A story from the local Virginia press about a Russian Ukrainian and former gulag prisoner who has become a typical victim of the immigration bureaucracy (once studying for a doctorate in Virginia, now housed near the Mexican border pending deportation to Russia and not allowed to make phone calls -- but of course).

I can't vouch personally for the guy (though many do), and some circumstances make me inclined to fault him for his own mistakes, but then again, maybe I'd have done that too. Ayway, what's interesting in my opinion is how Russia is equated with the USSR -- which glosses over many of the subtleties but is essentially valid.

The journalist even brings in heavy hitters from the university who grant that, well technically speaking, it is a whole different country, but then again, anything is possible in Russia. Priceless.

***

Also, the New York Times has noticed a phemonenon: You don't need to make stuff up anymore. You can just repeat what happened for a laugh. Along with many more skilful figures, this essentially puts me out of business on the Gen. Anatoly Khrulyov front, along with the asinine conservative commentator voice.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/so-funny-its-true/

This is an important, historic covergence. Vanity Fair editor noticed it too. What's the (aspiring) satirist to do?

A windy day

It was sunny again today, but after some rain in the night, Indian summer is giving up its ghost. The linden outside Morgan's window is finally turning yellow, and the tops of the trees in the distance, which have been brilliant, are starting to look a little bare.

Many of us found ourselves driving or walking by the sea admiring the whitecaps and perhaps pondering the whims of the shallow but dangerous Baltic. The bay looked like a fine monochrome engraving, like a 1930s Estonian postage stamp. Morgan and his grandma were on the way to Kadriorg from Maardu and found themselves walking all the way from Maarjamäe to the Russalka Memorial, a Tsarist era centrepiece that is also a universal memorial to those lost at sea.

(The monument has reportedly become somewhat padlock-infested. Apparently it's a traditions for newlyweds to put a padlock on the heavy antique chain surrounding the memorial. I liked the custom when I visited the footbridge at Ontika falls in Northeastern Estonia, but the scene at the Russalka looks like mass bicycle theft has taken place.)


Morgan made a trip to tiny Pandju Island the other day with his other grandma...it's reachable by foot from the mainland...

REVIEW: Debate #1; Estonian politics, too

Most Americans wanted to hear about the economy, but for me Obama won a close debate in the Russia part.

First and most important, Obama mentioned Estonia. (No candidate who has mentioned Estonia in a debate has lost a U.S. presidential election in the last 100 years.) So did McCain. Then again, Obama mentioned Estonia first, and in a valid context in a succinct answer. McCain saw Obama's "Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania" and raised him by parading his insider knowledge of and on-the-ground experience in the region (Eurasia), dropping names like "Yushenko" (sic) left and right as well as the Georgian president's nickname, "Mishu" -- which no doubt only true insiders are privy to. Couldn't T.H. or Tom have got a shout-out by name, too?

Yes, yes, McCain said Russia was run by the KGB, but Obama's two minutes on Russia, notwithstanding the perhaps Freudian slip of "six-party ceasefire", were one of his best, most presidential moments all night.

McCain's two minutes on Russia was meandering and insinuating in a manner that, unless I am totally out of touch, would cause ordinary Americans to tune out rather quickly. He began by mocking Obama for using softer rhetoric circa August 9 (as if it's really all about rhetoric, not action). McCain then satirized his own president's "I looked into his eyes" bit, denied that the old Cold War was back, and protested too much about his own intimate familiarity with the workings of regional Black Sea politics. He was all over the map -- but unfortunately, in the rhetorical sense as well.

**

On the whole, it certainly wasn't Nixon and Kennedy. (In fact I hadn't heard any JFK-Obama comparisons in a long time.) But I did think for a second that it might be game, set and match, once McCain came on, appearing to have foundation or talc caked in his crease lines. But the youthful Kennedy looked 40; Obama looks 18.

Now, of course, Obama has The Voice, though it doesn't work so well in a debate setting. McCain, though -- he sounds like a cross between Jack Lemmon in Glengarry Glen Ross and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.

I distrust men with no mid-bass in their voice. I don't know why. It's much like I can't take a woman seriously who has no lower register.

(Incidentally, it just occurred to me who Palin resembles most cinematically -- Marge Gunderson from Fargo. But I'm told this has occurred to others as well. Maybe a dash of the Naomi Watts character from Mulholland Dr., too.)

(Biden resembles a movie monster or Phil Hartman as Frankenstein, I think.)

Neither Obama nor Jessep -- uh, McCain -- blew me away with poise or charisma. Obama's hand movements, perhaps due to bad cropping, were distracting to me. In general, he still looks more like a high-school basketball player than a president. There is that element of Malcolm X (well, duh). I don't think I am reading the tropes wrong.

And what about content, and what they said? Oops, forgot about that. I was listening too hard for slip-ups, subliminal messages and tone colour. (Obama and McCain pronounce the last syllable of Ahmadinejad differently.)

***

Meanwhile back in Estonia, in order to balance the budget, the Ansip government is going after social benefits, like child allowances. Not two bucks per week that parents pay kids if they do their chores, but the close to 100 bucks the government pays parents every month for a toddler-age kid. The government doesn't realize it, but this is just as dangerous as if they required businessmen to pay taxes on reinvested profits. It chips away at the public's patience and tolerance.

