Note: The older the entry, the unlikelier outside links are to work.

Those of you who visited my site early on, when there still was a separate links-page, might have noticed a link to X-Entertainment. If you happened to check out that link, you might not have been so impressed. The reason is that the quality of the page has really gone down lately. I started reading it last summer, and have kept on reading it ever since because it made me laugh out often. That hasn't happened much lately any more, so when they finally posted a hilarious page again, I just had to link it. I grant you that it's not your average X-E story, which usually dwell around He-Man, Transformers or Nintendo games, but it's hilarious. If you decide to look around the site for more, I suggest you look in the early archives, because the newer stories really don't pack much punch. I might give you another example of an excellent, earlier text from there later.
Speaking of archives, I've decided that it's time to reduce the size of this front page. So expect in the near future an "archives" button somewhere and a lot less text on this front page. I'm not assuming anyone's ever going to go read any of the older stuff, but if the Internet can store an infinite amount of information, why not take advantage of it? Then again, my hosting service will only store 5 Megabytes of information, so at some point soon I'll have to think of putting the archives in Geocities or somewhere else with ever-entertaining pop-up banners. Then again again, with the speed that dotcoms are going down, there might not be much to advertise soon, and we'll be rid of stupid ads that nobody reads anyway.

I watched JFK last weekend, and as just so happens, today I came across a news article which says that there is a "96% chance there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll". No shit! I wonder what the last 4% consist of, cause the echoes and magic bullets and whatnot theories sound kinda lame. There's one thing that makes conspiracies so interesting: if you believe them, you're paranoid, if you don't, you're naive. I really don't know which one I'd prefer. I guess we'll see in 2038 or whenever it was that the papers are released. Probably not.
Feel free to invent your own, new conspiracy theory involving the military-industrial complex, Bush's endorsement of the $60-$100 billion missile defence program, which Gore was against, and Bush's laughably narrow victory, which wasn't really a victory at all. You call me paranoid? I call you naive.

I tried really hard to think of a title for my today's entry that would have covered both Jennifer Lopez's nipples and JFK, but I guess my imagination is just not broad enough. I have a vague notion of a "pair" of things, but it didn't really get me anywhere...

And no, I'm not talking about those that the chinaman has "evely molning"...
Vienna had its local elections yesterday, which were significant in two ways: 1) Haider's (you all remember him, the tanned populist which the EU made into the antichrist, or at least the second coming of Hitler) Freedom Party lost quite a bit, and Vienna remains as red as ever. Or actually, even more red than before, since now the Socialist Party can form a city government by itself. 2) I got to vote in the elections! Perhaps I'm the only person who's so excited about it, but I think it's pretty cool to have voted in two different countries' elections. Long live the EU! In truth, I only got to vote for the district representatives (so not even city-wide), but something for nevertheless. Now I'll be the entertainment king of any social event, when I can discuss the differences between two electoral systems, backed by personal experience. While on the subject, I've wondered why I don't get that many invitations to social events?
BBC has a bit more information on the subject, if you happen to be interested.

I guess the world is a better place now that Gladiator is the best movie of the year. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to share with you my doubts about the originality of the movie. Many months before I knew that there was going to be a movie "Gladiator" coming out, I had been working on a text-based game in Turbo Pascal called: yup, you guessed it, "Gladiator". I don't know how the Hollywood people got their hands on it, but it's pretty obvious that they blatantly took most of their ideas from it. I mean, listen to this: my game takes place during Marcus Aurelius' reign (who was the emperor dying at the beginning of the movie, although to sidetrack me and other people who might notice their theft, they changed the name to "Marc" Aurelius); my game is located in the Colosseum (as is most of the movie); in my game you kill lions (which is what Maximus does during many parts of the movie. They probably ignored my "weak, unarmed" Christians which you also slaughter during my game, to be politically correct); if you give yourself the name "Maxi", my game will call you "Maxicus" (which is nearly identical to "Maximus"). The list goes on and on. Obviously, they were making a Hollywood flick, so they had to add some romance and excitement (which both are completely lacking from my game), but I think the case is pretty damn obvious. But I'm good-natured, so I'll be happy with just 1% of the box-office income of the movie and I won't sue them.
But don't take my word for it, check out my game Gladiator yourself to find all the eerie "coincidences".

Usually there is no way I would be getting out of bed before midday on a Saturday, but today, thanks to the guy who invented time zones, I had to wake up at 10:00AM to witness a marvellous sporting battle between the national teams of Finland and England. The kind of sport we are talking about here is football of course. European football or soccer for all you North Americans out there.

