Waffle

We all know how much fun you can have with Lego. The other day I picked up a catalogue and frankly was shocked by the way they managed to remove the fun factor with neigh surgical precision. They now have a thing called Lego explore, for kids aged 2+. This is no Lego! These aren't building blocks, it's all prefab crap! They just added useless pegs to give parents the impression it's still Lego, it's become a design statement if anything...
And there are some very disturbing products they are coming up with. Take for instance this heavy truck. In the first place, what's with this Bob the builder-crap? In this day and age where nature conservation is the first thing our kids should learn, the most popular toys are of a guy who's best friend are a bulldozer and a cement mixer?! And if you look at the Lego heavy truck, take a closer look at the driver. That's one creepy mother! Unshaven, mean eyebrows, shades, evil smile! He's not there to save the squirrel from extinction, that's clear. Just look at the tires on that machine of his, not to mention the enormous exhaustpipe! Maybe the scandinavians are sick of their heating bills in winter and have created an evil plot to speed up world heating. Yeah, that's got to be it...

My studio-mate Marjolein has the coolest ringtone on her cellphone. It goes "Brrriiinngg". Like an old bakelite rotary-dial phone. This is what cellphones would sound like if they were made in the German Democratic Republic, and it's what they should sound like.

I need more emoticons on msn. I need a smiley that sticks it's tongue out not in fun, but in a genuine childish nasty way. I need an emoticon that flips the bird. I need a smiley with a cigarette. I need a smiley that looks demeaning. I need a smiley with drooping eyelids. I need a smiley that nudges and winks.
Am I alone?

You need to read Dutch to appreciate the fine work of Gudolf Bamboom, former approval singer and inventor of brunch prayers. But he's got his finger on the pulse of the times, oh yeah baby.

On Friday, I'll be on my way to England to assume Godfatherly duties at the baptism of my nephew Kyle. My brother emailed me to remind me that said duties include:

1. Springing for the baby's baptismal outfit; and
2. Buying him a present.

No problem (I think the unspoken part of the deal is that Kyle will spring for my headstone when I croak so I'll come out on top) except that being a confirmed non-parent myself, I haven't got a clue what to buy for a five-month-old baby. I've just been to the toy shop, and I'm sure that a giant Tigger plushie would at least make his mother happy (and if I were little, I'd love it), but the kid's already being brainwashed with Tiggers, Tiggers everywhere, so I'd welcome alternative suggestions.

Also, I'll need something to wear at the baptism myself. Of course, the baby will be the main attraction, but I don't want to show up either looking like a bum or upstaging the rest of the family. I've inquired after the dress code...

And my brother had emailed me earlier about some items he wanted me to pick up for himself. That at least will be easy...

Yesterday I was bored and frustrated and chained to my computer waiting for an important message to come in. To fill time, I did some trawling of my semi-regular blog bookmarks, and let things get to me that normally wouldn't get to me. I do think that selective blindness in political blogging is a real and widespread problem, but I could have been more civil about it, and I could have been more considerate and less snappish towards the people involved.

Besides, I can't really stand the heat myself. I do not court controversy; indeed I find it very stressful. And today is entirely the wrong day for me to deal with angry responses. I'll be traveling to Munster, Germany, to see my friend Kim who has been laid up following a car accident. Can't deal with heated debate right now.

So, sorry about the tone of my last post. Not sorry about the ideas I wanted to communicate, but I'll try to be more civil in the future.

Via Smilodon on IRC:

"Hey, what's up!"
"You'll never believe who's in Union Square right now"
"Anton Chekov!"
"Isn't that weird?"
"I don't know, I'd say he's around 65."
"Yeah, it's him, he has the beard and everything."
"Really? That's funny."
"Yeah, that's weird, well I think it was, I don't
know"
"19th Century you think?"
"I don't know, this is weird."
"Well, he's here."
"No, it's definitely him, It must have been the
1960's"
"It only sounds old because it's Russian"
"I don't know. This is weird."

I read all the way through Spike's rat mummification report without having to call Huey O'Rourke on the big white phone. I'm proud of myself now.

Warning: read the warnings. She's not kidding about them.

Inspired by my friend Kim's exhortation to "do something about the Egyptian darkness" in my apartment, and my neigbours' regular window-cleaning, I've cleaned my windows for the first time since the last century. I've also removed the net curtains (much needed for privacy; I live on the ground floor near a busy street) so I can take them to the dry cleaners' and put them somewhere conspicuous so I won't forget to actually do so.

