You Got an Idea, a Product or a Service? Then Do This..

Some great rules from my big brother about spreading ideas, in a nutshell, you can't force people and it can take time...

One of Our Boys Is Missing - Chapter 2, Hero in the Neighbourhood: Part 2

I'm getting bored of this already. You can check out the previous part here.

The apprehension I felt as I drew nearer and nearer to the epicenter that was Thrushingfold cannot be put into words. I felt my heart beating like a volcano, and sweat was literally pouring down my face in torrents as I imagined what would greet me. Would it be like a monsoon hitting me from the moment the gates of Fedioukine Barracks opened, a landslide of shouts and screams, the occasional kick? Would there be a Tsunami of information and rules, and an avalanche of kit to get abreast of? Would the barracks look like a sort of giant cumulo-nimbus cloud, with some smaller clouds dotted around it? Would the staff go through our bunks like tornados during kit inspection, or explode like geysers at the slightest faux pas?

In fact it was surprisingly relaxed and informal, the eye of the hurricane perhaps. We were taken on a brief tour of the place on foot, given a welcome address from the adjutant, introduced to the training team and given the rest of the afternoon off to get acquainted, go into town, and get settled in. Glancing around I noticed that most of the others seemed as scared as me, if not more so, and that if push literally came to shove, I reckoned I could take most of them. I got chatting to two of the guys immediately. One of them, Gareth, like me came from an unbroken home. Gareth's life and mine were to become inextricably linked from now, though we’d have long periods when we’d be doing different things, we’d always be reunited later on (like in a Dance to the Music of Time – ed.).

We had a few drinks in one of the local pubs but didn't fancy a big piss up at this stage, we were all too scared. I felt sick after about two pints. Another guy, Kevin WAS sick after about two pints, he was something of a bantamweight when it came to the old sherberts. We headed back to the depot to check out the NAAFI canteen, which was great. fried food and more fried food at knock down prices. I was starting to like the place.

‘So how long you gonna stay in for?’ I asked Gareth, my voice still pitching slightly higher than I’d have liked, and my absence of a strong regional accent (Gareth was a cockney) was a huge source of self-consciousness.

‘Couple of years, I reckon. It’ll be a laugh, then I’ll ge back to civvy street to earn some money’.

‘Yeah, me an’ all’ I said, trying to sound streetwise and dismissive of the whole thing – if only we knew.

The next day came and things began for real. After the regulation haircut we were off to the quartermaster's stores for the issuing of kit. The Calthrops' beret was in fact a very, very dark blue, which to all intents and purposes looked black. This was out of deference to an action during the War of the Spanish Succession, where the Calthrops had taken an entire brigade of enemy horse by surprise, attacking at night, and slotted them in their entirety. We were to spend many hours wetting, shaping and reshaping the berets in the quest for the perfect fit. It was common to see recruits sitting with a towel around their shoulders to catch the drips from their still-wet beret whilst they watched telly or did some admin.

I know I need to give the blaggers amongst my readership a lot of information about kit, and if your name is Geoff and you have a beard, are a member of CAMRA and still live in the house you were born in, you’ll want the information to be scrupulously accurate to the minutest detail – was it the ’58 or ’74 pattern of webbing we were using? Did we keep two water bottles in our pouches or just the one? Had we started using yellow blank firing attachments by then or the old brown ones? Etc etc However I suggest you head for the Osprey military section of a bookshop, just in case there are any of theirs you haven’t bought. I don’t want this to turn into a dull narrative of what kit we used and where; all I’ll say is that looking after your kit (called ‘admin) is of the utmost importance, and extremely difficult especially in the field. Much of a man's kit is a personal thing. With experience, you soon learn to augment it with bits and pieces of your own, non-standard kit that you've been bought, borrowed, inherited (literally), nicked or found lying around in the most unlikely of places. If you come into contact with US armed forces, they offer a very abundant hunting-ground for kit-hungry squaddies, as there is so much of it, and they dispose of it at an astonishing rate. There was a rumour that in Iraq a few years ago, some lads from the REME managed to assemble an entire M1 Abrams tank, A-team style, with the detritus that surrounded a USMC encampment. In any event, some items that come as standard issue do the job well, others are about as useful as the 'white' you used to find in those sets of pencil crayons when you were a kid. It's an accept, reject, modify process, getting to grips with your kit. It’s also possible to go to far in this direction. I remember one guy in the Calthrops actually marrying his kit, with a formal service with best man, vicar etc. I was never in any danger of going too far down that road, though I have to confess that I feel a surge of excitement in all sorts of ways when this year's army and navy supplies catalogue comes ripping through the letterbox.

