On This Day 344 Years Ago

...some things are everlasting..
December 25th 1665: "To church in the morning, and there saw a wedding in the church, which I have not seen many a day; and the young people so merry one with another, and strange to see what delight we married people have to see those poor fools decoyed into our condition, every man and woman gazing and smiling at them."

Hilarious Xmas Traditions

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 glamorous part of the world indeed, and so is not at all out of place mingling with the glitterati of the Old Town where he hangs out on a Friday or Saturday night. He likes beer.
It's Christmas time, mistletoe and wine and so I thought that I'd ensure that I was worth every last penny of the fairly sizeable amount that the students have spent on my 'lessons' by finishing off term with a list of unusual, and really very amusing, xmas traditions from around the world. They must be true because I found the list on one of my colleague's desk, which was I think a copy of a copy of a copy of something from a now-defunct ESL website called "English language drop in shop" or something like that, I dunno I've never actually used the internet to put together teaching materials; my genius lies within the confines of my own cerebral cortex, ever able to come up with a dazzling array of explanations, games and anecdotes to keep them coming back for more (at least until the end of the course).
Anyway, here they are, brace yourself:

• In Luxembourg, children must skip anti-clockwise around an old, dead cat-sock (whatever that may be) before they can receive their present.
• Christmas is actually celebrated on 14th June in Kiribati. This is because it is in the Southern Hemisphere and, due to time zone differences, the day corresponds with 25th December in the Northern Hemisphere.
• A traditional Christmas dinner in England consists of turkey, cranberry sauce and, titter, mince pies, which aren't really pies at all, more like something like a giant jaffa cake.
• In Scotland, Christmas is called "Hogmanay" and culminates in the ritual slaughter of a pretend haggis.
• Instead of Father Christmas, children in Armenia can look forward to their presents being delivered by a spotty youth on a BMX.
  
• Due to a bye-law dating back to the regime of Oliver Cromwell, which has somehow been overlooked and remains on the statute book, the residents of Twickledrie in Southern Scotland are forbidden to celebrate Christmas.
• In Latvia, it is customary to drink Riga Balzams, an unholy concoction sold in strange-looking bottles, with holly sprigs.
  

So, looks like the final lesson's gonna be a laugh a minute.

Axe and Thou Shalt Receive

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.

I just had to tell you about something interesting that happened to me the other day. I was waiting in transit at the Hatfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta, when I noticed an elderly black gentleman sitting next to me reading a book. He was about my age, and I was just reflecting on how little we had in common, when he turned to me and said "you know, you want something real bad, all you godda do is axe. Axe and thou shalt receive".

This was undoubtedly the greatest meeting of minds in human history and the best piece of advice received by anyone ever, and naturally it just had to be yours truly Walt Gleeson. It's true. All you have to do is indeed ask and you will definitely receive everything you ask for. OK, God works in mysterious ways, and it may not be in exactly the way you anticipated. For example, you might ask for a Ferrari 355 in yellow and in fact receive a 355 page long yellowing copy of a biography of Lolo Ferrari, but that's just as good surely, so quit complaining.

It struck me just how far the negro has come since the bad old days of segregated buses, ad hoc lynchings and "no taxation without representation", I'm so glad that white people sorted out all the mess for them and we can all sleep easier now.

I realised that this message was sent to me for a reason, and that this man was, in a very real sense, working through me to reach my wider audience in some kind of synergy of binary-creative outputting with divine concretization.

I later beat a hasty retreat when I discovered he was a muslim.

Yo! Aksk!

Walt

I'm Not a Twat

Forgot just how great the Armando Ianucci show was. Ok his neuroses aren't quite as universal as I'd once thought, some things would translate well here in Estonia and others just wouldn't come up on the radar at all.
But it's perhaps the best stuff he's done, even more than the sublime Time Trumpet.

More Excruciating Clichés

Following my list of pet peeve clichés or unnecessary or overused phrases which can be viewed here, it's nice to see that others feel the same way.

This list focuses on the worst office phrases (by the way, why stop at 10?) but could equally be applied to everday life.