To my shame, Kim's exhortation was made 2 years ago, and I first noticed the neighbours' window-swabbing last year. It's taken me that long to take action. I got a lot, I mean really a lot of grime off both sides of the windows and even though I haven't done a stripe-free job of it, I definitely get more light in. One more step towards making this place pleasant to live in again.

On the downside, people walking down the street can now see the appaling levels of disorganisation and messiness in my flat. I'd better do something about that. But not today, because I've been indoors for long enough.

Two Friends of ROCR are having their birthdays on Tuesday. Occasional ROCR colorist DFG turns 39, and Adam, co-blogger and writer of Dangerous and Fluffy, turns 25!

Have a good one, guys!

Continuing in "Heh, interesting", quick-link-and-blockquote mode until I'm feeling my cantankerous, nuance-free self again...

In a post from 2003, the wonderful Dsquared writes:

In English, the answer to the question "can you compose a haiku?" is basically the answer to the question "can you count?"....

And yet there are still people in the world who believe themselves to be showing off their intelligence and even, ye Gods, sensitivity, by attempting to "compose" haiku extempore. I've seen it happen in real life as well as on the internet (obviously)and in Simpsons episodes about precocious kids. It's horrendous. The fact is that, unless you have decided to adopt some restriction of English metre or rhyme, the haiku is free verse, end of story. The intellectual effort needed to fit the seventeen syllables is equivalent to solving crossword puzzles in one dimension. It's much less intellectually challenging a form than the limerick, for example; damn few people can write a good one of those.

How the hell did the haiku get so popular? I can only blame English teachers. Nobody, apart from a few freaks, Orientalists and other statistical anomalies, would have bothered with trying to import this form into English otherwise. Obviously, as with so many abstruse and foreign forms, Ezra Pound has to cop some of the blame for introducing the English speaking world to the bloody thing in the first place, but I find it rather difficult to believe that a single one of these 456 people has ever heard of him...

[snip]

If you're thinking of writing a haiku, don't do it.

His commenters then take the opportunity to torment him more, and one of them points him to an actual campaign against joke haiku:

If I had a cat, I'd be doing this myself: posting pictures of my cat just to fill in some time. But instead I'll make do with cat pictures from The Religious Policeman who treats his readers to an overdose of adorable cuteness to tide them over during his vacation, but also manages to pack in a lot of information about the place cats and dogs occupy in Saudi life, and gets a chilling point across with one of his captions:

By the way, I cannot be traced from these cats. They are long gone.

By the way: while I agree with the point made about camels and think it applies to camel drawings as well, this should not be seen as an excuse for writers to work camels into comic scripts. So be warned, Geir Strøm.

Work went well today. I may soon have time to jump on the "commenting on Michael Moore" bandwagon. Yes, I know it's on the opposite end of the cuteness spectrum from baby kittens, but brash ping-ponging between aesthetic experiences is a big part of what ROCR is about.

Today, I finally got a taste of Barbara Stok's Chocolate Beer. I'd heard conflicting reports about it, but because I didn't go to the Stripdagen in Haarlem, for which this beer was brewed, I hadn't had the opportunity to taste it yet. But Barbara recently received over a 100 bottles from the brewer, so she invited Jeroen and me to try it out.
Strangely, I share part of the credit, or blame, for this limited edition beer being on the market. Six or seven years ago, I found some bottles of an English Chocolate Ale at a liquor store in Groningen, and bought some. I mentioned this to Barbara on the phone and invited her over to give it a try. It turned out that this product, whose name I've long forgotten, was a pretty good brown ale with a strong aroma of chocolate and a solid brown ale taste. It was also pretty filling if I remember correctly. Not bad at all, but it was an expensive import and I never found any more of it anyway.
When brewer Jopen approached Barbara about marketing a theme beer for the biannual Stripdagen convention/festival, she thought of our chocolate ale experience and suggested a chocolate beer. The brewer ran with this idea and came up with a white chocolate-flavored Weissenbier - very different from the stuff we drank but promising nonetheless. It's a change from previous two editions (out of three), which were heavy beers tailor-made for hard-drinking cartoonists. This one is only 5% vol., sweet, with lemon more present in the flavour than chocolate.
The bottled version, coming in 3/4 liter containers with a champagne cork, is very different in taste and appearance from the same beer as served on tap at the festival, as a result of it still fermenting in the bottle. And boy, has this stuff fermented! There's a biochemistry Nobel to be won from researching this beer. Opening the bottle resulted in a spray of froth. Pouring it caused the first glass to be filled with nothing but foam. The next two (small) glasses from the bottle developed a large, solid head that looked a bit like baking dough rising, with an endless flow of CO2 bubbles rising from the bottom, visible through the clear liquid.

