Find the Cross of Freedom...

For many Estonians, the idea to erect a central monument to the War of Independence has become a hotly disputed issue.

The monument design -- a cross atop a tall glass obelisk -- appears to be the main bone of contention and the rhetoric, at least from Estonia's notoriously active Internet commentators, has become increasingly strident.

Do you believe that it's an idea whose time (tick tock, tick tock) has come, and that Tallinn needs a centrepiece to the fight for independence, which anyone in their right mind agrees is a sacred thing?

Or are you a pinko sots with artistic leanings who doesn't want a high-rise tombstone? Maybe you're a pagan?

You can vote your preference in my poll to the right, which is less loaded -- a simple anonymous yes or no.

***

My take? Personally, I'm just happy Freedom Square will no longer be a parking lot. But the price tag does seem a bit high. In the end, I voted "for".

Some of the comments so far: Prime Minister Andrus Ansip, who may be unimpressive but is ever vocal on the subject of monuments and sports, has chimed in, saying that to not put up the monument would be like postponing the Olympics.

Some supporters make good common-sense points, noting that it's not the designers' fault that the most pre-eminent symbol of the War of Independence is the cross, and putting an armoured train (which helped win the war) on a pedestal would not be very aesthetic.

Opponents point out the price tag (US $7-10 million); deride it as un-European, by which I think they mean anachronistic; and say the monument will not suit the historical integrity of its surroundings.

ANNOTATED SPAM: "You know when you're Estonian when..."

Not an all-time classic, but some interesting points and observations. I don't get Internet mass mailings often, so here goes...

1. You use the word 'normal' if something is ok.

Estonians also say "normaaalne", accent on the second syllable, to mean "cool" or "that's impressive", in the sense of "not baad.."

I always associated use of the word more with Russians or Latvians. When I worked at a newspaper in Riga, there was a Latvian kid who used to do layout for us. He would be looking at Internet porn and when you asked, "Imants, where the hell are the thumbnails," he would say: "Normaals, normaals..." I don't know if he was commenting on the pictures or telling me everything was OK.

2. When visiting friends abroad you bring along a box of Kalev chocolate.

I always bring Viru Valge. But yes, this would be a tip-off that the guest is Estonian. Kalev chocolate is even harder to get abroad than Saku beer.

3. You attended a song festival at least once either as a performer or as a spectator.

Certainly.

4. You know that going to the sauna is 80% about networking and 20% about washing

I enjoy the top level of the steam room as much as anyone else, but my thoughts usually revolve around out-toughing the other punters -- i.e., I try to arrive earlier and leave later, leaving the impression that I live in the sauna. For me, it's about competition , showing I can take the heat, and not protesting or heading for a lower level when someone throws another ladle on the rocks.

5. You are nationalistic about Skype (it is actually an Estonian company)

Better Google the current ownership. But this is getting at something -- no one outside of Estonia seems to have any idea or knowledge about the Estonian connection in the case of Skype.

6. 'Kohuke' belongs to your menu

Cubes of biezpiens (curds) in chocolate is a Latvian invention, isn't it? But we have good ones.

7. You declare your taxes on the internet like all modern people

Absolutely. Just did, today. In fact, I read in Äripäev, the business daily, that declarations will phased out entirely in a few years -- already the equivalent of W-2 forms get sent automatically; in the future the right amount of income tax will be withheld automatically.

8. You actually believed for a while that Latvians had 6 toes per foot when you heard that as a child

Our childhood true story was that Latvian girls rubbed stinging nettles on my mother when she was a girl at a DP camp. Maybe this is something that shouldn't be repeated, but there you have it.

9. You are convinced that Estonia is very strategically located

Isn't it?

10. You spent at least one midsummer in Saaremaa, Hiiumaa or one of the smaller islands

Pass.


11. You can quote films like "Viimne reliikvia" and "Siin me oleme"

I can hum a tune from the former.

12. You spit three times over your left shoulder for good luck

People do the spitting in such rapid succession that I had forgotten it was three times. But I do spit over my shoulder more than I say "knock on wood" or "touch wood".

...

More territory for young women, please

Even though it is worth it just to get great, great writers out of seclusion -- especially if they happen to be charming, interesting and youthful for 74 and talk to other people besides Oprah -- I'm a little sorry that Juno didn't win Best Picture instead of the Coen brothers' (right) reading of Cormac McCarthy (left), pictured here in this shot taken by a NYT photographer.

The reason: feel-good is good, especially if it is hip and witty. No Country for Old Men, on the other hand, is an adaptation of a solid novel directed by some very talented and humane film-makers whose sense of humour happens to be right up my alley -- and they used the humour sparingly this time -- but the film itself follows a reptilian logic (as dictated by one very twisted mofo) I'm not sure I want to be reminded of. My impression is that there are more and more people like the killer Chigurh roaming the land these days, symbolically or otherwise.

I would have left it at Best Supporting for Bardem and given Screenplay and Picture to the Juno gang.

I reviewed Cormac McCarthy and some other authors in a breathless gulp back in 2006. I guess I was fed up with bleakness already back then.

Independence Day tradition in Tallinn

At 11am, the university corporations had their procession from Town Hall Square to Toompea, singing as they went. It is simultaneously a jolly, dignified, as well as a slightly odd spectacle.

Most of the fraternity men carry rapiers, and they appear to be the real thing. I was a little worried that both they and spectators would make their way up the hill to the castle via Lühike jalg, a narrow stair. Luckily they took Harju hill, which has more elbow...epee room.


Now as someone who isn't part of any order, fraternity or league, I couldn't resist a good-natured comment about the corporation flags, once the swords were at a safe distance. After seeing nothing but blue black and white hanging from buildings, the scene on Town Hall Square was more motley; one of the Estonian flags had apparently been through the wash with the green things (sorry, Rotalia) -- and it looked like the square was also being used as a staging point for an obscure league of central European countries.

It is an old tradition that both in the lower Old Town and on Toompea, the respective officials are offered a pint of a beverage to quaff from a tankard. In the lower town, the mayor's representative, who looked like a prim and high-maintenance woman, had what was obviously Fanta or some sort of near water.


In the courtyard of Toompea castle, speaker of parliament Ene Ergma (looking very imposing, even ladylike, in a fur coat as I have never seen her), obliged the crowd by quaffing until there was nothing more to be quaffed. "Riigijuhtimine on ikka hull raske asi," she said, coming up for air. (Running the state sure is a damn tough job.)

Ah, Estonia. I love it.

Then it was down the street to the Toomkirik, where the oldest Estonian national flag -- dating from 1884, when it was the flag of the Estonian Students' Society -- was on display before a colour guard.

INTERVIEW WITH ESTONIA: Nonagenarian!

Happy birthday! How do you feel?

Good. I just had a birthday physical and they checked my pulse -- 72, as a matter of fact. Just like the US. How about that? I don't think it's going to stay that stable all the time, but maybe once I get to be 200...