Savisaar, incidentally, says that businessmen, especially foreign businessmen, should pay income tax. In a column in a daily, he unveiled 14 points, which would have been interesting if it were a 14 point plan, but it was actually 14 criticisms of what the government has done wrong and not too constructive a piece. I guess by enumerating that many things, he was rhetorically trying to "build a case" against Ansip. Incredibly, most people at least dipped into the list, maybe even past #10. It has got almost 600 comments in Eesti Päevaleht.

***

Palin's latest round of interview -- yes, interview -- did not go well and even some conservatives are reportedly losing confidence in her, though it's probably a sophisticated straw man set up by liberals, and I mean that seriously.

But I wonder if Palin couldn't bow out gracefully. This is what happened with a Bush appointee named Harriet Miers. Conservative columnist Krauthammer suggested gently that she could resign without ever letting Americans read what she had written in cases, and she duly did. At the rate at which odd things are appearing about Palin -- Google "Kenyan witchcraft Palin Youtube", for example -- it might not be that bad an idea.

Nice try, part II

Talks to resolve the financial crisis imploded yesterday.

The reason that they imploded was the distracting presence of Obama, who was everywhere yesterday, even muscling his way into a meeting with Bush. How dare he sit there, not even drinking the coffee offered to him (though God help him if he unclasps his hands and makes a move for that cup, which is the next guy's), and trying to look more presidential than the president, and not even trying very hard at it -- not even smirking once?

What's that? Bush invited Obama to meet with him at the White House?

Well, even if he did, that doesn't mean Obama has to accept, does it?

What the heck is Obama doing, injecting election-year politics into a bipartisan issue instead of staying out on the campaign trail like any reasonable person?

This is a crisis unprecedented in American history. What sort of message does it send if life does not go on as normal, and candidates cancel engagements?

This is the sort of elitist presumptuousness ordinary Americans don't need.

Obama should be down in Mississippi rehearsing for his...speech tonight. Leave the crisis to McCain. Now there's someone who has his priorities straight in a crisis and knows that you can't have this sort of "sticking to the routine" in one.

IRRELEVANT INTERLUDE: Bad espresso

I was walking in the Old Town today and decided I would order a coffee to mark the fairly rare occasion.

It came down to the Kehrwieder empire or the Reval Cafe empire. I ordered an espresso from one of the latter's cafes, the former Cafe Mary at the beginning of Vene. It cost 30 kroons or just shy of $3. It wasn't espresso. Definitely no tamping took place. They have one of those spew-machines where you push a button, much like Hansabank probably. This was far under bank-coffee quality, speaking of which, I can't wait to go back and try their free coffee after the name change.

Thirty kroons for 4 cl of weak coffee, eh? The lowest price for a 500-gram package of coffee grounds at a supermarket that I know of is now 38.90 kroons.

A ratio of 30/39. Is this some sort of international record? When will the price of a coffee exceed the price of a package of coffee?

I am sorely tempted to return to Reval Cafe on Vene with a camping stove and some coffee grounds and grab the seat in the dormer window upstairs (a great place to sit) and pull the curtain shut and brew my own.

Nice try

McCain is ending his campaign.

That's what I read at first, I swear. It was logical. He was the campaign reform guy. Being moderately cynical, I also figured that the campaign would eventually pack up and start redirecting all of its resources to keeping Palin safe and most important, not talking to any more reporters. That woman is a liability. She can't even stick to repeating a simple line over and over again, like "I was a POW for five years", not because it's untrue, because that is not a problem at all, but because she is from Alaska and people are garrulous and ignorant up there.

Then I looked again and saw that he was only suspending the campaign. Oh well.

But the reason was sound: an unprecedented crisis has hit. And -- there's a debate on Friday.

At a time like this, what could be more un-American than a debate? No, rephrase that: what could be more un-American than a debate?

Only one thing.

An election.

This is not a time for a vote, for God's sake. This is a time for unity. Not for talking to reporters. Not for talking straight to reporters. Not rubbing elbows with moderators with their...moderation.

It's a time for unity.

And that is why McCain is heading to Washington. This is forward thinking. Instead of America facing a divisive vote between Christianity and Islam, McCain will face America -- from as close to the White House as possible. Or maybe from the White House. Bush isn't there. I think he's in Africa.

McCain's palms are sweaty, but it's not from fear, the fear of facing a more articulate and youthful opponent with righteous audacity and even poor whites from southeastern Virginia on his side.

Did I mention yet that McCain spent five years as a POW?

He did.

Those sweaty palms aren't from fear, they're from radiation poisoning -- that is, they are and they aren't.

There's a dirty bomb in our financial system. Just like a dirty bomb, it will take all the cash we can throw at it.

In effect, McCain is saying to the American people: I don't need to wait for a terrorist act or a real crisis to take the moral high ground.

And that is courageous.

Senator Obama should just concede now.

A cone of colostrum?

A Swiss restaurant recently wanted to use human milk in its cooking. Besides bad puns in headlines and probably making it difficult for the proprietor to ever find work in the food preparation sector again, this has bred some additional wackiness.

