Walt Gleeson With The Story Of Tragic Dwight, 2

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.


Hi Walt here, with an urgent message for you...


Here everything has to go in soft focus, with some slow, mournful reflective, twangy guitar music of the type you got on that movie about the gay cowboys who were much better looking than more or less everybody...

"Ok now we've  got that in place, I'd like to tell you about Dwight....Dwight was born in an ordinary small town, in an ordinary state in middle america. Dad was a cop, mom stayed at home looking after Dwight and his two older sisters. But Dwight was different..."


Cue zinging sound that they make by sliding a piece of metal along the steel strings of an electric guitar

"Early on, when he was just short of his second birthday however, his parents noticed that he couldn't throw a baseball overarm all the way from the outfield, but rather just lamely tossed it in a kind of uncoordinated spasm worthy of on English gayman. Horrified at this affliction, Dwight's parents Brandylene-Jo and Seth, took him to all the doctors in the area and even went as far as New York City to find a cure, just to make Dwight a normal little boy".

Cut to Dwight's grandparents who explain that Dwight is a bubbly boy and full of beans, just to differentiate him from all other people of his age, and that all this means that he probably won't be a starter for the Kansas City Royals, though they'll probably be dead by then and not have to face the shame in the street; all this interlaced with a few finger-picked minor 7th chords..

Show Walt arriving at Dwight's home  in his cadillac and waving to the small child through closed window whilst puffing on a big cigar..

Cut to Dwight surrounded by older kids, playing a game a running round just to underline the fact that he is a normal little kid just like you or I and not some kind of freak as such.

"We ask you to help Dwight, and others like him, but especially Dwight (some of the other ones are black, for example) by sending a donation, as much as you can (but not less than 99.99 USD) to waltgleeson.com and make a little boy and his parents very happy by helping him to not still be throwing like a girl on his third birthday".

Music fades out and cheesy, soft focus family pic of everyone's plastic looking faces appears..

Help Me - I Wanna Be Un-PC For A Day...

Here at the PMC we're in a bit of a quandry, namely, we can't decide which side we back in the American Civil War of 1861-65 we should back.

Now, on the surface, this should be a no brainer, right? The North, obviously, since they were abolitionists. On the other hand, the South had a cooler flag (latterly, I think the saltire-based design came in towards the end of the war), more balls, and the Dukes of Hazard (and Lynryd Skynryd) onside...

...anyway, since the war was resolved (on the side of the righteous) one hundred and forty five years ago now, it's fairly academic, but we're still wondering if any of our readers are faced with the same, "it's-obvious-whose-side-I-should-back-but-in-any -case-I-fancy-the-other-side" dilemma. Perhaps you secretly back the nazis, hoping their far cooler Stuka dive bombers, Tiger tanks and Nebelwerfer rocket launchers would put pay to those pesky Americans, Brits and Russians once and for all. Or maybe you really take pleasure from the British government forces' crushing of the Jacobites at Culloden. Or alternatively you revel in the Conquistadores atrocities, or think that Sadam Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds and the marsh Arabs were right to hold sway, whatever it is, we'd like to know..

...mark your entries 'The Side That I Secretly Back In a War That Has Long Since Been Resolved, Even Though I Know They Were The Baddies' and there might even be a prize in the offing, for the best entry, who knows...

Thought For The Day No. 38 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

Just as a small fire is extinguished by the storm whereas a large fire is enhanced by it - likewise a weak faith is weakened by predicament and catastrophes whereas a strong faith is strengthened by them.

Viktor Frankl

NFL v 'Soccer' part two

This is part two of a post which began over a week ago and which we hadn't got round to completing, distracted as we were by the opening volumes of Churchill's volumes of Estonian history, but since then we've had a renewed interest, not least since Pittsburgh have gone three and oh (meaning they've won all of their first three games of the season, one of only two teams to do so), so let's pick up where we left off...

Scorelines
This relates somewhat to the variety aspect outlined last time, i.e. that American Football has a lot more of it. There is always a scoreline in the NFL. No doubt at more amateur levels, results might be either exceptionally low or exceptionally high-scoring, but in any event a draw/tie is so rare that it's worth commenting on (there has been a grand total of 17 in the NFL in the last 36 years and the last one came in November 2008 when the Philadelphia Eagles and the Cincinatti Bengals tied 13-13).
Compare that with some of the 0-0 thrillers that you get in soccer and have you losing yet another 90 minutes or so of your life...
Admittedly the scoring system makes a difference, there are several different ways to score in Amercian Football and most of them carry more than one point for a team's efforts, but that's just the point, don't make the method of scoring such a rare event that the world's population will have changed markedly in the time elapsing between each episode..