I came to grief once again with kit, or lack of it. This concerned the rifle cleaning kit. Everyone had been issued with one, a little selection of metal rods, brushes, oil and pieces of cloth, except me. It looked like mine might have been snaffled. I raised this with the NCO overseeing the distribution of our kit, a textbook ‘chuckle brothers’ lookalike.

'D'you think I give a f*ck? Tough luck. Just borrow one of your mates'.

I sensed that the shelves in the Corporal's room weren't too densely crowded with, for example, books on cognitive therapy, or some of Bowlby's work on bereavement. But there again, is that such a bad thing?

I was confused; we were to strip and clean our weapons at the next detail, and I wasn't confident that other people would surrender bits of their kit willingly. Later on he then changed his tack;

'who's got a rifle cleaning kit for Moraine?' he shouted.

'if Moraine hasn't got a complete kit by 15.00 hours we're all going for a little run'. This was part of the military way that I grew to like. We all had to pull together, if one person was out of shape, the whole section got it, so it encouraged a kind of cameraderie in the face of abject panic. Believe me, groups of young lads are every bit as bitchy and conniving as women, and his approach was the only way were going to get some sort of cohesion, rather than the me-first approach you get on civvy street.

Our first period of Physical Training came soon enough. I was peversely looking forward to this. I'd enjoyed school sports and I'd done some cross-country running at school, though it had always taken a back seat to rugby due to its somewhat geeky reputation. The cross-country team were in fact referred to humorously as the 'Cambodian rugby team', to which one of the wittier runners riposted that the rugby team were nothing but the 'Tongan cross country squad', shortly before suffering for his art in a most vexatious way by being put in the chicken run, a small alleyway in between two labs, walled off at one end, which would be lined on either side by the punishment squad, leaving the condemned man to make his way out as best he could whilst kicks and punches rained from all sides .

But I'd kept reasonably fit on the sly, and my impending army career had motivated me to continue after I left school. I found myself amongst the front-runners. Those early-morning jogs had started to pay dividends, and actually found myself enjoying it. The sensation of pushing yourself, if not to your limits then at least to within chundering sight of them, the smug satisfaction when it was all over, at the pathetic sight of one of your contemporaries lurching across the finish line in uncoordinated, unself-conscious humiliation, by which time my pulse rate had returned almost to its resting level, the smell of wet grass, mud, stagnant water, swear and damp made for a cocktail that was to prove one of my main vices in the coming years.

This success came at a price though. I was ceasing to be the ‘grey man’ already, meaning I was attracting the attention of the training team rather than keeping my head below the parapet. In fact I subsequently got hauled up for not trying hard enough by Sergeant McGrain, a tall, balding , imposing and fucking hard Scot:

‘Ah’ve seen some loafing in mah time but this is takin’ the pish’; he was eyeball to eyeball with me out near the perimeter fence, we’d been doing ‘grunjays’, a particularly knackering form of exercise which seems to reduce every muscle in your body to a kind of napalm jelly by about the fourth repetition.

‘There’s the four tonner’ he pointed a couple of hundred yards along the peri track. Some of the lads had already started running back to it, the session was nearly over.

‘If you’re no’ the first back the whole squad’s gonna do this phys session again’. I could tell by the all-seeing all-knowing meaness in his eyes that he meant it too.

I was off like a greyhound; the front runners amongst my contemporaries were already getting close to the truck. I was steaming past people right left and centre, elbowing them out of the way; ‘what the fu…?’ ‘Moraine’s…lost….it’ they gasped, I tried to offer up an explanation but it would have utilized energy that was better used elsewhere. I could see the first bloke, about to reach up to the rope hanging out of the back of the truck, used to aid climbing aboard. I leapt up, naturally everything from this point went into slow-mo…

‘NOOOOOO-OOOOOOO-OOOOOO-OOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH’ I howled, flying through the air, legs akimbo, the other guy turning his head slowly ‘WHAAAAAAAAAAA?’ he replied in the same choked foghorn tones.

‘DDDOOO-OOOOO-OOONNNN’TTT’ and something else garbled before smacking my nose right into the tailgate of the four tonner then hitting the deck.

‘Fucking hell Charlie you only had to ask’ came Kevin’s Geordie Lilt through the haze. ‘I didn’t realize it meant that much to you’.

I got a proper ribbing off the lads on the way back but I’d avoided getting them in the shit, though the ungrateful bastards didn’t know it. And was sure that, in amongst the menacing stare McGrain gave me afterwards there was a flicker of respect.

