Rememberment

Ari and his fiancée, Satu, had moved in together to live in a small apartment right in the town centre. Their place was above the only video rental shop in town, along the route from my school to the bus station. One day I was leaving school and decided to pay them a surprise visit. Ari had told us that they had gotten a pet parrot and I was curious to see it. After climbing the steep and narrow staircase that led to their home, I knocked on the door and was let in by Satu, who was alone at home. The parrot was big and green and its former owner didn't want to keep it any more because of all the noise it made. Satu and I chatted about it for a while, but then she had to leave to run some errands. I asked if it was okay for me to stay with the parrot for a little longer. "Sure, just make sure that the door gets locked when you leave." The birdcage was hanging from the ceiling above one end of their sofa, so I lay down and tried to teach the parrot some words. It seemed to ...

Here are some of my favourite songs adhering to the theme, in the order of their time of release. Please enjoy the music, and have a blessed week ❤️ 1. AC/DC - Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be (1977) During the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s, religious groups pointed to the song's title as proof that AC/DC was leading youth straight to the devil. But just like in their even more famous song " Highway to Hell ", the actual lyrics have little to do with theology: " Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be " is about a man who is in love with a woman who treats him terribly. 2. Pet Shop Boys - It's a Sin (1987) Much more to the point, Neil Tennant wrote the lyrics for this song about his time at St. Cuthbert's High School for Catholic boys. When the single became a hit, said school apparently warned its students that anyone found with a copy of " It's a Sin " would be suspended. It's a song about religious pressure and guilt, and remain...

Elementary school was over, and so was the summer. It was time to join the Big League - secondary school. My parents weren't very happy with my grades from my recent school years; my average had dropped by one full point. It still wasn't terrible, but they had higher expectations. "You need to do better in order to get to the upper secondary school" said Mom, who seemed to take it for granted that that's where I was heading. She wanted me to become a doctor or enter some other prestigious profession. But I had started to not only become more depressed, I also had frequent periods of being angry and frustrated at just about everything. I didn't give two shits about my grades or what my parents wanted me to become. Also, our new school didn't make it any better; it looked more like a prison than a school, and felt like one too. I also hated the school cafeteria (the whole concept of having a hundred people sitting and eating right next to each other is somet...

Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French mathematician, proposed a famous thought experiment in 1814 which has since been called "Laplace's demon". It goes like this: if a super-intelligent entity knew the exact position and momentum of every particle in the universe, it could use the laws of physics to both calculate the past and predict the future with absolute certainty. (There's a brilliant show on Disney+ called Devs, which explores this concept. Go watch it if you haven't already.) If such an entity could even theoretically exist, it would throw a massive wrench into the works of many philosophical and religious concepts. If everything has been predetermined since the beginning of time, our cherished free will doesn't really exist, but is merely a construct of our minds. Everything we do, say and think is just an effect of a prior cause, and every decision we believe we make has already been made for us. We just don't feel like it has. Except for us office wor...

Matti's dad Eikka was a short, obese man with thick black eyebrows. His arms were massive from spending a lifetime doing hard manual labour and his strength was the stuff of legends; his party trick was to wrap some strong, braided fishing line around his hands and snap it without any effort. There was also a story that he was once challenged to an arm-wrestling match, and as his opponent was using his leg to support himself, Eikka slammed his arm into the table with such force that the other guy's ankle was broken. A house painter by profession, he was also an avid hunter and fisher. He also kept bees; sometimes when I called Matti to ask if it's ok for me to come over, he warned me that there would be an "air hazard" - that the bees were angry because his dad had just collected their honey. And often I walked there anyway, and sometimes did get stung by a bee or two because of that choice. Eikka was a familiar sight to us. Sometimes he stopped by just to make a ...

Like so many others, I found poker during the great poker boom of the early 2000s. Poker shows (such as the World Poker Tour ) started to become popular, and I was quickly hooked by the combination of skills that it takes to be a successful player. And it is, indeed, a game of skill. While randomness certainly plays a part - often infuriatingly so - it's only important in the short term. The more you play, the more apparent this becomes; if you put your money in as a 60-40 favourite, you may lose 10 times in a row. But if you make that play 100,000 times, you're almost certainly going to show a profit. But while maths is important, it isn't the aspect that I find most fascinating. Sure, you certainly need to acquire some understanding of the maths involved (such as how odds work or what an M-ratio means in a tournament) but that's all just mechanical. To me, the real beauty of the game comes from the fact that it's largely about telling stories . First of all, as th...

I spent some of my most memorable summers at my aunt's countryside home. Often there was a whole bunch of kids; Jari and Juha (my cousins, who used to break my toys at Christmas), Jukka (with whom I had the long road trip), Ilkka and Tiina (cousins of Jari and Juha from their dad's side) and sometimes even Jani, Marko and Mika, my older cousins from Sweden. The summer of '88 was a fun one. Elementary school was over for me, so when my aunt and her husband left us alone for a weekend, my cousins decided it was time to celebrate the occasion in the most Finnish way possible. There was an old junk car in the woods nearby, and my craftly cousins had prepared a bucket full of prison wine in its trunk. And so we went upstairs into their room, put on some Samantha Fox tunes and started to party. I didn't need much to get a nice buzz going (imagine that - I was a scrawny little 12-year old after all) so when my mom suddenly called to check on me, Jari's face turned pale. I ...