Big party coming up tomorrow?

Definitely. This is the big one, as far as I'm concerned, not 100, and you know why? Because I can still celebrate with some of the good people who were there when I was born. True, all of the Estonians who made sure I got my birth certificate are now gone. But there are still so many spry old people who are older than I am, who might even have had a puff on a cigar when they were passing them out. I just heard of a guy the other day who's 103, and sharp as a tack.

The comeback makes it all the sweeter for you. You were in a coma for 50 years...

I would call it an out-of-body experience.

What's the secret of long life for you?

(chuckles) You're going to have to ask one of these journalists, especially that fella with that British newspaper, sometimes I think these guys understand me better than I do, and I mean that.

But one thing is this: not making any sharp turns. And I would drop one little hint. Moderate alcohol consumption. Sometimes I like to have a nightcap, after 8pm.

What's your goal for the next 90 years?

We need to mend some fences with neighbours.

We also need to remember. Talking to those old fellows I mentioned is important. As for me, not repeating the mistakes of my youth. I still have trouble with that one, sometimes. You start thinking back sometimes and want to feel young again. Instead of just feeling good in your own skin.

Hell's half-acre: Süda-Tatari takes a beating

(UPDATE: The super of our building informs me that there is a detailed plan for a big building at the head of the street; the parking lot is just a temporary cash cow. Logical; should have realized.)


The wooden Süda-Tatari neighbourhood in central Tallinn, sometimes called Little Tartu because it was one of the intellectual centres of the city before the occupation (though current residents like us perhaps detract from it), has been taking a beating lately.

Last week, about a half-acre's worth of structures was removed to make way for a large "Europarkinglot". These particular buildings weren't especially architecturally valuable, but the scene is now total devastation and the quality of life on Süda tänav has changed significantly. The street survived the April riots unscathed...and now this. And just as we were getting our sh*t situation resolved.

Since it's so close to the centre and to Freedom Square -- currently used as a parking lot but to be phased out -- there is a lot of commercial pressure on the street. A park on the corner of Süda and Pärnu mnt, the main commercial artery, boasts a rare ginkgo biloba tree; it always seems to be in danger of being developed. Two shacks, Balti Sepik and Asian Aroma, stand on the other side.

But despite linking Pärnu mnt with another major and much uglier thoroughfare, Liivalaia, the rest of Süda tänav is an elegant and well-shielded little lane, partly because the one-way street makes two right-angle turns in quick succession. It's a little like the street A.Alle in Kadriorg, which is home to embassies. Süda is not that posh, but Süda 3 and 3a are marvellous stately examples of restoration.

It has its share of conscientious property owners who have helped restore buildings along the street, who fought to preserve trees and keep out the asocial element attracted to the garages behind the Kino Kosmos. There have been some casualties, new yellow apartment buildings, but nothing too atrocious.



Now I am a little worried. From the southern end on Liivalaia, you can see clear through to the buildings on Roosikrantsi. Noise is a good 5 dB up at our house. Wind also appears to be more substantial. A natural wind feeder leading to Liivalaia, easily Tallinn's ugliest and windiest major thoroughfare.

It remains to be seen what else this will bring. People using the parking lot as a Euroshortcut?

Next in the developers' sights... an arbour with apple trees next door to Süda 9 and the German Bierstube.

Linkscape

It's time to overhaul my Links section. I've decided not necessarily to make a distinction between commercial and uncommercial sites, or between blogs and non-blogs, as sometimes the borders between the latter are fuzzy. I also removed some sites that haven't been active for more than a few months.

In the past, I included a few links to Estonian-language sites, and I've decided to open the field to Estonian-language blogs -- because, well, I think it's time you learned Estonian, or at least developed a mashup that will provide a rough translation. Time is a-wasting, there's great discourse and wordplay going on, to say any more would be patronizing.

So instead of being grouped according to age, gender, size or "location of IP address published from", which are perfectly valid criteria, the linkscape is like a city: there are a number of very beautiful literary blogs that are like the salons, cafes and even temples; quality mainstream blogs and sites that are like the marketplace in the Athenian sense; more personal and offbeat sites that are like the mom and pop shops and coffeeshops and welcoming/unlocked private homes, and finally the hard data -- the newsstands on the corner and electronic marquees on public transit, maybe (gasp) the government institutions. And finally -- the (criminal) underworld, though I am still debating whether to include it.

Pretentious? Sure. Clear? Hopefully.

Among newly added Estonian-language links, one to check out is Egokulturism, which is surely in the belles lettres category; from there most of the wonders of Tartu should be a link or two away.

There will be a pipeline

(A new category of blog entry -- the Baltocentric review, in which a work of mass culture is reviewed from a myopically local perspective bordering on delusion of reference.)

The most politically salient movie currently featuring the Baltics may not be Singing Revolution, after all, but rather another film of a high artistic calibre, There Will Be Blood.

It's supposedly based on an Upton Sinclair book, but don't let the dun California landscapes fool you -- it's a thinly disguised version of the current Nord Stream scenario.

Day-Lewis is Putin, a Stalinist (note the moustache) cipher of a man who uses a young boy (Medvedev, of course) to appear palatable to the rest of the world and expedite his acquisitions. His partner/nemesis is a chubby-faced confidence man who is looking for a kickback (Schroeder) and has a twin brother/doppelganger who is a preacher (is director Anderson saying even the Christian Democrats can be co-opted?).

Standing in the way of the pipeline is Bandy (note that even the first two letters of his name are the same as "Baltic Sea state"!) who wasn't initially consulted for his opinion.

The film can be scoured for hidden meanings -- Bandy lives to be 99, Putin ends up smashing in Germany's head with a bowling pin, etc -- and indeed hidden meanings are the only explanation for the bizarre ending.

So what if the allegory doesn't quite work? Do any metaphors stick perfectly? What's interesting that a major American prodigy is so locked into current events in this small corner of the world. There will be a pipeline...unless we heed Anderson's warning.

There Will be Blood also features a splendid acting performance by Daniel Day-Lewis.

Here is a reasonable alternative to a full boycott of the Olympics.

The argument against a boycott is of course that China has not done anything bad(der) since the Olympics were awarded to them, and most intelligence sources concur that the invasion of Taiwan is only going to happen after the Olympics.

No one really argues for a boycott, and even the "boycott beijing" link I tout opts, like a responsible EU citizen, for a "review as to whether a boycott would be a good idea" or some such formulation.

But it would be nice to skip what will be undoubtedly be a nauseating, profligate and insulting spectacle that would have de Coubertin rolling in his grave, with or without China.

Unless of course, rumours are true that Lindsay Lohan will be participating in one of the allegorical dance sequences in which China exposes the West as a narcissistic fraud intoxicated with its own filmic images.

***

From the "noted but not yet investigated by me" category, something odd happens every night at 8:30pm -- the digital TV signal in Tallinn stalls. One person speculated it has to do with the switchover from daytime to nighttime electrical modes, which if true, would be fairly incredible as well as unacceptable.

