Oh, hold the phone, I was wrong, he’s got it all figured out. This is great.
"You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest,very important…I was with the President of Finland…he called it a forest nation and they spent a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don't have any problem." pic.twitter.com/f6aD37B3KA
— ᴿealfarmacist (@real_farmacist) November 17, 2018
The floors. Cleaning them. You have to clean them. If you clean them everything will be fine; no more fires. It’s all a matter of hygiene.
He was with the president of Finland who lives in a farrest nayshn, he called it a farrest nayshn. “They spend a lot of time on raking, and cleaning [big back and forth hand gesture here, to represent ‘raking, and cleaning’ for those who don’t understand], and doing things, and they don’t have [pause, tiny shrug] any problem. Or if they do it’s a very small problem. I know everybody’s looking at that, and – and it’s going to work out well.”
No one was rude enough to tell him that Finland has a rather different climate from that of California.
Update: oh but an actual Finn was rude enough to tweet no we don’t.
We don't rake our forests here in #Finland. https://t.co/DTBhWkNZIa
— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) November 17, 2018
Finland has ~73% forest coverage = 222,180 square kilometers of forests (world bank study). Our forests are densest in the world, averaging 72,000 trees in sq km. That's 22 billion trees or 4,500 for every Finn (yale university study).
Please send help. Must bring own rakes.
— Aki Heikkinen (@akihheikkinen) November 17, 2018
Comments
9 responses to “Raking and cleaning and doing things”
Still not seeing the problem with the [farrest] pronunciation.
And how does Trump say “nation” differently from anyone else? Don’t we all say [nayshn]?
Well, have a listen. He pronounces tions more wetly and childishly than is usual.
And yes, I know regional variations in pronunciation are just that. I know. But Trump requires different rules of etiquette.
I mean…sure, I know it’s petty or snobbish or both to mock people’s pronunciation, and normally I don’t do it, but Trump is a special case. He’s substantively awful and at the same time from my perspective he totally lacks ANY kind of surface charm or charisma or appeal that might compensate a little for his substantive awfulness. I find it necessary to point out all of it (to the extent possible – I can’t keep up with all of it, of course). I find it kind of fascinating that the rest of his life hasn’t rubbed off his Queensisms at all. Most people who climb the ladder do get their accents made more generic by wider circles of acquaintance, but Trump just stays at kid from Queens age 8. It’s weird. Plus I find it extremely ugly, and in his case I don’t mind saying so. See: Alec Baldwin as Trump.
I did listen to it. It sounded like a regular-old “nation” to me. But I should leave you to your fun. God knows I curse Donald Trump for everything I can think of.
Well that’s it. Venting my hostility, basically.
I’m from Finland and my mother owns some forest. It’s not just that we don’t rake the forest, that would be the stupidest idea of forest management at least in Finland I’ve ever heard. And the president of Finland would never have said anything like that.
Actually, OlliP, it’s unclear from the tweet that Trump is claiming the president of Finland said that. He said the president called it a forest nation; the rest could just be his usual stream of consciousness thinking. It’s hard to tell with the Donald.
I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the forests of the midwestern US (because I’m an ecologist, not because I am raking or sweeping, or even swinging from trees, though that last has tempted me. If I could climb trees, I might have tried it). Even in the smallest, sparsest of the forests I was in (and some of them were just fragments), raking and sweeping would have taken a very large crew a very long time. And would have been a bad idea, since leaf litter plays an important role in the forest ecosystem.
What’s this what’s this? You’re saying it’s not a good idea to keep the forest floors antiseptically clean?? That’s crazy talk! Forest floors should be like kitchen floors: solid gold and well rinsed in Lysol.
Finland’s climate is more comparable to Sweden’s. I guess this didn’t make Fox News.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/30/the-swedish-town-on-the-frontline-of-the-arctic-wildfires
Oh, wait. It did:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/forest-fire-raging-in-sweden-prompts-evacuations
Someone wasn’t paying attention.