The Tallinn, Estonia airport has a speedy and stable wireless Internet network that reaches all the way from the terminal entrance to the individual airport gates. But the airport isn’t much bigger than a regular-sized Safeway in the United States. It’s this dichotomy that defines much of what I’ve experienced in the city of Tallinn – and country of Estonia – in the past three days.

Three days is not enough time to really “experience” a place. But it can be enough to get a good feel for a location – and enjoy your time while doing it.

When I booked my flight to this, the northernmost country of the former Soviet Baltic states, I immediately started hearing two things about the country:

• It’s become a party haven for young people from the wealthier parts of Europe, ever since the discount airlines such as EasyJet started flying here a couple years ago.
• It’s cold. Damn cold.

And in my three days here, I’ve learned that both of those things are true, except when they aren’t.

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The New York Times obituary today for President Gerald Ford included the byline of James M. Naughton, a former Times reporter and previous president of the Poynter Institute.

Naughton is still alive, but he isn’t a reporter for the Times anymore — and it reminded me about how obits for the big names are sometimes done ahead of time. Like, for instance, Naughton’s article included pieces from an interview he did with Ford before he died.

At Marketplace, we had a couple of radio obits of economists and business people, like this one of Milton Friedman who died in November but whose radio obit had been in the can for years.

And that helped me stumble onto a blog posting (also via Best Week Ever - Sierra?) about a great SNL skit about both Ford’s death, and pre-canned obits. Enjoy.

Gluhwein

Originally uploaded by ethanlindsey.

It is December, and here in Germany that means one thing: Gluhwein. An interesting, traditional German drink sold on the streets around Christmas, gluhwein is a variant of mulled wine.

Let’s be honest. Gluhwein is usually terrible, and sometimes even worse than that. But it is traditional, and in cold weather quickly warms the palate. Problem is, this year Berlin has been unseasonably warm, so the gluhwein is less desirable than normal.

Check out some pics of gluhwein, christmas markets, and Berlin in Dezember at my flickr page!

As per Wikipedia:

Glühwein is usually prepared from (not too expensive, sometimes outright cheap) red wine, which is heated and spiced with cinnamon sticks, cloves and sugar.

Three of the (five) Fulbright journalists in Germany turned up at the Deutsche Oper on Monday night to see the showing of “Idomeneo”, the Mozart opera that had been cancelled in September because of worries over Islamist terrorism.

(We even ran into CNN’s new Berlin correspondent, who we had met with earlier in the month at a Fulbright-sponsored journalism conference.)

I did a short piece for Marketplace (which I found out I had been assigned a full 10 minutes before the show started), and Michael Scott Moore did a great piece for the LA Times. We took different angles — expected, given that I was covering the show for a business show, and Mike wrote his for the opinion section. But, it still exposed the major differences between print and radio. I do feel like Mike had a veritable treaure of time (space, in his case) to explain his story. I had 1:01, and even that was 8 seconds longer than I had been assigned.

Oh, to be a print journalist:

But the whole point of the evening was a scene reviled by most of the audience. What we all thought of as kitsch had become indispensable. I wished Neuenfels had changed the scene to surprise us with some fresh outrage, but for the journalists and politicians, and for the opera itself, mounting the show as advertised was enough to make a world-resonating statement about free speech and Islamic terror. Which is odd, because the whole controversy, from the self-censorship uproar to the hordes of useless police, was a drama with no conspicuous villain.

My favorite news article of the day concerns the much-criticized owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press and her appearance in an American Journalism Review article that alleged as the newspaper’s owner, she threatened her own journalists with “discipline” and possible legal action, lest they speak out against her reign at the California newspaper.

What do you think News-Press owner Wendy McCaw’s response was?

A lawsuit, of course.

Per the Los Angeles Times, the attorney for Susan Paterno (the AJR author) had this simple response:

“Unless they revoked the 1st Amendment over the weekend, I don’t think they have much of a chance. (This is) a message to any reporter out there: ‘If you’re thinking of doing a critical story on this newspaper or its owners, you better watch out. We’ll do everything we can to hang you out to dry.’”

Which is pretty much the point, I imagine.

I just got a spam email for penis enlargement from an ‘Andrea Lindsey.’

When its Nigerian royalty or unknown chinese characters I don’t feel overwhelmingly connected to the spam coming my way — but when they use my last name?

