Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Dead Rudolph


I went for a walk today to check out the preparations for the end-all-and-be-all Christmas festival of the world--the Weinachtsmarkt.  America has already been soundly put to holiday-celebrating shame, and the Rostock festival hasn't even started yet.

I saw this booth from the Finnish Tourism Agency and thought it was both disturbing and hilarious.   Ruuuudolph?  Is that youuu?  No, no, it can't be!  Is it...is...it...Nooooooo!

Also, that reindeer is seriously only about four feet tall.  Did you know reindeer were so small?  I think all those Christmas movies from my past totally thought elk were the same as reindeer.  They. are. not.  A bit of ethnocentrism going on there.

Finnland now has two "n"s just so you know.

And did I tell you that I'm working at the Max Planck Institute now?  I have my own office and I'm working on a project about FinNland, no less!  So, here's to you FinNland, dead Rudolph, and the Christmas Market that starts on Thursday.

4 comments:

  1. We know we should have come at Christmas time. We haven't heard about your new job! We are finally home so we need to Skype soon. Love your blogs as usual. We are still soooo jealous! Love, Mom

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  2. So Tim is totally curious about your project on FinNland....what is it about? Do you get to go there at some point to research?
    And, speaking of dead Rudolph, he says reindeer is good on pizza....and also in steak form.")
    Sherrie")

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  3. Hey Sherrie!

    The FinNland project is a big demography study of all the little parishes around FinNland in the 18th century. There's a demographer here who has a big database of all the information from parish church records, but he wants to see if trends in births/deaths/lifespans/etc. are related to location, and if so, how much. So right now I'm just going through each parish's name and finding exactly where it was, putting it into a GIS, and then eventually making some pretty trend maps to see if there's anything to his hypothoses. It's really fun!

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  4. Oh, and no, I don't think I'll get to go to FinNland for the project--but we'd like to go to Helsinki just for a trip sometime! We'll try out that reindeer pizza! (They put Tuna Fish on the pizza here...weirds me out more than reindeer for some reason).

    ReplyDelete

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