Ten-minute roundup

Haven't been blogging very much. Both kids were sick. One night was every bit as bad as it could be, with one taking turns waking up the other. This time I did not catch the bug.

All the old wisdom is coming back. Little things, like the fact that "khkhkhkh" is more effective than "shhhhhh" for comforting a squalling baby. At least our babies.

I found the time to make croissants. Huh? Well, yes. They came out well. Maybe real men don't eat quiche and they probably don't bake croissants. That's what I thought until I saw this video. This guy could be a general describing how to invade Manchuria or something. Actually, making croissants takes a sort of Eastern military discipline. Anyway, really, if you are house-bound and have a lot of butter on hand, and are sick of walking to Reval Cafe for pastries, what can you do?

* My small test stock portfolio, now down to mostly Apple and the rest a no-name lo-cap tech firm, is back to where it started in January. So I've been eating more lunches outside of my own house as of late.

Came across an interesting piece that was sort of mind-blowing for a second -- that Apple has 66% of the market for computers over $1000. Being told by Lenovo and Dell that they didn't want my business because of my Hansabank-issued credit card, I had forgotten there were even computers under a grand. Overall Apple is still way in the minority.

* The Supreme Court of Estonia has issued a landmark decision. Now Ühisteenused, the ticket controllers and performers of odd jobs, can no longer fine people because it is a private contractor. I don't know how it will affect fare-dodgers, whether fare-dodgers are taking advantage of the temporary power vacuum to run amok, as I have stopped the odious practice. But it does make Estonia even more modern; these are the last little chinks in the õigusriik (state governed by the rule of law) that are getting spackled and sanded over.

* Two men are planning to swim across the Gulf of Finland. This is a cold, long swim. The Gulf of Finland may be 16 or 17 (65) degrees, then the next day it may be about 6 (42)degrees -- in mid-summer. They swam the length of the Emajõgi (river) last year which I imagine might have been about 18 or 19 degrees.

I would like to see a ironman type race across the ice to Finland, if it froze in winter, so hence the interest.

The morning after

It is the day after the Eurovision semifinal and there is a bt of queasiness in the air.

No, Estonia did not advance. The local TV voiceover tried to generate some suspense each time they opened an envelope, but unfortunately it was already clear from the boo-birds during the performance: Estonia could not parlay its oddball anti-song into fan favourite.

Now there's a feeling that you might have after a party, when in your mind you dazzled everyone all night with deft satirical jabs at the hosts, such as "Lobster!" and "I've had it"...and then you end up getting the bill, too -- 2 million kroons.

A feeling of "what exactly were we thinking?" has set in.

A "wait a second: maybe this wasn't that funny" moment, followed immediately by "why was this supposed to be funny?"

And the fucking economy only grew 0.4%.

Someone close to me was just saying she was celebrated for something when in high school -- "monohumour". She would be rolling in the aisles at her own jokes. Luckily this itself was funny in a meta sort of way.

I viewed most of the proceedings in last night's semi-final with monohorror, of course, especially Dima Bilan's ever-more desperate attempt (oddly, intonationally flat rather than sharp) attempt to convince us he "Believes" in which I think the violinist actually hit 11, as in the Spinal Tap guitarist's metaphor, but not on the volume scale but as in points for overwroughtness.

But it seems that in Estonia's case, what was supposed to be a "small drily ironic country sticking it to those Eurobastards" was more like...monohumour. Maybe the far better thing would have been to stay home, like Kosovo did (check this).

Next time, stick with small bits of shouted nonsense like "Perrea perrea!" and have a genre.

REVIEW: Singing Revolution -- the book

As noted by several reviewers, the documentary Singing Revolution covers a lot of ground -- it has to inform and move people who potentially know absolutely nothing about Estonia -- and it manages to do it very well.

In case history buffs need something more meaty, there is now a companion book: an English-language volume retells the documentary in the equivalent of a long National Geographic article on Estonia's history, written by Priit Vesilind, Estonian exile author and photographer and long-time contributor to that magazine.

Vesilind is a premier feature writing voice. Who better to introduce Estonia to tourists who may be browsing an Old Town bookshop for a volume just like this?

The only disappointment here is that you don't get that great National Geographic picture quality. Though the usual journalistic standards apply, no one really expects a work like this to be a go-to source with its historical incisiveness or rigorous treatment (although it is important to give the proper weight to the proper forces in society).

It should be eye candy.

But if I had not admired the quality of Vesilind's own collection of photographs from his legendary 1979 trip, also published by Varrak, I would have recommended that anyone wishing to publish a book with abundant pictures from different sources, steer clear of this publisher.

