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10月13日 Department Day and Pigfest: A WeekendMuch fun was had this weekend, starting Friday with our quasi-annual work blowout, the Department Day.
The afternoon started, as is traditional, with a series of work-related presentations and discussions that I can't tell you about and would only bore you if I did anyway, so I'm going to do you a favour and just skip them. Special thanks go to The Taj and The Poh for making our table one of the greatest contributers to discussions, mainly of things that could not be repeated to anybody but were instead muttered under the breath, or written on a piece of paper after the pen was stolen from me, only to be scribbled out five seconds later for fear that someone might see. I can only assume that the things written there were portents and prophecies of some Lovecraftian doom and The Taj was protecting our sanity by destroying them and we should all thank him.
Sanity was in short supply by the time we finally called a halt to the talk and began with the feasting process, anyway.
The food was pretty nice, although by no means the best Cantina West can offer. When you go for buffet, though, I think you have to surrender high-quality for mid-quality in the name of high-quantity, and that was pretty much how it went. Burritos and burritoes later, I was completely stuffed and most people had moved on to coffee and cake. I wasn't interested in that so much, and had another fifteen chicken wings instead (not wrapped in a burrito). Coronas were also duly served, which was a very welcome treat in these troubled times. I believe various people at our table (our table was graced by Mr. Farenheit, Gerry and Heli, as well as the aforementioned Taj and Poh) also had themselves some wine.
The Taj had apparently given up on caring about his co-workers, something many might argue he had never started to do in the first place, but I remember quite clearly a number of times in the past when he would decide not to drink but still order his share from the bar staff so his table-mates could enjoy it. I don't think I'll get any argument, even from the man himself, if I say this is one of the only reasons you'd want The Taj at a table with you in the first place.
Gerry told us a lovely story following The Taj's insistence that the mood be brought down. I won't splash it around here, but a certain amount of love triangulation and stabbing was involved. I think the conclusion we reached was that stabbing was bad - although earlier on, while we were waiting for The Taj to actually arrive and contemplating how grumpy he was going to be after having been forced to work overtime at <confidential material edited>, it was pretty funny. The only thing that could have made it funnier would have been if Steve Irwin had been there to poke a stick at him and then pick him up and swing him around by the neck. Or try to.
I don't know what time it was, but it was probably around seven o'clock in the evening when the Tampere people began to get edgy and the old game of Where The Fuck Are We Going Next began. This is a game at which we excel due to long practice. Also, the drinks had dried up and not many people were interested in my lukewarm Minttu (I give and I give for these people), so we made our way to the Pullman Bar. The Tampere team wanted somewhere close to the railway station because most of them were going home at eight o'clock, so we did the best we could and actually found a bar inside the railway station.
We promptly moved in with a force of about thirty or forty people, and took over one corner for the glory of Lionbridge. Tuija W and the freshly-returned Sari T alarmed nearby patrons with their screaming as they let off steam, and this managed to clear a few more tables for us. It still wasn't enough to get all the 'bridgers in one place, though, so Tuomas, Heikki, Hanna, Verna, Juho, Taija and a bunch of others found themselves a niche in the opposite corner of the bar. Essentially, we dominated.
Here's a small part of our crowd, busy dominating. After a little while, the Tampere folks left (except for Mikko, who has lost none of his staying power) and this freed up a bit of space on the couches. The group on the other side of the bar did not come to join us, however, in spite of our invitations.
Drinking continued to ensue. Discussion varied from advanced hair care and drunken bus drivers to chicken fingers (chickens don't even have fingers, but somehow, after the enormous pile of burritos and chicken wings I'd had already eaten, the picture on the menu managed to tempt me) and - at least I seem to recall this being a topic - the bizarre Mormon-Catholic sex rules in that awful Twilight series. Although I think this might have been another one Gerry was telling us about at dinner. Yeah, that's right. I mean, not that Anne Rice's vampires were exactly mad butch hornbags always out on the pull or anything, but at least they weren't teenagers.