Is this problem being worked on, or this just part of life in the post-analog era? Anyone -- people recording DVDs, backing up data -- inconvenienced by this?


***

I've become lazy about including pictures in this blog.

Believe it or not, part of it is just the hassle of reaching into my bag of tricks for the right USB cable. I can just about pound out 1000 words in the time it takes me to compose a scene, shoot, download and upload.

I fully appreciate how important pics are to page design. Incidentally, when I look at the creativity around me -- even if it is just a case of hastily writing something and photographing it -- my hat comes off to my fellow bloggers, not least in the estosphere. There's been some iconic images produced.

Links to some of these pictures, uh, to come soon, when I get around to it.

**

I'm still suffering vestiges of some kind of gastroenteritis. (Hopefully this is the last mention of illness here.) Alas, when we were in the States, we forgot to stock up on Pepto-Bismol, which is not available here -- it's a great OTC stomach soother. At home we have something called Smecta, which was recommended for Morgan when he was colicky. It was utterly useless. We don't know anyone on whom it's worked, big or small.

Luckily I had success with a good old remedy. I had bought carob beans when I was in Italy and Austria a couple months ago and they have sat in the cupboard ever since, after the novelty of munching them and spitting out the seeds at people wore off. iI thought I had read that they were used for thousands of years as a remedy. I tried one and relief was almost instantaneous.

Winter's last stand

Winter has been mild but it's still a tough foe. Round 2 vs bugs is underway here now.

I felt I was completely recovered from "flu" so I went for a run on Friday. A crisp night -- I almost said "fall night" -- but still relatively balmy. A nice training tempo at which, as sports gurus recommend, you still can carry on a conversation -- with myself in this case. From the centre I went down Pärnu mnt toward Nõmme. It didn't seem like particularly easy going so I didn't even think to stop to check if I was being pushed by a tailwind the whole time. When I finally turned around I found myself in Nõmme, 8 km out with major tuisk in my face -- drifting air with some sort of cold white dust. Coming back was like Arctic exploration and the wind at the crest of the railway overpass must have been close to 30 m/s.

Long story short, Estonian old wives' tale confirmed: Cold does make you sick. It's the air itself, Leeuwenhoek and Pasteur be damned. I wasn't chilled to the core in any way, but the fact that my part of my face and neck was cooled was enough. I felt it start as I changed back into street clothes. I've been down for days now. Stomach is unhappy with anything I eat. Fatigue and malaise. Bodily recession.

It was so bad on Sunday that I checked online for the symptoms of radiation poisoning -- could Putin's reach be that long? (I'm long a hypochondriac, but now this political paranoia thing is getting to me. And if there's a strong east wind, and the air above the Kremlin is 20 ppm polonium, could...)

Today the rest of our wood came, so it was time for heavy lifting -- but only 2 cu m this time. We've been happy with the company, Halupuu.ee, but like everything else, the prices have become insane. We buy ash, which is expensive to start with as it has the highest heating value of any native tree aside from sacred oak. This being late in the season, they only had a veinisõprade offer (wine drinker's delight) -- a container filled with bagged bundles for almost double the price.

The first time we bought, a couple years ago, they were just a small Hiiumaa company with different price brackets for each region. Delivering to the centre of Tallinn on a weekday night during rush hour was not something they did much. They had me stand in the middle of our busy one-way street to halt traffic while they tried to unload the pallets by crane and not get tangled up in the power lines. Now they have warehouses in different parts of Estonia, and a guy on a little mini-forklift spurted out of the back of the semi and took the wood to the right place, then zoomed off behind the house and hauled away the last empty pallet from November.

My wife was the skilled labourer -- good at stacking wood with a minimum of air. She filled in one of the archways again. It's nice to have the "Koskenkorva" wall back in our home -- like having an extra room.

A chill in the air

"Lucas is right about the return of Russian autocracy, the curtailment of the media, and the fact that the country is run by some scary people." Alexander Zaitchik in the Exile, November 19, 2007

There you have it. No ellipsis, no brackets. It's on page 3 of the review of The New Cold War. I had a suspicion that we were all on the same side on this. That if you read even the Russian press, it's saying the same thing -- it's just buried beneath obligatory pages of smoke and hot air and ad hominem attacks, possibly to throw off Putin's dogs.

Lucas has some astonishing trolls on his blog, not seen since the days of the riots, they've always reminded me of a personal coterie of ne'er-do-wells who might have gone to the same public school as Ed but who perhaps chose the wrong country (Russia) to work in while Lucas ended up making a smart choice (Baltics).

And some are Russian nationalists. To them, nothing sinister is going on. Russia is simply asserting itself just like a certain Florentine philosopher might counsel. They're like, this is our day in the sun, now. Don't rain on our polonium picnic.

I haven't read The New Cold War, and probably won't get around to reading it cover to cover for a review. In another time, I might have studied it and set off for a session of spirited Usenet debate with the trolls, but I'll leave that to others.

Other than being a well-researched work, a catalogue of the charges against Putin, it is yet unclear to me what constructive purpose the book serves. For 13 years, even under Yeltsin, I remember nothing but grim cautions about how the country is a menace. Now Russia is a rich menace. Whether we agree that it's a New Cold War or not is really a semantic issue.

I think that in many ways, the situation is inevitable. Macroeconomically, Russia is just another one of those countries that has been fattened by high oil prices and the West's softness. As for the scary people in charge, they're a product of the tradition of central autocracy and perhaps the people with the lowest political IQ/savvy in the semi-developed world. Could it really be any different? I never thought Yeltsin was any different, either, it was just easier to deal with a king figure crossed with Boffo the Clown who let his country be dismantled by oligarchs while he slept. The fact that it now has a ghoulish sober leader who probably takes radioactive supplements in the morning and has his enemies killed is so much more inconvenenient for the West.

Saag at the Peterson

Stopped into Cafe Peterson last night with Morgan for the opening of an art show by Sven Saag. The only painting I have in my house is a Saag that is clean and crisp by comparison to most of his oeuvre. He used to paint things like old doors that would be desirable in anyone's home even unpainted, doing amazing things with textures.

Like many of my acquaintances, he's a Nõmme resident. We visited his studio in that green piney district a few years ago -- it was in a part of a church. He wore a flannel shirt and everybody drank wine from mugs. It was Bohemian-Estonian.

Peterson is a cozy place but at the same time upscale. It reminds me of Stockholm. I eat there from time to time -- they seem to specialize in quiche. It's kid-neutral, but I hadn't remembered just how many of the tablecloths were sheer velour with large crystal centrepieces on top.

