DEVCON-3

The DEVCON scale, which measures imminent threat of devaluation, is at DEVCON-3 for the first time. That's still far from DEVCON-1, but like nuclear first strikes, it doesn't mean it isn't impossible.

Everybody who's not a nut still says it won't happen. But apparently big, already-failed financial houses are already pricing in the devaluation in their assessments of Swedish banks.

The world financial system (imagine a porcelain throne with gold trim) is clogged up with toxic assets, and then there's these bubbles floating on the surface of the cesspool -- the Baltics! So the first urge for a failed banker or lazy plumber is to pop the bubbles, even though it isn't going to make the caca go down the cloaca any faster.

If I know my economics, I think the theory behind devaluation is that one's national currency becomes cheaper, so that foreigners can swoop in and make investments, and Estonian milk will be cheaper than Lithuanian water, and British stag-party tourists will come back, and a coffee at a local cafe will cost only €1.50, and everything will be hunky-dory...until Monday when everyone raises prices to reflect the new euro rate.

The official line from the government is that devaluation is an impossibility. That it requires a bunch of legal procedures and it cannot be done "in one day." Then again, the weekend has two days.

And as one commenter said, kui juba ansip nii ütleb, siis tuleb raha hoida euris. If the PM says it won't happen, better head to the bank.

Latvia already sold their soul to the IMF. Estonia, to this point, has been coasting on the perception that it has some cash. Now, apparently, crunch time is a little closer. At the very least, there is a growing unease that if January is still OK, February may be a month where we go into the red.

To be fair, it is to be noted that Clinton's people removed the letters from the keyboards as they departed the White House; there was also something about bong water in the heating system, but I can't find that one now. The Bushies seem to have engaged in regulatory vandalism, on the other hand, the extent of which probably has yet to become fully clear.

Tariffs have been slapped on cave-dwelling farmers, sending a clear message that could not be more succinct and targeted: "Go sell cheese to Osama, surrender specialists. That'll show you to mess with Texas beef. P.S. We're out of here!"

Instead of leaving their farm and cave to technology and maybe puttin' that spelunkin' expertise to use at Tora Bora as advance scouts, these Roquefort druids live a life of atavistic agrarian denial, making cheese from sheep's milk.

Everything about their lifestyle is slightly eccentric, down to the "oval-shaped grazing area." Grazing area? Why not a square feedlot?

Any fool knows that cheese is made from cows. With machines. Boil some milk, stick it in a centrifuge, then an inoculator line injects the mold an instant before it is shrink-wrapped in consumer-paks and 'tis done.

Oops, I did it again

I don't have an excuse (do I need an excuse?), other than I needed orthopedic shoes for my carbon footprint.

We're going to Morocco next month.

Apollo.se, a Swedish travel agency, came through. The page is only in Swedish, but I noticed some ridiculously low numbers for places like Tenerife and Egypt. Following them through to the billing screen revealed that taxes and hidden fees were not that high, and there was even an instant online rebate or two.

We're landing in Agadir, which I understand in terms of cityscape and its 10 km beach is not that unlike Gaza before the war, then getting the heck out there, taking some sort of wheeled conveyance north to a quieter area from which we can, if choose, pop into Marrakech for some culture.

Sure not to be beach weather, but it'll be an adventure. This will be interesting -- I see it going two ways, cold floors for Lorna, and the muezzin waking us up in the most restful phase of sleep, and dodgy hygiene. Or...it's something like Chania on Crete, and we see the full moon rise.

Fish offal

I'd been having trouble getting Morgan to eat dinner. Food's usually the last thing on his mind after a long day, and it sometimes ends up being a battle of wills or a game to see what he can get away with. We're usually up for it, but I feel it's my one chance to get something wholesome into his body so I get a little stressed.

Because breakfast is always the same, with obsessive regularity -- Corn Flakes on top of Rice Krispies with homemade granola** sprinkled on top, yogurt and milk. We don't dare vary it now or run out of either cereal because we don't want an "incident" in the morning. Then every other day he goes off to preschool, where the food is theoretically wholesome, but if you actually get around to thinking about it, then like many things like cream of wheat, it doesn't supply much vitamins at all. One afternoon I went to pick him up and he looked pasty and white and for some reason an image popped into my head of cookie crumb crust and sweet curds. "What did you eat today," I asked, and I swear, he said, "cookie crumb cake and curd cream." He said he had a little bread, too, followed by a spoonful of potato -- it was like a inverted bland, pasty version of the food pyramid. And I know he was telling the truth. At meals, he'll sit there making faces at the girls and then at the end of the meal he'll have a piece of bread. I was once on a preschool field trip with the class and lunch was the basic Estonian potato salad with pink cubical bits of bologna, which he didn't really eat much of, and then every kid got a huge Danish pastry. My wife doesn't think things are so bad, but I insist.. it's horrible...horrible.

