rafael pyton

My cousin Jennifer married her prince in May. It was a superbly romantic old-fashioned church wedding with all the accouterments one could wish for. And I snapped millions of pics, most of which are perfectly pearly. In my twisted mind, however, I wanted to show you the one that got away from me - or shall we say my camera. But maybe there were darker forces at play? Be what may, the image is glorious! And hilarious!

Towards prosperity and beyond, Jejja & Mattias! And I do hope you can find it in your hopefully humorous hearts to forgive me for publishing this picture - sadly, the devil guides me from time to time.

Oh, must NOT forget to mention this: at the wedding party I was the one who caught the bride’s garter… UH-OH!

These are two of my favorite material possessions of the moment, the impossibly roomy 160GB iPod Classic, and the unnaturally competent Nokia N95 8GB. Together, they cost me all of… 0 euros.

Madli, whom I romantically refer to as my denominator, gave me the king of iPods for my birthday of May. What can I say? She must like me a little.
Bear with me here, because I am about to unveil some serious stats. Now, 160GB means about 40.000 songs. That roughly translates to 4000 albums. Say you pay at least 10 bucks for a CD, and what do you get? You end up with 50.000 euros [at least is included in the equation] worth of music.

Fifty thousand euros!

You’d do well to murder me for this thing. In fact, I would, was I me. And I am, which might become a little tricky. But as long as alive, I am carrying - yes, I will mention this acutely mindboggling figure again - fifty thousand euros in my pocket when I move around and about town!

Yes, as you can hear, I am actually one of the very few who can fill up the biggest, most humongous iPod to be sold today, solely with mp3. Oh, bragging is such a wonderful sport, when you’re licensed to do it.

Ok, ok. So it is not completely full with music; I also fitted it with the entire James Bond series from Dr No to Casino Royale…

Moving on to the black thing from space, or what the jealous Swedes refer to as rubber boot, the Nokia supremo. I chose model, Sealed Air footed the bill. And bear with me once again, because I will unleash more magnificent stats. Or maybe I won’t. No, I guess I won’t. You see, was I to list the muscle of the N95 8GB, you’d still be reading at 64, if I playfully assume you are 34 today.

Instead, I can summarize, and effectively so. You will be happy to learn that it does… everything. Hey, there is a button in there somewhere that if pressed, the phone makes coffee for you. I think. Better make mine a tea, no sugar. Afterwards, I will travel in time with it. Always did want to eat cake with Marie Antoinette.

This here honky vision of super-succulent white flesh is my good friend Kalle from Kotka, kippis with kokis. We go back, back beyond too far for our own good, back to autumn in Karis, where we wasted a year getting ready for the prime time. But as Frank would say, that was a good year.

We soon discovered that our intellectual beans were ground in machines in heaven. In other words, Kalle was someone to talk to. I catch myself remembering that he kept poems and great platitudes in a little black booklet, which he would break out now and then - and not just to impress girls. This is a sure-fire sign of greatness. If you have a friend who does so, hang on.

I did. And together we plotted to rule the world [it's a hobby]. University in London was our platform, and we packed our bags. Somehow, we ended up in different schools, and it could’ve been a case of that’s that. But along the later line I learned the hard way about the accommodation market in central London - it’s pretty crowded. Kalle was the first one I called, and that’s how I ended up sleeping three weeks on a cold and creaky Ealing floor, where every single morning the landlord would walk past my head into the office which was in the next room. Well, it’s a long - but really rather interesting - story.

For another forum; to do history no service at all, we linked respective kismet and wowed to be friends forever.

Eventually, we got our fantastic degrees and set sail for CEOness. Damned if I didn’t think I was going to replace J. Ollila in five years. Sadly, both Kalle and I were cold-shouldered by the ignorant realities of the Finnish labour situation. It seemed as though no one appreciated a man fluent in Foucault. Brutes. They wouldn’t know Wittgenstein if he so bit them in their asses.