I was settling in quite well in other ways, though. I'd got together a good group of mates, and we'd go out and get wasted at weekends. On Friday evenings we were allowed out of the depot to go out on the town. There was a curfew at 23.00 hours. This meant that you'd suddenly see the town emptying of squaddies, easy to spot at the best of times, at about twenty to eleven. It was only a short bus or taxi ride back to the barracks, but you didn't want to be even one minute late. It happened once with my troop, a couple of guys missed to curfew by a few minutes and as a result we were up at three in the morning for a run around the perimeter fence...carrying our mattresses, followed by a dip in the dunk tank on the assault course. Nothing like making the punishment fit the crime. Life was tough, but with a good dollop of fun as well. For example, once the colour sergeant let us have some extra biscuit rations after a 15 mile load carry, and there was a basketball competition between sections biannually.

Another time a live band came and played at our bar - everyone was clapping their hands and really getting into it. We then started throwing ashtrays at the band and exhorted them to play our regimental march, 'the crippled palomino’, and then booed them off as they didn't know it. 

To be furthered.

Ära Kasuta Valget Leppapuud

Is my advice to you. It doesn't really have the right quality to heat even the immediate vicinity of the fireplace, at least when it's minus 20 out; I've subsequently discovered that it's primarily used for smoking meat, fish etc as that's about all it seems to do-give off a load of smoke. So go for tamm, kask or puitbrikett if you wanna survive a hard winter..

The Lizard Brain Reigns Supreme..

My older brother Seth Godin posted today on something I couldn't resist picking up on. He calls it the "lizard brain". Well, he didn't originate the term, and I don't know who did, but he put a new spin on it.
In short, the lizard brain is that kind of primeval little blob underneath our "proper" brains, and it's something we share with the animals. It essentially deals with the "five Fs" (Feed, Fuck, Fight or Flee, Feel good). And a very good job it does too as far as it goes. Can you imagine having to remember to breathe in and out whilst awake, never mind when you're asleep?
Unfortunately it has zero intelligence. It's the part of the brain that makes a man (I can't speak about women) drink more than he should, smoke, get addicted to drugs, look at pornography, aimlessly lust after unattainable women (or even attainable ones, only to find he's cracking open and empty shell even if he does 'succeed', despite all the big talk and posturing - which is presumanly a function of the lizard brain itself).  It's that part of the brain that wants, like Winnie the Pooh, "just a little something", all the bloody time no matter what's happening externally (ever had a drink 'cos you felt bad? Ever had a drink 'cos you'd had some good news? Ever had a drink when nothing in particular was happening?)...there are others who explain the concept better than I, you should check for Mr Orange Paper's explanation here.
I'm only speaking from an informed viewpoint since I have a lizard brain myself, and so do you.
But I also have a human brain, a cerebral cortex, inifinite, sublime, divine even, if that's your viewpoint. We're not animals and yet the behaviour of many, many people seem to suggest otherwise, and I fully include myself in that appraisal.
What I hadn't appreciated is that the concept can also be applied to companies and products. The collective lizard brain likes to stay in the comfort zone. It's not only why people stay in crappy underpaid jobs for years and years, but even whole companies do it; it's the playing it safe thing, resistance to change despite all the boasting about innovation, doing something because it's what all the other companies are doing. And it may only be that tiny handful of companies that aren't the voice of the lizard brain who dominate when it comes to innovation (Apple is case in point). But again, I'm not really qualified to write on the subject when there are so many others who are - which is why I think you should check out Seth's post.
Perhaps David Icke was right all along...

A New Concept in English Coursebooks - Part Three

The third (and finallest) instalment in our merry ESL book..

INTERNATIONAL REALIA     


In international Realia, you get clear, relevant and accurate information about cultures around the world. You will get a chance to ‘sample’ their food (well, look at a picture), look at a very large scale postage stamp map of the world that makes the Mappa Mundi look like it was done on CAD, and hear one of the actors noted above putting on their best Manuel from Fawlty Towers, or the guy at the end of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum who used to sing ‘land of hope and glory’ in a Indian accent  before being told to ‘shaaaadaaaap’,  voices.

Sample listening script  from Unit 2, ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’:

Ho ho, Italians ride around on Vespa scooters eating ice cream, shouting ‘mamma mia’ and ‘belissimo’, whereas all Americans like to eat apple pie, drink root beer and play baseball every single day (near one of those yellow school buses). Irish people go to the pub all the time, drink Guinness and they like the ‘craic’. Germans are always on time for meetings and nothing ever breaks down. People in Africa on the other hand all have leprosy and they don’t know what rain is.


b) Sample discussion exercise:
 Place the following international heroes into the correct order (hint, the order does not need to be changed):

1)Comrade Lenin
2)Comrade Stalin
3)Comrade Krushchev
4)Comrade Kalinin
5)Comrade Gagarin
6)Comrade Stravinsky
7)Comrade Eisenstein
8)Comrade Tereshkova
9)Comrade Kasparov
10)Comrade Yashin





