Dave's Travel Journals
Happy Paavo Nurmi Day!
Stockholm, Sweden: June 13, 2001
By Dave Fox
Today in Finland, it's Paavo Nurmi day. I know this because yesterday at a park in Helsinki, I was accosted by a radio reporter who was interviewing foreigners to see if we knew what or who Paavo Nurmi is or was. I got the answer right on my second guess, and rumor has it my incredible mastery of Finnish society was to be broadcast to trillions of listeners in Helsinki this morning. (I could not hear the interview because we were arriving back in Stockholm on the overnight boat at the time it aired.)
Anyway... you, yes you, can win a fun and fabulous, cheap, tacky souvenir from the Finland party boat duty free shop if you are the first person to accurately tell me who or what Paavo Nurmi is or was. Good Luck!
We Have a Winner!
Kalmar, Sweden: June 14, 2001
Okay... you people spend too much time on the internet. The next time I can't be bothered to look up some obscure factoid myself, I am going to have a contest. I am astounded by how many people responded to my Paavo Nurmi trivia contest. And most of the responses were right. Most, but not all....
My cousin Lucy wrote, "I have no idea who Paavo Nurmi was. I do question your assertion that anything in Finnish gets heard by 'trillions' of people."
Well, actually, I was interviewed by the Swedish language service of Radio Finland. Swedish is an official language in Finland... presumably because Finnish is so complicated, trying to learn it can cause violent seizures.
Jätä maksupalvelukuori pankkiin vähintään 5 pankkipäivää ennen maksupäivää.
(The preceding sentence says something about a bank.)
More Radio Finland trivia: It is the only shortwave service in the world that broadcasts the news in Latin every day. For fairly obvious reasons.
My friend Beth also took a wild guess. She wrote, "I had to think a long time. I had to drink several beers. I had to eliminate the truly awful answers. I settled on a merely inane reply. Paavo Nurmi, a.k.a. 'the big bird,' was the founder of Finland."
Beth, you are amazing. You are wrong, but you are amazing. Paavo Nurmi was not the founder of Finland, nor was he called "the big bird," but he was known as the "Flying Finn." For a guess that close, I will buy you a beer the next time you come to Seattle.
Several people had the correct answer, but the first person to reply, the person who wins a tacky Finnish souvenir, is Kirsten Cook of Seattle.
Kirsten,
you have won a Moomintroll thermometer refrigerator magnet. The Moomintrolls
are the national cartoon characters of Finland -- mythical creatures with
a startling resemblence to hippos. Check them out at moomintroll.com.
(Actually I have no clue if this is a real website. And for all I know
it could be a hardcore porn site, so go there at your own risk.) I will
post a picture of your ultracool magnet thermometer on my website when
I get back to Seattle next week.
Paavo Nurmi, for those of you with better things to do than look him up on a search engine, was a Finnish sports hero in the 1920s. He was a runner who won nine gold and three silver medals in the 1924 Summer Olympics. He broke a staggering 25 world records. And my friend Gwen astutely noted, "He died in 1973, but that's not his fault."
[Update -- May 28, 2006: For real information about the Moomin family, check out the link at Wikipedia.org. Thanks to Bjarne in Bergen, Norway, for the tip.]
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