Stick With The Winners On Our Side Of The Atlantic - Walt Gleeson

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Winfrey... 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. Starting as a rust repairer on a sewage trawler in international waters, on one cent fifty per month, Walt soon rose to control the entire US fleet, and he never even graduated from High School. His career has spanned over half a decade, during which he has acted as advisor to such alumni as Richard Nixon, Oliver North and Mike Tyson, and 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, My Lai Was Just a Blip and Become a Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, Walt is the Puumaja Crew's personal realization and fulfilment coach, whatever that is.

Walt has just returned from a trip to Europe..

Hello all, Walt here, I'm so glad to be back in the land of the free following my trip to the old country - Europe. The whole thing was a mixed bag of experiences I have to say.
First of all, the sheer poverty of the place. It's just everywhere. From the moment I got off the plane at Helsinki Vantaa airport, I could tell I'd arrived, if not in the third world then the second and a half world at the very least, from the tiny little cars to the  puny, emaciated kids, to the safe houses for Islamists to the criminal income tax rates and 'free' healthcare.

Struggling to find a McDonalds at the airport, all I had to make do with was something called 'Hessburger', which my wife Betty pointed out to me, sounds more like 'horseburger'! So I had to make do with an inferior European burger, not for the first time. Sure, the Europeans are big on their street cafes, at least in the southern part of the country, but many of these are just one offs, they're not part of a syndicated chain nor do they have any desire to be. Losers. The ingredients are these so called 'natural' products, made by, no doubt unwashed, hands, over an unacceptably long period of time, and it was difficult to find anything which contained corn syrup.

Many of the folks just don't seem to want to smile at you or wish you a nice day, either. I was treated with great rudeness at one of the hotels I stayed in in either Germany or Ireland, I don't remember which - they're so similar, and was asked curtly to 'please fill your name and address here and the porter will take your bags to your room'. Not a meaningless platitude or toothsome soft focus smile in sight


Then we get on to the legendary European cowardice. From the French resistance museum to the memorial to the landing of the British paratroopers at Arnhem, all one big mess of retreat and counter retreat until, thankfully, we came in and single handedly restored the Europe of our forefathers (I'm of Welsh-Sorbian heritage and my wife comes from an old Icelandic-Algerian family).

Once, whilst we were announcing to the entire restaurant that we were from the USA, we encountered an example of the legendary European stinginess, ordering a 'family size' plate of authentic European buffalo wings, it came on a plate, with a knife and fork, and not a bucket and spade!

I'm not saying that Europe doesn't have its good points - it does: the antique churches, domestic animals runing free in the streets, the beautiful girls, just waiting and praying for an American GI with a poorer command of the English language than they have to come and whisk them off to Little Cliff, West Dakota, it's a place with real potential some day to produce something really valuable and long lasting instead of the motley crue of composers, philosophers, writers, inventors, scientists, musicians, actors and sportspeople they've been churning out down the years...but I know where I hang my hat, and it'll always be here...stick with the winners!

Walt.

Thought For The Day No. 42 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

'That old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind'.

Martin Luther-King

Travel Clichés

Some time ago I went on a writing course with a noted travel writer, who provided us with, amongst other things, a list of no-no clichés (see previous posts too)...

...so here are some of the most cringeworthy that you mind find in trave 'literature' - some of it might not even be directly taken from the canon of the Lonely Planet, Rough, and In Your Pocket guides and similar, but not much..

'snow-capped mountains'
'Majestic mountains'
'Lunar landscape'
'Narrow/winding cobbled streets'
'Perched on the hill/nestling in the valley'
'Like opening an oven door'
'Best kept secret'
'A land of contrasts'
'Where east meets west'
'The Athens of the North/Venice of the South'
'The real Borneo/Acapulco/Ulam Bator'
'In a time warp'
'Washed down with a glass of the local wine'

'Those wearisome adjectives of magnitude - big, great, vast, huge, tremendous, enormous, gigantic - which are nothing but emotive noises inviting the readers to do all the work. They are the plague of most travel books...'

...so there you go, I know some of our three  readers are budding travel writers and so hopefully this will have been 'food for thought' to coin another one..

