Work has started on the igloo at Harriniva.

The team at Harriniva in Finnish Lapland have started work on their Igloo. The excellent snow levels and cold nights, already at times as low as -30, are ideal conditions for building.

Guests staying at Harriniva during the winter can book a room in the igloo to stay in for the night. At Harriniva they build this one large igloo with a central chamber which will be furnished with an ice table and chairs in the coming weeks. Individual bedroom chambers then lead off the central room.

The cosy sleeping bag and crisp clean air are the ideal conditions for a good nights sleep, even when it is -30 outside.

Pictures of the finished, decorated igllo to follow shortly.

For further details on visiting Harriniva this coming winter click here.

Malcolm McLaren headlines at FutureDesignDays conference in Stockholm.

The list of adjectives that has been used to describe Malcolm McLaren, the notorious manager of punk rock band the Sex Pistols, is long, and not entirely pretty. McLaren was one of the headliners at the sixth annual FutureDesignDays conference in Stockholm this week.

He was joined in Stockholm by a motley crew of artists, architects, fashionistas, and other creative types that travelled from all over the world to contemplate the future of design.
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 “I’ve been accused of being many, many things… a con man, a charlatan, a thief, a murderer, a person inadvertently responsible for turning British culture into nothing more than some cheap marketing gimmick. But I’ve never ever been accused of being an artist,” the sixty-year-old Brit told The Local.

After dropping out of London art school in the early 1970s, McLaren has dabbled in a variety of creative mediums ranging from fashion design to music. And whatever others may think, McLaren considers himself to be an artist – although for him this does not necessarily mean picking up a paintbrush.

“I developed the art of provocation. I got rid of the idea of objective beauty as the classical vision of art. And I turned art into anything you wanted it to be,” he explained.

“What I had gathered and learned in art school, I was just carrying on. You could do it as the manager of a surrogate pop group that you could call the Sex Pistols and you could make these young sexy little assassins go off and create terrorist acts for the cultural good of the planet.”

With a grandmother who loved Christian Dior and a grandfather who was a tailor, McLaren was exposed to fashion at an early age. But in spite of these early experiences, or perhaps because of them, McLaren is very wary of what he calls the “treadmill.”
“I don’t really think it’s an interesting life to be on that treadmill and have to come up with next season’s big thing,” he said.

“If it wasn’t art enough, if it didn’t have a philosophy that had an inbuilt subversive quality and had all the style and sexuality to sell it…it just wasn’t worth doing. I wasn’t interested in fashion for fashion’s sake,” he said.

In 1971, McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood opened their first clothing shop, Let it Rock, on the King’s Road in London.

“Vivienne just wanted to be a successful fashion designer, and I helped her because she was such a brilliant foot soldier in the beginning,” McLaren reminisced. “And I did that for ten years. But ultimately I had to part because it just wasn’t intellectually interesting enough for me. And to be perfectly honest, I couldn’t emotionally connect.”

Although McLaren was perhaps the most well known and infamous personality descending on Stockholm for FutureDesignDays, he was not the only big name there. Other speakers included Japanese fashion designer Tsumori Chisato and British fashion stylist Alexia Somerville, who has dressed stars such as Robbie Williams and Pink.

FutureDesignDays was initially held in Borås in 2001, organized by FutureLab, a business development and communications agency based in western Sweden. The event took off and was moved to the vast Stockholm International Fairs exhibition centre in the capital in 2004.

Other highlights of this year’s event included the FutureDesignDays Award, which is presented to up-and-coming young designers. The winner of the 50,000 kronor award was the Swedish industrial design firm, FolkForm, with designers Anna Holmquist and Chandra Ahlsell picking up the cheque at a ceremony in the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall on Monday night.

Holmquist and Ahlsell experiment with innovative uses of natural materials. For instance, they have embedded a real butterfly in a masonite tabletop, aiming to create a “permanent organic decoration” on their furniture.

The other nominees for the FutureDesignDays Award were Cheap Monday, RAW Sweden, and Norwegian designer Marius Watz.

