I had an “Aha!” moment the other day when I was reading the Word of the day where brilliant folks at Merriam-Webster daily deliver an explanation of one delicious English word after another. Reading that one particular explanation literally made me stare into the distance for the next fifteen minutes. Everything around me came to a standstill. It was exceptional in that it helped me uncover part of a riddle that had me puzzled for a long time.

For quite some time now I have been scratching my head about the origin of the word joulupukki, the Finnish word for Father Christmas. The literal meaning of the word is rather straightforward, albeit rather peculiar. Joulupukki is a compound word consisting words joulu (Christmas) and pukki (goat). Christmas goat? But why Christmas goat?

As Wikipedia these days provides an answer to almost any question, they had that covered too. The article explains the origin of goat (pukki) in the word joulupukki by referring to a “tradition of men dressed in goat’s clothes called nuuttipukki [who] used to go around from house to house after Christmas eating leftover food.” I have also checked the Finnish etymological dictionary which traces the origin of word pukki to bock, Swedish for billy goat.

Although Father Christmas is incomparably more popular, the nuuttipukki tradition is supposedly still alive in the Finnish regions of Satakunta and Pohjanmaa, according to another Wikipedia entry. Never mind that nuuttipukki does the opposite of what joulupukki does: kids today dress up and go singing from house to house hoping to receive candy and pocket money in exchange. A Halloween of sorts, only two months later.

Back to Merriam-Webster and their Word of the day that started it all. Folks at Merriam-Webster reveal that an English adjective puckish originates in medieval England from word puke (also pouke) meaning a nasty hobgoblin, an evil spirit, a demon. However, both puke and pouke are related to the Old Norse word puki, meaning devil. Since Finnish did loan words from Old Norse, I wouldn’t be surprised if Old Norse puki was Finnishized into pukki and  Christmas goat afterall isn’t really a Christmas goat, but rather a Christmas goblin, elf, sprite, fairy, puck, demon, or imp. Something that the makers of Rare Exports Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 understood very well.

Mladen

Not that I am looking for an excuse for not writing anything within the last few weeks, but I might just as well point a finger at something. It was the moving that kept me away from writing, or even thinking about writing. I don’t know how often you read this blog, but for all those who lost track, this has been my third move this year. So I hope you understand.

At this point it’s not only difficult to keep track of personal belongings, but I have to pause for a moment every single time when asked for my address. If I happen to recall the street, then I’m not sure whether the building is 3 and the flat 19, or is it the other way around. Not that important after all, although it adds dreamlike experience to everyday life. And it’s not just the address and belongings, also the surroundings become elusive. Every street and lane is familiar and strange at the same time. I’d be turning left instead of going straight, just to notice that the turn would have made sense three cities ago, but makes absolutely no sense here and now. A couple of weeks ago I set off to work on my bicycle just to cycle right by own front door quarter of an hour later with a mouth wide open. I’m sure I had made a ridiculously beautiful circle and confused the snoops, but I also discovered a space wormhole in my neighborhood and was late for work.

Absentminded? Maybe. But I have to admit it’s been great fun too. With the exception of yet again displacing what seemed like an endless stream of boxes and all that other stuff. Every move makes me scratch my head thinking if I need any of these items at all. By far most creative response to all this moving came from a friend of mine who asked if I only carry two backpacks with me after all these too frequent relocations. His remark was spot-on, as Britons like to say, and if I were smart enough, I’d shake it all off and stop carrying and caring. Of course, this wasn’t the first occasion leaving appendages behind crossed my mind. These kind of thoughts keep my cranium surprisingly busy every time I need to carry excessive amounts of things from place A to third floor place B. More than once I wanted to forget this or that box–as long as it didn’t contain any books.

Speaking of books, I could blame them for my long absence too. It’s so much easier to curl up in bed with a good book than it is to sit by computer trying to come up with something anyone would want to read. Especially when other writers have so much more captivating things to say.