Apparently they need a lesson in anti-aliasing. The At first I thought most of the pictures were fuzzy stills from the documentary; the impression is that the colour images were taken with a cheap digital camera. Yes, this is XVid.Singing.Revolution.CAM.

The typography is surprisingly uninspired as well. Uninteresting sans-serif fonts make appearances on busy backgrounds. The manuscript was not checked for double spaces. (If you think this is unimportant, I defy you to find a single book among the bestsellers at a Barnes and Noble's that has any of these problems.)

Though it is not without its fact-check problems ("village of Kunda", "Hiiuma" etc), I am more forgiving on copy editing. I am listed as the proofreader of Mart Laar's chronological general history of Estonia, a 200-page work not too unlike this book, and I have yet to look at whether my changes were incorporated accurately, or, more likely, if I missed anything. I fear the worst.

Fortunately, the writing and the pacing in Singing Revolution, like Laar's, is fine. Good enough to raise the hackles of Popular Front leaderswho feel they did not receive their due. It seemed people were more unanimous in their reception of the documentary itself.

And the small format makes it convenient to schlep it back home as a gift.

Just make sure you include the DVD for the original photography.

Notes on birth in Estonia

Viimsi Hospital and the adjoining birth centre, Fertilitas, are part of a socialist architectural complex that is par for the course in Estonia, not unlike one of those bunker-like shopping community centres you find around Sõpruse and Keskuse in Mustamäe. You get used to it and think no more of it.

Viimsi is a more affluent spa-ish area and the air is cleaner. Though it's not on the sea or anything, the facility is pleasant enough. Our room looked just like any "SPA" or sanitarium room, with TV, WiFi, good lighting...

The birth room is very cozy at Fertilitas, leaving the impression of perpetual candlelight. A rocking chair, which my wife notes is useless for her in the actual process, adds rustic charm as a prop. There is a bath for water births. The house music (we didn't bring our own or a guitar, thinking the less distractions the better), if desired, was Jack Johnson, basically the epitome of mellowness and whatever the opposite of egoism is. Good choice.

Down the corridor from our room is a fantastic palm and tropical plant choked atrium with statuary. It's overgrown like a secret garden and a little decadent, with algae-stained tile. This may not sound appealing, it is clean, and seems alive in a fertile way, more than, say, a slick, art deco Nordic hotel atrium. It looks just like the courtyard of a hotel we stayed at in Mazatlan. So the combination of socialist architecture, quality health care and tropical paradise said "Cuba" to me, though I have not been to the island.

Besides a flat fee for birth, and a fee for each bed-day, we paid extra to retain the services of one of the midwives, as I mentioned in one of my posts. It just doesn't work out the way you planned. She was fine, I guess, conferred with us and was in touch, but she was mortal too and when it came down to it, and we were in the actual birthing room and Jack Johson was playing after 24 hours of irregular painful pre-labour, it was another midwife who was there.

No complaints there: the entire bill came to $600, which to me seems negligible considering we were there for five days.

On the negative side, there was a sense of a private clinic that wasn't there in 2005 when Morgan was born. Not that a public hospital would be preferable, natch. Yet I got the sense they were hurrying along the process to make way for the next batch of birthees. A doctor even said, around the time when we were eating spicy food, that the coming weekend would be busy for them and that we should think of inducing. We didn't, and the process started naturally, albeit very slowly.

My suspicion is that you only get one chance to give birth, even if you are not in actual labour. After your one chance there is pressure -- in the form of an array of subtle cues and suggestions expressed as foregone conclusions -- to induce, to resort to surgery, or other clinical options...

In this case, Lorna was postdue and there were signs that she might be close to foetal distress, so who knows. I trust Estonian doctors. But I do insist on knowing by what path they arrive at their recommendations, and it seems they don't always want to say. It's something I've experienced in the past. As a patient in Estonia, especially coming from a different cultural background, you need to be an investigative journalist if you want to get to the bottom of your case.

One thing worth mentioning, and I noted it on the Fertilitas customer survey, was that the cleaning staff were completely from another planet. A bewildering mixture of obsequiousness, class-fuelled disgruntlement and just plain illogical thinking.

One patient who had bled on the floor in the IC unit said that a cleaning staff member who happened to be in the room at the time, that "I didn't need that kind of gift."

The hospital had provided do not disturb signs, but if these were not to keep out cleaning staff, I wonder what else they would be used for. It seemed that after I asked that uneaten food not be taken away immediately, they made a special effort to be unpleasant, pointedly failing to take away one empty yogurt container or one dirty spoon. And they seemed to take offence when I would leave some food that they served.

Vibe is very important in the birth process, and if the people who enter and exit the room the most often are weird, it negates part of the effort of the doctors and other dedicated staff members. The overall impression from Fertilitas is still a warm one. And I would recommend it.