Cheap Monday, a rock-n-roll inspired Stockholm-based jeans label, has received notoriety in its own right. Last year, it came under fire in the American media due to the supposed anti-Christian messages communicated by its logo, a skull with an upside down cross on the forehead.

“We received some emails stating that we were going to burn in hell,” said assistant designer Carl Malmgren. “But it’s not an anti-Christian statement, and the logo is actually a Mexican symbol from the beginning. It looks a lot like the Day of the Dead skulls.”

Like McLaren, the self-proclaimed agent provocateur, Malmgren explained that for Cheap Monday, it has become “a provocative thing. Like an aesthetic rather than a political statement.”

Although attention the brand received from the Christian right was initially unintentional, Malmgren admitted, “we’re enjoying it.”

Charlotte West  Published: 15th November 2006 16:01 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/5519/

According to EU survey 77% of homes in Sweden have access to the Internet.

Swedish Internet access compares very well to that of other European countries, according to data released today by Eurostat. The European statistics office looked at access to the Internet in the EU25, as well as Norway and Iceland, for the first quarter of 2006.
For the period in question Sweden recorded more regular Internet users, 80 per cent, than any other European country.

A full 77 per cent of households in Sweden have access to the Internet. Only the Netherlands and Denmark, 80 and 79 per cent respectively, have more homes hooked up to the net.

Finland pipped Sweden to third spot when it came to broadband connections. Again the Netherlands led the pack with 66 per cent of its population wired up to high speed connections. Sweden’s 51 per cent was enough for fourth position.

Latvia, at 80 per cent, had the lowest proportion of businesses with Internet access. The equivalent figure for Sweden was 96 per cent.

Swedes and Danes in the 55-74 age range are active Internet users, with 56 per cent of the older group spending time online. In Greece only 4 per cent of people in this age group used the Internet.

Across the European Union more men (51%) than women (43%) use the Internet regularly. The corresponding figures for Sweden were 84 per cent of man and 76 per cent of women.

Results not great for the Finns but event is a success.

After a false start in Sölden, when the racing was cancelled owing to rain and unseasonably warm weather, the FIS World Cup season got under way at the Lapland resort of Levi over the weekend, with a women's slalom competition on Saturday and the first-ever men's World Cup competition hosted in Finland on Sunday.

By contrast with the inaugural 2004 Levi event, when Finnish #1 Tanja Poutainen took the women's slalom competition, the Finns were much more generous hosts, and neither Poutiainen nor Kalle Palander, who was returning after a long layoff from injury, could get into the top ten.

     
Poutiainen, who has normally shown a sunny disposition even when things did not go as planned, was visibly disappointed with her 14th place in the season's opener, while Palander was left with mixed feelings about his race. 
Poutiainen was fully 2.7 seconds behind winner Marlies Schild of Austria, with nearly two seconds of the gap coming on a rather erratic first run. Schild was followed home by Nicole Hosp and Katrin Zettel to give the Austrians a clean sweep. 
In recent years it has been unusual not to see Poutiainen's name among the top ten finishers. Apart from a few falls, she has been remarkably consistent and has only been outside the top ten once in the last four years, back in January 2004. She blamed her poor showing in part on early season excitement.
     

Kalle Palander, on the other hand, demonstrated eventually that he has recovered his old form after surgery on a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his knee. His first run was something of a trainwreck, however, leaving him dangerously close to not qualifying, down in 25th place. 
But his second try at the Levi Black hill produced a much better performance and the 3rd fastest time, hauling him up to 11th overall and putting a smile on his face. 
It was also a pleasant experience for the Finn to ski home safely in front of his mother: on the previous occasion in Åre in the spring, the first at which his mother had been present to see him ski at the top level, he had the accident that obliged a visit to the operating theatre.
     

Top honours in the men's event went to Benjamin Raich of Austria, making the weekend something of a family celebration, since Marlies Schild is Raich's girlfriend. 
Raich was the Olympic gold medallist in Torino, and so his win - the 23rd of his career - came as no great surprise. Second place went to Markus Larsson of Sweden, and the other spot on the podium was taken by Italy's Giorgio Rocca, the defending World Cup slalom champion. 

