I have been conversing a lot recently with a man named Jarkko Haarala, he's a resident of Finland who goes by higge on this forum and for the past year and a half has been running a discussion forum of his own at WorldWar2Talk.com (URL now currently forwards to WW2F.com). Please note that this is not our sister site WW2Talk.com. Unfortunately, due to factors out of his control higge must moving on to other things and will be unable to continue to maintain his forum through 2009. Rather than let his members and their posting vanish into the ether, higge has agreed to roll his members into these WW2 Forums! Hopefully the merge will be completely seamless. Members of WorldWar2Talk.com will be able to carry on posting here as before, it will be as if they had been posting here all along, and for WW2F.com members, they probably won't notice anything other than a sudden addition of posts and a few more members. While WorldWar2Talk.com wasn't exactly a giant website, both higge and I believe every single post and every single member is a valuable resource worth preserving. All data posted to his site will be merged with ours, and will live on permanently as a part of the WWII Forums. For those from WorldWar2Talk.com, I welcome you and christen you as 'Rogues' which is the colloquial term for all members of WW2F.com. If you have an account on both sites, please contact me via PM or via the email in my signature. I'll be able to merge your two profiles into one consolidated ID, with all your posts made at either site associated with it. For those from WW2F.com, please help me welcome our new members. They come from a site that used the same software as we do here, but I'm sure their culture might have been a bit different. Let's make them feel welcome shall we? Finally, cheers and a supreme thank you to higge! Not many other admins have such concern for their members, he put forth the extra effort to ensure they were not abandoned.
A multi-year turnaround on this, however the import is finally happening. Let's call it a 5 Year Plan vs a 5 year delay, shall we?
Hate to make a promise and not complete it, even if the reasons are legitimate. We are only talking about a number of posts that is roughly 1% of our current total, but I'm sincerely relieved this is getting resolved.
And before the emails start, this was a completely different WorldWar2Talk.com to WW2Talk.com. Which isn't confusing at all. :eyebrows: ~A
In the interest of saving myself from a cricket bat to the shins, I'd like to re-certify what Von Poop said. It was mentioned in the initial post of the thread, and I've made the text a lot more prominent now.
Gotcha. Kind of like a Half Brother we didn't know we had due to fraternizing. Nice to see the Family grow.
I'm probably confused, but according to no less an authority than C. S. Forester, having a Finn on a ship is bad luck, just like a white mare or a preachers wife. Of course, we've managed to stay off reefs with Kai Petri on board, but... Oh wait... this isn't a ship, so never mind. I love Finns...
Finland ! Finland! Finland...the place id quite like to be... "Oh Finland has it all..." (Monty Python)
Just to remind you Finnish weather explained +15°C / 59°F This is as warm as it gets in Finland, so we'll start here. People in Spain wears winter-coats and gloves. The Finns are out in the sun, getting a tan. +10°C / 50°F The French are trying in vain to start their central heating. The Finns plant flowers in their gardens. +5°C / 41°F Italian cars won't start. The Finns are cruising in cabriolets. 0°C / 32°F Distilled water freezes. The water in the Vanda river (in Finland) gets a little thicker. -5°C / 23°F People in California almost freeze to death. The Finns have their final barbecue before winter. -10°C / 14°F The Brits start the heat in their houses. The Finns start using long sleeves. -20°C / -4°F The Aussies flee from Mallorca. The Finns end their Midsummer celebrations. Autumn is here. -30°C / -22°F People in Greece die from the cold and disappear from the face of the earth. The Finns start drying their laundry indoors. -40°C / -40°F Paris start cracking in the cold. The Finns stand in line at the "grilli-kioski". -50°C / -58°F Polar bears start evacuating the North Pole. The Finnish army postpones their winter survival training awaiting real winter weather. -60°C / -76°F Korvatunturi (the home for Santa Claus) freezes. The Finns rent a movie and stay indoors. -70°C / -94°F The false Santa moves south. The Finns get frustrated since they can't store their Kossu (Koskenkorva vodka) outdoors. The Finnish army goes out on winter survival training. -183°C / -297.4°F Microbes in food don't survive. The Finnish cows complain that the farmers' hands are cold. -273°C / -459.4°F All atom-based movent halts. The Finns start saying "Perkele, it's cold outside today." -300°C / -508°F Hell freezes over. Finland wins the Eurovision Song Contest.
