Sisu

“Have you heard of Finnish sisu?” asks a character in “Mortlake” — and it turns out that sisu is a sort of stamina or staying-power which the Finns have had to develop as a result of living next door to the Russians.
— Nigel Dennis, New York Times Book Review

When my car’s engine was threatening to stop as I was driving in the darkness to NYC, I was thinking of this clip. Not because of all the driving prowess, but because of what they said about sisu — a Finish version of guts, spine and other organs symbolizing courage and determination.

Lesson over, we stopped for a cup of hot raindeer blood [not really] and talked about why the Fins are so suited for motorsports.
— Tell me a bit about sisu. What’s sisu?
— Sisu in English means “courage”. What to a Fin is courage. Let me give you an example. Climbing up this tree. And then jumping down from there. Now that doesn’t mean sisu. It’s not courage.
— That’s stupidity.
— Exactly. Now, sisu we can relate very much to in motorracing. For example, you are driving a rally car in a forest extremely very fast. And you need courage to break light, to go throttle very early or go very close to the apex of the corners...

Now, I didn’t need to do any of that. I just needed to keep driving. In a way, it took more sisu (if I have any — I was born just across the border from Finland) than driving through ice on I-84E that I did last winter.

A little more sisu:

Не имей сто рублей, а имей сто друзей

There is a Russian saying, above: Nye imey sto rubley, a imey sto druzey (I am transliterating to demonstrate that it rhymes). It means: “Don’t have one hundred rubles; have one hundred friends.” (It made more sense back in the days when one hundred rubles was relatively a lot of money.)

My car’s thermostat went bust, as a result of which my antifreeze was not cycling back into the radiator. The pressure built up, and the opposite pipe burst open, leaking out all the antifreeze. As a result, my engine obviously started overheating. Only when the smoke filled the car, I realized that something was wrong (I know approximately as much about mechanics as a regular mechanic knows about Neuroscience; the fact that the temperature needle went all the way to the right and that heating stopped working meant nothing to me).

My neighbor (the son of my landlady) replaced the pipe and the thermostat (and drove me to the AutoZone to buy all the parts and the antifreeze). The whole affair cost me about $36. My local mechanic would probably tell me that I need to replace the whole radiator.

When asked “What do I owe you?”, my neighbor answered: “Nothing. I like fooling with this kind of stuff.” (I am still going to buy him a case of beer, though.)

Hence the above Russian saying.

(Need I mention that he is from Russia? Need I mention that he is Jewish?)

Russian problem — Russian solution.

Background: While driving along the road, sometimes a Russian driver wants to eat some peaches. To do so, he can stop and buy some from a local old lady selling them along the road (with regular intervals — not just pears, all kinds of stuff).

Problem: After sitting in the heat the whole day, the peaches become hot. A driver wants to eat cold peaches.

Solution: Put the pears in a plastic bag; hang the bag on the rear-view mirror, over the A/C vents. Turn the A/C on max. In a short while you’ll have cold peaches.



[via Artemiy Lebedev]

Government backs your waranty

So. Many. Jokes.

It is just too hard for me to determine which of the thousand or so jokes in my mind deserves to be voiced out. And besides, whatever I write, it is still going to be not as funny as seeing this clown speak himself:



The only question that comes to mind is: does he believe himself in what he is saying? Or is this the biggest mass-scale scam in the history of the Western society since Reform Judaism?

TopGear on Communist cars

My favorite part — 12:38:

In Russia, you had to work hard on car factories, or you’d suddently discover how difficult it is to mine Siberian salt, while wearing a hat made from your wife’s head.

British Communists didn’t really bother with any of that. Mostly, in fact, they didn’t bother turning up to work at all. They’d simply make their way to factory’s gates, where they’d spend the rest of their day chatting.

See also 9:12 for British Communist car (“The nerve to call it ‘super’. I suppose you couldn’t just call it ‘Trotskyite crap’. Maybe that’s what TC stands for”).

More on UK liberals.

I wonder what American cars bailed out by Obama and the rest of Politburo will look like in a few years.

It’s also always amazing how, given a choice of two syllables in a Slavic word, an English speaker will always put a stress on the wrong one. It must be the English and American way of distinguishing themselves — after all, they can’t speak through their noses like French.

And, finally, how difficult is “Zaporozhetz” to pronounce? It’s not like we are forcing you to say “Dnieprodzerzhinsk”.


(full version)