So long Donny

Donald Rumsfeld resigned last week as secretary of Defense in the US and Craig - I would kill to have that accent - Ferguson of the Late Late Show bids him farewell;

Electification

As you may or may not know, the Dutch will hold elections on November 22 to select some people to pretend to run the country for what supposedly would be the next four years, but most likely will be six months (that is, if our current prime-minister remains in charge; in four years he managed to go through three cabinets).

About 30% of the voters are still unsure about who they will support, but seeing that I pay the Dutch Labour party (PvdA) 2 bucks a month (to.... ehm... get drunk?), it should come as no surprise that I will vote for their sorry asses, even though my expectation is they will lose (that is, not become the biggest party). That leaves just one question open; which of the 80 people on the list of candidates will I vote for?

Yes! You guessed correctly, after the amazing succes of the previous edition, it's time to once again play: Vote who Boris will vote on!

The rules are simple, theres a couple of candidates below, one reader one vote (meaning an expected total of at the most three votes) and the results do not in any way have to influence how I will actually vote. Here's my selected candidates:


Name: Wouter Bos
Nr.: 1
Pros: He's the big guy, leader of the pack, he's down with his homies (including those in da hood), he likes progressive rock, is a vegetarian but does not complain about it, to a certain extent he's quite funny, and lets face it; he's not ugly either.
Cons: Why vote for the nr. 1 guy? It's not like there's any question to whether or not he'll get in. Also, he can be a little over the top.


Name: Martijn van Dam
Nr.: 9
Pro's: his weblog is highly entertaining (well, as far as political weblogs are entertaining, lets be reasonable). also, his picture is even more Wouter Bos-esque than Wouter Bos' own pictures.
Con's: he studied something technical. which is probably why he's on hyves, I hear that takes a lot of computer skills to get on. like, you know, press the keys on your keyboard...

Name: Hans Spekman
Nr.: 17
Pro's: was an elderman in Utrecht for social affairs, and one of his claims to fame was helping immigrants the national government denied citizenship but did not have the interest of actually getting out of the country, by giving them shelter on the budget of the city - making sure mothers and children don't have to wander the streets is apparently a Labour thing too.
Con's: has been nominated twice so far for the Worst Dresser In The World award. So far he has lost, but he's confident he'll win it next year. Finger's crossed Hans!

Name: Roos Vermeij
Nr.: 32
Pro's: Studied history. Also, she's a woman.
Con's: She studied it in Leiden. Also, she's a woman.

Cast your ballots before November 20th people!

My Cat

... is missing. Or dead. Either is possible and neither is making me particulary happy. Yesterday morning, as always, she went into the garden but this time she did not return (or at least not yet, fingers crossed). It's essentially triple-sad (with extra chunks of sadness mixed through it, so that with every mouthful there's more than enough sadness to keep you sad) because my cat is both deaf and senile so she probably got lost, hit by a car (which is not extremely likely since nobody reported that to the animal ambulance) or died lying somewhere in the bushes. Option 2 and 3 are actually the least depressing, since the vet told my mom she'd probably have to be put down within a very short period anyway (the cat, not my mom).

Anyhoo; todays motto is "Life sucks, *$*(()#)#)!!!", todays music selections are "Bad Day" by REM, "You're missing" by Bruce Springsteen and "Tobia" by Zucchero (that last one is actually about a missing animal... has the man not sung about anything?) and we're not bothering me today, k?

Micromanagement

The institute I do my internship at has a large collection of microfilm. Specifically of declassified documents from different American governments of the past. Until I started working here I never used microfilm before, but I think it makes me look rather interesting.

To watch it, you need a big expensive machine into which you roll the tape, then you have to wait till the film is sucked up (sucking up most likely is not the specific term microfilmmachinemakers use, but then again microfilmmachinemakers probably isn't either) and then you can go through the documents frame by frame.

Granted, you don't quite get the historical thrill (us historians do actually get historical thrills when we get around old things..... we're pretty pathetic yeah.) as when you would hold the actual documents, but there is a certain charm in having to go through a big role of film, frame by frame, looking for stuff you can use in notes, which, by the way, nobody reads anyway.

The institute buys its microfilm and its books usually from sellers in the United States, they then deliver it to the Roosevelt Institute who then (when enough has come in) send it to the United States Embassy in the Hague so that no taxes have to be paid. The Embassy then lets my institute know they got some stuff and they then send a company to get it.

