Newspaper roundup

One of the most endearing things about Estonia (perhaps it is true in many European countries) is that morning television hosts will at some point start telling us about what's in the papers that day. It's somewhat of an awkward moment -- the host will physically get out the newspapers and start rustling and leafing through them, and reading/summarizing passages. Though it's worse than dead air from a TV production quality standpoint, I'd love to hear McLuhan's take on this phenomenon.

Anyway, I will try to do something similar in this blog from time to time.

---

Starting with my old hometown paper, the Washington Post. From the "Daydream Nation" category, here's an op-ed by Michael Gerson entitled "Compassionate to the End". It's about his ideological father and social welfare specialist George W. Bush, who as we know is quite the compassionate one. The question was of course if he is still true to form.

(I confess: I initially suppressed shock at the headline's suggestion that something had befallen Bush, other than just lame duck blues.)

"Compassionate to the end"...Even as I write this, some liberal-scum moral relativist in a cave is probably countering Gerson with the argument that Saddam didn't kill babies with his bare hands, either. That Saddam had his social initiatives, too; it couldn't have all gone into maintaining his own standard of living during the sanctions.

But there are actually plenty of more subtle points in Gerson's piece, it almost seems...could it be...Satire?

When President Bush took his final walk to the rostrum of the House chamber, his speech and manner conveyed little nostalgia. He views both meditation on the past and speculation about his legacy with equal suspicion, preferring to live in the urgency of the now. So his last State of the Union address had no Reagan-like, misty-eyed wistfulness.

Ah, the long measured walk.

A note on the misty eyes. Alzheimer's is bad that way, so let's not stoop to judge Reagan too harshly. Even though Reagan's is now Obama's ideological father and the bane of conservatives.

The "urgency of the now"? Sounds like Gerson has been spending too much time at Esalen or something.

I wonder though: if Bush views both the past and perception of his past with suspicion, preferring to live in the present, what about the future? Isn't this sort of speechwriting device supposed to refer to all three parts of the linear conception of time?

I leave deconstruction of the rest of this increasingly silly piece to you.

***

REVIEW: Juno

It's a tough, tough tightrope act -- to make a film that navigates the minefield of precocious adolescent irony and still manages to be humane with loving characters who act realistically. A movie that confronts the collision of innocence with maturity ("viscera", "junk" and all) without going all American Pie on us.

In terms of style, Juno's very much in what I suppose would be the New New Geek cinema mould, with nods to 1970s coming of age films like Harold and Maude or the quirky stylization of a Royal Tenenbaums. Because of the core values, though, it's a movie that may even go over well in Red America, without trending toward Afterschool Playhouse in any way. Also, being about teenage pregnancy, it has to deal with the abortion issue in fairly short order, and it dispenses with it in a much more credible way than, say, Knocked Up.

With the exception of an improbable scene with a convenience store clerk in the first five minutes (involving buying the pregnancy test), where it seems to me director Reitman and the screenwriter try a wee bit too hard to establish the character of their young heroine as hip and streetwise (all the world's a small town, hm?), Juno obeys the logic of its characterization as well as the logic of real life.

In a way it's like Ghost World -- you know, where a alienated girl develops a relationship consummated through rock and roll records with an older, even more outcast male -- except there's a fetus.

That new life growing inside Juno renders categories like geek and cool irrelevant. Also, "the characters are off sex" and thus shenanigans and triangles don't really distract as they would in other youth movies.

Of course, the older, understanding male, played by Jason Bateman, is very cool, and as a guy in my 30s, myself a little too old for rock stardom but in search of a little studio niche amid my family life, I also developed... an affinity with Bateman's character as the prospective adoptive father. If there is perhaps a weakness in character consistency, it is a plot twist involving his character, but who knows -- so ably does the film get us into its characters that we are pretty subjective by the closing -- like Juno, we want both of the adoptive parents to prove OK, and for there to be a happy ending.

Juno is currently the only nominee for Best Picture to not be in the pipeline for a run in Estonia, probably because of its indie image. Hopefully they will get it sussed out by the time the statuette is handed to Reitman.

Notes and updates

...after work, walked through the Old Town to pick up some sundried tomatoes for my wife at the Delicia Italian deli and saw a beautiful courtyard like a secret garden between Pikk and Lai, the two long parallel streets leading to the old port -- someone had left the gate open. I had forgotten how desirable the Old Town can be as a place to live, and that not all of it is commercialized...

...Delicia incidentally is one of the few places in Tallinn where you can get things like chickpea flour and nero di seppia, and if you don't make your own pasta or like to eat ink, well, they also do a mean caprese sandwich and other panini stuff...

...The stocks in my portfolio I started a couple weeks ago on a whim are distressed, but that's why I bought them. Two have now paid back the commissions, though. I've decided to eat lunch out when I gain on a given day, if I lose I will pack a lunch or go home for some tatar with stir-fried veggies or something... the daily change does seem mainly to be in the 5-10 dollar range.

...I have been going for lighter fare lately, anyway...running less and sitting more....

...stocks, gourmet food, maybe I sound like a bourgeois asshole while journalists conduct experiments on what it is like to live on 5000 kroons a month, but these are important notes and updates...next is real estate. Even though it isn't spring yet, I came across a nice southern Estonian property for a reasonable price (half of what an 80 m2 apartment in the centre of Tallinn would cost) . The real estate is lakefront, has a 400 m2 manor-era building on 2.5 acres, 80 sq m of the building is beautifully interior-finished with beams and lots of textures -- but the pictures were taken in summer and the broker has not responded to e-mails or called...typical...

...the situation with sh*t at our home is no closer to resolution but is a "he said, she said" impasse with the water company, which claims that we have not done what we accuse it of not doing...But it is a listed company, so there may be other ways of influencing it; battle plans have been drawn and a request for documents has been filed under the local Freedom of Information Act ...

...internationally, I was glad to hear Prince Charles has said he will not be attending the Beijing Olympics. Neither shall I.

Not always natural: Estonia's food industry

This month's Oma Maitse culinary magazine features a message from the Estonian Foodstuff Producer Union that masquerades as an informative news article (Estonian text version here). Laid out on a field of Day-Glo yellow rapeseed (canola for North Americans) -- one of the most distinctive features of Estonia in the summer as viewed from the air -- the article appears to be educating the public about how unsaturated fats are more healthful than saturated fats and transfats.

Let's leave aside the still-open question of whether saturated fats are really that bad for you. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. Certainly Estonian expeller-pressed canola oil and its monounsaturated cousins like olive and peanut oil are healthful.

So midway through the article, we're all cheering for unsaturated fats from plant sources. And then the article asks, "So why is hydrogenation necessary"?

