I think this is trying to intentionally emulate a physical advertisement leaflet distributed to people’s homes? Or something akin to newspaper commercials? It looks a lot like my childhood, anyway! :)

But yeah, having a page scroll horizontally instead of vertically is indeed something very special. They actually had to put quite some effort into making this work the way it does, didn’t they?

I wish you could have told this to my ancestors.

Ah, good point indeed!

Hah, have you ever noticed that the meaning of “quite” is quite different depending on whether the person saying it is from USA or from England? :) On one side of the pond it means the same as “somewhat”, while on the other side it means “very”.

I am able to follow an American movie by just listening to it, but if I do turn on the subtitles, I get a lot more out of it! I need to spend less of my brain capacity interpreting the foreign language and can use more of it for understanding the social context shown in the film. Or the scenery. I understand more meanings and can read better between the lines when I can see a decent translation into my mother tongue in the subtitles.

But also: Netflix and one of the Finnish TV stations save extremely much in their translations. That means the translations often contain gross errors or leave things outright untranslated. Even then the subtitles often help, because if my understanding of what was said and what I can read in the translation are about the same, then everything is probably fine.

In any case: My English is not all that bad, as you can see, but I still turn the subtitles on whenever I can, and I am much less interested in watching a foreign film without them.

I am largely unable to enjoy song’s lyrics in English if I cannot read them at the same time. In song lyrics the difference is much more noticeable than in movies. I can get about 75 % of the enjoyment of a movie even without subtitles, but lyrics in songs almost become just another musical instrument if I cannot have the lyrics in text format to follow while listening to a song in a foreign language.

Also, if I try to write something beautiful, it is usually best that I write it in Finnish and then translate it into English, because I can express myself so very much better in Finnish than in English! Takes more than twice the time compared to just outright writing the text in English, but the plot of a story becomes much better if I’ve written it down in my mother tongue. There will be more nuances in the people’s behaviour, and that translates into a more interesting text overall. Even after translation.

Largely true.
But the ambassadors don’t really have the luxury of that. Their job is to represent the United States and they are required to generally support what their country’s leadership says. So, their job is to make some semblance of sense of what Trump is saying. Or, alternatively, they can quit.

Many good answers have been given already. One more is that many people understand it would be better for the environment and their own health if they biked instead of driving a car. Yet getting a car was one of the symbols of having the means for a good life. If you are able to let go of your car, it shows that you have held pointless things as important parts of your identity. You don’t want to have been a moron, do you?

So, you suppress the idea that you could be doing something else than what you are doing. And other people bicycling is kind of in-your-face. They show that you could have an alternative, and that causes a feeling of guilt in you. And that feeling of guilt is uncomfortable, and the people riding their bicycles are what have triggered that feeling. In other words: They have ruined your day by making you feel guilt. A completely self-created guilt, but an annoying feeling all the same. And then you hate everything that is connected to those people that keep ruining your days by the virtue of visibly existing.

This is not necessarily the reason for all of the people opposing bike infrastructure, but it is one of the important reasons for many.

Highly esteemed fellow fedinaut, I hereby enclose the information your fediness has requested:

No late fees are collected for children’s books in Helsinki.
For everything else, it’s 0,20 € per item and day.

It might have looked much less phallic when it had not gotten weathered like it’s now. And maybe all kinds of columns were more commonplace back then, in general? You don’t really see new columns being erected (no pun indented) these days.

Where’s this pic taken at?

Where is Italy expecting Moretti to flee to? Why?

Living the rest of one’s life as a fugitive won’t be much fun. It means you’ll be leaving your friends and family behind for good.

That’s pretty much the Finnish language :D

Just check out the difference between these two phrases written in our goose-y language:

(You can use your machine translation of choice to check the meanings of those two phrases, if you wish.)

I’ve been often wondering, how will we use all this car infrastructure once people advance past private cars?
What will become of that drive-in McDonald’s?

I could imagine some sort of a small-scale factory using the building?
Multi-storey parking garages could also serve as storage space, maybe? The tilted floors make many things more difficult, though.

Glad to be of use!

Oh, and here’s an incomplete Wikipedia article about that cow (and the almost not main character, which is a crow): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_Moo

Once upon a time there was a crow who was befriended with a talking cow that really, really liked to sit in a swing! (The original name of the book actually implies that the cow has a child, which is kind of freaky, because there is zero mention about the child, and actually reason to believe the child is nowhere around anymore. Why is the book not talking about the cow’s trauma at all?!)

In any case, once the cow had climbed to a tree for fun, and it was very important that the farmer won’t notice, because cows are not supposed to climb trees. The crow did a good job warning the cow when the farmer was approaching and damn it, I cannot remember what the hell the book tells, wait, maybe in the children’s room there’s another book about the same two animals!

…nope, couldn’t find it. But, would you like to hear a story of a father who recently found three children’s books that should have been brought back to the library a week ago?

I hope this story about a crow sated your appetite for crows!

Sorry for getting your hopes up. It’s there a couple comments up from this one :)

Crows are generally awesome! I’ve only ever met one that I really didn’t like. Want to read a story featuring that one? 🙃

Nope.

Awesome, thanks!

Something even more seagull-compatible than that. I don’t remember what food I happened to have with me, because this happened some, 5-ish years ago? (It also was not a surgical mask, BTW!)