As G.O.B. would say, “C’mon!”

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KCRW, one of the most unique and trailblazing public radio stations in the country, is heading into fundraising season in January.

Sometimes, it seems like every season is fundraising season for public radio.

And as a listener, as well as an employee, the pleading really does get to me. But it’s a necessary evil. And its hopefully convincing enough to get you off your duff and contribute.

But if you don’t want to sign a check or send any money, another option is to man the phones. As a one-time KCRW phone volunteer, I have to say that not only is it gratifying — but its fun. I do think public radio people share more than just listening habits. There is an NPR personality…and spending a few hours once or twice a year with others can be very fun.

(And, from my experience at KCRW, I have to say that you can eat some amazing food, get some free stuff, and feel like a do-gooder.)

Okay…back to regularly scheduled programming.

TIME Magazine awarded its person of the year, 2006, title to you. That’s right. To you.

Once you stop retching, you’ll get that they are trying to celebrate blogs (just like this one!!!), podcasts, and Youtube videos. But it’s an idiotic suggestion — and basically a cop-out.

Instead, I would jump on the bandwagon with TV Squad, which has an homage to the obsessive internet fanboy, and a well-justified one.

Does the following ring true to you?

Before the internet, geeky collectors of kitsch and useless information were relegated to underground freak status and this was detrimental to us all. For instance, let’s say it’s 20 years ago and for or some reason (drugs) you got a hankering for some information about the appropriately named 1983 TV show Manimal (about a man who could turn into animals). Where could you go? There’s a chance that one of your neighbors might be a closet Manimal freak with a room full of pictures, videotapes, and quite possibly the head of Michael D. Roberts (who played Manimal’s sassy friend Ty), but the odds are slim. Even slimmer are the odds that if you actually had a neighbor like that, he would be willing or socially able to tell you about his Manimal love. You, my mildly-interested-in-Manimal friend, would be out of luck.

Enter the internet! By providing obsessive fanboys with a comfortable interface (a not-judgmental-about-your too-tight-Wolverine-t-shirt computer keyboard) the internet gives fanboys the opportunity to finally share with the world all the hundreds of thousands of bits of useless information they’ve been collecting.

The first person who springs to my mind is Jedediah Mecham. Anyone wanna stick up for Jed?

We have a new world record.

Or maybe a new “not-of-this-world” record.

Disc (frisbee to the layman) enthusiasts have long competed for the longest flight record, or Maximum Time Aloft, mark. Currently the record stands at 16.72-seconds by American Don Cain in 1984.

But Cain may have lost his record mark to a Swedish man, Christer Fuglesang, who flew his frisbee for 20 seconds. One catch — Fuglesang is an astronaut, and he was in space at the time.

Fuglesang is a former national disc champion in his home country, and brought the disc into space to attempt to break this specific record. Question is whether the World Flying Disc Federation will accept the record, considering it happened in space.

The Sacramento Bee has a good summary of the new talk of a westside extension of the Los Angeles metro system.

The idea has long been intriguing and promising, but because of political manuevering by Rep. Henry Waxman and his Beverly Hills resident-voters, the possibility was killed in the 1980’s when the metro was being constructed.

As the Sacbee story recounts, Waxman’s obstinance is similar to how Georgetown residents, in Washington, D.C., successfully fought the construction of a D.C. Metro stop in their neighborhood, likely because of fears over a rise in crime and a drop in property prices.

Per the Sacbee, “Regardless of the cause, Los Angeles residents have been trying to rebuild their mass transit system since 1980, when they approved a half-cent sales tax for transit.”

Early plans called for a westside subway line that would have likely covered some of the same territory as as a subway to the sea. But some west Los Angeles residents fretted about the influx of outsiders and tried to block the proposed line.

A dramatic 1985 methane gas explosion along the subway’s proposed route did the job for them.

A Ross Dress for Less store employee unwittingly ignited a basement full of the odorless gas, triggering four days of subterranean fires that sent flames shooting through cracks in the street.

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, responded with a law prohibiting subway tunneling in the area where methane gas collected, effectively killing any hope of a westside subway line.

But Waxman, and the westside rich, have mostly dropped their opposition these days. So the extension seems like a real possibility. Stay tuned…

(HT: linkz, LA Observed and flickr, hexod.us)