Sporting life

For several years in the 90s I taught courses in Finland. It is about the only time I went to a sauna; as a sort of hats off (and kit off, of course) to the host country. Far too hot to be comfortable, really. I found the Finns had a very sharp laconic sense of humor, often quite dark. One chap referred to another as "about as useful as wet toilet-paper": with the accent and delivery it took me a while to twig this phrase as a synonym for utterly useless. Here's a pretty and peculiar [both] aspect of Finnish culture - keppihevonen - in which girls gallop over jumps astride a hobbyhorse and perform a fair imitation of dressage.

• I've mentioned wife-carrying, another Finnish sport, before.
• But maybe not [English] shin-kicking.
• Worm-charming is another English all-the-family sport
• Quintessentially British at this time of year: conkers.
• Mountain unicycling, anyone? You've got to have a cotter-pin loose for that sort of thing
• Paragliding.  It boggles my mind that I was in 2002 able to master the task of getting my canopy airborne above me and then launch into space.
• Previous coverage for out-there passtimes.

Here's a another form of fun: playing a power-hose on a 130 tonne fatberg [2013 prev] under ground in East London. Metafilter used a come-on-and-click title Congestion backs up London Tube for a quarter of a kilometer to a predictably witty rich seam of comments.