You may be interested in other products in the ULTIMATE range:


TEENZONE

‘YO! What’s goin’ down my main man?
We’re gonna be checking out some of the bestest bands around today – Tears for Fears, the Rocksteady Crew, and Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Titch are just three of dem. There’s gonna be loads of wicked info about the new ‘hula hoop’ craze that’s just come out of the States, and also ‘bodypopping’. Bodypoppers wear tracksuits, often in bright colours, and modern-style sneakers made by such hot brands as Slazenger. The music bodypoppers listen to has a heavy ‘beat’, and dancers are able to invent tonnes of brilliant new dancing moves. Would you like their job, dude?
Wot’s your fave music? Doo wop? Or skiffle? Or maybe you prefer the smooth sounds of West Coast Jazz, Dave Brubeck and all that gang. Drop us a telegram and let us know’.

….phew – I need a can of tizer already! That’s just a teensy peek at what you can get from the coolest language learning course in the universe. And it’s only 9.99 in the shops now, part 2 free with part 1, and there’s a free Limahl poster inside. Respect!


BUSINESSPRAT*

Quote of the day:
‘Hit ‘em. Hit ‘em hard. Hit ‘em where it hurts. And when you’re through with that, hit ‘em again’.
Walter Z. Gneisenauer, CNTCorp.

Look, you don’t have time for this, and you don’t want to go back to school – you dropped out at age 16 with only 2 qualifications, remember, but you’ve worked your way to the top through grit, determination, reading the right crappy management speak publications, and by murdering a couple of people. Well now you can put all thoughts of wasting time with your head in a book with ‘Businessprat’*, the newest concept to hit the market. No needlessly long words are used. Portable enough to use on the road or in flight (executive class). Each unit has six Bullets, which are aimed at giving you the facts and nothing more. All in no more time than it takes to loose off a couple of emails to Shanghai. Ultimate English ‘Businessprat’* range. It’s got legs.

Bullets:
• Agenda – what have we got in this unit? We run a few ideas up the flagpole.
• Are you serious? – the position as it is now, includes listening sections, all recorded by       REALLY SUCCESSFUL corporate men and women.
• Fast Facts – let’s do a lunch, synergise, network, put all our cards on the table, give it to them straight and roll out the most kick ass knowledge sharing depository the boardroom has ever seen. You’ll find our ‘earn language dollars’ marking system sexy as well.
• 15 second discussion window – because money multiplied by time and divided by   information equals goals.
• Grammar Hammer – yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking, it’s for geeky perpetual students who earn less in a year than you spend on lattes with cinnamon to go, but if you wanna get ahead you have to sound professional. Includes Brit section.
• The Bottom Line – at the end of the day, this sums up the overarching points, in the final analysis. Presented in familiar ‘meeting minutes’ format.


‘BusinessPrat’* from Ultimate English. Because money is an uncountable noun.

*now available for Blackberries, Green Gauges and other devices.


Have you visited our website yet? Why not, you twat?
www.ultimate-english.net.

The first part of can be viewed here whereas for the second you must click thusly.

A New Concept in English Coursebooks - Part Two

Part two of the new English coursebook which has got everyone running amok in the Puumaja..

TIME FOR SKILLS

Sample mingling exercise from Unit 7, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’

Imagine that you are the finance director of the third largest gypsum warehouse in New Malden, Surrey, England. You are networking with colleagues in the plasterboard business. Move around the room asking questions with the other classmates and respond to their questions. Now switch roles. And switch again, doubling back. Now complete the table below.

	Introductory phrases	agreeing	disagreeing	Talking gyspum
Student A	‘hello…’ ‘how do you do..’		‘no I don’t agree with that’	‘gypsum is good…’
Student B		‘yes I agree’… Yes, mmm…		‘I just bought some new gypsum…’

GRAMMAR EXPLANATION PLUS+

In grammar explanation plus, you get a clear, concise and relevant explanation of a grammatical point. We do not allow important grammatical points such as the use of articles (which are not covered) to be included at the expense of other less obvious points, which native speakers use biannually in the odd letter here and there, and in any case get it wrong.

Real life example from Unit 10, ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’:

Present subjunctive using phrasal (sometimes called multi-word) verbs in conditionally reported speech, where they subject is not present, and in the passive.

Example:

He said the Ferrari would be bought by him if he were a rich man getting off on the salary given him.

Complete the rule:

The____ is used when_____.

...to be continued some more. You can see the first part here if you like.

