Four is a Magic Number?

Franscud challenged me to The Fab 4 meme.

4 Films I Could Watch Over and Over:

Gone with the wind.

A Clockwork Orange

Romeo + Juliet by Baz Luhrmann. What can I say? I love Shakespeare and love pop culture.

Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola


4 Television Shows I Watch:

Um. I don’t know if I watch anything regularly nowadays. Some of these are no longer on TV and I watch them on DVDs and some of them are on, but as reruns.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Gilmore Girls

Ugly Betty (well, UB is current)

Little Britain


4 Places I've Lived:

Hmm. I’m kind of boring, because I’ve only lived in two places. (Well, if not counting my grandmothers summer house where I spent all my summers as a child. It’s located in a small town near Turku and by the sea.)

Turku in South Western Finland. Born and raised. It’s the oldest city in Finland, founded in the 13th century.

I’ll show you a (very non-official) video…




This is a grass-roots hip-hop video performed by the people on the streets of Turku. Video and music by Tatu Hiltunen, Tatu Metsätähti and Henrik Axlund.


Nowadays I live in Jyväskylä that’s located in the inlands. I came here to study and probably will be moving on once I’ve graduated my Masters.


4 Favorite Foods:

Raw salmon with baby potatoes

Grilled chicken with a special marinade my mother makes

Vegetable pizza with blue cheese or feta

Um, chocolate in all forms

4 Websites I Visit Every Day:

It varies. Right now:

Helsingin Sanomat

(from the website: ”Helsingin Sanomat is the biggest daily subscription-based newspaper in Scandinavia. It is also Finland's leading national paper, which is read by more than three-fourths of the residents of the Helsinki metropolitan area and by a quarter of all Finns.”)

I’m a subscriber and read my paper at home, but news travels fast so I gaze online news headlines as well.

Youtube (Well, almost every day. I don’t post videos, just watch them and get annoyed by the idiots commenting.)



I check certain blog directories, blog catalog and mybloglog, but not on a daily basis.

And I check my email several times a day. That counts, doesn’t it.

Oh yeah, and Roiworld rocks. Never too old to play dressup.


4 Places I Would Love To Be Right Now:

Because I have a cold, nothing would be quite that fun right now.

I could try moving to the couch to rest, but that would require effort and I’m not much for effort today.


4 Favorite Colors:

Anything that goes with my complexion. Pastel colours, red, blue. Black, although it’s not an actual colour.

4 Names That I Love but Would/Could Not Use For My Children:

Sylvester (the Cat)

Nasse (impossible to translate)

Putte (Finnish for Porky the Pig. It’s a common endearing nickname.)

Björn (it means bear in Swedish and is a common name amongst the Swedish speaking Finns)

I wanted to tag people that I though would be open to answering a meme. Here's my list:

Bobobimbo
Morinn
Lou
RobSellen

Survival of the fittest

How often misused words generate misleading thoughts.
Herbert Spencer

Should have listened to your own advice, Herbert.

Song of the day is from a movie soundtrack. La Cité des Enfants Perdus (The City of Lost Children) is a movie in which dreams of children are stolen. Goes together well with Social Darwinism, don't you think.

Fair Trade Porn - A simple yet not at all fool-proof checklist

If you’re lazy, and only want to read the checklist, then scroll.

Hi hipster! So you like porn, do you? Well, here’s a little checklist for you, buddy - just to ensure you’re enjoying pornographic material that’s a little less exploiting. Let’s do our best to make sure the women, and men participating in films and posing in pictures, are at least exploited mostly on camera, and not off camera.

Seriously speaking, this is something I wish the media would pay more attention to: the fairness of porn and the problems that arise in production. I’m certainly no connoisseur. I have no affiliation with the porn industry. Being a woman also cuts me out the major demographic audience. Still, I want to say my bit.

I’d like to start-off by clearing out some misconceptions you might have about the people in the porn industry. They are not all inherently bad, rotten apples. The women in porn are not bad women. They are not dirty, slutty by heart, or daughters brought up all wrong. They’re not asking for it. They’re not asking for a double penetration and a cum shot. For the most part, the motivating factor for these girls is poverty. The majority of porn actors and actresses come from poor countries or areas in Eastern Europe, Asia or South-America. The US has a large enough porn industry - what’s wrong with it, you ask? If they’re using domestic porn actresses or actors? Well, most of the porn actors and actresses in the US have lower class backgrounds. These girls and boys have limited options in life. They’re not going to be the next Rhodes scholar, no matter how hard they try. The porn industry, as unpleasant as it might be, can seem like a better option then working three minimum wage jobs and still not paying the rent.

Drugs, another big motivating factor. Many girls and boys in the porn industry do drugs, and simply are addicts. It’s easy to imagine how this cycle runs. You start of doing porn to get money for drugs and very soon, if you’re making any money at all, you’re even more addicted. Also the general attitudes towards porn actresses probably doesn’t help with ones self image, and you’ll have even more reasons for substance abuse.

I began writing this text with a clear objective in mind. I was going to give simple advice on how to avoid the worst of the worst, most exploiting porn. The task turned about to be more difficult then I had anticipated. For who is it then, who can act in porn, for the porn to be still considered somewhat fair trade? No one? I thought about this for a while and then came to some kind of a solution. There’s never going to be one hundred percent ethical porn. At least not in a society where porn actors and actresses are frowned upon. However, this does not mean we should give up.

So finally, here are some guidelines:

1.Think, what do you know about the production company? If there’s no background info to be found, then chances are there’s something wrong. Try to stick to companies you trust. Sometimes production offices that have women in leading positions are fairer, sometimes not. Write to them and ask questions. If no one bothers to answer, draw your conclusions.

