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

So I've driven around the US for the past three weeks, visiting 21 states in 21 days. And following the good advice that you should never trust anything you read on the Internet (a lie, a huge lie, a statistic, an Internet poll...), I didn't end up going to Wyoming or Salt Lake City as some of you suggested. I did see Las Vegas and as much of (of, not as!) Texas as possible, which the other half of you suggested I'd do. Incidentally, Wyoming is the only state that is perfectly rectangular, I learned on this trip. What I also learned is that you should forget any prejudices you may have of a state in terms of how worthless it might be to visit it, I was positively surprised on several occasions (okay, Delaware was still pretty boring. And Kansas too. Hell, just keep your prejudices).

I'm still not through with the trip, though. We still have a little less than two weeks to get from DC to Boston, which means that we'll be visiting some other places still, maybe even Canada. Meanwhile, hopefully you're also enjoying your early summer vacation from constantly reading what's going on at Kekkuli.com. Not much, as you can see. But we'll be back. With a vengeance, hopefully (Remember that change I've been promising? It's coming, I promise).

It has been indeed a very quiet month here in kekkuli, and as the sun is shining more brigthly and longer every day, it looks like it might be a somewhat quiet summer too. Well, at least till Jani gets back from his travels and fixes this mess that he remotely created. If anybody noted, I did manage to save and re-post my 4th of May story. Well done moi. Anyway, to start things up again and cheer up this latter spring time, here is a classic story some of you might have read. The Washington Post's Style Invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some recent winners.

1) Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
2) Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
3) Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
4) Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
5) Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
6) Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
7) Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
8) Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
9) Glibido: All talk and no action.
10) Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
11) Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
12) Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

As you can see, the temporary fix we were able to do to our little problem kind of erased everything we've written over the last month or so. So you'll have to reread those entries from March that we now have up if you don't get your daily dosage of Kekkuli otherwise. I think this is where we'll stand until I get back home in June, when I'll be able to retrieve most of the stuff that was now lost. Slowly, you begin learning the importance of backups...

Damn Swedes...

So it turns out that thing with the site not looking right was not computer-specific, but that the computer I was using screwed up the pages permanently (I blame the Compuserve browser I had to use, may they burn in hell). What it actually did was delete all the attributes from tags, meaning that links don't point to anywhere, images are not shown, and most of the font attributes don't show up. In other words, no hacker could've done as much damage if they'd tried. The good news is that I have a backup of most of the texts and links, the bad news is that I can't get to them when I'm in the US. So as a quick fix, we'll try to get some version of the pages up as soon as possible so that they don't look as awful as they currently do, and we'll fill in the holes left by this bug once I get back from this trip. I swear, it's always when I'm travelling that something goes wrong with these pages. Bear with us.

Well, before any submitter to our poll on the ice hockey winner is embarrased by an early exit by one of the favorite countries, we better change that poll. This time, you have the chance to control the destiny of three foreigners in the wilderness of what is the US of A. Obviously I'm not going to take some poll as the final word but hell, if enough people tell me that Wyoming is the place to be then that's something to consider. So like I've mentioned before, in a few days we'll begin on a roadtrip throughout the USA with no specific target in mind. We might stop and spend two weeks in New Orleans, we might go for San Diego, or we might find ourselves deep in Mexico (well, not really, due to insurance reasons: we are specifically prohibited from driving in Mexico). So make your voice heard, with comments if possible. I'll reemphasize that we have not concrete planned, and a convincing word in one direction might take us just there.
So far, we've seen New York and Philadelphia (in addition to Reykjavik) and I have to say: some prejudices I hold have been somewhat erased, others have nothing but strenghtened. This really is a one of a kind of a country, I'll give you that.

Wow, this computer I'm working on makes these pages look awful. I really hope it's only this computer and that it hasn't done something to screw the page up permanently. If that is the case, then you'll have to try to tolerate it for a little while, until I get online again and try to fix it. Let's just hope it's temporary...

The ice hockey world championships go on, and although Jani might really be having trouble watching the games now that team USA is totally out of the competition, some other nationalities have had much to rejoice. Take for example Denmark. This country has played only once before in the world championships, something like 60 years ago, and then they lost to Canada 47-0. Now they beat the USA and tied with Canada, so pretty good improvement one could say, although by now they are pretty much out of the race anyhow. Something else that could really improve, and at a faster pace I hope, are the currently circulating "Ice Hockey chants", songs specifically created for the magna event for all morons to purchase. And they do, which is amazing, for most songs on the official cd at least, are oldies which you have heard a trillion times and the new ones are mostly horrible crap. As we Finns are not even taking part in the Eurovision contest this year, we really should leave the songmaking to the Swedes who are masters at it. Take for example sport songs like Den Glider In, or Explodera, the official song for Swedens European Championship Football team. I cant find any links for the songs, so just use Kazaa to download them all while you're at it. Sing along!

Speaking of songs, how about this one from the real Saddam Hussein? If you really listen to it, the song seems to tell us the truth about the whole war issue. Well, I wouldn't know anything about that, but if truth is what you are looking for, listen to this banging song. Also, here is a new approach to country music... Oh, and happy belated first of May to everybody!