Today I was passing by the central market and I decided to check out Fish. Not bad -- these days the supermarkets generally have two kinds of salmon and one really expensive white fish, but here there was all sorts, even cod, except you have to clean them yourself. Being mercury and PCB-conscious I grabbed some Estonian-raised baby trout. I got about eight of them and I was surprised it cost $3.

I gutted them and put them in a big dish and sprinkled salt and lemon and butter on and in them and baked them. "I'm not eating tonight, I'm going to play some more," Morgan announced, as usual, but I showed him the dish and it was very interesting to him, seeing a whole fish instead of some multi-hued Moosewood-type casserole. I asked him if he wanted an entire fish on his plate or if he wanted me to pick at a fish for him. Silly question, of course. When we were seated, I started teasing back the skin to expose the delicate meat when he decided he wanted the skin, probably remembering a recent duck we had. OK, I said, I don't really recommend eating the skin on big Baltic Sea salmon, but OK.

Then, winking at him -- and I had been waiting for this moment for a long time, a rite of passage in which the father lets his son in on the fact that the sweetest, most steak-like bits are in the fish's cheeks -- I grabbed a knife and started exploring the jaw area, except the damn fish were so small, almost like herring, I couldn't even find the cheeks... Morgan announced, "I'm going to eat the eye."

He took his fork as I was still sullying the fish's jaw muscle, deftly removed the eye and popped it in his mouth. Meanwhile things got chaotic as Lorna had her first small bite of fish, and she didn't like it. I turned back to see a fin go down Morgan's hatch, or maybe it was a gill. He also ate the tail.

I don't know where my responsibility lies. I was just glad he was eating something different. It wasn't blowfish, and saying things ineffectually from the sidelines like "yes, but wouldn't you prefer" seemed lame, too, and he was showing remarkable intelligence about the bones, so I went with it. I did notice my wife, who's not even thrilled with meat that has bones (if you can imagine that -- meat with bones in it!), let alone fish with faces, seemed less than hungry.

I should probably have said to Morgan, "whatever you do, don't eat that creamy-pink flesh."

There are definitely interesting things in a fish's neck, I don't even know what their biological function is. But more than a quarter of a century later, I still remember the utter revulsion when I ate the "dead man's fingers" in a Maryland crab (and the yellow fat) so I might not be as experimental when it comes to texture.

** Just noticed nami-nami has a granola recipe, but ours happens to be the Adele Davis formula

Best of Jan. 20

Some of my favourite inaugural lines. Points for correct ID. No Googling.

The government-people dichotomy

1. "For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies."

2. "Government has great responsibilities for public safety and public health, for civil rights and common schools. Yet compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government."

My foreign policy

3. "America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way."

4. "Our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint."

Evil-doers

5. "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

6. "The leaders of governments with long habits of control need to know: To serve your people you must learn to trust them. Start on this journey of progress and justice, and America will walk at your side."

Uplifting historical reference with oral history overtones

7. "Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life. This work continues. This story goes on. And an angel still rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm."

8. "At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: 'Let it be told to the future world...that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive ... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].'"

What I did Jan. 20

As the Mall was already filling up, I started the morning translating at a conference on waste management, or more accurately, I coordinated the simultaneous interpreting. I don't interpret into Estonian. I've never done it and am not about to start, even though EU translators are required to have two language pairs and a stint in Brussels might be something worth looking into. I lack the virtual memory or headroom. I need more words, more semi-parasitic expressions. I need to be able to say "põhineb sellel" as well as "rajaneb sellele", which mean exactly the same thing and don't need each other, but for some reason you need redundant expressions at the ready when you're interpreting. You need to have that native B.S. facility, otherwise your performance slows down or has occasional crashes. It's an odd, almost quantum effect.

I can interpret into English in dialect (Southern, Scots, even Moron) in my sleep but not into Estonian, no. Speaking of moron, there's also the matter of my accent -- Estonian has the characteristic of sounding like it is spoken by a thick person when it is heavily aspirated. I can fake it and hide my emigre Estonian origins by holding my breath when I speak, but this is hard while interpreting. I am loath to inflict the accent on the three or four people wearing headphones at a conference. They're probably old-timers from Oil Shale who are the only Estonians left in Estonia whose Russian is better than their English. At least let them hear some quality Estonian before their drive back to the northeast, I figure.

There are very good English-Estonian interpreters in Estonia. I was happy to farm the interpreting work out to a trustworthy associate, and get coffee and water for her. At one point I did save the day, as Tom Green would say, by remembering that "hopper" (as in bin or vat) was "punker" when my colleague was in a jam, though I did screw it up by saying "dosaator" first.