The final third of the bottle on the other hand was much more opaque and quieter, but with no visible dregs. This suggested that, even though it obviously wasn't safe to shake the bottle, the beer should have been shaken before pouring to homogenise it! The bottom of the bottle smelled and tasted much stronger too. There's a Physics Nobel waiting for the person to resolve this dilemma.

As Weissenbiers go, Barbara's Stripbier is pretty good. Maybe a bit too sweet for my taste (like the only American Weissenbier I've ever tasted, Celis from Austin, Texas), but nice, nonetheless. I liked the extra fizz in it - if soft drinks manufacturers made their products as sparkly as that, I'd drink a lot more soft drinks. And the bottle itself, of course, is a must-have for fans of Barbara's comics.

I'm going to experiment with putting some of this in pancakes. Should be fun, and maybe explosive.

Note: The site linked to above is in Dutch so international readers may miss out on the fact that the thumbnail on the right of that page links to a larger picture of the label.

Found this little fellow in a gift shop on a tour to Sterling. Sadly, he wasn't for sale.

This fellow may have been the model for the character of Jean-Pierre

I recently found out what had become of the chickens that used to have the habit, during the summer, of coming into my backyard at 6 AM to wake me up and steal my berries. Their owners, who live in a squat nearby, are preventing new chicks from being hatched so the flock is dying off naturally, and I'm afraid it's happening rather fast (at least I don't think the squatters kill and eat the adult chickens. There are always some people in a squat who object to that sort of thing).

Right now there are only two roosters and three hens left. I'll be sorry to see them go. I'd got rather fond of them (except at 6 AM).
On the plus side though, more berries for me, even though the growing conditions this year have been abysmal.

Crooked Timber's Ted Barlow would rather cook lamb than argue with Glenn "Isntapundit" Reynolds' latest bit of bollocks. Can't say I blame him myself. MMM lamb.

He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

The recipe is impossible to screw up and requires little attention. I usually make it for just two people, which means that I only cook two lamb shanks with the same quantities of vegetables and liquids. Since the skillet easily holds two lamb shanks, this is a one-dish meal for two people.

Lightly adapted from Cooks Illustrated.

6 lamb shanks (3/4 to 1 pound each), trimmed of excess fat
Salt
1 tablespoon canola oil
2 medium onions, sliced thick...

It looks like much of my incoming email for today was eaten by something or other. If I don't respond to a message you sent, it may be because I didn't get it.

And now I'm off to get annoyingly and belligerently drunk.

Completely contrary to my cycling post of two days ago I now feel like shit. I'd been trying like mad to work ahead to be able to go on a two-week sailing holiday, but yesterday evening I finally broke down and realised that I was driving myself around the bend to produce a page or more a day and get all my other stuff done, and that that was exactly the wrong way to approach a vacation. Plus I'd have to get straight back into scramble mode the day after my return. Fortunately I hadn't actually booked anything (yes, it would have been very last minute) so I could cancel it without worrying about the cost except in terms of embarrassment towards all the people I told I was going.

It was the right decision. I can tell because I felt overwhelming relief after calling it off. However, what with the pressure coming off so abruptly, I'm a bit demotivated and deflated. I'll probably lose a day's worth of work anyway as a result.

All is not lost, though. I have a much healthier buffer than I used to have, I've proven to myself that I can still work fast and produce decent ROCR pages (only the one I made yesterday is sub-par. Dunno if anyone else will notice but I don't like it), and I've been telling so many people that I'm interested in sailing that I'm sure opportunities to give it a try will come my way.

And I'm going to do other fun things instead. I'm gonna have fun, dammit! I'll go cycling a few more times, visit Geir in Norway (I'll book the flight this week, once I've coordinated with him. Thanks to my preparations I've found out that Basiqair operates some affordable Scandinavian services) go to parties and do my work and stuff in a relaxed fashion. Not as good as the sailing looked when I was thinking about it, but the cost in added stress will be a lot less.

