Of Cows and Windmills

cows and windmill
Originally uploaded by flyin' hawaiian.

Flickr is so funny. You write on the search field ´cow´ and ´holland" and you get hundreds of images.

I was yesterday in a public whipping. It felt like home. A lot of people in high positions listing what is wrong with Holland. This time the keywords were the lack of innovation, risk avoidance and the lack of public-private partnership. And if you add the words "multiculturele drama" to that, you more or less get the tone of the discussion.

As I said, we love these things in Finland. We wet our pants every time a foreigner is flown into the country, put into a speaker´s booth and asked to tell us that we are not doing that badly. Did I hear someone mention ´PISA learning results´? When you are small and only recently wealthy, you still desperately need the big boys (for instance Richard Florida, Manuel Castells, the Dutch and the British) to recognise you.

Only today I noticed that one of the Finland-boosters - and I would dare to say a friend of mine - has a weblog. And here I show my incredible talent to round up this post: his name is Nauta, which means ´beef´ in Finnish.