Spin 101 -- remedial studies

I was thinking Russia was developing some slick savvy at the art of influencing people in the West -- Harvard-trained American-English-speaking talking heads, Russophiles constructing lifelike straw men etc.

Luckily, I guess, there are still Duma demagogues like Konstantin Kosachev whose awareness is still on a Siberian thatch-hut level, as evidenced by this pearl:

“In Estonia when the defenders of the monument celebrating the conquerors of fascism were beaten by police, there were no open letters, or resolutions to the European Parliament, no condolences sent - only complaints that youths outraged by murder had interrupted the Estonian ambassador’s transportation."

Problem here being the overabundance of nested delusional statements and false value judgments in a single sentence ("murder", "interruption of transport", "fascism").

Remember, the point is to spin the issue, not the heads of the listeners.

The trick to applying spin, of course, is to concoct a sentence that comports with the conventional ideation in all respects -- except one. In other words, fabricate just one grotesque claim in an otherwise normal sentence -- sneak it in there.

A time for alcohol

Alcohol (off-license) sales have now been harmonized for the whole country. In Tallinn, the city of Mammon and sober early capitalism, alcohol sales ended at 8pm and apparently there was even a requirement that the hard-working populace couldn't look at beverage containers for fear of recession -- stores had to cover up their merchandise under sack-cloth; while in Tartu, the city of blessed irresponsibility and crazy late-night notions, you could buy alcohol until 2 am.

Now the tables are turned: starting later this summer, it will be 10pm for the entire country, which means you better start queuing up at 9:45 pm. No more driving to the next county. Though you should check the local legislation in Latvia -- there might be some interesting differences to exploit.

Tartu will turn into something like New York during the Giuliani years, while Tallinn, which I assume has seen public drunkenness wiped out, will no doubt backslide big-time.

In fact alcohol sales rules are utterly meaningless. Just as it was recently revealed that anyone can legally buy anything for any currency in any store in the Old Town (just call it a private transaction between buyer and seller), alcohol purchased can be backdated, too. Just ask your corner store proprietor to treat your purchase as retroactive. You're just picking up/redeeming something you bought on credit earlier in the day.

Brief respite

I will be taking a break from the blog for a few weeks. I have decided to have a guest blogger while I am gone, though no guarantees that he will produce anything. He'll probably just change the template to something strange. I met him in a pub in Tallinn, Hell Hunt (Gentle Wolf). His handle is Utugi. He's 25% Cherokee and 50% Estonian. There aren't many 6'7" (199 cm) people with recognizably Native American features in Tallinn so he may be familiar to some. His Cherokee is still better than his Estonian; he didn't learn Estonian growing up but he studied Cherokee and ended up "rejoining the Eastern Band" in 2003 and still operates a small business in western North Carolina.

I'll try to post myself as well. I'm spending more quality time with fam -- and breaking in heavy-duty garmont Pinnacle hiking boots. Went up and down Pikk jalg 30 times a couple nights ago -- far more enjoyable than it might sound, and the cobblestones should be much harsher terrain than anything in northern Sweden.

Days of leto svet

Notes on summer...a time of lightness.

Leaving for my recent trip to Rome, I walked to the Tallinn airport. I don't know any other major city you could do that. I live close to the centre and it took 28 minutes. I set out at 4 am, and the sun was rising. I jogged a bit in the beginning with my light carry-on (I didn't want to arrive less than an hour before the flight) but I don't think it would have taken more than 30 minutes if I had walked. The sidewalk was continuous. When I landed back in Tallinn, I did it again, exited the terminal and cut across a field to the road to avoid the parking lots.

The greenness of this, it should be noted, is questionable. The amount of taxi cab fuel I saved was counterbalanced by the calories consumed. And as there is currently no direct flight from Tallinn to Rome, I had to fly what was the world's most ridiculously short flight to Helsinki (the plane reaches cruising altitude and stays there for about 5 minutes while they turn off the safety belt sign and roll the drink cart down the aisle) and fly directly over Tallinn.

But someday, I fervently hope, maybe with some government subsidies for Estonian Air (I'll leave it to Savisaar to suggest renationalization), Estonians can walk through the forests and fields to the airport and get on a non-stop flight to places like New York.

Jun. 23 and 24 are Victory Day and St. John's Day, a time for grilling meat and making bonfires in the countryside.

This is so important a part of the folk calendar that in order to continue the pagan tradition, Estonians have seen fit to formalize it both as a saint day and a secular holiday devoted to an obscure military victory over not the Russians but the Germans.

This is the traditonal end-of-summer celebration. There is a tinge of frost in the air, the autumn rains have arrived... What, you say -- summer has only started? All right, then. Perhaps I am wrong and it is in fact the midsummer celebration or the beginning-of-summer celebration. (Go figure.) But the days are now getting shorter and we aren't yet aware of it. Something similar I suppose to the situation with the oil economy and people in their thirties.

It sure did pour rain. Official efforts were mounted to provide for a period of clearing around 8pm. In Tallinn, the "eye" of the storm was around 8pm, when the skies briefly cleared.

Tallinn is always amazingly devoid of people in summer, but especially so this year. We saw some Japanese tourists wandering around the centre, looking scared; I wonder if there were efforts to brief them. Our holidays could cause disconcertment. If I visited a city that was that empty, I would wonder if I missed an air-raid siren or something.

Internet cultures

Someone forwarded me an interesting study -- here -- on the speed at which countries embrace new technologies. Estonia is a fast tech adopter, like South Korea, for example.