The next races on the calendar will be in Lake Louise, Canada (for the men) and Aspen (for the women) in two weeks' time.

For details on visiting Levi click here.

They propose that special bars be added to electricity poles

WWF Finland on Friday told the Finnish Energy Industries that special bars should be fixed on electricity poles so that white-tailed eagles could safely rest and observe the waters and terrain below.
According to the WWF's white-tailed eagle group, the bars would prevent power cuts caused by electrocuted birds.

The bars have already been tried in the Åland Islands.
In 30 years, Finland's white-tailed eagle population has increased from 40 nesting couples to 300. Between 1994 and 2001, 57 ringed white-tailed eagles were found dead in Finland. Studies show that 11 of these were electrocuted and 16 died after flying into a power line.
Finnish experts on white-tailed eagle protection gathered in Turku on Friday.

Hunters and police tracking the bear.

A bear was sighted on the streets of the southern city of Hämeenlinna last night. 
Around 8:30 this morning, judging by its tracks, the bear was believed to have moved to the area around the Aulankojärvi Lake east of the city. 
The bear is currently being tracked down by 20 hunters and police officers plus hunting dogs. "If it enters the city again, the aim is to kill it without putting the public in danger", explains crime chief inspector Kari Suominen from the Hämeenlinna police.

     
According to the police the bear does not appear aggressive and has so far presented no danger to people. 
"But of course we do not know how the animal's behaviour may change when there are more people about and it comes into direct contact with them", Jyrki Antila of the local police told the Finnish News Agency STT. 
According to Antila, people living in the immediate area would do wisely to stay at home if possible. Walking and bicycling should be avoided at all costs. 
"Children should be taken to schools and kindergartens by car", Antila emphasises. 
By mid-morning on Thursday, police officers had been detached from the hunting party, leaving only the hunters and their dogs.
     

This is not by any means the first occasion on which a bear has "gone urban": a couple of years ago there was near-hysteria in parts of the capital area after a bear was sighted trundling down a street in suburban Espoo. On that occasion, the creature decided it really did not fancy built-up areas after all, and it went back home to the woods of the nearby Nuuksio natural park.

To see bears for yourself try some bear watching next summer, click here for details.

Lordi biography just proves they are hard working, nice guys........

If everything had gone completely according to the original plan, then the members of rock act Lordi would still be unknown to the general public - aside from in their monster roles and extravagant costumes.
Such a vacuum in their civilian profiles would have paved the way for a truly splendid work of fiction about their monstrous characters and behaviour.
     
Things did not go quite that way, however. After the sensational Eurovision victory had been snatched up by Mr. Lordi and his scaly and sharp-nailed chums, the entire five-piece outfit wound up on the tabloid flyers with their faces rudely shorn of latex.
YOU being a monster after that.
Jussi Ahlroth's lavishly illustrated 270-page Lordi volume deals with the monster rockers by their given names rather than their roles - in other words they are real people with real lives.
This is simultaneously the book's strength and its main weakness.
     
On the one hand, the approach does work. The history of the phenomenon known as Lordi, with its disappointments and lucky breaks, is dealt with in such a way that it is obvious to all readers that the band's boss and front-man, Tomi Putaansuu from Rovaniemi, has worked his ass off in order to realise the dreams he had as a little boy.
Then again, this is really just about his work, and for all the interesting details and sometimes surprising connections that are thrown up, the shaping of Putaansuu's dream into its present manifestation does not make for incredibly fascinating reading.
To boil it all down: a man who has always wanted to be a monster, is now one, and that's about all there is to it.
     