There were British experts in waste there, all interested in getting Estonia to adopt waste-to-energy and various other technologies that will lower our still very high per-capita waste generated stats. I think waste-to-energy is basically waste vaporization, like the Delorean at the end of Back To The Future One, but was interesting to hear it described by Brits using the language of oil shale -- basically the same processes of pyrolysis, syngas and steam are used. I wonder if there is any nation that is better at all-around distilling -- petroleum spirits, moonshine, synthetic diesel -- than Estonia.

Waste management is massively big business, of course, but these guys weren't flaunting their wealth. One guy from a recycling lobby firm, confusingly named Edwin Lucas, had a presentation called "recycling can be fun" and slides with pictures of monkeys.

As is typical of conferences in the Baltics, the Estonian conference attendees asked no questions, not even of comic foils like Mr. Lucas, and so the organizer got up, grabbed a mike and...saved the day, I guess, though they were soft questions, I thought. The problem isn't that Estonians are shy (certainly not about asking questions in English, not these mid-level officials) they're just professional buttonholers. Come to think of it, this is the way I would act at press conferences -- I would generally avoid standing up and being called on, but would charge to the front after it was over and try to corral the official.

Lunch was free and tasted good, but was not, disappointingly, the Portuguese Vasco de Gama, which I thought was Uniquestay Hotel's in-house cafe, and which I've never tried because I'm never in this part of Tallinn.

After taking my leave, I did some work over WiFi at a Reval Cafe. Then it was home to make dinner and pick up Morgan for swimming. We go swimming at a hospital which has a semi-public pool -- it's not just for kids who are in physical therapy, in other words, you can get into the system. Some families go because it's cheap, we go because it's almost next door to us, and it's a pretty nice pool. But I'm frustrated with institutional recreation, and can't really stomach it on all but the most stress-free days, and this was not one of those days.

Morgan wasn't much for swimming, either, preferring to do "exercises" on the steps, which looked like he might burn a whole three calories if he kept it up for the whole 45 minutes. So we got home a bit early. I hadn't thought of the party in Washington all day. Obama was just screwing up the first part of his and Roberts were faking each other out on the oath when I turned on the computer at a little past seven. Thank God everything else went well. I didn't see the Rev. Warren, but I did see and hear one Rev. Lowery, who really struck me -- something about his diction, his cadences, sounding like some folk character from America's past. But it was mainly the content that was noteworthy. (Found out later that he was 87 and a civil rights leader.)

I tried to follow the "tweets" live feed on Washington Post, but every time I started reading one, another one would appear at the top of the screen and bump the one I was reading. Very disorienting and fragmented. Who were these people and how did I know if they were telling the truth, and why should I care? I really question the hype about this technology, all these microblogs are supposed to add up to an omniscient superblog of information but the only use I can see is an entertaining diversion. In the old days, we had journalists who parsed and summarized analog twits.

A happy day so far, needless to say, but more a feeling of relief that it's winding down. I'm really anxious to see how this administration gets down to brass tacks, it's been months of hearing about the move to Washington, Blair House, the first daughters, evangelists, and I don't like staged events where it isn't considered good form for you to be critical so I probably lack the enthusiasm of some people.

Then I thought: Maybe for all my anti-Bush rhetoric, I haven't been truly impacted as some people have...

NEW BLOGS: Renaissance and..."Decay"

Part of my upright uplift post-Jan 20 party plan involves phasing out this blog and introducing a number of spinoffs -- one called something like Jeffersonia Estonia, which would be a more mutedly optimistic offering focusing on my adopted hometown of Charlottesville, Va. and yeomen farmers and small towns in Estonia; then a blog with more rants and rage in it (readers can choose the name for a prize of 1000 EEK); third, a music blog which would also feature some ditties and scribblings, not that have I done much creatively in the last three years.

First, though, from the "Obamanation-spelled-with-an-'A' category, though, comes a polemic from Australia Tallinn and Berlin's very own Joel Dullroy.

Though even I noted America's infrastructure looked especially bad last time around (Bush persisting in his conviction that God will take care of the overpasses), it still irks me when a non-American visits my country and publishes a series of articles about drifters, vagrants and schizophrenics, each earnest piece beginning a la "Schmucktown is a city with no hope left in which even the shitholes are full of shitholes."

And he didn't even visit the Downtown Industrial District in LA!

That said, here's Joel Dullroy's new blog, Decay, which promises to be excellent if they let him visit again. I know I'll tune back in.

Estonia: a really calm flashpoint

When things get slightly sour, all of a sudden Estonia ceases to be Nordic and becomes Baltic again.

Not that things are all that rosy here, or that Nordic is a byword for good and Baltic bad.