Though, God, if I were a woman, I wish we had the Dutch system of supported home birth. It is effective, safe and humane.

All's well that ends well. Laps on käes -- we have our child.

HFI all over again

George W. Bush had something called a Healthy Forests Initiative.

It was innocuous enough on the surface of it, basically amounting to thinning underbrush and making untidy forests look more like a kind of place where you might want to have a church picnic. Deep down, I figured it was driven by the same fear of unspoiled wilderness that made early travellers across the Alps hide their faces to avoid seeing mountains in their nakedness. More practically, HFI was also driven by the real motives of protecting valuable timber tracts, probably already promised to companies, and the tinderbox McMansions of Bush's Western base. And it ran roughshod over endangered species living in underbrush, and the key fact that fire is a part of the natural reproductive life cycle of most Western US forests. As far as I know, it was successfully challenged by challenging one specific part of it. As of 2003, there were orderly piles of underbrush outside visitor centres waiting to be burned, but none of the "aggressive backcountry thinning" has taken place, although Bush has undermined environmental protection in so many other ways.

Estonia has a new legislative initiative to change the Forest Act. If you go by the critics, the amendments seem to be similar in effect to the executive-level HFI, in that they disingenuously predicate forest policy on what is supposedly good for the forests -- while benefiting the private sector. The subtext of the initiative is that forests have been mismanaged for years and it is time to put order in the house.

The new Forest Act also provides legal instruments that the private sector, through potential toadies in government, could potentially use to change the nature of a forest in order to reclassify it as clear-cuttable. Say what you will about former environment minister Reiljan, but if his like returned to office, they would have much more leeway to be corrupt.

Right now, the situation is decent. Estonia, while viewing forests as manageable resources, is still deliciously wild by European standards. People hunt big game here; it's a yardstick of the state of the environment. The proposed forestry model is considered to be Scandinavian. This is not good, except for maybe the paper industry. The only reason "Scandinavian model" is not synonymous with "environmental destruction" is that there is so much more boreal forest in Finland and Sweden to clear-cut.

The biggest sticking point is that the legislators want to get rid of the provision that 20% of Estonia must be forested at any given time. (The figure is 60% in Bhutan and is constitutionally protected, at the preservationist extreme. Just for comparison.) If the number drops, what gets cut will inevitably be mature pine and spruce. What grows back will in most cases be brush and at best alder and aspen.

Other major changes (summarizing from hooliveesti.ee) state forests can be leased for more than 100 years to timber companies.

* Sales and leases will be decided by a council of bureaucrat laymen, with no naturalist participation guaranteed.

* Administrative reform will create large management zones that do not reflect specific character of local ecosystems.

* The "protection forest" category will be abolished, which is basically a buffer zone, but a key one for many human communities and natural reserves. (Protected forest is the more strict classification.)

It is supposed to be enacted on 1 July. There is a grass roots movement against it. I am trying to find out if there is a legal challenge against it, as the Sierra Club ws instrumental against HFI.

Of course, HFI was a sneaky Bushie executive-level order, this is taking place in parliament.

To plough the seas

I will be going to the States with Morgan this year for a month, during my vacation, which is scheduled for mid-August to mid-September.

I remember the days (until about 2003) when I would wait, procrastinate, and then finally buy a Lucky Fare from Icelandair. It would cost about 350 dollars for round trip airfare from Stockholm to New York. The ship from Tallinn to Stockholm? Don't mention it -- about thirty dollars for a spot on the deck.

Now, of course, there are no more deck spots or people sleeping in the sunroom. You have to get a stateroom, with the cheapest berth running well over $100 and entailing sharing a cabin with strangers (probably fierce smokers and drinkers). Springing for the whole coupe -- as one would do on Eastern European trains in the 1990s -- would be well over $300. Worth it last year, when three of us travelled.

Airfare, as many know, is double what it used to be. Things have now got to the point where I am considering a transatlantic cruise on the Queen Mary. For the thrill of entering New York the proper way, of course, but also for a taste of the future.

It's only a six-day crossing (though that, too, will change by 2025). For only slightly more than a high-season plane ticket, you get six nights in a cabin with board.

I came across something very enticing about a "free return flight to London" (too good to be true, right?) from as recent as last year, when the QE II still plied the Southampton-New York line. I take it it no longer exists, but that would make a sea crossing very competitive indeed. SleazyJet to London and then Southampton Dock.

New pics

Updated the "New" section of the photo site with a few pics of pink baby and grizzled sleep-deprived adults. (OS X Leopard users will inexplicably still see the unupdated site. Must be a parallel directory somewhere on the server, will have to root around.)