2. From which country are the actors or models from? Yes, I know, it’s hard to tell sometimes, but try. Decide not to look at porn of which’s origin you don’t know enough about - especially if the actors look and sound East European, Asian et cetera. And yes I know, it’s a hard task trying to figure out who’s East European and who’s not. Yet, it’s not an indifferent issue, so try.

3. What kind of activities are featured? Double anal penetration and other similarly extreme stunts mean that the actress is in serious pain. Rigorous anal penetration, which is considered quite mainstream in porn, can also cause harm to the actress or actor later on in life. If you’re a conscious porn user, you don’t want to support such films. If you’re a sexual sadist, faked torture films, where no one gets hurt, should suffice.

These are the three basic rules for fair-trade porn, defined by me. It’s about minimizing pain and harm to others and having a social conscience.

Now, shall we move on. For some fine-tuning:

- I’m hesitant about saying this, but it might be better to buy products of established porn actresses such as Jenna Jameson. Yes, they’ve probably been exploited in the past and by becoming icons, beautified by silicone, botox and lipo, they contribute to a problematic cultural representation of women. Yet, better buy Nikes than sweatshop sneakers whose brand says nothing at all to you. At least we know Jenna Jameson makes good money and calls the shots.

- Then, slightly contradictingly: you might consider if you wish to support films and material you see detrimental to how women (or men) are culturally represented. For example why look at material where the women or men are verbally insulted and degraded? Why support extensive plastic surgeries?

- Last, but not least. Why watch unrealistic, anatomically incorrect porn? Women don’t cum while giving head. Also, most women don’t orgasm during plain vaginal intercourse.

That’s all, folks. Be responsible. Drive safe.

Quote and song of the day

Sacred cows make the tastiest hamburger.
Abbie Hoffman




I'm going to a reggae club later on. I spent my afternoon pretending to be a hippie, and the hypocrite I am, I'm enjoying a chicken and cheddar burger now. Peace.

Ping, ping, ping!

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Harry Potter and the Second World War - Spoilers ahead!

I finished reading the new Harry Potter just this morning. I had sat outside reading all yesterday evening and finally grew so tired, that I decided to say good night to the book, while the sun was starting to come up. I had only fifty pages left. Harry had just tapped into Snape’s memories and knew he faced death. Should have stopped reading then.

From that point on, it was all downhill. There are no surprises ahead. Casualties are few. Only the demise of our dear old Riddlemaker awaits, who naturally had it coming a long way. And Harry, dear Chosen boy Harry, of course cannot die. Martyrs survive. For the Greater Good.

Oh well, actually, now I lied. There is one surprise in store: Guess what boys and girls, dear Lord Voldemort is dum as a rock! Needn’t be afraid anymore. He is portrayed as this classic psychopath: he’s incapable of loving, and from that somehow follows stupidity. There is nothing outside power and fear for him. Fear becomes his Achilles heel, for Harry does not fear, but embraces death as the only means to save the world he so loves.

The epilogue, the epilogue. Oh God, how I despise the epilogue. Harry has gotten married, with Ginny no less. Teen romances do last. Aww, how sweet. Not. Hermione has become a mother, is married to Ron and apparently has achieved nothing else in life worth mentioning.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t hate the book. But somehow the feeling that fills me now, when I have just laid the book down, is: how could a woman conjure up a story so sexist? I hoped Rowling would have reacted to the critique thrown: of not casting women in strong roles. I hoped she would have finally taken up the task of writing some interesting females in the storyline. At least the three Peverell brothers could have been three sisters instead. Somehow she has managed to take the female encrypted world of witchcraft and spun it around, so it becomes a man’s world. World of the Fifties, or maybe even further down the line: turn of the century.

But lets move on to happier things, nazis that is. What did I like about the book? It’s very eurocentered. Gellert Grildelwald is of course somewhat of a nazi, literally speaking, and Dumbledore is a no long the pure lamb he was once portrayed as. He has, in his days, been interested in something dark: the idea of a wizarding world that bowed to no muggle, appealed to him also. This is by far the best teaching in the book. It was not only the Germans who were seduced by the ideas of racial hygiene and eugenics, that lead to the mass murder known as the Holocaust. It was whole of Europe. A known historian has suggested that if he were to pinpoint a place where these ideas would have gained ground in the 1930s, it wouldn’t have been Germany, but France. In actuality, Jewish people have been prosecuted for a very long course of European history. There should be a shared collective guilt in being seduced by dark ideologies. No one person is purely evil or purely good.

The allure of the books seems somewhat seedy to me. The HP books have prospered and sold millions around the world, because they depict something that it’s by now lost to us forever, but what we earn for, all the same. The ways of the European aristocracy. Harry Potter has something in common with brands like Louis Vuitton and Burberry. Except for one thing: at least on some level the Potter books tell us to go against the old order, defy ancient blood lines and hierarchy. Burberry and Vuitton wish us only to engage in the dream.

Now, for the reasons explained above, you can see why I have a problem with the new shadow puppet of a Voldemort. He doesn’t seem to live up to the teachings of the story. Of course one could argue that by dissecting his soul to bits and pieces, he has gradually self-destructed. But Dumbledore warns Harry about You-Know-Whos mind working still racer sharp as ever. So on a metalevel, in the end Voldemort’s problem becomes lack of a soul. For all the evil he has committed there could be mercy found in remorse. Even old Grindelwald might have had some regret over his actions and doesn’t let Voldemort in on the Elder-wand. But Voldemort is incapable of repentance, without a soul he is less of a human, dehumanised. What does this all mean? I’m not sure I like the idea of a dehumanised evil. For it is ideology and structural violence, that constitute evil in my books.

All was well - and status quo.

Hail!