My plans for May 1

1. Run the annual Viljandi Round-The-Lake race, beating Priit Pullerits, Meelis Atonen and Kalle Muuli soundly. (If you look at my historical race results, it appears that these guys have some sort of strategy to box me in.) Would a time of 48 minutes be too much to hope for?

2. Pick up some trash in the race parking lot (in honour of the big trash cleanup day a year ago).

3. Labour-related fun in observance of International Labour Day. A game of "Name that Estonian Union" and "Estonian Union Leader Bingo" with friends, as well as the board game "Strike!" (What? You've never heard of these games? Sour grapes, I say -- you probably just can't name a single Estonian union leader.)

4. Pick up some more trash in Viljandi town.

5. Stop in briefly at one of the countrywide braistorming sessions on the road back to Tallinn.

6. Suggest everybody repair outside the church/community centre/school and pick up some more trash on this day, too.

7. Pick up some more trash around the countryside.

8. Arrive back in Tallinn. Pick up more trash (there's a lot). Sauna.

Must be the fresh air and copious sunshine, but I'm beat. We're in Tartu, our base for looking at properties in southern Estonia for a few days. Much to write about, which I'll get to when I'm back in Tallinn.

One point of this short interim post is never underestimate distances in Estonia. Tartu is already two hours south. The train, which I took with my son, again takes 2:25 -- I clearly remember it being down to around two hours, so something is either being fixed or the opposite -- not being maintained. We slept at a friend's house in Tartu -- former Defence League brass and wife's co-workers. From there, it's 67 km to Võru from the edge of Tartu. This leg is a little mysterious -- the road is good, we're never below 90 km/h except for maybe three towns, but it still always takes an hour. The lakeshore town Võru is really elongated for a city of 15,000; and you have to go SE around the big lake to finally go SW toward Valga, the neighbouring county seat. (It's not even marked at the intersection.)

The neighbour woman at the first property on our list at Tsooru was really surprised we were there all the way from Tallinn; she actually did a double-take.

Apparently this particular property is where everyone starts their farmhouse search. Hell, the people who are selling the second house on our list started their search here. We had it on our list just because it was cheap. Turns out it has been on the block for ages. It used to be 275,000; now it is 120,000. There was no realtor there to meet us, and I was working the lock out of the door as we had been told by the realtor to do, when the the neighbour woman showed up. She was like the anti-realtor. She clearly wants the triangular piece of land herself and has been using the smoke sauna (with the current absentee owner's permission). She launched into a litany of its demerits -- the main one being the current popular paranoia/urban myth of metal thieves roaming the countryside, stealing anything not bolted down - seems too 1993-4 to be true, but who knows. It was all capped off with the claim that the house suffers from the dreaded vamm, some sort of mould that forms thick knotty ropes and actually destroys the timbers like so many termites. Whether the house really has vamm or not is not clear, but the property was full of small flaws. It originally belonged to an old crone who lived there for ever. She died, then a Finn had it briefly. No sooner was the ink dry on the notary document than the Finn organized a crew to plant it full of spruce seedlings, even the potato patch. The electricity has been ripped out. So it's a house and sheds in the middle of a field of little Morgan-sized 3-year-old trees. The main problem for me is that the neighbours are too close, even though I didn't mind this particular woman - she seemed cagey and resourceful and metal thieves would actually be no match for her eagle eye.

The second property was infinitely better, but no epiphany and we got "welcome to Latvia" messages on our cell phones. More on that tomorrow after we get back from another day of searching in Põlva County.

America's Third World curse

I have to sound off on this. Guns.

Practically not a day goes by when there isn't at least one crazed person killing someone in the US. The stats are incredible. Seventeen thousand dead a year in the States. Two billion dollars in health care costs to treat almost 70,000 wounded.

It isn't just schizoid youths who are blowing people away. It's doctors and marketing professors. I'm waiting for the brief on A2 about a priest who has a disagreement with a parishioner and then "goes away for a few minutes and returns with his guns."

My mom and sister were out on a Sunday drive recently in rural Virginia and ran into some "traffic" in a small town. Guess what -- some guy had had a disagreement with his employer and he had "returned with his guns".

