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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2009 January 30

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January 30 edit

Finnish humour edit

Not sure if this is the right desk, but my question is about Finnish humour. Once in an ad there's a couple who pole walk in their backyard, trick their dinner guests with store bought sauce, and refer to Finnish humour. After reading the origins of the name Molotov cocktail and what they called the Russian bombs in response to propaganda, I'm wondering if there are more examples and references, preferably historical, but anything really. Julia Rossi (talk) 05:03, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Geez, that's a good but awfully broad question, Julia! I'm kind of racking my brains here, trying to figure out a reasonable answer to it. I mean, I could come up with examples, but I'm a little hesitant to do that simply because it wouldn't be a very comprehensive answer -- it'd be a little like saying that Friends is an example of American humor, which would definitely be true, but that doesn't necessarily mean that Friends is representative of it, you know? There's plenty of Finnish humor on the internet, of course, but the language barrier is a kind of a problem here, and humor is always difficult to explain.
But! Don't despair, Wikipedia to the rescue: of course we have a helpful category, Finnish comedy and humor. Unfortunately, the articles under it aren't that great and the selection isn't necessarily terribly comprehensive, but I figure if you check out the entries there, you'll have at least some idea of what this entails, and if you have additional or more specific questions after that, I can probably be a little more helpful. =) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 09:03, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]


Julia, you asked for "anything, really", so... as a neighbour, when I mentally combine "Finnish" and "Hilarious", the first performer that comes to mind is M. A. Numminen, especially with this song, which I can understand, because it is sung in Swedish. The lyrics go "like a rubber ball, I come back to you", over and over again. I realise that to an outsider this just seems somewhat weird, but I can assure you, there are lots of people (yours truly included) who find this song absolutely hilarious. There is a lot of humour in the Moomin universe. Then there are the Pekka and Toivonen jokes, which, I suppose aren't really examples of Finnish humour, but rather humour at the expense of the Finnish. Otherwise, to a neighbour who is old enough to have endured Finnish TV theatre in the early 1970's, a time when there wasn't a lot of channels to chose from, humour is not the first thing that comes to mind... It's more like "suicide, booze, sauna, more booze, murder, booze, making your own coffin (best to be prepared), booze, sauna..." --NorwegianBlue talk 20:25, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking of Finnish entertainment... [here]'s an example with subtitles. 84.239.160.166 (talk) 20:40, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Cap D, NorBlue, 84.2, that's wonderful and unexpected. Thank you, I just love it – quirky, larrikin, spoofy, cool stuff. Even the rubber boomeranging ball breaks me up. The eaten pie offering. The wrong house and the unfazed neighbour. Sorry about the bigness of question, but you nailed it. Of course if you are inspired further, let it loose here. There had to be something special about people returning a joke under pressure – grin from this ear to this other ear You're too good. :)) PS I'm starting to get the stubbornness too. Is there anything like the American, the Englishman and the Australian using Finns, Swedes etc? As Pekka and Toivonen, everyone seems to like a pecking order ... Julia Rossi (talk) 09:17, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, absolutely -- Swedes and Russians are favorites in addition to the Finns in those jokes, I think, but we're not that picky. (Content-wise, they're pretty much the same as every other "X, Y and Z walk into a bar" joke you ever heard. =)) -- Captain Disdain (talk) 17:04, 1 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Julia, then you will love Aki Kaurismäki's moovies, as I do. As to your original question, I suspect that, responding with jokes to bombing, is not peculiar of the Finnish character only. It rather depends (IMHO) on how close are the explosions. I heard about similar jokes in analogous circumstances (e.g., in trenches of WWI): they are made to take hart, mainly. But if the bombing get too close and intense, as we have to see every day, people get crazy, or die for hart attack, even children. So Finnish jokes about bombings, I think, are rather due to the extremely low population density of the country (it's only 17 per Km2). Or if you want, to the particular odd attitude (a kind of sense of humor, we may say) of the Soviet Army to throw bombs in the middle of a desert and frozen land (after all, they never bombed civilians, did they?) --pma (talk) 12:02, 4 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

summary of human affairs (present day) edit

can someone give me a brief (one hefty paragraph) summary of human affairs (present day)? I had good luck previously here at the reference desk asking for a summary of human history. I am now looking for the same length and depth but with attention to present human affairs. Thank you!