Supporters
I once went to a pre season game between the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Steelers, drank copious amounts of beer, shouted 'Pittsburgh dogs' numerous times (this was before I liked them) and the worst thing that happened was that someone looked at me. Compare that to mass crushings, burning stadiums and police cavalry charges, all for the sake of a little game...the English football fans are animals, make no mistake. Even since the 90s when the premiership went all middle class with people like David Baddiel pretending to like it, it still brings out the worst in human tribal instincts, as anyone who has been anywhere near England during their biannual summer embarassements in international competitions.
OK, football is played elsewhere, better, and not necessarily accompanied by the same degree of aggro, but England is it's home turf surely, and sets the scene as a kind of style barometer even as it fails to produce the goods on the field.

Commentators
The American game tends to have more than one (usually two) commentators (or announcers) covering the game itself. Not only this but they're often real experts, and former players of the game. Contrast this with the monotonous drone of Jon Motson or some other non-former-playing non-entity as he proceeds to mis-pronounce every foreign-named player one by one and regale us with a succession of utterly meaningless 'interesting coincidences' and facts, that England haven't won on  the second Wednesday of any November, whenever the manager has an 'r' in his surname etc.

Glamour
Let's face it, Americans are better than the rest of us. They are, as a whole. Yes, I expect you can find pretty sorry instances of humanity, and not just in the much-maligned trailer parks, but even the crap cities like Detroit could manage to be a fairly convincing backdrop for a police series, movie etc (or just compare Birmingham, Alabama with Birmingham, West Mids). Compare the broad, expansive nature of the people there with the little, little folk of  the Thames estuary or wherever - they even pronounce our place names in a less farty way when they're transplanted to sunnier and/or leafier climes (so it's War - sester, not Wooster). And without being unkind, a brief look at the Cheerleader roster of any NFL team that has them (they don't all, I assume the 49ers don't anyway) and compare it with the Sky girls...the difference is just pitiful.


There are other areas we could mention - the absurd payscales in the upper reaches of the English premiership, compared with the lower leagues (a player for second division Wycombe Wanderers had to make do with my one bedroom flat in the crap end of town that even I wouldn't live in, compare and contrast with 'Beckingham Palace'), the educationally subnormal level of the majority of Association Football players and their inane pundits that prevent them for making the connection between subject, verb and object, the list goes on....

...but we'll cut it short there, because it's not that important really, just some ideas now that we have time to actually have them, away from the dreariness of the round ball game..

Don't Rush To Place A Youtube Comment..

The dangers of getting something out of context - or of getting the full story - brought home to me in these two clips:

the  first, an acerbic Australian comic who gets heckled for being a racist and makes mincemeat of the heckler(s) causing them in the full glare of the scorn in the audience..

the second, an acerbic Australian comic who plants a couple of people in the audience for a wind up.

I saw the first some time before the second. Always get the full story..

Thought For The Day No. 37 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

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

One should never strike a woman, not even with a flower.

Hindu saying

Estonia v. Lithuania

Having lived in both countries, people sometimes ask me what the difference between Estonia and Lithuania is.
I tell them "Latvia"...

History Of Estonia 101: Part Four

Since the PMC has been going for some 60 years here in Estonia, during which time we've seen such comings and goings as the regaining of independence, the imminent introduction of the Euro, and the Beatles concerts at the Lauluväljak, we feel fully qualified to present this, a multi part set of posts on the history of Estonia which will appear, now and again as we're given time.
There's unlikely to be anything new for Estonians, who therefore don't need to read on unless they want to check we're not peddling complete mistruths. The sources are likely to be the usual internet sites such as wikipedia and any links that arise therefrom, but this should save the reader some time in finding all this stuff themselves, the one or two books we have on the subject, and maybe the occasional word of mouth stuff.
You might also want to check out our posts about a year ago now, on the Estonian language.
At the very least we hope to dispel any misconceptions of Estonia being a slavic speaking country, being located in the Balkans or being a place with a lot of stones (although this last is in fact true)...

