Kablammo!

Lastehaiglas olles mul ei tulnud õhtul uni,
ikka olin üleval ja kuni hommikuni.
Haigla oli varem olnud mingi elumaja —
olid toad ja esikud ja vannitoad, kus vaja.
Minu palat oli kohe vastu vannituba,
uksetahvel aga klaasist, läbipaistvast juba.
Oli aeg, kus enam polnud, kuid ei olnud veel
matti klaasi, jääklaasi — nägi läbi veel.
Õhtul tehti tuled surnuks, lapsed unne jäivad.
Ma ei jäänud, piilusin, kuis õed ja tädid käivad.
Vahekojas põles tuli — üldse mitte hele —
mina olin keskendunud oma ootusele.
Ja ma nägin igal õhtul — kui tal oli mahti — ,
kuidas õde vanni läks ja jättis ukse lahti.
Siis ei teadnud, miks ta jättis, nüüd ma tean, et liiga
palav oli vannitoas, seepärast tegi nii ta.
Miks, ei ole tagantjägi enam oluline,
oli vaid see vaatepilt, see vanniskäigu-ime.
Kuidas viskas kitli varna, kuidas vaatas varvast!
Ihu liikus, vesi tilkus ninast, käest ja karvast.
Ilu igas liigutuses — kaunim luulest, filmist;
olin tummas vaimustuses arstitädi Silvist.
Oligi see kogu ravi. Siis sain haiglast välja.

Ravi kestab.
Tema mõju
ma ei mõelnud välja.

My apologies to Juhan Viiding.

Yeah. Here it goes.

• Driving across Africa.
• Freeciv. (And Netgear™ products.)
• “Viina võtta”, and Jägermeister.
• Protokoll.
• Hansel and Gretel.
• Haircuts.
• Potatoes — lots and lots of potatoes.
• To the Windows Explorer design team: I can see why you thought it was a good idea to add “Sort by Album/Artist/etc” functionality to directories full of music files, but for heaven’s sake why did you eliminate the “date modified” option?
• Naked men, sweating together in the pitch dark.
• Credit-card debt.
• Minor-laid.
• Plugs that work, and pots that don’t crackle.
• Following the signs at the airport, only to end up right back in the exact same place thirty seconds later.
• And, of course, Suur Vanker.

Song of the Moment: «Suur Vanker» Laagri Laul.

Bless you, Codepage 437.

╔═════╤══╦═══╗
║ ☺ ☻ ╞══╣ ♫ ║
╟─────┼──╫───╢
╙─────┴──╨───╜

Call me crazy, but I found this slightly amusing:

In other news (incidentally, other online-purchase-related news at that), I’m extra happy that I found Dissidenten’s Sahara Elektrik on eBay for about 1/9 what people in Amazon’s marketplace are asking.

So now I’m eagerly awaiting the delivery of two things: a book on patent law, which will hopefully help me open some kind of portal to the future; and a CD of German-Moroccan tribal-rock fusion that will give me a definite link to my own past.

In yet other news, I must say that based on my (admittedly limited) use of it thus far, Rainlendar is quite a handy and useful program. Maybe if I actually use it, I won’t continue to make such a mockery of due dates in the future. Like the due date for the aruanne I need to write. Which is tonight.

Song of the Moment: «Brakes On» — Air

Holy crap, I haven’t played that marble game in ages.

Also, pink polo shirt with a canary collar? A canary popped collar? Six-year-old me had style that would make Tom and Enn so jealous.

In other news, I wonder what Samu is up to these days. Still eating shitloads of salmiakki, I wager.

I was watching Law & Order earlier tonight, as was my wont. I joined an episode that was already in progress, and was both ashamed and mortified when I remembered the episode and its resolution (“Monster“; the hapless admitted pædophile they indict at first isn’t the real rapist/killer) within 30 seconds of starting to watch. Of course, I kept watching, tho’ I already knew the ending.

Soon they showed the real killer, a security guard played by Paul Calderon. As soon as I saw him on screen, my immediate reaction was, “Hey! He was the guilty mail carrier in a more recent episode!” (“Veteran’s Day“; his Vietnam-vet mail carrier murders an anti-war protester who disparages his son, slain in combat in Afghanistan) As soon as I looked this Calderon guy up on IMDb, though, I learned that he guest-starred in a third episode as well (“Sunday in the Park with Jorge“). In this one, which I believe I’ve managed to avoid watching due to some fluke, I can only assume he plays some sort of murderous dogcatcher or exterminator. Someone who wears a uniform, anyway.

In other news, I was equally mortified when something else I saw on teevee today also showed me myself in an unflattering light. I refer, of course, to the VHS tapes my mother filmed during our family trip to the ESSR back in the summer of ’87, which I watched a bit of as part of my master plan to start transferring our massive collection of VHS tapes to DVDs.

What I saw in my four-year-old self was a self-absorbed, high-pitched-voiced and clumsy little child with a bad haircut who feigned a complete lack of interest in the jumprope while all the other children were playing with it, only to run over and pathetically tangle himself up in it after everybody else abandoned it in favor of playing “Telephone” instead. The only thing different now is that (a) my voice has almost changed and (b) these days I’d probably manage to convince myself to forgo the jumprope entirely. No sense getting all worked up and excited over something so patently juvenile.

Oh, at age 4 (4 ²/₃ to be a bit more precise) I was also evidently always the last one out of bed in the morning, and I’d often pretend to be asleep despite it being clear that nobody (myself included) was buying into my ruse.

