Nothing much

I still exist.

I don't want to delete this blog, and maybe one day I become more active again.

I'm rather busy studying at the moment and I'm doing rather well. I should spend more time on the internet.

That's all folks.

I Surrender

Have you ever made a list of "things I want to do before I die"? Very high on my list for over 20 years has been the wish to see David Sylvian perform live. Last Friday my dream came true.

David Sylvian doesn't tour that often, and has never visited Finland, so I thought it's rather unlikely I'll ever witness him playing in concert, but I caught the first night of his The World is Everything tour in Stockholm.

"I won't believe I see David Sylvian before I see David Sylvian" was the feeling I had before the concert, but it didn't get cancelled or the ferry didn't sink on its way to Stockholm (on the way back I didn't really care). The evening was wonderful, the audience very enthusiastic and loving, and I was able to surrender to his voice and the music. I felt very present there and then; peace and togetherness with the world.

Here you can find the setlist and a few words about the performance. Personally I enjoyed listening to the more recent songs the best. As it was (dare I say) rather a sacred experience for me, I can't really find the words to describe the whole thing. It's not really so much about what happened on the stage, but how much it meant to me personally.

"Too much singing in the rain"

I saw The Who live a week ago. They were fantastic, even if Roger Daltrey had some problems with his voice (hence the subject). I knew that might be a problem from the reports from Roskilde, but thankfully it wasn't that bad. Pete Townshend was absolutely brilliant. And the video screens worked perfectly, I've probably never seen anything so impressive visually in a concert before. I don't usually go to such big concerts, so I'm not that used to big screens like that, but wow!

I think their new album is very good, but I have to admit that the old favourites worked better live, the crowd seemed to love best the songs famous from CSI. There were quite a lot of young people too. It was one of those cases when I wasn't quite sure if I wanted to just sit down peacefully and enjoy the spectacle, or dance around and sing, but I took it rather quietly. I hope the band still knows how much we loved them.

And did you know that Pete Townshend is blogging too?

dEUS

I haven't really much explored MySpace-sites, it seems there's mainly just huge lists of "friends" that's not very interesting to look at. Anyway I was trying to find a title of a song from dEUS, and stumbled on their MySpace-site. There's some pretty good music (and videos) to listen to.

I recommend Instant Street. I really like the video too.

Sociopath test

This is just a silly online test, I would never ever believe I was a sociopath whatever the result. I tried to answer yes to as many questions as I possibly could. :)

You Are 16% Sociopath

You're empathetic, loyal, and introspective. In other words, there's no way you're a sociopath... but you can spot one pretty easily!

Are You A Sociopath?

The Owl Incident

Tonight Finland won Belgium in a football match, so we can still dream about reaching Euro 2008 finals. It's a slim chance, but if we continue to play this well, who knows. :)

The funniest thing was though that a very handsome eagle owl landed on the pitch, and the match was held up for several minutes. The owl is known to reside on the stadium, but he's never interfered with the game before. He circled around the stadium, and sat on the goal posts. I don't think the referees knew what to do either. Fortunately the owl finally decided to leave the pitch, and the play continued. (I hope the experience didn't shake him up too badly.)



The picture is taken by Markus Jokela from Helsingin Sanomat. I usually try to respect the copyright rules, but this time I just couldn't resist, sorry.

ESC 2007

The Eurovision Song Contest was held this year in Helsinki, and what a wonderful job we did with it! The show was brilliant, and the overall quality of songs was quite good. I'm slightly tired of it all right now, but I just want to say that I absolutely loved the winner Marija Serifovic and her song Molitva. So here it is:



There's also ESC Webradio, if you want to listen to all kinds of songs that have competed in the Eurovision Song Contest over the years. And there's ESC television on the web, so you can watch the whole final, if you want to.

There's been a lot of horrible music over the years, that's true, but there are some good songs as well. I think the quality has gone up in the last few years, and I'm not at all sorry to see new "eastern" countries to take part. So if next year we'll see Palestine or Kazakstan, I couldn't be happier about it. Welcome to this crazy mix. :)