Everyone loves Mopho Cake, the newest addition to the Lionbridge Paparazzi Corps. Long story. Eventually, I wandered over to the other side of the bar to see for myself what the rest of the crew were doing. I asked them if they wanted to come over and join the rest of us, and they countered by asking if I wanted to join them, so we could compare conversation topics. I was unable to come up with a sufficient answer to this, and besides they were talking about God, so I decided to give it a shot. Once again discussion began to ramble, from my Dilemma of Faith anecdote into the far deeper waters of Bill and Ted philosophy (is not the moral of the New Testament, after all, be excellent to each other [and party on] ?), then back to my ilves-eating anecdote (those of you who expressed doubt as to whether the ilves lives in Estonia can stop worrying, it does ... although arguably the one I ate doesn't, not anymore), followed by Tuomas's assertion that the blue whale has one-ton testicles.
I'm not sure whether anyone really wanted to disagree with him on that, or if so why. But I suppose it must be true, even if it has nothing much to do with God (beyond the possible fact that He designed the blue whale, and must have been overcompensating for some really small-gonaded animal at the time). We continued to talk about any number of things, while Salmari and Minttu and various other drinks flowed freely. I remembered I'd left a cider over at my other seat, but it was a bad cider anyway and I didn't go back to get it for a while. Mr. Farenheit left to go - of all places - to a restaurant, where I hope he ate hearty. The Taj and The Poh left as well, but stayed a respectable amount of time. Gerry also left, having to drive at an ungodly hour of Saturday morning.
Sari came by to see if we wanted to join them on the other side of the bar, and then stayed when we invited her to join us. Conversation went on degenerating, although where it could go from piano-sized whale balls is a matter of some uncertainty. Conversation at the other camp had gone on to cars and cannabis, but the general feeling at our table was that sex and rock and roll were the major players in the Triforce of awesome. Also, Heikki K related a couple of anecdotes about his ... was it uncle? Grandfather? ... anyway, ask him about his shooting habits. And then ask Heikki about his umbrellas.
Eventually, most of the people in the other camp decided to leave, and Verna also decided it was time to go (but didn't know where), so we all stood up and milled around for a while. I went back for my cider, but a mouthful reminded me that it was bad cider so I left it where it was. Heikki and I decided nobody was going anywhere, so sat back down, and then everyone decided to go somewhere. We piled out of the door and down the stairs and out into the railway station.
What followed was one of the more surreal pub-crawls I've ever been on. We went through at least a couple of pubs - and I can't say I actually remember walking along any streets in between - without actually stopping to drink anything. In one pub I seem to recall seeing Tomi K, and in another we realised Antti Pa (The Pas?) had been left behind smoking on the pavement. By which I mean smoking a cigarette, not that he had burned up on re-entry or something. I ran back to bring him through just as the rest of the crowd vanished out the back door, and we were on the move again.
We finally fetched up at a bar where we found a table and chairs, and we had Baby Guinnii and I had another cider and a Tequila Motherfucker in honour of absent friends. Discussion continued, along with a certain amount of Man Boob Appreciation.
Tuomas may believe he can feel a lump. I'm just not going anywhere near this. Also pictured: Tequila Motherfucker. At this point I seem to recall it was Hanna, Heli, Tuomas, Mikko, Antti Pa ... who else? Wendy, in fact I'm pretty sure she outlasted the rest of us, on a technicality. I have it on good authority that the rest of them wandered back to her place in the wee small hours, and made the usual mess. I was sure there were one or two others. Must have been. Anyway, the usual crowd of Stayers, I would say. Tuomas got me another cider and this one was much nicer than the other one I'd left behind. I finally decided that missing the eight, nine and ten o'clock buses (and blaming these incidents on Tuomas, and why not?) was enough, and I should probably get the eleven o'clock bus if I wanted to be in any condition to play the pipes the next day. So I did, and I was.
After getting home and having a bit of a snooze, it was around midday and I was just about ready to face the world when Freddo came around with his electric guitar and amplifier. This, combined with bagpipes, is a great hangover cure. We practiced for all of about an hour and a half, then called it a day - until that night, when we would be performing before an audience of in-laws and their closest friends.
