People just aren't social enough, are they? Whether you walk thru a crowd on the street, walk past someone in the frozen dinners aisle, or sit next to a stranger on the plane... It's hard for these strangers to even utter a 'good morning', or a 'hello'. A Dutch poll showed that 63 percent of our population feel that random strangers they meet have to greet them.
A Belgian organization, Boodschap Zonder Naam (message without a name) think they have the solution. This week from Monday thru Friday, their 'agents' will be randomly walking around, and anyone who says 'good afternoon' to them will receive 25 euros. In fact, there are two 25,000 euro grand prizes for the persons who say it in the most polite way: one winner in Dutch-speaking Flanders, and one winner in French-speaking Wallonia.
I don't see the point. If I had to greet everyone I passed on the street it would take me at least fifteen minutes longer to get to each place I go to every day. Also, I can't walk into a grocery store without being greeted by the manager. Sometimes in the public transport system people take liberties that just drive me mad. I think people are social enough as it is.
Last Monday there was an interesting coincidence on Belgian TV station Canvas. First an episode of Australian satire show The Chaser's War on Everything, which was then followed by a British documentary from Louis Theroux. Both shows touched on the subject of the Westboro Baptist Church. You know, the Phelpses, America's most hated family, who blame all of the world's mishaps on homosexuality, and who disrupt the funerals of young Americans who have fallen for their country. The only family whose sheer rightwingedness is too much even for Fox News. That lot.
The Chaser gave a few links to their websites, and one of them intrigued me: godhatessweden.com. It's a piece of pure filth, and I don't recommend that anybody read it, but it got me wondering: does godhatethenetherlands.com, or indeed godhatesholland.com exist? The answer: no. At least not this past week, and not this morning. God hates Canada exists, as does God hates America, God hates Ireland, and God hates Mexico, but not God hates the Netherlands. I mean, we were the first country to give homosexuals full marriage rights, and we are one of very few countries where homosexual couples can adopt children. Doesn't Mr. Phelps know about it.
Still, I took upon myself the nauseating task of analyzing the hate sites, and came to this conclusion: the site God hates the Netherlands doesn't exist, because The Phelpses can't prove it. If he created the site now, he could not possibly prove that God hates us, and it would just make them look like idiots. On all the other sites, they call on natural disasters, and other instances from recent years when many people of a country have died, and in the case of Ireland there were the Catholic priests who did evil things to young boys, but what huge natural disaster, or even religious scandal, really hurt us, the past fifty years?
We've had our floods, but with hardly any loss of life. We have soldiers in Afghanistan, and we've been in Iraq, and even though lives were lost, the total death toll is pretty low. In the case of God hates Sweden they bring up the fact that 2000 Swedes lost their lives in the Asian tsunami. Dutch people too were affected by that, but the death toll was less than 10% of that of Sweden's.
Anyways, don't read their sites. It's just filth, pure and simple.
The Dutch police have to cope without their dogs for the next few months, maybe years. Apparently the use of police dogs in solving murders is an unreliable method. This isn't the fault of the dogs themselves however. It's the cops themselves who are to blame. Sniffer dogs are used mainly to prove suspects have been present at the crime scene at some point and have held the suspected murder weapon in their hands. The police are impatient however, so if a suspect looks innocent, the cops will manipulate the evidence so, that the dog will bark at the right time to get innocent suspects convicted. It's sad to see the many ways in which animals are misused by humans. All this has no bearing on sniffer dogs that look for drugs and explosives at the airports.
They couldn't stop talking about this on the radio, last Saturday. An Amsterdam newspaper, Het Parool, discovered that exactly 200 years ago yesterday, the French appointed Amsterdam the capital of the Netherlands. The newspaper called the Amsterdam city governments about the festivities that were planned, but there weren't any. They had simply forgotten about it. The centenary, in 1908 obviously, was celebrated in grand fashion. They're now looking for a new date in the very near future, to make up. Still, it's a good thing there were no festivities planned. The national soccer league came to an end yesterday, and two teams were still in the running for the championship, PSV from Eindhoven, and Ajax from Amsterdam. PSV won. If you know anything about the riots that surround European soccer you understand why it's better this way.