Having just come back from Italy, where I valiantly tried to remain in a fluid work-and-play mode (like a character out of a William Gibson novel), I was reminded yet again of the differences between "grey" countries such as Italy and "reddish" countries such as Estonia.

WiFi isn't specifically correlated, but it seems like a touchstone technology. Laptop and WiFi for me, anyway, is the ideal. Anything else (mobile phone, fax) can be derived from it. As a result, I haven't paid any attention to things like 4G mobile phones. As long as I can use my laptop to make calls with Skype, then watch video clips, I'll be fine.

WiFi is perfectly married to the concept of the cafe. This may seem like the world's most obvious statement, but it isn't to some. French cafes, like the ones around Montparnasse back in the day, were the crucible of a sort of guerrilla literary atmosphere that I see as the essence of the Internet. (I wonder if La Rotonde has WiFi. Probably not.)

I have been pleased by how gracefully cafe culture in the US has developed. Thanks to a certain NW chain and its countless imitators, even most soulless shopping malls even have cafes -- classy yet relaxed places with cafeteria-style orders, no bewildering rules or charges. So many cafes have seen fit to provide free WiFi (if not the NW chain). In Estonia it would almost be unthinkable for a cafe to not at least have an Elisa router (2 dollars for a 24 hour ticket). Kid corners are also becoming common.

Italian cafe culture (as with Viennese cafes I suppose) seems incompatible with getting out a computer and tapping away. It's also odd that, for such a kid-friendly country, I did not see any toy corners. This is not a complaint; I'm sure they have different customs and a stronger home life.

It would seem gauche to place my laptop on an Italian espresso bar and start typing, though it is approximately the the same height as 15-minute-limit e-mail terminals in US public libraries. It's really the domain of the baristas. The espresso slamming that goes on there is specific, serious business. Even at the airport, where there was a different layout and you stand and drink away from the actual bar, the person bussing the empty cups did not think much of what I was doing and made it clear that I should pound down my shot and move along.

There is also little public WiFi in Italy. And, I understand, it is also not that common for people to have high-speed broadband at home.

The result is that you will see respectable people in Rome huddled in seedy little Internet cafes. To me, the Internet cafe has been an anachronism, for more than five years. People won't be on a park bench, or on a lawn with their laptop -- even with all those wonderful places to perch, and all that warm weather. And, as said, there are few cafes that have the characteristics that would invite you to "jack into" cyberspace.

I believe part of the problem is the 2005 Italian anti-terrorist act, which some have chosen to interpret very conservatively and I imagine actually turn in lists of sites visited to their local police department as the law mandates. This means that practically all connections are secured, and linked to your name. This being the case, it is easy for hotels, like the one I stayed at, to go the next step to sell Wifi as an extra service hourly rate and charge an extra fee.

Slowly but surely there is some street-level WiFi budding, always at a "very low" signal strength, and I never understood where the signal was coming from. For example in the Trastevere neighbourhood of Rome (the entire district was covered for a while but this seems to have run its course). There I also found a nice arty news café near Santa Cecilia with a secured free Internet connection, and they didn’t ask me for ID. Here, too, however, they took lunch very seriously, and I was asked (because of my computer) to leave the bar area and sit on the couches in the next room. Fair enough.

Incidentally, I have never understood why people look askance at talking on mobile phones in certain public places (though I still find the hands-free people disconcerting and I have to remind myself that they are probably wearing a headset and not insane). As long as they keep their voice down, I don't see the problem. Why is it worse than talking with someone who is physically in the same space as you? The only difference in the case of the cell phone is that non-parties can't hear the other side of the conversation. This to me proves that the etiquette mavens' ban against mobile phone use in some public places is merely a sour grapes attitude from would-be eavesdroppers.

Anyway, I'm happy to live in a country where no one sees anything amiss with taking out a piece of hardware at a cafe or pub and joining in with a discussion somewhere in cyberspace.

BREAK FROM THE BALTICS: 70 hours in Rome

Nuns and motorbikes, sacred and profane, Vatican and Satyricon. But one word to describe Rome?

Palimpsest.

I have never been in a city that is more like one, which is to say, a manuscript that keeps on being reused, usually betraying the past imperfect erasures. In Rome's case, not many outright erasures. Just additions and edits and fading and darkening.

Parts of Rome may even look like other Italian cities -- probably the general street-level chaos (always the motorbikes and streets at oblique angles) -- but in Rome's case you will be walking along (very lost) and rather than just a monumental dome or fountain, though there are plenty of those, you will come across formations, usually reddish brown, jutting out like an eroded tooth, unspeakably ancient, almost geological. The centre of ancient Rome does not coincide with the Renaissance centre but the remains of the ancient capital are everywhere.

There’s even a hill in Rome (not one of the seven) which is in fact a giant ancient waste tip of pottery fragments. A bunch of cafes have encircled it and are tunneling into the hill for more space. You can still see the fragments in the hill. Someone decanted wine from an amphora at a block party 1700 years ago and it was thrown on top of the heap where it has lain ever since.

The palimpsest thing kept on being driven home in different ways. On the last night I ate at an osteria in Monti that had devoted its walls to a guestbook.

**
Foodie notes

I was in Rome to work (had some big things I needed unbroken time on), catch up on sleep, and eat like a Roman. I wasn't able to do the last one.

I don't like eating at restaurants alone, but I was determined to try the local specialities. Looks like spring is the time to go, though.