Yes, it was the other quasi-annual event of the season, the Palokas Family "Eat Something We Shot" Party, where wild boar on the spit was on the menu. It all went fine, since I wasn't hugely willing to drink excessively before we played and then afterwards it was just too late and I was feeling a sad thirty-something wreck. The food was nothing short of awesome. I was ready to eat again by this stage, and I wanted one of the boar's legs although they somehow evaded me. Very disappointing.
Games abounded, like the pig-themed quiz and the much-contested Pin the Tail on the Wild Boar game, and home-made booze also abounded. The lemon schnapps was a bit too fiery for me, so I substituted Minttu after a couple of glasses. Schnapps songs, of course, also abounded. But that's what you get for partying with Swedish Finns.
Janica, Bella, food and booze and pig-themed decorations. After a little while Freddo and I decided to get it over with, everyone piled outside and we went up onto the balcony to serenade the entire village - if not the entire Vantaa region - with a bagpipe-guitar duet of Amazing Grace and Scotland the Brave, which in my opinion sounded pretty good. It's been a long time since I played vs. a guitar, and by his own admission it was probably about as long since Freddo practiced at all. Although actually, since I last played in a pub around 1998 or 1999, maybe not. But still, it was grand. Next time, we're totally going to play Paranoid. We stayed until about midnight, maybe a bit earlier, then got a lift home with some kind fellow guests. It might have been fun to stay a bit longer, as conversation was once again drifting into interesting territory (Muslims and religion and - in the words of one gentleman - shooting everybody who believed in anything), but I'd had my fill of that from the night before so was happy enough to leave before it came to blows. I was also being slowly pushed into the role of Drinks Fetching Bitch (after one unsuccessful attempt to pour Minttu into a glass instead of wine, which resulted in Janica's uncle wearing a big splash of Minttu and probably wondering in the morning why he was all sticky), and it's always good to get out of that whenever you spot it. The rest of the weekend was fairly tame. Nothing much to report. In fact, thanks to the generally consistent use of lonkero and trace elements of beer, schnapps and Minttu, I wasn't even hungover on Sunday. Wasn't exactly up for cutting wodd, of course, but heck. Maybe today I will be. 9月22日 So, what, do people die in September?I was just going randomly through my blog archive, and saw that the lead article for September 2007 was Robert Jordan dying, and the lead article for 2006 was Steve Irwin dying. This September it was Keith Floyd and Patrick Swayze.
September was also classically the month when fresh waves of newbies, morons and trolls swept Usenet, back in the day. Not so much of the dying, but I can't credit it with mere coincidence.
A whole mess of people died in September 2001, as well, but I hesitate to mention it because it has such huge hype value - really, on a global disasters / conflict scale it wasn't that huge. It was definitely tragic and horrible, but it's wormed its way into an entirely unwarranted position in the mass psyche's World's Greatest Disasters list.
Speaking of tragic and horrible, I still can't believe Floyd died.
9月21日 Little BrotherHere's something that's been gnawing at me.
The U.S. (pop. ~300 million) has something like 60 times the population of Finland (pop. ~5 million). Now even considering that Americans don't pay anywhere near as much tax as Finns, and the fact that maybe the top 2 million or so of the U.S.'s richest either pay even less or don't pay any at all, that's a whole buttload of money.
Now, they're not spending it on upkeep, utilities, or standard of living, and they're sure as shit not spending it on health care. So where is all this money going? I mean, "into illegal imperialistic wars based on flat-out government lies" is too easy an answer, and "into the pockets of that top 2 million we were talking about a second ago" is even easier, so here's my theory.
The U.S. is the world's little brother.
Look at it. The U.S. tries to be one of the grown-ups - tries, in fact, to be the parent - but just like the little brother in the house, he can't even hope to pull it off and just ends up looking funny at best. He's belligerent and moody and irrational and gets in fights all the time, which his older siblings need to help him out of (ooh, in spite of the fact that he furiously refuses to let them) and for which his parents endlessly make excuses (but still find it embarrassing and quietly hope the neighbours aren't watching).