Microfilm is surprisingly expensive. For a collection of 24 reels (which means thousands of documents) and an index you pay several thousands of dollars (around 4.000 I believe). And, although compared to that amount it might seem peanuts, shipping costs still have to be added to that. It's also questionable how long the films will still be in use, since the internet as a way of getting sources is of course growing very fast.

Most recently, the institute however spend an insane amount of money on two new collections; one on Richard Nixon's foreign policy, another on Eleanor Roosevelt (FDR's wife)'s personal correspondence.

Do you know those movies where luggage gets mixed up, and a perfect innocent guy usually played by a Chevy Chase or Robin Williams kind of actor ends up with a suitcase with drugsmoney, while the gangster, usually played by unknown actors we never hear from again, ends up with dirty clothes?

Well, that happend to us. We got Dick, but the other box was filled with utterly worthless university leaflets. The nice woman at the embassy said the boxes probably got mixed up since the leaflets should have gone to an institute on career choice, and she thought they probably might have our 4.000 dollars worth of microfilm...

I kinda hope we get it back.

Alarmed

Last wednesday evening, after a hard day of reading books at my new internship, I returned to what I reluctantly shall refer to as "home".

Although the outright bastards at the Zeeland housing renting company did finally give me the room they had promised me weeks before, they managed to rent me out a room that (at first) did not have the promised bed, matras, cooking facility, had a bathroom that was utterly filthy, leaking windows, a leaking heating system, a broken phone system to buzz people in and electricity problems. Although in the past week most of these problems have been solved, I'm still expecting the roof to blow off at any moment. "Home" therefore, it is not.

However, since I'm paying 400 euro a month for the frigging thing, not sleeping there probably would not be a very economically sound decision. And so, there I was sitting on my bed (it being the only furniture in the room, waiting for my chocolate milk to warm up, when the fire alarm went off.

At first I was afraid I had triggered it by foolishly using the cooking thing to warm something, but since it turned out I hadn't even plugged the damn thing in yet, it seemed more plausible somebody else was responsible. On the one hand, this was a relief (you dont want to start your tenure in a new community as "the idiot who starts fire alarms"), on the other hand this mean in theory there could be a fire in the building. Although this seemed a somewhat unlikely scenario, I decided to walk down the 6 floors that seperate my room of hell and the relative safety of Zeeland's soil.

Although the building I live in should contain about 200 students who are all enrolled in the Roosevelt Academy, only ten people bothered to come outside. The rest remained inside their rooms, despite the alarm going WEEEHOOOOOOO WEEEHOOOOOO quite loudly in every room, hallway and washingroom in the entire building every three seconds. Some just played their music as loud as they could, others apparently were deaf or immune for loud WEEEHOOOOO sounds.

It turned out that, like most of my building collegues had figured, there was indeed no fire threatening to kill us all, but just some annoying girl whose cooking skills were apparently crap. Which left us with only one problem: when would the alarm stop?

The annoying girl had called the renting company, which was closed so she was redirected to a call center which promised it would send a technician over, but after 30 minutes of non-stop WEEHOOOOOOing, no technician was to be seen and people were losing interest in standing outside in the cold. And so, when everybody else was going back to their WEEHOOOOOOO-infested rooms, I too returned and spent the next 30 minutes of WEEHOOOOOOOOOO-ing with a pillow over my ears chatting with My Friend From The North (who was understandably gloating over my room-troubles) thinking only: "This is not my favorite part of the country".

(The alarm stopped after an hour and I later found out it took so long because the construction crew that is working in the building had build a brick wall in front of the button that stops the alarm. There must be a lot of inter-family relations in Zeeland)

House

As you may or may not know, I live in Amsterdam. I was also born there and lived there all my life aside from six years my family lived in a city thats build on to Amsterdam (so everybody agrees that that doesn't count). Although we had a rocky start at first, ever since I moved to the center me and the city have grown to love each other to death (despite the fact we both have morning breath).

And now, I shall leave my city for places no civilized human being has travelled: Zeeland.

As you may or may not know; Zeeland is a province of the Netherlands. If you look at a map (for instance the one to the left here), Zeeland is the islandy thingy in the bottom left. It's a nice place, friendly people (though a bit too religious for my taste), and a bunch of beaches nearby, but unfortunately it is also two and a half hours away from the actual world (that would be Amsterdam).