Huh?

Because, you see, I thought hydrogenation wasn't necessary. In fact, I thought it was a nasty chemical process that destroys a lot of nutritious compounds and results in what has been called a metabolic poison. Denmark and New York City have banned the use of partially hydrogenated oil in food. Banned. As in, it's illegal.

Unfortunately, the Foodstuff Producer Union piece turns out to be a bit of an apologia for the food industry's use of a cheap industrial ingredient (as much as they can get away with) to substitute for real, delicious butterfat in cakes, ice cream and cottage cheese products.

It's a cynical and unsavoury mixing of concepts -- public health on one hand, and the profit margins of the Union's members on the other.

***

I've often written and talked aout how wonderful Estonian bread and dairy products are. They are -- they are mainly wholesome and yogurt comes in flavours like cloudberry-honey-apple and rhubarb-oat.

But the ice cream situation is a notable exception to this rule.

There is not a single brand of ice cream on sale in Estonia that is all-natural -- the nondescript Regatt is rich and comes close, but all of them feature some combination of skim milk powder, water and cream; the downmarket varieties contain a combination of vegetable fat, oil, water and milk solids. Some are non-dairy and not clearly labelled as such. The sad thing is, you can taste it. You can taste the skim milk powder.

Contrast that to the situation in the US, where besides Häagen-Dazs vanilla (cream, milk, sugar, eggs and vanilla bean -- full stop) and Breyers's natural line (more or less the same as Häagen-Dazs with some natural-source thickeners and gums), numerous local dairies churn and market excellent, rich natural ice cream -- even sold in supermarket chains. People have been blasting the US for so long for artificiality and fast food that they've been caught sleeping -- now America's far ahead.


[Gratuitous nostalgic plug for the best yogurt in the universe (granted, 11% fat)]

"Vegetable fat" -- which unless it is palm oil is nearly guaranteed to be a hydrogenated oil -- is the main transgressor. It really shouldn't be there. It doesn't taste like cream or butter. It really serves one purpose -- padding the profit margin of big producers. Butterfat is expensive, and when you use a bunch of poorly-matched ingredients like casein, water and oil that don't really mix, you need stability in the form of a waxy lipid that stays firm even when the ice cream gets soft.


***

This is actually a deep-seated problem. Foodstuffs in Estonia are controlled on both ends -- big production and chain commerce. Madis Jürgen wrote a piece for Eesti Ekspress a couple years ago about the difficulty a small producer would face to get a quality product -- I believe it was a carrot jam -- included in the assortment of a chain like Rimi.

The influence of big business results in a lot of questionable standard practices and lack of consumer alternatives. For example, there is not a single jellied meat or sausage product routinely available that does not contain nitrites or at least glutamates. E211 or sodium benzoate -- a very suspect molecule that contains the benzene ring -- as I have noted before, is routinely added to products that are canned and do not really need it.

The industry is ready with justifications at the drop of a hat. It has noted in the past that E211 occurs naturally in some form in cowberries and cranberries. Must be OK, then.

Now it has outdone itself again -- by insisting that its companies are primarily looking out for our public health. That's why they're replacing some of that evil, evil butterfat with small quantities of plant fats that have undergone strafing by a battery of corrosive chemicals.

Article: "Even though vegetable oils with unsaturated bonds are beneficial to health, unfortunately due to technological and sensory reasons it is not possible to use only vegetable oils in the food industry."

The translation into English: "If only we could, we would make ice cream out of 100% vegetable oil, too, but it would end up looking and tasting like total shit. (But we're working on it.)"

Cultural observation #23

To me, a cherry is a cherry, Bing or otherwise. A plum is a plum, be it Damson or Italian. As for a mandarin, it's basically a type of orange that's easier to peel.

Once I went to the store and bought some mandarin oranges for my co-workers. "Help yourself to the oranges on the table," I says. A couple hours later, the tangerines are untouched and I comment on that. Says the secretary: "Oh, did you bring in the mandarinid, too?" She didn't make the connection, and she's not dumb.

I have had similar things happen with cherries (kirss or murel) or plums (ploom or kreek). "That's not a kirss," a little kid will tell me, looking at me as if I am daft. "Need on murelid."

In late Soviet culture, tangerines were commonplace, while oranges were special, something rare, on the order of bananas. So Estonians have an appreciation for good premium quality navel oranges...

Nowadays, with the market offering clementines and hybrids like tangelos, I will continue to follow a policy of calling all orange citrus fruit "oranges".

REVIEW: Casablanca

While certainly no fan of old movies for the sake of old movies -- and a complete dunce in the pink category of Trivial Pursuit -- I noticed that Casablanca is not going away. Just like Sergeant Pepper has been outdone at its own game countless times yet still tops many an greatest album chart, Casablanca is still number one, just beating that young upstart Orson Welles and his biopic.

For example, just the other day, a propos of nothing, CNN published this feature. Maybe the news media is, again, preparing us for sacrifice ahead.

I figured 66 years isn't too late to see the dang thing and maybe review it. Plus meddlers occasionally get to these old movies and modify them. So an occasional new review might serve an important purpose.

I could only name one of the famous lines from Casablanca -- the one that is actually never said ("play it again, Sam"). Now I can do four or five. I'm going to avoid "Here's looking at you, kid" -- boy how I am going to avoid that one -- but there are couple good ones, and some obscure lines that might come in handy for me, like "Get away from me, you crazy Russian".

The interesting thing is that Casablanca's main theme does in fact tie indirectly into my own family issues. My wife works for an Estonian voluntary defence organization. She's a civilian, but we've often discussed how, if push came to shove, I might potentially take Morgan to the States while she stays behind.

Neither I nor my wife is into sentimental romance -- the province of the young and foolish. So Bogart is a perfect leading man. He phones it in like a champ, of course, relying on not much more than his own hardboiled persona. The rear projection flashback scenes of gay Paris with Bogart evoking carefree youth with a green-gilled smile in the foreground are mercifully brief, for us as well as Humphrey.

Casablanca will never be remade (not until WWIII and then under a different city's name) because of its sacred status but if it were, the big difference, I reflected, is Sam -- Sam would definitely have a role in the airport climax. Strasser would not be shot; Westerns-style, in the briefest of duels, but would manage to get away and try to stop the plane. Laszlo and Ilse move at such a stately pace toward the aircraft that they beg for one last obstacle.

Somewhere out on that horizon

Cities -- what awful places for little kids, this time of year. Vastik.

They don't know the difference. That puddle of black grit he's into up to his elbows could just as well be a pond by ye olde mill. That piece of rusty wire* he's found and toting could be a forked twig of hazel. He's looking for that underground stream in Tallinn.