In fact, imagine the household's embarrassment if the neighbours did actually turn up one afternoon, with a carrot cake and a "welcome to the galaxy" basket. And the U.S. was in the front yard, having a tantrum because he'd broken one of his toy trucks and nobody would buy him a new one. But I digress.
The U.S., and big brother U.N., get their pocket money every month, and the U.S. immediately runs out and spends all of it on candy, leaving himself perpetually broke. Not only this, but he has taken advances on his next month's pocket money, and the month after that, and advances on his advances, and spent all of that money on candy as well. He wants to hang out with the U.N. and his friends, even though he claims not to like them and declares that they're all stuck-up stupid-heads. Because, like most little brothers, he has this mix of hero-worship and inadequacy that makes him resentful even while he helplessly shadows the big boys like a puppy dog.
The U.N. and his friends, who have put their money away or spent it on wiser things, can afford to do all sorts of stuff that the U.S. can't, and they don't really want him hanging around ... but of course he's the little brother, and family ties demand that the U.N. looks after him. So the U.N. and his mates let him hang around with them and pretend to be a big boy, and smile indulgently when he makes a loudmouthed, often-dangerous horse's arse of himself.
Because, even though he's a bit slow and never has any money to pay his share of the U.N.'s club membership, he's got candy. Shitloads and shitloads and shitloads of candy.
And that's why McDonald's, Hollywood, MTV and Coca-Cola is everywhere. And that's why we love it.
9月18日 Precious memoriesLo all these many and varied years ago, I was blessed to visit the sleepy little town of Southern Cross in Western Australia, as part of a Perth Highland Pipe Band performance at an agricultural show. In fact, I think I visited the place two or three times in my years with the band. Chucky Reports, right here on this very blog, detail some of the more memorable events.
Agricultural shows are the best, mainly because of the food but also because of the booze and other entertainment on offer. Camel races, ute-doughnutting, f*ck-off big bonfires and The Lamb Van.
If you couldn't buy it there, then it simply couldn't be made out of a piece of a sheep.
One of the downsides of agricultural shows is the audience - not because I dislike or feel I am superior to the average hick redneck Australian - on the contrary, they are very entertaining - but because they generally have better things to do than watch a bunch of bagpipers faffing about in the 40° heat. They're not exactly your fun-time crowd, like for example a pub crowd, who buy you drinks and make you feel glad you bothered. Marching through an agricultural show beer tent is always fun and we took the opportunity to do so on almost every country performance I remember, but then I also remember being able to thank our applauding audience by name on at least one occasion.
Another favourite was the Southern Cross Hotel, the bar of which was a mass of carvings and engravings made by drunk or madly artistic people of bygone days. They didn't actively encourage bar-carving (or 'barving', as I am now coining the phrase), but they obviously didn't mind it, and by the sheer amount of it you could tell the bar was more of a feature to them than an eyesore. When asked, the bar staff said we could go ahead, as long as we weren't too obvious about it and didn't write or draw anything too profane.
I improved the bar in my own way.
You may notice, as I believe I did at the time, that this is one of the few coherent things carved on the bar, let alone correctly-spelled.
This picture was taken by a Perth Highlander by the name of Monty, returning to the SXH some ten years down the line. He was evidently pleased to see that our legacy remained, and I'm pleased to receive a copy of it way the Hell up here in the soon-to-be frozen north.
Good times.
9月14日 Oh yeah...and I just remembered. My sister-in-law and her fella got engaged a couple of weeks back, and have moved to Porvoo together.
Shine on, you crazy diamonds.
And that's my anoppi in the background, polishing her Napoleon impression. EthicMorning all,
Well, it's been a while since I had a chance to write something here, and as usual now that I have a chance, there's nothing to add. It was a busy summer, with fun and larks aplenty but nothing worth making a blog entry about just yet. Maybe some Chucky Reports incoming, time permitting.
Enjoyed two weeks with my parents (once you get used to the fact that my dad only listens to the first four words of any answer you give in response to his questions, it all goes smoothly), two weeks with my sister and her family (entirely too active, but definitely fun and now I know where the nearest lake and water-park are for next summer), and my 10th e-nniversary* with Mrs. Hatboy.