By the way is it a cliché to use the word cliché now?

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

Charlie 'Terminal' Moraine is a former special forces soldier who served in the legendary (especially since it's now defunct, along with most of the legendary British Army regiments) 53 Assault Reconnaisance Squadron in some of the world's hot spots (well they were hotspots if you were a special forces operative anyway) including Northern Ireland, Oman, Columbia at the height of the drugs war, and Chelmsley Wood in the West Midlands. The Puumaja Crew is proud to present, in serial form, his new book, 'One Of Our Boys Is Missing', covering his life story and over 20 years in the front line of one of the deadliest units since the Ottoman Janissaries.

Chapter two opens with Charlie's embarkation on a journey which was ultimately to culminate in killing loads of people, though nothing hinted at that yet.

So there I was, three months short of my eighteenth birthday, packing my kit ready for the trip down to Fedioukine Barracks, at Thrushingfold Depot in Oxfordshire. I had my travel warrant, sports kit, civvy clothes, and not much else.

The last few days at home I’d been doing a lot of reflecting; this is the point where, if this was on TV, a faded sequence of home movies would kick in - washing the car, with someone hilariously picking up a sud-coated sponge and throwing it playfully at another family member; my brother giving me a pummeling, then breaking off when he realized the camera was on him and hugging me and pretending we were the best of friends; one of my sister’s moodily slamming the door of her room in the camera’s face; no doubt the scene bookended with a fade-in of a jangly number by the Beach Boys or the Byrds.

But we’re not on TV and in the event it didn’t get much more sentimental than simply going out and getting lashed about five nights in a row. I was feeling a little bit unsettled, but I decided to repress this in the interests of playing up to what a hero I was and generally gobbing off about it. The last night came, to the pub as usual. I felt a bit guilty as my family had arranged a ‘going away’ dinner, which I proceeded to shovel down as I had an urgent appointment with John Barleycorn to get to.

The next morning, and with the mother of all hangovers, I did a final sweep of the house to check I hadn’t left anything, and felt my heart quite literally in my mouth, which made talking very difficult, as I came down the stairs and into the blinking sunlight, the taxi’s diesel engine idling, reminding me it was best to make this short. My mum and sisters presented me with an assortment of goodies - jam, books and the like, which I hid at the bottom of my bag and ditched before I reached the depot. I felt a few jabs of remorse, but the reality was I was going into the world of the military, a million miles away from the civvy world of jam and books, and I just couldn't risk the embarrassment of being busted as a secret reader. I did however find space for Quentin, my childhood teddy bear, and I'd even made him a little cammo suit. I had to keep him well under wraps though, and designed a secret compartment in my bag for the purpose - this was real contraband.

I'd like to be able to say that my father broke down when I left, chewing the flagstones in a display of abject anguish, and pounding his fists into the ground wailing 'why, why, why?' but in fact he just said 'good luck', and gave me a firm handshake. He was never one for goodbyes. But it was sad to be leaving the family fold, however dysfunctional they might have at times been, they were soon going to resemble the Von Trapps in comparison with the new 'family' I was joining.

All the neighbours turned out for my send off, and I felt like the most important person in the world, like Chistopher Columbus or someone, leaving for terra incognita. I reality I probably looked more like Christopher Robin, laden down with my little pack and sauntering off, naive, innocent, and with locks which were far too long and curly for my own good. As I shut the door of the taxi, I wondered when I'd next see them all again and how much I'd have changed (probably at Christmas and my hair would be shorter, and I'd be fitter).

The taxi pulled away, and, before I had time to warn the driver, shot over the give way sign at the crossroads at the bottom of our close, broadsiding into an early morning milkfloat, sending bottles full and empty crashing all over the place. The milk float driver was incensed, and in the ensuing argument between him and the cabbie I made my way back, feeling very foolish.

‘Come on I’ll take you’ my dad said – buying some extra time with the old man made things a little easier.

To be spun out some more...