PETA, of all organizations, read about the Swiss guy and, not at all shy of the weird non sequitur, dashed off a note to Ben and Jerry asking them to start using breast milk in their ice cream. Never mind that the eccentric restaurant guy was from Switzerland, a crazy European country, and Ben and Jerry's are from Vermont, where they are sort of heavily pre-involved with the family-farm cow's milk lobby.

Ben and Jerry trade in a wholesome 1970s back-to-the-land mythology mixed with old-fashioned American gumption. You can see them pulling a red Radio Flyer wagon with a hand-lettered sign advertising homemade ice cream, but the image of Ben and Jerry canvassing Burlington with a Nuk pump harvesting breast milk from wet nurses loses something, I don't know what.

The letter was not written by Ted Nancy, author of Letters from a Nut, but by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I think there is a time when you regret having a sort of earthy, liberal image, and this is one of them for Messrs Cohen and Greenfield. This has to be handled delicately, before topless demonstrators (and prospective milk sellers) descend on Vermont along with the New York fall-colours crowd.

Clearly all this is all misguided in too many ways -- what about the ethical treatment of nursing mothers and infants? BUT...the point is good and the facts are correct: humans drink way too much cow's milk, for no good reason, and the stuff can cause everything from allergies to Crohn's disease.

The Finns know this well -- probably the most lactose-conscious population on the face of the earth, with even the coffee creamer on the national airline being of the low lactose variety -- but even Estonians are concerned, though for a more specious reason -- because too much milk could mean that kids aren't getting their fill of red meat and iron (never mind that iron itself blocks a host of key minerals).

Certainly breastfeeding could always use more publicity. China -- well...

I'm thinking one thing an ice cream manufacturer could do is introduce an ordinary non-dairy ice cream product and call it "Less Leche" and support breastfeeding awareness with the proceeds.

And I'm thinking, too, that many restaurants could offer human milk from a bank on their kids' menus. Not that this would go over well, either. I was reminded on my trip to the US that restaurant owners believe that the nature's ideal food for young kids is not mother's milk but a cheeseburger or fried fare with no vegetable side dish.

But as far as a radical stunt, it has some merit.

Baby moves

After, count 'em, 23 days of bonding with Morgan in the US, I had forgotten I had a baby back home. I knew I had a wife -- I took the ring off each time I went swimming in the lake and it felt weird, like I was skinny-dipping or something -- but a baby? No, no. Life was wonderfully self-contained, not necessarily easy, and damn was I tired by the end of the day, but with Morgan sleeping 10, sometimes 12 hours at night, and being reasonably well-behaved, partly due to my wife's exceptionally diligent early child-rearing efforts, partly because I had told him that George Bush would arrest us if he didn't behave -- things were nice. I was even able to go running/swimming in the golden hour or two after he dropped off to sleep. Life could have continued like that for ever, it seemed.

But the baby back home is not just there, but about to escape, as babies do around five months of age. She's already rolling and turning over -- just for the hell of it, it seems. If you look away, she will be in a slightly different place, and I still do a double-take after a couple days of this.

Life will soon completely cease to be the same. I wrote about grabbing once -- babies do this, and I expressed my awe that every baby is programmed to do so -- and in the time that I was gone, Lorna has turned into a Shiva of arm-blur.

I used to pride myself on how I could eat dinner with Lorna in my lap, magnanimously giving my wife time to finish her food, but now, even with my long arms, I have to sit as far away from the table as possible, basically eating with my fingernails, because she pans her arms across the surface of the table, seeking for anything, she'll grab the edge of the plate with one of her seven arms and send it flying, all the while smiling coyly at something across the room. While similarly looking in an opposite direction, she will latch on to the handle of a coffee mug with perfect precision each time and not let go. With an ability like that, I think we should start in with basic utensils already.

This is all compensated by the smiles she gives everyone, though it was tempered somewhat when I craned my head around and caught her smiling at my hand in much the same way.

D.F.W., the eulogy

People are probably wondering who David Foster Wallace is and why am I making such a big deal about his death. Wasn't he a writer, a very niche writer from a hermetic subculture? That's what I was starting to think for a while, too. It's like the way I have admiration for master Scrabble players, or people who can do elaborate mathematical proofs, Bobby Fischer or Roger Federer, but I don't really care about them. I think a lot of people are conditioned to see writers, especially some of the postmodernist ones, as misanthropes or even autistic geniuses. What the master writers do takes place on a rarified level that seems to have less and less to do with dumbed-down everyday life in the USA (or Estonia). It is recently that again writers have re-emerged as humane sorts of creatures who are extremely concerned with the world and with making it a better place, who are conflicted about many things, even including the fact that they have to spend so much damn time alone to do what they do. (Incidentally, of media figures, I think Charlie Rose has done a great job to shine a light on this. Oprah, too. And bloggers everywhere.)

Wallace is definitely one of the latter, and probably the leader of his generation, who didn't just admire him for his technical prowess. This didn't sink in until later. In fact I had my eulogy buried in a blog post entitled "This Week's Ups and Downs". The last I heard of Wallace was some short stories of his I had read at a bookstore, and they seemed thin and unsatisfying, like some of the less interesting sketches ("episodes"?) from Infinite Jest. Now I wish I had known him.

