So everybody who knows me a bit will know that i am not particularly fond of all things white and liquid. basically i hate all white milk based products (except mozzarella cheese & ice cream) to the extend that i get physically sick just by being to cose to them or thinking about them. the stuff makes me literally shiver…

Now the dutch are particularily fond of milk! they seem to eat large amounts of cheese, produce one of the moost awful substances in the whole universe (‘vla’) and even think that it is ok to have a glass of milk for lunch (for adults!!). they seem to be so fond of all things milk that they commission art-works for public space that cherish diary products: on a playground along my route to work there is a giant milk-bottle sculpture. needless to say this thing used to give me the creeps every time i cycled past it. now some kind soul seems to have had mercy and has added a message that i can wholeheartedly support:

Still makes me wonder what the original sculpture was meant to say: kids in africa a worse off [ :( ]because they do not get a bottle of milk every day? and the dutch kids need to internalize this while enjoying themselves on the playground?

During Thursdays Anniek van Hardeveld memorial race i was doing a checkppoint (yes i know i am getting lazy and slow these days…) on the head of java island. The checkpoint was at the memorial for the employees of the N.V. Nederlandse Scheepvaartmaatschapij who had died ‘at sea or wherever on the shore’ while defending the ‘liberty of their country’.

The memorial is a rather simple one made from stone. It has a 3 meter-or-so high stone base on top of which there is a 3 meter high sculpture of a sailor gazing to the west (into the sunset? after his dead comrades? at Amsterdam central station?). The base of the monument is covered by plates of shiny black marble (or something like that). Inscribed in gold on these plates are the names of the employees who died between 1940 and 1945.

Now while waiting for the first racers to arrive i started to read the names and was stuck by the fact that every second of them sounded non-dutch to me (which of course is not strange at al as we are talking about sailors here who have always been a motley crue). Took me a while to figure out that i was in fact looking at the section of the monument that lists non-dutch people. that’s right, when they set up this monument these freedom-lovin’, injustice-hatin’ Dutch people decided not to mix then names of the Dutch people and foreigners who had sailed, fought and died together. Instead they decided to list them in separate sections of the monument, The dutch with first and last names and the others only with what seems to be their last names/nick names:

Now the monument was set up in 1950, and lots of people have argued that it was ok for the Dutch to be a little bit racist back then (like it was ok that the first thing the Dutch did after being liberated was sending troops to indonesia to make sure they could go on repressing the locals some more). Guess the times were indeed a bit different then, but the fact that nobody bothers to change this fuck-up while once a year an official delegation comes along to lay down flowers also tells a fair bit about our times. So this post is dedicated to the memory of:

alimin bin alisin, abdoelatip, asan, asikin, alidjojo, astro, adoel, ardjosari, ardjiman, assan, birhasan, boewang, darboes, dasoekie, djokomarie, doelsenen, doelmanan, djojo, djin, gani, haje, ahmat emery, jamin, kadir, ladin, mat, maodin, martalie, marliat, madani, matalie, mail, moein, martiman, moeljo, moebin, matalowie, mohamad ramli, maohamad moein, moekasim, moenawie, oesman, odder, noh, oesin, ossin, rabanie, ridoean, roen, saian, safie, sanoesie, saharie, sakiman, saimin, sarie, sarmadie, satie, seehan, seger, soek, soekie, soemo, soerio, tahir & tarip

(To me this also looks a bit like they ran out of space and decided not to honour people with names in the u to z range…)

So officially queensday is to celebrate the birthday of the Queen of the netherlands, but in reality it is just an excuse to wear extremely silly orange hats, listen to bad cover bands in overcrowded streets, buy stuff that you would not buy on any other day and most importantly to get really really drunk in public and embarrass the shit out of yourself (of course if you are dutch you wont find any of this embarrassing). In order to get drunk queensday-style you must absolutely do so by drinking beer from cans (only other thing that may be consumed in between beers is oranje-bitter).

The fact that queensday is about drinking beer and nothing else becomes most obvious on the day after, when the streets are littered with green beer cans and when the supermarkets that have been open during the previous day look like they have been looted by a mob that only had one think on it’s mind (beer?). Smack in the middle of the annual madness is the Albert Heijn super market behind the palace on dam-square in Amsterdam.

The following pictures have been taken when i went there for breakfast shopping on the morning after Q-D. Albert heijn never being shy to squeeze the last cent out of every possible chauvinist occasion had literally crammed a beer display into every unused square inch of floor space.