But if there is trouble in another Baltic state, it is de rigueur to graft Estonia on to the bottom of the story. If you're working at a news organization, forget all those features you wrote about Estonia's different cultural identity. Wipe them from your memory and take out the circa 1991 crib sheet, with all of its post-Soviet syllogisms.

I have a theory that "Baltic" was invented by people as a fudge to cover up ignorance and a lack of information. We haven't been doing our homework, but gee, it's lucky we have this word to fall back on.

It's as if there's riots in Boston and New Haven one night, and everyone gets on the line dutifully to the guy in Montpelier. "Ayuh," he says, "it's tense." After much prodding, he says, "Resources are tight, we might vote out the mayor in the spring." (The taciturn upper New Englander being the closest thing to the reticent Estonian, plus I always learned in school that Estonia is the size of NH and VT put together.)

At least it provides a chance for copy editors to shine. The Guardian still has sub-editors on the payroll. Nice head and subhead here:

Eastern Europe braced for a violent 'spring of discontent'
Riots and street battles are set to spread through Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic states as inflation, unemployment and racism fuel tension.


I'm sure if there was room for seven more characters, they would have included "pitched street battles".

Street battles? Sounds like a game, LARP or paintball.

The box at the bottom lists us we are one of Europe's four flashpoints, despite the article largely being devoted to Romania. Well, the really calm one, anyway. Bloomberg says riots may come to Estonia as well (spontaneously, without Russian meddling?) which is a laugh right now.

No one really knows anything about what will happen, but governments rarely survive a full term in better economic times. It would be unfortunate if they developed a case of Bushian stubbornness about holding on to power right now.

It would be hard to explain to the public why staying the course would be the right thing. There is no precedent. In the 1990s, Laar could push through incredibly harsh seeming reforms because there was so much theory and doctrine to back it up. Now so much of that Friedman has been discredited or equated with the seeds of the current crisis, even though it worked in Estonia's case back then. Keynesian theories are all the rage now. I don't see an Ansip having any credibility if people find it hard to live the life they have been accustomed to and simply hangs on, increasing taxes.

REVIEW: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

.taht ekil detiolpxe gnieb ta yrgna tlef neht, ybab (dlo ylemertxe) a ekil deirc I

.esimerp diputs a tahw ,nam tub ,godmulS sa gninnuts sa tib yreve saw ti yas dluow I



.gninnuts saw siht yllausiV

(Eye candy, in the manner of a 1GB iPod Touch, and if you need a good cry on general principle, you can use this to prime the pump. 2.5 out of 5

Apologies for art

(corrected and updated)

For a while, the Czech EU presidency's shares were way up. Each country in an installation in honour of the new president gets a little space on a map of Europe where "stereotypes are demolished".

Estonia's entry incidentally is pretty clever -- a deconstructed hammer and sickle made of power tools. Clearly a reference by artist Sirje Sukmit to the building boom and economic miracle, which is..um, over for now, but, well...



Took me a little while to get it, but OK.

Other countries' artists interpreted the assignment extremely differently. (The other Baltics were simply inscrutable. Lithuania's sent a cartoon of five guys peeing into...is that Belarus?



Sorry, Belarus. Man, it's good they aren't included in the installation.

Latvia sent a sketch of mountains. I don't know what the hell it means, but I do wish there were mountains in the Baltics, too.)

Now the Czech artist responsible for curating "Entropa" has had to apologized for art, because some of the countries really didn't like what their own artists came up with, and not just the countries that were shown getting peed on.

I've noticed there's a lot of this going on: someone will do something a bit scandalous, which he or she knows perfectly well will be scandalous, and then the predictable people get all flustered instead of being amused, and then in the end the jester is humiliated by having to unwad other people's knickers, which procedure the people whose knickers are in a wad would obviously be best-poised to do themselves.

"Entropa" really isn't that incendiary. There's a fine line between sending up a stereotype and simply perpetuating it. Romania depicted as a vampire theme park -- that's the best they could come up with? I don't know anything else about Romania. I guess neither do the Romanians. Anyway, kind of makes me want to go there, true or not. So in that sense it seems like a case of Boratitis, which no doubt increased interest in Kazakhstan.

On the other hand Poland (priests in cassocks hoisting a rainbow flag Iwo Jima style) is pretty funny, unless you're a priest.

The Estonians had something subversive at the most recent Venice Biennale -- a gas pipeline between the German and Russian pavilions. (Too bad Venice doesn't get the attention that Eurovsion does.) Luckily that was a hip event, and I guess the political comment didn't ruffle too many feathers. But the Czech event was for an official EU installation, and the Czech government already has a reputation for thumbing its nose at the EU. But again, what do you expect? Reading about Cerny's past work (I'm even reluctant to type some of the titles here), it seems a bit like Bush commissioning his presidential portrait from Mapplethorpe (which I'd incidentally like to see, were it possible). Did you really expect something polite?