No, now he's twisting it into a manhole cover, the lock of a Mercedes door. Well, that could just as well be a fissure in an old tree or stump.

He's seeing it all for the first time.

I'm the one who's overlaying the city in all its nastiness.

I hide behind a lamppost (tree), peek around to see if he's coming -- and I see my 2-year-old doing a perfect imitation of a factory worker stumbling home from the bar.

If only we had a place in the country, I think.

On the rare occasions that things come to a head and he's driving us up the walls, I think, "That's it, I've had it, we're all going to a puhkeküla -- a farm B&B." Someplace with nothing but woods and fields around. This is my solution to everything.

Apparently there are still good properties to be had in the south starting at $50,000. Something with an old farmhouse fixer-upper, a couple fieldstone outbuildings, cellars, sauna and a couple hectares. The Swedish bank'll give us a loan. If not, then the Finns.

Come spring, I'll start looking. After all, no one else wants to live there anymore. Post offices closing, general stores driven out of business... Schools, too.

We'll homeschool. We'll grow flax and hemp, too, if they allow it, things like beets of course. Just like in the old days. That's the ticket.**

* Literary license.
** Joke. With some grains of truth.

Gender roles

(...)

Wife: (sorting impossibly tiny, outgrown outfits): "Do you think light blue or dark blue is a more baby girl colour?"

Husband: (staring into computer): "Daamn, the Macbook Air has an aluminum casing. Maybe I didn't wait long enough."

Wife: "Light blue or dark blue?"

Husband: "White...why do I have the only Apple laptop model ever in white plastic?"

Wife: "Do you want a MacBook Air?"

Husband: "Only if I drop my MacBook."

Wife: "That can easily be arranged. What colour?"

Husband: "Light blue. Wow, what a slow hard drive, though. Hard to believe any computer wouldn't have at least 5400rpm."

Wife: "...because I think dark blue."

Man from Apple: "Hi. I'm Steve. I work at one of Apple's 15,000 stores. I'm going to give you a video tour!."

Wife (holding up a tiny rugby shirt): "Do you see your daughter in this?"

Husband: "Hmm. I don't know about that one."

Wife: "Why not?"

Husband: "Oh sure. You know, they go through so many shirts. Constantly eating, spilling. Hang on to it.

Wife: (Holding up a tiny jacket emblazoned "Varsty Baseball")

Husband: "Mm, now I don't know about that one."

Wife: "Why not?"

Husband: "Well you know. Not as a regular outfit. A high school girl might wear her boyfriend's -- but I mean... Hey, Steve is telling us about the MacBook Air's battery!!"

Wife: "You're the one who always said no gender roles. We don't know if she's going to be a tomboy or a little princess."

Husband: "You would never dress a boy in a pink dress. If there's something that's ruled out for boys, it makes sense that should be a counterpart for girls. Theoretically."

Wife: "But there isn't. (Pause.) You want your daughter to be a princess."

Husband: "No, no. I'm fine ordering nothing but shapeless wraps for the first year or two. Shapeless Wraps. Good solid hippie-owned company."

(...)

New Year's resolutions Estonia should make

Estonia has followed Scandinavia's trend of banning smoking in indoor public places.* Great.

There's so much more that can be done. Little things that make life better for a greater number of people. Things that hew to principles that help make the world a better place.

Ending alcohol sales at 8pm is not one of them, of course. It's narrow-minded, reactionary and not consistently applied. But the point is it was done. It was possible, in one fell swoop. There was grumbling, but people got used to it. Banning alcohol in Tallinn seems quixotic to an extreme, but for three or four days last year, sales were banned entirely. And (to way oversimplify) people stopped rioting.

The items on this recurrent list are just as possible. In the great division of things of the Serenity Prayer -- things we have the power to change and things we cannot -- these are things we should NOT be serene about. We should do them (or start doing them) and get it over with.

1. "Torpedo" the container terminal planned at Muuga. And boycott Chinese goods in general.

I couldn't believe there was no negative reaction to the news the day an agreement with China's fourth largest port was signed, at least not in the two major dailies. This port serves only two purposes: entry of more Chinese goods into Europe and sweeteners for Estonian port officials.

I realize Estonia's government consists largely of former reform communists, but how can anyone even remotely aware of Baltic history condone our coziness with the People's Republic? It causes me physical pain. It is as if we are sending Estonian troops into Lhasa to smash Buddhist temples, over and over again.

What you can do -- if you think that you are not going to be able to stop a port the size of the Kopli peninsula from being built -- is look at the labels when you go to the store and say no, if you can. This is one country that no one should be supporting due to its record on human rights and the environment, least of all bloggers or people who read blogs.

No one even remembers, but some of the Baltics had diplomatic relations with Taiwan. The day they were cut off is a unexplained blot of shame.

2. No tax on reinvested profits. Rather than establish a 10% tax, which won't endear us to the EU and will generate a lot of headaches for companies starting next year -- at a time when the economy is slowing -- Estonia should continue on its same course. Don't tax money that stays in. Tell France and Germany to stuff it. Instead, maybe establish a 10% social tax on dividends (not 33%), and establish better tax audits. And of course, go after those companies that haven't submitted an annual report in four years.

3. Just abolish the presidency already. Estonia now has a repatriated-expat president, de rigueur for the Baltics lately. Let him be the last one. It would be understandable if the president retained some constitutional power, even as the "midwife of democracy", but Ilves has even abdicated the president's role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He might as well step down now.

Estonia has enough rich people and a nice healthy gap between the haves and the have-nots, like most countries. We don't need one more symbolic fat cat with a country home and a palace in town, who does I-don't-know-what all day on taxpayer time. The only thing I am aware of is that he contributed recipes to culinary magazines and occasionally he pops up with a statement or speech on holidays and events in which he seems to be speaking for all Estonians.

Under the 1920 Constitution, Estonia didn't have a de jure head of state. Let's be unique that way again.

Unless we have a war hero who has led forces into battle against the Russians. No one else should have ten years paid for by us.

And I won't entertain arguments about how lobbying and intelligence activity are the equivalent of such heroism, though I'm sure they played an important role in hastening the demise of the USSR like so many demolition charges placed in a condemned building.


* Apart from the fact that non-smokers don't have to smell other people's trash fires while we are eating, even many inveterate smokers-drinkers are happy -- they say a break outside revitalizes a long encampment at a public house just as well as changing venues does on a pub crawl.

Wired subversion

I don't want to get into too much coverage of other blogs here -- gets kind of incestuous. At the same time, what should a weblog be if not a chronicle of one's activity online?

