Dec. 30 - Cheez

Found this recipe in the fridge, delicious.....needed:

• Halloumi (Cypriotic cheese)
• Pineapple chunks
• Cashew nuts
• Pine tree pits
• Some lemon juice

Cut the cheese in 1cm thick slices and fry on both sides in own fat. Throw in the pineapple chunks halfway. Simultaneously, fry the cashew nuts and pinetree pits. Put together, shower in lemon juice, open bottle of merlot, enjoy.

Dec. 29 - Plans

2006 knocking on my door. What are my plans for the new year? Here's a shortlist:

• Spend more quality time with Kela, Robin and Dani
• Keep growing in my work, it's fun
• More rock and roll, shake off the "tight fit"......indefinately
• No more politics
• Learn more about Finland
• Move more, lose the excess
• Prepare for a BIG event in 2007, it's about time...
• Remain / be more creative

Let's see in a year from now, how I did.

Dec. 26 - Let it snow!

2005 gave us another white Christmas, and as "Let it snow, let it snow" played repeatedly on the radio, sung by almost every artist or group of them, known to man, the snows here in Paipis kept on falling. It does give that extra little touch to it and in that respect we are spoiled a bit each year here up north. Christmas this year is great and I hope it will be just as nice next year when we will celebrate it with the family in Holland.

The best moments of Christmas this year to me were Robin shining with excitement when Santa finally knocked on our windows, Dani's eyes growing wider when he opened his first present to find a "fuug-pannnnn", an airplane, in his little-man-swedish accent, and Robin, deciding he wants to celebrate new year with us instead of with his father. Also the stress in Mikaela - a usual thing when we need to arrange a party, let alone Christmas - has its good side: She made a fabulous dinner and a gorgeous Christmas table for everyone to sit at. Add to that the excellent choice Christmas presents and I conclude she is one hell of a lady.

Dec. 22 - Toward Christmas

We all know Santa is from Finland. I caught him yesterday, doing his final shopping before he's off to all the children (big and small) around the globe.

This year christmas eve is being held at our place, which is a first ever for me. In the Netherlands I never celebrated the eve-before. Christmas day is the big think there. But here in Finland all the gifts, wine and good food starts an evening earlier. So, as you can imagine, stress levels will be rising the coming hours as is usual in my small family of 4 + cat & dog. Thankfully the tree is standing and all the shopping has been done, both for food and gifts. Tasks remaining: Making the food, cleaning the house and getting myself an outfit that's Christmas-worthy: I'm on that this afternoon.

BTW: Did you know that Christmas is celebrated on the 25th because it's the day when the sun is lowest on the horizon in the northern hemisphere? This event was called Yule by te Germanic tribes. The Romans, fresh from kicking some Germanic ass while conquering them, thought this to be kind of "wicked" and decided to throw a party because of it. They started it actually each year on December 17 to honour their God Saturn (the god of agriculture) and called it Saturnalia. During their week-long bash...ending on Yule (they sure knew how to party) they exchanged gifts and, nice guys as they were, they temporarily released their slaves. I wonder who got the drinks and made the food for them. Christianity developed and at some point dring the 4th century AD, the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. To keep everyone happy, they decided to throw Christmas on the 25th of December and mark it by giving gifts....along with worship, wine, food etc. I guess a soul was easy to win in those days.

Ok, we skip 17 centuries and are back in -15 degree 21st century Finland, that is still waiting for some snow. At least a bit more than the 3mm we have now. I suppose 17 centuries did not change Christmas all that much: We still attach Christmas to a tree dressed up for a party, free our slaves erh....workers temporarily and make sure everyone gets a gift, good food and drinks!

Dec. 16 - Regulating the Internet

BusinessWeek, an online magazine that I read regulary, reports on some worrysome developments regarding the Internet providers vulturing for more cash. The idea is, that those site owners who pay more get more bandwidth and those who don't are slowed down or even blocked. It threatens the whole idea of the Internet as a source of free information and a place for nurturing entreprenurial business people with a great idea. For example, I am a regular user of Skype, the free internet telephony service that is currently taking the world by storm. I started using it because it was clearly superior to MSN Messenger, not only in sound quality but also speed. In the world that the AOLs, XS4alls, Elisa's, Verizons etc. dream of, a small company like Skype with a great idea and great technology would stand no chance against Goliaths Microsoft, Yahoo! or what have you. New ideas will be blocked and everyone will eventually be stuck with what the big boys think the rest of us should eat. Eventually, the Internet will become as boring as TV is nowadays. Also what the providers seem to miss is the incredible influence the Internet and its growth has had and will have on the world economy. So, I say: Back off and keep the Internet free, totally free.

Dec. 14 - Where's the snow?

One of the goodies of living in Finland is the long winter. OK, most Finns will now conclude I am a total nut but, being used to the lame wet and windy Dutch winters I say Finnish winter really is a treat. What's not to like about arctic temperatures and stunning white landscapes? It always feels like a new beginning to me when I wake up to see the world changed from dark muddy to icy white. Usually here in southern Finland the first snows that fall to stay show up at the end of November. However, this year they're already two weeks late. With Christmas approaching fast, the uncomfortable feeling surfaces that this might just be the first one that's not white. Another thing that's awesome is the "revontuli" also called northern lights or aurora borealis: A free, green-yellow light show that usually only is visible during the dark nights of winter. Surprisingly we had one of these shows during a September party night in our garden.

