Pizza Fritte

and Lemon Thyme Chicken

I’ve walked on air. I’ve been totally, exceedingly, deliriously happy. I’ve had everything I wanted and I’ve felt like whatever would happen, everything would be OK.

That was a while ago now and I’ve been searching for that feeling ever since.

Don’t get me wrong, I was good before and I’m good now. But now I’ve experienced what it can be like. I’ve discovered the full potential of life. And the fact that I have to refer to it in the past tense is eating away at me.

Some days I remember to forget about it, and then I’m content. But that’s only some days.

I’ve been searching for it ever since, but I’m beginning to think it might be a long time before I find it again.

It was with sad puppydog eyes that I just discovered I can’t go see Wall-E when it opens at the local cinema, because as with all ‘family/cartoon’ movies, it’s going to be dubbed in Estonian. Have to wait for the DVD, I guess. For movies such as these, where the target audience is not obviously only children, couldn’t they atleast show it in the original English on just one or two screens?

Blueberry and pineapple däncakes

and Dänburgers

Mugabe declared landslide winner.

…he was the only candidate.

Meet my new roommate:

Another green axiom busted:

Despite significant recent public concern and media attention to the environmental impacts of food, few studies in the United States have systematically compared the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with food production against long-distance distribution, aka “food-miles.”

We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%.

Love is not putting someone else’s happiness above your own. Love is drawing your happiness from the happiness of another, regardless of how they achieve it.

One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

…

Stephen Corry, the director of the group - which supports tribal people around the world - said such tribes would “soon be made extinct” if their land was not protected.

Survival International said that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

…

He described the threats to such tribes and their land as “a monumental crime against the natural world” and “further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world”.

…

The government said the name of the tribe was not known but the warriors were strong and healthy.

I saw a documentary on Natural Geographic a while back about a South American tribe and in it, one of the tribesmen said that what they want more than anything, far from being ‘conserved’ and left alone like so many furless animals, is “for a town with a hospital to come near here, so our children wouldn’t die.”

I imagine Mr. Corry, et al would be aghast at such a notion. I’m not. The sooner these tribes ‘become extinct’ the better. For them.

Update: it’s even more pathetic - the uncontacted tribe angle is a hoax.

In Postimees.ee, a Gallup poll:

Question: Hansapank is changing its name to Swedbank. Will this make you leave them in favor of another bank?

Answer 1: Yes
Answer 2: I will have to look at other possible banks
Answer 3: I am not a Hansapank customer

James Lileks:

The dog lost five pounds. Put another way, the dog stopped throwing up. If you recall previous Bleats, I got a call on my cell while touring the Three Caballeros ride in the Mayan Pyramid in the Epcot Mexican Village - it was the housesitter, telling us that Jasper had been barfing up bad potato. She wasn’t kidding – he hurled ten times while we were gone, and was gakking for half the week. I put him on a mild diet of hamburger and rice, and frankly for a day or two I wondered if he’d be borne off to Dog Valhalla. He could barely make it down the block for a walk last Tuesday. But he’s bright and cheerful now, back to normal. And he expects hamburger and rice for all his meals.

Tonight I gave him the old stuff, the pressed-nodules of grain infused with flesh-flavor, the stuff he’s happily gobbled for years. He looked at it, then looked up at me. I knew what he meant.

You know why dogs don’t talk? Because they don’t have to.

I characterize myself as an introvert who does his best to occasionally emulate an extrovert. That’s why nearly everything said in this post rings familiar to me.

If you’re an extrovert, read it.

1. Whatever it is you’re writing about, turn it into a list
2. Make a stupid list
3. Make a stupid list
4. Make a stupid list
5. Make a stupid list
6. Make a stupid list
7. Make a stupid list
8. Make a stupid list
9. Make a stupid list
10. Make a stupid list

Seriously, enough with the fucking lists.

Update: seriously, this is from a single page on Digg:

5 Things I learned about Personal Growth by Moving
8 Reasons Windows Users Don’t Switch
Top 5 Things Every Extrovert Should Know About Introverts
The 8 Least-Threatening Comic Book Villains

Our politicians have been falling all over each other trying to come up with more insane and crazier restrictions on the sale of alcohol. All they needed to do from the start was this: actually enforce existing laws and educate.

Yeah, I know. Complicated, isn’t it?

BBC:

British troops accused of illegally scaring Kenyan wildlife

I know he’s an idiot, a self-important crybaby with an ego the size of the Moon and he’s allegedly some kind of singer or musician or something, but since I’ve never heard a single song of his, I’m not entirely convinced that’s the case.

Anyway, 50 Cent said that he’d retire if Kanye West sold more records than he did (which sounds like a no-lose situation, seeing as Kanye West would have to be some kind of rapper or something in order to sell records). So imagine my surprise when it turns out that West did sell more records than 50 Cent. I guess he works at a record store. But he still seems to be sniffing glue:

“Because that’s what they want,” West tells “Nightline.” “They want the black guys to be up against each other, about to shoot each other. And that’s not what they got. What they got is two black guys sellin’ a lot of records.”