A full report must, I fear, wait, but I was reading Henry Fielding's Tom Jones on the plane, and must quote a bit:

Allusions to this part are likewise often made in the sake of jest. And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your arse, for having just offered to kick his; for I have observed very accurately that noone desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another.

It may likewise seem surprising that in the many thousand kind invitations of this sort, which everyone who has conversed with country gentlemen must have heard, no one, I believe, hath ever seen a single instance where the desire hath been complied with. A great instance of their want of politeness; for in town nothing can be more common than for the finest gentlemen to perform this ceremony every day to their superiors without having that favour once requested of them.

Don't be surprised if you see a reference to this passage in Dangerous and Fluffy a bit down the line...

My new cycling hobby is becoming more expensive, not just in money but also in time and energy. I have bought a new saddle, a (very expensive) new tire, (trekker-quality) inner tube and wheel ribbon for the front wheel, a saddlebag and some repair stuff. This morning I went to work to install them on my bike, and contrary to expectations, I ended up without major injuries and with the bike in better shape after the procedure than before. I even got the saddlebag mounted the right way up on the third try!
Also I only did a modest amount of swearing during the time it took. Not nearly enough to cause those rain showers late in the afternoon, oh no sirree.

Is there no honesty left in the world?
A friend of mine is currently on a two month trip in Peru. Being tall, blond and by Peruvian standards very wealthy, you sort of expect people to try and rip you off now and again. This indeed happens quite a lot. Usually if you pay attention you can prevent being overcharged for every and all things. Still, she was less thrilled when her bag got stolen when she fell asleep in a bus...
But this is another continent! I live in the First world, Europe, the Netherlands.
Clean healthy living, surely you can expect not to get ripped off every purchase you make? Not so! Fixing up my racing bike, no doubt inspired by Reinders' bicycle adventures, I discovered I needed a new front wheel. Off I go to one of the main bicycle stores in Groningen and buy said wheel. At home I spend about an hour trying to get the tire around the rim and wondering why it doesn't fit. In between fixing a flat for three ladies passing by. Do I accept their reward money? Of course not! That's how I was raised, and in a society such as ours, I see no reason not to be kind and help a stranger.
The people at the bicycle store think otherwise. When after an hour I still couldn't fit the tire around the rim, I began to suspect it wasn't me bungling, it may just be the wrong wheel. As it was almost closing time I went to a nearby bicycle shop (yes, there is one on every corner here). "You've been had laddie!" this man told me. You've been sold a 27" wheel. It is an odd size and you'll be buggered if you can find a tire that fits it." It also turned out I paid twice the amount the wheel was actually worth. Ofcourse then it was too late to go back to the other shop, so now I'm stuck with an incomplete bike and I can look forward to do some shouting first thing monday morning. Yay!
Bastards...

They have nothing to do right now, so they swarm all over the place to eat sugary food, drink beer and pick fights. That's as normal a behaviour for wasps as it is for teenagers, but is it my imagination or are the little striped bastards more than usually annoying this year?

As a result of writing the trial sequence, I'm getting more interested in what actually goes on in the courtroom. So I enjoyed this report from The Volokh Conspiracy, unfortunately not well-sourced:

A small community in California passed a local ordinance prohibiting fortune telling within its city limits. A fortuneteller named Fatima Stevens brought a lawsuit seeking an injunction against enforcement of the ordinance... our Supreme Court granted a hearing.

As counsel for the fortuneteller rose for oral argument to present her case, Chief Justice Lucas said, "Counsel, you have us at a disadvantage."

The attorney was perplexed. "Why, Your Honor?"

"Well," said the Chief Justice, "hasn't your client told you how this case will ultimately turn out?"

(Volokh:)
On its face this was an irrelevant joke; but it was, intentionally or not, sending a subtle message that fortune-telling is indeed bunk, and that even the lawyer can't be taking it seriously -- something that would have dovetailed well with the city's arguments that fortune-telling is fraudulent and should be banned. Dangerous stuff for the lawyer. Here's how Mosk describes the lawyer's artful dodge:

[...] "No, Your Honor," he replied. "You must remember I did not consult my client for advice. She consulted me."

A judicial interchange worthy of Fafnir and Isolde Shieldbiter, methinks. Volokh reports that the fortune-teller won, by the way.