When I came to Finland during the summer of 2000, the reason being love, love, love, all you need is...(guessed the song?) Finns usually warned me about the winter. I found out that the cold really is not such a big deal. With the temperature occasionally dropping to -30, sometimes -35 this seems like a bold statement coming from a guy with a bald head. It does make sense to wear a hat during those temperatures, hair or no hair. I've found that the thing to cope with though is the darkness. This month the sun rises at around 9:30 and sets a little over 15:00. Bearing in mind that it doesn't get very high and that there can be clouds, it never really becomes very light. Hell, if you live a couple of hundred kilometers north then you won't see the sun at all for a month or two. What do you do? Likely it's one of the reasons why (a) the Finnish software industry is regarded highly in the rest of the world and (b) Finns seem to have a chronic problem with alcohol consumption. Personally I can't say it has affected me, my family is doping a good job at keeping me too occupied to drink my ass off or to start living behind a computer....erhh...well, neither have become an addiction....at least.

So where's the snow? With the temperature close to zero and the barometric pressure dropping steeply over the past few hours, who knows what the - fantastic - view out of the bedroomwindow has in store for me tomorrow morning!

Dec. 8 - The Fridge on Fortuyn

The Dutch secret service AIVD just made one of its biggest blunders in its history. It is fairly obvious it leaked false information about the late Pim Fortuyn, killed under rather weird ciscumstances a few days before he was destined to become the new Dutch prime minister by a "guerilla animal rights activist" who - according to an "independent" commission - was acting alone. It now is at least questionable how correct the outcome of the commissions' research really is.

According to the state-secret information, that - listen to this - was left by an employee of the agency in his lease car when sold, (ghehehe...what a joke) on - and now it comes - an unencryped 1.4" floppy disk, Fortuyn had regular sex with underage Moroccan boys. This information was "accidentally" released (the AIVD calls it "lost") surprisingly not very long before the next elections are to be held in the Netherlands.

The information, got into the hands of Peter R. de Vries, a runner up in the coming Dutch elections, who the AIVD now threatens with a 15 year jail sentence. Something stinks, and this time it's not me. This reeks after a slaunder operation coming from the sick mind of someone not all too er..."gifted" when it comes to plain thinking.

Dec. 4 - Music website

I was informed a few days ago that my internet provider increased the space of our website from 30 to a whopping 500 megabytes at no extra cost. Not that I was doing a lot with the website lately, I find the system too work/time intensive to do the updates. This Blogger however, seems to work nicely.

One of my passions in life is music and, although some people do not qualify it as music, I really like techno music, among many other types of music. In a distant past - when raves were still illegal...and fun - I used to organize underground (sometimes literally) techno parties with the Mononom sound system in the Netherlands and many other places in Europe, regularly working behind the bar as well as the decks. After a long techno-free period I found its still in the blood, got the gear and returned to playing, albeit nowadays at home, drug-free, just music. Since the extra space on the website came in handy for this, I decided to host the first mix I made after 6 years of not touching a record, it came out not too bad I think. You can find it here.

Dec. 2 - Confronting the evidence

Last week I received a DVD called "Confronting the evidence". It's an interesting documentary that covers a conference held in the USA with the aim of reopening the 9/11 investigation. It claims that the attacks were part of a bigger plot to ensure United States' supremacy as a super power for many years to come. A super power needs a big army, strong economy and resources. Having a big part of control over those resources, say oil, would make being a super power a whole lot easier. Most of the worlds oil however is controlled by governments that are not all that friendly towards the USA but blatantly starting a war in order to remove those governments does not carry the support of most of the people living in the USA. If however, you bring in a number of passenger jets that strike down the symbol of US capitalism as well as a wing of the pentagon that (conveniently or not) is being renovated, you're bound to get a lot of support for a war. So, you attack Afganistan, not too hard a target for the mighty USA, which rationalizes the need for a higher defense budget (more weapons) for the American public. Then you go after the one you're really after: Iraq (read: Oil). No other country wanted a war with Iraq so what you do is you link its leader to the 9/11 attacks and brainwash the American public by saying he's got much more weapons that could do even worse things. The effect: A big majority of the Americans is for the war and you go to war, regardless of what the international community says. People often forget that at the time a new currency called the euro was breaking every record in strength compared to the dollar and oil selling countries were seriously considering to stop selling oil in dollars. This would have big consequences for the value of the dollar and the American economy.

Enfin, we find none of the weapons, we find none of the supposed links to the accused terrorist organization but we call it victory anyway (the new Iraqi government is pro-USA) and start dealing with our next problem: Iran (they got shitloads of oil too). How to make them look really dangerous? Well, how bout if we tell everyone they are after getting the bomb?

All of this could be partially true, fully true or fully bullshit. You have to admit it is interesting though... The thing that struck me most about the DVD was: How on earth could those planes ever reach the towers? If an airplane normally changes it's course (certainly a passenger plane) without notification then traffic controllers start asking questions within minutes. If they don't get an answer within minutes after that they alert the airforce who send in intercepting jets for a visual contact of what is going on. The passenger jets that we are talking about were hours away from their targets when they changed course toward New York and Washington. Hmmmm makes you think why not a single F16 was sent off to take a look. Then comes the really amazing observation: After the first tower was hit it took a fairly long time before the second plane struck. With no reaction from the airforce. Then the airforce even let a plane go toward washinton DC. Hmmmm..... BTW.: Why did the highjackers choose the Pentagon over the White House or the Capitol?

The commision that investigated the 9/11 events gives very little explanation for many issues and with such a disastrous, world-changing event, you might want to consider reopening the investigation.

Dec. 2 - Start

Mark the day, December 2, 2005, with 29 days to go this year, BigBoringFridge goes live. What you will find in the Fridge? Rotten apples, the light, food for thought, cheesy stuff and sometimes one hell of a smell, the stuff you find in any fridge really....