I do want them to shoot eachother.

Kanye West, may I present you with the award for being the most annoying person I don’t know or give a crap about. Now you can stop whining about not winning awards.

(via Kottke) I don’t know if it’s an American thing, a New York thing or the lack of an equivalent Estonian thing, but I can’t imagine something like this happening in Tallinn.

Ran across this post on Digg. Instant flashback.

The first time I ever saw the internet was in my dad’s office in ‘92, I think. He just showed how FTP works, and I was completely underwhelmed. I thought “that’s it? We have that already, it’s called a BBS“. Mind you, I was only 9 years old.

The next year we got the interwebs at home, and I discovered IRC, moved there and didn’t come out again until four or five years later. Incidentally, that’s how I got my start in programming. By creating scripts for mIRC, an IRC client program.

I also discovered BatMUD. Oh, many’s the night I would sneak into dad’s office and play BatMUD until the wee hours of the morning. We were only allowed 2 hours of internet a day. And as you can imagine, that wasn’t nearly enough.

If I could talk to the 10-year old me right now, I’d say: “relax, dude. In another ten years or so, you’ll be spending 80% of your day online! Oh, and dude - lose the long hair. Seriously.”

Update: I would also say: “Nokia. Buy.“

I’m a pretty sad figure, because the farthest from Estonia I’ve ever been was the Canary Islands. And that was in 1992.

Other than that, I’ve never left the immediate neighbourhood (Latvia, Finland, Sweden).

That’s why today is a special day. Tonight I embark on a roadtrip through Europe. The planned route includes Amsterdam (and Sensation White), then down to the French-Swiss border near Geneve, after which we hit the Cote d’Azur before heading north through the Alps towards home. Wish me luck.

Expect pictures!

Update: oh yeah, those pictures I promised.

Researchers have found they can use drugs to wipe away single, specific memories while leaving other memories intact. By injecting an amnesia drug at the right time, when a subject was recalling a particular thought, neuro-scientists discovered they could disrupt the way the memory is stored and even make it disappear.

A new analysis of pictures taken by the exploration rover Opportunity reveals what appear to be small ponds of liquid water on the surface of Mars.

My brother writes about Estonia, then and now:

Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV

I was 14 at the time, and on the day the tanks finally left, a free concert was held on Freedom Square, known during the occupation as Victory Square. The concert was named “Paka”, a Russian slang word meaning “Buh-bye”. As the Soviet tanks and troop transports abandoned their bases, a collective sigh was released by every Estonian. That warm summer night we all danced and drank, kissed beautiful girls and sang along to the music until the early hours of the morning. We were finally, at last, after all this time, totally, utterly free in every possible sense of the word.

This is unreal. Have all these insane savages been living among us all this time?

There really is nothing else to add to the prime minister’s and president’s statements. There is no excuse for this mindless violence. No perceived affront about a lump of bronze can justify this. This is simply the extreme manifestation of a belief that some russians living in Estonia seem to hold, that the re-independence of Estonia was somehow a mistake, and that the righteous masters are no longer in charge. A view that terrifyingly seems to be held in Moscow as well. There doesn’t seem to be much difference between either of the two possibilities I can’t decide between: that the politicians in Russia are really this crazy or that they are pandering to a public that is.

Newsflash to russians: excuse me if I don’t thank you for ‘liberating’ us from fascism only to replace it with communism. That’s like replacing crap with shit. It’s semantics.

Nevermind that you had already invaded us before the Nazis did.

Nevermind that the removal of a monument in the capital city of a country honoring the soldiers of a conquering army that brutally occupied said country for more than half a century would be a no-brainer anywhere else in the world.

Nevermind that the ‘oppressed’ russian minority in Estonia does not exist. No one is not even remotely ‘oppressed’ in any possible definition of the word.

Nevermind that what Russia and the russians running amok in Tallinn are both basically saying amounts to the russians living in Estonia being mindless barbarians that could naturally not react in any other way when faced with a two ton piece of metal being relocated. Well ofcourse we would go on a rampage, what else do you expect from us?

Well, I am not going to give them what they want. I am going to join the overwhelming majority of the people of Estonia, both estonian and russian, and going to go about my daily business. I’m going to work tomorrow and spending time with my friends. I’m going to leave these losers to the police. I only hope the ones who are citizens are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and the non-citizens are returned kicking and screaming to the bosom of Mother Russia for whom they seem to have such affection. Its funny how 9 out of 10 of you would balk at the prospect of living in that giant third world country rather than here. Why don’t you think about that for a bit.

(via Geekologie) Once in a while you hear of a new invention and you just know that the guy that invented it is just like you, because no one could have come up with a solution for that particular problem unless they themselves suffer from it. I give you Clocky:

Clocky is an alarm clock that runs away and hides when you don’t wake up. It gives you one chance to get up, but if you snooze it jumps off your nightstand and starts wheeling around the room looking for a place to hide.