I came back to him from another angle -- the body of journalism and essay writing that he'd produced in recent years, including a piece on the pre-2008 John McCain. While I had been in Estonia, Wallace, it seemed had turned into the second coming of Tom Wolfe (except a Tom Wolfe who uses pages of entertaining footnotes as his schtick).

And I hadn't realized the morality that underlies his writing. As for irony, Wallace used it precisely because he hated it, or at least thought irony was a disease in society. As a literary "cartoonist", he was very unlike Matt Stone and Trey Parker and more like Mike Judge, who by his own admission actually "hated those guys" (Beavis and Butthead) and hated it when people thought he was celebrating them.

The more I read, the more I see that Wallace can be even seen as a crypto-Christian writer, even though he could never manage to write "Jesus Christ". It was always "J.C." for Wallace, though that could appear to belie some sort of middle American bar-room familiarity.

You can't get around the fact that Wallace wrote very entertaining novels. His total novelistic output is less than, say, Ken Kesey's, which is to say, very short -- two books. There will be no rollicking autumn finale like Sailor Song. That is sort of sad, but let's face it, Kesey's Sailor Song was not an important work. I think Wallace may have been done with fiction; his essays were getting better and better, however. Profound and accessible at the same time.

But it is good that Wallace wrote Jest ten years after Broom of the System. Everyone has one novel in them, wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes; two cements you, especially if they are major works. These are.

I remember really, really liking his work in the late 1990s. Broom of the System , which is concerned with linguistic constructs but is not dry, actually came along when I was digitizing Wittgenstein (along with other philosophers) in Charlottesville, occasionally glancing at a page between scanning to admire a linguistic deconstruct. As my friend Tim said, Wittgenstein was someone that he could see a guy with a short attention span reading in his dorm over bong-hits. (We didn't do that, but both of us had some dim memory of people doing that maybe 10 years prior.) Broom is a great book, oh so clever without ever being tedious.

The other novel, Infinite Jest, is one of the few books that I really gave dog's ears to. In contrast, Finnegans Wake was over my head, in the same way that I cannot do a British crossword puzzle. Gravity's Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, the writer who probably inspired Wallace the most early on, is also over my head, by sheer weight of the British music-hall pop references and the heavy science.

Wallace, on the other hand, wrote in my language, 1990s American. He wrote about addiction and the whole pain-pleasure dichotomy -- I haven't been where Wallace was in the early 1990s (probably because I haven't had his type of early success), but I have thought a lot of and about substances at various times. They do surround you on American college campuses.

In short, Wallace embodied an aphorism of Pynchon's, which I think is emblazoned on Slow Learner: "Be cool, but care."

The Estonian connection is that in some ways, Wallace's suicide is pretty much a redux of what we might have felt when Juhan Viiding checked out. As Village Voice puts it about Wallace, if a guy who so "obviously gave a shit" left, that can't be good. I don't remember the details about Viiding exactly (didn't it occur in a sauna in front of people?) but there, too, there was a feeling of something dark occurring on the cusp of darker times. A man with a great soul and a wrongful death. Hadn't Viiding in fact seen a huge building-sized poster of Ants Erm and had a premonition of fascism? There are many stories like that, unattributable now. There is always the temptation to see the writer as divining rod for a whole climate and to read too much into it. In the end, Viiding was certainly wrong. No homegrown fascist movement ever evolved in Estonia. I don't think. Of course, consumerism has become very bad, much as it has in the Wallace's home.

Most people console themselves in this case by telling themselves Wallace's depression was a chemical aberration; he was not his depression; it was something separate. Well, I don't know. I have known one bipolar person and seen him having an actual "episode". I don't think it is ever completely separate.

Other people say Wallace should have embraced Christianity, which was clearly leading up to but hadn't had the guts to do.

There are all sorts of explanations. You can say what you want.

The best thing to do is to read and write.

Wallace was undoubtedly very aware of John Kennedy Toole, New Orleans' greatest writer. How sad is that, a mom going through a dead son's papers and getting his one novel published. In a way, I don't even feel like reading Confederacy of Dunces -- seems sordid.

The greatest tragedy, Wallace said, is for a writer to quit before being published. Luckily there is a sense of fulfilment in his own case. He endured 20 years of depression and he leaves something he presided over with true devotion. Good for him.

ANNOTATION: Advertising outtake

It's not that a whiff of high-class prostitution is all that bad for a new spa hotel, but...

What really got me here is the obvious question: what fairy tale? "Watery" as in "having a thin consistency" or as in "of water"? This sent me to the bookshelf to consult a volume of northeastern Estonian folklore to see if there were any variations on the Frog Prince where a merman gets transformed into a naked guy. Here a naked intruder gets turned into the fish or something. Unless their lips have already touched, but I don't think that's the point.

The naked dude isn't your typical primitivist, innocent sea creature. If you're in the process of infiltrating, au naturel, a lady's submarine sitting room through an open porthole, it would be in your interests to look like Elijah Wood or something. Fabio here is radiating a oily Mediterranean vibe and quite a rooster's crest.

