Tiny cat Moonster came to stay for a weekend in 2004, not long after I had started this blog, and due to all kinds of circumstances she never moved out. Even when I moved in the interim, she moved along with me. Last Monday, four years and five days later, she had to be put … Read More
I’m working on this project to get more street photos into Wikipedia, and for some reason I let myself actually be scared by the questionable politics of leftist blogs like BoingBoing and Making Light. When it comes to politics these sites are the left’s alternative to the right wing letters to the editor and e-mail … Read More
“A school for scandal?” asked the Telegraph. “All very pukkah,” assured BBC TV News. “Bizarre!” shrieked the Sun. Lately, people have been mentioning St. Trinians, a comic strip about a public school for very bad girls, which made me remember Your 64. Reading this dayglo magazine for teenage boy owners of a Commodore 64 at … Read More
Loads of people don’t feel like taking their unsold goods back home at the end of Queen’s Day, so they leave them behind for the garbage man. Dumpster diving! The stack of five on the right comes from going through the garbage, the stack on the left I bought, paying the sum of 2.80 euro … Read More
Happy discoveries on Queen’s Eve and Queen’s Day. Thanks to Natasha for pointing out the latter two. On Queen’s Eve I was at bar Festina Lente where The Lovers from Sheffield, UK, were playing. The bar has a bench outside with a bronze statue of a faithful regular guest. After the nation-wide Queen’s Day flee … Read More
In 2002 Jacqueline de Bruijn, a political scientist from Amsterdam, studied the way news from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reported in the Dutch press, and found out that the MSM tend to exaggerate the evil of the Palestinians’ violence, and play down the Israelis’ violence. I remember from that time that the press had a … Read More
Wikipedia uses more and more SVG graphics, the “open” “Flash” developed by the W3C. Somebody asked in a forum how to make a generator for SVG pie charts. I thought that probably would not be too hard, and tried coding one. And then I figured I might as well share the resulting code with the … Read More
The British-Dutch mega-publisher Reed Elsevier spent more than 3 million dollars in bribes lobbying fees in the US last year. What the publisher hopes to get back for this money? It probably won’t be a more balanced and more honest form of copyright. The US politicians that were bolstered by this “support” have been bullying … Read More
As you may know, I blog at a couple of other places too. One of them is 24 Oranges: off-beat news about the Netherlands in English. Somewhere around February, we hit a dry spot in the news. Nothing would come our way. I’d Skype Orangemaster, my co-conspirator, and ask: “And?” And she’d say: “Nothing.” And … Read More
This is from way back. Or, if you want a more definite indication: waaaay back. The bar was called De Pijp, and the time was around Carnival.