for your inspiration you can use the summary of human history:

Well, let's give it a try, shall we :) A very short, very abridged (and badly written) summary of the state of the world:
Today, the dominant power militarily is the United States and economically, the United States along with Western Europe. In East Europe Russia, after 50 years of being a superpower and a subsequent collapse, is once again ascendant, although they have quite a ways off until they reach superpower status.
The future, however, lies in Asia. The two mos populous nations in the world (India and China) are pulling themselves up from the relative poverty that afflicted them during the 20th century, and are becoming economic powerhouses due to adoption of more liberal market policies. India has also adopted democracy which will only help them in the future. It should be noted that they are not alone, they are just the most powerful; there exists today a number of rapidly developing economies, former third-world countries that are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and as a consequence will enormously expand the economy on the timescale of a few decades (Brazil and Eastern Europe being good examples).
It is not all good news. Many parts of Africa are still starving and in desperate need of aid. The AIDS epidemic has devastated the continent and is currently the leading cause of death in developing countries.
Currently, we are suffering through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It has severely (if temporarily) contracted the world economy. Experts predict that it will last to around 2010-2011, before the things get back to normal.
In addition to (or perhaps in response to) this world-wide liberalization of markets, there is developing a large grassroots movement for religious fundamentalism, especially in the Arab world. Unlike the enemies of the previous century, these are rarely entire governments or leaders of nations, these groups come from below. With the USs involvement in middle eastern affairs and Israels continued attacks on the Palestinians, these groups show no sign of weakening.
The world have shown signs of polarization in the last decade, following the 9/11 attack and the hard line taken by former US president Bush. The US has become hated in many parts of the world, much more so than previously. President Obama has promised a more conciliatory and diplomatic approach to foreign policy, however it is unknown at this time whether it will have much of an impact, but hope (as they say), is on the rise.
Finally, the world faces not only geopolitical and economic difficulties, but scientific ones as well. After the industrial revolution, the world has been releasing huge amounts of excess greenhouse gases, causing the average temperature of the world to increase faster than it would have naturally. This will lead to a rapid increase in famines, droughts, rising of sea levels and possibly many other problems. This is a recognized problem in the world, and most developed countries are taking action to slow it down, yet thus far there has been little noticeable effect.
Does that do? Don't quite know what you'd want it for, though, but there you go. Belisarius (talk) 12:52, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
This is a much more difficult assignment than a summary of world history, because we lack the perspective on the present day that history affords. Belisarius has done an admirable job, but others can and will differ on what should be included in or excluded from a brief summary of current affairs. Others would also differ on the significance of particular current events. I don't want to quibble or compete with Belisarius, nor do I feel confident of my own ability to present the current situation. There is so much that we don't know! So I am not going to attempt my own synopsis. Marco polo (talk) 15:08, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
How about giving a go at summarizing Belisarius, then, Marco polo, because the above is way way more than a paragraph? Thanks! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.120.227.157 (talk) 15:27, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki edit

In the miniseries Oppenheimer, it is suggested that the US decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not made to bring Japan to its knees, but rather because Russia was planning to enter the war. The committee making the decision concludes that a land war in Asia would be catastrophic and deems the atomic bombing a necessary sacrifice, even though they don't believe that it is the only way to bring Japan to surrender. The official make several statements to the effect that if Japan had shown their willingness to capitulate (even if not unconditionally) earlier, the bombings would not have been necessary.