The paintings, being heavy plywood and such, were the most heavy-duty objects there, but Morgan, 2, who is usually well-behaved, filled me with unease. He lolled on the couches with an odd glint in his eyes and then when I suggested we look at the paintings, he sprang to life and clapped his hands too zealously. "Careful, Morgan, remember what we talked about at the Kumu," I said as he touched the frame of the biggest painting, which translated as In Grandmother's Garden or Grandmother in the Garden and appeared to depict two dwarves in a May blizzard, and it swung to and fro. "Oh, no, this isn't the Kumu," Sven said modestly. Well, that was true, I don't remember any of the Miro paintings there listed for 30,000 kroons.

Among the polyglot crowd was Vello Vikerkaar. I had heard his name before -- but had never met him. I think I was confusing him with other colourful expats/emigres such as Viido Polikarpus of Eesti Maja. Now it came back to me. A guy who was periodically published in local Estonian publications like EPL and EE, and by all rights, Vikerkaar.

Anyway, Vello is now the editor of Baltlantis, a commercial online site about the Baltics that seems quite content-rich and witty, and which I am probably the last person in Estonia not to be familiar with.

The emigre/expat scene is deep. I just bob around, myself. Where do they all come from? I think there should be a book about expats in Estonia -- the unofficial history. Naturally focusing on people who have made a life here, but also including, for example, phenomena such as Danhammer, the changes of ownership of bars and the countless soap operas played out in the 1990s, and naturally, who was sleeping with whom.

I am thinking that our expat scene could take, say, the Czech Republic's expat scene in a steel cage match.

First Woman

The decision came suddenly, but I have the feeling it's the right one.

I'm endorsing Obama.

Michelle Obama.

I've always liked "endorsement", because I still don't know who I'm voting for and I don't have to say. But now I might have to vote for Barack to get Michelle into the best possible position for her own run in 2016.

The more I read about her, the more I like her. Largely because the media-anointed field of potential national leaders who are both African-American and female is so small, she invites comparison to Condoleezza Rice. An overachiever, yes, but since she didn't grow up in the South, but in the less polarizing and siege-like Midwest, she seems less overprotected, less intense...more human than Condi. Michelle would also be too young to remember the most dramatic days of the civil rights movement.

I don't like Barack that much, and it's unlikely I will. I think it's just one of those things. Sometimes people don't like people. I distrust bandwagons and rah-rah, and that's certainly soured things. If he had a fictional alter ego, sometimes I think Obama would be an exiled king who has returned home (maybe I'm still not used to the name after a couple dozen WASPs and it seems foreign to me), statesmanlike and dignified, who happens to have a smart, American-raised wife. But in this case, it is the wife who is even more practical, interesting and straight-talking.

I don't want to make race or gender an issue (because it's untouched territory, you know), but looking at the numbers, America needs a black female president on general principle -- we should have had five black presidents by now, just as we should have had twenty-two women presidents. So allow me to indulge in thoughts about knocking down two demographic barriers at one time.

(I'm trying to think of other candidates, but I keep on getting stuck on Angela Davis. That would basically represent a social Year Zero, but probably wouldn't be very good, other than for relations with Venezuela.)

But completely aside from any form of affirmative action or setting the record straight: As long as we (a little less than one in two Democrats) are prepared to vote for a candidate with no foreign policy experience who is a sharp socially progressive, fomer lawyer who is past her prime and seen as corruptible...

...why couldn't we consider someone with no foreign policy experience who is a sharp, socially progressive former lawyer who is in her prime?

Senate experience can be had later, I hear it's like buying a house. And one term will do.

I like Michelle (right now), and she shares a lot of our values.

7-Up

(cross-posted to Mountains)

Belatedly on the topic of Alar Sikk: he became the first Estonian to climb the highest peaks on all seven continents in late January, by climbing Kilimanjaro.

(Not belated because I missed the news or anything, but sometimes news has to depressurize, especially in such a high-altitude and competitive sport. And with the Tartu Marathon being cancelled on Monday, we need a dose of pep.)

There are fewer people who have climbed all "seven summits" than there are independent countries. It's a heavily US-Western Europe dominated list, and most countries don't have a climber on the list. So Estonia is ahead of the trend. Don't forget that for 50 years, Estonians had a choice only between places like Elbrus, Kamchatka and Altai.

There are notoriously easy peaks among the Seven Summits -- it's not like the 8000 (metre) Club -- but it's still a triumph of logistics and organization and leadership.

Sikk, first Estonian atop Everest, was also the first Estonian up Carstensz Pyramid in December -- I use the Western name for the mountain because it sounds even more romantic, conjuring up a crystal shard in the middle of impassable rainforests. It's a very difficult mountain in all aspects -- the red tape from the military government, the technical challenges.

The only question arises about the peaks themselves. Elbrus is more of an Asian mountain (no, this is not a gibe at Russia; it has to do with plate tectonic theory). So Sikk may have to climb Mont Blanc, too, though I imagine he already has done so. If not, he should check out the local Gauloises for his nicotine needs.

Let's not forget one thing, of course: Sikk is far from the only great mountain climber in Estonia. A gregarious native of Võru (Estonia's highest-altitude county), Sikk may be dashing in manner, an anachronistic image, posing with cigarette in mouth on a top of a peak. But there's plenty of others. From my own circle of acquaintances, I can name Tarmo Riga, who was on the first Estonian Himalayan expedition and was climbing with Sikk in Antarctica, apparently bare-handedly going by this picture -- and Riga's wife, Jane.

There's a trend of extreme sport that is surprising in such a low country -- orienteering, skiing, marathons. Even among amateurs. I once asked a colleague if his brother, who was due in Estonia for a Christmas party, had already arrived. No, he was off to climb the highest peaks in three of the four countries of the UK in his 24 hours of free time before the holidays.

***

Regarding the Tartu Marathon, cancelled due to lack of snow for the second time in the last five years, I leave you with this passage from Wikipedia:

Since the Elfstedentocht is such a rare occurrence (15 times in the last 100 years), its declaration creates excitement all over the country. The day before the race many Dutch flock to Leeuwarden to enjoy the party atmosphere that surrounds the event. The evening before the race called the "Nacht van Leeuwarden" (Night of Leeuwarden) becomes a giant city-wide street party (Frisians, who have a reputation of surliness, are said to thaw when it freezes).

They haven't held that ice skating race in 11 years now, but the website is also still up. In a word, it's not a historical curiosity: They're waiting for the canals to freeze! So even if it doesn't snow for a couple years in Estonia, there is hope for Tartu, at least hope for a good party scene, like a second May student holiday.

From the Hasty Review category, Britain is thinking twice about requiring its Olympians to sign a gag order on post-competition remarks.

In light of Chinese air pollution, a moistened gag is instead being recommended during competitions.

Rimshot.

And earplugs to drown out the screams from the Falun Gong gymnastics demonstration Olympic event.

他妈的！No funny! Censor wanted to help with bad joke removing.

***

Anti-Semitism is such an insidious meme.