The fact that this does not strike us as more absurd is shocking. Why do people have weapons at home? Awaiting what? Why multiple weapons? What makes this acceptable?

Maybe it's the gun itself that causes the problem -- some sort of demon leaches out of the metal and corrupts the possessor -- maybe not.

The NRA can defend its stance until the cows come home, but nobody disputes that only a fraction of the gun owners would reach for a knife or club instead if there were a ban.

So enough. Or I will start making creepy videos and circulating them on the Net in which I call for a full handgun ban.

Two tidbits

Two bits of news from two of the more interesting Estonians abroad.

New documentary about artist Mark Kostabi to open at TriBeCa film festival in NYC on Saturday. People have some idee fixe about Kostabi and can't mention his name without invoking Warhol. It looks like the film will encourage more of this, but it might be good and balanced as well.

Adbusters magazine is holding a Digital Detox Week. http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/digitaldetox Sure to be as successful as Buy Nothing Day. Hmm, "Day" might have been a less ambitious start.

Savisaar being replaced

Somehow I like these ads from the Centre Party. The technology is a little creaky, yes. Bob Dylan did the handwritten sign thing in a more playful way in Don't Look Back. But I think it's the fact that the Centre Party is calling for Edgar Savisaar to be replaced. It's a good start. Of course, right now Savisaar still comes back if you wait long enough (I just ran out of film), and I must say the idea of having a rotating triumvirate from the same party ruling the country is less than progressive - what are they playing, some sort of damn shell game? - vahetus, my ass.

Still, I submit to you: Savisaar being replaced.

Let's get bloated (I mean it in a good way)

This stuff is so good, I'm going to get bloated every night from now on.

I don't drink soft drinks, but a couple days ago after a round in the sauna, I had me this kali and I was saying, Kali ma, shakti de.

All right, enough of the testimonials. Stuff's good, and it's in a glass beer bottle.

The company calls it a "root beer", but it's radically different. Technically kali is -- let's see if I can get this right -- a hopless rye malt near beer with a high specific gravity (sweet), with 0.8% alcohol. Is it the same as KBAC? Ahem. From the Wiki, you get a sense that it is identical, but some might argue that KBAC is soaked rye bread in a tank truck that came around the kolkhoz at lunchtime, while kali is a cold-filtered, pasteurized drink made from hand-selected croutons. KBAC is totally acceptable for consumption by children. With kali, there is some hand-wringing. Descriptions of KBAC often say that it is sour. Kali comes in a glass bottle and is unmistakably sweet. I know what, let's just call it off.

As a taste experience, this kali was as great as when my Cuban godfather brought me some Malta Goya as a kid.

The fact that kali is in a glass bottle has other advantages. I've bitched in the past about preservatives in food in Estonia. It remains all but impossible to find cured meat without E250 series chemicals (nitrates). Even most ordinary domestic cheese has nitrates. You really have to scrounge around in the bigger stores to find some Saaremaa Ekstra or similar premium brand that only has the benign calcium chloride at most.

But A.Le Coq is on side. Like Coca-Cola, they have phased out benzoate in their soft drinks. As of March, Kelluke, which is some classic lemonade drink, is preservative-free.

A word for the competitor: Saku has non-alcoholic beer in a glass bottle, and it has been great for over a year. But they don't have kali in a glass bottle. I have yet to have a good non-alcoholic dark beer anywhere. O'Douls Dark tastes like pot roast -- seriously. But kali comes close to some Czech dark beers like Starobrno.

What is it with Russian nationalism and toxic metals?

From a story on Taras Bulba, the new Russian film about a non-Russian mercenary warrior that is making waves:

The director has said that he wants to show that “there is no separate Ukraine… When two drops of mercury are near each other, they will unite. You’ve seen this. Exactly in the same way, our two peoples are united.” Fighting words directed at the heart of the Orange Revolution.

I have not seen this. I went into a panic when we broke a mercury thermometer. There was one droplet and we cleaned it up incredibly swiftly before any of it evaporated.

