My last post, advertising the magnificent new IQ album, sparked response from various people who contacted me using various methods, just to tell me they liked it too. I appreciate this and am aware that enabling comments on this blog would make it easier to leave feedback on such matters. Still, since I like to maintain the illusion that I’m only writing to myself and don’t really want to find out who or how many people actually read this blog, the option to comment will remain unavailable. It’s easier to voice opinions to an audience unseen. But I’m always glad to share something I enjoy, which, when it comes to music, isn’t very often.

I finally got around to reading ”Paperweight” by Stephen Fry. Mr. Leinonen thrust the book upon me sometime last year and have refused to take it back on the several occasions I’ve tried to return it on the grounds that I’m absolutely never going to read it no matter what. Now that I actually am reading it, I’m very glad that in this case my definition of ”never” turned out wildly inaccurate. The kind of language mr. Fry uses is a pleasure to read even though I have to consult my dictionary every dozen or so words which is at times frustrating since looking a word up doesn’t automatically add it to my vocabulary. Sometimes I check up the same word for several days in a row, only to forget the meaning by the time I come across it again the next day. This can be very exasperating, but repetitio est mater studiorum, as the latin-speaking folks of times gone by were supposedly in the habit of saying in certain situations, most astutely.

I don’t know if they had a latin equivalent to ”forgetting is the father of frustration” but if they didn’t they clearly hadn’t thought things through properly and weren’t so astute after all. Examining the writings discovered on the walls in Pompeii might shed some light on this topic. Maybe they were too busy depicting various scenarios of sexual intercourse on their walls and had no time to think up witty and quibbly follow-ups to proverbs already established, those lusty latin libertines.


And now onto something else, seemingly unrelated but still cunningly interconnected to what I’ve been talking about so far. A year ago, everything was awesome as a new spring water called Plup was launched in Finland, with plenty of hullabaloo and expensive advertisement. Stefan Lindfors designed the container (it’s hard to call something like this a bottle) and a most exquisite and irresistible design it is too. This is what is says on their webpage, among other things: ”PLUP encourages consumers not to return the bottle, but rather to re-fill and re-use it. It’s highly durable and suitable for heavy use, such as hiking or boating.” Turns out Sunday afternoon picnicking doesn’t count as ”heavy use” but rather falls into a category of activities harder and more demanding than hiking or boating. And how do I know this? Because last Sunday, for a nice and cosy picnic in a sunny and lovely park, I had packed also a refilled Plup-bottle (or a container). After all the food and wine had been consumed, the refilled Plup-bottle (let’s agree it can be called a bottle, with certain reservations) remained untouched so back to the watertight picnic-basket it went, with other containers, and two paperback novels.

On returning home I discovered that all the 0,4 litres of water originally contained in the Plup-bottle were no longer in the Plup-bottle, due to a flimsy cork that clearly isn’t capable of holding liquids, but at the bottom of the watertight basket, with the paperback novels, one of which was this aforementioned ”Paperweight” by Stephen Fry, borrowed from mr. Leinonen. 4 dl is a surprisingly large amount of liquid when it’s in a pool somewhere it isn’t supposed to be, or in this case, absorbed into pages of a book. Plup might preserve the environment and the Baltic Sea but it failed to preserve the readability of a common paperback novel. So into the litter bin went the Plup-bottle and quickly towards Amazon.co.uk went I to get a new copy to replace the ruined one, shuddering at the prospect of mr. Leinonen finding out and wreaking merciless havoc upon my poor thoughtless person.

Summa summarum (as the romping Roman rascals of Pompeii might have said in between painting pictures of giant phalluses and reckless orgies on their walls): A new copy of ”Paperweight” was acquired for an excessively lucrative price of 0.01GBP plus postage (although the old copy, after having dried up, doesn’t look completely ruined either), I still like the design of Plup but will not buy another bottle of it (ungleefully sharing this resolution with a lot of other people too because according to this link Plup has flopped in a major way), the new IQ album continues to be excellent and I really need to find out more about the sensual way ancient Romans preferred to decorate their surroundings with.