And there was much rejoicing.
Had a few parties, really got our money's worth from the barbecue, and now the summer is winding down. Getting cold again in the mornings, et cetera.
Yeah. My CD burner died, so I went to Verkkokauppa (buy faster, buy wiser) to pick up a DVD burner. Since my backups are now spread across about eight CDs and erasing and re-burning them can take a whole afternoon, I thought it was time to get with the program. It started out really easily, I got the burner and set it up, installed it and everything. But of course the burn process failed. Contacted a few compu-savvy friends and established that they could get it to work but not (even on a Linux OS) without errors, so I took it back.
Verkkokauppa gave me a new burner, of exactly the same make and model. And what do you know, it had exactly the same problem as the last one.
I should take a pause here to explain that Verkkokauppa is not exactly on my way home from work. It's a round-trip on the Metro and a few blocks of walking out of my way in fact, and it's not something I have time to do every day.
So anyway, I took it back yet again and asked them to swap it for another label, maybe. They refused to do that, but they took the burner and assured me they would get it checked and see if there was a problem with it. Now, either there's a problem with the entire product line, or there's no problem except with my OS and the OS of my compu-savvy colleagues. And guess if Verkkoraiska are going to give me a trade-in if it turns out to be the latter.
Now I'm just waiting for them to get back to me and say "hey, there was no problem, you'll have to buy a new burner". Which I could have done almost a month ago. See if I ever buy anything from them again. In fact, I may just have to pick up a new DVD burner from somewhere else. Fuck those guys. Fuck those guys up their stupid arses.
I just don't know what's wrong with the world.
On the topic of ethics, I promised to share my "painted roadkill" shot, so here it is. I liked it so much, I made it into a Motivational. There's something very inspiring about this sort of carelessness. With years of diligent refusal to give a shit, Verkkokauppa could one day aspire to this level of greatness.
I have a new phone, and as soon as I get the MMS and interwebs working on it, that'll be great too.
Ah, it has been a summer of great renewal and change.
* Like an anniversary, but celebrating our first online meeting: August 27th, 1999. 8月3日 Barbecue 2: Revenge of the GrillenedThe great annual barbecue (we have now done it two years in a row, so it's practically a Lionbridge tradition) was almost shot in the head before it began. Warnings of unpleasant weather seemed to have been an understatement, and the idyllic summer sunshine of the Night of the Arts 2008 seemed a distant-arsed dream. Lightning, thunder and pelting rain abounded just an hour before we were due to turn up at Mustikkamaa, but the dauntless barbecue-goers of the Technical Writing department had no intention of flinching in the face of God's wrath, no sir! We had free shit to consume!
The pictures are presented in no particular chronological order.
Left to right: Mr. Farenheit; Free Shit; Antti P.
I received a lift to the site, together with Wendy and four bags of sausages, booze and chicken wings, by the graceful offer of Auri, who you would never guess was an ancient and terrible Trantex dinosaur resurrected using morally questionable scientific processes by Lionbridge R&D. I mean, to look at her. You'd be surprised. Anyway, she gave us a lift and proved an excellent addition to the Mustikkamaa barbecue posse for this and many other reasons. The ride out to "the Must" was epic, and more than a little hair-raising due to the fact that the window de-fogger was not operating very well and politeness denied me the opportunity to break into the beer carton during the journey in order to dull the edges of my terror. The second leg of the trip was a trek from the Korkeasaari carpark around the coast of the island. We picked up Anna along the way as we passed by the zoo bus stop, which was great because until her appearance, I was the only person who had been to the place before and was clearly expected to act as a navigator accordingly. Boy, they were way off.
Still, we found the place in the end, thanks to Anna's map and a whole lot of vaguely-hopeful comments like "it's a small island, by the time we go all the way around it we'll have to find the barbecues." We arrived to find that the weather, which had been mostly-invisible to us from inside the car, had improved dramatically in the past hour and was now merely grey, humid and soggy rather than thunderous and cats-and-dogsian.
