James’s Blog

The recent news about the riots in Tallinn is a little depressing. From this video footage, it looks to be mostly riled-up young men destroying stuff, as usual. The Russian government response pisses me off. The Estonian Prime Minister has the proper response to Russia:

We don’t consider it necessary to hold deep discussions with the Russian authorities over the internal affairs of Estonia.

It annoys me when big countries with influential culture can be so insecure and feel the need to mess with neighboring small countries, like the Chinese with Taiwan or, to a lesser extent, the Americans with Cuba. It’s the 21st century; stop the world domination game already.

I’ve added some nice pictures from Tallinn, from a more peaceful day, during my trip there in summer 2005.

I’ve been avoiding this since the creation of this website, but I’m going to begin putting some old travel pictures (prior to summer 2006) up on the web. It’s for bragging rights, and also for keeping track of some of the details that I’m starting to forget.

I’m beginning with Madrid, Spain. An anecdote: I ate lunch at the Santa Ana Plaza, and took the following picture.

I was very excited to see the NY Times Travel Section mentioning the same locale a few months later.

(Denis Doyle for The New York Times)

I found this hawk on campus today, near Wells Hall. Looks like it is a ferruginous hawk. It was trying to catch a squirrel, albeit unsuccesfully. The hawk seemed a bit languid, probably because it was too hot. It then decided to hunker down in the shade, let me come pretty close, and gave me plenty of time to snap lots of pictures. See more in the gallery.