New Flight Links To Tallinn

You will soon be able to get to (or escape from) Tallinn easier than ever; Ryanair are at long last hooking themselves up to the land of Kalev and, since the country is so small anyway, there is none of the usual landing at a disused world war one aerodrome a five hour journey away from the billed destination. They hope to shift 300,000 passengers per year through Tallinn airport, which will amount to a huge proportion of total throughput (for example in 2009, post downturn, a little over 1.3 million people, or rather 1.3 million passengers - some of whom could presumably be the same person travelling multiple times - went through Tallinn, curiously approximately the population of the whole country).

Thanks to the blue- and yellow-winged harp, Tallinn is going to be linked to Dublin, 'London' (acutally 'Luton aaiiirrrpawwt'), Dusseldorf, Edinburgh, Milan, Stockholm and Oslo, if any of those places grab you. Services start on 14th December (Dublin) though you're too late to have grabbed any special offers celebrating the event.

As if that were not enough, Sleazyjet are also upping their connections here, flying three times a week to and  from the laughably-named John Lennon airport in Liverpool, to join the existing Stansted service.

So now there's no excuse for the olds to not come and visit me...oh hang on, they're already coming next month...

With thanks to George Francis for drawing our attention to the news, via the Tallinn Property facebook page.

Remembering George Dawes

...he's not dead, was just reminiscing about shooting stars, here, and here.

Thought For The Day No. 41 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

In the absence of clearly defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.

Robert Heinlein

Can You Be Pro-Business And Still Be 'Alright'? - Seth's Blog

It's official - it's ok to be pro-business and yet not a heartless, polluting, labour-exploiting, cigar-chooing, call-girl patronizing shit, at least nowadays.

Check out this excellent post by my big brother Seth Godin. You see, paradigms have changed. Whilst minimum wages, environmental laws and the like USED to be something of a hindrance to business (when businesses were largely factory-based) this is no longer the case. This is because business needs people, first and foremost, and more to the point healthy, cooperative people, not downtrodden drones.

So unless you're in Russia or something, you can sleep easy whilst you vote for a business-friendly party (like IRL, in Estonia, for example) - they're not the enemy any more and you have an excuse to do the decent thing and chuck the Pete Seeger records at last!

History Of Estonia 101: Part Seven

Continuing from the last post...'

Of Palaces and Emancipation


So, from 1721 for sure, Estonia was a part of Peter the Great's Russian Empire, and continued to be so long after Peter. It was during this time that the Kadriorg Palace was built outside (then) Tallinn; named after his wife, Catherine I, it was not quite on the same scale as St Petersburg but employed an architect, Zemtsov, who'd been involved in the construction of the new city on the Neva. After Peter died in 1725 his wife showed little interest in visiting her summer home (which was still unfinished) and the palace we have today in fact dates from about a hundred years later, when Tsar Nicholas I ordered a drastic renovation in 1827. The palace gives its name to the surrounding district today.

Though the good old Swedish times were definitely over, many aspects of life continued as they had been. The two Duchies (Estonia and Livonia) enjoyed a relatively high degree of autonomy, in the same way that the Duchy of Finland to the North (a Russian acquisition after the Napoleonic wars) also did. A relatively progressive part of the empire, a trend that was to continue in the twentieth century, Estonia saw the abolition of serfdom in 1819, far earlier than in Russia proper, enabling the former peasants to own their own land or move to Tallinn or the other cities.

Nevertheless it was not all rosy. A disastrous series of crop failures in the early 1840s saw famine and epidemic (curiously almost concurrent with the Irish potato famine). Russian rule also brought a new religious denomination, Orthodoxy. There had long been orthodox people of Russian descent living in Estonia, most notably old believers descended from refugees who had refused to accept the reforms of Patriarch Nikon in 1666-1667. Now native Estonians could convert to Orthodoxy following the establishment of a bishopric at Riga. In a manner which only really resonates if you know anything of the Estonian character, mass conversions started in part due to the fact that the Orthodox church taxes were lower than the Lutheran ones, and upon the (no doubt intentionally spread) rumours that converts would be rewarded lands in return. Many disappointed peasants re-converted to Lutheranism when it became clear that this benefit was not to materialize! In this respect it could be argued that there was more freedom in Estonia at the time than there was in Sweden, surprisingly enough, where it was illegal for a citizen to convert to any denomination other than the state Lutheran church until 1860.

Unfortunately for Estonia's occupying powers, however, in a pattern which was to be repeated later on in Estonia (and in many places around the world) granting greater freedoms, far from placating demands for freedom, often has the reverse effect, and leads to more and more demands...

Kadriorg Palace in winter, believe it or not.