You cannot be a better person, but you can be a good person.

* It started in September of this year. Labour party member Geke van Velzen, city councillor for Amsterdam, had just nicknamed the upcoming national government “Brown I”. Maurice Limmen of the Christian Democrats, the party that was about to collaborate with Geert Wilders in said national government, got indignant. He asked for and got the … Read More

I cannot remember the last time we had snow in November … a last time. It is so quiet outside, not a creature is stirring, not even a climate change camp guard.

A while ago I discussed moving from making pots of coffee to making cups of coffee. My famous last words then were: “Still haven’t bought a Senseo, though.” Well, the cups of coffee back then were made by making instant coffee, which sucks, because the flavour of instant sucks. I failed to notice that right … Read More

Blakes 7 What do you do when you want to review something, you know you like it, and yet you cannot express or do not know what you like about it? The past year I have been watching Blakes 7 on my laptop, a lot. (The name, by the way, ought to be Blake’s 7, … Read More

Maciej Ceglowski has an excellent piece on the failure of the Scott expedition to the South Pole: Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been conquered in 1747, when the Scottish physician James Lind proved in one of the first controlled medical experiments that citrus fruits were an effective cure for the … Read More

A.k.a. “learning to lie”. I am slowly getting to the point where I can see the good picture before I take it. The problem is I still prefer to tell the truth. And Zoetermeer train station is very ugly—a dreary place where the wind tries to get under your clothes and the grime manages. I … Read More

I had never seen polo being played live, and there was a tournament in the Amsterdamse Bos, so I went and watched the finals. I guess you can learn to like the sport if you start to understand it more, but I got bored and left early. The website had mentioned a dress code: smart … Read More

Last month I mentioned that I bought a new pocket camera, the Canon IXUS 300 HS (or Canon Powershot SD4000 as it is known elsewhere), but have so far failed to tell you much about it. In Europe Canon has two ranges of pocket cameras, IXUS and Powershot, where the former is aimed at those … Read More

Hush, I’ll let the work speak for itself: