They're stopping Law & Order!

NBC has canceled Law & Order. Ouch!

The trash: why I'll skip the picnic

I'm going to skip the traditional Ullanlinnanmäki picnic.

May 1st is the Labour Day and also a major student festival in Finland. For about 25 years, I've had the tradition that in the morning, I put on my student hat (if I ever took it off after midnight when its permissible wearing season starts) and head for Kaivopuisto park in southern Helsinki for a picnic. For a long time, it's been a family tradition for us and a few of our friends: we pushed baby carriages up the hill, tried to find a suitable spot, spread out an eloquently prepared breakfast, and enjoyed it with about 30 000 other picnic breakfasters.

But not any more. I don't like to leave trash out in nature, or in public parks. All these years, we have always collected any garbage that our breakfast produces and taken it with us - with the exception of the champagne bottle caps, because once you pop that off, it flies up and hits someone else's head. We've in turn collected the caps that hit our heads. But it seems that many if not most people in Ullanlinnanmäki simply leave their trash on the spot, and it looks horrible. There are literally tons of waste in the park.

Call me old or middle-aged or lame or anything, but I don't want to participate in this promiscuous littering of food wrappers, cans, bottles, everything. There are also a lot of drunken people, although everyone is in a good mood so it's not really inconvenient at all. So, the rush of people may be a factor, but mainly I'm irritated by the littering, and I no longer want to participate in the event at all, because even if I'm taking my own garbage away and even helping a little with what the others leave behind, I'm an accomplice in an event that is becoming outrageous.

We'll maybe take a picnic in the park of Aurora Karamzin's manor in Träskända, instead. It has a fine lawn and ancient oak-trees; it used to be the countryside hideout of the richest woman in Russian empire, but now it is the suburban area where we live, and people who go about here for a picnic are not leaving trash. They take it with them. Like we do.

Task list for Pope

A proposal for the programme of the papal visit in Britain, September 2010, as devised by the superbly diplomatic staff at the British Foreign Office:

• Open an abortion clinic


• Bless a gay marriage


• Launch a Benedict-branded condom range


• Sing a song with the Queen for charity


• Apologise for the Spanish Armada

It all makes perfect sense, except for the part about Spanish Armada. I should think the Foreign Office ought to know that Papa Ratzi was born German, not Spanish. Why did they not come up with any Führer jokes, just to fine-tune their diplomatic feat to perfection?

How would I know the Nazis?

In Russia, a lady who was preparing posters for the Victory Day accidentally used pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers instead of the Red Army. A number of people were exceedingly offended.

Her defence was: "We are young and we didn't see the war. We don't know what Fascist soldiers looked like".

Indeed. For the people squeezed between Germany and Russia, it was equally hard - already at the time - to tell much difference between the national and international formats of socialism.

Reindeerspotting - efficient message about drugs

The Finnish Supreme Administrative Court has upheld a decision of the State Film Board and decided that the Reindeerspotting - Escape from Santaland movie will be banned from minors - one needs to be 18 to get to see the film in a theatre. The film is a documentary about the life of drug addicts in northern Finland, and supposedly (I haven't seen it) sends a strong message against drugs.

Clever marketing! What better way could there be to ensure that all teenagers want to see it than forbidding it? Perhaps it really makes people think seriously if using drugs is a good idea.

The film also has a page in IMDB.

Science and secret data

The Times reports that Queen's University in Belfast will need to hand over data to so-called climate sceptics due to the British Freedom of Information Act.

Unlike Douglas Keenan, who was requesting the data, I don't suppose this data is really valuable for reconstructing temperatures in history. What amazes me is that the researchers in the university want to hide the data. Why? Do they think that sitting on the data would achieve anything good? The only outcome of this refusal to hand over the data is more conviction of the climate sceptics that the anthropogenic global warming theory is a hoax, based on secrecy, monopoly of information and possibly forged data.

Scientific method is about openness of how the research was done. The climate research is in serious trouble if it does not understand the basics. Its credibility among the general public, particularly in Britain, suffered already terribly in the so-called Climategate. That should have taught a lesson.

Gay Heads and Helsinki KKK

CNN carries a story about a wind farm which is planned in the Nantucket Sound in Massachusetts, a sea view enjoyed by many rich and famous people - for instance, the Kennedies at their place at Martha's Vineyard. The project has been going through red tape for about ten years, and the battle goes on.

It is fairly natural to have differences of opinion about whether a wind farm is a good thing on a seashore, and at this location in particular. What I find unnatural is that they have a thing called Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head. What on Earth is that?

The fact that I find this name funny - I don't know what it is but the name is funny - is probably because of similar reasons to the fact that many Americans were severely annoyed by the old abbreviation and Internet domain name of Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, or Helsingin Kauppakorkeakoulu ( http://hkkk.fi ), believing it is a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan and prompting them to send hate mail.

So, what's a Tribe of Gay Head?