Living in South America truly has its benefits. Not only do they refer to football as football (see above), but also because they are crazy about it, they show on television almost every possible game from every sector of the planet. This of course allowed me to watch my national team play a hugely entertaining game against the Brits LIVE. Unfortunately, this time we lost, but taking into consideration the calibre of the English squad, we did pretty well for a small country of 5 million people. All through the game I was jumping on my bed and screaming wild supportive sentences such as "PERKELE POJAT!" and "NYT SUOMI JUMALAUTA!"... Now, if you try to scream those phrases in a very loud voice in a hotel room, you might get some complaints or at least weird looks from your next door neighbours. I wouldn’t be able to comment on the situation here though. I haven’t left my room since the defeat...

The world-cup 2002 is approaching fast and now I can only hope that my country will qualify, because this would mean there is no other alternative than to be there in person. Read some more on the world-cup qualifiers as well as the latest results.

The question of what kind of technological gizmos we're going to be using in ten years is a really interesting one to me. Think back ten years, and it's pretty obvious that that's enough time for some pretty radical changes. In 1991, I didn't even have a decent computer (I did have an Amiga 500...) and here I am writing crap on the Internet.
The CeBit fair is currently held in Germany, and that's usually a good place to see the most futuristic ideas that engineers are coming up with. The booth descriptions have short descriptions of some technologies and links to more information. If that's your thing, then it's definitely worth it to spend some time.

For a few years now, there's been talk of how common household appliances are going to be hooked up to the Internet and do all kind of miraculous stuff. Hasn't happened yet, but at least they're trying with the talking fridge. It also orders your food for you, but I think the talking part is much "cooler" (hey, it's a fridge :-P ).

But we shouldn't forget about the wonders of technology from yesteryear, especially when they're going to become burning meteorites in the atmosphere. I really think it's too bad about the Mir, it wouldn't been great to use it as a tourist hotel for rich capitalists, but I guess the risks are too great with Russian "technology" in general. Well, at least we still have the ISS to look up to, especially whenever it's visible in the night sky. For those of you living north from Denmark, and can't see it, I gotta tell you, it's a great sight.

As you've noticed by now, there have been some "significant" changes to this site. First, the link buttons have changed to look much cooler. Second, you're now offered a free and ever-changing (as long as you don't refresh more than 20 times) random quote every time you visit. You're also welcome to suggest your own pieces of wit and cleverness, which I'll add to the generator if I agree with your sense of humor. Third, I got rid of the links page, because I realized this front page is one big links page. Fourth, a contact-page has been added to the benefit of friends of the rest of the family, who can now check what that e-mail address that they forgot was (alright, so if you remember the site address, you're probably going to remember the e-mail address as well. But hey, you can't blame a guy for trying to fill up the Internet with "valuable" information) Besides, on that page you can also see how spread out throughout the world our family is. Although it's going to look like crap if you don't have IE, because the MARQUEE -tag I used to create the fancy animation effect doesn't work in Netscape, and I'm too lazy to try to create something similar that would work in Netscape (especially if my pages still just crash it). What was that "cling"-sound? Oh, just another dime in Bill Gates' piggy bank. Fifth, my life is now under "Jani", and my brother's, surprisingly logically, under "Tero". We'll both still be adding text on this page, but now you can read about our back problems on our own pages. We'll try to keep this page free from personal matters. Unless, of course, you consider prostitution a personal matter.

A couple of times, I've noticed myself in need of a calendar without having one readily available, just to check what weekday some date is or something. Since I'm not the proud owner of Nokia superFX9000D cell phone, with built-in calendar, TV and toaster, I have to depend on less high-tech tools, like the Internet. Having finally found a decent calendar on the net, I wanted to link it so I could forget the URL. So now it's here for your benefit as well. And you Nokia superFX9000D owners: can your phone tell you that January 1st, 1, was a Saturday? Thought not.

Looks like my mentioning Planet Alumni had an almost immediate effect: I received an email from them that a second person besides me has signed up for my high school. I'm sure she's one of my most avid readers: Hilkka Isotalo-Zirkle, from the Class of 1966. She's definitely a part of my target audience all right. And I don't think too many people are suggesting my site to their mothers. Just a strange coincidence that, after having heard nothing from PA for six months, the moment I write about it on my web site, some total stranger signs up.

