition will soon end at Ateneum.