Author: John

Suomi go bragh! (Is this thing on?)

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On March 16-17, the St. Urho/St. Patrick feast-day diphthong, we’re ALL Finno-Irish Americans!

Bless me father, for I have sinned against Wetmachine, having not posted here in about ten years. But because I’m nuts and a sentimental guy, I’ve been toying, lately, of getting the Wetmachine band back together & taking it on the road.

These days I mostly post on my substack Sundman figures it out!, but during the nearly 15 years that Wetmachine was my main online home, I often marked the St Urhu-Day/St Patrick’s Day dual fest. So I’m doing so again today, like a bear waking from a ten year nap.

I’m not going to bother to format this post. If you’d like the full experience with the pictures and working links, check out this version on SFIO!

If you do, I’d love it if you leave a comment to tell me that you got there from via this Wetmachine post.


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Sundman figures it out! is an autobiographical meditation, in the spirit of Michel de Montaigne, of a 71 72 73 year old guy who lives with his wife in a falling-down house on a dirt road on the island of Noepe, also known as Martha’s Vineyard, that dead-ends into a nature preserve.

Incidents, preoccupations, themes and hobbyhorses appear, fade, reappear and ramify at irregular intervals. If you like this essay I suggest checking out a few from the archives. These things are all interconnected.

Together the heroes call us to our great heritage

Before Wetmachine, a group blog which I founded but which became better known to the world as ‘Harold (Feld)’s site,’1 (similar to how the J. Geils Band became known not as the band of J Geils, but as Peter Wolf (AKA ‘the wooba-gooba wit da green teef’)’s band), went into deep hibernation a la 2001, A Space Odyssey, every year (except on those years in which I forgot to do so) I made a post calling attention to the conjoined feast days of St. Urhu, patron saint of Finnish Americans on March 16th, and St. Patrick, patron saint of Irish Americans on the 17th.

I’m racing to get this note posted before the door closes on March 16, 2026, so happy Saint Urho’s Day to all who celebrate. And a pre-happy St. Patrick’s day to the much larger cohort of Irish Americans who’ll be wearin o’ the green tomorrow.

And an extra-special shout-out to Finno-Irish Americans like myself, to whom this dual holiday is doubly-sacred. Suomi go Bragh!

And now, to save me the trouble of writing something new, here’s a twice or thrice recycled Wetmachine Urhu-Patrick piece from days gone by2:

That great annual harbinger of spring, that mid-Lent quasi-Catholic dual name-day celebration for two saints (at least one of whom probably (or at least possibly) existed), that diphthong of drinking excuses, the elision of St. Urho’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day, is again upon us. This, more than even the setting of the clocks ahead, gives us to know that we have survived another winter.

Now, it’s well known that Irish Americans can be very loud and unsubtle about celebrating their (our) heritage of leprechauns and bullshit artists and crooked politicians from South Boston and great singers like Ella Fitzgerald.

Ella Fitzgerald – The Best Woman That Sang Jazz Music | uDiscover Music
The legendary colleen Ella
And so of course everybody in America and around the world knows that tomorrow is Evacuation Day, I mean St. Patrick’s day, in honor of the great Romano-British Christian missionary who returned to the land of his captivity and bondage as an apostle of peace and went on to drive the serpents into the sea, (or maybe not), and so Guinness will be consumed, and cabbage, and yea, Harp Lager too, begorrah.

Alas throughout much of this country that is not the upper Midwest, the name day of St. Urhu, who drove the grasshoppers from Finland (today, March 16) is sadly neglected, to the point that we can expect virtually no mention of it by color commentators in television broadcasts of today’s pre-season baseball games.

My mother always said that sharing Sundman figures it out!! was much more satisfying than drinking a pint of some murky, sweet Irish stout with a plate of corned beef & cabbage.

But let it never be said that Wetmachine has forgotten the confabulated patron saint of the Finno-American diaspora (of which I am a proud member), the great St. Urhu, whose famous utterance Hein sirkka, hein sirkka, mene tlt hiiteen (grasshopper, grasshopper, buzz off why dontcha?) still stirs our hearts everywhere.