Whenever moving I am always amazed how many books I rediscover, which makes for even scarcer and weaker attempts to write. Obviously I buy more than I can read, or even remember what all I would have wanted to read. Of course, when bought, most books are optimistically placed onto the pile next to the bed. At some point the pile grows too large and every so often I move the books to the shelves where they are all to easily overlooked and forgotten. But whenever I’ve been packing and unpacking boxes I unavoidably rediscover all these gems. First I have a hard time placing the books straight into the boxes as I’d so much more like to sit right there and then and read the book, any book (I believe you’d want to do anything else but pack too). And the same struggle recurs during the unpacking. It’s terrific and terrifying at the same time.

Even though you might think I’m kooky, I must admit that I love doing this. It’s like shopping for [place your favorite item here]. I find it very much resembles browsing in a great bookstore. Great majority of these books I have carefully selected and am sure that at least at some point I had a very good reason for getting every single one. This shopping-like instant gratification is particularly reinforced if I have completely forgotten about owning a certain volume. So when I hold it in my hands the desire to know what the covers hold immediately comes back.

And that’s what happens when I am at home; it’s nothing in comparison to how ape I go when in a good bookstore. Unless you’re a book nut, I encourage you not to come along. It doesn’t really take a Powell’s in Portland to tickle my book nerve for hours (size doesn’t matter, variety does); Akateeminen bookstore in Helsinki does the job just as well. And just as women usually park their male counterparts in a sports bar before they head out shopping, I park my missus in the shopping district and head out to a good bookstore. It would work perfectly, if only shopping wouldn’t exhaust her so quickly.

And what could be a better place than Finland for a book lover. I was stupefied when I read in Nick Hornby’s fantastic column that “forty percent of Britons and 43 percent of Americans never read any books at all, of any kind.” As if it wasn’t difficult enough to imagine that half of the population of these two countries never read a single book, the reading there seems to be in decline. So it’s not a slightest surprise I spilled hot tea all over myself when I read that Marcel Proust recently made a comeback by making the top ten list of the best selling foreign authors in Finland. And these sales figures were not just coinciding with Proust’s blockbuster hitting the big screens in Finland; Proust was among the best selling foreign authors for three consecutive months, even reaching the sixth place in the April 2007.

As I trust you knew already, the reason behind Proust’s success was not really Brad Pitt giving voice to the famous French writer, which could result in a massive hysteria and teenage girls rushing to bookstores grabbing Proust’s books off the shelves. Rather it was the Finnish translation of Proust’s seventh and final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu that caused the spike in sales. And it is probably safe to assume that whoever bought the seventh book has most likely already read the preceding six. Which only makes me wonder how many of the respondents in the research Hornby quotes knew that Proust is actually a writer and not a dessert or a salad dressing.

I’m heading to the Helsinki book fair this weekend. Let’s see if I can come home without any books this year. And you should stop wasting your time reading this blog; go tackle a book instead. (Tackling books was, by the way, exactly what bookmarks distributed in my US high-school were telling the students they should do. The bookmarks even portrayed a fully equipped football player (wearing helmet and all) holding a book like Hamlet usually holds a skull. I’d say you should read them, tackling’s no good on a book.)

Mladen

Selling things is nothing short of a science. It’s not only being at the right place at the right time with the right thing priced just right. It’s also how many of right things you have on offer and how well you find your way around all that inventory of yours. That’s where algorithms, Web and throng of people step in. And the result is? Well, Chris Anderson calls it the long tail.

Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson first published an article back in October 2004 where he writes about practically infinite niche markets that drive a very big chunk of today’s on-line retail business. Then last year after gathering a long tail of comments and contributors from all winds on his Web site, Anderson published a book with an expanded title: The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand.

I picked up Anderson’s book a few weeks ago. The verdict? Read at least something about this phenomenon as it will help you understand what you might have not known even existed. If you have a reason for being too busy to read the book, then read the article. But if you’re getting into on-line business, then you should devour the Web site.

Here’s a few tidbits from the book.

Did you know that entertainment industry blatantly and unashamedly uses information about the content exchanged on peer-to-peer networks to develop marketing and release strategies for their products? Yes, those very same companies that sue their customers, at the same time benefit and even profit from the actions they sue those very same customers for. Strange, but not too surprising.

The name of the game is BigChampagne, a company that for monetary exchange tracks and analyzes information about media consumption of all kinds, with emphasis on following what’s hot and what’s not on P2P. The content producers thus know what people want and how bad they want it.