Finally, this quote from CNN was hilarious, at least out of context: "Cerny, and his main collaborators Kristof Kintera and Tomas Pospiszyl apologized to Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek and other government ministers Tuesday, according to a statement on the artist's Web site, for "not having informed them about what is true and for having misled them."

Do I have to inform my officials about what is true? Goodness, I'm still trying to figure out what is true myself. I thought the officials knew.

Since apologies are all the rage, might as well before anyone stumbles across what I've written... I apologize for mistaking Zatlers for Bowie -- his hair is much cooler. If you had a good buzz going, I'm sorry for posting the entry entitled "Sobering". And I'm sorry for saying that Bush was just a bum and a leecher -- I don't know where on earth I got that impression. I'm sorry for suggesting that Israel should have been a little more careful and that they might have evacuated 333 children before attacking. Unless, of course, by showing that it can drive the Gazans into the sea, Israel is engaged in a bit of conceptual art itself in pointing up its own history. Then it should apologize.

Heroes

I keep thinking back to happier times. It must have been in the late 1990s. Latvian President Valdis Zatlers was performing for a sold-out crowd. It was after he had quit practicing medicine and before he started using hairspray.

He walked on. "You" -- he pointed and the crowd was his -- "you can be mean. And I? I'll drink all the time."



Like a partner in a relationship, the public can be mean, like they are now. And some leaders drink all the time. Not Zatlers, of course, it's just a figure of speech.

And they're lovers, see, Zatlers and the crowd, no matter how badly they may act. National unity and heroic determination trump all. They're both heroes.

This is what the president should say now.

"We can be heroes."

"Let's steal time" -- not a bad idea either, time being interest.

And if they call you a zoo president, give them animals. Dolphins. Dolphins swimming through nothing, which incidentally is the amount of credit circulating through the economy.

That's what a leader does: plays the old hits. It really tends to work. I don't mean that tongue-in-cheek. Of course there has to be policy, too, but that's what you have the prime minister for.

I recently criticized Coke for being a worthless product that should be taxed to the hilt, but I was translating some propaganda today and was struck by a claim that Coke contains no preservatives. Sure enough, Coca-Cola is almost back to what it was in the late 19th century -- they finished phasing out sodium benzoate (E211) in December. Way to go, Coke!

Now if Estonian fish canneries would only take notice of the E211 trend...

Sobering...

The environmental impact of Google searches. And, by extension, I suppose, posting this link. And I thought, without ever really thinking about it, that it was all fibre-optics, superconductors and flash memory.

My two shoes' worth

"Crawford, TX"

By Daniel Plainview & the Blue, Black and White Alert House Band (featuring John Ashcroft)

MP3, 6:14.

Recorded at iSight internal studios.

"Put on your dancing shoes and take a trip back to the halcyon days of Dubya's first term. Is it in good taste? No. Purty? Heck no. But it's a historical artifact.

And remember -- it's always summer on the president's ranch."

BONUS: Follow the bouncing ball.

Instant corrections on the rental market

We lost our tenants in the basement apartment we rent out. We were sorry to see them go. They approached us after Christmas with a request to meet in person, and of course that could only be one thing: a polite demand for lowered rent, which probably seems like the height of brazenness to folks in the US, but it's a little different here. The guy had lost his job, too -- apparently there was a wave of layoffs around the New Year -- and had a option to move somewhere else. I think they made a good-faith effort at Casa Rikken North, even buying firewood to stoke the ahi instead of using easy and expensive electricity, but then the wood had run out and the last utility bill had been way over $200 or so that we had mentioned as a wintertime baseline. I didn't have the heart to tell them they should heat the stove twice a day; that always seemed excessive to me.

We gave them 10% off but they wanted 15%, which is about what rent prices have fallen since August when they signed the lease. Leases are easy to get out of in Estonia -- just one month's advance notice. You often pay a month's rent in broker's fees upon moving in, so changing address is not completely cost-free.

Their initiative was a good one, so we thought, what the hell, and the wife called our current landlord and asked for about 11% off, and they gave it to her instantly. (The owner lives in Britain and the pound is very cheap. I don't even thnk the Estonian agent consulted the owner.) Made us think we should have asked for more.

Meanwhile, the vacant apartment is being shown, but is incredibly attractive to me. I'm dabbling a little bit more in music. I brought some mics over from the States in September and am thinking about getting a loop station and mixer and doing some recording as well (along with fantasies of collaborating on songs over the Internet) so I am not keen on seeing the basement apartment re-rented out, but let's be honest, that's a little shortsighted -- we could use the money, and I don't have time or energy for such things on work days. I have to be honest with myself, it's straight out of the book of stereotypes -- the paterfamilias disappearing into the garage to tinker on his car.