A New Concept in English Coursebooks - Part One

The  Puumaja and its resident ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher Tim Flowers just had to publish this synopsis which dropped on our desk some time ago. It covers a new ESL  coursebook which we think puts all the others (Deadway, International Depress, Cutting Wrists etc) to shame..The synopsis is quite long so'll be published in parts..



 

ULTIMATE ENGLISH from University Press Ltd.

Ultimate English is a fresh, dynamic and revolutionary new concept in Actualized Realistic Stipendiary English (ARSE) learning. It is built around fundamental core needs of the student’s interactional linguistic and intuitive framework and aims to synergise his or her deductive assimilation without detracting from essential lexical and cognitive necessities.

Each unit is divided into SIX sections as follows.

INTRODUCTION

Our units compete mercilessly with one another in trying to find the dullest, most soul-destroying introductory topic imaginable, thus rendering any potential chance of discussion still-born. Unit-by-unit you will be enthralled by such hot issues as ‘stones and where they come from’, ‘the first time I went to a furniture shop’, and ‘what is it like to grow up in Llanelli?’ Debate will be provoked from the outset with such questions as : ‘Do you have cups in your country? If so, how do you use them?’, ‘how old are the people in these pictures and how old are you?’, and ‘what is the worst personal health issue you have had to visit the doctor with and how was it treated?’

LISTENING

Our team has assembled a group of ‘resting’ actors, all of them card-carrying equity members. We salute their valiant efforts to inject some sort of meter into scripts which would make public service information narrators run off a pier. Don’t worry though, we present a range of very, very convincing accents from around the Anglophone world, rather than using, say a British actor to ‘go american’ for the odd unit or two. Because we’d never do that.

DISCUSSION CORNER

Sample discussion lead-in from Unit 2, ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’:

What do you know about these world famous people?

-Britney Spears

-Vladimir Putin

-Madonna

-Dimitri Medvedev

-Christina Agueleira

-Yuri Andropov

-the one from the Pussycat Dolls who goes out with Lewis Hamilton.

-Felix Dzerzhinsky

- Ricky Martin

- Aleksei Leonov

- Glen Medeiros

-Lev Yashin

- Leona Lewis

-Viktor Korchnoi

Which of them can you identify with the most?

 
...to be continued.
 

On This Day 350 Years Ago..

24th January 1660

"In the morning to my office, where, after I had drank my morning draft at Will's with Ethelland Mr. Stevens, I went and told part of the excise money till twelve o’clock, and then called on my wife and took her to Mr. Piercest, she in the way being exceedingly troubled with a pair of new pattens, and I vexed to go so slow, it being late. There when we came we found Mrs. Carrick very fine, and one Mr. Lucy , who called one another husband and wife, and after dinner a great deal of mad stir. There was pulling off Mrs. bride’s and Mr. bridegroom’s ribbons; [ie debagged them - ed] with a great deal of fooling among them that I and my wife did not like. Mr. Lucy and several other gentlemen coming in after dinner, swearing and singing as if they were mad, only he singing very handsomely. There came in afterwards Mr. Southerne, clerk to Mr. Blackburne, and with him Lambert, lieutenant of my Lord's ship, and brought with them the declaration that came out to-day from the Parliament, wherein they declare for law and gospel, and for tythes; but I do not find people apt to believe them. After this taking leave I went to my father's to, and my wife staying there, he and I went to speak with Mr. Crumlum (in the meantime, while it was five o’clock, he being in the school, we went to my cozen Tom Pepys' shop, the turner in Paul's Churchyard, and drank with him a pot of ale); he gave my father directions what to do about getting my brother an exhibition, and spoke very well of my brother. Thence back with my father home, where he and I spoke privately in the little room to my sister Pall about stealing of things as my wife’s scissars and my maid's book, at which my father was much troubled. Hence home with my wife and so to Whitehall, where I met with Mr- Hunt and Luellin, and drank with them at Marsh's, and afterwards went up and wrote to my Lord by the post. This day the Parliament gave order that the late Committee of Safety should come before them this day se’nnight, and all their papers, and their model of Government that they had made, to be brought in with them. So home and talked with my wife about our dinner on Thursday".

Scenes We'd LIke to See

#1
A load of British, American and Western European guys going to Moscow, St Petersburg or one of the Baltic capitals and running rings around the locals, cunningly doing them out of quite a bit of money not to mention belongings and self-esteem and making them look like a bunch of cretins.

#2
Anybody with two X chromosomes between the ages of 18 and 45 walking past a load of British builders and them continuing their work with great equanimity, not so much as diverting their eyes for an instance from the task literally in hand.


#3 a group of people involved in a protracted, heated and probably beer-fuelled argument/debate about politics, religion or some ethical question without one of them resorting to the Reductio ad Hitlerum, or Godwin's Law.