Messieurs Master Of The Universe resorted to desperate measures. When you aim at the right hand of Kofi Annan, and end up in fucking Kirkkonummi as a financial consultant, it ain’t sweet. Kalle, bless him, worked as a teacher. Although the rich supply of horny teenage girls in cigarette pants was more than nice, he certainly had greater ambitions.

While I languished in the swamps of bad luck and unfortunate circumstance, Kalle caught a break like a swallow catches a fly. Better yet, he didn’t spit it out like I did, he swallowed it, put his head down, and worked his way up the ladder of the auditing industry.

Now, where you may think auditing is not terribly cocaine, Kalle lives in Lausanne and drives a V12 Benz. He goes by the title of director. His numbers make or break factories. In fact, he is responsible for making manufacturers move to China. And he makes 200K a year. How’s that for exciting?

Kalle is a star, and I’m proud to call him my friend.

And do you know what? He still wears that challenging Jimi Hendrix-like purple leather jacket he picked up at the flea market in Karis in that tender year of 1996!

What we have here is my sizable Skoda Octavia. I won’t lie - it didn’t thrill me to learn that my company car was going to be a Skoda. Then I picked it up at the airport early June. It had twin exhaust pipes. Oh, a turbodiesel, I muttered to myself, how exciting. Yes, I was being sarcastic.
Then I stopped caring, and pulled away. Eventually, something did not feel entirely right. It felt like I was moving at a rather brisk pace? Surely not?

This was no diesel. It was a TSI. Suddenly, I was paying attention!

TSI is Volkswagen’s best engine, turbocharged and supercharged. It is frugal, yet fast. When I least expected it, I had 160 pferdestärke underneath the bonnet - been galloping ever since. As company cars go, you could do a lot worse. Besides, it is really really black, and has aux in for my iPod 160GB…

On a related topic, you can see I was not telling tales and spinning yarns when I said that the garage was also painted. Twice. Hey, I wear the paint brush like a glove, and it’s hard to slow down when you get up to speed.
Speaking of speed, it would be criminal to neglect the red thing you see peekaboo kutchy koo. I’m still very much in hot lust with my Porsche 944. It may be 23 years old and barely quicker than that Czechian car, but it has so much character and Gordon Gekko style that I wish I could drive it to work instead, always along the long road. Well, when I’m finished with the Skoda, I know what brand I want for my next company car… clue: it ends with ORSCHE.

I had waited half a year for this - but on some other mysteriously spiritual level it felt as though I had waited a lifetime. Friday night was the day Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band came to town. Did I ever sing along, did I ever!

Before I tell you more, this is what I proclaimed afterwards: “My life is thus complete.”

It’s one of those lines you use when you’re drunk on endorphin, feeling feverish from rock and buzzing from the happening, reeling from the dealing, hovering and heaving, dreaming, dreaming, of. Of.
So it was pretty good, in other words. In fact, the event was too precious to experience alone, which is why I dragged along my reference, Madli.

The Boss gave it his ALL for more than three hours straight, and had us eating out of his hand the whole time. I have never seen a longer concert. Other bands can be loud for no more than two hours. But then again the Boss is called the Boss for a reason. We got our money’s worth, and a mountain of gold to boot, at the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki. Even the post-concert parking ticket waiting neatly stashed beneath the windscreen wiper of my car seemed like a damn good deal to me.

All praise and utter adoration, eh? Yes, mostly. But when you have waited a lifetime for something, you sort of build up no mean expectations, the worst kind of greed; it knows no bounds. And when all was said and done, I wanted God but got angels.

I wanted, I wanted. When the E Street Band cranked out No Surrender, and Bruce bellowed out that line, that big line, “well, we busted out of class, had to get away from those fools“, I wanted to feel the feel to end all feel. I wanted every strand of hair on my body to take off from their follicles, I wanted my heart on gasoline fire, I wanted inside vision and outside body.
I did not happen. It was just really really great. But when you for nearly ever have imagined that No Surrender was code for your own life, that it was written for you and no one else, then you suddenly feel a little empty, was that it? Well, it was.