Statue of St. Urho in Minnesota
That saintly collusus!

It’s OK to mark this day without alcohol, but consumption of traditional all-starch foodstuffs is encouraged. So if you can find some Karjalanpiirakka, go for it.

Confession: I’m not pure Finno-Irish
Actually it was my father, John E. Sundman, who was Finno-Irish. His father, Reinhold, AKA ‘Pop,’ rechristened ‘John’ at Ellis Island, whose heroic resistance to piggish Russian occupiers led to his dramatic flight to America, ~1914, where he met and married the bewitching Irish maiden from County Roscommon, Lillian Hudson, herself a recent immigrant to these shores, (when poor immigrants were welcome and celebrated here, as they should be, always, before the Republican Nazis (ptui, I spit) took over the Federal government and began their Nazi campaigns against our fellow immigrants of today —but fuck them (the Nazi-Americans), their days are numbered, may they rot in Hell, Amen) I chronicled in this SFIO! essay, one of my most popular essays ever:

A lone figure skis across a frozen sea, pursued by Russians shooting guns
john sundman
·
July 4, 2023
A lone figure skis across a frozen sea, pursued by Russians shooting guns
How my grandfather, a teenage Finnish resistance fighter against Russian occupation, fled his home & family, on skis, alone, and came, penniless, to America.

So while my father was Finno-Irish, I’m only half so, inasmuch as my mother, “Mom,” AKA Margaret Mary McFall Sundman, was an immigrant from Scotland.

But please note: my mother was a Catholic immigrant from Scotland. Which is pretty close to Irish Catholic, if you think about it. (Also my mother was a passionate anti-Nazi who spent the Clydebank Blitz in a backyard Andersen bomb shelter. . . I could digress but I think I won’t for once. . .)

Resuming. . .
But let’s not go down unpleasant paths; there will be plenty of time for that soon enough. Let us rather do the least we can do to uphold our most sacred Wetmachine traditions, [of which Sundman figures it out! is the inheritor], one of which being the observation of the annual elision of the name days of Saints Urhu and Patrick, a happy pairing that brings pride and joy to all of us Finno-Irish Americans — including you, dear SFIO! reader, if you choose to so identify. Whatever your heritage, dear reader, welcome. And take courage, because for the duration today and tomorrow, at least, we are all Finno-Irish!

1
I have a story about that, involving the then-chairman of the FCC Kevin Martin, who told me, when I mentioned my site Wetmachine, and I quote, “Wetmachine? Oh, you mean Harold’s site.’ But that’s not a story for today.

2
I copy-pasted this from 2016. How time doth fly when you’re in suspended animation in a spaceship flying to Jupiter. I’ve made only minor edits.










Attention must be paid

Happy Saint Urho’s Day to all who celebrate. And an extra-special shout-out to Finno-Irish Americans like myself, to whom the Saint Urho / Saint Patrick feast-day diphthong is doubly-sacred ? and even more so when it falls on a weekend. Suomi go Br?ch!

St. Urhu & St. Patrick Together Call us to Our Great Heritage

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Ah, Wetmachine, my child. How I have neglected you. You, who have been so much a part of my own renaissance, deserve a renaissance of your own. Perhaps you shall have it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let us rather do the least we can do to uphold our most sacred Wetmachine traditions, one of which being the observation of the annual elision of the name days of Saints Urhu and Patrick, a happy pairing that brings pride and joy to all of us Finno-Irish Americans. Whatever your heritage, dear reader, welcome. And take courage, because for the duration today and tomorrow, at least, we are all Finno-Irish!

And now, to save me the trouble of writing something new, here’s a recycled Wetmachine Urhu-Patrick piece from days gone by.

That great annual harbinger of spring, that mid-Lent quasi-Catholic dual name-day celebration for two saints (at least one of whom probably existed), that diphthong of drinking excuses, the elision ofSt. Urho’s Dayand St. Patrick’s Day is again upon us. This, more than even the setting of the clocks ahead, gives us to know that we have survived another winter.