It is possible to get the local specialities like artichokes smashed flat between bricks and cooked whole (a restaurant in the Ghetto seems to be a year-round ode to the thistle) but they won't be the local crop. It soon became obvious that most places worth their salt don’t serve them out of season.

At that osteria I mentioned, called La Carbonara, almost half of the items on the menu were piatto di stagione (seasonal).

So what was left were a bunch of typical primi like Cecca and sciue-sciue, basically tomatoes and bits of atipasti (anchovies, capers, bacon etc). Delicious, no doubt, but nothing earth-shattering. Most of the meals I have had in Italy have been like that. Maybe the key is to go right to the secondi -- various meat and offal fare, but I'm usually not that adventurous. Of course, some places ave homemade pastas. And many establishments have house tapenades and breads. So it ends up being a pretty rich tapestry, anyway.

A place a couple blocks north of the Vatican, Osteria del Angelo, came through with something a little different -- gnocchi with clams, basil-zucchini paste and cherry tomatoes. Rich, but you feel like you’ve taken a shower on rhe inside. See, that's the thing. When I eat in Italy I feel good and sated afterwards. And I actually think about food less, it just complements the company (given that there is company) like the wine complements the food. Going out to eat is usually truly enjoyable.

The best place I ate in Rome was Il Pulcino Ballerino in San Lorenzo. The salad of rucola, sliced mushrooms and tomatoes just beat out the pasta for best thing I ate. Just poured good olive oil and a little salt on it.

I will have to make sure to get a new guide book especially if I go with the whole fam. Many of the restaurant picks in the Rough Guide from two years ago were defunct. Some were so closed that I couldn't even tell where they might have been located.

So most of the ones I went to I just stumbled upon in my endless ramblings, little neighbourhood places. They were:

1) Il Pulcino Ballerino (San Lorenzo; great pasta all'amatriciana with seabass instead of cured pork)

2) Volpetti (a deli down in Testaccio with pies stuffed with greens)

3) Osteria Del Angelo (Prati district)

4) La Carbonara (Monti district, on Panisperna).

5) Africa (Ethiopian place near train station, good quality)

The last two had one American couple each eating there when I went. Everyone else was local. All of the waitstaff spoke at least OK English. All charged around 4-5 euros for contorni and 7-8 for primi. I call that cheap, even though they were listed as moderate.

4 hours in the Holy See

On Tuesday morning, I went to the Vatican Museum. I could see from the lineup that it would probably be a Western version of the hajj in Saudi Arabia so I visited some of the quieter corners of the palace first.

I spent an hour in the Pio Cristiano, the early Christian museum, learning things about sarcophagus reliefs and getting insight into the institution of marriage (seriously!).

There is one stone casket in particular that I liked, where the relief represents different avatars of the husband and wife -- from newlyweds on the extreme left and right, looking, frankly, scared as they look toward the centre of the scene; then the mature married couple; and on the inside the husband and wife represented as pastoral figures, the woman as what is known as an “orant”, and a shepherd who is seeming to be administering some rite, or perhaps he is mediating some sort of dialogue between them, or even keeping them separated.

Some of the sarcophagi are pretty old. The museum doesn't quite go so far as to include any sarcophagi from before 0 A.D. but it does represent some fairly early works as Christian, even though the iconography is completely pagan. I would have thought that Eastern motifs like winged victories and "orants" might have come straight from the East and Persian-origin mystery faiths, rather than through Christianity. But what do I know…

In any case, by Constantine’s time, the sarcophagus lids were full of Biblical scenes, and not that different thematically from what one might find today -- a sentimental hodgepodge of Old and New Testament scenes, out of chronological order.

There are a couple other worthwhile and thought-provoking auxiliary museums in the Vatican. In a way it was thrilling to see the sculptures in the Braccia Nuova, and to attach faces to all these great personae I have read about -- emperors, historians.

Alas, at some point I found myself drawn into the main channel and was pushed along in a crush of people, as in a huge salsicca casing, toward the ultimate goal of the Sistine Chapel.

You have no way of knowing how far it is -- the palace is a labyrinth. You don't know which floodgates will be opened for your particular regiment of tourists. There are plenty of bottlenecks, too, because even the popes didn’t need huge doors.

One woman fainted and paramedics had to be called, but such was the haste to get to the Sistine Chapel that people did not even stop to rubberneck. I thought that really said something.

The hordes and I passed through some Papal dining rooms and an interesting 16th century map mural room, but I learned absolutely nothing. Stopping to look at an exhibit would have probably been as deadly as swimming in the Tiber: everyone was in a desperate hurry to get to Michelangelo’s prize, and I suppose, claim it.

Tourists (let's say from a different cultural space) pushed brusquely past, then muttered and hissed with apparently real shock when you did the exact same thing to them, as if they had just been praying in a temple. In fairness, one American woman was ready with a quick elbow to let me know I had entered her personal space.

I would like to know one thing. Why is everyone so desperate with their digital cameras; is it some sort of asserting of ownership? Are they trying to steal the soul of the Vatican Palace with their little winking boxes? I didn’t see anything worth photographing for my own private use.

I wanted to say: People. Buy a nice coffetable book of art history from the gift shop, and spare everyone your petty paparazzo clamoring. Take a few carefully considered shots to share with friends, expressing your own personality.

And then, all of a sudden, we were at the Grail.

Predictably, no one could keep silent in the Sistine chapel. Everyone just had to say something to their neighbour in an undertone, which multiplied by about 1500 turned into a ferocious din. The hall proctors saw fit to clap their hands loudly and bellow silencio, which was self-defeating.