We also arrived to find that nobody was there with their kid, nobody had prepared for our arrival by setting the fire and getting it lit, and nobody had opted to spend some precious hours of their remaining summer holiday time to meet and greet with the peons. I began to set out our first round of sausages on the apparently busted grill. Nobody was derisive and unhelpful with regards to my attempts to fix things, more or less as expected. There was a certain amount of tension when Auri accused me of putting a piece of wood into the fire "the wrong way around", but it was diplomatically defused by the clarification that she was talking about the sausages on the grill, not the wood at all. Thus mollified, I continued to try to cook on a grill tilted at an angle of 35°, thirty or forty centimetres away from the actual fire.
Discussion turned to who else was coming, and I was halfway through my description of Hanna's uncertainty and sleep-deprived lack of confidence in ever finding the place when, to my surprise, she appeared. Mr. Farenheit also turned up around this time, and barbecuing duly commenced. Mr. Farenheit opted not to reprise his role as the Steakinator this year, leaving it in my capable hands. He also remembered that the grill had been busted last year as well, and that we had pulled it aside and barbecued directly on the catching-tray. So we did that again this year. Nobody claimed to have told me exactly the same thing, which was just a stinking lie.
I wave farewell to my dignity. It must have been fairly late by this stage, because the ciders are finished and I'm onto beer. Also pictured: my briefcase, which gets an unfair amount of teasing on account of being from the 80s. Don't look now, arseholes, but a lot of our new Technical Writers were born in the 80s. Drinking also commenced. Nobody went for a jaunt around the beach with the kid, returning with a lump of seaweed on a rock as a conversation piece. It was suggested that the lump of seaweed on a rock could be our new global department manager. It was also generally agreed that Mr. Farenheit put it on his head and pose for photos, thus earning the rock with seaweed in an honoured place in the Mr. Farenheit Hall of Things I Put On My Head And Posed For Photos. The resemblance to a troll doll was initially quite clear, but faded with time. He also placed the rock under his chin as a hilarious beard. I don't know if he has a Hall for those.
Mr. Farenheit as a Leprechaun: unconvincing and possessed of strange odours.
Mr. Farenheit as a Troll Doll: like the Leprechaun, but also prone to biting. Time went by. The packets of sausages dwindled, the steaks were a mild disappointment, the weather continued relatively pleasant. Nobody left. People began to wonder whether or not Antti would actually turn up. Hanna had a momentary panic attack when she thought we meant a different Antti to the one we really did mean. Mr. Farenheit assured us that Antti was coming, but would be excessively late due to a combination of work and public transport factors that I for one found highly questionable. For a moment it seemed like Antti, too, would appear the moment we started talking about his presence, but it turned out to be a female jogger. And then an old man. And then another female jogger, and then a dog. The thing about Antti is, he's so easily mistaken for any number of other things that aren't Antti.
Finally, though, he did show up, with some cock-and-bull story about an engineer keeping him waiting for documentation information and then forgetting he was there, as if that ever happens to Technical Writers. He then compounded his folly by making up some astonishing fairy-tale about the train being late. We forgave him for his colourful imagination, opened more sausages and began round two of the barbecuing. Hanna graced the grill with her turkey-veggie weiners, which became quite the party piece later in the evening (in the most innocent of ways) but sadly we don't have photos of that. The chicken wings also came out, and proved to be a hit.
Auri provided bacon-wrapped mushrooms filled with blue cheese, which I assume were nice ("Yay, it's the smallest one," Mr. Farenheit was heard to remark when his share of the delicacies were deposited on his plate). The general consensus seemed to be that all the nicest stuff had been brought along out of the attendees' own wallets, which was harsh but fair. The mass quantities of sausage and free booze were, however, greatly valued, and Wendy went on the official record as stating, via her spokesman Mr. Farenheit, that the blacker the sausage, the better.
Wendy: unable to get enough sausage. On that note ... I think it was well before this point that Anna began to bombard us with her patented Anna-uendoes, combining them with bad puns because Janne Keskisaari wasn't present this year to carry the torch. But they grew steadily more blatant in their disregard of the Geneva Convention for Treatment of Language-Related Humour, and she was enthusiastically assisted in her crimes by a number of other people. This is what happens when Technical Writers go bad.