TEST: Cherokee Rose

More for the purpose of seeing how podcasting/audio works, posting an .mp3 from the vault.

I've been pulling some of my old TASCAM 4-tracks and early digital recordings out of the closet. This one is a loose song -- sort of a early sketchpad version -- a skeleton track of acoustic and voice recorded during a thunderstorm in 2002, to which I added layers.

It's never been pared down to a "pop single", it consists of umpteen improvised verses, all concluding with "Cherokee Rose", a bridge/refrain, and then a coda.

I played it once at Vinegar Hill Grill in Charlottesville, a sort of blue-collar bar, and people got up and slow-danced to it, but it never really blossomed in a full band setting.

Overlooked offering from Macworld

Tight. Some of these clips make the Daily Show seem like bloat (though this one was obviously produced long before the news about Jobs).


Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

In other, real news, the new 17" Macbook Pro has a battery built into it (what's next, a laptop built into a desk?), and the latest Windows version is called "Windows 7". Innovation.

Dear Hugo...

Why do you keep doing things like this? You know I can't possibly support your administration or your policies publicly, but you make it hard to remain upset for long. Your idealism brought a smile to my face and is even better than boycotting sweet potatoes or herbs from the aggressor. For a second, I hoped that my country of Estonia could arrange with your country to buy sweet potatoes and mangoes, to take away the business from the merchants of death. If I had more money, I might even visit your country -- well, on a day-trip from Trinidad, with an empty petrol container, then go back to the resort on the island for the rest of the week. But still, I could say I bought Venezuelan.

But seriously, good move sending that diplomatic bastard packing. If it were my country, I would not be able to abide it, either. If Western capitals had reacted like this (by cutting off relations) every time the Soviets shot anyone or invaded a country, I still hold that the whole colossus would have collapsed sooner. Too bad you probably view that as a bad thing, eh? I realize you're steeped in that whole Latin American revolutionary narrative, of course -- it's probably nearly as old as..well, the Middle Eastern conflict. But if you know your history, that is even more of a reason to "just say no" to industrialist military complexes that squeeze out the common man. Long live the revolucion, just not the revolutsiya, is what I always say. Remember where that got us, the next time the Russians apply their version of the Monroe Doctrine.

P.S. I'm not just being charitable to you but your rival, Beelzebub. His popularity is up to a record 27% this week. I think it's because of the landmark Underwater Wilderness Act. (Don't worry, the Caribbean is not affected.) I don't know how enforceable it is, and maybe it will anger the Polynesian oil lobby, but hell, it's an environmental initiative, akin in scale to declaring the entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter a national park, which I think will be his next move before leaving office. Bush doesn't smell like brimstone anymore -- not this week -- he smells like a rare Pacific seaweed, which oddly, smells quite sulphurous when it's out of its element, sort of like brimstone. He's also quite cuddly, much like you, Hugo.

My best to your "family cell".

Institute of Economic Research leaks info!

There's always discussion about how relatively expensive life really is on these shores. Raw data would be great, right? But comparative consumer information always seems spotty or hard to find, for some reason -- usually you just get the official indexes -- for groups of goods expressed as the percentage growth. Not the individual items.***

Ah, but today Tarbija24 published a table showing prices of basic grocery items in 12 capitals. It's just a low-quality jpg. The Institute of Economic Research, which carried out the study, didn't have the original table (or anything at all) posted on their webpage.

To the extent that it's readable, it's welcome. There's even Big Mac data which, despite being a legendary index from The Economist, I have never actually seen in the pages of that newspaper. Way to go, EKI!

I can understand why this sort of information is sensitive. I'm sure whoever set the price of a Big Mac in Helsinki at 62 kroons (about 4 euros) would not want it getting out that it costs more than it does in Sweden. (Though maybe there's some reason for it -- did the powerful Hesburger lobby get a tax slapped on the Mac.)



The big shock is beer: I still remember Prague from 1997 as a blessedly dirt-cheap place. Rents are higher there now, but like many other things, Czech beer is still cheaper, in fact less than half the price that it is in Estonia, thanks to the new excise taxes that went into effect here. The price difference is reflected in retail prices in Estonia. Czech imports are basically at parity with Estonian beer. Since most Czech beer is also much better-tasting, it's not much of a dilemma.

Estonia has a number of cheap food items, and notably, one non-food item: Estonia has just about the cheapest Coca-Cola (only cheaper in Riga and Vilnius).

I think this is bassackwards. I generally oppose taxes, but if anywhere, this is exactly where a tax should be imposed -- on all those sugar waters, not on beer, which is in theory a B-vitamin rich cocktail of micronutrients and flavonoids.