“Hey," I shouted, "WHO'S THAT CLAPPING? WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS?" Then I clapped my hands even louder to try to drown the first clapper out, and bellowed for people to shut the hell up. Some of the Japanese thought it was a cue to applaud the work of the artist and wave after wave resounded. Another crack appeared in the ceiling. On the altar painting, Jesus looked cross and his mother, astonished and frightened. I got out just in time before the whole thing came crashing down.

Seriously, though. In the few semi-quiet moments, and in the complete absence of popping shutters, I was awed by the Sistine Chapel. There is some truth to the fact that after the gold leaf on the ceilings of some of the previous halls, the Sistine is different. Plus, your eyes have to get used to the light. But then...allow the sheer scale to sink in and enjoy the detail, preferably with a pair of binoculars, as the guide books recommend. And earplugs.

The whole point of whether such a building should be only aesthetically admired is contentious. This is a holy shrine, even though a luxurious one commissioned by a different generation of Popes. Something has to be done to give it its dignity back. The only thing I could think of is that on Sundays and at night the chapel can rest, but at night the paintings cannot be seen at all.

I think one practical solution would be to require every visitor to the main exhibits to be assigned to a guide. And have groups of 20. Most people in the guided tour groups right now have earplugs; the guide, who often gets separated from his group in the tremendous crush, broadcasts to his group in a very low tone of voice. In the Sistine's case, the guides might stand outside the chapel and continue to speak. That would probably cut the noise at least in half.

Headline blank

On the subject of news and newspapers, a cheery article this morning -- not. An elegy for my sometime profession of copy editor. Yes, I think the same downward trend applies to the position known as sub editor in the UK.

Maybe we can all get jobs at the local silkscreening shop.

Newsshirts

Occasionally I find a concept on the Internet that humbles me with its sheer brilliance, timeliness and trenchancy.

CNN.shirt.



"With CNN Shirts", says the FAQ, "you can wear the news". I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to do that, especially in public. It makes me feel like a "journalist" "broadcasting" the news to passersby.

While I don't understand how a brand-new beta can have received enough questions to classify as frequent, I do know what my next question is: "How can I wear the news?"

It's easy. Most news items on CNN's front page that come in video flavour now also sport a little CNN.shirt icon. It's not a link to the text version of the story -- there is no text version! -- but takes you to the shirt order page.

The logic is stunning. People, as we know, aren't reading newspapers anymore. And indeed, why should they, if they can read a newsshirt? This saves paper, too.

A CNN dot shirt is the perfect way for lobbyists and policy-makers to refer to the news and stay on message as they argue their case. It's like you're a walking Powerpoint presentation -- with one slide (unless you dress in layers).

Like many politicians, President Bush only reads headlines, and it takes him a long time to read one of them. Wearing a shirt to that important function, and remaining in a standing position, can make sure you get your message across.

CNN.shirts also bring a variety of angles to the world of news. Notice the two options in the archive: "Mudfearing pig forced to wear boots" OR "Mud-fearing pig wears wee little boots". This can make all the difference. You don't want to come off as a strident PETA activist.

If meeting with the president, definitely choose "wee little boots".

It's not just for lobbyists and pols. Anyone can get a kick out of watching their friends and relatives open their brand-new CNN.shirt -- and see the delight spreading over their faces as they realize they have been given something salient.

It can be a potent public service message. Take something like this -- "L.A. toilet water may be used in taps".

Imagine walking around Downtown L.A. with that one, and sparking outrage among the residents of San Julian Street about what might be coming out of their taps!

More inscrutable people and intellectuals (Estonians, hello?) can also get a headline like "Muslims go online for dating advice" on their T-shirt -- or one of the many CNN headlines that didn't go through copy editing, like the one on the pic.

Keep your neighbours and friends guessing at what your actual intent is!

P.S. Unfortunately the archive only goes back to April, so you can't order the Saddam hanged shirt.

More than a pocketful

Here's something about another unsexy but practical Estonian thing that should be a great alternative in tough economic times: rye.

I wanted to avoid food-related topics in solidarity with a Tartu blogger, who I think on his way to beat David Blaine's record unbeknownst to maybe even himself, but perhaps a small virtual toast of Saaga will smooth things over.

It was a superb rye harvest in Estonia last year -- 60,000 tons. That's more than triple the 2006 harvest, and yield per hectare was an amazing 50% higher. The press is reporting (I think pegged to a rye celebration somewhere rather than a release of statistics) that Estonian black bread will again made be from domestic rye rather than Finnish- or Polish-grown. This is great, considering that wheat prices have skyrocketed. There has been concern before about how no one wants to grow rye, and how kids don't want to eat it. Even the national flower ("rye flower" in Estonian) has taken umbrage at the amount of herbicides being used on other crops and has become scarce.

Rye is good stuff. It deserves to be celebrated. It's the quintessential field-next-door grain, likely to be local unless there's a deficit. It can't be very readily turned into high-fructose rye syrup or be used to make synthetic shoe leather. Even Richard Branson would have to acknowledge grudgingly that no jet fuel can be wrung out of it. The ethanol made from it, on the other hand, is typically high-end vodka and whiskey -- odd as it is a cheap grain.

It's almost always found in unrefined form. Last year I found that even rye sprouts taste surprisingly good and take only a day or two to germinate. Unlike bean sprouts they did not mould in my fridge, but they kept growing very slowly for a month (though they made quite a root ball and we did not eat them at that point). Incredibly hardy.

