Wednesday, December 11, 2019

WIKI TIKI WEDNESDAY - THE LATVIAN PRESIDENT



In this past Saturday’s ‘Saturday Night Live’, the cold open reimagined the recent NATO conference as being an international political version of high school.

There were four major guest stars for just this cameo sketch, including Alec Baldwin returning as Trump.  But the main three were Jimmy Fallon as Justin Trudeau, Paul Rudd as Emmanuel Macron, and best of all, James Corden crossing networks to appear as Boris Johnson.  Rounding out the cast were Melissa Villasenor and Heidi Fineman as Denmark and Norway aides respectively, Mikey Day as the Romanian representative, Cecily Strong as Melania Trump, Kate McKinnon as Angela Merkel (too over the top, IMO), and always solid Alex Moffat as Eglis Levits, the President of Latvia.


From Wikipedia:
Egils Levits (born 30 June 1955) is a Latvian lawyer, political scientist and judge who is the President of Latvia since July 8, 2019. He was a Member of the European Court of Justice from 2004 to 2019.

During the late Soviet-era he was a member of the Popular Front of Latvia and contributed to the declaration of renewed Latvian independence in 1990. He was Vice-Prime Minister and Minister for Justice of Latvia from 1993 to 1994 and ambassador to Hungary, Austria and Switzerland from 1994 to 1995.

He was then appointed a Judge of the European Court of Human Rights, a position he held until 2004. He finished second in the indirect election for President of Latvia in 2015 behind Raimonds Vējonis. Although an Independent, he was the candidate of the National Alliance. In 2018 Levits was reappointed a Judge of the European Court of Justice. He is married and has two children, a son, Linards, and daughter, Indra.  He published a book of memoirs in 2019.



For more on President Levits, click here.

The only flaw in Moffats’ performance as “the NATO guy at the Losers’ Table” was that he pronounced the name as “Eglis” and not “Egils”. 

But hey – he got me to look up who the Latvian president was, so I’m now smarter than I was yesterday. 

Television as a teaching tool…..


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