Yesterday evening I witnessed something interesting that took me back to the early days of the Net when all sorts of wacky guerrilla stuff went on (here's a static and relatively unwitty example but the only one to be archived). Even now I sometimes read about how some institutional or major site is hacked and the index page is replaced with a subversive message, but I've never seen it live.

Yesterday's was no illegal hack. What happened was that an article in Wired magazine -- or SONY Wired SONY, as it is now known -- linked to content on the host server of a Tartu blogger. Instead of providing a link to the content that readers could click at their own discretion, Wired followed the practice of "embedding" the content (meaning that the target page opens automatically in a frame within the webpage).

Since Wired is well-read and the content was a rubbernecker's delight (transcript of a suicide note), the Baltic server's use went up suddenly, threatening to swamp it.

I think embedding is neat. (Snap previews, on the other hand, are annoying to me.) I don't know how embedding plays with copyright laws (it's sort of like appropriating content). But to me, it's clear that if you choose to embed content, there's a caveat emptor -- if the content of the embedded link changes, so does the look of your page.

What was interesting that instead of choosing to "monetize" the opportunity (a word I hadn't really heard) and put up ads, the blogger put up a message that tore the Wired staff a new one for using up his precious bandwidth without so much as a warning. Very 1960s, very revolutionary. So what if apparently one reason was that he didn't yet have a Google Adsense account up and running.

Personally, I would probably only deviated from Flasher T's action by making the embedded page refresh to a link to the same Wired page. Just to see what would happen. If the universe would be thrown into an infinite loop or something. Or tried to look down the deep well of recursive embeds, to see what was at the bottom.

Sh*t and such, cont'd

Ouch -- this is the price estimate for hooking our building's sewage to the mainline -- $10,000 plus. What's up with the price for refilling the site -- more than labour and equipment rental combined? Expensive dirt?

WET BLANKET DEPT.: Obama at Ebenezer

You have to remember that I don't like politicians very much in the first place. I think that they will eventually, like organized religion, become obsolete, as people realize they can be their own cheerleaders and that every fuzzy concept doesn't have to have a corresponding incarnation in a physical person.

So when I hear a line like

(we have come to believe) that if the demagogues and those who would exploit our racial divisions would simply go away...that all our problems would be solved

and no more than ten seconds later Obama's voice has risen to a rather coarse shout usually reserved for use by demagogues and he's excoriating the institutional and social barriers, I have to think: isn't that as much of a case of exploiting them? He's running for president and working a crowd (in a church, no less) into a lather -- by invoking barriers and divisions!

Granted, I know his heart is in the right place or at least from what he says he believes in the America I want to see.

But so do a lot of folks, and I don't see Obama's middle game. Basically, we're hearing "who I am" and "what's wrong" but we're not hearing "what exactly am I going to do for this country (for us)".

I am fine eating mustard and relish sandwiches, like the girl in Obama's closing anecdote. But I can write my own speeches, come up with my own grand narratives for my hopes. I don't need homespun ideology and scriptural solace.

I need content.

Of course, I don't expect a speech at a black church on MLK Day to be a wonkish exposition of how to get from point A to D, and since it was moving, I will defer final judgment on Obama.

But time is getting short.

(To his credit, Obama actually addresses the major problem I have with him -- that he's running on fuzzy good feelings like hope. He even defines "hope". It's a bunch of things, basically, and he says that it don't come easy. But deprivation and sacrifice are going to be hard sells in an America that is softer and more complacent than ever. And there are plenty of people there who don't even think MLK was a great man.)

***

Speaking of sacrifice and privation, is anyone picking up on how Estonia is preparing its citizens for the hard times ahead (in the crazy calculus of Estonia's economy, people panic if acceleration of the rate of economic growth slows) -- all these public service articles in the newspapers on säästmine, etc.

With the news of the new Chinese superterminal that will bring Eastern Europe the Chinese goods it really needs (ha-ha) and continued emphasis on consumption, I hadn't, really.

Should be an interesting day on Wall Street. All indications that it should be a banner day, since it recently seems to do the opposite of expectations.

Mysteries of the (p)ages

I am haunted by two mysteries of the modern (p)age. Well, more like unexplained inconveniences. If anyone can solve them or explain why it is so, I would be thrilled. Or even if you think I'm off base or just the hundredth millionth person to mention it.

1) Text size on webpages. Everything else is working swimmingly. We've come a long way. Web pages look fantastic. And at widescreen 1200x800 or whatever it is, so much information can be displayed. But every month, text size seems to be shrinking. I know it's not my eyesight. But it will be my eyesight if it keeps up. It is going to be something like 4 point Arial in another year. Maybe it's an adjunct to Moore's Law.

(It seems to be one of those phenomena, like the multiple layers of scrolling horizontal text at the bottom of news broadcasts that threaten to "drown" the anchorperson like so much rising water.)

The text size is often hardcoded into the webpage and is thus immune to attempts to use the browser menu option of decreasing or increasing text size. "Make text larger" only works on like 20% of webpages these days, by my reckoning.

Isn't it odd that everything else can be modified and adjusted but not the CSS? Or am I missing something?

(Of course the Mac has a built in zoom in function so that provides some relief.)

2) I can't read web pages offline.

Fictional example from our road trip. I have just parked in front of a Comfort Inn in Pohunk, Wyoming, and downloaded an incredibly important piece of information in Explorer over the free WiFi. When the manager runs out shaking his fist and yelling "Freeloader!" (fictional, as I said), I drive away and out of range. But I have accidentally closed the browser window. I go back to the page, yet it won't load anymore. I scour the cache in Windows Explorer. Nothing. No such file.

Hell, back in 1994 I was able to specify, in Internet options, "never check if page is updated". Why not now?

I understand that a lot of applications (the autosave in this very Blogger interface, gmail) rely on consantly being online. But is there no way to override this?

REVIEW: Into the Wild

(cross-posted from Mountains)


This is retro magic all the way, from luminescent 16mm family video that glows like a Spielberg memory of childhood, to Sean Penn’s directing style, to the people who populate the film – dreamers, hippies, roughs. And the Eddie Vedder soundtrack, which is all ice water and treebark, shamanic, Alaskan, haunted. Sounds like grandma Pearl had a couple more jars of her famous jam laid away, because these songs really cut to the quick.

The main character Alex, who rejects society and heads off into the wilderness -- sure, he's flawed. He gives away money that isn’t really his. Then he works for McDonald’s (a big evil corporation?), when he needs cash to finance his Zarathustra turn.

The "last living boy in America“ bit, which he no doubt plays up consciously, can be tiresome. Sometimes I squirmed at seeing a grown man act like he was 10 or 11, when Penn’s camera intrudes on him sounding his barbraic yawp upon arriving...at an abandoned bus in the woods? Is that his mother lode?