Part four: Of Bishops, Knights, Castles and Kings

After those pesky christians started arriving in large numbers and spoiling everyone's fun,  from the early thirteenth centrury, things started to get particularly hard, not least for the hapless blogger who simply wanted a nice resume of Estonian history and now regrets this series of posts which seem to have taken on a life of their own and which noone's going to read anyway.

The country lay divided loosely between the Danish north and the German south, via the crusades of the Livonian, or Sword Brothers, order for most of the thirteenth, and the first half of the fourteenth, centuries. It would be misleading at this point to think in terms of the modern day Estonian state or that the nation's occupiers were trying to construct the modern day country of Estonia (and exactly the same would apply to contemporaneous France, Germany and most of the rest of Europe). This is medieval Europe. Lands were held as fiefdoms which could cut across linguistic and other boundaries. People didn't even have maps in the modern sense and the whole of the Baltic region was an area which had been up for grabs in effect since Pope Celestine III declared a free for all in 1193. You can read any motives into it that you like, and draw your own conclusions from the fact that the Third Crusade to the Holy Land which had ended only the previous year had failed in its objective to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. Lands covering all of the modern day Baltics, the Kaliningrad exclave and parts of Northeastern Poland were all affected.

The 'Duchy of Estonia' comprised the Danish, northern half, which was comparatively short lived so we'll deal with that first. Despite a series of Danish raids on the islands off the west of Estonia going back to the twelfth century, these were not a component of the Duchy.

Lyndanisse (modern day Tallinn) came to be known as 'Reval' and a bishopric was established here by the Danish King, Valdemar II in 1240. Most of the lands were in fact held by German vassals, with Danes and even a few Estonians making up a small minority. The Danes did have some ambitions in expanding eastward against the Votians, once a regional power and closely related to the Estonians, after going to war with the Novgorod state but this came to naught.

As is so often the case with foreign occupations, it was turmoil at home which led to the ulitmate downfall. The death of Christain II of Denmark led to divisions in the Duchy between the pro-Danish and pro-German factions (the latter held much of south Estonia, remember). The Estonians were not slow on the uptake, and in July 1343 the St George's Night Uprising saw wholesale massacre of German settlers, churchmen and the like, and an equally brutal suppression by the German Teutonic order, a far more professional unit than the Livonian order, who effectively took on the Danes' bad debt in the form of the Duchy of Estonia. Actually the Teutonic order were confusingly renamed the Livonian order after absorbing the remnants of the Livonian 'Sword Brothers' following their annihilation far to the south at the battle of Saule, in modern day Lithuania, but we'll stick with the Teutonic appellation for simplicity's sake. One of the last battles on mainland Estonia happened in a location in present day Lasnamäe, which will raise a wry smile to the face of anyone who knows Tallinn.

The last stand was in fact made on Ösel (Saaremaa) which after much to-ing and fro-ing, fell to the Germans in the winter of 1345. The Danes were in fact recompensed by the Germans, some 19 000 Köln marks for the mainland territories, however much that was, it sounds like a lot, although they had to apologise to the Pope for giving up so easily on a territory which had effectively been gifted them by one of his predecessors and which they'd promised never to relinquish.

In fact that wasn't the last of it; Ösel/Saaremaa came back into Danish possession over two hundred years later, in 1572, having been purchased from a German Prince, until 1645 when it was ceded to Sweden. More on that in a later post...

Meanwhile, South Estonia came to be a part of the state of 'Livonia', named after the order of knights (see above) after the papal legate William of Modena said so. This state incorporated most of modern day Latvia as well, and coexisted with several bishoprics, including that of Dorpat (modern day Tartu) and the sprawling Archbishopric of Riga, though not always peaceably, with civil wars blighting most of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, along with the troubles arising from the vacuum left by the departing Danes. As noted, with the obtaining of the Danish lands to the north, two important Hanseatic towns (Riga and Tallinn) came into German possession.

Ultimately, the Teutonic Order went the same way as the Livonian Sword brothers, again at the hands of the Lithuanians, at least in part, following their crushing defeat at the battle of Grünewald by the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth in 1410. The Livonian Landtag was formed in 1419 to resolve the continued bickering and sat at the modern day town of Valga/Valka, then as now on the boundary between Latvian and Estonian ethnic lands. This remained the status quo for the next few decades, until the next chapter in our story and the arrival of a new regional power or two..

Part three is here...