#4 somebody in Estonia accepting the given price for something with equanimity (used that word already I think) and paying punctually and without query.

#5
Somebody, anywhere in the world, who, having seen that they were being legitimately issued a parking ticket by a traffic warden saying "fair enough, I transgressed the rules and, whilst I wasn't going to be a long time I was probably a bit more than five minutes, and yes, I can see I could have easily parked in the multi-storey not 500 yards away".

#6
A bookshop which has a cash desk (or whatever it's called) totally uncluttered with nick nacks, little bits of card and tiny wee books with iffy titles like 'the little guide book to life', 'the hilarious book of rhyming cockney slang' and 'coping with a penis'

Have a Bath of Woodlice

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Aaron... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. With a career spanning over half a decade, he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You and Become a Millionaire Whilst On The Toilet.

Hey there, it's Walt with a message which I know is going to set 2010 quite literally on fire for you!
If you bathed in a bath of of crawling, seething woodlice for dinner, properly washing all the necessary areas with a great handful of the varmints, I'd bet that, unless you live in Korea, it would be the worst thing that you'd experience that week, most likely.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it! Apart from making a change from radox, think how you would empower yourself afterwards, knowing that you'd conquered one of mankind's primeval fears, namely that of small things that move too quickly for their own good.
You'd definitely see a massive improvement. I know I did. In fact since I first bathed in woodlice when I was a young man in the US Army in Northern France in 1918, I've made it  a weekly practice. There's simply nothing like it for energizing you, and work colleauges and family will really notice a change in you.  You can even vary it by adding centipedes
So go do it - have a bath of woodlice!

The Puumaja Isn't Haunted - Not Shock

After some months of living here I have no strange phenomena to report.
A few days after moving in, I wan't awoken by a strange cackling sound, experience some inexplicable changes in temperature or odd smells, nor did I find that furniture had been moved around in the night.
I was, it's true, disturbed by a crashing sound once but that was the cat knocking over a broom (again).
I'm not considering getting in a priest to battle drive away the non-existent evil spirits in latin, no doubt  getting a smack in the eye in the process.
No strange ectoplasm has issued forth from the taps, my child isn't disappearing up the chimney ( I don't have one anyway - as child I mean) and I think it highly unlikely that these happenings will reach some kind of crescendo, seeing me either fleeing in the middle of the night in the car, still wearing my pyjamas, vowing never to return, or them finding video footage a year later of my final night in the house.

Kholodna Sayvodnay, Slahvah Bogoo!

Ee mnoga sniega, kak obweechna. Ya dumayoo shto yesho boodyet kholodna noh mozhyet bweet, snieg ne idyot. Balshoi spaseebah vam za vashoo vremyoo.

Myths About Formula One Savagely Torn to Shreds

Benedict Francis_Kentigern, or BFK as he's know in these parts, is the PMC's occasional motoring correspondent. Here he sets fire to a few myths surrounding the interesting world of Formula One, raking over the charred ashes afterwards, if he remembers...


Myth No.1: "Formula One is dangerous".
BFK writes: This is one of the longest running myths of all. It was dangerous in the past as my previous post explained, but modern day F1 is as safe as a Swedish wendy house. You've more chance of dying than of being in an accident in an F1 race, even if you're a driver.

Myth No.2 "Children are not permitted in the Formula One Clubhouse"
BFK: another misconception. Children and dogs are always welcome in the clubhouse. They just aren't allowed to sit at the bar, that's all.

Myth No. 3 "Formula One is dull".
BFK: this is one of the commonest preconceptions about F1. Nothing could be nearer an abject lie. There have been several exciting races down the years. The last one, in 1982, saw one driver finishing ahead of another, and then only just, and that after a tense moment since for a while there it looked like the other guy was going to win.

Myth No.4  "Formula One works year round, 24/7"
BFK: Would that it were, but even those supermen need a holiday sometimes. In fact, half closing day for F1 is Tuesday afternoons. In Formula 2 the half closing day is a Wednesday, something that arose during the East-West schism and the council of Nicene.

Myth No. 5 "The F1 supremo has always been Bernie Ecclestone"
BFK: Whilst Bernie has been 'the guvnor' for a good long while now, and nothing happens without his say so, there was a time when Bernie wasn't head of F1. The post was previously occupied by a bloke called Dave.

Myth No. 6 "Formula One cars automatically run anti-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern".
BFK: Not so; this is a commonly-held falsehood based on water flowing down a plughole. In fact the designers of courses have slightly more initiative the flowing water and on some course cars run clockwise, others anti-clockwise, and 80s driver Andrea de Cesaris wherever he god dammed pleased.

