Brian & Ann's European Experience

We've Moved the Blog!

2005-06-07T23:14:00.000+02:00

That's right, all your favorite posts of yesteryear and all the posts from now on will be available directly from mochasteak.com.

Special thanks to Mark Lorenc for all the help he has provided in getting the new blog up and running and with migrating all the old posts.

What are you doing still here? Stop reading this and go to mochasteak.com!

The Day The Music... Died

2005-06-03T02:53:00.000+02:00

It may very well be that years from now people will look back at this week and say “that was the turning point for the European Union”.

On Wednesday the French, whose former President DRAFTED much of the constitution, voted against it in a referendum. The talking heads on the TV are saying that the French vote was mainly an expression of frustration against the government for the poor economic situation in France, and a knee-jerk reaction to the fear of outsiders coming in and stealing their jobs (all those “New” Europeans) or fear of free market capitalism coming in and wiping out their precious welfare state.

Chirac campaigned heavily for the constitution, and in a way that just made it all the more obvious that he was stuck between a rock and a hard place. He wanted so much for France to be relevant again, and for Europe to play the counterbalance to the US, that he really went out there and pressed the flesh trying to get it passed. But if he had just allowed the decision to be made by the legislature, instead of by a national referendum, the French would have passed the EU constitution and the pressure would have been on the Dutch to follow suit.

Even though the Dutch were also pissed off at the EU constitution (for completely different reasons – they thought it wasn’t strong enough), after living here I can tell you that they would have succumbed to the pressure. The Dutch are all about consensus.

By the way, I have heard from more than one Dutch person that they were going to vote no because the deal that was on the table wasn’t good enough. While I certainly agree that there is a time to stick to your guns, what the Dutch don’t realize is that if they didn’t take the deal that was on the table, there would cease to BE a table. Sometimes you have to take a deal you don’t want just to keep a relationship going so that you can get to the point you want to be.

Now, with two ‘no’ votes, the idea of an EU constitution is pretty much dead, and any attempt in a few years to revive the idea will be met in people’s minds with the history of the last experience.

One country’s people thought it was a threat, one thought it wasn’t enough of a threat, in the end, nothing happens and the potential of a united Europe is again unfulfilled.

In my opinion, it will ALWAYS be unfulfilled.

With some minor differences in standard of living, ethnicity, and religion, the EU is just like Afghanistan: a group of tribes who each want to cling to their own power and will never give up their small amount of power in order to gain a greater amount of power as a united country because they just don’t trust each other enough to take that leap of faith. Just like in Afghanistan, there’s some weak central government trying to push the country in the direction of unity, but they have little real power and there’s not much they can do because they have to keep up friendly relations. There is little carrot and absolutely no stick.

Europeans are different.

Maybe in some fundamental ways they are alike (mainly Christian, mainly white, social welfare tendencies, love taxes and universal health care), but their differences are not superficial. Language. History. Business approach. Politics. Size. Economic wealth. There is just too much that is different that there will always be a significant block of countries that disagree with each other.

Remember how easy it was for America to divide Europe with the Iraq war? You have one group of European countries saying “it’s illegal and immoral and we will do everything to stop it” and you have a bunch of others sending troops.

The rejection of the European constitution, as watered down and vague as it is, illustrates how difficult it will be for Europe to ever play a dominant role in international affairs. They have little to offer (“hey, we’ll sell you our stuff”) and no ability to enforce any kind of policy beyond their own borders.

The really sad thing is that this rejection of the concept of the EU will push those who want a “multi-polar” world even closer to despotic countries like Russia and China, simply so that there can be someone on the world stage who can challenge the US and show those American bastards they can’t just make everyone eat McDonalds and drink Coke and get rich.

Yikes. Way past my bedtime.

New Blog Design Coming

2005-06-03T02:20:00.000+02:00

Sorry I’ve been so remiss with my postings. The thing is that I have been spending many nights up until 2am working on the design for my new blog.