The other question, given how tightly his lower torso is clenched, is how is the next couple seconds going to look. How do they plan to sustain the kiss? It looks like either 1) Enrico will collide painfully with the woman and bounce off or 2) he will be forced to make little awkward circles with his hands to remain in place.

Bring out the bullhorn baby!

FDR with Ennis Del Mar and bullhorn in happier times. Photograph by Gilbert Stuart.

George Bush, the man who ended the Second Great Depression two days after it began. Or whatever. Times are moving fast. They have to; Obama is in the lead again with 40-odd days to go. But looking at Bush rally Congress today, and call for us all to put aside partisan differences as we return to him our tax rebates, I thought it was all so grim. He should just pull out that bullhorn** he used the last time Lower Manhattan was devastated. Judging from the long faces today, the cabal of three witches flanking him, you would be forgiven for thinking that this was 9/11; 2001 was more like an energizing campaign rally or Lee Greenwood video. Why not dust the megaphone off? America is just like Wall Street in the sense of fickleness. - Time to unite. - Who said? - President. - OK. That's probably an actual small-town conversation between neighbours somewhere.

The difference is that Wall Street is a private blow party or sandcastle wank-a-thon that should have sobered up in the 1980s or 1990s after junk bonds and dotcom, and America is still fairly full of decent people with real lives. And you might not get the same rah-rah response from a bullhorn address on Wall St. Instead of shouts of God bless America, here would be lots of whir of ticker tape and frenzied buying. But never mind that.

Desperation -- the Republicans know that if they lose, they will return to power in a very different America -- brings out the basest urges, no matter how outrageous. Bush playing Roosevelt? FDR? A saint of big government? Sure. Why the hell not. Krauthammer compared him to Truman today. Now we need a reference to Thomas Jefferson. Who'll do it, Gerson? Oh, sorry, he's writing the Mt. Rushmore application.

Yes, the Republicans are going to pull out all the stops from here on out. The usual campaign headquarters break-ins and vote stealing will continue in the background. Now it has also become despicable on the public level. It's beyond spin: they'll just lie from here on out. That's the difference from even ten years ago. Even Nixon ultimately resigned when under intense public pressure. One by one, the men around him fell. But America has lapsed into some sort of unreality show and the power of investigative journalists has been usurped. Resignation for Bush has always been unthinkable. Individual Bushies have defected/been purged but he still has a choir of nomenklatura singing his praises.

You can smell the fear, though. Bush has not answered a question from a reporter in any form since August 6. Even the dry heat on the ranch during his holiday didn't help. It just reminded him of the other place, the legacy place, that awaits maybe 20 or 30 years down the road.

The stunts, even the most theatrical and expensive ones, have a shorter and shorter half-life. Palin was good for about a week, max, wasn't she? Then the press got around to visiting her hometown and found it out it was the worst sort of sprawling functionalist concrete strip-mall sarcophagus there is in the States and that she had practiced just about every sort of depressive-small-town cronyism there is. Even blank checks from Jesus and hating the sin (not the sinner) as hard as you can don't quite make you like her. If not for Obama, most Americans would have a Jon Stewart-Tina Fey ticket, I'm sure, even many conservatives. Hell, most would have a ticket consisting of Al Franken and just the glasses. Hornrimmed and frameless. Lots of good slogans there.

And all the while, the press is talking about a second Great Depression in the lower 48, how tent cities are increasing for the first time in decades, how the infrastructure looks increasingly threadbare (as it does to me, not that I am particularly observant, but I go back every year or two and see the changes in time-lapse).

Only why so grim, George -- your presidency opened with a pile of rubble and a bullhorn; it can end with them, too.

**All leaders need a small bullhorn to amplify their voice when necessary.

REVIEW: Eskola

Ants Eskola was considered one of the best Hamlets in the world, an actor's actor, an Estonian leading man for the ages. But it was his Soviet prison camp experience that really shaped him, made him remembered for more than just the epitome of the 1930s gentleman, which he certainly was, too.

There's a new documentary out about Eskola. I did the subtitles and was invited to the opening. Although I confess the last thing I wanted was

to see the film again
after 10 hours of FF and REW -

I was pleasantly surprised. It was quite an experience on the big screen with the PA system in Sõprus really turned up.

Visually, this film is far from the lazy panning over musty photographs as a narrator drones on; this is Ken Burns on acid, which is not to imply some sort of wildness or lack of focus. The voiceovers are also top-notch -- the cream of Estonian acting, notably Mait Malmsten's instantly recognizable delivery.

Kristjan-Paul Virve, the film-maker and Eskola's grandson, was, I believe, some sort of pioneer in the digital and visual arts in the 1990s. He uses great montage techniques and layering.

This is very appropriate since Eskola was also a gifted artist. Also, visually, it's probably worth the price of admission to see the CGI animation in the opening credits (I haven't seen anything like that, let alone in an Estonian film) and an animated sequence about a prophetic dream Eskola has that occurs about midway through the film, is good, too.