There is also a slight problem lurking in the fact that basically Putaansuu is a nice gent.
There's no getting away from it; he doesn't get trashed or throw TVs out of hotel windows, and as a result the team doesn't exactly stampede across the pages of the book, either.
Of course, opinions can vary, but in my view at least, a book about rock should be able to sling a little ordure on the walls.
The most exciting stuff in the Mie oon Lordi book (the title translates to "I am Lordi", but delivered in a thick Rovaniemi dialect - the one Putaansuu shied away from using too much for fear it might undercut the menace of his character) is on the level of who was going out with whom, and what people thought about it.
And this is not really enough.
     
Still, I suppose the official biographical tomes about Lordi's great-grand-daddy, the American band Kiss, were not themselves exactly a milestone of gonzo journalism. So the Finnish band are on the same wavelength as their idols.
The object of the book is presumably to present properly the idea of and the background to the whole Lordi creation, and to correct some widely-held false assumptions, and in this department it does its job well enough.
Ahlroth writes fluently, the book is well structured, the layout is nice, and it is not difficult to wade through the entire package.
     
A little extra scaly flesh around the bones comes in the form of an appendix that collects all sorts of trivia information from the background to the individual Lordi characters through the making of the masks and the stage pyrotechnics on, and on to merchandising matters.
In a few "Lordi Lets Rip" side-bar panels, our friendly demon expresses his opinions on various subjects that get on his wick, such as music critics, the media, and booze. It would have done no harm to have a bit more oomph in this section, too, as most of the growling is pretty predictable stuff.
     
The book is actually at its best in the opening pages, where Putaansuu's monstrous - in the nicest possible sense of the word - childhood is presented to the reader more in a narrative fashion than in dry reference book manner.
One witty touch is that his childhood snapshots have been systematically retouched to show Mr. Lordi's features rather than the young Tomi who smiles out from the family album pages.
This entertaining opening section again makes one ponder what could have been achieved with a fictitious bio, if only the mystery surrounding the band and its members had not been punctured along the way, or in other words without all the fuss surrounding this year's Eurovision Song Contest.
Then again, without that, would it be likely we'd have had this book at all?
     
In any event, Jussi Ahlroth's effort is unlikely to be the last word on Lordi, at least if the rumours that the legendary Kiss manager Bill Aucoin might be getting involved with the band prove to be true.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.11.2006
     
     
Jussi Ahlroth: Mie oon Lordi publ. Johnny Kniga, 272 pages, EUR 39.00.
     
     
The writer of this review is the editor-in-chief of specialist heavy rock fanzine Inferno

Visitors to Harriniva this December will be able to meet the Husky litter.

Avalon, Aragon and Aurin and their sisters Akita and Aura are keeping their mother busy and are growing fast. Any time now they will be transfering to the kindergarten where they will have more space and greater independence.

Harriniva already has a decent covering of snow, more is forecast for the coming week and temperatures are constantly dipping below -10. This means that the puppies are looking on with interest as the older dogs at the husky farm are setting off on training runs as the first husky safaris will start by the end of the month.

If you are visiting Harriniva this December you will be able to meet the huskies in person. Please send us your favourite photos of them.

For further details on visiting Harriniva in December click here and for the remainder of the winter click here. 

Transport systems badly hit again!

Dreadful weather conditions continued in Finland on Wednesday, with a fierce blizzard complicating life in the southern and central parts of the country. In places up to 30 centimetres of snow were recorded. Traffic on the main roads was badly hit, as were rail and sea connections, but no serious accidents were reported.

The rail traffic between the cities of Lahti and Lappeenranta came to a three-hour halt at 8:30 in the evening when the gusty winds caused some trees to fall on the track. Six of the evening's departures ran late because of this. 
The snow cover is expected to stay on the ground in the coming days, for the weather forecast predicts the temperature will stay below freezing. The heavy snowfall, however, seems to be over for now.

     
The blizzard started on Tuesday, when warm moist air from the sea met with a cold continental front. 
While the coastal areas received both rain, sleet, and snow, further inland a heavy snowfall turned the landscape white. 
The municipality of Kalvola in the Province of Häme, for one, had received 29 centimetres of snow by Wednesday morning. 
"This doesn't happen every winter, that's for sure", says meteorologist Matti Heinonen from the Finnish Meteorological Institute.
     