In other funny news that I learned about this weekend, an English woman applied for a license to demolish the home of the man who wants her house demolished because he wants to build a mall on the site. It would be funny if the license was granted.
A small item in one of the papers I read every day: the TV show Holland's Got Talent doesn't get the high number of viewers they sort of expect. Why? Because of its name, and strangely not because of the poor quality of the show. I would suspect the latter to be the case, but the paper insisted it is the name.
What's wrong with it? Well... Internationally Holland is a name for my country recognized probably far more widely than the official name, the Netherlands. The reason for that is that we have had a long and successful maritime history in this country, and those ships sailed from Holland. Holland is just a part of this country, and it consists of just two of the twelve provinces. Even though most of them will state, when asked in English, that they are indeed "from Holland", a lot of people from outside these two provinces (North and South Holland) feel offended when a TV show is called Holland's Got Talent, and so they boycott it.
I myself was born and raised in North Holland, but I usually choose to say I'm from the Netherlands. I don't have a problem with the word Holland per se, but I do have a problem with one of the main uses of the word in my own language. When you go to a record store -sadly there aren't a great many around anymore- and you're looking for Dutch music, do try and avoid any section with the header 'Hollands'. Good music in my language can only be found under the header 'Nederpop'.
What's wrong with music that's billed 'Hollands'? Why, everything! It's one of the most popular genres in my country, but you must have an IQ lower than 65 to appreciate it. The lyrics are too simple, often of a poor grammatical standard, the singers can't sing, the music sounds cheap, ... Still, it doesn't require too much of a brain to understand it, so it appeals to people.
It isn't just music. Every form of low culture in my country is billed as 'Hollands', and people are proud of it too. If ever I was wondering why this country produces such idiots as Geert Wilders with their unprovoked crusades against anything alien, now I know.
The Holland v Netherlands discussion is also a topical issue where my language itself is concerned. I have made the point before that the Dutch language is an artificial language. It was constructed from dialects spoken in the Holland and Brabant regions. Professors introduced all sorts of difficult grammar rules to make it even more difficult and to create a distance between the new language and the dialects it evolved from.
Dialects spoken in other parts of the Netherlands were neglected in the creation of the Dutch language, and so with the exception of the provinces of Flevoland and Utrecht, in each of the neglected parts there are movements to get the regional dialects recognized as official languages. Frisian, spoken in the North, is such a world away from Dutch, that it already has that status. Several dialects spoken throughout the east also have the status of language, under the unified banner of Lower Saxon. In the southeast the province of Limburg are bitterly struggling to get their dialects recognized as one single language, and in the southwest there's the province of Zealand that would like their dialect to become an official language.
Still, the whole Holland v Netherlands thing can be fun. I once convinced an American that Holland and the Netherlands are actually two completely different countries, that are at war with one another. The word Holland also comes in handy when traveling in America. In all the hotels I stayed in, many Americans asked me where I was from, and when I said I was from Holland their faces invariably lit up, only to look disappointed three seconds later, when I added: Michigan. I have such a convincing American accent, that it was sometimes hard for me to convince people I really was from that European country, and not from the town in Michigan, but it usually led to fun conversations.
Anyways, any excuse to get the show canceled will do it for me.
This is from a facebook application I've been clowning around with. It's called Graffiti. I admit straight away that I've done a poor job. Still, I think it's fun, and I've only discovered it last weekend. Also, I only have a mouse to work with, which I can't imagine to be the case for the many people who showcase their work. Hopefully, my artwork will improve over time.
One comment concerning the one in the middle: Texel is the name of the island where I was born, back in '80. Oh, and for the 99.9 percent of you who don't recognize it, the red bump in the top drawing should remind you of Ayers Rock, in Central Australia.