I am going to move the blog to mochasteak.com and just turn the website that’s there now into a blog. Most of what I write is just like a blog post anyway, and since I don’t have any kind of content management system running my site, it tends to become just this huge conglomeration of pages.

Plus, I never went back and changed the design of all the old pages, so I have a homepage that looks one way and anything you click on takes you to all the old pages that have the original design that I made in 2001 when I was just starting to learn HTML.

I am fairly proud of myself for leeching off of the brilliant work of others while creating my new site. I did a few PHP tutorials to get a feeling for how that stuff worked, and some CSS tutorials so I could fool around with the design, and the result can be seen at http://www.mochasteak.com/blog.

Let me know what you think. A few more weeks and the entire Mochasteak site will look like that.

I'm So Bad

2005-06-03T02:14:00.000+02:00

It’s come to this. I’m back to playing poker online.

About two years ago I tried out an online poker site for about a week or so. Lost almost two hundred dollars before I realized how stupid I was being. Nothing has changed in terms of the security of online poker, but my gambling opportunities are so diminished in this poker-barren land that I have resorted to extreme measures.

The most annoying thing about signing up for Party Poker.com is the fact that two of my credit cards got put on security holds while I was trying to get my first deposit in so I could get started.

This is tantamount to taking your kid to Toys R Us, letting him pick out the most expensive toy, waiting in line at the checkout, and then having the cashier tell you that while she’d LIKE to take your money, apparently buying toys with credit cards is now illegal.

Apparently there are some laws or some such nonsense about gambling online. It’s not allowed for Americans because there are some stupid “laws” or some such against gambling in certain states (not mine, mind you). What a stupid idea. I’m going to stop people from using the Internet to get their entertainment fix.

Next thing you know they’re going to try and stop me from downloading all those TV episodes and movies with BitTorrent.

(Note to RIAA and MPAA: come and get me bitches.)

Well. I finally figgered a way to get some money on my account. I went to PartyPoker, got onto a Hold ‘Em table with some other degenerate losers, and started very quickly whittling down that initial deposit. I mean, it’s not my fault or anything, it’s just really hard to think of it as real money you’re losing when the graphics are so pretty.

I got all the way down to being all in on a hand before I finally slapped myself a few times and physically wrote down on a paper in front of me: PLAY ONLY DECENT HANDS STUPID.

It took an hour and a half but I eventually got all the way back to even and then a little profit. I’m still playing as I write this, and periodically just hitting the ‘fold’ button unless I have pocket kings or Ace/King suited.

I’ll go to bed soon, it being 2am and all. And oh, the dreams I will have.

;-)

London Trip

2005-05-19T20:38:00.000+02:00

Ann and I took the Eurostar high-speed train to London last weekend. Sadly, there were no more seats available in coach, so we had to go first class. I have to say, it was pretty damn cool. On the way there we had breakfast, which I slept through, but which Ann tells me was great. All I can contribute is that the seats are comfy.

Ann and I lived in London for a grand total of four months, from November 2000 to February 2001. We were part of the aborted European expansion of Xlibris. We both loved London and were really bummed to leave. Besides the fact that we had the worst four months of weather ever, London is such a great town that it’s impossible not to have a good time there.

Unfortunately, the weather report for our weekend started off “grey/cloudy” and deteriorated to “going to rain the whole damn time” as we got closer to our departure date. It turned out alright though...

Here are a few highlights:

Saturday

I planned this whole itinerary on the train, down to the hour. It involved a lot of traveling around London by tube and seeing old places. We started off at the hotel (tube stop: High Street Kensington), then went to have lunch at the shoarma place we used to eat lunch at where I worked in Mayfair (tube stop: Marble Arch).

We got out of the subway and it was like nothing had changed. Oxford street when you come out. The big arch to your right, at the corner of Hyde Park. Park Lane ahead of you, one of the ritziest streets in London. Oh, and I don’t know what crack the weather guys were smoking, but it was sunny with puffy white clouds and in the high sixties.