It's a mindless meme. There is no basis to it. Everyone knows that. Jewish cartoonists, aware of and outraged by the absurdity, the mischaracterization, parodied anti-Semitism back in the day, but it only fed the meme. Some say that's how the trouble started. And to this day, the satire defense is verboten, though some leeway is granted for humour aimed against Hitler's person, even by people other than Mel Brooks and Jon Stewart.

As a Balt, I often find myself in the position, where for reasons of debate, I want to compare some facet of the Soviet occupation to the Nazi state. We suffered under both occupations. But one doesn't go there, not for long, even though the totalitarianisms share some outward characteristics.

The possibilities for social suicide by remarks in this and related areas are endless. It's quick work. You have Michael Richards, who thought he was playing on some rarified satirical level where he could bandy around the N word. Big mistake. Or political suicide: the case of the German defence minister who compared Bush to Hitler...and hasn't been heard from since.

If anti-Semitism didn't actually lead to ghastly real-life results and genocide, it would be nice to be able to give everyone one free pass for an indiscretion, in this day and age. Because the tentacles of the meme are so intermeshed with so many areas. Because people, like Mel Gibson, get drunk sometimes.

I mean, what if I had a dream of my doppelganger shouting anti-Semitic claptrap and then blogged about it? I think I would much sooner grave crazy-images of M-----d and take my chances.

Take the late great Bobby Fischer. If you exercise a kind of divine discretion and pardon his impardonable anti-Semitic remarks, what you find is that he sounds pretty reasonable on just about everything else besides his own race -- just about how you would expect a man to sound when he has been persecuted by his own government. Or if a man with a 180 IQ applies his mind to the events of 9/11 and comes up with an answer.

Poor Bobby Fischer. I always found him fascinating. A certified genius of a latter-day age when horses don't race against locomotives anymore. And American. Born, that is.

Good last words, too. Perhaps what he needed was love.

Anyway, Cavett had a good eulogy with some video.

***

Came across Drunk History, a new...er...genre of video. While self-indulgent to an extreme, there's some potential in the idea -trained costumed actors earnestly re-enacting a scene completely faithful to the slurred narration from yr sloppy-drunk host.

It doesn't look like it will amount to anything much -- volume 2.5 isn't even history, or I don't think, just a vehicle for Jack Black to play the goat and milk a sight gag from "Vol. 2" to death...

But these could actually be educational I think, a kind of Cliffs Notes for the Jackass set. Couldn't they be?

Mens sana, at least

I recently received a couple of expressions of concern over my state of mind. When you consider, out of context, some of the recent postings here -- a weird rambling nightmare, a meditation on Beat Generation icons, and two posts where I denounce Estonia's prime minister (for being a communist tool in his youth) and call for Estonia's president to abolish his office, respectively -- I guess such questions may not be unwarranted.

The answer is that I am just fine, thanks.

I did come down with the flu last night, which doesn't exactly make me very well-disposed toward the world.

Increasingly, flu in my case seems to be a mental blip, something that can be read most dramatically on a brain monitor rather than a thermometer.

Sometimes I even think it's a necessary bodily function, getting sick every once in a while.

Anyway, there's an initial acute phase which lasts less than 24 hours. Maybe there's vague, shifting cold-like symptoms. Sometimes there's even a period of creativity, a buzz. You read about people giving the acting performances of their lives whilst flu-ridden. But generally irritability -- irascibility -- sets in quickly. You can only tolerate aches and pains for so long.

Then a days-long recovery period, a depleted fogginess.

I rarely get sick enough to actually be in severe discomfort, so sometimes the main medical question comes down to what type of pain reliever should I use if I am perhaps well enough to have a drink later. (Opt for ibuprofen over paracetamol. You don't want to close off options should there be a dramatic turnaround.)

An Estonian cold cure is tea spiked with vodka. Or Belii Aist brandy, but the less congeners, the better; a clean and pale spirit. This is one of my memories of my first winter after my return to Estonia. Youngish, educated, sniffling people sitting aroud the office nursing jagatees.

I don't really subscribe to dehydrating my body during the active phase of a malady.

I did find yesterday 800 mg of ibuprofen puts a different, almost pleasant spin on the acute phase of flu.

I've always been an aspirin man. It's naturally-occurring, and it seems to me like an intelligent substance that knows where to go in the body when it is needed. Plus the general blood-thinning properties. I've even used it for things like nerves like some people use beta-blockers for stage fright. Yes, I know, the pharmacokinetics are different, but placebo effect mixed with well-being = effective. We were out of aspirin, though, and standing in line at the valveapteek wasn't appealing.

I was a little surprised at being recommended 800 mg of ibuprofen, because I was once prescribed 600 mg after a root canal. I always distrusted ibuprofen's spicy chemical taste and associated it with kidney damage, just as acetaminophen involves playing a game of chance with your liver.

But according to Wikipedia (a great source for dosages and drug interactions, incidentally, being a source that anyone can modify), the toxic dose is an order of magnitude or two higher. Apparently some countries have 800 mg as a standard dose, whereas it's those lily-livered Americans who have 200 mg as the regular dose and only 400 mg as a extra-strength dose. Estonians have taken the middle route, with 400 mg as the basic unit, and many people take two at a time as needed.

**

Another observation: I've found that having kids exposes you to more illness. So much for the logic that by a certain age, you will have already developed immunity to all of the entry-level bugs your toddler might get from kindergarten. I think I get 75% of Morgan's bugs. Then we incubate these things and pass them back and forth to one another with minor mutations for the next few weeks.

Or maybe four years of dwelling in the centre of a city has weakened or recoded my immune system. Always blame civilization, when I can.

BRAINSTORM: Folk heroes

Phillymag just ran a piece about the life and death of Tristan Egolf, a swashbuckling man-child who lived life like an existential experiment. He wrote three postmodern novels and established a name for himself as an activist in the 1960s tradition before burning out and becoming a squalid suicide somewhere in the suburban sprawl of what used to be Amish country.

Egolf's value as a writer was far less than his value as folk hero and personality. Truman Capote's "typing, not writing" dismissal of Kerouac could apply just as well to Egolf, and Egolf's first novel doesn't add anything to the canon that wasn't suggested by something like Milagro Beanfield War.

But reading about how Egolf charmed Parisians not only with his mad prose but with his picaresque oral tales from his mythic vision of America, I started thinking about folk heroes.

How our demand for folk heroes is much greater than our need for writers.

Writers are a dime a dozen, especially in this age of cross-fertilization, where most people have the technical skills to string coherent sentences together. And established writers often turn out to be an industry creation, because the means of production (except for the most radical samizdat) are still in the hands of an establishment. (Look at the poor writer singled out on the last page of the Phillymag piece -- groomed for years, so perfect, a product of positioning, the right degrees and no doubt collaborations with cover designers. There's some truth to that.)

Folk heroes congeal from disparate strands.

The example of Neal Cassady is perfect. Cassady (lived from 1926-1968) is a giant of a folk hero in the US, somewhere at the nexus of the automobile at the moment the great highways were built and the Nietzschean superman, even if you have not heard his name. His persona arguably continues to inform the counterculture and vice versa. If there is an avatar of the road trip, that most American thing, it is Cassady.