Putin, on the other hand, would probably play with it and use it as props on military maps to represent armies. Then, lick his fingers. Like Wolfowitz licked his hand in Fahrenheit 911. This is one reason why no one wants the Russians in NATO.

MP3: "Bath of Souls"

A little Sunday morning for your Saturday night: an outtake of "Bath of Souls". A country-rock hymn that has different sets of lyrics and versions. This is one of them.

I don't know if there's a shrine at Messina, but it would look like a Roman bath and good people would wade into the pool and be rejuvenated.

Musically, this song should be tighter than this, but not much. It should rock out, building inexorably. Here the 12-string is so dominant and on the same track as the voice, so fewer possibilities.

Technically, I'm still concerned by the fact that while Garage Band has a great interface and is a joy to use, the audio compression is not so good and by the time everything is mixed down and turned into a compressed file, it's pretty soupy.

I actually used the program for work yesterday, recording my wife reading Estonian and English sentences for a UK tour company. It did a great job (as did she). Easy to produce a professional recording even with a crappy USB headset. So I don't know why music sounds so muddy with good mikes. Though luckily it is not a song that lends itself well to hi-fi anyway -- spirituals never do, do they.

This revolution will be televised

(Guest Blogger: Dirk)

(Ed's note: To my knowledge this is not a American expat from Tartu, it's someone random who sent it in... I liked the style so I used it.)

I'm sitting here in my safe perch about 6000 miles from the cradle of democracy -- the US of A -- and I'm torn. After the Tea Party, I wonder if there will now be an "American Revolution".

If there is an American Revolution sponsored by FOX, I want the part of Paul Revere to be played by Glenn Beck.

Storyboard 1: The segment could be called "Three if By Air" and the ride would be done slow pursuit-style with evil federal marshals hovering over Beck's SUV in a helicopter. "The Bluecoats are coming," Something wacky like that.

The downside is the more serious side -- a Rush administration and a possible ground invasion of Britain to unseat the king. Would a Rush administration do this? It really comes down to what sort of advisers he has and what he’s on. You can definitely see the conservatives’ side of it — unseating the British monarchy is something left unfinished, much as Saddam was allowed to remain in power for 13+ years

But that would be crossing a line for me. It would damage America's reputation abroad -- again.

That's my analysis.

The rest of the story...

(This post is rough going, but I spat it out in a hurry and I don't feel like editing it. It's a sordid saga. Pat Buchanan, of all people, is the one of the few making any sense on the matter. What is the world coming to?)

Why am I upset about the deportation (now on hold again) of John Demjanjuk? Besides, of course, the sight of the banal evil of US immigration misdirecting its forces and public funds yet again -- seeing an 89-year-old who is quite possibly an innocent man ripped out of his bed by the State and wheeled to an airplane to be deported to Germany, where interest in trying him is lukewarm at best. Cui bono?

The main reason I'm upset because there is a hollow feeling of evil prevailing beyond the grave, far into the 21st century, that Hitler and Stalin are having a great laugh right now. Yes, Hitler and Stalin. Because there is nothing either of these dictators would like better than to pawn their crimes off on "beta" drones, Cossacks, subordinates, refugees. If there was a way to just blame the Jews and be done with it, they would jump at the chance.

The (very indirect) personal content is that like Demjanjuk, my grandfather was ethnically Ukrainian. He was older, better educated (and he was an Estonian citizen) but it could have been he, I always thought, back when Demjanjuk's legal troubles began. All we knew was that all of a sudden, lists of people had been drawn up, of people who were suspected war criminals. The lists were managed by the Department of Justice and yet they were largely seeded by the Soviets. Could someone like him be next? It didn't seem impossible. Hadn't he worked for Siemens before the war? The impression was that he had been all over central Europe in 1945 as the fronts closed around him and my grandmother. What if he hadn't accounted for a "resume gap" on his US immigration application? What if he had pissed off someone in the communist regime in 1940?

He died ten years ago to the day. One of the things that I regret was never really interviewing him. Sadly I am left with an increasingly simplistic memory of him as a staunch anticommunist, an Estonian patriot, a good grandfather, an amazingly handy person who built a working automobile from spare parts in occupied Germany, and many views that could be classified as politically incorrect/less than pluralistic, but above all a stoic calm.