Though she does not speak a word of Finno-Ugric , I kid you not, I think Kai and urgh use it in PM's, my wonderful 2od generation Finnish wife of 50 years inspires me to welcome the new members of World War2 Talk to this fine forum. If we do run aground, let it be together, but perhaps in the Ionian Sea rather than the Gulf of Kandalaksha, Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr ! Gaines
I'm trying to think of an insulting/racist/derogatory term for someone from Finland. None come to mind. Maybe just saying they are Finnish is insult enough?
They joined the Germans...and are a reluctant member of the angle countries...i like your thinking though : )
I'm not so sure they joined the Germans, but rather did not want to miss out on a good scuffle and could not find anybody more disagreeable to shoot at than the Russians. I could be wrong, but only when I don't have my Moderator hat on, which I have just now firmly placed on my head.
The Finns were defending themselves from the Soviets, who attacked them in 1940. The Germans then also began fighting the Soviets in 41. Finland went back into the war to regain territory lost in 1940, and to do so they allied themselves with the Germans, militarily. Finland is still an independent nation, so it must have been the correct decision to affect an alliance. Finland defied the Germans when they insisted on measures against Finnish Jews. Most of the foreign (Non-Finnish) Jews were spirited away to Sweden. Finnish citizens were protected throughout the war. I recall reading somewhere that several (Jewish) Finnish soldiers were awarded the Iron Cross by the German army. Each of these men refused the award, which created a furor between the Finns and Germans, but Mannerheim told the Germans to... how to say this politely... OK, there is no way to say it politely - he told them to FO when it came to Finnish citizens. At any rate, the Finns were military allies but they were absolutely not fellow travelers with the Nazis. It's a tiny nation with the Soviet Union on their border. They did what they had to do. Back to my original comment - why did British navy sailors in the 18th century think having a Finn on the ship was bad luck? Anybody have any idea what that was all about?
Agree with you, except the soviets attacked on 30th December 1939 for the first (well - second really) time. Finland and Germany did not "ally" as such, but of course there was co-operation. Yes, there were at least two Finnish Jewish officers who were awarded the Iron cross, which they refused. I'm not sure if it caused anything. To your question: maybe it was because people thought the Finns were wiches who could control the weather - perhaps because Finland was so remote, the language so different and the relationship with the Finnish people and the nature quite close. See this: http://www.forteantimes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3234 http://www.steppingintobooks.com/JRogers%20Pirate%20School/N3-Superstitions.htm [SIZE=10pt]"Witches would sell the wind to sailors in the British Isles and Europe. These wind-sellers sold magic hawsers tied with three knots, said to bring the wind. By the end of the sixteenth century wind selling had grown into an international trade.[/SIZE] [SIZE=10pt]According to the book, Women Pirates and the Politics of the Jolly Roger by Ulrike Klausmann, Marion Meinzerin and Gabriel Kuhn [Black Rose Books, [/SIZE][SIZE=10pt]Montreal[/SIZE][SIZE=10pt], 1997], the last European wind-seller was Bessy Miller, a resident of the Orkney Islands. Sea travelers were still paying her tribute in the nineteenth century. [/SIZE] [SIZE=10pt]The witches of Finland and Lapland had a reputation for being able to call up winds from the most remote areas. They did a brisk business selling their conjuring skills. [/SIZE]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_modification "The Finnish people, on the other hand, were believed by others to be able to control weather. As a result, Vikings refused to take Finns on their oceangoing raids. Remnants of this superstition lasted into the twentieth century, with some ship crews being reluctant to accept Finnish sailors."
I got a message from a member inquiring about WW2 websites going defunct such as the one mentioned in this thread. I'm posting here to bump this thread for him. I'll also reaffirm my commitment to saving any WW2 website that is in danger of being abandoned, deleted, or removed from the web. If it's a discussion board, plain web pages, whatever, we will host that info here permanently.