His myth is the equally the product of two quite separate major works. He appears in his youth as a thinly disguised fictional figure in On The Road, then amazingly (because most people only get 15 minutes of fame) pops up again in his late 30s in Tom Wolfe's New Journalism book about the hippies, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, where Cassady is a kind of yogi. In fact, hippie leader Ken Kesey, (a real life writer!) is positioned as a rather statist figure, suggesting at various times Louis XIV, and a leader in exile ... even more than an outlaw or bandido, which is the "official" legend sung by Kesey's followers.

Folk heroes are potentially the greatest enemies a state and statism will ever have because they are untouchable. They come from the collective subconscious and take shape by channels outside of the state, down midnight rural byways, underground tunnels and garden paths -- and they end up somehow something deep, maybe symbolic of the nation.

There has yet to be a folk government in any country and there never will. Experiments to establish it have only been a hamhanded attempt to hide agendas behind the the working class, who are mute when they are actually at work in the mills. Everyone fell into that trap for a few years -- Guthrie, Seeger.

Can one writer create a folk hero? Sure, remarkably integral ones. Don Quixote took the piss out of pompous men of letters and the Good Soldier Švejk snapped back the silly moustaches of dynastic imperialists. Švejk's creator did not live to see the end of his hero's life, but no matter; Švejk was not silenced. His language was the language of everyday people, your over-the-fence neighbout, telling you about his day. He had nothing to do with the state's writs, officialese, Miranda rights and the like.

And there is perhaps Estonia's greatest antihero** Toomas Nipernaadi, the boy of summer, a creation of the writer August Gailit. Though from an era whose prose now often seems dated, his prototype still shines through. We know his type, sometimes a sailor, sometimes a tailor, full of meta-stories, and shaggy dog tales, haunting the edges of the rye, seducing women with his stories and breaking their hearts when the images fade.

Every spring, Nipernaadi is back.

These guys were story-tellers above all. Like a radio with its dial being turned -- constantly putting out a stream of patter. Like magicians.

You don't execute a condemned man before he's finished his last meal, and nor can a folk hero be silenced as long as he or she is talking. Someone else will pick up the thread.

Which is why no one will remember Egolf's character from Lord of the Barnyard, his heroic garbageman. He doesn't speak, almost at all. It is a narrative and Egolf -- the folk hero -- is the one who is speaking and who will be remembered. Or at least channeled.


**Estonia's epic hero Kalevipoeg was a galoot who did things to the landscape only glaciers are capable of in real life, but he is not a folk hero, just as Uncle Sam is not a folk hero. They don't speak to us. They are men of blunt action and conscription of others, not of letters or words. Yet we are aware that they are the insincere ones on some level, even though folk heroes might fib brazenly to us.

REVIEW: My Mac

Four months is the end of the probationary period for many employees; let's extend it to computers, too, and see what my white Macbook 2.16 GHz has done in that time.

Except for four** issues detailed below, I have been completely happy. The specs have held up under heavy work, even video rendering, and there is always the option of adding more memory to the existing 1 GB if I really need to. OS X -- less so Windows -- is an efficient battery consumer. It is nice to be able to watch two short feature films on battery power. My last ATI graphics card-equipped laptop seemed to run in space-heater mode.

1) It runs Windows fine. For the first month, there was a problem with spontaneous shutdowns when coming uot of sleep, but it hasn't happened in a while. Maybe a firmware update resolved it. Also, the MacBook did not like Parallels -- the $59 or so program that lets you boot a second operating system in a window within the Mac OS --it reminded me of a prank people used to play on each other -- running nested instances of Windows 3.1 back in the days when it was DOS-based; finally everything ground to a halt and I had to re-activate my copy of Windows XP before using it.

2) The white polycarbonate (sounds like graphite or something, means cheap plastic) casing is substandard. From merely the weight of my right hand, a horizontal crack has developed 2mm from the proximal edge of the laptop, which threatens to eventually extend all the way across the keyboard. Luckily the plastic has a grain or is baffled on the underside, so it is splitting in a straight line and is unlikely to expose any circuitry. It's just out of the range of the built-in iSight webcam, so photo to come later.

3) I had some issues with the glossy screen, but that was when we were still on our road trip. Since then -- commuting between home and office, and even while travelling in Europe -- I have forgot all about the fact that it is reflective. It still surprises me that the engineers wouldn't take more extreme uses (in a cramped car with direct sunlight) into consideration. For example, it should be possible to open the screen more than 135 degrees.

4) The slot-loading drive used by Macs is stupid. Two homemade CDs won't play (nor can the songs be imported) because the artist's CD label is too thick, or there are minor imperfections in the label adhesive. So I will have to ask a friend with a PC. And when a program such as iTunes encounters a problem with a dirty or damaged CD, it doesn't time out after a certain period of time, but will continue to "grind gears" interminably (pinwheel cursor) until a force quit, and even the response to force quit is sluggish.

As a veteran of the first Macs with their groaning sound upon eject, and having inserted many a paper clip into the little hole, every eject makes me think about impending drive failure, whereas I've never had that feeling with PC drawers.

** Well, there is a #5. The fact that so many other people have a white MacBook, even in Estonia. I used to duel with people in coffeeshops. The coffeeshop has become a stand-in for the oldtime saloon, and computers and cases have replaced guns and holsters. You and your opponent make eye contact briefly then proceed to draw your computers. No, Calamity Jane doesn't faint or fall off her stool, but you can imagine that the middle-aged lady selling vastlakuklid lets out a low whistle if your ax is really ripped...and you smile smugly as you start typing. (It's a virtual duel.) But ever since the Apple section was opened in the Tallinn Kaubamaja department store, there have even been folks packing aluminium MacBook Pros...a model that starts at close to 3,000 gold dollars in this here neck of the plains.

Osso buco baby

In Estonia, Mardi Gras is restricted to the somewhat banal and ubiquitous vastlakukkel, the whipped cream bun with a funny hat. One of the Balti Sepik cafes in Tallinn had a whole section of the cafe cordoned off, reserved for the largescale distribution of vastlakukkel orders. That's dedication.

It's fine if it's real whipped cream (see my screed on vegetable fats) and if it's fat that you're after. But being more vegetarian than not, I need something more meaty and festive on this of all days. A stew. We had osso buco last night, which together with the orange and lemony gremolata that it's traditionally served with, makes the house smell like Christmas all over again.

Flavour-wise it is a kind of pot roast -- except of course it's supposed to be made from veal shanks. There aren't exactly any local butcher's shops to pop into...and veal is sort of an ethical pickle for me anyway, to mix culinary expressions.

But Stockmann was offering something fresh for 40 kroons a kilo under the name of osso buco -- and it was a cattle product, if much closer to ox than calf, and I decided that we would break out the marrow spoons. It's a threefold experience -- the meat, the sauce which is rich and gelatinous on account of the bones, and then the marrow.