I used to cross the street and pass by the Aston Martin and Jaguar dealerships before taking a left onto Grosvenor street. Our office was a single large room in an old stone mansion that used to be an embassy. We rented the dining room. It had fantastic floor to ceiling windows that looked out onto the garden.

Damn I had a good time back then.

But the best thing about our office was lunch. Two to three times a week we’d walk a few blocks up Edgeware road to this Lebanese shoarma place. They made the most fantastic shoarmas. The chicken and lamb are the best quality, roasted on this spit with lemons, limes, bell peppers and tomatos dripping juices down the side of them as they cook. The tastiest lamb I’ve ever had, no contest.

After lunch we walked down Oxford street a little. It’s one of the most famous shopping streets in London and home of some of the largest departments stores. Ann and I bought a bottle of vanilla flavored liqueur at Selfridges because we’re suckers for jars full of pretty colors.

We went then went to Chiswick (pronounced Chiz-ick, tube stop: Turnham Green) to see our old apartment. 37 Esmond Gardens. We had the best apartment of all the Xlibrians I must say. We walked around the High Street, shopped a little in the Waterstones (the British equivalent of Barnes and Nobles) since the books were cheaper in London than the Netherlands (weird).

By this time my feet hurt and the schedule was shot to hell. We went back to High Street Ken (oh, to speak like the locals speak) did a little shopping (Ann pouted because I bought a suit jacket and she hates being outspent by her husband).

We had dinner at an Indian place called Utsav right on High Street Kensington. Great food. We had this appetizer shaped like a little pot of thin crispy bread. It had this spicy chickpea paste inside, but the coolest thing about it was that it had a hole in the top and you filled it with a cold soup, put the whole thing in your mouth, and when you bit down it exploded like a juicy bomb in your mouth. I love food you play with.

We had a talkative Pakistani waiter who said he would want George Bush as his President. Since I was on vacation I held back from saying, “Take him, please! He’s all yours.”

Sunday

All the people we knew who lived in London are all gone. But I called up a guy I know from work, Skip, to see if he wanted to get together. Skip actually works for a company that provides email services to my company, but we’ve gotten really close in the six months that it’s taken my company to figure out they want to renew their contract.

Skip did something really nice: on one day’s notice he agreed to make time for Ann and I to have breakfast with him and his wife on Sunday. I called him and he said: “My wife, who is very proactive, booked us a table for breakfast at a hotel called the Dorchester.”

Sounded great. It was just right across the park. It was another beautiful sunny, cool day, and Ann and I walked all the way across Hyde Park to work up an appetite. The parking lot of the Dorchester, which is on Park Lane, was filled with a Ferrari, a Porsche, a stretch Mercedes limo, and a Bentley.

Okaaay. So the Dorchester ain’t a dump.

The inside was appointed in a style that can only be called ‘palatial’. A waiter in a waistcoat with tails offered to take my coat. Skip and his wife Christie (who was seven months pregnant) moved to London on a temporary assignment. That was four and a half years ago. Skip and Christie were both great. They were even greater for picking up the check. I didn’t look, but I think the bill was about thirty pounds a head. With the exchange rate being almost two dollars to a pound, that’s $240. For breakfast. Without tip.

I can safely say, that was the most expensive breakfast of my life.

Skip said he would expense it, and I truly thank him for that. I sure wouldn’t want to explain a $240 breakfast to my accounting department. But without Skip’s graciousness, I never would have had a $32 bagel with lox.

But it didn’t stop there. We mentioned that we were going to visit Windsor castle after breakfast and Skip said, “Oh, we live right in the next town, we’ll drive you!” Now THAT’S service. I asked this old guy with advanced Parkinsons to take this picture of us. Then his wife offered to take another, and after checking around numerous times for the imaginary tree branches and strands of hair that were in the way, we eventually did get this nice shot. Thanks again Skip and Christie.

So it’s simply a beautiful day. We’re walking around this quaint little English town, and right smack in the middle of it, overlooking the Thames river, on top of a little hill, is a huge freaking castle!