In places the blizzard made for chaos on the roads. The Pirkanmaa Emergency Exchange was notified of no less than 130 collisions in a 24-hour period. The City of Tampere simply did not have enough vehicles equipped with snowploughs to deal with such a heavy and abrupt dump of snow. 
Trailer trucks stuck in the snow and slush were a particular nuisance on many of the highway stretches in Southern Finland. Trucks jammed up traffic for several hours on Highway 3 in Hämeenkyrö, Highway 10 in Tarvasjoki, and Highway 12 in Savitaipale. 
Some of the express ferry departures between Helsinki and Tallinn were again cancelled because of the treacherous weather conditions. 
Train timetables were affected in Tampere and Lahti. Because of the electrical switches that kept freezing up, every other departure between Helsinki and Tampere had to be cancelled. 
The faults were repaired in the afternoon and today, Thursday, all the trains should run again as normal, the state railway company VR assures users.
     

Fixing the power lines that were damaged by falling trees will take longer, however. Thousands of households in the Provinces of Finland Proper and Northern Savo may have to manage without electricity even through Thursday. 
The mail delivery services are also struggling with the snow and slippery roads. "We received half of the winter's snow in one night. What is that all about?" postman Veikko Pasanen from Lappeenranta laughs, surrounded by chest-deep piles of snow.
     

According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute the snow will not melt right away. Temperatures in the region of -5 to -10 degrees Celsius are predicted for southern and central parts of the country. 
The forecast for Lapland is 15 to 20 degrees below freezing.

The last month has seen Sweden gripped by farmer fever.

TV4's Bonde söker fru (The Farmer Wants a Wife) has proved a barnstorming success and has already overtaken Idol 2006 as TV4's most popular programme.

Over 1.5 million Swedes plonk themselves in front of the telly twice a week to watch four lucky farmers interact with a bevy of potential wives.
It all began in May when viewers were presented with eight farmers and asked to write to the one they most admired. The four farmers who got the most replies are the ones who will continue to grace our screens until late November.

Once Andreas, Marcus, Mikael and Per Martin had cast a critical eye over their fan mail they in turn selected a group of favourites. These female admirers then came to the farm to try to win the heart of their farmer of choice.

But were these single women ready for life on a farm? Would hearts melt when they encountered their favourite farmer in the flesh? Would the farmers regret the whole thing and wish they were back with their pigs and potatoes? Or would love blossom and wedding bells ring?

Enough people were interested in finding out to make the whole endeavour more than worthwhile for TV4. Nor did the channel walk blindly into the project. The Farmer Wants a Wife has already achieved a top rating for channels in Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The series has now passed the half-way mark and the farmers have managed to separate the wheat from the chaff. They are each left with four potential wives.

Lars Höök from the Federation of Swedish Farmers has long understood the lure of the farmer. In 2001 his organisation launched a farmers’ calendar, which went down so well with punters that it needed to be reprinted three times in its first year.

He is planning to watch The Farmer Wants a Wife for the first time today.

"I have heard it is quite good. It is not like your average reality show. It is more serious and the intention seems to be to make a good quality programme," Höök told the Local.

"The impression I've got is that they portray farming as it really is. They do not try to make a fool of the farmers, who are just ordinary guys who would like to find a wife"

Höök has some theories regarding the concept's popularity.

"The farmer has a cult status in society. In a globalised world, where everything is moving so fast, people look for things that are stable and mature. And it doesn't get much more stable and mature than a farmer."

The growth in farmers' popularity is not all that new, according to Höök. He points to the success of the Swedish film The Guy in the Grave Next Door, a sort of farmer-meets-librarian romantic comedy, which is still doing well on the rental charts four years after its release.

"Then I think that after 9/11, when there was so much focus on terrorism and fear, a lot of people went back to basics. In a complex world farming is understandable to people."

Finally, Höök reminds us that Swedish urban development came quite late.

"There is a little farmer in all of us," he said.

"Sometimes that farmer gets bigger in our hearts. It comforts us."