Re: Yesterday was a great day in history of motorsports in Mänttä. First ever street rally in this town. I can only hope Mänttä Sprint will become annual event.
(I Wish I could actually watch the clips to see if I'm on some video.)
Re: Mänttä-Vilppula "Municipality reform" os the phrase of the day. In recent years government has encouraged small towns to join - such as Mänttä joining with Vilppula. Finland has about 300 municipalities, some 50 less than ten years ago. But now prime minister Katainen and his folks are calling for much bigger change: ten years from now we should have less than 100 town, even under 70.
The current economic situation is clearly making it hard for small towns to maintain hospitals and other services, especially as they often have relatively old population (if it weren't for the school, we'd have average age of 60). But as you can expect people are resisting this kind of changes and there hasn't even been any proof it helps at all; it may be just moving money from one pocket to other.
The timing of announcing such plans - while admitably smartly just AFTER presidential elections - is pretty bad as municipal elections are coming this year. That's going to mean huge victory for Center party that has always had most places in majority of city councils. After the alltime disaster in last year parliamentary election, Center did a surprisingly strong comeback with moderately successful presidential campaign and the old redneck party is now going to make most of this direct threat on their supporters, low population areas and small town.
In short, this is going to result in lots of fired up talk, a country-wide reorganization of at least hundred municipality joints and probably very little changing in the end.
Unfortunately Mänttä-Vilppula will not survive despite this one joint, we're going to get together with more neighbors yet. And it looks badly that we'll be on the edge of new municipality, how ever it turns out.
Re: Mänttä-Vilppula One more loss for me: the movie theatre.
This year the theatre less than 100 meters from my home - one that is almost 100 years old - did not come back from summer break.
For movie goers in general this isn't bad at all. Instead of the small and cold old place, they're now renting a lecture hall of a school for movies and it's a bigger, more comfortable place and they have new, better equipment.
Of course I'm not happy. Not only has one of Finland's oldest theatres been a matter of local pride, but there's great personal meaning for me on the place where I saw Star Wars, LotR and various other films. And I loved the atmosphere, it's somenthing famous directors talk about in documentaries: how it used to be seeing movies in hundred people, one screen theatres.
I hope they'll sometimes do special events in the old place, I hate seeing it all shut.