Something I never realized until earlier this week. When you find a wounded owl in your Dutch backyard, you can't take it to the vet straight away. It's a protected animal. You have to take it to the police first, so they can check whether or not you're guilty of its wounds. Only after that you are free to get it the veterinary attention it needs. The owl could have died during this bureaucratic diversion...
An interesting piece in one of the four free daily fishwraps we have in this country. Up until a few years ago, and this used to affect the income of at least three people I know, when you were disabled and couldn't work, the authorities simply said, hey, but you can still fold eggrolls. If the victims didn't apply for that job they would lose substantial parts of their benefits.
The fact of the matter was, however, that in this country, only a handful of people were actually needed for the job, and on top of that, it was a job that required tremendous skill. You would not only have to be able to neatly fold eggrolls, but you'd have to be able to kep an eye on 21 pans that were cooking at the same time. If a disabled person actually were to apply for the job, they wouldn't stand a chance.
Fortunately all this is over now. The biggest producer of eggrolls in this country, Beckers, have fully automated the job, and all the living souls it takes now is a maintenance crew. With the machines they produce 700,000 eggrolls a day.
The eggrolls I am talking about, are slightly different from the ones I have eaten in the States. Those ones (that I ate in the US) are referred to as "Vietnamese eggrolls" over here, and are cyilindrically shaped. The most popular eggrolls over here -we do love both kinds- are rectangular, and I believe them to be of Chinese or Indonesian origin.
Yes, we have it too, in the Netherlands: a smoking ban in bars, restaurants, and clubs. The ban commenced yesterday. It's nothing new of course. Many other countries have such bans in place. Still, knowing the country I live in, the coming months could be interesting. Will the ban be upheld at all? I mean, we don't fight the use of certain drugs, slavery in the world of prostitution goes largely unnoticed, if you report the theft of items like laptops and bicycle the police laugh at you instead of taking you seriously... Why would they go from bar to bar to uphold a smoking ban? If the restaurant, bar, or club owner allows it, what can the police do?
On the other hand, there is such a thing as the militant non-smoker, who will try and stop anyone from even trying to light a cigarette. If enough of those call the police, they will have to show up at that particular venue to stop the smoker. I wonder who will win out, eventually.
Of course, small businesses are already busy taking legal steps, because this smoking ban will kill them. The slightly bigger establishments, however, expect to thrive under the new law. Their income is usually hampered by people who occupy tables all night drinking only one beer. The ones who smoke will lose the table as soon they go out for a fag, hopefully to customers who drink more than one beer. Anyways, those are the cliche expectations that were seen the world over, wherever the ban popped up.
As for me, I don't smoke, and I never did, but I'm not at all hostile to smokers. I don't mind if people want to smoke around me. I used to feel slightly different about smiking when I was younger, but then I saw a woman asking a militant non-smoker for a light, and he gave her a lecture that made my head spin. I felt my sympathy towards smokers grow right away.
To those who drop EntreCards on my blog: I'm going to change the way I drop my EntreCards. From now on I will ONLY drop cards right after I post new entries. I will continue reading my favorite EC blogs, but without dropping. The same goes for ads. I will only approve new ads when I have posted new entries. I also expect of you that you only come dropping your EC when I have dropped first. I know this will severely reduce my blog's traffic, but I'm not here to separate you from your money. I only need the traffic when there is a reason for it to exist: a new entry. I do promise that I will continue reading those blogs that I always read.
Mass hysteria. It's always an interesting phenomenon. Especially when it's crushed. This country has been in such a state for the past two weeks, and yesterday it was all over. Streets, stores, people's outfits... The color orange reigned supreme for two weeks, and some streets are still orange, but only because the garbage truck hasn't been yet.
The hysteria was caused by the successful start of the Dutch team in the European soccer championships. People called what they saw magic, and on Saturday the magic was all gone, and the team crashed out against a far, far superior Russian team. True, it's sad that we're not winning the tournament, but the joy I get from seeing the sheer disillusion far outweighs it.
Take the so-called "welpies" for instance. Those are small toy lions in the colors orange, red, white, and blue, that were given away by a supermarket (the same one that had the wuppies two years ago). They were very popular among Dutch soccer fans, and only last Friday the stores ran out of all 24 million welpies that were made. Saturday morning two women at their store in my town lost it completely when the store manager had to disappoint them. Right now you only have to go looking on the sidewalks in certain streets and you can find all the welpies you want.
I won't easily forget the kid next door either. After he came back from the pub with some of his mates he stood swearing outside the front door for almost half an hour. His parents probably didn't let him in until he changed his tune.