I personally only know American beer by reputation; I dimly recall that Budweiser beer was briefly in vogue among the beer snobs I hung out with in the late '80s, in the same way that American beer snobs pretend to like Heineken. I don't remember if I actually tried it. In a previous post, I mentioned a Texan beer that I found acceptable, but that's about it for my experiences with beer from the US of A.
That reputation that I know American beer by is almost uniformly bad, even among the most red-blooded, star-spangled patriotic Americans. The improbably-named Kihm Winship has a large archive of writing about beer and brewing, written over a 30-year period, that tells me why this reputation is justified and how America came to the point where the descendents of German, English, Irish and Scandinavian immigrants saturated the market with swill. That's a good thing, because it means I still won't have to drink the stuff to consider myself knowledgeable about it.
Winship's more recent beer writing (the two historical articles about the devolution of American beer are from 1975 and 1988) focuses on mostly local microbreweries in the Syracuse areas and new, different types of beer hitting the market. There is light at the end of the tunnel, it seems.

Sorry, Sidsel is moving house and I'm trying to catch up with my work. We may get ourselves in gear again on Tuesday. Meanwhile, enjoy this link reader Boreger sent me: Hauling cargo by bike.

Come to think of it, maybe we could have turned Sidsel's move into our Saturday cycling adventure...

Speaking of desirable things:
Exactly a month from now, on September 14, it'll be my birthday. I'll turn 33, so I'll probably be a bit sad. Oh, how I long for the days when my head was full of black hair and birthdays were the occasion to make up long, improbable wish lists that my mom would have to trudge halfway through town to even begin complying with!

Well I can't bring my hair back and after looking at pictures from those days I'm not sure that I want to. But I can bring back the joy of wish lists, thanks to Amazon! See my wishlist and if you're feeling kindly disposed to me for bringing you ROCR 3 times a week (or if you're a long lost friend who happens to be reading this after a google search), why not send me an item from it? It will make me less sad.

I'm not one to "ooh" and "aah" each time a see a cuddly toy. My bed is devoid of bunnies, tiggers and/or bears.
But these cre'atures are different! Down Under comic artist Timmeryn, creator of the Pantheon has in the past already shown to be able to bring life to comic characters with >papier maché. Not very cuddly and most likely annoying to sleep with...
Not so these lovable Rahballs, Fuzzyballs, Dragonballs, Wolfballs and Wee Tiny Balls! I've instantly fallen in love with these little fellows, and would like to add how refreshing it is to see toys, not made and manufactured in horrible sweatshops! Cuddles made with tlc! How rare it seems in these industrial times.
As much as I hate advertising, I do have to say: "Buy one! You know you want one! Support your artists!"

Trying to figure out which factors contributed to my lack of mental focus in the past couple of weeks, culminating in my bout of writer's block (which I now think I'm over, but who knows), I've decided to quit drinking coffee for a while. It hasn't done me much tangible good in recent years: I need two stiff cups in the morning just to function as a normal human being; the effect wears out after an hour or so leaving me feeling like my mind is a haze; and both withdrawal and drinking too much of it give me nasty headaches. It's an endless chemical balancing act.

Because I already had a headache anyway, I decided to skip coffee in the morning, and will do without it for as long as I can. So far, it's not that bad; the only effect (apart from the headache which is actually subsiding now) is a strong desire to crawl back into bed. But I might get a bit crabby in the next few days.

Quitting coffee is no fun at all. Even though in recent years I'd cut down to four large cups a day, (from 12 in the early 90s), going from those four to zero has been hell. I spent yesterday evening in bed trying to find a position to lie down in in which my head didn't feel like every brain cell was being ripped apart.

On the other hand, I felt well enough in the morning to go for a little run. Like I mentioned early in June, a knee problem prevents me from doing serious running, but today I got a bit further than the last time. We're still talking about distances in the hundreds of meters rather than kilometers, but doing as much as that without the knee bothering me at all is progress. It must be because the cycling has made me stronger.

Work-wise, the withdrawal is making it very hard for me to do anything, but a Floor script has been mailed out, 8 pages of Courtly Manners 2 are now colored (but not lettered), and the buffer for ROCR is not empty just yet. My holiday plans aren't looking too good right now. I still intend to go to Norway, but it will probably have to wait until September.