This isn't mentioned in Wikipedia's article on the Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so I was wondering if this is theory has any weight among contemporary historians. Is there any evidence that Stalin made it clear that Russia wanted to 'help' the US fight Japan? risk (talk) 09:04, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See this article. Oda Mari (talk) 09:24, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Soviet Union had agreed, with the US, to attack Japan on a specific date, after Germany had been defeated. At the time of the agreement this was considered necessary, by the US, to defeat Japan in a timely manner. However, with the atomic bomb, and the lesson of how Russia just ignored it's agreements to allow a free and independent Poland, the US no longer wanted Russia to be a major player in the war with Japan, since they would presumably keep whatever Japanese territory they conquered. So, yes, one of the reasons to drop the bombs was to secure a quick surrender, and thus deny Russia the ability to take Japanese territory.
As far as the US accepting less than an unconditional surrender, there was some support in the US for adding a surrender clause that would state that the Emperor would retain his status. As it happened, there was an unconditional surrender, but the Emperor was allowed to remain, anyway. The Japanese had in mind more of a "cease-fire", where both sides would stop fighting and Japan would withdraw from the conquered territories, but the Japanese government would remain intact. This was completely unacceptable in the US. StuRat (talk) 13:50, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The Americans were very afraid of the war ending while the Russians were in Japan and could make territorial/jurisdiction claims. The US had gotten the USSR to agree to enter the war earlier on, as they thought they'd need the help. By August 1945 they no longer wanted it anymore. The Russians, on their end, were somewhat desperate to try and get into Japan as well before it ended, as they did want a postwar say in the country.
The argument that the bombs were really a "warning" to Russia or a way of trying to keep Russia out is definitely common enough in scholarly work that it should be part of that page. Gar Alperovitz made this argument fairly explicit in his revisionist work. Overall the "debates" page is missing a lot of stuff. -98.217.14.211 (talk) 14:34, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the insights. In case anyone is interested this page contains a great deal of primary sources on the whole matter. risk (talk) 15:44, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I'd point out that if the USA hadn't had the 'atomic weapon' card to play, it may well have needed the USSR's help; so it was only when a nuclear strike became apparent that a 'neutral' (i.e. non-active) USSR was preferable. - Jarry1250 (t, c) 17:08, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Well the US (here in the figures of Truman and Stimson, as not very many people actually knew about it) certainly felt empowered by having the bomb. It's up for debate (and, as the page indicates, has been debated and debated since 1945) whether the US could have done it alone, whether it would have been hard or not, whether the estimated dead are inflated, whether Japan was basically willing to give up anyway, etc. It's not a simple thing, not the least because of the counterfactuals involved. --140.247.242.36 (talk) 20:45, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The United States lost almost 9,000 troops killed at Iwo Jima. There is utterly no reason to believe that the Japanese would not have fought even more fiercely to defend the Home Islands. While some US Presidents have been profligate with the lives of American soldiers, Truman decided to drop the bomb and lost none in invading Japan. You may notice that even after the first bomb and the Soviet declaration of war against Japan, it took a second bomb to force the surrender.
Was anyone suggesting that the US not drop the bomb scheduled to be in the first wave of landings on Honshu? I rather think not.
B00P (talk) 14:36, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Japan was seeking peace and the USA knew it. Read this section and the next one. Oda Mari (talk) 05:45, 2 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Winston Churchill was in Potsdam with Truman when news of the Trinity test arrived. In his book Triumph and Tragedy, the last volume of his Second World War set, he reports that at their meetings on the matter "there was never a moment's discussion as to whether the atomic bomb should be used or not", and "There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise. To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, a miracle of deliverance." Any hand-wringing came after. As for the Russians, he says quite a lot, as you can imagine, and the issue was particularly germaine at Potsdam. "Moreover, we should not need the Russians" and "We had no need to ask favors of them" seem to be the prevailing notions. The atomic bomb was not used to forestall the Russians, but that was certainly a welcome bonus. --Milkbreath (talk) 15:11, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The Queen's sense of humour edit