The best laugh I get however, is from the 100,000 Dutch people who all traveled down to Switzerland in support of the team. Only 20,000 of them got into the stadium, with the rest of them pressed together on town squares to watch the game on large screens, in temperatures well over 80 degrees, few public toilets, no hotel or campground accomodation afterwards, and a very poor performance by the team they sought to inspire.
The Dutch fans were unrivaled in their mass hysteria, mostly because other countries simply don't sell the hide before shooting the bear. They got what they deserved.
I'm a bit of a show off, well sometimes, and since someone asked me to go online to investigate the links between certain actors using the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, otherwise known as the Kevin Bacon Game, I thought hey, let's post an entry about what links me with certain famous people. The links used in the Kevin Bacon game, so are some of mine, are often very thin, but I promise you, that the final link really knows the famous person.
1 Paul Getty (British-American philantropist, died in 2003, known for the Getty Center among other things) - 3 degrees: My mom knows a Bulgarian-born chemist, who specialized in restoring paintings. In that capacity he was often invited to Paul Getty's home. Anecdote: Paul Getty (allegedly or I'll get sued) had coin phones in every room of his house to 'save money'. You could call from his home all you wanted, but you had to pay him for it.
2 John Lennon (the Beatle who was so brutally murdered in 1980) - 2 degrees / the other Beatles - 3 degrees: I have (or had, she passed away years ago) a Liverpool-born great-aunt who lived on his street, and knew him, and didn't approve of his ways. I've heard claims that if I were to go way past the six degrees, that the game sees as a maximum, that we are related through several marriages.
3 George Walker Bush AND George Herbert Walker Bush (not something I say with too much pride) - 2 degrees: On a cruise ship I talked to a fellow several times, who knows the two personally. He played a big role in both campaigns for the presidency of Bush the Elder, and had a picture of Young George with his baby grandson, and said he was very proud having it. Of course leaders posing with children is a proud tradition... I mean, Stalin, Hitl...
4 Gen. Montgomery, Gen. Eisenhower, Robert McNamara - 2 degrees: On the same cruise ship there was this former colonel I chatted with for hours. In World War II he enjoyed the company of several big-shot allied officers, first in Italy, later in Normandy. He was a career soldier, so later on he met several more important people. Among them Robert McNamara, who according to him was a complete idiot who single-handedly killed many thousands and thousands of young Americans by sending them to Vietnam.
So, anyone else who can stay within six degrees, playing this game? Pinoy and Malay celebrities do count.
As most of you know, I'm not doing my blogging from home, and as usual, here I am at the Enkhuizen library, which is a fifteen minute walk from my home. Normally, at this hour, 10 AM, on a Saturday morning there's already a lot of traffic from people who are getting their weekend groceries done, tourists, etc., etc. This morning, on my way over here, I saw two cats, maybe, and a handful of grocery shoppers. I don't think I've ever seen a Saturday morning this calm.
During the wee hours of the morning however, that was quite a different story. Drunks shouting, and singing, claxons, people pounding on whatever their delirium would have them believe to be musical instruments... The reason? We beat France 4-1 at soccer! What a game. Just a week ago, before the start of Euro 2008 polls showed that upto 78% of the Dutch fans didn't believe the Netherlands would make an impact at all, especially since we had been drawn into the so-called 'Group of Death'. This afternoon however, people will wake up more confident than ever, realizing that we have first beaten world champions Italy resoundingly, 3-0, and last night we beat the runners up at the last world cup. I say beat, I mean thrashed.
Now, the team are in the luxury position that they can now decide the fate of both teams in one more group of death game on Tuesday. Should the team intentionally lose to Romania, both France and Italy are out. I just read a German fan forum, and those German fans are begging for us to do exactly that, so that if the Germans reach the title game, they won't have to face either. Still, when it comes to soccer, who the hell listens to Germans?
Now for something important: herring. The new herring has arrived to the Netherlands just over a week ago. The herring is a fish, y'all know that right? This is an event of national importance in my country. The first barrels are auctioned off at Scheveningen, with the very first barrel fetching a five figure sum. I believe a hotel school won out this year. The first reports on the new herring suggested that this is the best herring in years. They weren't lying. I don't think I ever had herring that good. I've eaten four so far, and I'm planning on eating many, many more.
The day of first herring even has a name, Vlaggetjesdag, or Little Flags Day. There's more to it than herring, as you can read in an entry on another blog, that I sometimes read, Laane on the World. The link opens in a new window.
Another week without any new entries, so here's another weekend update. There isn't much to talk about, but I do have a desire to produce at least one entry a week. The only thing of any importance to me is the olive tree in my backyard. After seven years it is bearing fruit for the first time. The olives are already as big as the pickled ones they sell at the store down my street.