Yet despite the low-gluten, health-food cachet, it can still be turned into a greasy yet satisfying snack food -- those salted croutons, for which I think we have the Slavs to thank. There is another work of sheer peasant culinary genius: Karelian pies, though the rice porridge in the middle is the main attraction.

Estonians just make good bread.

Some mangiacakes (Pliny the Elder, for one, if you go by Wiki) prefer white wheat flour and say rye is only good mixed in with other flours a la Tallinna Peenleib.

I say sucks to Pliny -- anyway, he headed toward Vesuvius when it erupted didn't he, while everyone was running the other way? -- and personally I buy only 100% rye bread. I have never made any that turned out OK, though. One of the cheapest and best loaves in Estonia is 100% rye -- Pereleib -- and still costs about 80 or 90 US cents for the equivalent of a US loaf.

I tried to find 100% rye bread in the States last summer, and finally I ended up locating a five dollar loaf (it weighed a brick though) at a health-food store and it tasted like it had been made in a facility that also processed incense.

Our company had a lot to celebrate at one time -- a master's degree, a bachelor's degree, a child (my contribution) and a birthday, so the partners treated us at Fahle Caffe and Restaurant. Some tasty salads, and loads of loads of prosecco, which somewhat confusingly overlapped with the coffee/dessert round.

"Fahle" is a former cellulose factory, the architecture from Czarist days, the vibe from Soviet times. Now it has been converted into a "culture factory" and has won a lot of accolades from style magazines. Justifiably, I would say. It's always been a little too far out of the way -- and at the top of what passes for a hill in Tallinn -- but I'm glad I finally had a reason to go. The cafe area is stylish -- stylish enough to add a second "f" to caffe -- and might even be a good place to get some work done one of these days.

I am currently quite sick with one of my kids' colds. Having a fever, a congested right sinus and a stuffy left ear can add an interesting sort of phase shift effect to conversation. For some of the younger employees, who hadn't seen me since Lorna was born on 8 May, it must have been a sobering sight, how far I have fallen, and they may never have children.

But a beautiful building, good restaurant, and good friends. I'm always glad when Kaido shows up. He's a father of two kids, slightly older than mine, and a sworn translator, so I usually end up picking his brain for ways of coping, and of dodging taxes. He probably talks faster than anyone I have ever heard, but I am starting to get used to it.

I had just read in the local dailies about the Dylan show in Tallinn. The reviews were for the most part reverent toward Bob but negative toward the venue.

Apparently it's good that I caught him in Helsinki -- Tallinn was acoustically a washout, everything was a puddle of sound inside Saku Arena. And security guards had prevented people from dancing in the aisles.

Kaido, as it turned out, had ridden his bike the 7 km from Kalamaja and stood outside in the parking lot listening to some early 1960s Dylan recordings, drinking beer, and trying to decide whether to buy a ticket or not. He decided not to.

He played some of the Dylan recordings on his phone for us at Fahle, and the quality was quite good. I thought that when the phone was placed in a wide glass it sounded like the young Dylan, but when the phone was placed in a narrow prosecco glass it sounded like an older Dylan, in the early 1990s.

Estonia's invisible resource?

I recently finished David Strahan's excellent Last Oil Shock (his futures must be soaring right now) in which he argues compellingly that a) peak oil will occur about halfway through the history of oil extraction, not at the end, b) it is about to occur, and c) from here on out, production will never keep up with demand and we are in deep shit.

I noticed there was no talk of oil shale, 73% of the world reserves of which are held by the two countries covered by this blog, US (72%) and Estonia (1%).

Again, I know it's not "oil", I don't think it will save the day or change Strahan's basic argument, but isn't it odd to completely write off trillions of tons of something that will burn in situ and can be refined, most of which is non-OPEC? Especially if you're covering things like oil sand?

Strahan devotes quite a few pages to oil sands and even visited Alberta for his book, which is more from a UK point of view, and if anything, oil sand is a trickier "unconventional" than shale.

I checked out the author's website, which has a "Depletion Atlas" based on information from energyfiles.com

Oil sand is mentioned where applicable, but no mention of oil shale, here, either. The atlas claims that "Lithuania is the only significant oil producing country of the three Baltic States". The correponding graph shows that production there will peak in 2011 at 8000 barrels a day. Multiply by 365 days to get 2.92 million barrels a year.

Another case of Estonian invisibility? Estonia, according to the local business daily, in 2006 was already producing 400,000 tonnes of shale oil per year and increasing. Convert to barrels and coincidentally it is also 2.92 million barrels a year, the same as Lithuania's projected one-time high water mark. The 2.92 million Estonian barrels -- not insignificant -- are not some tar or slurry; this is fuel oil that has marine uses, and is sold to the West. It has a lower viscosity and sulphur content than black oil from petroleum. Moreover, the process produces useful byproducts for the chemical industry.

All of which, thanks to the $138 price of petroleum crude, is now so much cheaper.

Strahan, based on his exchanges with silly Gordon Brown ministers, is a fairly bright, witty and open-minded guy, So I wrote him.

Why, I asked, does the "depletion atlas ignore Estonia? It has some of
the highest-grade oil shale deposits in the world along with
a proprietary extraction process that is as good as it gets
in terms of self-sufficiency; moreover its energy company
is exceptionally active, with a huge investment planned in
Jordan (where the oil shale is unfortunately inferior and
high in sulphur)."

The answer: "Hi Christopher, (sic!)

Shale is an irrelevance at present, no production anywhere as far as I know."