So be it. And let it be. Because Friday night still went down into my bank of memory as the highest of carat. At times I could barely believe it was the Boss down there, the real Boss, not some sort of clever 3-D illusion of song and dance. I had to bite my knuckles in between throwing them up in the air.

Union cards, sawmills, refineries. Thunder roads, dirty streets, sad hometowns. And a big ol’ Buick. Broken down and beat, but still breathing hard through all that dust. It is ugly, yet beautiful, but why? Precisely, I think, because of the painful poignancy of reality; that’s what makes tramps like me hop into the suicide machine and drive all night towards the dream, always the dream, always away… and always to.

What happened? In qualifying, Heikki kicked ass like ass was a leathershaped inflated oval ball. Add Kimi on third, and everything was set for the Finnish Championship Series come Sunday at the second to last-ever Silverstone.
But when it rains. When it rains, it pours, and princes turn to frogs.

Reluctantly, very reluctantly, I must hand it to that guy Anthony Hamilton - or whoever it is that drives the other McLaren. He was so good it was disgusting. When everyone else was having fun making grass or gravel angels, Hamilton kept clocking his card in timely fashion, going for - and easily earning - the golden plaque of Employee Of The Month.
Yet, Kimi drove him down, all the way down, and they pitted like lovers do, but then Ferrari forgot to change those round rubber things… which I can only compare to turning up at work and noticing you forgot to wear clothes. Oh, sure, they thought it would stop raining… stop raining, in England? Come on, Ferrari. Watch the race on TV next time - the airwaves were full with “rain in five minutes“. If not, then at least fire your weather man. Juha Föhr, is it?

This changes nothing, of course. Last Sunday, there was only one good driver on the course, and it was black Jesus. Everyone else was a bag of crap. But among all those bags of crap, Felipe Massa stunk the worst. I have never ever seen anyone spin so much in a race before! He was rotating more than accelerating, and that is some merry-go-around-round! Wooee! Tivoli! Or carnival, as they say in Brazil…

Speaking of Brazil, Barrichello put on a pretty nice show. To me, sofa-set and screaming out advice, it was agonizingly über-obvious extreme wets were the way to go. When you can go ten seconds - in a Honda, no less! - faster than anyone else, it takes only three laps to gain the time you lose pitting. But until one of the F1 teams hire me as the All-Seeing Oracle, all my advice will be lost in space, and the reign of the blind hen will continue.

But when the spray had… oh, England, remember… when the spray still hung heavily in the air, points were added - or substracted, depending on your mood - three drivers stood atop the tree. The Ham, Kimi, and Massa. They may not weigh much, but this is one branch that will break - and what a treat it will be to see two of them fall.

My prediction? Well, it’s not so much of a prediction, you know; Kimi will be the one to yell “TIMBER!”

Summer means rock. Not that winter does not mean rock, but in the summer you can rock outdoors, too. But you might insist that rock is a state of mind, not a seasonal flirtation. And you’d be right. Even though it still feels better to rock in the summer. Which brings me back to where I started. Haha! You read all that for naught.

Madli is taking a shower. I like that sentence. I like sentences that I can watch. In any case, that’s also why I’m blogging - I have nothing else to do and a window of about thirty minutes to do nothing else. But she might be quicker, so I better get to the point…

We’re in Tallinn, getting ready to go see Franz Ferdinand. Add air guitar and tam-ta-da-da-da sounds. It’s summer, and Franz Ferdinand rocks. Ah, finally, one single sentence to make the others obsolete. So be it. And in high time; there she is, stepping from the shower, all… wet and dripping, I was going to say. But I didn’t.

Ok. Slinging my air guitar over my shoulder. We’re off into the white night.