Now, it’s well known that Irish Americans can be very loud and unsubtle about celebrating their (our) heritage of leprechauns and bullshit artists and crooked politicians from South Boston and great singers likeElla Fitzgerald. And so of course everybody in America and around the world knows that tomorrow isEvacuation Day,I mean St. Patrick’s day, in honor of thegreat Romano-British Christian missionarywho returned to the land of his captivity and bondage as an apostle of peace and went on to drive the serpents into the sea, (or maybenot), and so Guinness will be consumed, and cabbage, and yea, Harp Lager too,begorrah.

Alas throughout much of this country that is not the upper Midwest, the name day of St. Urhu, who drove the grasshoppers from Finland (today, March 16) is sadly neglected, to the point that we can expect virtually no mention of it by color commentators in television broadcasts of today’s NCAA basketball games.But let it never be said that Wetmachine has forgotten the confabulated patron saint of the Finno-American diaspora (of which I am a proud member), the great St. Urhu, whose famous utteranceHeinsirkka, heinsirkka, mene tlt hiiteen(grasshopper, grasshopper, buzz off why dontcha?) still stirs our hearts everywhere.

Statue of St. Urho in Minnesota

That saintly collusus!

It’s OK to mark this day without alcohol, but consumption of traditional all-starch foodstuffs is encouraged. So if you can find someKarjalanpiirakka,go for it.

Synthetic biology legend George Church & I talk about science and civilization

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In March of 2015, George Church (whose accomplishments in biology (and visions of the future) are too numerous and significant to for me to recap here, so just go read about ’em here or here or here) & I sat down to talk for about an hour an a half on topics ranging from the Stuxnet cyberwarfare weapon to civilization (and its foes) to surgery on Mars. I edited the discussion into four segments of 17 or 18 minutes each, conveniently gathered here for your edification, amusement, and enlightenment. As a special bonus, at the end of this blog I’ve included the new Foreword to my novels that George was generous enough to write, just in time for the SynbioBeta Conference taking place in San Francisco this week, where I’l be hawking my wares, as is my wont.

Continue reading

Separating M. L. King from Historical Context to Trivialize, Appropriate, Diminish his Work

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It’s 2015, Martin Luther King, Jr. has been dead for nearly fifty years, and it’s only natural, if sad, that his work and message have become appropriated by the engines of consumerism, capitalism, complacency and historical revisionism. Time passes, people forget, old people die, new ones arrive on the scene. MLK jr was twenty or thirty years gone before today’s hipsters were even born. Heck, even Steve Jobs, who appropriated MLK’s image to sell Apple consumer electronics, is fast fading into the rear view mirror. Steve who? And so Martin Luther King jr becomes a literal figure head, and like the head on a penny in circulation for fifty years, he becomes tiny and smooth.

But the smoothing out of M.L. King is not only a natural consequence of time. It’s a consequence of the way his story has been told by Powers that Be. In the the consensus narrative, King was a man to whom history gave a great challenge, in the form of the Montgomery bus boycott launched by Rosa Parks’ famous decision to not relocate to the back of the bus, and who rose to that challenge and went on to become a great and transformative leader, and true and uniquely American hero, and ultimately a martyr.

That story is fine, so far as it goes. But what it leaves out is the history of black people in America organizing and working courageously to advance their own interests, to secure rights or at least their physical security, during the entire period from the end of the Civil War until 1955. And thus Rosa Parks becomes a naive simple seamstress unaware of what she was doing, and King becomes a Moses figure, a man capable of reaching out to all Americans, a man whose eloquence and courage could open the eyes of (white) people of goodwill who somehow were ignorant of the realities of the racial divide in America until Boston University-educated Dr. King brought it to their attention. Dr. King is sui generis, one of a kind, who launched the whole Civil Rights Movement.