Sleep su doku

Sunday - 4
Monday - 1
Tuesday - 7
Wednesday - 2
Thursday - 5
Friday -
Saturday -

OK, with a nap, I actually got 11 hours of sleep on Tuesday. But this jet lag thing is pretty crazy in this direction. It would be fine if I could just sleep all day, the natural tendency. Fortunately it looks like I'll be able to get 6 hours today or tomorrow.

The week's ups and downs

DOWN:
Hyperintellectual, astute, funny as hell -- and younger and more socially engaged than yr typical Pynchon or Barth(elme). Didn't leave a note; no last words -- of the top links, perhaps this, a commencement speech from 2005, is the closest to it, to summing up the D.F.W. take on life. It seems like he didn't follow his own vision.

DOWN: Pink Floyd keyboardist Rick Wright dies. An "up" is that Philly radio stations on the way up to NY were drenched in the type of sweet analog psychedelia you usually never hear on radio, even on classic rock stations -- "Astronomy Domine", "Remember A Day".

DOWN: On a far more trivial note, none of our checked luggage (JFK-CDG-HEL-TLL) arrived on the belt at Tallinn Airport yesterday. One bag is still missing. It is the backpack -- mostly full of kids' clothes, but also a quart of maple syrup, coconut oil, Miracle Whip, which no doubt necessitated a deep probe by Fatherland Security. (Miracle Whip to Estonia -- suspicious, as there's perfectly good Hellmann's mayo on the market there.)

I'm guessing, though, that it was two little Whole Foods bulk herbs bags of stevia and valerian that are responsible for the snag. Lab tests back in a few weeks? We'll see.

But I noticed, after dropping off the bags at the central baggage dropoff site at JFK, that nothing would have kept anyone from walking away with someone else's luggage, as the security guards sometimes had their backs turned as they were throwing bags onto the scanner belt.

I'm pissed off, but hopeful. Some day it will all come together. Why, this time the airline checked our bags all the way to Tallinn, which indicates that we are finally getting treated as a European capital, even way out in Queens.

UP: Speaking of getting things together, Apple still hasn't done it in the form of a 3-in-1 phone/media player/minicomputer that doesn't come bundled with a commitment to AT&T or someone. But the iPod Touch is pretty cool. On the advice (and to test the theory) of one of Estonia's English-language tech expert bloggers, I bought a new iPod Touch for resale in Estonia.

I stopped into Christiana Mall in Delaware, our East Coast sales-tax-free paradise. (Nice mall, BTW.) I put down $299. In its case -- with documentation, USB cable and earbuds -- the dang thing still slid into my pocket.

I'd put an ad up on soov.ee to gauge interest in the pricier 32 GB model, which has the biggest margin in absolute terms (meaning if you sell just one, you can make the most). Not much interest. I figure the extra Flash memory is probably not worth the extra 100 USD. The 16 GB one sold in a heartbeat.

I had no seller's remorse. I was selling what amounted to an interface prototype; a computer, true, but one with a 4-inch screen that plays MP3s at average audio quality. And you need a credit card and iTunes account to even initialize the thing. I warned the buyer about the bundling but he seemed unpeturbed.

He paid 4300 kroons ($390), which I think sets an ethical price point. After all, there are first-generation Touches going for 4500 kroons. If you are selling, that means about 8-12 Touches could allow you to break even with travel expenses to NY. We also concluded the deal at the Tammsaare statue, which also may set a precedent as the first non-shady transaction in this shady area.



UP: I actually guessed right on a financial dealing, buying USD at 10.4 EEK last month and selling at 10.95. Much better than leaving the money in a term deposit. To be repeated soon, hopefully. I have proved hopeless at the stock game.

DOWN: Airports need to improve people transport, specifically getting on and off planes. A 3-year-old has no chance in the crush. Two people carrying too much carry-on fell on an escalator, landing on Morgan. Ugly scene, with people rolling and unable to rise, and the escalator continuing to operate. Luckily only a scrape or two and a bum ankle.

He also got whacked by an armrest that wouldn't stay up on the Airbus -- actually it was not designed to stay up. So I spent six hours with my elbow wedged against it while he slept. And a glass jar fell on Morgan's head from an overhead compartment, luckily only after it bounced off my head. It was like something from a comedy film -- Farrelly Bros or something. I'm sure there is a direct precedent where a kid keeps on getting beat up and whacked, but I can't place it.

We're half a continent away from the hurricane, but gas prices have gone up 10% here in a day or two.

And then...I haven't seen anything like it -- every gas station along 29 south of Charlottesville had run out of gasoline tonight. I had loaded Morgan into the Subaru after a Friday night on the mall, and the two of us were on our way down to the lake with one more visit with my sister (and one last taste of summer -- as it often is this time of year, the temperature difference with Estonia will be about 20 degrees C tomorrow -- 30 in Virginia, 10 in Estonia).

I began getting worried when even the massive Sheetz station south of Lynchburg had plastic draped over all 30 or so of its nozzles. It had been a completely normal Friday night in Charlottesville, people cruising about. I had thought about refuelling before hitting the road, but did not, because prices are usually cheaper past Lynchburg.