When the tree was first bought the salesman told us not to count on any olives to grow from it ever, but this winter I heard something on the BBC about the olive production of Great Britain, which has been really good for the past four years -thanks to global warming- so I had high hopes. And olives we have. I think I'll try a few this weekend. If anyone with tips on making olive oil without the necessary equipment reads this, a comment would be more than welcome.
In other news, Euro 2008 kicks off tonight. That's the European nations soccer championships for the Americans who read this. I predicted the 2006 world champions Italy correctly, and wasn't far off with predicting success for Sri Lanka at the cricket, so here are my tips for those who want to bet on the Euro: semifinals Germany v Poland and France v Italy, and in the final Germany will beat France. Should you win anything, I shall be happy with a five percent share.
Normally I'm not a fan of all these people filing lawsuits over stupid things they did, that warning labels didn't warn them about. As a manufacturer you can't think of everything, nor should you be forced to. Here's one however who asks for it.
On the late night talkshow Friday Night with Jonathan Ross (BBC), a device for tired drivers was demonstrated. It's an earpiece, that will emit a high-pitched sound when you lower your head, so that if you're dozing off you immediately wake up again. Now, there's a danger to that too, you could be startled by the sound and make a sudden sharp turn or something to that effect, but that's not what inspired this entry.
Apparently it says on the label that it's suitable for drunk driving. I would love to see the first inebriated driver causing an accident with this device on his or her ear, who tries to sue the manufacturer. I do not condone drunk driving, but I'd love to know how the judge would rule. I doubt that they dare putting this claim on the label in America, but I would especially love to see an American court rule on it.
From something about my country that sucks, to something I'm truly ashamed of. We have a pedophile party in this country. They tried to get into Parliament at the last general elections, and fortunately failed to raise the 570 signatures required to get on the ballot. You would think they would have learned their lesson, but they haven't. This week they presented their program for the next election, hoping this will get them on the ballot.
With the new program the Party of Neighborly Love (that's what they call themselves), they are trying to get rid of the pedophile label. Last time around, their program revolved around legalizing consentual sex between adults and minors as young as twelve, this time around their program is based on all sorts of items popular with many different groups. They want our country out of NATO, and the EU, porn shows on daytime TV, stricter rules for testing on animals, a ban on certain weapons, but also the legalization of holocaust denial. Make no mistake though, they still want the consentual sex thing, and they want to legalize the private ownership of images showing the abuse of children.
Anyways, their entire program is unimportant. They exist and that's enough. Still, they're an outcropping of the freedom of speech obsession that started with the murders of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 and of Theo van Gogh in 2004. It'll be hard to get em banned.
The past few months I've been part of a discussion, on and off, about the quality of Dutch beer. I was the only Dutch person involved in this argument, mainly thru emails, so I had some explaining to do, as we all agree, including myself, that Dutch beer sucks. It sucks big time. We have some decent specialty brew, but if you go in for a Dutch lager, there's something wrong with you.
I had to come up with a theory of my own, as Heineken, Amstel, Grolsch, etc., did not allow me to witness their brewing process. Well, I didn't ask, really. Anyways, looking at all the evidence I did find, this must be how they do it. From restaurants that have big industrial dishwashing machines they buy the dirty water, which is probably sifted to obtain a certain degree of transparency. Then they add artificial colorings (allergy risk!!!) to make it look yellow. For the alcohol, medicinal alcohol is used, and gas is added to make it bubbly enough for a white head. Does this seem about right to you?
It's not just beer where us Dutchies seem to be proud of a flavorless product. Our tomatos are just as bad. In Germany there's this joke. What does a Dutchman do, when he wants a drink of water? He eats a tomato. It's true. It's also a problem if you're traveling down to the south of Europe, where suddenly the tomatos do have flavor. You might not like them, and you'll have to go thru great pains to acquire a taste for them. It happened to me! After I finally learned to appreciate tasty tomatos, I no longer understood how I once liked Dutch tomatos. Fortunately, during the late nineties Italian tomatos became available where I live, so I never have to put up with the red Dutch waterballoons again.
I've devoted a few entries to a Dutch TV show called De Gouden Kooi, a reality show about ten people living together in an expensive house, being smothered in wealth, with the person staying the longest winning the house. The show was intended to go on forever, but due to poor viewer ratings (they actually were pretty good, so I guess any excuse would have done to cancel the show) it ended last week, with a winner chosen by the public winning well over a million euros. The guy who won, Jaap, a big man nicknamed "Terror" for all the stunts he pulled, first promised to the viewers that he would donate half of his winnings to charity. After he won, he kept all of it, saying that he wasn't born yesterday. Not someone worth remembering. I'll have to put up with his guest appearances on various shows for a few more weeks, and then it's all over. For Jaap, for the show, for the people who always talked about it within earshot. I never watched the show, but it does feel like relief.