So even great investigative journalists, besides not getting spellings right, have blind spots. Now I'm wondering about his dismissal of hydrogen in the book. I'm going to have to ask my friend Andrew, who works in fuel cells and hasn't been heard from much in years, what's new.

Sunday comix

Gratuitous literary reference to Estonia #87

[reader-editable version of this post] [comment]

In the late 1990s, postmodernist novelists seemed to love to drop "Estonia", often in a way that made you wonder if these authors actually research anything.

There was David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest who decided to give Don Gately, who was the central Demerol addict in the book, an Estonian father. His name was "Borat" or "Galik" or something. He ran off and Don was raised by a military policeman. You'll have to excuse me for not looking it up. It's 1000 pages-plus and the reference was once, on page 842 or something. It was a funny work, so I was charitable and said to myself it was a Chechen from Tartu.

Then Michael Chabon had a short story in Playboy about a Satanic mill in a western Pennsylvanian town with an ethnic community of Estonians who worshipped in onion-domed churches. No excuse.

Finally, though, a reference that is accurate and amusing from Neil Gaiman, actually from a 1999 story but anthologized in last year's Fragile Things, which I opened to page 102 and read:

'This work is a philological oddity and a linguistic delight,' said
MacLeod as we walked along the Embankment. 'The Shahinai speak a language
that has points in common with both the Aramaic and the Finno-Ugric family
of languages. It's the language that Christ might have spoken if he'd
written the epistle to the primitive Estonians. Very few loanwords, for
that matter.'

Looking at Obama's positions

Back in February, I half-jokingly endorsed Michelle Obama as my candidate. Despite vowing once that I would not vote again until there is real direct democracy, I'm toying with supporting her husband at the polls. I'm registered in Virginia, a heavily US Navy and socially conservative state but thanks to all those metro yuppies up north around DC and the liberals in my ertswhile adopted hometown of Charlottesville, Obama has a chance.

I'm looking at his positions now. There's three that are far from good.

Missile defence. I always thought Reagan got a bad rap from the left over SDI ("Star Wars"). Yet ask even an Estonian academic like Endel Lippmaa what caused the Soviet Union to collapse and he'll tell you, SDI. There was no SDI as such, yet some saw it as an effective bluff. Imagine if it did exist. The US is still the leader in many military technologies (we have seen the ability to shoot down Scuds demonstrated). Why not missile defence? What is there to lose, even if the tech is "unproven"? The "weaponization of space" criticism seems misplaced, too. It's not like there are spotted owls up there.

Iran. We know Obama is against the war against Iraq, but he seems not to be so clear on Iran. Bush has said he is against military action, adding: "that said, all options are on the table". Obama, except for the smirk, has said much the same thing. Probably this is out of concern over Iran getting the bomb. I don't see Iran menacing us in that way. I see protracted cold war as much worse -- China will gobble up all of the ventures. Iran has to be made the next Libya.

Death penalty. A pure ethical issue. Obama is wimpy and seems to be guardedly pro-. The only thinkable position to me is completely against. At least Obama is from the same state as governor Ryan, who commuted all of the death row inmates' sentences there, and Obama played a minor part in casting aspersions on the system's accuracy.

Putting off the last oil shock

[reader-editable version of this post] [comment]

Estonia has long been synonymous with IT and new technologies, certainly with good reason.

While heads continue to be craned in that direction, scrutinizing the field for recent accomplishments, I like what Estonia is doing in the field of oil shale.

Yes, oil shale. No, it's not sexy like hydrogen or fuel cells. It's not new. But it's logical and enterprising.

One of the Estonian processes for getting the oil out of the shale and refining it is a mature technology which was first developed in the late 1940s but has become gradually more streamlined and applicable. Even elegant. It is considered the most efficient in the world, by a whisker.


This illustration is here more for decoration, but it is the actual, "Galoter" process.

It may seem a little Rube Goldbergish, but basically the exhaust and ash from each stage of the distillation get filtered and fed back to heat the incoming shale, keeping the pump primed, so to speak, and the reaction going.

(There's a similar principle used in Alberta to convert the tar from the massive oil sand deposits there into usable synthetic crude, which is a tricky thing to do.)

I like the fact that the Estonians are not just doing this in their own northeast, where the oil shale deposit lies, or merely to replace heating oil or marine fuel. They are developing a oil plant that should be able to produce fuels indistinguishable from good diesel and petrol (albeit at a relative trickle).

They are flogging the technology in places like Jordan, where they have courted the government for exclusive extraction rights -- a plant there would have a 15% rate of return if the market price per barrel of crude were only $60 -- and Kazakhstan.

The smart money is on oil not going anywhere. Man will go crazy trying to suck the last drops from the ground before any paradigm shift. It is too energy-rich a substance and everything we have is designed to run on it. The whole system.

Nothing else has come along to replace it.

Hydrogen? Harnessing sun and wind to electrolyze water is the dream, but we're still looking for ways to overcome hazards and improve mechanical efficiency. The whole infrastructure would have to be replaced, I believe.

Biofuels? There's the whole zero-sum game food problem to sort out, plus it's not as sustainable as you might think -- growing most crops productively on a large scale takes nitrogen fertilizer, which is produced commercially using...guess what? Oil and gas. Many other such considerations.

Luckily the world's shale oil reserves are many times larger than crude oil reserves. The figure is in the trillions of tons. Multiply by about seven to get barrels.

Even if it could all be extracted, naturally I do not favour the idea of letting all this go up in smoke over time to fuel our economies. That would be insane and kick us back to the Permian era. But unburned, it's reassurance and stability.