Hi! I'm Reinder Dijkhuis, and I'm a cafeinist. I'm trying to quit, but I fell off the wagon a few times during the weekend. I've been dry since Sunday evening though.

Seriously, my aim isn't to quit drinking coffee altogether, but rather to be able to do without it on most days, so I'm not that bothered by having a cup during Saturday's cycling or on social occasions. However, it does slow down the withdrawal process, so now I've got less severe withdrawal symptoms, but they last longer. I'm able to work, though, and in fact I'm producing comics at my prior rate of one a day again.

I've been reading up on caffeine withdrawal at the FAQs.org caffeine FAQ, which I really should have done before quitting. They recommend a slow cutdown, and warn that withdrawal symptoms can get quite nasty if you quit cold turkey:

Regular caffeine consumption reduces sensitivity to caffeine. When caffeine intake is reduced, the body becomes oversensitive to adenosine. In response to this oversensitiveness, blood pressure drops dramatically, causing an excess of blood in the head (though not necessarily on the brain), leading to a headache.

This headache, well known among coffee drinkers, usually lasts from
one to five days, and can be alleviated with analgesics such as
aspirin. It is also alleviated with caffeine intake (in fact several
analgesics contain caffeine dosages).

Often, people who are reducing caffeine intake report being irritable,
unable to work, nervous, restless, and feeling sleepy, as well as
having a headache. In extreme cases, nausea and vomiting has also been
reported.

Arr, well, here I am in Groningen, the Dutch town famous for having every other person who blogs here living in it. 'Tis a pleasant, quaint city, full of wide streets and very steep staircases, interesting little shops full of interesting-looking comics that I cannot read, farmer's markets, and rather a lot of sheep, from the cover of the Groningen Festival guide - I think that's what it is, anyway - to an episode of Skippy involving bearded shepherds and sheep dogs.

I think we're being followed.

Arr! So, day three of my stay in Groningen, and we haven't killed each other yet, even after making Tuesday's Dangerous and Fluffy. Always a good sign for collaborations, that!

Perhaps a sample is in order, in a size suitable for an MSN messenger icon:

Further informtion about that when I get home, as I didn't bring the cable I need to download the pictures.

But I digress.

Friday, due to me having to stay up late, was spent mostly with a slow tour around Groningen (Which has a statue of a naked woman with a sheep, a theatre festival whose prgram has sheep on it, and several sheep pastures just outside of town.), followed by a party with the artistic types in Groningen that included me,Jeroen, and Reinder with a rendition of "Combine Harvester". Twas fun, but I fear having to wake up at 4am to catch my plane left me unable to do much more.

Saturday involved the creation of the Chapter 2 opening comic of Dangerous and Fluffy (A peek into one of Gregory's comics), a look around Jeroen and Reinder's studio, (Reinder was working on a comic for Courtly Manners that included, in the background, a painting of Fiefelsfalsfaffel lying naked with a sheep, and a painting with two suspiciously familiar women... but I mustn't say more.), a trip to the Comics Museum, in which I suddenly realised that far too many absolutely superb comics were only available in Dutch, and thus I will have to learn it. Damn. I discussed my plans for early Chapter 2 of D&F with Reinder, and he discussed the Tamlin story to follow the Rite of Serfdom with me. Following this, we went to the theatre festival (with the sheep advertising).

There was superb fire juggling, delicious poffertjes (something like a spherical pancake, with alcohol drizzled on top.), and the completely unexpected sight of the piss-cross.

A piss cross is a way for men to urinate in public in a not-particularly private place. They stand just next to pedestrian paths, and block the view of the front three or four inches of the man from view when he stands at one of the four urinals

I didn't take the photo myself, they were in use and, frankly, the men using them were rather burly and bigger than me, and I didn't want to explain why I was photographing them urinating, so I found one online.

Following that, we went to the much-vaunted (and very, very cheap) nightclub, Vera, and indeed it was very nice, and had very good and inexpensive alcohol. Sadly, though, it was also packed with new university students, limiting the fun. Arr, weel! Next time.

After a good sleep, it was time for a bike ride with Reinder and Sidsel. I havn't ridden a bike in ten years, ever since my parents took me to a lecture on bike safety that took pains to teach all the children that if you don't wear a helmet, you could be very badly hurt or die.

They then refused to buy me a helmet. Ah, well. Happily, after a couple bike exchanges to get me the only bike in good nick, I was able to do quite well and keep up. My arse is very, very sore, though. Hopefully, that'll die down in time.