Yesterday I went to a chiropractic for the first time in my life. I did this in order to check my back, which has been suffering from diverse abuse lately, ranging from tight airplane seats to a mix of gravity, alcohol and barstools. Now we all know that the back is a very delicate and important part of our body. Our backs consist mainly of muscles, loads of veins and the vertebral column, which in turn consists (usually) of 33 vertebrae arranged in 5 different regions, with the spinal cord tangling in between. The column provides stability for the back (and the whole body) by the shape and strength of individual vertebrae and by intervertebral discs, ligaments, and muscles. The regions of the Vertebral Column, where individual vertebrae are named according to region and position, from superior to inferior, are called Cervical - vertebrae (C1-C7), Thoracic - 12 vertebrae (T1-T12), Lumbar - 5 vertebrae (L1-L5), Sacral - 5 (fused) vertebrae (S1-S5) and Coccygeal - 3-5 vertebrae (Co1-Co5).
So, in other words, our backs are great writing surfaces and they are unbeatable for patting people or animals, or something in between. You might think I learned all that from my visit to the doctor, but you would be wrong. I knew the patting thing from before.
So, anyway, there I was at the chiropractic asking if my back was okay and thankfully it was. I was given some on-the-spot ultrasound therapy, which to me seemed more like shock therapy as the whole process involves electricity current going through your body and back. Why they call it ultrasound still remains a mystery to me. The only ultrasound, really, was my scream when the kind doctor increased the electric current strength a bit too steeply. On the positive side, I now understand better the poor souls we used to torture with electric shocks during the Spanish inquisition. Oh boy, those were the days. But enough of me, you take care of your backs now, sit straight, sleep in comfortable beds and pat somebody today.

After navigating for months and years through millions and millions of webpages, I have finally found it. Click here to see what I'm talking about.

Well, here goes nothing. Or, as we say here in Peru, here goes... well, they actually don't have any good sayings in Peru to put here, so I will simply skip this part. Anyway, the main point is, that this is my first attempt to put up some text on this rather fantastic web page of ours, designed by my clever but still little brother Jani (blame him for the colors and that awful logo! Heh!). I intend to learn how to do this properly so I can provide our readers (both of them) with a different view on things and perhaps even create some sort of discussion panel here, where the Moliis brothers can try to outsmart each other and everybody else as well for that matter. This probably meaning that what we write will be understood and of interest to about 0.01% of the world population (read=nobody), or 10% of the Finnish speaking people of the world. But wait! This is in english! Damn, I'm confusing myself once again. Talk to you soon.

Oh, and on the lighter side, this is your last chance to cancel that Mig-29 spring-sale purchase you were planning to do. Another one just fell down yesterday in Chiclayo, north of Lima, in a demonstration to prove their good working record for the local government. Fujimori's legacy lives on, and not only in jokes as it seems.

Last night, I had an interesting conversation about prostitution. Actually, it wasn't the first time, but having had the discussion again, I wanted to write about the point I argued.
What I tried to say to the other people in the discussion was that prostitution is more honest than your regular one-night stands: at least with prostitution, both sides know for sure what they're after. You go to a nightclub or wherever and "pick up" someone, it's more likely that the two persons' expectations don't match. The other one might just be looking for sex that night, the other one for a long-term companion. I know this isn't anything new, but if sex is really all you're after, wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if you just went to a prostitute?
Let me give you a scenario that I just thought of last night: suppose you're very rich, and for some reason must have sex tonight. You have the choice of going to a nightclub, let your wealth speak for itself, and end up at your penthouse apartment with a partner (I'm avoiding any references to gender on purpose). Or you could contact a high-class prostitute and, once again, let your wealth speak for itself.
I'm assuming most people would choose the first option, since going to a prostitute is considered somehow immoral. But come next morning, and the chances are that the first option leads to more heart-ache than the second. Because morals have something to do with being nice to other people (I'm not giving an authoritative definition here), isn't the option that is less painful more moral? This all, of course, is assuming that sex was all that you were after. Anyone who disagrees, let me know.

Ever wondered what happened to all those people from high school/university? At Planet Alumni, you're most probably not going to find the answer. The idea is that people sign up under their school and other people will then be able to look up their class and see who's doing what. But in the case of my high school, which I opened an account for about six months ago, it doesn't help much when one other person has signed up. But maybe your fellow students have come across the site more often. Probably not.