But I’m charitable, first of all because Chris "Alex" McCandless was almost my age, and grew up less 5 miles from me in the Virginia suburbs which can be stultifying even with a good home life. And he went further than I ever dared or needed to on the path to being... what do you call it anway, I guess "free" would come close. Though I was personally more intrigued by this role model. Also a good book.

Even if the premise or the personality doesn't really float your boat, there is a kind of Straight Story pattern to Alex’s life (or the Sean Penn telling of it at least) – like Alvin in that Lynch movie, he makes his way on a single-minded quest, and without any attempt to be a missionary, brings light to the lives of others, mainly through synchronicity. His life was far from wasted, and I hope what Penn says did really happened.

The Foreign Ministry is holding a video clip competition -- deadline March 20. Theme: communicate something interesting about Estonia to the rest of the world. First prize: 5000 kroons, not quite the price of a solid camcorder, but not peanuts either.

I thought I'd go to Pirita today for some shots of the biggest storm this winter but the sun went down too soon. What am I saying - I'm no film-maker, anyway. Too much iLife and "Ken Burns effect" breeds delusions.

But a great idea from the VM, better than the quiz.

Rubbish and such

In my Austrian pension room in early December, I noticed signs about the country's strict waste laws. Apparently they applied equally to hotel guest, administrator and chamber maid. The sense I got from the tone of the multilingual signs was that all three can be locked up for the same one violation.

So I mastered the categories of Austrian waste -- bioabfall, restmüll, et al -- sorting and packaging everything in my pension room like a true anal retentive chef.

Not long after returning to Tallinn, I found that Estonia has also adopted laws that allow me to apply the same skills.

While it's no doubt high time, there's been some talk in the press of how the transition has been too sudden and whether people were really ready to go overnight to European-style recycling.

Especially as there is a subspecies of people in Tallinn who could help with the sorting. They're called prükkar. Though undoubtedly a bottle-scarred breed, they're not really bums -- they don't lie in doorways or shoot heroin or the other really nasty stuff. They are these grey people who move around in the early morning light collecting bottles and other waste. And the thing is, they're really efficient. I can only liken them to urban macrophages or human vacuum cleaners for inorganic waste.

OK, maybe everyone's been there at some time or other. Everyone's been a prükkar. But still...

When my wife was in Barcelona, leaving me with the domestic duties, the garbage piled up for a couple days, unsorted. I had it positioned near the door in three bags. Then I had the three bags positioned outside the door (which in our case leads directly to the street), ready to be taken into the courtyard. For whatever reason, there they stayed, overnight. When I finally got around to it, in the morning the bags were gone. Not gone, as in ripped apart by raccoons or something with garbage strewn everywhere, but gone without a trace. Only a bag of ashes from the firegrate was left. The prükkars had opened it and retied it.

A Russian youth movement changes tack

Nashi is a Russian fascist youth group that had a hand in the Tallinn riots in April, but changing times demand changes in strategy, and they've now taken to sponsoring the lucrative transit trade in Chinese agricultural produce.

I tried one of the Nashi Asian pears. Not bad for 21 kroons a kilo, though I expected a greater "bite" and of course a darker, bronze colour.

"Linter" lemons are expected to hit Stockmann in March, and I'll be waiting in line.

Justin may be on vacation (though the apres-blog scene is always in full swing), but the English-language Estonian blogosphere has plenty of other options besides its justified leader Itching for Eestimaa and many other good Tartu-based blogs. Here's a Canadian Estonian one that I tune into from time to time for clarity, brevity and lack of snarkiness. Irony is lovely but every so often one needs a break. And there's also No Estonian Unturned. This guy worked at the same paper as I once did, and any former TBTers should definitely have a look at the Christmas Eve Day entry.

(I originally continued this post in a long essay on the theme of "Estonians, where do they all come from", which segued via poignant memories of summer camp in Canada to the theme of "Canadians, a gifted, musical people". I'm a little concerned about the word-to-idea ratio in this blog as it is, so I'm actually going to refine. But stay tuned, mangiacakes.)

Sh*t and such

Like other modern city-dwellers, we pay Tallinna Vesi each month to pipe in fresh water and take away our black and grey water.

But as it turns out, the main sewage pipe of our eight-unit building from 1910 has never been connected to the grid like the other houses on our street. It seems hard to believe, but the pipe goes somewhere...then peters out below the ground.

Apart from this making the property, one would think, the most nitrogen-rich in all of Tallinn -- perhaps we should look into growing crops and mining saltpetre here -- it's now clear that dribbling effluent is unsustainable in the long term.

No, there isn't much of a smell, at least that my non-pregnant nose can detect. My wife says it is bad. We live on the lowest level, and water is not going down as well. Flushables are not flushing as well as they ought. The situation has been declining for months.

Tallinna Vesi has been the very model of what is known locally as JOKK -- "legally speaking, everything is in the clear".

From January 4-12, they closed the sidewalk with signs, and dug a big hole. It all looked proper, like they knew what they were doing. Then, on the evening of the 11th, they filled in the hole and paved it over. Alas, they had not connected their pipe to ours, not had they told our apartment association: "OK, we're ready for you to hook up your end of the pipe."

Now they shrug their shoulders. Say they've done their part -- installed the pipe to the property line.

They don't want our sh*t, but we're going to give them some.

* i

Back from relative paradise

Tiia-Triin came home from Barcelona with a memory card full of photos that look like they're from upscale architecture magazines -- half as many photos as taken in the entire six months in the States. I'll (as the current family historian) be posting them at our photosite the Refuge in the coming days. "Gingerbread house" gets bandied about when talking about our own Old Town, for lack of a better term for the ornate medieval architecture, but some of the fanciful modern buildings in Barcelona are closer to the sagging graham-cracker wall and melted icing look of the houses we used to make in elementary school.


The slightly staggered layout of this post is not intentional and nothing to do with surrealism. I just don't fully understand how photo alignment behaves in blogspot. It would be nice if they made it either completely codable or completely what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

***

Tiia-Triin also brought me a cookbook of 1000 Catalonian recipes (in Catalan) and was sweet enough to translate some of the headings. I couldn't help thinking last night that reading Catalan is a little like reading Spanish after getting hit hard over the head. The French element is just perceptible. Hence llet is milk -- clearly more like lait than leche. But it's pronounced "yet". And there are also instructions such as treure-les, which also sounds French. And separeu-ho, w.hich sounds...enthusiastic, like something a knight might say to a horse or a sidekick.