What about the other people in the videos, all the various and sundry relatives we visited? In my self-absorption, they serve only to remind me of further self-absorption. At times the screen felt like a checklist of people I didn’t visit over this past school year, when I was in Estonia and not attending classes anyway. Kind of pathetic that I saw more relatives in two hours of tape filmed over the course of two or three days than I did in the 45 weeks or so I was living there.

Of course, some of those people died in the meantime (and I visited a few of their graves), but the rest of them didn’t so that’s really no excuse. Especially considering the number of people I still haven’t called back.

Song of the Moment: «Outsiders» — Franz Ferdinandикони

Re: Bush lashes out at ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Islamo-fascism, eh? Looks like nothing has changed in the past 61 years: “…as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless.” I guess convenient bugaboos, bogeymen, and catchphrases never really go out of style. And since they’re meaningless to begin with, you can combine them however you want! Like calling religious fanatics both “Fascists” and “Communists”, both of which terms generally apply to political and economic systems — and dissimilar ones at that.

I guess it’s refreshing, though, to see “Communist” as a slur come back into vogue.

Onward:

The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.

Whereas the President seems to believe that forcing one country into “democratic” hands will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all clerical governments in the region and establish a hotbed of democracy that spans etc. Go go gadget domino theory, let’s keep those pinkos out of Cambodia Syria! Does everything have to be so goddamn black and white? Do we really assume that a change in government in one country in a region must necessarily lead to the same change occurring in every adjacent country?

We are facing a radical ideology with immeasurable objectives to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world.

How do you go from calling some objectives immeasurable to describing how they can be measured later in the same sentence? (Hint: measure their objectives by counting “Islamo-commie-fascistically-enslaved” countries, why don’t you.) Don’t words have meanings anymore?

…self-defeating pessimism…

I guess not. Mr Bush: You meant to say “self-fulfilling”. Self-fulfilling. Self-defeating pessimism would be pessimism that leads to the defeat of pessimism, which I don’t think is what you had in mind.

…I’m going to stop here. Sorry for the rant. But it’s not like anybody read it anyway.

In other news, I remain irked by Ubuntu’s decision against mp3, decss, etc; it’s hard to jump through the hoops to get all that stuff installed on a system when you don’t have any internet connectivity to speak of on it. manpages are certainly helpful for some things (like your fstabs and whatnot), but not only are they hilariously dense, they’re no help at all for Ubuntu-specific things (all but the barest-bones of documentation for which are online) or GNOME (ditto). All I wanted to do was watch my Futurama DVDs and listen to my vast collection of legally-obtained mp3s under linux, but without the interweb on that computer it’ll prove quite difficult.

However, I haven’t gotten ANY sound playback to work on that system yet so maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Song of the Moment: «Lupita» — Panico

From today’s Veronica Mars:

“So what are you up to?”
“Remembering why I’m a misanthrope.”

*Swoon*.

In other news, Happy Birthday. Poke poke.

Which reminds me:

I poke, poke his face
And yet he still ignores me.
Poke poke poke poke poke!

That stingray sure got a shot of Vitamin M!

In other news, cheesus this seems a bit overly complicated.

Song of the Moment: «Superweekend» — Giant Robot

In short:

• It rained last night, so we weren’t able to waterproof the deck today as we’d hoped. Perhaps soon we’ll get a chance to go down and try again.
• The DVD recorder seems to work as advertised, and I guess now we can start archiving the Daily Show on shiny plastic discs instead of black-matte cartridges full of shiny plastic tape. Oh, and making backup copies of all those hilarious, embarrassing, and/or boring home videos.
• Mandy Patinkin guest-starred on a Law & Order today. Will his star ever stop rising?

Song of the Moment: «Robot Theme Song» — Aquabats

I kept a promise today: I went to meeskoor practice. I showed up half in the bag (thanks, Paul; thanks, XII), but that didn’t seem to really affect things. I mean, the whiskey I sipped throughout might even have helped my voice a bit. I was the youngest person there by at least 30 years, but that didn’t really seem to affect things.

(Did Neil Young just name-drop Chris Rock in “No Wonder”? Shit, I think he did.)

I mean, I’m obviously not some kind of saviour of meeskoor or anything, but everybody seemed legitimately happy to get some fresh blood. They certainly knew their craft, though. Some of them have been coming to practice for over 50 years, and it shows. When you’re the newcomer and you haven’t read music or sung in a choir since 8th grade, it really helps to be able to sit next to a guy who seems to know every song by heart. I’m not ashamed to admit I was essentially cheating off the guy next to me.

(I’m only 4 tracks into the new Neil Young album at this point, and I have to say that so far it feels every bit as good as Harvest. And I don’t say that lightly.)

Anyway, I’d forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble. The previous sentence is a complete lie, since I’ve recently been thrilled to harmonize at such events as people’s 70th birthday bashes, or Connecticut suvepäevad, but I had forgotten how good it feels to sing as part of an ensemble where you have four-voice harmony that’s actually composed beforehand, as opposed to being ad-libbed on the fly. Not that there’s anything wrong with the latter, of course.

• I need to practice reading music again.
• I also need to start learning how to play the harmonica I bought over the weekend.
• I was never particularly good even remotely skilled at playing the violin, so that means it should be trivial to get myself back to my previous level of proficiency, right?

Anyway, I saw the following on a sign in K-Town and decided to put it in my blog:

カラオケ

(Humour me.)

Of course, I fucked up immediately after keeping that promise. I’m simply thrilled that I left the book I borrowed (the NYEM 30.a. Aastaraamat) on the train. I said I was going to look over it, and instead I called somebody, hung up on her in the middle of the conversation for no reason, and started working on the Sudoku (数独?) and crossword puzzles in the New York Post, which so absorbed me that I left the book on the seat. Splendid.

Song of the Moment: «The Painter» — Neil Young