What Just Happened #61

Nothing. On purpose.

Welcome to this vacation edition of Common Sense and Whiskey, and thanks for dropping by. Talk to me anytime in the comments section or directly, at BillMurrayWriter (at) gmail.com.

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Okay, on with the (road) show:

Tervetuloa from warm, sunny Finland. Which is an unusual thing to write.

Last week, on July 25th, the mythical ‘Jaakko’ was to cast a cold stone into Finnish waters, starting their cool down, meaning the end of summer is drawing near. You’ll see a mention of Jaakko Day in the press each year, like American Groundhog Day, but this year Jaakko was a no show.

Finland has now hit twenty days in a row of temperatures exceeding 30C (86F) somewhere in the country, a feat that has blown through the previous record (13 days), which had stood since records began. It has everybody talking.

We’ve spent a couple or a few weeks in Finland for many summers now, and just about half the time you run up against a too-long patch of rainy cool days, when anoraks and sweats are more suitable than crocs and shorts.

This is deeply disappointing for Finns who can only expect a couple of months of full summer, so these twenty days in a row are such happy news (for a country that usually wins the happiest country award anyway) that you might almost expect folks to feel guilty.

But not while the fun is going on.

Finnish July is like August in Paris. Helsinki, Espoo, Tampere, Turku and the other towns clear out and the whole world centers around lakeside kesämökkejä (summer cottages), water sports and grilling out.

If there are very many summers like this one to come here in Finland, you would expect a savvy tourism authority to swing into gear, hoping to lure vacationers away from super hot southern Europe. In the medium term, once southern Europeans learn of the beauty of northern lakes and forests, we might expect an appreciation of Finnish real estate prices. Whether shoulders down, barefoot and usually reserved Finns will welcome hordes to their under-appreciated secret shores, that we’ll have to wait and see.

OPPOSITE OF BEACH READING: Back home there’s a stack of books of classic literature in one corner of the room that I have never read—Middlemarch, Madame Bovary, Vanity Fair, The Idiot— that taunts me everyday. I am determined to read them all some day. Every time we come here I bring not a beach read, but a doorstop sized book, on the theory that I’ll never be less distracted.

Sometimes it works. Once I read an exhaustive history of what seemed like every last World War Two battle in the Pacific while sitting on this porch. This time, with attention spans shorter, I’ve brought a book from that classics stack, more digestible in theory: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. To be fully transparent, so far our hero Hans Castorp strkes me as a whiny, judgmental little twit. But there’s still time, by which I mean hundreds of pages. Go Hans.

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If today’s What Just Happened is proof-of-life after last week’s absence, what has fascinated me more than The Magic Mountain is a story that might be considered proof-of-wonkishness, or maybe just an inability to fit in with popular entertainment that most people like, things like whatever’s popular right now on Netflix.

Last summer, before coming here to Finland, we visited Moldova, and I sent an online Postcard from Moldova about the travails of a small former Soviet republic hoping to adhere to the EU. Now, in the last couple of weeks, Greece has arrested a man under an Interpol Red Notice, a shady billionaire by the name of Vladimir Plahotniuc, who is allegedly responsible for one of the world’s greatest heists in history.

Plahotniuc, whom Greek authorities say held at least 21 false identity documents including passports issued under fake names from Bulgaria and elsewhere at the time of his arrest, is said to have stolen twelve percent of Moldova’s GPD in 2014.

If he is quickly extradited to Moldova, Plahotniuc’s presence will blow up the crucial election campaign for parliamentary elections scheduled for September 28th. Pro-Europe President Maia Sandu has warned of “unprecedented interference” from Russia in those elections.

The whole Plahotniuc case is a riveting tale that has gotten nowhere near the press it should have. Twelve percent of a country’s GDP! Here is the best quick catch up, for anybody interested in true gangster crime tales. Which strikes me as true beach reading.

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When we leave Finland we’ll be off to the Norwegian Arctic, and I’ll send a note from there in a week or so. Enjoy summer like a Finn, and cheers for now.

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Cheers,

Bill