How can Sheetz run out of gas? It is as inconceivable as there being no bottled water or pizza slices under the hot lamp. For a few miles, there was a paranoid sense of big trouble looming. The Road by Cormac McCarthy kind of trouble. I had 50 miles to go and an eighth tank of gas -- enough to make it to the lake, but not enough for the return trip on Sunday, when we have to drive back to Charlottesville and then take a rental car up to JFK for our flight back to Estonia. I called the lake house on my cell to the effect that the oil was probably running out for good.

Tonight's "goodbye party" in Charlottesville: A concert on the pedestrian Downtown Mall. Loud music -- no problem for Morgan this time. I guess the amphitheatre was slightly familiar and he found a good friend in my bandmate's wife. We ate at a place usually associated with lunch -- Revolutionary Soup. It has the good sense to stay open until 8 pm and is just a couple paces off the mall, where it can be difficult to find a table on Fridays. Town and gown mingled around us.

We also had a great time with grandparents. Morgan took long walks on the nature trail, including one with just grandpa. Grandma read book after book. I didn't get to the mountains this time, but I have been so close together with Morgan for the last three weeks that it would feel odd going on a trip by myself...I would probably panic, feeling I had forgotten something. So I did some errands in a few hours that I had off, trying to find some last good deals. Kids' clothes, electronics -- the things that are ridiculously cheap here even with the temporarily stronger dollar.

Fish story

Morgan's first fish: half-pound largemouth bass, a private pond near Bedford, Virginia, bait: half a fat nightcrawler. This is important here, as I'm sure it is in most places in the country. People -- my Texan scion-of-cattle-ranchers brother-in-law, our Virginian hosts on this occasion -- treated it as a hallowed moment.

I remember my first fish: at the Bellevue Reservoir, Ohio, early 1980s, a half-pound bluegill, hooked through an eyeball, bait: none, worm had already fallen off the hook. I can't say it was traumatic -- it didn't get me involved in the animal rights movement or anything -- though a catfish spine later that year certainly was painful. I was slightly nonplussed as the bobber hadn't moved and the waters seemed to be teeming with the critters. I never really warmed to fishing and always had lousy luck. Perhaps I should have just stuck to flailing an unbaited hook through water.

In 2003, I bought a cheap rod and reel and tried to fish for dinner on a backpacking trip in the Eagle Cap wilderness in Oregon. Didn't even catch a rainbow trout. Luckily I reserved some of the sharp Cheddar cheese for myself, or I would have gone hungry.

If there is good conversation or views or there's a good whitewater moment in it for me, I'm fine. On this occasion, we were at a pleasant enough pond in a holler at my brother-in-law's boss's house about 20 miles from the lake. The big lake itself is considered difficult to fish, even by tournament anglers.

I was longing slightly for a hike in the mountains and a square picnic lunch instead of hours of beer at a pace of about one every hour and a half, which seemed scarily sustainable though I felt a little wan and desiccated by 4pm. Compared to the open waters of the lake, the little pond inevitably reminded me of rustic ol' Estonia, except for the searing 32 degree temperatures and the chigger bites around my ankles which have got to be some of the itchiest things in this world. The half-acre pond was also good for a dip, and amazingly, on account of being in such a deep hole, cooler than the big lake.

The boss, who gave us a box full of fancy tackle that was pretty useless in the pond, stayed up to putter up at his garage. He was an interesting man, grizzled like an old captain, apparently a native Virginian but unaccountably does these southwestern collage paitings with turquoise coloured paint and cattle skull motifs.
Like so many people, a contractor who has become quite wealthy and, it seemed, not uneccentric.

I caught sight of some crossbows in his other (yes, the other two-car garage), and I asked one of his younger relations about them, the younger guy was a tattooed sort of edgy but urban intellectual seeming guy -- or as urban intellectual as you get in the countryside around Roanoke. No, he said, shaking his head, he personally didn't go in for that, and I nodded, but then he invited me to shoot some guns sometime. When I told him I had never fired anything but a .22 rifle, he was quite perturbed.

Morgan soon snagged a second crappie of several pounds, though for him the canoe ride on the pond seemed to be the main attraction. That and the buggy ride up the steep hill. I thought briefly about Dave Matthews Band member Leroi Moore, who was killed in an ATV accident on an estate probably not unlike or too far away from this one, but everybody remained responsible and indulgent of the little man.

Morgan turned three yesterday. We went out to eat at a Mexican place. (I'll skip the review; fairly good but I doubt many readers will venture to Moneta, Virginia.) Then we made maple walnut ice cream at home. Aunt Kai made kräsupea kook ("kinkyhead cake"?, also known by the possibly more PC name of linnavaremed (city ruins).

Keeping lines open with Estonia is getting tough as I am now on US time, going to bed at midnight here -- I have the phone on silent so people don't wake me up all night. No, I haven't heard back about a screen test from the people who wanted to cast me as a drug addict, but Hansabank wants to sell me more money.

I think almost all of the family members got to talk to the birthday boy. We're sorry we couldn't be in two or three places at once.

He's a good kid, but boy are his feet flat. We pressed them into the freshly poured concrete driveway yesterday. Cousin Kiira, almost 2, has very well-defined arches. Guess who's going to be the circus star?

