The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee. Unfortunately the government of that country has been short-sighted enough to raise taxes and customs duties through the roof. Supposedly it is to pay for killing Russians, and for resettling the hundreds of thousands of Finns who have to pull up stakes and move whenever Stalin, in a drunken lunge, or Hitler, in a psychotic fit, attacks a map with a red Crayola. It just has the effect of making coffee harder to obtain. According to Otto, Finland is a nation of unproductive zombies, except in areas that have been penetrated by the distribution networks of coffee smugglers. Finns are generally strangers to the entire concept of good fortune, however they are lucky enough to live right across the Gulf of Bothnia from a neutral, reasonably prosperous country famous for its coffee.