Onward!!

I enjoy a good beer. Specifically, I appreciate good ale. To hear about the death of Michael Jackson, the foremost beer critic and aficionado the world has had came as a shock. One could say that it was because of Jackson that beer style became to be appreciated, and that the real ale and traditional pub culture lives on in Britain. At least Jackson can be credited for continuing to inspire the Campaign for Real Ale, as well as the writers of a great Finnish book on London Pub culture that I got as a present before leaving for London. In that sense, I have Michael Jackson to thank for my continued, and developing, enjoyment of good beer.

Hopefully someone as dedicated as the Beer Hunter will continue the work, and write about beer without moralising and patronising, which I feel is a problem with CAMRA criticism.

Where I work we get around two truckloads of stuff in every day. It arrives on pallets and in cages to our warehouse, where it is split according to department. Some things are shelved, but others are dragged upstairs and put on display and sale. Then customers, like ants at a stockpile, carry out what they think they want and need. The enormous pile of stuff dwindles, only to be replaced the next day by an equal-size pile.

It disgusts me. I can’t even begin to grasp the physical amount of the matter around me when I walk among it in our warehouse. To think that those mattresses will be taken home to some poor student’s place, and that those frames will go on someone’s wall amazes me – who needs all of it? How can we get rid of so much junk every day? Where does it all go? Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so they’ve all been dredged up from some resource stockpile somewhere, gathered up and made into things in order to replace similar things already in existence. Then those old things get thrown away to clog landfills.

And we’re not even a big department store. Our two truckloads are nothing. That disgusts me even more.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute has advised people in Helsinki to remain indoors because of a large thunderstorm. Right now it’s rumbling overhead. As you can see from the photo, at 10:30 this morning, the sky was dark and gloomy like the sun never rose. It’s not so bad over here on the eastern edge of town, but apparently downtown the rain is really heavy. Radio transmissions have been cut for a while, and lightning has hit warning sirens, causing them to go off. It’s pretty awesome.

Cliche, I know, but “beginning of the end” describes what I feel quite well. I’ve got three weeks before London eats me up again, and this weather is sort of symbolic – a last-minute flood of sights, sounds, smells, emotions and familiarity.

Image from Helsingin Sanomat, but only because I couldn’t get a decent exposure on my pocket camera.

When your first thoughts after looking up at the starlit, early autumn night sky and seeing the Big Dipper are “Holy shit, it’s been a while,” you know you’ve seen enough light pollution for a while. Similarly, when the next thought is “oh wow, it looks exactly like it does in textbooks,” you realize the extent of the alienation of Western (Northern) society from the natural environment.

We left some stuff in London over the summer. One thing we can’t pick up from friends when we come back is the computer, an iMac G5. I got a phone call just after I fell asleep that my friend’s place had been burgled, and all computers in the house had been taken.

Apparently, the robbers were unscrupulous. They had emptied two IKEA bags full of another friend’s stuff and carried the computers out in them. This had all gone down in the middle of the day, in plain sight.

With no insurance policies to cover what happened, all that is left to do is to buy a new computer. I have a feeling it will be another Mac, this time the new 2007 model. The old one was due for a replacement in the near future, but this time we won’t be able to get anything for selling it. We’ll see. This whole thing is a budget-wrecker, though.