WIthout resorting to Google, the recipes are like those football score puzzles where you have some of the outcomes and you try to solve for the rest of the matches. For example, "arengades". Sounds delicious. But what are they? Well, you can eat them cold (arengades fregides), you can slice them in half by the espina (a spine or stem?). They can be grosses and grasses (big and fat or big and greasy?). You can serve them with a half kilo of raim. What is raim? Well, another recipe calls for white raim which comes in grans. All, which is garlic, also has grans, so it must be something like cloves of garlic.

So for now I'm no wiser as to what can be but is not always white, has cloves and is used by the pound. :)

Bush and Putin

I was reading Anna Politovskaya's Putin's Russia last night. Here in Tallinn, we live just a few hundred kilometres from the border of what some are calling the new resurgent Russia. Pessimism is easy if you're so inclined and think the worst of Putin. Enough for you to, say, make a big deal of the 90th anniversary of Estonian independence this year for fear there won't be a 100th in ten years.

I'm not that worried. Anyway, my thoughts kept on drifting in another direction. I kept thinking about Bush. About the fact that no book like Politovskaya's has been written by an American for the foreign market about the outgoing Bush administration, whose record is so much like the Putin regime in so many ways, especially when it comes to invasion, denial of due process and general demagoguery.

About how Al Qaeda is made the scapegoat in the US at every turn in the road, just as in Russia.

About Cindy Sheehan, who like so many of the mothers featured in Politovskaya's book lost a son in a foreign country, and encountered nothing but a stone wall in her efforts to get at least an answer.

And about the way the independent media has been stifled in the US -- far more subtly than in Russia, by deals and syndication and bandwidth allocation, but just as effectively.

The differences, of course, are considerable, too. For starters, each president's personality, and the fabric of the countries they rule. Bush has warmth and ostensible humanity. I acknowledge that. He may be a coward who is only comfortable speaking in front of people who answer him, "Hoo-ha", and his yes-men, but he is no grey KGB ghoul.

Putin on the other hand is a iron mask, betraying an utter lack of emotion. Economic freedom in Russia is zero -- either the Mafia or the government will confiscate your small business, is my feeling (am I too far off?)

(But I do think it's telling that long before Bush was installed as president, these two teetotallers went on a raft trip out West with their delegations. Got on splendidly, it's said. )

*

When one of Bush's most eloquent critics and fellow Texan Molly Ivins died (of natural causes), Bush issued a terse but respectful statement, familiarly signed Dubya. When Politovskaya died, from very unnatural causes, Putin was conspicuously silent, in typical fashion.

But Molly, who I mention here because I think she was the most effective Bush critic, like a Herblock to Nixon, isn't Anna.

She didn't hate Bush like Politovskaya admits to hating Putin. It's hard to hate Bush personally, as Bush projects that ignorant-incompetent image.

There are any number of books by "liberal" writers exposing Bush variously as duplicitous, incompetent, a failure.

But I wonder, if Bush had a real enemy among the media like Anna, not just showmen like Michael Moore and smart "girls next door" like Ivins, who wasn't afraid to take her thoughts to their logical conclusion, and called Bush's actions, and perhaps the man or the sinner himself, for what they are -- evil... a book that gave us the true horror of what the US (and its contractors) has done in Iraq -- which we have got in bits and pieces up to now -- the torture, the silence of the military establishment.... (if the left hand, the generals, are even aware of what the right hand, the contractors, are doing)...

...I wonder if his or her fate would be all that different.

Or would it be enough to deny White House access and force a corporation to nix a book deal?

And is the fact that Bush is more sophisticated in making his critics seem irrelevant rather than just having them shot, as some believe Putin's people might have, reflect that much better on him?

Just a late night thought.

Greetings in Tallinn

Someone talked to me at the Viru väljak tram stop yesterday. A stranger. It was dark at 5pm and 38 degrees F and lightly misting. He didn't want anything or even need information. He did ask me if the tram had just left (the next one was already in view) but this was just a lead-in. He went on immediately to volunteer a bunch of information about himself. What he did for a living, for example.

His teeth were a little crooked and he was wearing the close-fitting condom sort of cap that is the main winter headwear style here, so it was easy to take him at first for a bit of a simpleton. (I have the same kind of cap, incidentally.)

Because people don't talk to each other on the street, in Tallinn. Or in most places. Unless they're casing you as a possible mark. Certainly they don't tell you what they do for a living. Generally they whiz by in Audis and BMWs and you wonder what they do for a living that they can afford their rides in a country with the average salary being what it is.

He said he was a freelance journalist for Postimees. OK, you're a freelancer, I thought -- and I'm a consultant.

Then he told me about a party he had covered, a party thrown by brother and sister entertainment celebrities Gerli and Tanel Padar. And that he had a country home around the same area as the Padars.

Ah, I said. How was it? This went on for some time, as long as the tram ride lasted.

I kept on thinking, "OK, now here it comes -- the invitation to his church." But it didn't come. He was just killing time by conversing pleasantly with me.

I'm afraid I acted like a typical Tallinner -- at first I acted suspicious and then curt, while making a show about being cordial.

What's happened to me? Not so long ago, I thought highly of a line from the Garcia-Hunter song Scarlet Begonias" -- "strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hands". Nothing seemed better than superimposing a rock festival vibe on everyday life.

What if they did? Wouldn't that be far preferable? Or at least a "hi". It would cost nothing.

Or would we all lose face somehow?

Anyway, saying hi also qualifies you as a true frukt.

When I lived in a quiet rural neighbourhood outside Tallinn, we made an effort to be friendly. But one day I had a group of five-year-olds tell me, You don't need to always say hi.

Geez, such sophistication at such a young age. I wondered if they expected a faint knowing nod, wise to the wise, or if they just wanted to be ignored...

An exception to all this was when Morgan was a baby and I walked around with him in a sling. Old dour ladies in a country where pensioners have a reputation of being bitter and mean, actually smiled and greeted us. I never really figured out why. Morgan was photogenic in a certain way, but I never caught him doing anything funny anytime I walked past a mirrored office building.

Anyway, because it is one of the few things to even remotely break the routine in the winter gloom (kids are great and work is interesting, but we're all in a holding pattern until spring) I started somewhat delusionally scouring the encounter with the stranger on the tram for meaning.

The stupid economist

(From my lecture series, My Three Euro Cents on Your Worthless Dollar. The full version, available only to subscribers, costs $100 and will be used to fund my depreciated stock portfolio a year from now. For the live audio version in which I read the lecture in a well-informed voice in the Sakala Centre, add 20 euros. For reverb and crowd reactions, add an additional 5%, preferably in an emerging currency.)

