Yold

There is something extremely depressing about young women dating older men. I should explain that the rant below is in no way a competition or jealousy thing, because I am not interested in young women or older men, so here we go:

The other day I was sitting in the train on my way back to Amsterdam (also known as "Actual human society") and halfway through this couple sat in the bench in front of me. The woman was probably in her late twenties and not unattractive. The guy was in his late 40's or early 50's, had a comb-over of sorts and wore a leather jacket.

They were on their way to her place in Amsterdam (also known as "A place stores are still open after 6pm") and discussed how they would spent their evening. The woman wanted to see "Borat", the guy had no idea what that was, but eventually agreed. After that they discussed which restaurant to go to, the woman (being young and happening and not unattractive) had about six ideas on where to go for cheap but fairly good food in what, no doubt, are restaurants frequented mostly by young and happening and not unattractive people.

Couples in public generally are highly annoying as it is. Because they happen to be together, they feel the need to be showcasing their physical affection which is both a clear attack on single people, and generally gross. But when the age difference is so clear it's all just so damn stereotypical (midlife crisis, father-figure, you can figure it out) .

While watching them go on about their weekend I could just see them visiting her parents on sunday afternoon. Her boyfriend being about the same age as her father presumably is, a lot of negotating (probably by her mother) had to be done before the visit was arranged. Then, while the four of them are sitting in the living room everybody tries to avoid the subjects "age", "future", "marriage", "kids" and (in gods name!) "sex" as much as they can, leaving only "the weather", "sports" and "music, films and TV".

The older guy and the dad probably at one point find out they have about the same taste in music, and while the talk warms up (the younger woman and her mom glance at eachother reassuringly) they realize that they were both at this 1974 Rolling Stones concert, and both still own a tour shirt.

I give them one more month.

Electification (2): Animalistic

The elections of last week has brought us the following:

- the evil people of the christian democratic party have lost three seats, but remain the largest political party
- the even more evil people of the free-market, anti-immigration, otherthingwitha - inbetweensomething VVD have lost six seats
- labour (my homeboys) have lost a whopping nine seats
- the former mao-ist SP has gained immensly
- a very christian social party has gained three seats
- a very very very scary right-wing xenophobe party led by a guy with weird hair has won nine seats

and
- the "animal party" has entered parliament with two seats.

He's coming!

I can't quite explain my love for the Italian hairball featured in the video below. He's slow as hell in releasing stuff, a bit over the top at times, and occasionally wears leather pants (long time ago, last time was in 1999... I think). Still, I think his albums are amazing, and his live performances are absolutely breath taking. And Zucchero is FINALLY coming to Amsterdam again.

So, on May 28, 2007 I shall by making utterly awkward and very painful to watch moves to this song and many others.

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)