Arr! And, besides me interviewing Reinder, that gets me up to date! Until next blog!

-Adam Cuerden

Today, Sidsel and I went to Emmen - the longest trip so far. Emmen is 56 kilometers as the crow flies, but a bit further away if you're actually using the bicycle paths. We left at 8 AM, rode the first half of our journey in the morning fog which at some point was even denser than a month ago on our trip to Schiermonnikoog, and arrived in Emmen at noon. After attacking our food supplies with ravenous appetite, we paid a visit to the Noorder Dierenpark where we stayed all afternoon. I don't remember having ever been to any other zoos, so I can't tell how it stacks up against them, but on its own, it was an afternoon well spent. The feature that the zoo prides itself on in its website and brochures is the absense of barred cages and the comparitive freedom that most of the animals enjoy in natural-looking little habitats. Often there is not much more between the visitors and the animals than a low fence and a sign warning visitors not to lean over in case the kodiak bears or crocodiles devour them. Yes, visitors are treated as responsible adults here.
It is a really pretty, well-designed place too, although some displays needed repair. In fact, the only place where I thought there was a real safety problem was in the poison frog display, where the netting over the terrarium was broken. No problem for a responsible adult, but a child might want to pick up a pretty blue froggie and get a hand full of curare.
I liked the fact that one of the first animals visitors are likely to see are the gibbons; those are lively, tree-swinging apes who talk to their mates in sing-song voices and show little aggression between themselves. At any time of the day, many other animals will be asleep (or sleepy - the otters in particular had a very infectious yawn), and quite a few others will be vicious little bastards, so it's a good thing the gibbons set the tone. Also: a Dutch naturalist once said that the only animals that do any real aping are humans, and that was confirmed by the many imitations of the gibbons' call from the audience! By contrast, the zoo's hamadryad baboons are nasty pieces of work, fighting all the time over food and rank. However, if you look more closely, you can see the same belligerent individuals share food with their mates or comfort a baby caught in a fight. How very human.
I could talk about the zoo all day, and there's more to see than you can take in in a single visit, especially on a hot day such as today. We left at 5.30 PM, attacked our remaining supplies with a ravenous appetite, and rode back at six to arrive home at 10, covered in clammy sweat because the evenings are getting damper. The last hour and a half of our trip was in darkness, which was allright in the larger villages, but a bit hairy on some narrow, poorly-lit rural paths.
By the way, I rode a used Koga Myata touring bike which when new must have retailed at a price that competes with a decent used car. My parents bought it from a friend for my birthday; I didn't ask them what they paid for it for fear it would make me feel guilty. It's a great bike too, with perfect balance and a 21-speed gearing system that made it much easier to go fast. Sidsel, on the other hand, was on her old bike, so I had to restrain myself a bit.
Now, Sidsel and I are the sad wreckage of the man and the woman we used to be, which is why this entry is a bit shorter than most cycling entries. But I suspect that that is a good thing, really.

Lounging kangaroo, shot yesterday at the zoo in Emmen. I've got a technical problem with my camera that prevents me from taking many photographs. It refuses to switch off, draining the batteries in no time. This animal, at least, sat still long enough for me to put batteries in the camera, and its pose, lounging on its elbows, was irresistible.
The fact that it spent its day lying on its elbows, in the shade, proves that kangaroos' intelligence is superior to humans'. Me, I bicycled 120 kilometers that day.

It's a bit late, but I do believe it's about time I finish up the photo blog of the trip to Groningen! Naturally, I'll concentrate on what I managed to get photographs of, as I fear I forgot to take my camera to one or two places, but you can always read my original entry here.

I left quite early Friday morning, after spending some time hiding my monitor in my closet, unplugging everything, and so on. Hiding the monitor in the closet was necessary since all four of my cats like to perch atop it, and destroyed the previous monitor with a hairball...

Then I was off to the airport and away!

Once again he tried to keep it quiet, but he's not going to get away with it that easy! HAPPY BIRTHDAY REINDER!

I've been sitting on this knowledge for a few days now, and it's time I did the responsible thing. Remember when I wrote about Barbara's beer? I have now heard on the nearly reliable grapevine that the bottles of chocolate Witbier are liable to explode when stored at room temperature for too long.
I haven't been in touch with her about it (she probably knows about the problem) but pending reliable advice about it, it may be a good idea to keep the bottles chilled, and when you open them, open them with care, and allow the beer to settle for a while. It's a little more alive than beer ought to be.