The reason I'm going there is not a new interest in survival or Christian politics, but an internship at one of the top American Studies research centers in the Netherlands. I'll be spending three months (with scheduled Amsterdamian intermissions during the weekends) there, running their library, reading their books, doing some research for their professors and (most importantly for me) working on my thesis. Sounds like fun? It does.

Aside from the fact that the Zeelandian house renting people refuse to give me a room.

It's not that they don't have rooms. In fact, there is one with my name on it. It's just that they refuse to understand that I need that room somewhere next week. For three weeks now me, and apparently the otherwise nice lady I've been calling with, have been waiting for a some company to check if the room is in an acceptable state. I appreciate this, of course, if only because I've seen enough episodes of C.S.I. to know that finding a dead body in your new bathroom is nothing short of a right pain in the ass.

However, they seem incapable of understanding that I still need to move stuff in there. They also seem to be incapable of understanding that I am a complete neurotic and that I need structure and certainties to plan ahead (and no, I don't select my clothes a week ahead... I am an excellent driver though.... but never on tuesdays... nope). All I get everytime I call is have the perfectly nice woman telling me it's all going to be done waaay ahead of time while I can see the amount of days I have left before I start working 5 days a week from 9 to 5 slip away faster and faster.

Which leads me to a new theory; people from Zeeland are a lot like Italians. They're lovely people, but if you want something done fast they're totally useless.

God I hope they don't google me....

The Return of the Sugar Man

Zucchero's new album is called "Fly" and will be on sale next week.

Also, he's entering a Fidel Castro lookalike competition.

More info for the few that care, here

9/11

I tend not to write about politics or news events on this blog. Partly because involving myself in the daily dirt of news is below my statesman-esque stature but mainly because my regular readers (that would be Merel and Cybbis) don't really care that much about my opinions on such things.

However, since I am a student of the recent - political - history of the United States of America (in other words, US history is my bitch) I figured I probably couldn't escape writing about 9/11 which (in case you haven't heard it yet) happened 5 years ago today.

On september 11, 2001 a much weirder version of me was at home at my parents place with the flu. In the golden, 'still in high school days', of the flu that usually meant you could lie in bed all day, read comics and have your mom bring you drinks. However, this specific day my mom was sicker than I was so instead I had to go walk the dog. I can't remember the exact time when I returned home, but when me and my dog came back my mom shouted from upstairs that I should turn on the TV. Which was kind of odd, since my entire life my mom usually told me to turn the TV off.

Anyhoo, when I did I saw the two main towers of the World Trade Center burning.

I can't quite remember how I spent the rest of the day. Obviously I watched TV as people were jumping out of the towers, a plane crashed into the Pentagon another one somewhere in Pennsylvania, and as finally the towers collapsed and Manhattan turned into a big dust storm. At the same time, I was emailing and chatting with friends from the U.S. I remember Cybbis and me talking with our friend Kathie, from Los Angeles, all afternoon while she tried to contact our other friend Wendy at work.

About a month later, I was in New York. It wasn't so much a "watching the car crash" trip, as it was an earlier planned exchange my high school had with a New York school. In april 2001 a bunch of New Yorkers had visited Amsterdam and had stayed at our homes (not my home ofcourse, my New Yorker didn't have a passport and therefore couldn't leave the country. Just my luck). Although they only stayed for four days, it was great fun and our return trip was pretty much in the center of my mind when school started again in september.

After the attacks we were all convinced that the trip is off, partly because we weren't sure we wanted to go, partly because we weren't sure the New Yorkers wanted us to come, and partly because we figured our parents would tie us to our beds rather then let us get near any planes or New York City in general. Surprisingly enough, problem one and two appeared non existent when the school in question practically demanded us to come ("We won't let terrorists ruin this!") and we ourselves laughed danger in it's fairly unatractive face. Finally, our parents didn't have much objections either (do they even love us? there were Anthrax letters everywhere!).

That week in New York turned out to be amazing and I utterly and completely fell in love with the city and (surprisingly enough) with its inhabitants. What was amazing was, that despite there being thousands of papers with phone numbers and pictures of the missing throughout the city, and despite smoke still coming off Ground Zero, New York City and the New Yorkers were recovering; they were still the funny, bitchy, complaining bunch of people they always were. And that's probably the best lesson from 9/11; it'll take a whole lot more than two planes and two towers to destroy a city.

Or, to quote the great cultural philosopher that is Ryan Adams: Hell, I still love you New York