I just saw the film based on Mikael Niemi's novel and I cannot help but recommend it to everyone with even a little sense of Finnish humour! Gods know I needed to laugh that hard and concentrate on other matters...
I'm not quite sure which I should find more alarming: that I could identify myself with Niila almost completely, or that the one to recommend this film to me last night said I would find it interesting? She can read me like an open book, to torture the cliché.
Niila... I may have to re-think my son's name again. I had already decided that but Niila sounds very nice... My daughter's name I decided years ago, so there won't be any changes coming to that (unless the Finnish admiknistration decides that the other name isn't justified, that is). But at least I could keep the first name, that's an important one! Curiously enough, both my son and my daughter would be named after literary figures, the other one coming from a bit more scholarly background than the other.
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The Meme of the Day:
Couldn't resist... test which historical lunatic are you at http://rumandmonkey.com/widgets/tests/lunatics/!
"You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!
A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.
This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.
In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.
A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges."
