Trump Surnud

I met a friend in a cafe in Tallin.  He had to leave early,  leaving me with an hour before my hair appointment. I took the time to practise my Estonian and started to wade through one of the newspapers gathered neatly in a pile on a shelf by the window.  I started with the headlines.  The front page was easiest: Trump something,  it said.  I couldn't quite work out the word: it was in the past tense,  it was short.  Finally I found it in my dictionary: Dead. In retrospect I should have got the sense of the article from the photograph that covered most of the front page.  It showed Trump at his inauguration,  his blonde hair like a frightened snow fox on Ivanka's shoulder,  his head a vast bloody hole.  I assumed it must have been some sort of exploding bullet. I used my dictionary to piece together the rest of the article.  As he crossed the podium to sign in,  live on TV,  his head had exploded.  At first it was assumed he had self-combusted,  apparently not uncommon in Estonia.  Detectives soon realised he had been shot from some point about half a mile up and two miles away.  Possibly a hot air balloon or air ship.  The newspaper speculated it was a rogue Amazon drone. 

To check my understanding I read the front page of an English language paper.  It simply reported the inauguration had gone smoothly,  Trump had said some inopportune things,  the Bruce Springsteen tribute band was well received,  and in short Donald Trump was now president.  I turned to page 2 of the Estonian paper.  The first article reported that the number of guns an individual was now permitted to own had risen from one to seven. This was more difficult to check,  so I asked the cafe owner.  He said he had heard a report on the radio that morning.  The law had been changed to allow those with a firearms license to own up to eight guns.  Not seven.  He was going to register his guns that afternoon.

This was odd.  The difference between seven and eight is not large. However,  it is still a difference. I read another story.  This one reported that ID cards were to be scrapped in Estonia: they were an infringement on an individual's right to be ignored.  I asked the cafe owner again.  His name was Mikael.  He laughed and told me that they had just made them even more secure -  much more difficult to counterfeit now.  Which, he informed me,  was a shame.  I asked him how he knew.  He had seen it on the TV before he came to work he said. 

This was odder still,  and something to think about whilst I had my hair cut.