What this gets wrong is that Rosa Parks and the Montgomery boycott did not just come out of nowhere; their success and national reverberations, largely attributed to Dr. King, would not have been possible without the groundwork done by black organizations, most significantly the NAACP. That boycott was 56 years in the making, at least, and it took root because of networks established over decades by thousands of brave people, a fair number of whom died in the cause. The “King as Moses” theory thus allows people conveniently ignore the true history of the Jim Crow south and the far from benign north. King was a great man and it is entirely fitting that we have a national holiday in his honor. But we can honor his legacy not by repeating stock phrases about content of character, but by actually learning a little history. If we want to complete Dr. King’s work, a cliche to which virtually every American claims to embrace, we can only do it by looking at our situation honestly, and that means learning our own history, even the unpleasant parts. I highly recommend Patricia Sullivan’s Lift Every Voice, a history of the NAACP, as a good place to start. You can find my review of it here.

Separating Dr. King from history, making him a saint and “hero”, only trivializes and renders impotent his true message. He deserves better than that. We owe ourselves more than that.

Wetmachine has a new baby sister! And so does Acts of the Apostles!

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Well, what I mean is, I’ve finally set up JohnSundman.com as a place to discuss, promote, wax ecstatic about, and, mainly, Real Soon Now, sell direct to you, dear friends, my hackertastic philosopho-literary tales of the technopotheosis. It’s not nearly as nice as it soon will be, but on the other hand it does exist, which is (as my pal Gary Gray will attest) something.

TOO-ALSO, my ancient chef-d’oeuvre Acts of the Apostles has been cloned, and the new instance has thereafter been given an oil change, face lift, new transmission and a stern talking to and rechristened Biogigital: A Novel of Overmind Emergent. For the next month you can get it (ebook only, DRM-Free) from Unglue.it. So please do check it out.

Few thing are sacred here at Wetmachine, but St. Urho-Patrick’s day(s) is one of them.

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Alas tis true, as my dwindling parish of Wetmachine readers well knows, all two of you, that I’ve sadly neglected my home site here at Wetmachine over the last few years. The reasons for this neglect are many and various, and mostly bullshit. So I’m not going to go into them because I’ll just confuse & piss off my own self. I do feel bad that I’ve posted here so seldom in recent years (and grateful to my fellow Wetmechanics who’ve kept the lights on & the water bill paid in my absence). But I shan’t promise to post more, although that’s my intention, inasmuch as I’ve made similar promises before and broken them, which is kind of debilitating to me, even if nobody else notices. BUT ENOUGH OF THIS NAVEL-NOODLING, WE’RE HERE TO TALK UHRO.

Now listen, I’m not going to educate y’all about blessed St. Urho; that’s why God created the Internet & its idiot bastard offspring Google (google), Microsoft (bing), and Yahoo (who cares) (and too-also its not so idiot nor illegitimate stepchild DuckDuckGo); that is, so you can look St. Urho up yourself. I’m only going point out that March 16 is, by longstanding (all the way back to the 1950’s) tradition, St. Urho’s Day, dear to Finnish-Americans everywhere, and March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, dear to Irish Americans almost everywhere (although not so much in places where people have gotten sick of all the St. Patrick’s day bullshit, another tale altogether).

Wherefore thus obviously to people like myself of Finnish-Irish heritage (with a minor in Swedish-Scottish), this name-day pairing is doubly sacred. As in, “make it a double”. Or, as I said in an earlier and somewhat more eloquent post a few years back before my brains went on vacation,

 

That special time of year, when St. Urhus dayelides into the name-day of St. Padraic, is again upon us. Longtime readers know that here at Wetmachine we have a special place in ourheartsfor this great Finno-Irish-American festivalmainly on account of I started this site and Im a Finno-Irish American, of which there aint too damn manyoffer dere, as my late Grandfather Pop used to say.

 

 

Wherefore let it be known that the logical Urho-Padraic menorah was lighted this year at Wetmachine. Selah.

The NSA & other USIAN “Surveillance” entities are actually

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in the business of Control, not the business of Watching.

The two go hand in hand. See, for example, this essay by Cory Doctorow

For courage, take a moment to read the transcript of the late, great Pete Seeger’s testimony before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. “Who I associate with is none of your business.” Really, read it, it’s inspiring and eye-opening.

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.

The NSA “metadata” sweeps are all about collecting exactly the kind of information Seeger mentions, and it leads, inevitably to the kind of state harassment and terrorizing that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

Call your representatives today.