Myth No. 7 "Formula One cars are fast"
BFK: An optial illusion I'm afraid. Although they appear to be going very fast indeed, since the footage is speeded up, average speed is about an adult male's walking pace at a slightly hurried gait.

Myth No 8 "Your Granny could drive an F1 car these days".
BFK: Not so. Your Granny could NOT drive a formula one car, because she doesn't have a superlicence. She also doesn't know how to work the gears, and would probably reverse into some armco whilst parking.

Myth No 9 "All the formulae are numbered sequentially, 1, 2 etc all the way up to 5000"
BFK: It seems logical, but in fact the various formulae are based on prime numbers (remember, that's a number which cannot be multiplied, ever, and doesn't contain a zero or a 7 in it). Thus, it runs Formula 1, Formula 2, Formula 3, 5, 7, 11 .... and so on.

Myth No 10: "The chequered flag waved to show the finish of a race is sometimes utilised by bored officials and mechanics to play chess or, more plausibly, draughts"
BFK: Stop this, it's silly...

Keep the Crap Ideas Coming - Seth's Blog

This is a great post from my big brother, even if he doesn't say so himself.
It's essentially the "way to have a great idea is to have loads of bad ones" formula (sometimes using the Babe Ruth analogy - the year he hit the most home runs, he also held the record for most strikeouts, whatever that means). And now there's a new real-life example who you can relate to and who hasn't been dead for about 90 years - Tim  Burton!
So I'll keep posting then!...

When is Owen's Next Song Out?

Upon glancing though the PMC's vast collection of vinyl, I noticed that Owen Paul hasn't been in the charts for a wee while. Surely the follow up to 'my favourite waste of time' is due soon, just to avoid any possible stalling in his monumentously successful contribution to humanity?
He's at risk of failing to capitalise on the success of 'mfwot', given this brief lull in proceedings, since the song hit the airwaves in June 1986; perhaps a change of record company might be the solution? It'd be terrible if he were to let his career slip to the extent that Tight Fit have more recently.

Thought for the Day No. 4, With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss, resident psychologist, spiritual guide and arbiter of good taste. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"Noone is more likely to be arrogant than a lately freed slave"
CS Lewis

Friday's Word

This was a first on me but I managed to learn a new word in English from some Estonian text (or rather Estonian text which had been translated into English) : "Flavescent".
This doesn't have anything to do with flavour (as in Flavor Flav) but rather "turning yellow; yellowish", presumably as in "he's been drinking so much he's gone flavescent".

Seth's Blog - Try This if you Can

My big brother posted something on the wisdom of, upon having a complaint, a product which doesn't work, working conditions you're not happy with etc, instead of prefacing everything rudely and aggressively as most people do (he doesn't actually use these words) we start off with a compliment, eg "this is a great product and maybe we could make it even better by..."
Now, this could well work. Not being customer facing as such I can only hazard a guess the effect it would have on the browbeaten customer services 'agent' who receives nothing but attitude all day long due to something which isn't one's fault.
It's really difficult to do though - try it - and you might sometimes feel like a complete clown doing so (and maybe look like one too).
Furthermore, whilst irrascible and intimidating people might benefit from using this strategy, I doubt the wisdom of self-deprecating or mousy people in effect exacerbating this fault.
It's also not new advice, Dale Carnegie wrote an entire book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, espousing just such an approach, way back in 1936.
I've heard tell that he in fact committed suicide, though this isn't referenced in his wikipedia entry, for what that's worth...
Still, it was a great post and he's a great blogger, I don't know if we could improve on it in any way..

Stop Showing Poofy Pics From Nature - I'd Like to Shoot the Little Bastard

Wikipedia's featured article today was of a beautiful little bird which can't help but act as a counterpoint to the monochrome of Tallinn in the winter (well, it does if I hold up the picture to the window anyway).
It's called a 'Splendid Fairywren' and, like a good chunk of the world's amazing natural sights, lives in Australia.
I can't imagine getting such a brilliant bluish colour out of a tin of paint..
It's ok, you can appreciate it without being emasculated!

Thought for the Day No. 4, With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"It is only the riff-raff of each sex that wants to be incessantly hanging on the other. Live and let live. They laugh at us a good deal. That is just as it should be. Where the sexes, having no real shared activities, can meet only in Affection and Eros - cannot be friends - it is healthy that each should have a lively sense of the other's absurdity. Indeed it is always healthy. No one ever really appreciated the other sex - just as no on really appreciates children or animals - without at times feeling them to be funny. For both sexes are. Humanity is tragi-comical; but the division into sexes enables each to see in the other the joke that often escapes it in itself - and the pathos too".

From "the Four Loves", pp 92-93, by C.S. Lewis, 1960.

