To The Finnish Line -

NO!  How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You -
Conrad does not make spelling mistakes.  If the word is there, then it is intended to be there, in the exact same form that you see it in.  So - there.
     Perhaps I ought to have used the Finnish word for Finland, that is, 'Suomi'.  Which means 'swamp' if I recall it from memory correctly.
     A this point I think a bit of map is in order.  Art?

Land of the midnight sun and all that

     Finland is one of the very few provinces of Tsarist Ruffia that managed to remain independent when the Bolsheviks took over after the second revolution in 1917.  There was a brief civil war within Suomi, which the Whites won, and that was that.  Here we are one hundred years later, and the Bolshies are long gone.  
     Enter Mysterious Volume #1.  Art?

Pictures of Finland

     I got this at a car-boot sale for 50p, with the vendor saying they thought "It's Russian".  No it's not.  Art?

"Ruffian" my hairy white posterior!

     Your Humble Scribe immediately recognised it as Finnish, which is spoken in Finland. That title translates as "Finnish pictures", and that guff about the Presidentti - I hope I don't need to translate that for you - is him with his Parliament.  Some dirty cur has cut out the index and header pages, so there's no information on when it was published, but it's a fair guess that it was either in 1919 or soon after.  Abebooks isn't much help here, there are titles with the same name published between 1902 and 1978.
     Here an aside.  One of the more bizarre conspiracy theories out there - which is saying a lot when you consider people firmly believe Adolf Schickelgruber is alive and well and living under the polar icecap bravely fighting off the KGB with their mind-control lasers* - is that Finland does not exist and never has done, that there is merely an enormous gulf where maps insist it sits, and it's all been dreamed up between Japan and the Ruffians.  Something to do with fish.

Scandinavia, absent Finland

      This would be fruitful subject matter for a director like Aki Kaurismaki, except he can't exist, since he's Finnish.
     Right, motley, you just take hold of this cute little bear cub whilst we drive off - that noise you can hear is it's mother looking for it.  Good luck now!

Very good luck.

B.B.C.
Or, "Bus Be Coming", which I admit is a bit South Canadian vernacular: I couldn't do any better whilst under time pressure.   Sorry.
     Anyway, it is my contention that, whenever I am under time pressure of a morning, most especially when on an early shift, the BBC deliberately and maliciously puts lots and lots of interesting sidebar articles and headlines on it's website.  This is almost too tempting to resist - "Oh it won't take more than a minute to read this through - aha - I see - well what do you know - uh-huh - very interesting - what were they think  OH DOG BUNS THE BUS IS DUE IN FIVE MINUTES!"      This morning I only made the bus with seconds to spare.
     DAMN YOU, BBC, DAMN YOU!
     But do please continue to be interesting.

"UAE claims four vessels targeted for sabotage"
How could I resist?

A Delicate Sound Of Blunder
To coin a phrase.  Conrad has, of late, come across a very interesting set of Youtube videos, which you might collectively call "Anti-scamming".  To understand how they work, you need to know that there is a species of scammer based in India who ring endless people selected from the phone book.  Entirely at random.  If they get a response, they introduce themselves as "Edward" (despite having an accent you could slice and put on bread) and try to bamboozle those answering to allow remote access to their computer "to fix it".

The dirty dogs!

     If they do get access then the jig is up for you - they can extract files, steal passwords, find out your account details or just lock the whole thing down and demand a ransom to unfreeze it.
     However ...
     There are a number of extremely technically competent IT people out there who have decided to take the battle to the scammers.  Take Jim Browning, for example.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CBL3rS1ZKs
     That's the link to a very entertaining video where a scammer contacts him using Teamviewer.  The people behind this software have realised that it was being grossly abused by scammers in India, so the scammers now have to allow you access to their PC - then they flip the connection and remote control your machine.

Teamviewer

     Unfortunately for "Sam" or whatever alias he was using, Jim promptly seizes control of the scammer's machine and proceeds to copy everything, before deleting everything.  The IT wolf-in-sheep's-clothing has truly thrown off his disguise after pretending to be a rather dim and non-technical victim!  Retaining the crim's files allows Jim to analyse how the criminals operate, and with what software.
     The universal response of the criminals when they get punked like this is to resort to Bad Swears, threats, and then crying or begging for their machine to be released.

Yeah, this and these.

     We may come back to this, because - Schadenfreude!


"One, Two, Buckle My Shoe"
Beware, for there are some SPOILERS AHEAD.




SPOILERY GUFF AHEAD




YOU WERE WARNED!  AS THOUGH HIS APE'S BRAIN - oops, no, sorry, that's from "Forbidden Planet", isn't it?  Still - SPOILERS.


     I refer to the recently-aired Hercule Poirot mystery, which I have already yarked on about, but this is different, honest.
     Okay, so Blunt and his bigamously-married wife are about to be blackmailed by the sinister and foreign Amberiotis.  Art?

There he is, being all furrin' and all.

     How do they deal with this?  Okay, they decoy away Mister Morley's secretary with a fake telegram, so Miss Montresor - that bigamous wifey - can falsify a set of records for a fake patient, then Ol' Blunty murders Morley (the dentist, for your information) by shooting him in the head, whose body is then dragged out of the way, and then Blunty pretends to be the dentist for Amberiotis, who is new to the practice and thus doesn't know the dentist is fake, and is then poisoned with an overdose of adrenaline and morphine, whilst Miss Montresor also pretends to be Miss Sainsbury-Seale -
     Convoluted, nicht war?
     Given that Blunty had a gun all along, why not just - oh, I don't know - shoot Amberiotis?

Also cures toothache

     That also reminds me of a goof Inspector Japp makes when they discover the dead dentist, gun clutched in his hand.
     "Revolver found in his cold dead hand -" says Scotland Yard's finest.
     WRONG!!  As you can plainly see above, it was a semi-automatic.  Completely different kettle of fish.
     Conrad: splitter of hairs to the 142nd degree.**


Finally -
Because <ahem!> you can't have fins without having sharks -

Sharks are our friends!***

*  I did not make this up.  Which is worrying.
**  Also Grand High Poo-Bah Of The English Pedantry Society
***  Really!