My Other Projects: Existential Questions, Budapest City Guide, and Helsinki City Guide

I’m really an overambitious person… I work full-time, yet I now write five different blogs, as well as administering quite a few groups on Facebook. Oh, and a forum for the Existential Questions blog…

Allow me a minute or two to run through my side projects which I operate in addition to my personal blog at http://janihelle.wordpress.com and my Political Science/Stupidity blog at http://hellipsis.wordpress.com.

My most ambitious project has to be Existential Questions. Over a few beers I got a great idea for a Facebook group and a blog, as well as a forum and a web TV channel in the works.
The whole idea is to collect a database of responses to life’s questions, such as What Is The Meaning Of Life? and Are We Alone In The Universe?, as well as debating about more controversial issues such as Abortion and Creation vs Evolution.
If you’re interested, you can find the blog at http://existentialquestions.wordpress.com. Don’t forget about the Forum, the Facebook group, or the Existential TV channel!

My two newest projects are only a few days old. Somewhat similar to Existential Questions, these two are attempts at Travel Guide 2.0. As the web moves towards being more and more user-generated, most travel guides are still dragging their feet.

With this in mind, I have started the Budapest City Guide and the Helsinki City Guide, two cities close to my heart.

The whole premise is that you can spend years in one city and never learn about all the cool places to go, see and experience. Traditional travel guides only go so far as to mention that these places exist. People who actually spend time there will always know better. That is the key point with these groups/blogs. Anyone who reads this and has been to, lived in or wanted to visit Budapest or Helsinki could gain from these guides. All it takes is for you, the reader, to share your experiences! Please visit the blogs at http://budapestcityguide.wordpress.com and http://helsinkicityguide.wordpress.com and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feeds for each site! If you’re on Facebook, don’t forget to check out and join the Budapest City Guide group and the Helsinki City Guide group!

I’ll leave you with a few slogans for these projects:
Do You Exist?

What Are YOUR Favourite Things About Budapest?

What Are YOUR Favourite Things About Helsinki?

American Family Comes To Finland, Seeks Refugee Status: Are Things Really THIS Bad In America?

Here’s a headline from a free newspaper, Uutislehti 100, which made me wonder: “American Family Seeks Refuge”

I’m sorry, what? Are things really THIS bad, politically or otherwise, in the United States? Allow me to translate and paraphrase the newspaper clipping for those of you who don’t speak Finnish:

An American family of five is seeking refuge in Finland. The man and woman with their three underage children arrived at the Helsinki-Vantaa International Airport on Tuesday (Sep 18) from Germany. The papers for seeking refuge were filed at the airport and the claim is being processed at the Finnish Directorate of Immigration.
No further details concerning the reasons and ground for seeking refuge were released.
Finland considers the United States a safe country and the claims for refugee status will be processed with that in mind.
Because the family arrived in Finland from Germany, the processing of any claims for refugee status should be dealt with in Germany.
[Source: Uutislehti 100/STT]


Most likely the family will not be granted refugee status as they’re not exactly coming from a war-torn country and they aren’t being persecuted for their religious or political views.

Which brings me to my earlier question: are things really so bad in America that Americans are moving to the Old World in search of a safe haven? Is it really that bad to be under the leadership of Dubya? The next presidential elections in America are getting truly underway in mere months as the preliminaries kick off in February. Change is (possibly) just around the corner. Patience America, patience. Political change is coming. You know that the first thing each incoming President does is attempt to undo everything the previous President achieved or messed up…

I can’t fathom, for the life of me, why any American would seek refuge anywhere, especially in Finland. Sure, Finland is far more liberal than the U.S., especially right now, but hey, we don’t even have Wal-Mart or Taco Bell (we do have universal healthcare, free education, one of the best public transportation systems in the world, the least corruption in the world, etc etc…)!

Can you figure out a possible reason why an American family might file a claim for refugee status in another Western nation?

I’ll update this post if any more news is published about the family and their reasons for seeking refuge in Finland.

Source:
Uutislehti 100, September 21st 2007, Issue #154 (2339)

Where Were You On September 11th, 2001?

September 11th, 2001 is our generation’s D-Day or Pearl Harbor, to name a few, a catastrophic event which is remembered by asking people where they were when it happened.

Today marks the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. There’ll be demonstrations and there’ll be remembrance events. Will there be another terrorist attack? Probably not. Too obvious. Today is most likely the safest day to fly in America. Then there’s all the conspiracy theories of the events of 9/11. Do you believe in any of them? Was 9/11 an inside job? If you know any “credible” theories of 9/11 on the net, add the link with a small description below in the comments section!

Six years ago today I was a senior in high school in Hungary, on a bus with the other seniors, heading to Bovec, Slovenia for fall trips. Around the half point of our 12-hour bus ride, our school director paused the movie we were watching and announced that there’s been an incident in New York. It was around the time that people knew that it wasn’t an accident. Naturally, blame was immediately attributed to several powers, such as Muslims, Palestinians, and Americans. Someone even suggested the Japanese… Obviously, none of us had any clue as to what had really happened. We were on a bus with barely any means of communication to the outside world, with the exception of the school director calling the school a few times to get updates and one student’s Nokia Communicator from which was somewhat broken as only about one word out of four were legible from the screen. What he managed to decipher from one piece of news was that in the region of 50,000-100,000 had died. What was left out was that that number was the number of people working in the Twin Towers on a normal day. You can imagine the panic that some people went through. There were some 35ish of us on the bus from many different nationalities, mainly Americans. Upon reaching our destination, most of us retreated into our hotel rooms to watch the news on TV. Spending the trip in a room with two Americans, what was surprising was that I was the one who stayed up until 2am to watch President Bush’s speech to the nation and the rest of the world… The next evening, we got drunk on Slovenian wine.

So, where were you on September 11th, 2001? What did you do that day? Where were you when you first heard about the attacks? Please reply in the comments section below!



Video: Alternative Theories of 9/11

 

Warning: If you have no sense of humor, or if you knew someone who perished on 9/11, please do not watch this video as it may offend you. This video was shot in good humor, and there is no script involved. So what do you think? Is there any truth to this theory? Or is it as outlandish as the rest? Please, share your views on this theory in the comments section below.

If the embedded player above doesn’t work for you, click the thumbnail to the left.