My Big Brother Says Something I Disagree With - Shock! (Seth's Blog)

According to the latest post from the usually incisive, visionary and  engaging  Seth Godin, the way to deal with the problem of ailing public libraries (or rather their ailing clientele) is to train people to take intellectual initiative. How the hell do you do that I wonder?
True, it's a depressing fact that librarians he spoke to saw most of their 'business' coming from free DVD rentals rather than borrowing books we don't want to / can't own (in my own experience the former British Council premises in Vilnius were exactly that, and they had some good DVDs too, and I believe in Tallinn it was the same). But I don't know if intellectual curiosity, initiative, call it what you will, can be induced.
Certainly the signal "you should read this, it'd be right up your street" was almost always a turn off in my youth. And, well, libraries just aren't sexy, are they? Are you going to sit in a musty room leafing through a rather foxed hardback copy of  Foxe's Book of Martyrs,  or lug a whole load of heavy books home, or are you gonna read about Tiger Woods' indiscretions on the Internet (read about it on the Internet I mean)?
To be fair Seth does suggest using the Internet as a facility for leaders, or even sherpas as he calls them (but then Sherpa Tensing's success went right to his head I believe) but I don't know how this would work in reality.
It's peaks and troughs with culture as everything else, and I can only assume we're entering  or already are in a sort of intellectual dark ages which noone alive is likely to see the end of (or even realize that it was ending if they did).
Still, I'm very much a child of the times, I thought Gabriel Garcia Marquez played for Liverpool...

Thought for the Day No. 3, With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"Hit 'em. Hit 'em hard. Hit 'em where it hurts. And when you're through with that, hit 'em again"
Walt Gleeson, personal motivator and success guru extraordinaire (quo vadis on this blog).

Thought for the Day No. 2, With the Rabbi Anders Weiss

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"All anger comes from weakness"
John Jack Rousseau

Thought for the Day Part 1

Latest addition to the growing roster of occasional contributors to the Puumaja crew: the Rabbi Anders Weiss. This is an affectionate nod towards BBC radio 4's "thought for the day" which was broadcast every weekday morning, oftentimes with the delightfully named Rabbi Lionel Blue at the helm. Don't know if it still is, although I never got to hear it really anyway as it was the signal that I had to go and catch the bus to school...

"When you pursue bodily pleasures and live only to pamper them, then inevitably you lose the ability to feel pleasure"
Lyev Tal-STOY

Don't you just!...

Someone Nabbed My Parking Space and I Didn't Go Ape Crazy on All Fours

I guess I must be integrating well here in Estonia. Earlier on today I was in a multi-storey in one of the big shopping centres in Tallinn, which is undergoing some kind of refurbishment so spaces are at a premium. That coupled with the fact that it's cold out and seems to have snowed perpetually for the last month and everyone really wants to be undercover.
Having spotted a space I did my usual of overshooting it, indicating, and backing in. Of course the person sitting right on my arse wasn't about to roll over and let me take it, and nipped in there front-ways (presumably I'd have got the blame if I'd reversed into them).
Now, time was I'd have flipped. I mean, window down, out of the car, screaming and f-ing and blinding etc. Not a good idea, especially in England, I'm thinking of various knifing incidents. I even met someone once who managed to break his own leg kicking someone who'd done more or less the same thing!
It's a bit different here though. The poker-faced, I'm-never-wrong way people go about things in the baltics means that you might as well shout at the wall. You'd only come off second best. I can see it now, main headline on ETV news, mad Englishman screams at driver in car park. The tag would probably stick.
So I left it. Hardly even felt angry. And I found another space just round the corner!
Hardly worth reporting but I'm pleased with the outcome!

Unnecessary Plug for Unnecessary Quotes Blog

Finally I had a post up on the blog of  unnecessary quote marks. In short, this is a blog in which users send in photos of signs and so forth which, in a twisted variant of the grocer's apostrophe (as in CD's and Vegetable's for sale etc.), words are in speech marks when they clearly don't need to be.
Mine wasn't anything special, just from an ad on a car detailing website for cotton towels, but there are some real gems there...not sure if the rules confine this to the English speaking world; non-native speakers of English should probably be exempt from such ridicule (but in any case, check out engrish.com!) but I'll look out for signs advertising things like 'hot' coffee or 'friendly' service whilst out and about in Tallinn's old town in any case.

Don't Believe the Hype - Seth's Blog (think this title`s been used before but what, ho).

Good post and food for thought from my big bro´ today regarding fearmongering, you know the type of thing, everyone with a turban´s about to explode, the polar ice cap will melt this summer and you´ll drown, politicians work 24/7 on ways to fleece everybody except their close circle , that type of thing.
Check it out here.