HAMLET 1-3, LLC
OWENS CROSS ROADS, AL

Of course, I’ve also been catching up on back episodes of Marvel Agents of Shield (finally finished the last season, sooo goood!), read a couple of books, started researching where I’m spending next year, dealt with the 2015 tax snafu, and an ATM card problem, started seeing a local chiropractor, and gotten out around Oslo a bit, so it’s not been all Twitter. Thank the Maker. Still, it’s really been a confirmation that Twitter is perfectly capable of filling my whole day with interesting diversions, leaving nothing else done. This is not ideal, and I may have to be a bit more disciplined about how I use it. Discipline, blech! Oh well. , I talked about the Midsummer Mayhem event, a big Player versus Player event where we joined up with other players from our 1/3 of the player pool to fight the other 2 player alliances for control of the central territory. This event ended by early August, but the stuff you could get in it helped me to progress towards some game goals that I wanted, and even after the event the regular PvP play kept me progressing towards those goals, so I kept doing it. Not at the same level — i.e. nearly-all-day-every-day — but still a solid 4-5 hours daily (for the most part) right through the end of my stay in Helsinki. In fact, I got the final thing I was after just the day before I was scheduled to leave, which was super satisfying. You may remember me ragging on the labeling for some Icelandic yogurt that I saw in a Philly Whole Foods earlier this year, due to the label suggesting that “Skyr” was somehow special because it used Icelandic bacteria cultures — like every local yogurt doesn’t use local cultures. Turns out, there’s a lot of Skyr in Nordic countries, and they don’t get so high-falootin’ about it. They just sell it to you. It’s perfectly good yogurt. Look, I’d known that the artist Tom of Finland is (quite reasonably) an even bigger deal in Finland than he is elsewhere. (The Finnish government has even issued official postage stamps with his pictures.) But it was still super surprising to find his gay-themed art plastered across food products at the local grocery store. Go, Finland! I had a great little chat with the ticket seller, an American black guy in his 40s (maybe?) who had a bunch of questions about the L.A. area, because he and his teacher wife were going to be taking a long car ride over Christmas from Seattle to Florida and he wanted tips on where to go while in L.A.. (I plugged the Santa Monica Promenade to him.) Usually, I sit on the top of these buses and get lots of great pictures. Unfortunately, it had rained early that morning, and the bus people must have been too worried that it would rain again, or that it would just be too chilly, so they had the roof up on the top deck, making the thing too enclosed to get good pictures. And this nearby modern stretch, heading towards the west side of the city, was about as bleak as one could hope for. Granted, the overcast skies didn’t help much. But the overall effect I got from the city was that of a small, older core of buildings, and then a sudden flood of modernism in a compressed, catching-up flood of styles, put up without a coherent planning committee, and in a climate where people didn’t expect to be hanging around outside a lot to enjoy the aesthetics. I would just like to point out that nearly all of the statues I saw in Helsinki looked like this guy. Very few guys on horses, heroic poses, that sort of thing; just solid, respectable businessmen in suits, looking solid and respectable. I found it a kind of amusing statement about the Finnish temperament. And then I looked up this guy, A portable altarpiece. Generally kind of cool, although I can’t help but think Christ would be better portrayed with his arms out on the cross, in the traditional manner, instead of, what, crossed behind his head as if he’s just lying on his back relaxing? And the junior Christ-wannabees on each side don’t really help much, IMO. But, hey, maybe that’s just me. Ok, that was my first thought when I saw this. But the caption for this read: “Andrew and Sebastian were popular saints. Andrew was asked to give luck when fishing, and Sebastian protected people against the plague.” Look, I may not understand how the whole “saint” thing works, but I can’t help but think that martyrs, whose main claim to fame was that really crappy things happened to them despite how holy they were, maybe shouldn’t be your go-to guys for good luck. Just sayin’. That’s really all I wanted to say about it. If I could have fit those two photos in anyplace else, I probably would have. But the narrative flow forbade it, so here we are. (Side note: we had a Japanese-American woman in one of the other rooms for a time. And one evening I notice that the floor towel in the shower room, used as a bath mat, was quite soaked and was hanging up to dry. I didn’t think much of it, but then the next morning I took my shower, opened the shower door, and discovered that the shower room floor was flooded, filling up the slightly-sloped floor with water reaching almost to the outer door. I had the usual panicky thoughts, but with the water turned off the floor was slowly draining back under the shower stall. So, knowing that it would be dry soon, I left it to drain, and sent a message to the host warning him about the problem. He soon came up and did something to the shower, and later thanked me for the warning and told me it was something that happened occasionally. He called it “Japanese girl problem”; a mass of long black hair clogging the drain down in the slightly odd shower drain connections. If the water didn’t overflow the shower room, it would drain out Ok, but a couple of times it had reached the door and flowed out onto the hall floor and down through the walls and become a huge problem, so he appreciated my having caught it and warned him. After that, I figured out how to pull out the odd-but-easily-removable drain mechanism, and so every morning I’d clean the drain of its accumulation of long black hairs before I took my own shower. It was kind of disgusting, but it avoided the problem and Jussi appreciated my doing it, so PR win!)