And despite its reputation as a nasty polluting resource, Estonia does a pretty good job with aspects of the oil shale industry, such as recycling ash for use in cement and construction, and reclaiming and afforesting quarries. Greenhouse gas emission per capita in Estonia is not anything to be proud of, but some aspects of the oil shale industry do have an upside -- no acid rain!

And if we're able with technical ingenuity to work out an extraction process that is close to self-sufficient, maybe Estonians could work something out in the field of carbon capture and sequestration as well?

Now in Wiki

This may seem a little wacky, but if you ever wanted to have the experience (!) of blogging right on this page (or as close to it as possible without me actually handing you the passwords), I have now added a widget that makes it possible.

It's at the very bottom of this page (so that if vandals attack it's not the first thing people see) -- a public graffiti space in an iFrame. Even better, I am putting blog posts up there, so if you think something should be changed in an entry, you can do it.

I'm just curious to see what will happen. I'm not presumptuous enough to think this will be remotely interesting to most people, but it could be a good way to suggest changes, leave feedback, etc. I started messing with this originally because I wanted to have comment functionality on the front page (which is probably possible, too, but it would involve some hacking of the Blogger template and some object programming ability) and it led to this.

I'll tinker with the interface some more. Right now the big snag is that you have to deal with the iFrame scroll bars, and of course, after you do your wikiedit, you have to remember to enter the word recognition characters before pressing Save Changes.

US roundup

Obama claims victory, the headlines blared this morning, signalling that indecision 08 is finally over. Or is it? I don't think Hillary actually conceded or admitted she had lost; maybe she was not aware that it was over and she will continue to campaign in places like Guam and overseas military bases. Maybe she thinks that Obama "claiming" victory meant that Obama alleged that he had won and not that he claimed the win in the sense of taking formal possession of something that is a mathematical certainty.

**


Interesting comment from Cheney (considering he's got his political reputation at stake, I mean) about West Virginia. Apparently he has a family member named Cheney on both his mother and father's side and he chose to make a gratuitous reference to one of our poorer states where this is perceived to be common. What no one is picking up on is that where there's a joke, the truth is not far away. Could the fact that Cheney is inbred be responsible for his strange quirks? And what the hell is Cheney doing telling blowzy stories about his genealogy? This is a time for burnishing your and your co-president's legacy -- and destroying Halliburton documents before the Obama people move in next January. Cheney is a man famed for his bloodless demeanour and intense fixation on his prey. Now it sounds like he's in confessional mode.

I'm planning my summer vacation. I'm officially cleared for August but I hope I can finagle a week in July. Helsinki reminded me again that there is nothing like travel to clear the head. But most of the time, travel ends up being "connect the dots" between cities. Which is all very well, but cities are heavy (dude) with their big statements, the constant noise and its real effects, other people's dreams (they say you can pick them up in prison, and sometimes cities aren't that different), the static from people and their interests colliding and bouncing, or more often, sliding inelastically against each other.

I used to believe that people should spend a third of their time sleeping and a third of the time alone. Both states are dilatory in different ways. It's become a impossible schedule to keep, of course, but one way I try to make up for lost time is to get out into the wilderness with just a pack on my back a few times a year, and just walk.

As much as I would like to stay in Estonia, I think it's more of a bike and sailboat paradise. For trekking on foot, Sarek is my number one choice right now. A national park in Swedish Lapland that is a pure wilderness in the presevationist sense. There's one bridge in the whole place, and it gets coptered in at the start of the summer, and it's a much wetter place than the slopes of Kebnekaise, which I climbed two years ago.

Mont Blanc is on the list, but I think it will be crowded and I wasn't that fond of walking in mountaineering boots and crampons in Washington State. I think I just want to range over open country. I remember walking in Lapland was relatively pleasant, even off-trail. No squishy muskeg.

THE CRANKY CONSUMER: Pricey snacks

I only lived in New York for four months in 1999 but it formed the benchmarks for my consumer price instincts, for my personal Big Mac index. A falafel in a pita should be $2. A slice of pizza is $1.75. A unlimited single ride on public transit is $1.50. That is the natural order of things. I know all of these have risen but I expect them to return to the default settings some day. I'll leave out the price of gas, which still flirted with $1 a gallon in places back then -- it's an import and it's about to run out for good.

Now I know that Nordic/Scandinavian is synonymous with expensive (unless it's furniture or hotel rooms), that the people must be taxed out of their minds, and that inflation is in the double-digits everywhere currently.

But I still can't get over the prices of convenience food when I go to the northern capitals. I have a sensation of physical pain when I have to shell out $7 for a microwaved falafel in Helsinki.

Everythng is always much more expensive than you imagine. For example, I go to Wayne's Coffee in the Academic Bookstore and I have an internal monologue. "OK," I say to myself, "the coffee (from the pot) is 2 euros ($3). I'm used to that by now. Surely the tiny rusk or scone cannot be more than that. It can't be like 3 euros, because that would make 5 euros, which is $7.50. Even in Scandinavia, a coffee and a donut is not going to be $7.50. Maybe in the Zurich airport or Tokyo."

It was $7.50, of course. But at least I got some cream cheese and martini olives, which I would never get with a scone in the US, so that was interesting.

On the upside, some things cost about the same as they do in Estonia, like Finnish butter and cheese.

