Joep’s wonderlijke avonturen When I first read Herman Heijermans’ “Joeps wonderlijke avonturen” (Jack’s Wondrous Adventures) I was pleasantly surprised for two reasons. The first was that it was by far not as bad as I had expected based on what little I knew from Heijermans, third hand knowledge I had about his play “Op hoop … Read More
Saw this in a comment at Engadget: Vista is Ballmer’s way of throwing chairs at people he can’t reach. (Explanation: Steve Ballmer is the CEO if Microsoft, who is known for throwing chairs through the room in Gordon Ramsay style hissy-fits. Gordon Ramsay is a bum-kneed football-pro turned cook who is known for his tantrums. … Read More
Here’s a scene from Heijermans’ Diamantstad (Diamond City). It’s winter and Eli has promised his family food. Having exhausted all possibilities of getting a job for the day, he decides to go and catch fish. On his way to the Amstel river he meets a kid he knows, who asks him what he’s up to. … Read More
I haven’t been hiking for ages. Part of that was because I was busy with work; and on top of that, I tore a muscle in my left calf right after the last job. Scary business, because I did not know what was wrong. I wasn’t really feeling pain, I just could not fully develop … Read More
Aletta Jacobs (1854 – 1929) was the first Dutch woman to complete a university education. She had to jump through a number of hoops to get where she got. First she had to get permission to attend classes at a polytechnic. Next she had to get the state’s permission to attend med-school lectures at the … Read More
Pictures I took in and around my office last April. Back then I didn’t think anybody would want to see photos of the remains of fish fingers, but today I saw an arty photo of a blob of ketchup on a sink on a blog that seemed to suggest otherwise.
There are three major e-book projects that make electronic books available for free to the general public in accessible formats (usually HTML, sometimes “plain text”). One is Project Gutenberg, an American project that does not limit itself to English. I am a volunteer there. The second is Project Laurens Jz Coster, named after the Dutchman … Read More
In the early nineties I helped write a couple of Sjors & Sjimmie comics. Sjors is a Dutch phonetic way of writing George; but the character is a spin-off from Perry Winkle, the adopted Buster Brown-like little brother of Winnie Winkle the Breadwinner. I am still going through some of my old stuff to determine … Read More
You can download design plans for the Sputnik, the satellite that kick-started the space race fifty years ago today, at the website of the Arizona Model Aircrafters. The plans exclude the instruments; these are perhaps left as an exercise for the reader.
Brian Flemming reports that the Youtube account of the Rational Response Squad has been deleted in response to false copyright claims by a creationist group called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries. The Rational Response Squad, an activist group of so-called New Atheists, had been posting videos that discussed claims by the creationist group. These videos included … Read More