Did you know that you might order a book (book as in book the object) from Amazon that will materialize only after you have placed your order? Amazon doesn’t store just eBooks in digital form, but also many other titles that they plan to sell as atoms.

Their print-on-demand industrial printer machinery was first placed into their warehouses to top off small print runs inventory. In 2005 Amazon went a step further and acquired a leading print-on-demand company BookSurge to make their inventory more efficient and flexible. Although I’m still waiting for the day when I can get any book I have ever wanted, on eInk, instantly. Print-on-demand is cool, but dead trees and waiting for postman are so late-19th century.

Try to wrap your mind around this one:

TV produces more content than any other media and entertainment industry. There are an estimated 31 million hours of original television content produced each year. … In addition, 115 million digital videotapes are sold each year for personal camcorders.

31 million hours! That’s more than three and a half millennia, in a single year. Most of it is garbage, but it’s still 3.500 years. What about 115 million tapes (each probably an hour long on average) that amounts to more than 13.000 years? Who wants to watch all those home videos? Someone better discover how to consume video in a compressed format.

And if you think you or your obscure interests are unique, think again. The existance of parallel mass cultures might surprise you, but you and your freakiness are no longer alone:

The same Long Tail forces and technologies that are leading to an explosion of variety and abundant choice in the content we consume are also tending to lead us into tribal eddies. When mass culture breaks apart, it doesn’t re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of microcultures, which coexist and interact in a baffling array of ways.

Or, as sociologist Raymond Williams wrote in Culture and Society: “There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses.” And he said decades ago.

Mladen

Two cool things happened yesterday. I’ve finally seen Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, a movie I’ve wanted to see for a long time now. Actually it was Lev Manovich’s great book The Language of New Media that brought my attention to it a few years ago. Manovich writes extensively about Vertov’s movie drawing parallels between the common characteristics of the movie and the today’s new media. Now that I have actually seen it, I can finally understand what is so hip about it.

If I didn’t know when it was made, I’m pretty sure I would have guessed wrong. Sure, it’s done in black-and-white and it’s without sound (the music accompanying it in contemporary version was done just recently according to Vetrov’s vision), both of which give it vintage look and feel. However, everything else about it is contemporary. Everything from (then) experimental editing, to length of cuts, dynamics, even topics it covers (technology).

This just a bit over an hour long film praises technology of it’s day. In 1929 that mostly meant machines and Vertov shows many in a truly poetic way. The film immediately reminded me of Godfrey Reggio’s quatsi trilogy, especially the first two films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi. While the other story it tells is the story about a cameraman. Camera following camera, an issue which resurfaced in the last decade when there has been a lot of talk about remediation (Remediation: Understanding New Media by Bolter and Grusin is just one such example). So again, the movie is right on the spot.

While Vertov was fun, the other cool thing of the day was more educational. It was a lecture about lockpicking titled nothing else but “Locks, Lockpicking, Security” held by Mateusz Pozar at Valand School of Fine Arts. There’s really a lot about this topic out there on the Net, but it is so much more fun to hear someone talk about it in person.

Pozar covered pretty much everything from the historical development of locks to the very basic mechanical underpinnings of different kinds of locks. It was interesting to hear that locks have not changed much over the last two centuries, which I found to be rather surprising given all the other technological advances and how much we rely on locking up our stuff on every step. However, Pozar actually spared his audience from actually showing how to manipulate and pick locks, which I had expected to see with anticipation.

But what was really cool about the lecture were the tidbits. For instance, that already Egyptians were using wooden locks, which were opened with really large keys. That the guards at the Tower of London have been for the last 700 hundred years locking its doors every single day at exactly 7 minutes before ten o’clock in the evening encapsuled in just as old ceremony that looks more like a sketch today. And among other things also that the city of Detroit gave the keys to the city to no other than Saddam Hussein himself. I don’t know if I am really surprised by that.

Anyways, the lecture was more about the social aspects than the actual act as our speaker was still perfecting the skill. But for all you budding enthusiasts out there, here’s where you can start:
- The Open Organisation of Lockpickers
- Sportenthusiasts of Lockpicking Germany
- Lock Picking 101

Knowledge is power. Have fun.

Mladen