I don't really know if this is appetizing to most people or not.

My wife self-admittedly tends to have a better relationship with organ meats than she does with bones and their contents. Well-marbled beef (läbikasvanud veiseliha) is not officially recognized as a concept in this country, and beef cuts with (un)healthy strips of fat or the bone in also seem to be out. An Australian was just lamenting the lack of a good steak in this country in an email...another country that knows from meat.*

Apologies to the vegetarian members of my family who may be reading this. Just consider that I was originally going to lead with the story of the epidemic at a slaughterhouse in Minnesota, which would have grossed everyone out.

* What's good in Estonia: smoked sausages, an amazing array of extremely non-kosher snacks like ham rolls stffed with cheese and garlic, all manner of pork, the new lean beef cattle, lamb from southern Estonia...

Rounding up some news I missed the first go-round...

Las Vegas, the city of perpetual Carnival, has its great American novel. Or America has its great Las Vegas novel.

The write-up from the NYT Magazine almost makes me sorry we didn't visit.

We saw New Orleans in 2004. Maybe we'll catch Vegas...before it burns or something.

I always thought everyone in Vegas either works in HoReCa or is somehow part of the dynamic of gambling. So the fact that the author has two pawnbrokers for parents isn't surprising. What's incredible that someone in Vegas has read David Foster Wallace and John Barth and then wrote a book that, aside from some Pynchonesque names of characters, apparently isn't too derivative.

***

The apocalypse continues to be foretold -- in the offbeat news, travel, medical sections. Yropical diseases have landed in Europe. To me, this is sort of like the Moors establishing a bridgehead, yet since chikungunya -- yes that's the name -- is a disease and thus a great mimic, news arrived late. I always figured a place like the swampy Adriatic coast was a more likely place for an outbreak than sunny Sicily or something.

DREAM: Tolkien's horror garden party

Dreams are boring to other people, but considering that mine are almost always fuzzy states or mini-moods that would put anyone to sleep, I thought this one deserved a write-up. It could never be literature; besides the feeling is fading too fast to reconstruct and probably by the time I retire tonight it will just a collection of symbols, even to me. But as an artifact of a very haunting moment...why not put it down.

It was Boschian when it came to symbolism, and vivid. And I didn't feel I came out of me -- I've been feeling quite normal lately if a little fixated on material things. In fact I’ve never had, in hindsight, so powerful a feeling of the presence of a sinister, alien agent within a nightmare. That the nightmare was a work orchestrated by an evil power to serve a specific purpose.

The question is how much I was compromised. For half the day, I was unable to shake the feeling that I had somehow done something, "put my soul at hazard", to borrow a line from a recent movie that happens to fit perfectly.

I wonder, can we be responsible for actions in dreams? Other than in a direct case of a voluntarily submitting to a succubus (which this was not - I don't think), can we commit a metaphysically significant act?

--

It was a party at J.R.R Tolkien's country house -- somewhere outside London. Lawns, shrubberies and rich kids, many of whom have apparently been staying on the estate for an extended period of time. Late 1960s model Karmann-Ghias parked outside, yet 1990s Britpop playing.

Except, I realized after I woke up and far too late, it all had a worldly, reptilian quality right from the beginning -- something on the order of Jean Ray's Malpertuis comes closest. Or the Castevets in Rosemary's Baby.

It was truly a wonderful house. Elrond himself couldn't do better. Wood panelling, rambling annexes, extensive shrubberies and gardens.

I can't wait to blog about this, I actually thought to myself in my dream. A private party at Tolkien's.

The man himself was sitting on a lawn with three liver-spotted dowagers with their eyebrows demarcated to suggest superciliousness and other such qualities.

For an odd moment, in my dream, Tolkien conjured up a old memory of meeting the linguist Paul Saagpakk as a boy. There was an eminence about him.

I embrace Tolkien. He is neutral. I know this man. As I embrace him, much harder than warranted by the social setting, I feel something like deep filial love mixed with professional respect, but I realize just how ancient and wizened he is -- why, even over hundred would not say it -- and my hands seem to sink into his back. I feel his heart under my right hand, strong but impossibly fast, like a hummingbird's. Under my left hand I feel the same.

A lot of other things happen at once, like they do at parties.

The kids are university age, some are there, some are not. Their rooms are cluttered, and full of pills. Xanax and painkillers -- substances I have had no contact with in real life. Yet I rummage through them, thinking I might as well take a few bottles while I am here.

A girl, slightly younger than the rest, does amazing tricks - somersaults, flips, sleights of hand -- for me personally. I am aware that her behaviour might be heading in an inappropriate direction. (The pale complexion, black braid and Wednesday look about her should have been a warning.)

"And what will you give me for the show," she asks afterwards, "a trinket..." But I'm already thinking I'm going to kiss her. A peck on the lips. No more. Why?`Who knows. To confirm her as a person, amid this wasteland of ancient literati and wasted kids? Some such ill-begotten idea. Perhaps I linger for a split second too long, but she is pulling away. No matter, it is obvious I am the one who withdrew later. She smirks. The whole transaction takes on a sordid quality. I walk outside.

Then my son is sick is an upstairs room. He is sweating from a fever, but it is a pale red froth.

This is, I guess, the point in a nightmare where you are truly terrified, and any Oedipal elements fall where they will.

“Mamma,” I call for my wife, as if helpless, though I know perfectly well my wife is “Emme” and my own mother is "Mamma".

But my wife is holding another baby.

There are deep bloodless ulcerations on my son’s chest. It looks like in movies when a throat is cut and the blood has not started to well. Awful.

What's happening to him, I shout. Some disease?

Then I wake up.

I feel like I want to go to Mass or something, except I'm not even Catholic, and it persists the rest of the morning. I can’t stop thinking about the kiss. A kiss can be a signature. What was the contract?

Broken English

I hate it. I'm finding that sometimes I can't write English the way it comes out -- naturally.

The translation company I subcontract for is fairly reputable with various ISO certifications. Everything (except for maybe translations into Udmurt) gets edited by native speakers, and we're no slouches when it comes to quality control. While there's no such thing as exclusive customers, we get our fair share of work from "blue-chip" clients -- cultural institutions and so forth.

But this comes at a price -- some of the Estonian officials have just enough of an elite school background to fancy themselves experts on the English language. An angry fax or e-mail will arrive, sometimes with an attachment in which the client has made their own (almost always incorrect) corrections. I dread these occurrences, because I can't call up the client directly as I would if it were my own company's client; yet at the end of the day, this could have a bearing on my financial security, too.

Latest example: the sentences

"In 1939, X was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. She would be nominated on a total of 12 occasions."

"Would be nominated"? Now any native speaker understands that "would" is not conditional here but is an oddball tense known as "future-in-the-past" -- one of the features that collectively makes English as expressively rich as it is.