Some of you might have noticed that timer on the left with the "@" sign in front of it, running from 1 to 1000. For those of you who have, and haven't clicked on the what's this, I'll explain quickly. Basically, Swatch came up with their own measurement of time called .beat, divided the 24-hour day into 1000 .beats, and proposes it to be used as the common measurement of time in the Internet. No commercial interests, honest. I think there are actually watches made by Swatch that have a .beat timer on them as well as a regular clock.
Anyway, what I like about this idea is it's attempt to give a different perspective on time. We're so accustomed to the 24-hour day, 60-minute hour and 60-second minute that we don't think twice about it. But for the fortunate amongst us who live in a metric system -using country, these should be (and are) pretty awkward measurements. I constantly try to show the superiority of the metric system over the "traditional" one by asking my American friends to tell me how many feet there are in a mile. The usual answer I get is: "Who cares?" Although apathy is just as valid a point-of-view as any other, I think an easier answer should be available, like: "There are 1000 meters in a kilometer."
What's this got to do with time? Well, everybody is in the exact same position as those Americans when they're asked how many seconds there are in a day. Sure, you can calculate it, but not without spending a few minutes on it or using a calculator (or being Rainman). So instead, why not have 1000 .beats, or in order to keep some similarity with the old system, a 10-hour day with 100 minutes an hour and 100 seconds a minute? I'm telling you, after the initial discomfort, we would all be a lot happier. And I could imagine the clock-making industry supporting this idea as well.
But before anything concrete in this field happens (never, that is), there's one thing regarding time we should be content about: everybody uses the same measuring units in the world. We got some different years going, but at least everyone has the same minutes and hours. Knowing what havoc using different distance units can cause (the loss of a $200 million NASA satellite being the best example), imagine what it would be like if those Americans had a 13 hour day with 80 minutes every hour.

Looks like I'm not doing so bad with my random thoughts, at least in comparison...

I don't know who came up with calling cattle infected with BSE (whatever those letters stand for, it's nothing simple) "mad cows", but I'm telling you, it was a brilliant media move. Who's going to show interest towards "another BSE-case"? "More mad cows in Britain" or "Mad cows discovered in Germany" definitely packs a lot more punch. Why am I talking about mad cows, when they're already passé, and foot-and-mouth disease is the newest thing around? Because 1) "mad cows" also sounds much better than "foot-and-mouth-disease" and 2) I got my hands on a great mad cow-related file, for Powerpoint. (right-click on the link to save it on your hard-drive, then play the slide show in Powerpoint). If you don't have Powerpoint, you can just listen to what a mad cow sounds like on a regular .wav file.

Administrative notes: From now on, I'm including a link for sending e-mails at the top of every addition I make to the pages. This is in preparation for the time when my brother will start adding stuff on the page as well. This way you'll be able to see who's writing the crap you're reading, and send your abusive comments easily and immediately.
Also, it seems that when these pages are opened with Navigator, they make the program crash. On the one side, that's just good, because the pages still look horrible in Netscape, even with my attempted corrections. On the other hand, I'm not going to take any blame for this, I've done everything by the book. There's no other explanation except that Microsoft has infiltrated my pages (and who knows how many others?) and added some secret code that causes Netscape to malfunction, thus getting more people to use IE. Also, underneath that stupid hairdo of his, Bill Gates has a burn mark of "666" on his forehead. Honest! I read it at billgatesistheantichrist.com. (ed. note: In truth, there are no such pages. BUT! Somebody has registered the domain, so look forward to getting some content there maybe in the future.
Mr. Gates (or any henchman thereof): this is just non-offensive humor, no need to erase my identity from every database in the world. Please?)

Mar. 5: Movietime

Watching movies is definitely one of my favorite pastimes. As I'm not the only person who thinks so, the Internet is packed with good movie sites.

For starters, you could check out Internet Movie Database. If there's something you want to find out about a movie that you can't find here, it's not worth knowing (one could argue that there's very little movie-related information that IS worth knowing, but that's just the philosopher in me talking). The one statistic that I like to check often for some reason are the all-time top box-office hits. You can make some interesting conclusions about cultural differences when comparing the US and International (meaning everything but US) lists.

Once you've seen all the movies playing in theaters, you might want to find out more about upcoming movies. A lot of stuff, any movie you think you've heard that there's going to be a sequel to, you'll definitely find here. T3, Matrix 2 & 3 etc...

Another great way to waste time is to rate movies you've seen. At Moviecritic.com, you enter ratings for movies, and it'll then tell you movies that you might possibly like (and dislike). It keeps telling you how many movies you've rated so far, so I'm using it to see how many movies I've seen. I'm up to 270 now, which is definitely not all of them, but it's difficult to come up with any new ones any more.

The oscars are just around the corner, so you might want to check out the official site. Obviously, there's a contest for guessing the winners. I don't really see the point for that. I mean, sure, everybody's going to have an opinion on what the best movie of the year is, but when it comes to "sound editing" or "best documentary short subject", we're all pretty much guessing, aren't we?
I have a long-standing project to watch all the Oscar-movies. With the current speed of one movie a week, it'll take me a little over a year, even discounting the ones I've already seen. And I'm not sure whether I'm so enthusiastic about all those musicals in the early days...