On This Day 346 Years Ago ...

..London Diarist...

19th August 1664

The news of the Emperour's [sic] victory over the Turkes [sic] is by some doubted, but by most confessed to be very small (though great) of what was talked, which was 80,000 men to be killed and taken of the Turke's side.

The battle to which Pepys is referring must be the Battle of Saint Gotthard which had taken place nearly three weeks earlier on 1 August, near the modern day Hungary-Austria border. The scrap was  between Leopold I, the Habsburg emperor of Austria, and the Ottoman empire, under whose control much of Hungary had come since the previous century. The Ottomans had taken Transylvania and Leopold essentially wanted to take it back, in the process recruiting various Protestant north German allies. Despite being outnumbered about 3 to 1 the Austrian forces under Montecuccoli were triumphant and, whilst not inflicting the damages which Pepys himself had doubted, took between 16-22,000 casualties. The Ottomans were inexperienced in fighting modern, disciplined ranks of musket-bearing soldiers and a failure to adapt to this was eventually their undoing in south-eastern Europe. A 20 year truce was signed and, whilst Hungary was not liberated from the Ottomans immediately, that process started from around 1683. So there you go.

The Glamorous world of Tallinn Real Estate

From the pages of a real estate website here - they want 105 000 EEK (6,711 Euros, 5,530 GBP, 8,624 USD,  3,121,197 Zimbabwe Dollars)  for this!

Check out the main room - I'm feeling a bit better about the continual mess in my place already. It almost smells through the internet page! As for size I think I'd be moving into the mailbox in the hallway to extend myself a bit. It would probably need as much again spending on it to get it straight.

Still, try and see the potential...hmm, I can't really.

Desert Island Reads

If I were to be stranded on a desert island, or some other island, assuming it didn't have WiFi, and I could only take five books with me (presumably having planned to be stranded), they would probably be the following. I have only chosen books which were actually on my shelf, if I've survived without them in Tallinn then it seems reasonable they'd only get used as fire building material on the island...


Viktor Frankl - Man's Search For Meaning
Actually I've read this multiple times so it may be taking up valuable space in my survival kit that could otherwise have been taken up by a beta emitter, fishing line or condoms (excellent water carriers apparently). In any case the ultimate read in my view, by a survivor of Auschwitz, Dachau and other camps, but also a psychiatrist who had developed his own school of thought in Vienna before the war and got the chance to test his theories in the field so to speak. Triumph of the human spirit and other such platitudes cannot do it justice, just read it.


Phantastes - George MacDonald
The original fantasy novel, but don't be put off. One of a kind really, Anodos' travails through fairy land always seem to offer something new each reading. I don't think they have ash or alder trees in the tropics, so I'd be safe.


Guide to Rational Living - Albert Ellis and Rober Harper
Not sure if this would be really required in my hermitage, but it's a sensible book in a vast field. Nothing about how, as an infant, you'd wanted to murder your father and replace him in your mother's bed, surrendering to a higher power, or the secret of unleashing the hidden art of war for the soul, but rather a common sense approach to how we think ourselves into all sorts of jams - and thus can think our way out of them again (presumably including being down about being marooned).


Natasha's Dance - Orlando Figes
A cultural history of Russia which makes quite a refreshing change from his excellent 'People's Tragedy' survey of the Revolution, in that it doesn't have death, duplicity and damnation on every page. So much so that I've never really read it cover to cover, but dipped into it to such an extent that I must have read the bulk of it. My fave two paintings culled from the illustrations page - Surikov's 'The Boyar's Wife Morozova', and Malevich's 'Red Cavalry'.


Battle in the Civil War - Paddy Griffith
A little military book with lots of sketches, details the various logistical, tactical and strategic considerations that faced the armies in the (American) civil war. Doesn't sound too promising, and yet it's superb. I picked it up years ago in, I think, Foyles' in London. I would presumably have plenty of time on my island fastness to reenact, using sand and pebbles, where McClellan went wrong at Antietam.

Time Is Much More Valuable Than Money - Seth's Blog

A useful post here where Seth applies one area of unnecessary measures which just serve to generate more fear, waste time and fail to solve the problems they claim to address, in airport security, to the much wider picture.

Imagine a world without bullshit, it would be great, wouldn't it?!?

Jingoistic Pit Summary - BFK

Benedict Francis-Kentigern, or BFK as we know him, is an affable motoring journalist of the old school. Dropping out of some big public school somewhere in England to pursue his passion pretending to race cars, he's acquired such an array of tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, arran sweaters and empty travel sweet tins, that you can't help but ignore him. Look backward to BFK's "weekly" reports on motoring, cars, and what drives the people that drive them, in his section to be found somewhere on the site.

I was amused to notice that a random comment we posted on an obsucre youtube clip (as 'whyteay') was a highest rated comment (albeit with a whopping 4 votes)...

The clip was of the old BBC start grid music which I remember well when I used to report from the pit lane for along with Tiff Needell (this was in the days when Jeremy Clarkson was a provincial hack and Richard Hammond still driving pedal cars around the back garden).

In this case it was from the Hungarian Grand Prix, still in its relative infancy but a good chuckle nonetheless, in 1989, the first year turbos had been banned and everyone was in normally aspirated 3 and a half litres (and Senna and Prost still held sway despite the bickering that ended in them only speaking to each other via pit crew members).

Good old Murray Walker keeping the flag flying by only mentioning the British drivers on the grid.

I had a chat with the (now sadly late) Michele Alboreto about his cracked ribs that Walker mentions at the end, in the exception that proves the above rule. He said he'd slipped on a patch of oil whilst eating Calzone. Yeah yeah, we believe you Michele.

For the record Mansell won the race over Senna in a real nailbiter that had the rough surface of the Hungaroring at least in part to thank...ah, I'm reaching for another travel sweet as I write these lines..

Digging At The PMC

There is no posting today - spent a good chunk of the day shifting earth from A to B in a project to dig a drainage ditch at the PMC which has left us all utterly drained, appropriately enough.

Returning tomorrow..

Seven Of Our Posts Are Missing..

There seems to be a certain amount of discrepancy on the part of blogspot as to how many posts have appeared on the PMC. According to our editing page (which you can't see, not that you'd want to!) there are 308 - we did indeed mark the passing of the 300th post the other day with a cuppa soup.

However on this homepage it cites 202 (plus this one) in the archive for 2010, and 81 for 2009. Presumably the posts which appear on the front page aren't included in this figure, but they number 8 at any one time and so that comes to 301 in total (or 302 including this one). So there's a mystery 7 posts somewhere out there..

Maybe it's simply because we don't really count Tim Flowers' offerings as proper posts (by the way he's on his summer break right but promises to have some more inciteful musings on his own genius when he returns!)

Oh well this was an easy exercise in adding one more to the post count, whatever it may be!

Green Shoots Of Recovery

According to my sources, Estonia is no less than in second place in forecast growth in GDP for the 27 EU states in 2010-2011!

The figure stands at about 3.5 per cent (only Poland is higher at 4 per cent). Not quite the figure of the heady days of the early-mid '00s (peaking at 10 per cent in 2006), which may be no bad thing, but a vast improvement of the whopping 14.1 per cent contraction last year. So the belt tightening was the right thing to do all along, hats off to Estonia and its economic restraint!

For the record, neighbours Latvia came in at less than 1 per cent growth, Lithuania much stronger at about 2.6 per cent, the UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands hovering around the overall EU average of 1.6 per cent and poor old Greece the only one still in the red at about -1.8 per cent.