I live in a country that is terrified of spiders. Along with Belgium we are the most afraid of those eight-legged creatures in the whole of Europe. The reason for that can't be the spiders that we have. We do have black widows and Australian redbacks, but those still exist in such low numbers that you won't encounter them. According to the research the reason for it is the fact that the Belgians and us are completely estranged from nature. Everything that is nature really freaks us out, if it sneaks up on us during our daily lives. I'm sure that those who go to places in nature are mentally prepared to encounter nature, but in our day to day existences nature scares us.
I too have a phobia, although it's not spiders that scare me. A few in my bedroom keeps me from waking up all itchy, so they really are convenient. The critters that scare me are ticks. Although I can't say I've knowingly physically encountered more than two in my entire life, they just freak me out. In both events I found them on my shoulder still looking for a spot to dig in, so they didn't even bite me. One good example of how they scare me, was when I was about eight years old. My grandad said he had just removed two ticks from his dog, and flushed them thru the toilet. For three years I had to use the toilet in very awkward position because I couldn't bring myself to touch the toilet bowl. Even now I'm no different about ticks, believe me.
I picked up on an old hobby of mine, this past month. About eleven years ago, at a time when I foolishly believed I could handle having over fifty penpals at a time, I had received so many postcards, that I started collecting them. After the year 2002 however, I started neglecting my collection. Then, about a month ago, I somehow ended up on a blog by a Macedonian girl who showcases her collection online. I offered to send her one, but left the choice whether she would send me one in return up to her. She told me she would, and that somehow woke up the collector in me. I started visiting two Yahoo! postcard groups, and the yield so far is a card from Hong Kong, one from Macedonia, and a multitude from Texas, with several more on their way. To think, that last year I considered auctioning off my entire collection of over 5,000 on Marktplaats (a Dutch member of the eBay family)...
It might just be the sunny weather, and I might just be paranoid, but I seem to have found a local audience for my blog. I at least suspect four people living in this town to have read my entry on those Belgians who paid people for greeting. I know none of these people, but if you look at the graph I have in my sidebar, with the cat, next to the long haired guy with the beard, which is a very good representation of what I look like, they might have recognized me. Anyways, there are these four aforementioned townspeople I don't know, but who keep saying hi to me on the street. One even waved in my direction from her car, with me being the only person there.
Oh well, I'm not about to acknowledge them. They could make themselves known to me, if that's what they're hoping to achieve. I won't tell them to get lost, without giving them a chance, obviously. If they're reading this too, they now know what to do.
A peeve of mine. It's something to do with the radio. Last night I was trying to listen to one of my favorite radio shows. Sadly, it was a clear night on a summery day, so several radio stations from Germany (NDR 1,2 and 4, WDR 4) repeatedly came thru to block out the radio station I tried to listen to for 15 minutes at a time. They do disappear for upto 15 minutes as well, but it became very annoying. I stuck with trying to listen to what I wanted to hear, because of those intervals when the Germans weren't there, but even then the reception is marred by their static. This happens on any clear night following a hot day, and it starts at 9 PM, and doesn't stop till 7 AM.
You know, if it had been a good radio station, I probably wouldn't have complained about it now, and I might in fact have listened, but NDR 1 which blocked out the radio show I was trying to listen to, is plain rubbish. They only pollute the airwaves with what are called schlagers, which is a genre that is rightfully ignored by any Dutch radio station you can receive outside a 10-mile radius.
If you want to have an idea of what I'm talking about, think the music of the song Jambalaya by the Carpenters, and imagine four word lyrics about love in strange places such as Tampica, Tahiti, sung by people who are wearing those creepy permanent broadly smiling faces. They could be anybody from teenage girls to Austrian body builders you would just as soon expect participating in some timbersports event.
To illustrate the intellectual capacities of the people producing this music, I say... music, here's something I saw on a German show which one fateful day preceded a movie I intended to watch. They interviewed this singer who had written and performed a song about the Californian town of Mendocino. He had never been there, just found the name of the town somewhere. The song was something of a hit in Germany at the time. 25 years later the singer went on a vacation to Mendocino, and at several bars he asked everybody who would listen to his first three words, if they knew there was a song about Mendocino in Germany. Whenever somebody had listened long enough to give the obvious answer, "no", he boasted that he had written it, performed it, and that it was a hit, 25 years earlier. And at no point during the interview he thought he was saying anything silly.
The creepy permanent smile I mentioned earlier isn't even typical only for this music. Germany have produced great movies about WWII, and they have pretty decent crime shows, but anything you see on TV besides these movies and shows, is marred by this to the point where nausea forces you to run to the bathroom.
Oh well, come fall the radio will be back to normal.
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.
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Currently reading: Go Tell It to the Mountain - James Baldwin Currently watching on TV: Tour de France
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The translation this generates is poor, but intelligible