If you missed the last installment, it's here

How to Stop a Kitten That Keeps Biting You

A vexed question indeed. I've found that keeping a big water spray thing, the kind that you use for ironing, to hand and giving it a blast every time seems to be working. Another ploy is to have a big tin of coins and shake it once, vigorously every time they nip you. The downside is if you don't have these cumbersome things to hand, and I don't always, and get it immediately you've been violated (or better still just before) the stupid thing doesn't seem to make the connection and just thinks it's being sprayed/rattled for no particular reason.
Good luck!

Origins of the Estonian Language Part 2

..see yesterday's post for the preamble..
As noted, old woman who swallowed a fly style, Estonian falls in the Baltic-Finnic sub-group of the Finno-Lappic sub-group of the Finno-Volgaic sub-group of the Finno-Permic sub-grop of the Finno-Ugric sub-group of the Uralic group of languages!
It's spoken in, er, Estonia, with emigre communities in the kind of places you'd expect to find them, by a bit more than a million people, and as a second language by a good couple of hundred thousand people from the "Russian" community in Estonia, plus, in tiny numbers, attempts at speaking it as a second (or third or fourth) language by those from other parts of the world mad enough to live here.
The language was standardised towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the South Estonian dialect (centred on the University town of Tartu) losing out to the Northern dialect (centred on the capital, Tallinn). Apparently there's still a strong difference today but I haven't spent enough time in South Estonia to catch it. There are also apparently strong dialects in the islands, notably Saaremaa. More than that, there are at least a couple of distinct, but closely-related languages, spoken largely or wholly within the confines of the Estonian border (both in the South East of the country in fact) namely Võru and Setu. I have no idea about these two.
As I have said, Estonian is quite closely related to Finnish, though the two aren't mutually intelligle. That many people in Tallinn can speak Finnish is largely down to tourism and the fact that Finnish TV could be received, presumably illegally, in the latter decades of the Soviet occupation, Helsinki being only 80km across the sea.
It shares the large number of inflectional cases as well, and the endings are similar, but not the same.
For much of its history, Finland was a province of Sweden, being ceded to Russia after the Napoleonic wars as a semi-autonomous grand Duchy, whereas Estonia came under the German orbit. Thus, German influenced Estonian (but not Finnish) profoundly, and Swedish much less (though there was some influence, especially in the islands where Swedish speakers resided until WW2. German lexis, paricularly concerning matters of governance, bureaucracy and the church, flooded the Estonian language and we still have many of them today (a few examples: "kirik" (church), "kraad" (degree, as in temperature), "plats" (town square)..).
The standardisation of the alphabet must have come a bit later than that of grammar; on visiting the bank of Estonia museum (more promising than it sounds) I noticed that on some of the early bank notes from the first period of independence (after WW1), twenty (viiskümmend in modern Estonian) was written wiiskümmend, i.e. using the German 'w' as a 'v' sound, and I'm told that the German double 's' letter was also used.
The unique letter 'õ' in Estonian, which causes problems for foreign learners, is something that sums up the language in general. Very difficult to reproduce accurately or even to distinguish from the more familiar "ö" sound. For instance, the Puumaja being located on Õle street, I'm constantly having to say "yeah that's what I just said" in response to corrections at my attempt to pronounce the street name. Apparently even some Estonians have a problem with it, most notably from Saaremaa where people, presumably due to the Swedish influence noted above, tend to default to the "ö" letter, much to the amusement of the rest of the country. This was lampooned in the film "Malev". In terms of its sound, the spoken language is, to the uninitiated ear, quite lilting and scandanviany sounding, though not as much as Finnish, and also has a certain breathy quality due to the high incidence of aspirated 'h' sounds (which I assume Russians have as much difficulty with as I do with pronouncing their 'kh' (as in 'ya khachoo') sound.
Despite the old stereotype of Estonians being slow, most people speak quite quickly, although sounds aren't run together as much as they usually are in English or Russian.
In general it's a very hard language to learn, exacerbated by the fact that people here speak such good English, though any efforts will usually be well received, and presumably something of a novelty, though the disappointing tendency, as in the other two baltic states, to be used as a pawn in the "these Russians who can't speak Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian who've been living here since .." gripe.
Now on to actually learn the language rather than pontificating about it...