Of course, there is no reason I could not have written "She was nominated a total of 12 times".

And there are other examples are not as clear-cut. "Issue a statement to that effect..." ("What effect? Are you saying that it has a mõju?")

Anyway, style does count, even if the only people who will read your English are Swedes.

For now, I am assured that these occasional eruptions from ignoramuses are not hurting business, and that it's standard practice for Estonians to go ballistic when demanding a refund, especially if they suspect they might not be in the right.

Still, I am growing more defensive, and frankly it sucks.

PROFILE IN BRAZENNESS: Savisaar

Edgar Savisaar, the man people love to hate, the bete noire of...just about everyone in Estonia not in Savisaar's Tammany Hall-like political machine, has in his old age embarked on a wave of self-publicity.

All of a sudden, he's everywhere.

He's using city funds to buy airtime on the Kalev TV channel. (Because of technical problems with the telephone lines, the first show was free for him.)

When it comes to lower-cost promotion, Savisaar, once known as Estonia's most press-unfriendly politician, now has a blog at savisaar.blog.com. (Damn, why did no one think to tie up that URL with a site similar to gwbush.com?)

Also in the news this week: He's late for the ferry coming back from Saaremaa, so what happens? The ferry, which is a quarter of the way to the mainland, comes back for him. This is at least the second time, documented in the press, that this has happened. What is he doing on Saaremaa in the first place?

Who is this man? How did he get his power? How come I don't have it? Is it the way he doesn't move his mouth when he talks? Jedgar, Tricky Dick, Huey Long, Boss Tweed -- he's been compared to many legends from American history. Is there some truth to it?

And if, say, Ansip can go from a communist functionary to the PM from a right-leaning party, could Savisaar by the time he turns 65, become..likeable?

PROFILES IN COURAGE: Ansip

Twenty years ago today, Estonians were out on the streets of Tartu to remember the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty, in which Soviet Russia promised never ever to attack Estonia again, but did so anyway in 1939-1940.

The demonstration was a baptism of fire for a number of independence leaders. These were still not safe times. It was still illegal to fly the Estonian flag, Estonians were still serving long sentences in Siberia for things like writing and thinking.



Among Estonia's future leaders gaining valuable experience that day was current Prime Minister of Estonia Andrus Ansip. Unfortunately, as Ansip recalls, he was late showing up. Too late. The picket lines solidified. Maybe roads leading to the centre were blocked. Remember, he was a nobody back then, he didn't have an official car with a siren.

Incredibly, in the heat of the moment, and arriving late and all, he may have found himself hunkered down INSIDE the Communist Party building, watching the miltia break apart the demonstration.

This is the kind of rumour one has to be careful about. Someone says Ansip was in the Communist Party building, and the next thing you know, people are saying that he was beating heads of protesters in personally.



Well, he wasn't. He may have been watching people beating in the heads of protesters but he certainly wasn't beating them personally. (Anyway, there was no real carnage.)

And Ansip played only a menial role back then as the the head of the organizing committee of the Tartu Communist Party. He probably didn't have keys to the office. Someone had left the door open, or something, or there were militiamen going in and out all the time.

He could have slpped in unnoticed. There were dozens of brazen Communist Party careerists with menial roles. Not that Ansip was a brazen careerist; that's a sour-grapes accusation vented later by former communists.

And maybe he was simply the man who wasn't there. He may have been at his relatives' house. He was late and then he went to his relatives' house, after getting Secretary Närska coffee at the Communist Party building. Plenty of explanations.

Yesterday President Ilves's Memory Institute was established, whose purpose is to document repressions against the Estonian people. I wonder if they could make a point of getting to the bottom of where Ansip was and with finality establish him as being at his relatives' house, or that he was only at the CP because he was getting someone's coffee, and that he may have yelled an anti-Soviet slogan or two, albeit in a quiet undertone.

It isn't fair for such a blue black and white patriot to have a black mark hovering above him.

The way it used to be

I was recently forwarded a well-travelled slideshow of pictures from the late Soviet period. These pictures prompted strong negative emotional reactions in quite a few people, who, I suspect, remembered not only the things pictured, but the things just beyond the edges of the professionally composed and cropped frames -- the world of shabbiness and decrepitude and lies that can just be gleaned from the photos themselves.

At the same time, I felt a bit of nostalgia. I guess it could be called presque vu: I was here in 1991 and then from 1993, a heady and upbeat time when much of the old background still survived. I didn't have to live here back when it was bad and there was no other choice. Now we have the option of leaving ductwork bare and calling it industrial chic or minimalism; back then it was just an exposed pipe because panelling was a deficit item or something.

Yet there are definitely aesthetic values in these photos. These must have been officially sanctioned pictures. But if this is the BEST the Soviets could come up with, life must have been pretty cheerless.

Still, note (as Tiia-Triin did) the people standing in line to buy tobacco - not a bad thing to make smokers wait, though of course they waited for the staff of life, too. Note the sauna -- I remember the one at the Tõnismägi ujula and liked it. And those water vending machines -- before my time but said to be reliable, dispensing three flavours of carbonated water -- with no plastic waste!

I have to get this out of my system before midnight. Eighty-eight years ago tomorrow Estonia won its independence de jure and "for ever". It's a day that is still important to me. Flags will fly on the backdrop of freshly fallen snow, and meditating on Soviet virtues will be mildly put tasteless. But that is tomorrow. And sometimes I think we forget: Estonia didn't regain its independence for material reasons, only so that we could replace abacuses with cheap electronics, or glass with PVC solutions. Things have gotten a little too plastic, glib, cheap. Instead of a crumbly layer on top of everything, now there is a shiny film, and it adds cost but little value.

Calendar reform

Did you know that in Estonia, March 2008 is the Month of the Chancellor of Justice and the National Audit Office? It's part of the 90th anniversary of Estonian independence festivities. July 2008, for example, is Local Governments Month,a "time to discover beautiful places in the fatherland".*

Ignore the "fatherland" (it's just an innocent direct translation), but doesn't this strike you as having totalitarian-bureaucratic overtones? In any case, it reminds me of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, where in a not too distant future, months have sponsors (Month of the Depend Adult Undergarment etc).

I'm going to be disowned for linking to an old Popular Front era guy, but Rein Veidemann had an excellent op ed in Postimees a few days ago, in which he asks, quite astutely, why the months couldn't be named after things like the Estonian language, and Estonian literature instead of...state organs. Otherwise the celebrations could slip into self-parody,

* The webpage also notes: "When visiting various local governments and anniversary events organised by them, let us remember: local governments decide upon and organise all issues of local life according to laws, and what is most important – do so independently."

This isn't just funky language -- there's a problem with emphasis here. First of all, people don't visit "local governments". They visit places in the countryside, which happen to have, probably in a couple Eurorenovated rooms in an old manor-era building, a few officials, who help oil the wheels of commerce and make life in the outlying areas better. Let's not get too focused on power and organizing here.