As I was paging through some of the Estonian papers that Ragnar and Kristjan left behind, I stumbled across a Far Side cartoon in Estonian. Tried to find a web translator to tell me what’s going on but could only find dictionaries and I didn’t have the patience to piece it together word by word.
How’s your Estonian?
“Miks sa seda tegid, Biff? Ma tean k
We had a few Estonians in town this week to look at our web operation and exchange ideas. In addition to lots of interesting online discussion, Kristjan, who works for the Eesti Ekspress weekly newspaper, told us that he had voted in the Estonian parliamentary elections just that morning. He promptly pulled out a voter ID card with a chip in it that he passed around, explaining how we was able to log in on the Internet and securely cast his vote in the elections.
I guess this shouldn’t be too surprising. After all, these are the folks who launched a “singing revolution” to free themselves of Soviet rule. Since then, they’ve taken democracy and capitalist ideas and completely embraced them. When Lara and I visited Tallinn a few years ago, we were struck between the vast contrast between signs of the decaying Soviet Empire and the still-solid Estonian structures that date back hundreds of years.
Another interesting side discussion we had was about the Estonian language. It’s a difficult tongue, linguistically related to Finnish, and Ragnar, Kristjan and I were talking about whether Estonian would be able to survive in a 21st century where the world is contracting. A stock market burp in Shanghai rattles Tallinn and New York. How can a lanaguage with only 1 million native speakers manage to thrive and surive? I hope it does.
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— Here’s a link to Ragnar’s paper, the daily Eesti P
Those who know me well know that I have an unnatural affection for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish. This usually manifests itself late at night after I’ve had a few drinks, but I’ve also been known to indulge my Filet addiction at lunchtime. My most recent bout was during a 5 a.m. rampage in Las Vegas, but there was no Filet-O-Fish to be found. I had to settle for fried oysters. It wasn’t the same …
So it was with delight and submarine satisfaction that I found this story in USAToday about the birth of the Filet-O-Fish. Turns out, it was born the same year as I, and it was created to pander to Catholics who were trying to observe their Lenten rituals. Very cool. There even is a “Filet-O-Fish Facts” sidebar.