Time went on. Wendy left, instructing us to call her if we ended up in a bar. This seemed unlikely, but we promised, as we always do, to track her down somehow after she pulls one of her disappearing acts. Auri left too, generously upending her cornucopia of, uh, corn onto the barbecue and leaving it with us to enjoy. And we did.
I don't know. This is probably Auri. Possibly me and Farenheit in the foreground. There's nothing wrong with the camera. We really were this blurry by then. Time continued to pass. The carton was duly emptied, as were the bottles brought along by others. I was derelict in my duty this year, in that I neglected to bring Minttu along for the enjoyment of the few. I knocked the plastic forks on the ground an inordinate number of times before giving up on them amidst "fork"-based puns that simply do not bear repeating. Hanna finished her turkey-veg weiners and departed victorious. At some point around here, we were joined by a couple of people who were scouting out the area in preparation for a birthday celebration the following day. They failed to score any free food or beer from us, and we failed to score invitations to the birthday party. I think mainly they were worried that we were still going to be there the following afternoon. By that stage, we all looked pretty comfortable and the barbecue area looked pretty lived-in..
Mr. Farenheit also graced us with the Beer Can Arts, achieving the Full Hellboy for the first time in my own personal experience, and recorded by cameras for one of the first times in history.
The Heitmeister starts us off with the Unicorn, a simple classic.
The Full Hellboy. He thanked the academy for the faith it had placed in him, and put his success down to the increase in head-fat he had gained during his summer holiday, which greatly assisted in the creation of the required can-forehead vacuum.
 Then a spaceship descended on us out of the sky, with something really nasty mashed into its radiator. Or something.
In the end, Antti and Anna and Mr. Farenheit and I declared the night won, and packed our things. The fire was doused with a combination of water and Sprite Zero, which is like water with some bubbles and no more (or less) suited to dousing a fire than it is to drinking, and the leftover sodas were donated to Mr. Farenheit's Soda Saturday Foundation. Rumour has it that he soda'd, and soda'd good, on that particular Soda Saturday.
We walked for the metro station to find it had already performed its last run for the night, which makes sense given that nobody wants to go anywhere at eleven o'clock on Friday fucking night.
We're pleased, really, to have had our arses made sweet love to down by the fire, once again, by Helsinki public transport.
The workmen on the site instructed a dissatisfied Antti to "call someone who gives a shit": I'm not sure who he called but he seemed happy afterwards. After waiting for a while we decided that we should take the bus, which thanks to our dithering was just minutes from departure. Somewhere. We struck out for the bus stop, full of hope and accompanied by a skinny-arsed teenage kid who I was sure hadn't been at the Must. If he had, I would've given him one of my steaks.
By the time Antti, The Kid and I got to the bus station and realised the buses were all going in the wrong direction and we wanted to be on the other side of the freeway, the nearest crossing of which was several hundred kilometres away, we had already missed the bus into town. Anna and Mr. Farenheit had presumably already realised this, because they'd turned back and we had failed to hear their shouts as they did so. They were gone. Antti, The Kid and I returned to the other side of the Freeway, and after many weeks of agonised trudging found a strangely deserted bus stop with a taxi-van parked nearby.
The taxi driver was enjoying a cup of coffee and a chat with a friend when we stumbled up and asked him if he was booked. He asked us where we were headed, and when we said "Helsinki" he said, "what a coincidence, I'm going that way too."
The strange and surreal taxi ride got us as far as Sörnäinen before Antti got out to go and attend some sort of concert, and I realised this was as far out of my way as I wanted to go as well. I gave The Kid some money for the rest of the taxi trip into town, and that was where we parted ways. Antti handed me the huge bag of empty cans (he was going to throw them away, but I have this cunning way of getting money for them at supermarkets) and headed for his concert and I, having missed the bus yet again, got another taxi out of there.
On the way home, my taxi overtook the bus but I was too tired to hang my arse out the window at it.
The end.
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