Global warming is like economic downturn. Both, it seems, can safely be ignored for a long time, before a general alarum is sounded. Only somewhat later do we see the people reponsible for the situation rolling up their sleeves ... (Applause) and doing the right thing -- buying more time.

The climate and the economy are also similar in that just as it can get cold in liberated Baghdad and Kurds and Sunni Arabs make snow angels together on a given day... (Applause.) ...while global temperature continues to warm, individual stock performance can be completely different from the general economic situation as well, even in a recession.

Let's look at the first example -- delayed reactions.

It's sort of arbitrary as to when the general call to arms is issued. It usually happens obliquely. Just like you can't rely on news affecting the price of a stock the way you think it should, the trigger for a general realization ends up being something else. Al Gore -- (Boos.) ...Al Gore would probably never have made An Inconvenient Truth had he been inaugurated. That film was arguably the first big message to hit our poor hot-water-addled frog brains. The overarching conclusion is sobering: perhaps we should be more thankful that Bush won. (Applause.) Thus, thanks to President Bush, people are starting to understand.

We could have gladly kept on ignoring the warning signs abroad -- the plight of the polar bears and Inuits (north of our borders), Kyoto (Japan), Katrina (the Third World). Instead, we can acknowledge these developments and we can reference them. Then we can continue to go forward.

In the case of the US economy, it seems it was only because a big bank decided to step in and bail out a smaller lender that we are suddenly keenly aware of everything else, of just how rotten the real numbers are across the board. All of a sudden, we are aware of the trade deficit. (Scattered boos.) I know, I know. But it's true. We are buying more and more oil and no one is buying our exports even though they are cheap. Because there are signs that China is even starting to control the entire supply chain, like Russia controls its oil chain. Look at yesterday's news from Estonia, about the exclusive Chinese container superterminal to be in Muuga.

Luckily, we have a president who is ready to take action by attacking the problem not at its source, which would involve unquantifiable shaping of values and diplomacy, but by way of a stimulus, by gently warming the perimeter by manual friction -- an example of the "hands on" style of leadership we need. Namely, cutting taxes on the people best poised to address the problem were they not crippled by the groaning weight of supporting the domestic manufacturing worker lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the American public should buy stock in foreign oil companies so that they can recoup some of what they stand to lose at the filling station. The house may always win, but it won't win by as much. (Applause.)

Going back to global warming, the analogous solution to the president's gentle stimulation is patently obvious -- to airlift some of the recent snow from Iraq and Northern Saudi Arabia -- before it melts -- to other areas in the world that need colder temperatures. Of course, not to be overlooked is demand in the ski areas hit recently by warm tempertures in Vermont and the Lake Placid area. (Applause.)

Interlude: price of cheese

I noticed not long ago that Stockmann sells a large package of Finnish butter -- the good 80%+ butterfat kind -- that costs the same per gram as Estonian butter. I have also noticed from time to time that food prices in Stockholm and other cities do not seem quite so high anymore. Many things cost less in the US.

Estonian food prices have risen 20% over the past year, according to EPL. Although likely not the result of an exhaustive and properly weighted survey, the paper is saying that some staple foods now cost more than in Estonia than they do in Finland (where per capita GDP is 65% higher) .

We are told that we are catching up to the rest of the EU in price level. It looks like we are doing more than that.

There could be all sorts of reasons for expensive cheese, it could be something as obscure as an increase in the price of calcium chloride. Maybe from a Finnish owned dairy in Tartu they ship the cheese around a little bit just for the hell of it, and the price reflects sky-high oil prices. More likely, the fact that production and retail are both increasingly controlled by big business means a cartel effect on top of the rise in the standard of living.

The process of elimination

We were sitting having a family breakfast and the laptop was on the table, generally something I try to avoid. Even though I'm a Romney man all the way, and try to go for the image of 1950s dad hidden behind a newspaper.

I also try to avoid presidential politics, to the point of not voting in 2000 or 2004. This, I guess, makes me personally complicit and a Bush lover in some people's eyes, like the eyes of my friend Josh, who is a proper involved Democrat who believes that people have the power to influence democracy and people should "get out their vote".

I have another T-shirt sentiment in mind, one I saw at a Portland rally: "I voted for (13-letter word beginning in the letter A)". (The word was not "audaciousness".) Naturally the word was spelled out on the shirt. I wouldn't wear such a thing or even think it, but I think it makes a succinct comment that ties in with a lot of things in our world, full of regimes that need to be changed as it is. I'm glad someone made the comment, and that it happened in Portland, rather than, say, Birmingham, where the penalty for this kind of comment is crucifixion. (Check this.)

Anyway, back to breakfast and the laptop. I was reading from Wikipedia. McCain's entertainment value is off the charts. A smart-alecky master of the sound bite, he is. My wife especially liked the quip where he responded, to the tune of Barbara Ann, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran" to a press corps who couldn't get off the subject. I didn't get McCain's Chelsea Clinton joke, but put it down to curious Irish humour. I get the feeling that if my wife were American and a voter, she would support this sort of audacity before getting on the bandwagon of amorphous hope.

(As I write this, it looks like NH results are in -- the same two names that will be picked at the conventions later this year. I am now projecting this.)

For me, McCain is the easiest candidate to rule out. There is his age, positively Reaganic, though that means increasingly less these days. There's his view on Iraq, which is depressingly firm, and wrong (he supports the occupation). A third reason is his war record. Americans are under a misconception, ever since GW, that war heroes should naturally advance to be president. For me, the fact that McCain spent years as a POW is not an argument in the political ring. I don't doubt his mental stability -- no, I'm lying, I do doubt McCain's mental stability -- but I'm not making a cheap hint of latent PSTD. In other words, I think his temper is inborn.

Some other thoughts, running down some of the other names:

Giuliani is just weird, it seems to me that outside of NYC he's only a candidate for people who really, really like shows like NYPD and Sopranos. He is like from a parallel universe Mafia, except everything they do is legal and proper.

Huckabee is a scary phenomenon. I wrote about him earlier. He won't play everywhere. But the thing to keep in mind that if amorphous-change triumphalism (Obama) goes head to head against Christian triumphalism, the latter will win. A political machine with tons of money (Clinton) has a better chance.

Obama -- Am I being unfair about amorphous change? After all, I don't want an advocacy candidate, someone with a single issue. And a president should not be tempered by fire like McCain is. It calls for softer, not hard moral qualities, even a degree of slickness. But I don't get him yet. Once upon a time, I could believe. That doesn't make me a cynical bastard now. I just don't get him yet. Probably not my most well-thought-out idea, but I think part of it is that I'm putting him aside for now, until he has a little more experience.

Romney looks like someone out of the 1950s or the Nixon era. I thought the phenotype had died out. Now I'm repeating myself. Swell.