Morgan's semi-orthopaedic sandals attracted attention from a woman standing in line at the Kroger supermarket, who asked if they were European shoes. She was originally from Germany, had just been on a cruise that had called in Tallinn, as well as St. Petersburg. She said I should visit Russia. I whacked her with her handbag. Almost.

I got my driver's license renewed. The new picture looks like I am a grit -- a subspecies of redneck. Guess I'm stuck with it for the next eight years.

We're heading back to Charlottesville soon, for more time with the other grandparents. Morgan really thrived in the more structured environment, even though the weather was bad and may be again next week.

**

I made a foray into writing about family issues in my last entry. Family things are the most difficult thing to write about, because it is impossible to please everyone if you have a very diverse family. There are even some people in my family who think that a blog is not a place for family issues at all. I don't completely agree with that. Other family members have a very narrow view of certain things that has only hardened with time. Sometimes it seems like the blind men trying to describe the elephant -- or that the views need to be put together like stacked transparencies to make any sense at all.

I don't pretend to have the one right view. That would be good, wouldn't it? I'm just going to act like a newspaper with a variety of reporters and columnists. Sometimes it's a good thing to balance with some different views and some more charitable coverage. Anyway, the truth is a fluid thing that occupies a wide spectrum. It's a histogram.

A matter of latitude

We're enjoying some nice Virginia weather at my mom's lake house ("the homestead", as I call it) between remnants of Fay and Gustav and Hanna, who luckily aren't human guests. Because if they were, they would have to sleep on a couch, in a tent or on the boat dock.

"Lake house" bespeaks wealth, but the land was bought back 30 years ago when it was was cheap. It's a modest house, set amid beautiful Lake Constance-like scenery -- I don't think I'm exaggerating too much -- and it's fairly full. My sister and her partner and toddler, who live here year-round currently; Morgan and I; and my sister's guests from Europe. I thought of inviting some friends down from Charlottesville, too -- I know one guy who lives in his parents' house on Lake Monticello, kind of a fake gated community, and he might be interested in seeing what real lakeside living is like -- but I thought better of it. This community is also getting more stiff, signs warn not to park on the roadsides between 2am and 6am. The driveway is being paved and there are already four or five cars on the roadside.

As it is, there are just enough beds, things have gone swimmingly and luckily everybody likes each other. The Dutch guests are not at all the hippies I thought they would be. They help out with the dishes and take long drives in the countryside. Today we all went blueberry picking. This is not berry gathering Estonian style. We are talking about 30-year-old bushes with elderberry like clusters and tops that are almost drooping from the weight of berries. It took about 10 minutes to get a litre.

I mention the blueberries because it is a classic example of how America bowls you over with its bounty (fat blueberries in September during a drought?). As an experience, it's not necessarily better than crouching over huckleberries and lingonberries in an Estonian forest. I would not suggest that for a second. Yet America is never as hollow as people in Europe would have you believe, either and it raises questions. Are we doing the right thing by living in Estonia? Is it really fair to the kids, in the long view?

Of course there is the matter of housing, which I think is the only real crisis in America, where people otherwise still drive and eat like they used to. I don't quite know what to make of the fact that my kid sister and her family uses the lake house on an indefinite basis. I'm not envious per se. I certainly wouldn't allow one of my kids -- Morgan let's say -- to live in my house while Lorna had to pay rent in a city apartment. But I realize that I can't switch places anyway. My life is in Estonia.

If theirs is a sustainable lifestyle, more power to them. America is supposedly in the middle of an economic crisis, and corporate America supposedly nickels and dimes people like my sister and her partner, but their two refrigerators are well-stocked with gourmet (but not luxury) food. They're environmentally conscious, compost and recycle, garden, are socially active and somehow they find time to do all this and raise kids and three dogs. I don't think they have a secret source of funding, and they're certainly putting up co-financing in the form of the housesitting itself, and home improvement projects.

Of course, any improvement, no matter how small, has the effect of perpetuating their tenancy, a fact which I am sure they are keenly aware of, but let that be.

In contrast, I sometimes feel like a Soviet factory worker plowing through text and piecework, and I don't feel like I waste time or spurn creativity. I would love to take time off and fall back on a beautiful property, live a rambling lifestyle (even if the house itself is less than rambling), write and generate new business ideas, be an enlightened Brahmin patrone mixing with the labourers in the red Virginia mud, but I just don't dare stop -- I have to pay rent and feed the kids.

Meanwhile, to my surprise I have found that I like my brother-in-law. He is indefatigable (always wanted to use that word), a rustic rough in the Whitmanesque sense with a lot of big, Americany ideas. I suppose he must be a Texas version of Sarah Palin's husband.

Of course, when the guy, who has been living here for all of about 20 months, points out the fields where he "would ramble with the dogs when he first arrived" and talks about his fond reminiscences from back in 2007, I have to stroke my chin a little wryly.

I think if I can have my wry chin-stroking, and I think there will be plenty to come, I can keep my good attitude toward it all. Perhaps a room could be set aside in the house for Morgan...I'm not sure use of all 200 m2 is justified.