And as far as noshing (snacking) goes, Helsinki certainly isn't a culinary desert. A couple was selling luonnonlohi (wild salmon) including various smoked recipes, for a reasonable price at the Kauppatori and I brought some home. Also got some Karelian rye-crust pastries, with fillings that seem exotic, like candied rutabaga blossom, sprats, and salmon.

The situation with luomu- (organic stuff) is also good -- self-service bulk bins at some stores in the centre.

Colour commentary and setlist

(updated setlist with some notes -- had writing fever)


There is a sentence from Luc Sante in the official tour programme that expressed my fears pretty exactly:

"Guessing on the basis of interviews and movies as well as the hydra-headed mythic image that has grown around Dylan over the decades, (one) might have guessed his memoir to be variously inscrutable, gnomic, bilious, confused, preening, recriminatory, impersonal, defensive, smug or even ghost-written."

But just as his voice in the autobiography Chronicles, and his persona in the Scorsese biopic are just humble, plain-spoken Midwestern, his on-stage persona is also just there as opposed to not there (although he was dressed in black like a puppeteer on this occasion).

Inside it was just a sports arena and I was miles away -- the only detail I made out in 2 hours was seeing a string bass player twirl his instrument -- still, I think I underestimated Hartwall Areena. As far as anonymous suburbs of lowkey cities go, Pasila is pretty interestingly surreal with red Devonian rock outcrops everywhere and pedestrian tunnels cut into the rock (Finland's Red Rocks?), and thickets of girders and railway infrastructure.

Here is also the headquarters of Yle, the public broadcasting organization. With its limestone grey and patinated copper it is almost as impressve as the Kumu Art Museum of Estonia. No disrespect to Kumu architect Vapaavuori, of course. There is so much good architecture in Helsinki they can afford to throw some out in what in Estonia would be Peterburi mnt in Lasnamäe.

Part of the fun of arriving early is playing “spot the fan” – who is here for the show? I saw a late boomer age American couple, the guy wearing a tan safari outfit (why is this outfit so popular so far from Kenya?) – they looked like liberal, well-heeled American tourists, could they be here for Dylan? But they weren’t. When I followed Phish around Europe for seven shows in 1997, it was obvious, the hippies even stood apart from the usual bacpackers. But with Dylan, there were no such clear characteristics at first.

I went to the pre-show gathering at the Sokos Hotel and as I nursed my 6.80 EUR Saku Tume, I began to notice that many of the people there looked like 45-55–year-old rock journalists, all lean and with graying ponytails. I didn’t know it was possible there could be so many people who look like that in one city.

Ultimately the Dylan fans got the hotel restaurant to turn down the TV in favour of bootlegs on a boombox.

SETLIST:

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat -- I had never seen Dylan live before, and from what I read I was expecting mumbling, buried in the mix. He came out crackling, on fire. They adjusted the mix later, but not before he had hit 106 dB on my meter.

Lay Lady Lay -- OK, a bit of a perfunctory reading, and parts of this song would have been unrecognizable. Dylan's voice's metamorphosis into the voice of Tom Waits seems complete at moments like these.

?? - A twelve-bar uptempo blues, like so many of the songs from the last 10 years, raunching and rheuming away and proving that he can sustain notes at pitch perfectly well after all. He's definitely in his element with songs like these, Delta roadhouse mintrelsy.

Visions of Johanna - Back to guttural swamp preacher. Band was tight all night, but they overplay, especially here, sounds like about five people all playing lead at the same time. Which only works if everyone is superloose and zonked, as with Derek and the Dominos. And this is more of a solo acoustic song. "Ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face", always my favourite line: nicely delivered.

Things Have Changed -

The Levee's Gonna Break - more uptempo "Delta roadhouse". Music to jitterbug and shuffle to.

Tangled Up In Blue -- Uninspiring cover -- wait, he wrote this! I'm glad I heard it.

Another 12-bar blues.

Every Grain of Sand -- Some of his best poetry. As pretty as the Song of Solomon. Shame that the melody and rhythm are no more? A recitative with crammed-in words.

It's Alright, Ma -- stripped down and simplified to its rock song core, the way he's been playing it for years. Indeed, the president of the US has been standing naked for almost eight years.

Nettie Moore -- Amazing change of pace. A memorable, different song both harmonically and thematically.

Highway 61 -- Made me crave Like A Rolling Stone off the same album. It would come. Good soloing here by everyone, not all at the same time.

Spirit on the Water -- new song for me.

Summer Days - fun song, uptempo.

Ballad of a Thin Man -- something incredible happens -- all the people come rushing back on the arena floor. I hadn't seen them leave. What the hell? It looked like lemmings rushing to the cliff of Bob. Song was spooky, spectral, awesome. Great harp playing.

(Encore) Like a Rolling Stone -- I have to say, looking at some of the past few days' setlists, that this concert was a bit of a grand slam in terms of big "hits".

Oon Hesas. I'm in Helsinki.

I'm in a rather nice hotel room and debating whether to go out to Pasila early for the Dylan fans' gathering at a hotel near the arena -- I imagine it might be a hardcore oldtimers reunion with fond remembrances of the legendary 1987 Heartbreakers/Dylan show. Hmm.

Dylan week was a bust, I found no time to do anything. I was going to post some streaming mp3s of me playing some of those visionary mid-1960s ballads. I think you all are very lucky.

I could use some food though. So far I haven't found anything better than a stale quiche with iceberg, panini and open-face sandwiches at the cafes in the centre.

I'll have to be sure to use my 24 hours here to eat as much falafel as I can. Something I like and that is hard to find in Tallinn (or deep-fry at home).

Also on the agenda: academic book store.