Blogwise it's been a slow week, so it's about time I came up with a new entry. Nothing new in my country that's worth mentioning. In my private life there were no more exploding lights, nor anything else worth mentioning. Oh yeah, I left MySpace... Well, technically I'm still a member, my profile still sort of exists, but I got rid of my dodgy layout, and posted a message saying that I left, and on the blog there, I invited people to report anything they could find, so I might get suspended.
What's wrong with MySpace...? Aside from the dodgy layouts? Well, how about getting the very same friend request over and over again, to be taken to the same profile over and over again, which links to a site for nude models, just with a new name every time?
I've taken all my social networking activities to Facebook. I have been a member there for months, and apart from a friend request from someone from Mexico I had never heard of, but who -judging by her profile- seemed sincere enough, I never received a single message that can be interpreted as spam. I will maintain a certain level of semi-activity on hyves.nl as well, because that's a Dutch site, and if someone from my country is looking for me, that would be the place.
I think it's easy enough to put a finger on the root of it all. Sites like MySpace, and MindViz -where I got suspended earlier- were originally designed for upcoming bands and musicians to find an audience, but before long of course, everyone who felt like it signed up, looking for an audience even if they had no skill whatsoever: the so-called MySpace-whores, who live there in great abundance.
Facebook, meanwhile, but also Hyves, were originally designed exactly for the purpose they serve now: social networking. People become members to keep their existing social networks in order, and they're not likely to be looking for new friends thru the site.
In other news, I discovered that a small part of the IP range that has been annoying me is actually related to the Snap.com plugin I have on my site. It's just their crawler making screenshots. The main reason why they produce so many hits is that they make screenshots for every moused over link on every page that has the plugin, but after awhile these screenshots are lost and need to be renewed. This doesn't account for more than 50% of the activity that has been going on, however, so my paranoia isn't entirely gone.
The person on the computer next to me is browsing ads on Marktplaats.nl, a Dutch site very much like eBay, and found the following: "Refrigerator with free dent". Which reminded me of the following examples I've encountered myself: * at the movie theater in the town of Purmerend they once sold me an ice-cream without ketchup; * at the street market in Deventer I once bought an apple pie and for a small fee they offered to throw in a few bees; * a one-year internet subscription with data limit for free.
A (vague) acquaintance of mine has been divorced for a couple of years now, and still, every year on their wedding anniversary, she sends her ex-husband an email. She looks online for pictures of gravestones, and she puts fifteen of those together in a four-by-four grid and leaves one space open. In the open space she writes: "Want to advertise here? Check our cheap rates."
Thursday evening I watched Pulp Fiction on TV, and suddenly... BANG... My light bulb exploded just a foot and a half away from my head in the eight o'clock position. Don't worry, it was a clean explosion: the glass was neatly separated from the plastic base with the wires and one of those green plates dangling out of it. The glass didn't even break. Neither did the power fail. Still for a moment or so, I just didn't know where I was, or what I was doing.
After the initial shock I flicked the switch to turn off the light, and replaced the bulb, which incidentally doesn't take any lawyers, or blondes. When I had the light back up I inspected the exploded bulb, and it said made in China. I don't know if it's bad karma, but just yesterday afternoon I talked to my mom about Chinese stuff, and let's just say I expressed a certain disregard for it. That's a very, very mild way of putting it.
Anyway, the light bulb I substituted is made in the Netherlands, so I'm counting on it to be safe. If it wasn't the light bulb, but a problem with the power, I'll know soon enough.
A baby must have lost a shoe. Just down my street, in front of the day clinic. It's been there for two weeks now. Kids are kicking it around and just leaving it lying there when they grow bored. Sometimes it ends up in the traffic stream, etc. Every morning, however, I find it neatly placed on the day clinic's windowsill, as if someone is obsessed with trying to keep it from harm. Still, why doesn't that person take it home if its preservation is so important. If I wasn't so intrigued, I would just drop it into the bin, also right in front of the day clinic. Oh well, before long the city cleanup people will take it away. Unless it's sitting on that windowsill, because they have no responsibility for that...
