Two days ago I achieved a trivial triumph, and again exposed the embarrassing clutter that my neural net has accreted over the years. Paulette was working the Friday New York Times crossword puzzle and asked me, "53 Down, the clue is 'Neighbor of Helsinki' — 5 letters, might begin with an E".

I immediately suggested "ESPOO", which turned out to be right. But how did that factoid get lodged in my subconscious? I can only speculate that a couple of decades back, in the early ARPAnet/Internet era, the then-prominent stature on the 'Net of the Helsinki Institute of Technology in Espoo somehow penetrated my soggy noggin. And I still remember the domain name hut.fi. The fantasy-image it evoked for me: a wee wooden building, all alone in the snowy taiga. And that brought to mind the Dungeons & Dragons conjuration "Leomund's Tiny Hut", a magic spell to create a small place of refuge in a dangerous situation.

Alas, nowadays hut.fi forwards to the less evocative (to an English speaker) Finnish domain tkk.fi. Sic transit gloria mundi ...

(cf. CrossWords (2003-10-15), Perpetual Calendar (2006-01-25), ...) - ^z - 2008-06-08

(correlates: PerpetualCalendar, SouthernCross, HardCoreBelievers, ...)