cloudsoup

First saw Grandaddy on Jools Holland singing Hewlett’s Daughter. Helen bought one of their albums, then another, then another. For a while I used a line from Under the Western Freeway as a sig line – it was, ‘everything beautiful is far away‘ – and we even made a detour through their hometown of Modesto, CA as sort of homage, playing ‘El Caminos in the West‘.

Beautiful songs – ‘What can’t be erased‘, released as a B Side to the fantastic, ‘The Crystal Lake‘, ‘Miner at the Dial-A-View‘, from ‘The Sophtware Slump‘ (sic), for example, is one of my favourites and Helen votes for ‘The Warming Sun‘ from ‘Sumday‘ (sic). I liked, too, their cover of ‘The Best of All Possible Worlds‘. And there was, ‘Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance‘, and so many others.

Now they’re splitting up. Everything comes to an end.

Stewart Smith created a fascinating video for ‘Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)‘. As Grandaddy said:

Jeddy-3 the humanoid was assembled in the kitchen out of spare parts. Before Jed’s system died he wrote poems. Poems for no one.

You can see Stewart’s page about the song and the video here or link directly to the .mov file here.

I use Firefox, generally. Here’s one place where IE wins – auto-detection of network settings.

When at home, both IE and Firefox connect through my wireless network because I don’t have a proxy server. At work, we use a proxy and IE auto-detection works; Firefox auto-detection doesn’t pick it up and I have to mess about with the settings every day.

I suppose my response now should be to try and make Firefox better. That’s the point, isn’t it.

Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, Talinn – the Estonians don’t like it

Estonian’s related to Finnish and, more distantly, Hungarian. It’s absorbed quite a few German influences over the years but it was still the only place I’ve visited in years where I had, basically, no clue how to say anything, even with an English-Estonian dictionary and phrasebook.

I read a recommendation that there wasn’t any point even trying to speak Estonian – most Westterners get the pronunciation so wrong they can’t be understood. Take the word for ‘thank you’ – tanon (I think). The ‘t’ is pronounced very hard with little aspiration so the word sounds like danon, as if you have a blocked nose – and I tried and I was still almost unable to persuade anyone I was speaking Estonian.

Nouns and adjectives in Estonian decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative. This is almost impossible for me, who stuggled in school with nominative, accusative, genitive and dative in German verbs, to begin to comprehend. The word for house changes depending on whether I’m going into it, leaving it, viewing it or burning it down.

Well that was interesting. More to come later but, briefly – Estonia, history of foreign control by Germany, Denmark, etc. Gains independence at end of WWI with help of British fleet, enjoys a couple of decades of freedom, then is occupied by the USSR, then Nazi Germany, then the USSR again.

Freedom attained after the singing revolution and a 600km, 2-million person human chain stretching across Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.

Long talk with old man in the City Museum who took us carefully through the 20th Century section. He’d lived through the Nazis and the USSR occupation and despised Stalin and Hitler and all their works.

• Hitchens on cartoons and the State Department
• Drinking from Home on police priorities
• Theo van Gogh, slaughtered, Ayaan Hirsi Ali under protection
• Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered, Ettore Capriolo, murdered.

Here’s one of my favourite Tom Lehrer songs, called The Vatican Rag.Mr Lehrer wouldn’t be with us now if it had been The Mecca Rag – he’d have been butchered by some fundamentalist fascist freak:

First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Do whatever steps you want, if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.

Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!

So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!

Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman,
Ave Maria,
Gee it's good to see ya,
Gettin' ecstatic an'
Sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag! 

I cobble together a verse comedy about the customs of the harem, assuming that, as a Spanish writer, I can say what I like about Mohammed without drawing hostile fire. Next thing, some envoy from God knows where turns up and complains that in my play I have offended the Ottoman empire, Persia, a large slice of the Indian peninsula, the whole of Egypt, and the kingdoms of Barca, Tripoli, Tunisi, Algeria, and Morocco. And so my play sinks without trace, all to placate a bunch of Muslim princes, not one of whom, as far as I know, can read but who beat the living daylights out of us and say we are ‘Christian dogs.’ Since they can’t stop a man thinking, they take it out on his hide instead.

Beaumarchais’ Marriage of Figaro, 1784

Travelling beyond the Eurozone make me a little edgy these days. It’s all so comfortable, popping over the Channel. No need to order currency in advance, banks everywhere, everyone accepting the Euro.

A couple of years ago we drove to Italy via the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Switzerland, popping into Germany on the way back. Only Switzerland retained its old currency but even then we could use Euros in the shops. That’s the holiday I drove over an Alpine pass while Helen was playing, ‘I can’t get over the Alps’ on her iPod. And when we drove past Interlaken while she was playing ‘Interlaken’ by the Alpine Stars.

So here, while it lasts, is part of our order of the Estonian Kroon, known as the EEK.

Fingers crossed there are banks in Talinn.