The Olympic flame has been on the news quite a lot recently, from its start in Athens to its arrival in Beijing before going on a world tour of five continents and twenty countries. I've heard that this will be the longest journey the flame has ever been taken on. Time for a history lesson.
So did the ancient Greeks have an Olympic flame, and Olympic fire, or anything like that? The answer: NOPE. So where did it start? Well, the 1928 Olympics were awarded to the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. The city didn't have a stadium, so the government was asked for some funding. The government, which in those days consisted of devout Christians, refused, saying that such sporting events went against the will of God. The stadium was eventually funded by donations from the public. When the Olympics finally came to town, the organizers wanted to make a statement toward the government, by choosing a Pagan symbol. They chose fire. The gas main was simply opened up, and the flame was lit. After the Games, the gas main was simply turned shut again.
And now the long journey the flame is taken on every two years... When did that start? Well, the Nazis were pretty pompous in their doings, so they invented it for the 1936 games in Berlin. They thought it would be a spectacular gesture. So... disillusioned, anyone?
April Fools Day again, tomorrow. Which means there will be another couple of attempts at fooling the general public. Our local TV station, RTV Enkhuizen, are in on it this year. It's not much of a TV station, by the way. Just written news, and photos, but it's an indispensable source of local information, and their photos are great.
Their April Fools Day joke? Well, they aired it yesterday. They said that a bunch of very rare dolphins have been spotted in the IJsselmeer Lake, which can be accessed directly from the sea. Because they endanger other fish, a decision has been made to kill them. The TV station appealed to anybody who does not agree with this animal cruelty to come to the ferry to Stavoren at 8 AM tomorrow morning. The ferry, which won't fulfil its normal schedule that day, will take the protesters to where the dolphins are driven to for the slaughter.
It's not unfunny, but if there really were rare dolphins in the lake, they would be protected by law from being massacred, and besides, it would have been all over the news. Probably even in Germany, France, and Belgium. It hasn't been. I do feel tempted to walk over to the marina tomorrow morning to watch whether anyone shows up, but I might have better things to do at eight in the morning.
Since hardly anybody seems to read the entries I post on weekends, at least not within five days or so, I thought I'd just blow off some steam this morning. I finally found out who or what is behind all the hits I get from Grass Valley, CA. At present their location is given as Washington, DC. It's a company called Performance Systems International, and according to most sources it's nothing more than a spambot.
It's been annoying me for a year and a half now, and for the past six months I simply kept their IP addresses out of my StatCounter visitor stats. I didn't know about whois, so there was no way for me of knowing who they were. Until yesterday, when I accidentally deleted their IP range (38.0.0.0 thru 38.255.255.255) from the list of blocked IP's at StatCounter. I finally found out the name of the company, and I immediately launched an investigation.
A simple Google search unearthed a myriad of people with the same problem. Now, if they simply crawled my new posts, I wouldn't have a problem with it. From the days before I excluded their IP range from my visitor stats however, I remember clearly, that they mirror my every movement on my blog, sometimes within 30 seconds. More often than not they mirror the movements of my visitors who come to my page via search engines and the JournalHome front page. I even read that their activity sometimes causes eCommerce sites with high traffic rates to run slowly. If at any given day 30 visitors find my blog I open a bottle of champaign, so there's no danger of my blog running slow because of PSI, but it's my wish to ged rid of them once and for all.
Another interesting explanation I read someplace, is that they might be working for the US government, spying on blogs in the name of the USA Patriot Act. If that's the case, let them chew on this: bomb * terrorist * president. If I don't get arrested now... Neh, the spambot theory is far more likely.
