Quality Soda Street

This video, which Seth linked to in his blog, is, as people used to say in England (or maybe still do, I've been away 4 years) quality - it speaks for itself so I won't, but needless to say I wish there was a store like this in Tallinn, particularly as I'm now on the waggon indefinitely...

Introducing The Puumaja Crew's Latest Addition

Tim Flowers is an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher based in the capital city of one of the baltic states. He is 42 years old. His previous job was working for the Post Office (main sorting office - as a superintendent) and this excellent and relevant background has given him a good grasp of the fundamentals of the English language, and the art of teaching it to others.
He hails, as he likes to say, from Northamptonshire in England, a very glamourous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the gliterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night.
He likes beer.
We join Tim's diary of an ESL teacher just as he is emerging, pumped and swearing, from a successful lesson...

Staff Room Rant

F*ck me, those f*cking students are really starting to piss  me off...
...oh it's you, sorry, I thought I was in the staff room again, gobbing off about how hopeless a group of pre-intermediates were in grasping my cursory and mumbled treatment of what is actually a conceptually very difficult area of English grammar (and which I don't understand myself, incidentally).
Yes, these students are such easy targets; spending good time and money and erroneously seeming to expect English lessons from me  in return.
Ha ha, they aren't as smart as me, since I got my diploma in post office relations and scraped a TEFL qualification, after having spent a drunken weekend in this city and, purely on that basis, decided I wanted to live here .
I had to laugh today, somebody in an elementary group said 'in every Russia there is a problem'..yes, I got a lot of mileage in the staffroom announcing it to all and sundry. Never mind that I don't speak a single foreign language myself (though I like to put myself forward as an expert on which lanuages are inflectional and which aren't, how many cases they have, articles, personal pronouns etc ...).
Anyway I have to fninish now, have to go and prepare a lesson on the present perfect continuous; so that'll kill five minutes anyway.

A Blog - A Refuge From Facebook ('Cos Noone's Reading it Anyway).

Gripe today - Facebook. Is there anything good about it at all? Why do I need to know that someone I have a tenuous relationship with at best has just been / is just off to the gym? Why should I give a toss if someone I worked with 5 years ago apparently is more like Clive Owen than the other dozen actors their 'personality' was matched against? Why do I wanna go through the despair of not being accepted as a friend by someone who I fancy whilst getting a load of requests from people I've not heard of or work with and so sit metres away from them anyway?
Ok I'm as guilty of facebook loitering as anyone else but that's just my point, it even eats into productive people's time and lives. Don't get me wrong it's great to be able to keep in touch with distant friends, relatives, people who have young families and post pics of them etc, but surely that is what it is there for? Not some global mingle which doesn't even have the advantage of awkwardness (or time restriction) which bring such things to a swift and righteous termination.
Anyway, to get my point, check out this funy clip.

Don't Follow the Herd

This is a regular blog post dedicated to blogging the blogs of one of the most successful bloggers in the blogsphere.
Sethie Godiney is the diminutive sidekick to Seth Godin, an internet marketing guru, by my own unimaginative and lazy summation.
My big brother posted something interesting today that I'd like to think I've noticed myself too, which is to say, the time lag that seems to take place between something blindingly obvious being seen empirically, and belief in that being widespread. He cites the examples of Gallileo, who kept dropping things of high places to show that light things fall as rapidly as heavy things, which nevertheless people didn't take on board until much, much later, or a doctor who pushed for the now-accepted practice of doctors washing their hands before delivering births. It seems we don't want to change even when the evidence smacks us in the face, just 'cos that's what everyone is doing. The Emperor's New Clothes springs to mind.
So to that end, when are people gonna realize that this is a great blog, and start following it;-)
Sethie.

You Can Vote For Anyone So Long As It's Me

I wouldn't normally get political but just as a one off, I notice that Afghanistan has been rolled over again and Karzai, who so far as I can tell is a US puppet, has been 're-elected' as President. This was after his only real rival, Abdullah, pulled out of the second round of voting, Karzai not having received enough votes in the first round.
Yet only last week they were talking as if Karzai had lost, so what happened between then and now that caused Abdullah to simply give up I don't know. In any case it seems likely that Karzai's presidency's legitimacy might be questioned in a lot of countries.
More to the point it's likely to be questioned by a lot of people in Afghanistan itself; the US-led invasion in 2001 was billed as being a restoration of democracy, not that I like using such a hackneyed and misuderstood word, after the Taliban period and yet it seems they have only one choice now as well.
In short, I think they're losing Afghanistan. I hope not, I don't think the US is all bad and need always be a force for instability in the world; preferable to the taliban anyway. But it's not augering well at the mo', especially when added to the taliban forces' increasingly brazen attacks in neighbouring Pakistan.

Introducing the puumaja crew..

...the Puumaja (literally 'wooden house' in Estonian) crew makes no apology for adding one more humble blog to the already saturated blogsphere. In due course full penance will, hopefully, be done through the introduction of the five or six members that make up the crew (see the 'labels' tab below. Yikes, not sure if that use of quotation marks wasn't superfluous), and which will hopefully keep some of you entertained long enough to stay for more, and even to become followers...

Flat Tasks In The Puumaja

List of things to do at Õle Street 3-3 (hugely abridged to fit this page, and not in order of importance):
- install light above cooker.
-sort out transfer of electricity bill, still in the previous owners' name.
- buy a comfy chair for the living room.
- fix a kitchen cupboard door which won't shut and another that won't open.
- get curtains for the living room.
- backdoor keys cut.
- decide on whether one of the litter of kittens in the cellar is going to be adopted by us.
- sort out Ali's door so it shuts (ditto his wardrobe).
- rake leaves in the garden (other people would do this, it'll just look good if I do something communal for once!!).
- get to a bric a brac shop for memorabilia and old looking stuff.
- scrape off the terrible looking coloured paint on the bathroom windows (done by me, it's not lime green at least).
- get a throwover for the (old) sofa.
- get a wardrobe and bedside table for my room.
- fix the fire extinguisher, modem and wireless router to the wall.
- find a solution to small gaps in the exposed floorboards, where little bits and pieces of crap fall down.

...the list goes on. Not bad for 54 square metres! All has to be done by the end of the month or certainly xmas!