What was the chance that this man, any man in World War II, had seen things that it was better to keep quiet about? I'm not even going to dignify that with an answer. There is a great quotation, which happens to be from a Soviet officer in Afghanistan, who was asked by a journalist to qualify how exactly war was hell or something, and the brunt of the answer was that you would have to be insane to even try to describe it. For a common man (as opposed to, say, an enamelware industrialist), manoeuvring without any traction, the morality is even more complicated.

There were two types of "quiet neighbours" in the US. One is of course the Eastern European the epithet was invented for -- the vast minority, the people with something evil in their past to hide. And then there are the other quiet neighbours, whose reputation was unfairly besmirched forever by the insinuation. These were people who did what they could to survive the war and its aftermath, some already with children, who came to the West, tried to make something of themselves.

They were a thorn in the side of the Soviet regime merely because they existed, because they weren't members of the elite and yet in this way they attested to the superiority of the capitalist way (at least in that era).

The Soviet Union never passed up a chance to make their life difficult in return. Remember, for all its military might, this was a small-minded regime that would not allow people to leave, that was aware early on that it was an economic fraud.

It is unfortunate that long after the admitted injustices of such episodes as Operation Keelhaul, they found a willing partner in the US Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigations. Very real and justified outrage -- over the fact that so many high-level Nazis had managed to escape to places like South America and reinvent themselves -- was twisted maliciously and exploited.

Whatever Demjanjuk's role, this wasn't how it was supposed to turn out. It's not even some kind of atavistic eye-for-an-eye justice. I could almost understand and cheer, if a Holocaust survivor came knocking, like De Niro in Corleone, Sicily, to spoil some old nemesis's dotage.

Instead, now at the end of the road, with no one else left to prosecute, we have another 89-year-old (they're almost always 88 or 89), he's already been convicted and the conviction dismissed by the Supreme Court of Israel, and now faces some other charge. In the end he will be held for silver candlesticks. There's nothing to celebrate here but the blind unfeeling machinery that makes this sort of thing possible -- of the justice system, of modern medicine that makes it possible to continue to try and re-try a ghost for the same crime... And finally, it's anything but closure.

Masu

Masu is the new local Estonian word -- I'm still trying to track down the exact provenance but it appeared only a few months ago -- for the economic crisis or recession.

It's a combination of (ma)jandus(su)rutis -- the Estonian for "economic recession". The Finnish recession from a few decades ago was called the lama -- which suggests economic prostration, that the economy has fallen and can't get up.

Masu sounds a little diminutive to my ears, but it also has a ring of "depression" (masendus). So I think it's here to stay.

A vital public utility

Affordable state housing for people in foreclosure? A water tower (they take this shape in some US municipalities)?

Both good guesses. It's bank and liquid-ity-related all right -- Nordea Bank Estonia's new HQ in central Tallinn.

Intolerance

Jonathan Turley writes about the trend of arresting people who "insult religions", now spreading to the Western world.

Bagels...

...good ones, in the form of readymade sandwiches, at Apollo bookstore cafe in Old Town Tallinn. As far as I know, the first in Estonia since Wayne's Coffee briefly had them after the chain came to town.

Cultural observation #30

Must remember not to say "sure" as an affirmative, when accepting a job via Skype, etc. Means "Die!" in Estonian and not everyone may understand it as a quaint Anglicism.

Gutter St.

It's time to look at houses again. We're going to want to own something comfortable at some point that won't require us to move. Even though the economic recovery will probably not be driven by housing, I'm going to go on the record saying that prices are as low as they're going to get. An Estonian real estate broker even said in a newspaper that now is not a good time to buy -- signal to proceed.

A trip to the US didn't suggest many real estate options that made my mouth water, it just made want to cry to see how anything appealing was out of our range, so we're looking at Estonia, as hard that is to accept that I am gradually becoming a lifer here.

There's a number of properties on Veerenni tänav in the "Old South" of Tallinn's city centre for good prices. We looked at a loft that had consisted of an unfinished attic under a 4-metre gable roof, and three or four small apartments that were in an interesting state -- as if the former owners (factory workers with a teenage son, it appeared) had moved out in a hurry in 1989 and no one had been there since. The price was good as one would expect but reflected the location near the city centre.

