Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read Free

seems at the time.
    Now, to add to the picture, start filling in the details. Brown hair (what here in the United States is called blond, but in Scandinavia is just “brown”), blue eyes, and a slight shortsightedness that makes wearing glasses a good idea. And, as wearing them possibly takes attention away from the nose, wear them I do. All the time.
    Oh, and I already mentioned the atrocious taste in clothes. Blue is the color of choice, so that usually means blue jeans with a blue turtleneck. Or maybe turquoise. Whatever. Happily, our family wasn’t very much into photography. That way there’s less incriminating evidence.
    There are a few photographs. In one of them I’m around thirteen years old, posing with my sister Sara, who is sixteen months younger. She looks fine. But I’m a gangly vision, a skinny pale kid contorting for the photographer, who was probably my mother. She most likely snapped the little gem on her way out the door to her job as an editor at the Finnish News Agency.
    Being born at the very end of the year, on the 28th of December, meant that I was pretty much the youngest in my class at school. And that in turn meant the smallest. Later on, being half a year younger than most of your classmates doesn’t matter. But it certainly does during the first few years of school.
    And do you know what? Surprisingly, none of it really matters all that much. Being a beaverish runt with glasses, bad hair days most of the time (and really bad hair days the rest of the time), and bad clothes doesn’t really matter. Because I had a charming personality.
    Not.
    No, let’s face it, I was a nerd. A geek. From fairly early on. I didn’t duct-tape my glasses together, but I might as well have, because I had all the other traits. Good at math, good at physics, and with no social graces whatsoever. And this was before being a nerd was considered a good thing.
    Everybody has probably known someone in school like me. The boy who is known as being best at math—not because he studies hard, but just because he is. I was that person in my class.
    But let me fill in the picture some more, before you start feeling too sorry for me. A nerd I may have been, and a runt, but I did okay. I wasn’t exactly athletic, but I wasn’t a hopeless klutz either. The game of choice during breaks at school was “brännboll”—a game of skill and speed in which two teams try to decimate each other by throwing a ball around. And while I wasn’t ever the top player, I was usually picked fairly early on.
    So in the social rankings I might have been a nerd, but, on the whole, school was good. I got good grades without having to work at it—never truly great grades, exactly because I didn’t work at it. And an accepted place in the social order. Nobody else really seemed to care too much about my nose; this was almost certainly, in retrospect, because they cared about their own problems a whole lot more.
    Looking back, I realize that most other children seem to have had pretty bad taste in clothes, too. We grow up and suddenly somebody else makes that particular decision. In my case, it’s the marketing staffs for high-tech companies, the people who select the T-shirts and jackets that will be given away free at conferences. These days, I dress pretty much exclusively in vendorware, so I never have to pick out clothes. And I have a wife to make the decisions that complete my wardrobe, to pick out things like sandals and socks. So I never have to worry about it again.
    And I’ve grown into my nose. At least for now, I’m more man than nose.

II
    It probably won’t surprise anyone that some of my earliest and happiest memories involve playing with my grandfather’s old electronic calculator.
    This was my mother’s father, Leo Waldemar Törnqvist, who was a professor of statistics at Helsinki University. I remember having tons of fun calculating the sine of various random numbers. Not because I actually cared all that much for the