I think the rule of thumb could be that anytime a food processing company in Estonia does something that adds no intrinsic value to a product (let's say they add sugar and water to some imported concentrate and put it in a pretty package and call it "nectar") they should be taxed up the wazoo, including a health tax for slowly eroding kids' metabolisms and contributing to the obesity pandemic.

And I don't think anyone should mourn the demise of a company that funds that sort of business model -- even if the precious Economy is tanking.

Instead, we wake up from our hangovers and find that taxes have been increased on books (now 9% sales tax) and live performances are now assessed 18% sales tax, whereas hiking the price of Coke and other junk to Scandinavian levels with a 5 kroon/pint tax would probably be far more lucrative.

Cigarettes also cost half as much as they do in the Western cities, I should mention.

*** Or maybe it's just me, and everyone does a bang-up job in getting these stats out on a monthly basis. In that case, kindly set me straight if there's a link.

Getaways

If the weather stays cold and invigorating, there's no real need to holiday abroad, but we were recently playing the game of Where Would We Go -- if the economy were better and jetliners ran on coconut oil...

Morgan wants to go to Africa (he's not the only one).

Cape Verde actually looks halfway attractive, with packages as low as $600. In January, the Canaries and Madeira are bit chilly every time the sun goes behind a cloud, and so is the water. Tunisia is the same. But Cape Verde's islands are always around 25 -- like spring in Virginia. It's also bona fide African.

As for the other options, I've heard Gambia, while friendly, might be a little too intense and in-your-face. Cape Verde seems like an up-and-coming industrious country that has escaped the clutches of poverty, though it's sort of dry and drab.

For the cheapest sun, there's the Sinai, but well...the commercialism just seems too much and going to a Western resort in the desert now with everything going on in the region seems wrong-headed.

Libya -- I would have no qualms there. Fascinating; closed societies usually are, especially before it turns into a Dubai + an off-limits interior. But I guess we need to have two more kids before applying for the group-of-six-minimum visa, or maybe Mika and Anna-Bell want to join up.

Mauritius and Thailand are two destinations that have come down in price, to $1500. Still, who has that type of money? Who on earth can blow 60,000 kroons on a 1- or 2-week family vacation? (Once in a lifetime, OK.)

We've talked about going to a land where winter still reigns. But for all the talk about the economy, Iceland still remains disappointingly expensive. Only $250 flying from Stockholm (the krona has fallen in value), but once you factor in getting to Stockholm and everything else...

Slovakia's mountains beckon -- not so far away.

About the same distance as Slovakia, there's Northern Finland and the option of continuing on to the Atlantic fjords by car through the mountains -- tempting, but the distances are long, and Rovaniemi, like most Finnish cities, is not the most romantic place in the world.

BREAK FROM THE BALTICS: Surf's up in G—

What's the Baltic tie-in? Besides the universal "it-could-happen here" theme (stretched to the sense of anything could happen anywhere) not much. Ah yes, Estonia did donate about $100,000 to the UNRWA for humanitarian assistance -- don't laugh, this is ten cents an Estonian head, and it could result in Estonian government accounts being blocked worldwide. Kidding, of course; the US also donates to this organization in a strange act of duplicity (I--- considers the UNRWA a contributor to terrorism). So going by that friend-of-a-friend logic, I deem the modest contribution a proper one.

Of course it's not about actions, but words, right?, and on that front, in contrast to, say, Bush's latest weekly radio address, Estonia has taken a measured tone in its press releases, thankfully without saying anything about "internal affairs", "historical inevitability", or "terrorism" -- all those convenient mainstays of avoiding the proper, morally rigorous stance. The Czechs, the new presidents of the EU, led by everyone's favourite eccentric and arrogant uncle Vaclav Klaus, had issued a statement saying I--- had acted in self-defence...

Personally, I still persist in the naive voodoo-influenced notion that I can influence trends by my consumer decisions. I say no to an imported sweet potato and thereby withdraw my support from an entire government. The other day, as the aerial bombardment dragged on, I thought twice about buying some fresh chervil at the supermarket. No, there was no thinking involved. I checked the label and saw "I--" and I dropped it like a hot piece of polonium and chervil scattered all over the floor. That was close -- the Foreign Ministry gave 10 cents of my money to P---n relief but that would have been $2.80 of my money going for I---i goods. I went home and planted an herb garden (the latter planned already before the conflict).

**

It's clear to me WHY they're firing the rockets in the first place. If you lived in G—, didn't have a raft, found every tunnel closed off, with no choice but to swim for it, and knew that the I— army was coming, wouldn't you strap yourself to a rocket and take your chances? I would. I might not have jumped out of the South Tower, but I would take a flight out of the ghetto on a Q—. It would probably be a dud anyway, you would obviously land in a vacant lot somewhere, and you might be able to limp off and blend in before the cops show up.