Does wikipedia have an article or pointers on this? Kittybrewster ☎ 13:38, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Unlike Prince Charles (who is friends with Stephen Fry and Billy Connolly and a fan of The Goons) she doesn't seem to socialise with comedians or be a particular devotee of comedy. Perhaps she takes more of her humour from life; her consort Prince Philip is known for his "mischievous sense of humour"[1] and a former aide reported: "The Queen has a wicked sense of humour and is a great mimic. She can do all accents - including mine."[2]
Her taste in TV runs more to dramas and soaps like Coronation Street[3], EastEnders, The Bill, Kirsty's Home Videos, and horse racing[4]. Since Kirsty's Home Videos was in the same vein as You've Been Framed or America's Funniest Home Videos that lends support to the idea that her sense of humour involves some mischief or delight in people falling over. She is also reported to like Meera Syal, watching the TV adaptation of Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee[5]. However, this sort of thing can be overanalysed, so I'll stop here. --Maltelauridsbrigge (talk) 15:54, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Name that Icelandic landscape painter edit

I'm looking for the name of a painter of Icelandic landscapes who had a exhibition in some reasonably significant galleries sometime around 2003 or so. His paintings were notable for their titles, which were all very precise latitudes/longitude coordinates of the location depicted. Their presentation was unique, as they were mounted in large boxes ("cartographers cases" or some such term was applied), and hung from the ceiling. I've Google searched a large number of combinations and permutations of the obvious words, but haven't been able to finding anything. Anyone have a lead on this? Thanks, JamesLucas (" " / +) 16:44, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's this chap Húbert Nói. DuncanHill (talk) 16:47, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Spot on. Thanks. JamesLucas (" " / +) 17:22, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for asking - I hadn't seen his work before, and it looks very interesting. DuncanHill (talk) 17:27, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Now I'm doubly impressed with how quickly you came up with the name. How did you find it so fast if you were unfamiliar with the work? JamesLucas (" " / +) 17:48, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I highlighted 'Icelandic landscape painter' in the header to this thread, right-clicked, and searched Google for it. An article [6] about him was about the fourth or fifth result! DuncanHill (talk) 20:16, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
My hat's off to you for sharp eyes. I note that this conversation is now one of the top-ranked returns for that search. JamesLucas (" " / +) 02:10, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Google loves me, it gives me the results I'm looking for and notices my posts here! DuncanHill (talk) 02:14, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Arab World Religions edit

Besides Sunni Islam, Shi'a Islam, Druze, Alawites, Maronites of Lebanon and Syria, Chaldeans of Iraq and Copts of Egypt; is there any other Christian or Muslim sects that is found in Arab World, practise by Arabs? Excluding Armenians and Kurds. Do each Arab nation have their own census of their own? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.204.74.14 (talk) 18:12, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There are all sorts of Catholic (Roman or otherwise) and Protestant Arabs. Christianity in the Middle East is probably a good start. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:23, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Historically, there were the Arab Jews, or Mizrahi Jews, such as the Baghdadi Jews or the Palestinian Jews. A very strong case can be made that these Jews were just as much Arabs as their Muslim neighbors. Very few of these Jews live today in Arab lands. Many live in Israel. Some of those in Israel still identify as Arabs despite being Jewish. Among Muslims, in addition to those you have listed, there is the Ibadi sect. Among Christians, besides those you have mentioned, there are various Oriental Orthodox churches and the Assyrian Church. Marco polo (talk) 03:39, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein's deputy PM and Foreign Minister, was a Chaldean Catholic. -- JackofOz (talk) 21:05, 31 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

carboniferous plants edit

where is a good site to researh carboniferous plants besides wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.127.1.217 (talk) 20:12, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming you mean the Carboniferous period, there are links at the end of our article which may send you off in the right direction. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 20:26, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

St Edwin edit

In this image of St Edwin which is on all the medals of him there are two people pictured. Who is the other person (child?) in the image and what do they represent (like the dragons in the image of St George for example). Thanks. EdwinHJ | Talk 23:00, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]

At a guess, I'd say Paulinus of York. The image shows two people; a king and a bishop. Edwin was a king, and Paulinus was an archbishop who our articles tell us converted him and is often depicted baptising him. You might want to look more into it though. 79.66.71.197 (talk) 23:31, 30 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
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