I'm not crazy about it. Veerenni is a pretty noisy and ugly street that in my opinion had more charm -- a working class charm like that of the Kalamaja district -- back when there was an historical factory front across the street that extended several hundred metres. That was demolished some time ago to make way for the Lutheri residential quarter which is planned to be one of those industrial reclamation projects that Estonia is lauded for (in fact this phenomenon might contend for this blog's "top ten best things about Estonia"). With the recession, I'm not sure how on schedule the Lutheri project is; the website looks nice, but there's been a big vacant lot there for more than a couple seasons.

But on both sides of Veerenni are wonderful residential areas of private homes -- the best I can think of in the city centre (unless you count Lilleküla as part of the centre) -- a slightly plainer version of Nõmme, simply ideal quiet, leafy areas of medium-sized homes and big yards. I don't see any of those for sale though. It's the houses on the edge, right on Veerenni. So I wonder what people know about Veerenni that we don't. Are they going to widen it to make room for all the traffic the new development will generate?

I also entertain the absurdist fear that the plan is ultimately for Veerenni to live up to its name -- a giant gutter or flume.

Holiday house
Act fast! Please buy my house on sea before sea level start rise.
www.pssst.ee
Sekserakond
Play interesting games and make good use of your time while falling in love with our corpulent but charismatic populist leader! COMING SOON: iPhone game
www.sekserakond.ee
Land from owner!
Ideal for earth-berming one side of the house or as a cliffside dwelling. Enjoy the charm of propane and home-schooling!
cheapwhatever.com/widget
Potluck!
Install a small useful program on your computer. Operates silently in the background, sometimes "calls home" when you type a certain string
www.potluck-exe.com

New colour-coding alert system, at least according to The Coming Anarchy. Something tells me this is satire.

New and semi-new (other people's) blogs

http://oursummerinestonia.blogspot.com/ 2008 material, new writing.
http://marikamaasikas.wordpress.com/ Name-withheld expat blog with posts about cooking and a consistent voice.

Metanews; a visit to kindergarten

First news first: I'm not phasing out this blog after all. There's just too much Estonian/American content and it will be covered here. I have been busy, and it's been hard to flesh out Freecession with content, but I still think the second blog is deserved. It will be a chillspace and no-smoking area with music and multimedia, some of it good, some of it just sentimental value for insiders...somewhere to go to escape. You can click the link to get there, or you can cross the outdoor beer courtyard and go up the steps to the loft. Are you visualizing all of this? Actually, it's a little known fact that all blogs have floor plans. They're required to have a kitchen and a WC. Ask all of the blogmasters at the blogs you read for a floor plan for navigational purposes.

**

Morgan had his first parent teacher conference today at the kindergarten. We went to the basement office. The room smelled like what I thought was fish food for an aquarium -- dense, oily, decomposed. "Dead rat," said the teacher, shrugging. It had been exterminated but the body could not be retrieved. All of the classrooms are on the upper stories, luckily. This was an inauspicious beginning but we got used to the smell in a few minutes and what followed was a pretty good brainstorming session/discussion.

We had filled in a thorough questionnaire and the kindergarten had written a page and a half on Morgan. It was clear we were talking about the same guy and the paperwork had not been mixed up. It seems he is a model student; if there is anything, he's a bit of a follower. At least he does not author any mischief himself. He is doing well in language and math. He is able to make change from a 25-kroon bill. That's really good for 3, I think, though he probably has forgotten the alphabet. He learned the letters at 2, and then was like, been there, done that, but before understanding that letters can be used to form words.

They are keeping a folder on him, like all the kids, which contains his artwork and a selection of interviews ("kids say the darnedest things" style). I noticed that he wants to grow up to be a "klaverijuht" he said in his most recent "interview". That means "piano-director" and is made up. So the exposure to the keyboard at home and the grand piano at Rohuneeme might be good. (Though he can't carry a tune, but we didn't discuss that.)