I'VE WRITTEN A SLIGHT RECTIFICATION ON APRIL 12, 2008
The Wilders movie is finally there... Rumors had it that the movie didn't even exist, but yesterday at 7PM Dutch time, Geert Wilders posted it online at Live Leak. During the evening it became impossible to watch it at full speed because there were millions of hits. Large clips were shown on TV news shows, however. The government were quick to condemn the movie, saying that there could have been no other reason for the thing to exist than to cause offense.
I don't know if that is what did the trick, but so far there have been no reports of serious violence from the Middle East, and certainly not from our own streets. Only the governments of Iran and Indonesia have expressed their outrage, although I'm sure a few more will follow.
The biggest controversies surrounding the film have little to do with Geert Wilders' condemnation of the Qur'an. To me, it seems like a half-hearted attempt at getting the message across with images the world has already seen. There really is no surprise. Geert Wilders just forgot to ask permission to use the Danish Muhammad cartoons, and he used a photo of an innocent rapper instead of that of a terrorist. As a result he already faces two lawsuits that have nothing to do with his message.
One Muslim organization have filed a suit against him as well, however, and the government have ordered an investigation into possible law infringements. Even if the movie doesn't cause the expected violence, it will be a costly affair for Mr. Wilders. Even without the lawsuits, he has already posted a message on the site of his political movement, begging for donations.
'Fitna', by the way, is pretty innocent, compared to what seems to be coming on Hitler's birthday, in a few weeks. Another Dutch politician has created an anti-Islam movie. Ehsan Jami came with a sneak preview, that showed the prophet Muhammad with his nine-year-old wife, walking to a Mosque. He has an erection, and plans to have sex in the Mosque. There's a swastika on one of the minarets. If 'Fitna' doesn't piss off the Middle East, surely Ehsan Jami's (apparently animated) film will.
The pedophile argument brought on by Jami doesn't really hold water, though. It was an age of pedophiles. Kings, Noblemen, and ordinary citizens all over the Middle East AND Europe had their wives at very young ages. I mentioned this before on another site, and got an angry email over it, saying that you have to hold a prophet to higher standards than that, but then, why shouldn't we hold Kings and Noblemen to those standards? They equally claimed they were appointed by God. You can't judge Medieval times by comparing it with ours. Besides, lots of people living today worship Elvis...
Dreaming of a white Christmas in the Netherlands? Not a chance. These days, in December the summer is still winding down. Now that spring has officially begun however, winter is stretching itself for a final roar. Since Saturday we're finally seeing some snow. It's not as if the snow is here to stay, however. The snow that falls in daytime melts as soon as it hits something solid, and the snow that falls during the night is mostly gone by 11 AM. Still, traffic's pure chaos. At one time this morning we had 555 miles of stationary traffic. That's the second biggest traffic jam in Dutch history. The record, over 700 miles, was equally caused by snow.
Like I said, the snow is mostly gone by the end of the morning, but as fortune would have it, I woke up really early yesterday morning, because my cat wanted to get in. I saw that everything was covered in an inch of snow, and as soon as daylight broke, I went on a stroll through the town and shot about 15 photos. Sadly, I still work with old-fashioned film, so I won't be able to post them within the next two weeks. When I do post them, I'll post a link to my Flickr album. And I will post an entry to draw some attention to it.
Every small town, even mine, has its local Einsteins. Ours gave another example of his wisdom just a few days ago. There was a charity march around town, involving children of a local elementary school. They were raising funds for an organization that tries to bring clean drinking water to remote villages in Africa, a noble cause I fully support. Each child was fitted with a backpack containing six quarts of bottled water, to give children a feel for the road many African women must walk to bring some water home. So far so good, but at the end of the march, the children simply poured out their bottles and that was the end of it. Great way of raising awareness for the importance of drinking water, isn't it? Also, with people always crying out, that our children are out of control, and that we must set good examples, what better example than this, ahem? Don't blame the charity organization, Simavi. Those organizations don't dictate the way funds must be raised. Local people come up with initiatives. It was some local Einstein, who thought the best way to end a march for clean drinking water, was to simply waste it.
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