andrew_jorgensen

The Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, have many uses for their reindeer. One of the primary uses seems to be denial, or at least it seemed that way yesterday as we stopped on the outskirts of Inari for a visit to the home of a Sami schoolteacher. The noonday sun -- much like the midnight sun but still not going anywhere can't you tell I'm losing my mind from the sun the sun the sun -- had the temperature up to a lot closer to sweltering than I had expected, but she was dressed in a heavy calf-length dress made from reindeer wool; she quickly escorted us out of the open air into a canvas tepee so we could sit around a crackling fire, listen to her explain which portions of the reindeer become which handicraft, and sweat. To be fair, this was an attempt to avoid the mosquitos, gnats, horseflies, other-nasty-winged flies and flying, bug-sized piranha that infest the Lappish air, lapping up my blood. Our hostess said that she much preferred the winter, especially when it would reach 40 below, and I suspect the insects have something to do with this.

In the afternoon, we met another resident of the area who preferred the winter, but she was raising sled dogs, so I suppose it's to be expected of her. She had one Siberian Husky, but the bulk of her team were cross-bred from Alaskan Huskies and greyhounds. For the speed, one supposes; they are capable of reaching as high as 45 k.p.h. with a sled in tow.

The people I have met in Finland have seemed very nice, but I was a little disturbed to see, hanging in the window of one apartment building in Ivalo, a flag with a white cross on a blue background, starbursts at each point of the cross, and the Confederate flag. At 68° N I don't think this is an expression of regional pride. The population of Ivalo is so white as to be translucent, and my impression is that the immigrants there are all Russian, so I'm a little on edge. They do have a surprisingly large number of tourists from Thailand, though.

Today was spent indolently tramping around Urho Kekkonen National Park and then driving down to Rovaniemi, which has an absolutely beautiful riverside. It seemed as though every twenty feet another pair of young lovers had deposited their bicycles so they could sit, and talk, and watch the river, and forge dreams together, or somesuch.

A few entirely random thoughts:

• Libertarian-standing-tall Jim Henley calls "libertarian"-on-his-knees Eugene Volokh out for his complaint that the Supreme Court has created the possibility that "our enemies may use our freedoms against us." At the end of his post, Henley refers his readers for more to presumptive neoliberal Brad DeLong, the Social Democrats and academic Marxists over at Crooked Timber, and that extradimensional crustacean with plans for world domination, Fafblog's Medium Lobster. Politics really does make for strange blogfellows.
  
  
• While driving down a rural highway in Michigan today, I saw a rickety shed made of saplings strung together with a hand-painted sign attached to it. I only read the top part of the sign, which must have read in full "Hunting blind for sale," but my urban/suburban conditioning led me to expect from the first lines that the complete message would be "Hunting blind can cost lives. Be sure to hunt only with a properly trained guide dog." I suppose, though, that the sign would be effective only if it were in braille.
  
  
• The top story in the Arts section of Wednesday's New York Times treats the new bevy of skyscrapers going up over London. In my last couple of trips to London I've been flabbergasted by the new arrivals on the skyline -- I had thought that there was a municipal regulation preventing buildings from standing taller than the city's most famous and revered landmark. The article is accompanied by a spectacular computer rendering of the Thames behind Tower Bridge, surrounded by all the proposed new skyscrapers (though the Vortex, my favorite of the batch of unrealized buildings, is not to be found, the Times taking a more skeptical view than the Guardian on this issue at least).
  
  Walking between rahael's house and her local supermarket, one must take a pedestrian bridge over one of the major motorways. This bridge affords a great view of the Gherkin, London's most recent hot skyscraper; on a clear day I could see even St. Paul's and the Millennium Eye. Rah and I got into an unintentional habit of timing our return from grocery shopping to coincide with sunset, though our last shopping expedition had us leaving the store just as the summer rainstorm ended and the sky was filled with a gigantic double rainbow, arching clear and completely across the eastern sky.