Daily Loaf

Mood swings.

With a lot less going on at the office this week, I should be having plenty of time to blog away my heart's desire, but, alas, the lack of meaningful things to do has had me feeling less upbeat. I mean, what's life when I don't get to decipher phrases like "Now had removed the Diesel-engine from the Lombardini-engine." Or how about this: "We explained you in our E-mail that we sold one machine and direct after
putting tyhis machine in the field it was hot !!!!!!!!!." Wow! Our machines are sooo hot! Move over, Ferrari, our new silage feeder is the chick magnet du jour!

To add to my misery, today I've mostly been reading horrible, horrible, horrible crud on the web via Shame.org ("Hate tolerated is hate taught"), including the hilariously flawed statistics provided by the good people of the International Organization of Heterosexual Rights.

Just in time before I start my weekend, Blaine saves the day by informing me of an apparently divine new show on the telly, Queer Eye (for the Straight Guy). The concept is brilliant and simple enough - five gay men make over a straight lad - and the execution, I'm told, is worthy of the idea. The 'mos "act very much like superheroes"! How cool is that!

I know what I'm fishing from the nets this weekend!

Keystone Kops Play Stickball?

I'd managed to dodge the inevitable for long enough, but yesterday the flesh was weak and I bowed before peer pressure: I went to see my first game of Finnish-rules baseball at the Ronkaala Sports Centre Stadium. The name is a bombastic description almost worthy of Mohammad Saiid al-Sahaf (alive and well), as you can judge for yourselves if you check out the picture.

In retrospect it is a pity I'd evaded the game for so long. Far from being the tedious springtime staple of elementary school physical education, it was an absolutely energised spectacle of graceful athleticism, cunning tactics and athenian democracy. In short, it was absolutely brilliant!

Foreign readers might want to take a quick look at the differences between American and Finnish baseball at this stage, and the more advanced couch coaches would do well to revise their baseball lore, too.

As a consequence of the back boundary rule, there's much less emphasis on brute force, and more on skillful batting and agility. This in turn translates to players that don't have ugly 'roid guts and hams-for-arms like Mark McGwire (OK, so I did some searching and actually found a nice picture of him, but this is as good as it gets). I finally found out where all the cute young guys in Haapajärvi are.

I think a lot of the appeal came from the similarities I saw between this game and ballet, which is why I also understand why Maxim's (Cosmo for straight men) reporter didn't quite enjoy it. See for yourself:

• First Position.
  
• Third Position.
  
• Fifth Position.
  
• Arabesque and Grand Jeté.
  
• Gratuitous cuteness.
  

'Our' team lost, and by the last inning the main umpire was getting such a voracious vocal beating from the crowd that my ears must've been beet red. I ended up at the local watering with a couple of co-workers. It was karaoke night, but luckily Stargate SG-1 was on TV, so I excused myself after singing only one duet with the wife of one of the spare parts guys, The Beatles' Let It Be, and the theme from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg. I didn't have the courage to for It's raining men, though.

All Quiet on the Northern Front.

And that's because nothing much has happened. Tampere was as much fun as it was emotionally straining last weekend, a couple of friends almost broke up and another almost got dumped before his first date, but everything seems to be OK on both accounts now that a few days have passed. Also, I set up an IRC-Gallery account for my sister (14), and she thought I had coold pictures there. Since my profile shows I'm only on two channels (#gay.fi and #fingay), I also quite effectively came out of the closet to her - which I only hadn't done explicitly, the circumstantial evidence has been there for quite a while, and I'm constantly surprised at how very, very smart she's turning out.

I finally saw Bruce Almighty. Jim Carrey was a hoot, but then he almost always is. His kind of physical humour has always been one of my favourites. I was hooked on Danny Kaye movies when I was a kid. The Finnish Broadcasting Company, YLE, reran some flick of his some weeks back; had he been that obviously gay when I was a kid?

The weekend ended much too soon, but I'm enjoying the long drives up here more and more, they give me time to organise my thoughts. Matti realised Monday afternoon that his Summer RailPass was going to go sour if he didn't start using it right away, so he came over for a brief visit. An impromptu photo shoot on the way to Ylivieska resulted in a couple of nice pics, and I even managed to be there on time, but only because I trailed a tuned-up Opel Calibra, whose driver obviously believed speed limits are only suggestions after sunset.

Before Matti continued on to Oulu, we had time for plenty of wholesome countryside activities including a midnight swim at the reservoir, a grand tour of the factories, and gayspotting at Iso Kärkkäinen. The results: an elderly male couple shopping for orchids at the florist and two guys, one cute, the other dashingly handsome, having lunch at the same TexMex joint as Matti and I. You don't fool the good ol' 'dar by wearing socks with sandals, nay!