Oddly, the teachers failed to make eye contact with me. Even when I was talking, they weren't locking on to me. My wife says it was probably the converse of what we get from insurance companies and banks -- they automatically assume the husband is the one who calls the shots and that everything will be in his name. So they assume at the kindergarten that the woman is the child-rearer.

It is odd why Estonia is this way with gender roles, and why the disparity between male and female wages is the highest in Europe. You would think we are a rationalist, enlightened sort of place. After all, we had the Soviet occupation. Not that the Soviets really practiced what they preached about gender equality, but the occupation did leave a measurable mark in many ways. Estonia is the least religious country in the world, for example, according to a Gallup poll from earlier this year -- quite a ways under the non-post-Soviet Nordics.

Someone explain to me why this is -- the Nordics have the most sexually integrated political sphere anywhere and we're basically a Nordic country, and the Soviet influence should have at least a neutral effect on gender equality.

We did it!

One of the first things I hoped Obama would do was pose with two of my all-time favourite leaders, so I could have my pinup shot. This is the best piece of political porn I have seen in a long while. Obama is clearly the straight man, all American gumption and can-do -- not much analysis required there. I don't know what the hell Silvio thinks he's doing, but it's almost convincing, congenitally crooked smile aside. One would think that he is the earnest matchmaker of some detente for the ages, that he's been fretting over this meeting for weeks and now can be happy for them along with the rest of the world. Medvedev looks a little woozy -- and apparently he's been fattening up long before Jamie Oliver's G-20 dinner -- but his afterglow, while there's a bit of a spent vacuousness there, is not altogether devoid of charm.

After pledging what I understand was one trillion dollars, these leaders can afford to take a well-deserved break after a job well done. The crisis may be a black hole, but a trillion dollars is a lot of units to throw at it and it may buy some time before the next event horizon. Now...who's gonna pick up the tab, anyway?

Estonia to be virtualized

Lean times call for smart solutions, and Estonian IT people are teaming up with historians, geographers and an international consortium in an ambitious five-year project that will essentially upload the country itself to the Internet.

"At first there was E-stonia, which referred to the range of services available by Internet," said Bengt Eklund of Baltiscan AB, speaking on behalf of an Estonian programming team. "Now we're taking the next pioneering step: V-Stonia."

Known in Estonia as E-Varamu, the project is in the most time-intensive phase: data collection and modelling. When the application is ready, V-Stonia promises to have various layers that can be toggled off and on. Besides a geographical map, wealth distribution overlay and the near-photographic quality 3-D terrain view, there will also be a "Dynamic Flow view".

To produce the Dynamic Flow imaging, this summer 5,000 volunteers have been recruited to canvass the country, collecting data. They will not actually send data, but rather they will be blindfolded and their movements tracked by mobile phone positioning.

"This will generate a view of the possibilities of the flow in the social space," says Villu Vilnius, a Tallinn-based landscape designer and "architech". "Where is the public space limited by architectonics, where is it not? Where do people collide interpersonally in real-time?"

The Estonian government has issued an statement stressing that the project should not cause any disruptions to traffic patterns ahead of the tourist season, as many tourists are expected to be virtual this year.

And officials are quick to stress the sustainable aspects of the project as a whole. Government spokeswoman Marta Jasko: "In complicated economic situation, we have to remain innovative and knowledge-based."

Airlines have been approached by Enterprise Estonia as to whether they would offer access to the virtualization database. "The idea would be for tourists flying from, say, Paris to Riga to be able to spend a few hours in V-Stonia without leaving their seat," said the spokeswoman.

Technically, Eklund says he is pleased with the work of the Estonian programmers, who were not available for comment, and that the application should not be resource-intensive.

"Estonia is a fairly compact country and any reasonable server should have the system resources to run it," said Eklund. "In fact you may even be able to run it from a netbook, if you're running it in 'ignore wetlands' mode".

Eklund reassures nature lovers that this does not mean that the countryside will not be subjected to the same exhaustive cataloging as other places. "Ultimately we are going for a comprehensive capture," said Eklund. "But we also have for now a sophisticated modelling technology that will fill in many areas, such as rural precincts, with a basic 'skin'."