I wonder if someone could investigate this angle: that the rockets are manned and not explosive.

**
Anyway, the situation looks bad right now. Even Sean Penn is staying away. You know that, when there's a ground invasion and the reported death toll has levelled off, that no one actually has the slightest idea what's going on, or maybe counting was halted. Until one I— soldier got killed, that is. Who knows how. Probably H—, the cowards, used him as a human shield, or a underage P—n ran him over in an ambulance in the woods.

It's too bad; now the count starts at zero again for all infants and purposes.

Winter holds court, Western Estonia

I was supposed to go see a farm that's for sale on the border of Lääne County but I never made it. Only 60 km from Pärnu. I left Sauga at 1:30 pm, and had to be back by 4pm. A hunt for a service station, a wrong turn, a fallen log across a forest road and then it was 3pm and the sun was setting in a bog. No big whoop. It was out of our price range, but I wanted to get a feel for the area between Pärnu and Haapsalu.

A cold day -- the temperature gauge on the Skoda showed -14.5 -- quite cold for this part of Estonia, and it was only -10 in Pärnu.

Some of the cheaper digitals do incredible things when you point them into light; these pics were nice but don't really do the setting justice. Tallinn is currently pretty much snowless and the warmest place in Estonia at -4, incidentally.

COCKTAIL NAPKIN: Climate change

Draft of an article found in a Mala Strana restaurant, presumably annotated by advisers

Freedom, not climate, is at risk

By Vaclav Klaus

The writer is President of the Czech Republic all of Europe

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent (too damning an admission -- deny this or use the Kelvin scale and make the percentage sound much less) – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, (Do something about the weather -- nice touch, Mr. President. I.e., next those greens will ask us to switch off the moon!) and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” (good use of both "so-called" and quotation marks -- maybe this will piss Gore off enough to agree to debate Vaclav!) film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s (was Blair really not with Bush and us on this?) – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight (can we get more of a cabalistic tone here) summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. (it was good the first time, but maybe don't overuse) Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. (Don't leave an open door for them; they WILL respond.) The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. (Sounds suspiciously like Carl Sagan. Ask the Crichton estate where that idea came from.)

I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria (add here: "instead of real concern about actual events". Maybe use the example of raptors coming back to life -- Crichton wrote about this, too) has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life (don't make it sound acquiescent, put but "lived in stoic opposition to" or sth I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. (convoluted sentence, makes it sound that all those attributes lie in environmentalism!) This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy (future generations will have to be made from engineered sperm so in this sense they will RELY on progress, "enjoy" might not be the best choice), and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment.(add paragraph break here - before any sentence with "Malthusian" in it. )They are Malthusian pessimists.

(Can an ellipsis also be inserted before "Malthusian"? When the President delivers this line he pauses and his jaw quivers with revulsion before saying the word. Rich, can we get this 'muahaha' effect into text?)

The scientists should help us and take into consideration the political effects of their scientific opinions (add "quaint" or "fascinating" -- "their quaint and fascinating scientific opinions"). They have an obligation to declare their political and value assumptions and how much they have affected their selection and interpretation of scientific evidence (voicing this demand leaves our own scientists too exposed).

Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years? (Evolution? Avoid this word. Use 6,000 years.) Every child is taught at school about temperature variations, about the ice ages, about the much warmer climate in the Middle Ages. All of us have noticed that even during our life-time temperature changes occur (in both directions) (In summer it gets warmer, and at night it often gets colder. Add this.).

Due to advances in technology, increases in disposable wealth ("wealth for one-time use" is the preferable term), the rationality of institutions and the ability of countries to organise themselves, the adaptability of human society has been radically increased. It will continue to increase and will solve any potential consequences of mild climate changes.

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree (again, is that Kelvin? don't you mean a few hundredths), and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

The issue of global warming is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius (Again! Use the Kelvin and don't specify what unit you're using) changes in average global temperature. (Don't admit it!)

As a witness (good -- stress that you are not a participant; better yet, indicate you are unaffected) to today’s worldwide debate on climate change, I suggest the following:
■Small climate changes do not demand far-reaching restrictive measures
■Any suppression of freedom and democracy should be avoided
■Instead of organising people from above, let us allow everyone to live as he wants (direct quote from Bush -- attribute!)
■Let us resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority
■Instead of speaking about “the environment”, let us be attentive to it in our personal behaviour (sounds like something a Green would say)
■Let us be humble but confident in the spontaneous evolution (use "manifest design") of human society. Let us trust its rationality and not try to slow it down or divert it in any direction
■Let us not scare ourselves with catastrophic forecasts, or use them to defend and promote irrational interventions in human lives.