[Note that all pictures depict seperate piles of beer found in the store. I have refrained from taking shots of the piles from different points of view]

Have been going out in Amsterdam for the first time in what seems to be ages. went to a night called ‘labyrinth’ or something like that in paradiso. In the small room there is a quite prominent LED display which displays (no not the BPM count, that would have been like 10 years ago) but the noise level in decibels:

Now how silly is that? Are people constantly checking this and leave the room when the level exceeds what their doctor recommends? Are thy going to the DJ and asking him to turn down the volume to a specific level do they can have chat with their mates? Seems like the this whole idea that consumers have to make informed choices all the time (like choosing an electricity provider, or choosing for a call by call long distance provider) is getting a bit out of control. If you go to a club you get loud music period. If do not what loud music, or if you are concerned about the little hairs in your ears, well then do not go to a club.

So i got stopped for running a red light today while on the way from the dentist to work. The cop who struggled with reading my (dutch government issued!!) id card asked me at some point if i wanted to make a statement regarding the reasons for running the red light, to which i replied that id do run every second red light and that this happened to be one of them. She politely asked if i wanted her to write this down in the incident report which i confirmed. Unfortunately it turns out that my statement was a bit of a twisted description of my actual behavior: on the rest of mty rout e to work i actually ran all 8 red traffic lights that i came across…

[btw can someone explain me why the price for running a red light has suddenly doubled from €25 to €50]

Picture taken by Guido van Nispen before the p2p workshop at felix meritis last friday. from looking at the timestamps of the photo and the previous entry (all the way to the bottom in the white box) it seems that he has actually captured me writing the previous blog entry…

See the rest of the Guidos workshop pictures here.

Seems like everybody and her mother have bluetooth enabled phones nowadays. In the last few weeks i have had repeated pairing requests from unidentified mobile phones while working on my laptop in the Train. For the uninitiated, a pairing request is a precondition for establishing a connection between two bluetooth devices: The contacted party has to agree to ‘pair’ her device with the requesting device in order to transmit files, interchange data or use it as an input or output device.

Apart from this technical aspect the fact that a window titled ‘pairing request’ pops-up out of nothing on your computer screen also has a romantic connotation to it (though nothing is more annoying than not to find out who send you that request. This can distract you for the rest of a journey). Now all feelings of romance are immediately lost as soon as you see that the pairing request is coming from someone called ‘nokia6820’ or ‘K750i’ or even worse ‘RAZR’ or ‘ROKR’. how lame is that?

If you insist to harass others on the train with your mobile phone it is your first obligation to invest a little bit of time and imagination and give your phone a proper sleazy name. As an example i have renamed my phone from ‘K750i’ to ‘Luigi'.

One of the the most notable achievements of the Dutch in recent history has been the introduction of targeting aids in the men’s rooms in public toilets. The whole thing seems to originate from Amsterdams schiphol airport (having such a fine airport makes living in Amsterdam much more bearable than it would be otherwise). It seems that having a fly depicted in the bowl of a pissoir significantly reduces the amount of misdirected urine in such places (which is a good thing).

Another remarkable trait of dutch society is how closely Heineken has managed to associate itself with a) queens day and b) the national soccer selection without actually sponsoring neither of them. They have done this by launching high profile give-away actions in the run-up to queens day and important games of the national soccer team.

Now it looks like that the marketing geniuses at Heineken have started to gear-up for this years soccer world cup. Tonight i have come across a soccer-themed orange urinoir mat (the plastic inlay that is supposed to keep cigarette butts out of the water pipe) in a Heineken equipped Thai restaurant on Zeedijk in Amsterdam:

Seems like I have again underestimated the inventiveness (utter stupidity?) of the human mind. Hope i will make it through this summer without developing a serious drug addiction…

Have been on trains a lot the last couple of days. Since saturday i have gone from Amsterdam to Frankfurt back to Amsterdam and now i am almost in Berlin.

Since january i have traveld more than 43.000km by trains. Most of this has been within Germany some of it in Holland and i even took Amtrak from Boston to NYC. My bahn card wich gives me 50% reduction within Germany will expire in a bit over a month and that means that i will need to decide again if ill take a bahncard 50 or if i will go for the luxury of a bahncard 100 (which gives you unlimited free rail travel within Germany for a year and now even includes free public transport in more than 60 german towns all for €3250).

Economically it makes sense to get the bahncard 100 but only as long if i remain going from berlin to Amsterdam and Back three times a month. In other words it only makes sense if my life does not change much. Last year i did chicken out of buying the 100 because i did not trust my relationship or my commitment to my work enough to give both of them another year. Now it is a year further and i need to make this decision again (should have been smarter last year in the first place). I think i feel more confident this year…