Which one's the Russian?

Russia, and Russians, continue to be the hardest thing for Hollywood to get right. Even if you make allowances for French, Serbian and Danish actors (pictured left to right). (The Serbian actor doesn't get that much screen time though he makes a reappearance in a different part of the Thames later.)

Here we have an industry that is able to put out a three-hour movie in what for all I know was perfect Aramaic (Last Passion) yet still serves up Euro-Turkish pastiches if it needs to portray a Russian. (Not that this view of Russians is necessarily very inaccurate, but it is clear the ethnic tropes and accents are vague and shifting).

Now Estonians are about as far removed from Russians as you can get, on the other hand, but close proximity for so long has made us good arbiters of the Russian national identity -- and certainly apt judges of onscreen Russianness, especially accents. Believe me, Estonians know from Russians. I've seen a movie theatre in Tallinn erupt in laughter over Val Kilmer's The Saint, and it wasn't anything related to the action.

I thought David Cronenberg's new Russian mob film Eastern Promises, which I stole the above photo from, might have, well, promise -- it was shortlsted for a few top ten films of the year lists. And it does get some things right, though some lines are dangerously close to self-parody -- the offer (or is it a threat?) "and I will cook you some borshcht" made by the unctuous crime family boss (and restaurant owner) to the Naomi Watts character. Yes, there are some moments almost worthy of Mystery Science Theatre here.

Viggo Mortensen stars, as a driver ascending to be the boss. I wonder if there is really that much precedent for this in mafia dynasties. How many of the kingpins of NY crime families were once chauffeurs? Or is this just the mob movie cliche of the year, in the way that the black judge is the courtroom flick cliche of the decade ? Viggo is a mobster with a heart of gold, another cliche.

Still, the plot is fairly intricate and clever. And Viggo's acting is excellent, almost Aragornian.

How well does the man from Gondor manage being a Russian? Pretty well, for someone who has presumably done months of homework for the role. The less he says, the better. "Da, da" comes off particularly well, and I'm not being sarcastic. Kudos. There are certain things that he has down, perfectly conveying the stolid Russian leading man in all of his taciturn, macho yet oddly gentlemanly character. When he is inconvenienced, or when he feels a pang, he sets his jaw in this certain way - perhaps he overuses this - is as distinctive as De Niro's more lopsided crooked smirk.

"Chechens" make sinister appearances, as do other "former Soviet" elements, but the word "Estonian" is not mentioned, thank God. Interestingly, however, the film features a role by former president of the Estonian Supreme Soviet, Arnold Rüütel, who is in fine form as Stepan, a cagey old emigre who once worked for the KGB. Method acting all the way, I guess.

Translation website is up

My translation site is now online: www.suurentarkki.ee

A Dylan cover to check out; geek talk

Sometimes the God of little things smiles at us through the fractal maze of the Internet. I was working late and bleary-eyed and unable to find something I wanted to liste to when I found Jim James singing a rare track by Bob Dylan, "Goin' To Acapulco" -- on Calexico's myspace site!

Maybe the hipper readers are shrugging and saying, "oh, that -- that was a good song a couple years ago". But cultural happenings take their time getting to Estonia, even if we're wired up. I haven't heard much about the Dylan movie "I'm Not There", which the song is from. It seems to have been just a little while ago that I finally caught the Scorsese documentary on Dylan.

But how perfect this is: "Goin' To Acapulco" is one of the late-summer tracks on the Basement Tapes, along with "Tears of Rage" and "This Wheel's On Fire", where Dylan employs a wailing voice, just this side of a sob. I have done covers of it at open mics, trying to get the tone right, never succeeding. James, the lead singer of My Morning Jacket, the kind of guy who records songs about bars in churches and barns because his high Neil Youngish tenor voice is so perfectly enhanced by cathedral reverb -- and no one will ever accuse him of singing in the shower. Perfect pairing.

Calexico, a Tucson band I grooved on for most of early 2007 for their Americana, lends "square" Herb Alpert brass and vibraphone accents, which come in just before the first refrain, where you would expect the drums and full band to enter in a ballad. Quite corny but cool. Very corny -- but hey, if you're down and out and going to Acapulco, you're likely going to end up passed out in a town square woken up by a cheesy norteno band rather than making it to Pacific bliss...


Lead singer Joey Burns, whose exactingly precise and wimpy-a-la-Paul-Simon voice I have gotten sort of burned out on recently -- though never his lyrics! -- is not to be heard.

(((((()))))

Appears the "laptop server" I wrote about last post is not all it's cracked up to be -- it can't be accessed from anywhere except within our own network. D'oh.

Today I did something that seemed just as subversive, though. I sent a fax without a fax machine being involved -- using a beta service called Skax that piggybacks on Skype. (I had set up a day-trading account and they needed me to fax some documents. We'll see if I have convinced them that I exist. I better have, because I already wired my deposit.)

Peace and prosperity

We greeted the New Year like old people. No children around, we turned down an invitation to a party, watched some tube, stayed offline, and were in bed at midnight, just as Tallinn became a pyrotechnic zone. Didn't even open the champagne.

Morgan was at his grandparents'.

In the morning, shook that shaker of nut shells from Gabon that we bought in Nawlins that is supposed to bring prosperity, ate an omelet and black-eyed peas cooked with bacon.

**

I have been playing around with the Mac in the past days and it is going to be painful to have to boot up into WIndows again come work tomorrow and have all of the great apps inaccessible, like iWeb, a limited but not limiting web design program.

Not that I don't like writing code, but I like the way all the democratic, mass market yet stylish functions in the iLife suite link up with one another.

I tapped into the possibility of using the laptop as a server. I don't know if this ability is native to PCs too, but it is pretty neat. You can even choose a permanent URL and download a little utility from dyndns.org that updates your location if you move to a different cafe. Naturally you can't run a serious business site like this, but eventually I will transfer the entire site to the Mini (the desktop), which never sleeps.

The address is rikken.office-on-the.net, when in use. Currently it features a rough version of my company's site, which should be where it is supposed to be by next week. The blog link is under construction and some of the text needs to be subbed but comments are welcome on the rest.

I also came across a copy of FInal Cut Pro, which seems to work pretty well on my Macbook...although realtime effects need to be mixed down each time. You know when price tags and documentation gets into four figures (the manual has 1865 pages) that you're heading into "pro" territory.

And this ties into some of the...New Year's goals.

1. A healthy new child.

2. Get up to date with the Web again, master some interactive application development programme.

3. Drum up some simultaneous interpreting business.

4. Run a marathon, break 3:15.

5. Get back in piano playing shape, give piano concert for charity, maybe in November.