Also via Boing Boing, Newsday reports on a new alternative lifestyle: Freeganism.

They're not homeless, and they have jobs. They call themselves freegans, and though some fill their fridges with food from garbage bins to save money, many choose not to buy food for philosophical reasons.

"Freegan" comes from the term vegan - a person who does not eat meat or animal products for health or ethical reasons. Freegans take it one step further by eating food thrown away by stores and restaurants, to avoid waste and limit their impact on the environment. They say that by not buying food, they're boycotting a capitalist consumer society that needlessly slaughters animals and harms the environment by mass-producing nonessential food, much of which ends up in landfills.

I have wondered myself on the possibility of getting food for free by living as a modern hunter/gatherer in Groningen, where many edible plants and animals can be found in the wild if you know where to look. I had not considered hunter/gatherering in the trash at stores and restaurants though...

Also, I'm not surprised that one of the people interviewed in the article is an entomologist. Not surprised at all.

(previous dumpster-related post)

So I added Chocolate and Zucchini to the blogroll. Mmmm, zucchini rolls.

Seriously, I've been wanting to do more cooking, and more non-routine cooking, for a while. There's a vegetable pie in the electric mini-oven right now; probably the last time I will use that oven, because as I was working on that pie, the little door started falling open and refused to stay shut. It's kept shut for the duration with duct tape, which is remarkably melt-proof.

Today's cycling brought Sidsel and me to Westerbork, in just about the only corner of my battered old map of the province of Groningen that we hadn't explored yet. A 35-kilometer trip to the southwest of the province of Drente, made longer by our unfamiliarity with the terrain. We spend a lot of time and added quite a bit of mileage hovering around and winding our way through Assen, Drente's provincial capital.

We didn't go all the way to Westerbork proper, by the way. Our destination was the Camp Westerbork Memorial Center. It was picked because it was simply a place to go, but having been there one can't help coming away without a strong impression of the horror of what went on there.

Shot by Both Sides never fails to deliver good snark:

Meanwhile, Mark Chapman has been refused parole after a "review of records". Clearly they didn't review any of John Lennon's post-1973 records, otherwise they'd have granted him an official pardon.

Jacques Derrida died yesterday. We threw a Deathday Party to undermine the hegemonic life/death binary but for some reason everybody was still kinda sad.

One of many "Bwa ha ha" moments to be had from the excellent Fafblog. Let's face it, everyone who has a blog fits the profile of either Fafnir, Giblets or the Medium Lobster (I'm a Fafnir - gullible, easily impressed and with poor long-term memory).

My gas company has just socked me with a bill for € 826! Luckily I have that much in my savings account, because I put it aside to pay taxes with...
Studying the bill, it looks as if the cause of this little surprise isn't me stoking the central heating up to sauna levels, but instead the fact that they haven't billed me for monthly payments since September of 2002! It was about that time that I switched ("green") electricity providers from the same company that provides the gas company to another, who - it appears - also do their billing through the old company. Yay for utilities market liberalisation. The first few months after that, I got two identical monthly bills each month for the electricity (of which I paid only one until the double bills stopped coming) but none for the gas. It seems that pay time has come today.
So, I've got it, I clearly owe it to them, but I'll be sad to say goodbye to it. Just when I was thinking about buying a flat screen for the home PC out of those savings.
It's not leaving me with a high opinion of the gas company's efficiency or the quality of their record-keeping. Of course, it's arguably atrocious record-keeping on my part as well, but that's not exactly news to me, and besides I don't spend millions of Euros on accountants and enterprise-level databases each year.

I also note that the new monthly payment starting this month is quite a bit higher than the last one. Admittedly, getting cable from them may explain part of the difference, but still, there's a second setback hidden in that first one.

Just as the radio reported that Halloween was already on the way out in the Netherlands, I saw some kids out trick-or-treating in inner Groningen, for the first time, ever.

None of them was dressed up as Jenna Bush's liver, though.
(hat tip to Pete Ashton for the link to 2004's Scariest Halloween costumes)

What I like most about Electoral-vote.com is that I can learn American topography from it. Once this election is over I'll be able to find Connecticut on a map. This will give me legitimacy to mock Americans for their lack of geographical savvy.