See, that’s why I love Europe. Castles. You just don’t get that in the States.

We took the whole castle tour, passing through the appropriately luxurious rooms of the “oldest continuously inhabited castle in the world.” Forty-two consecutive sovereigns have lived in Windsor Castle. Don’t you feel sorry royalty. Always so limited in their career and housing options.

Then we saw the Queen. She was there for the weekend, as is her habit, and she came outside to inspect some horses that were there for the yearly Windsor horse show. I’m sure it’s a big to-do, but Ann and I had more important things to do. Like inspect old suits of armor and swords.

Ann made me walk all the way across the river to Eton to check out the famous college. Another quaint little town whose main street has shops right out of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. There were tailors providing school uniforms, antique book and map shops, Qwik-E-Marts, all of whom had been in business for longer than America has been in existence. Just reminds you that you’re in a different world.

When we finally got there they wanted us to pay six pounds for admission. Eton has got to be the most exclusive and expensive private school in all of the United Kingdom. What the hell do they need my six pounds for!?

No way was I going to give money to the richest kids in the land. Little brats.

So, guess what we had for dinner Sunday. If you guessed “Indian food”, you get the magic prize. Ironically, London has been colonized by the Indians and the Pakistanis, and as a result has the best Indian food in the world.

Okay, I have to admit, I made one terrible mistake on this trip. I convinced myself that there might be a chance in hell that Ann would like the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Well, the penalty for denying reality is that it smacks you in the face every now and then. Ann was a trooper, but if there’s any type of movie she hates, it’s one where weird fantastical stuff happens. And I took her to a movie where it started off weird and just kept getting weirder and weirder. Smart move.

The really funny thing is, that was the second movie we saw that weekend. The night before we went to see Sahara (which was actually really good). And BOTH times, in DIFFERENT theaters in Leicester Square, who should come and sit in the seats DIRECTLY behind us?

Dutch people.

Weird.

Monday

Monday we went to the British Museum, which, as I describe in another post, is my favorite museum in the world. It doesn’t have the Mona Lisa, but it has items of even greater historical significance and beauty. The Rosetta Stone. The Elgin Marbles. The Reading Room. It’s an amazing place.

Finally, after some last minute shopping at Marks and Spencer, it was time to board the Eurostar back home. Three hours to Brussels. A three course dinner with champagne. The best chocolate truffles (which the steward gave us a bag of). In the words of Adam Sandler, not too shabby.

And then it was back to life, back to reality. Dordrecht and the tall, cheese-eating Dutch awaited us. Ann asked the cab driver on the way back to the apartment how the weather was over the weekend.

“Terrible. Cold and rainy all weekend.”

Little Differences 5

2005-05-13T00:21:00.000+02:00

The bathrooms here in the Netherlands always have full floor to celing doors. All of them. Even the public ones (which you have to pay fifty cents or so to use).

I don’t get how on the one hand you can have a sophisticated quality-of-life improvement like fully-contained toilets, but at the same time the same liberal, socialist-leaning European citizens are fine with charging for the fulfillment of bodily functions. I find that kind of weird. You think that along with the “free health care for everyone” and “free education for everyone” that logically “free toilet use for everyone” would follow.

Just another example of the social complexities of “the Continent”.

Blogger sucks

2005-05-10T19:02:00.000+02:00

After many frustrating crashes right in the middle of posting for no apparent reason I have decided that Blogger.com, quite simply. Sucks balls.

Looking for a replacement, but it's hard to find good free services. I am hoping my buddy Mark Lorenc will hook me up and install some blog software on the server that hosts mochasteak.com.

Thank you Mark. You're the best. I'd mow your lawn or something but a) I don't know how to mow a lawn and b) you live on a different continent.

But I still love you.

I am the PHP MASTER!

2005-05-10T11:12:00.000+02:00

I'm feeling pretty good about myself. For the longest time I was trying to get the headlines from my blog to show up automatically on my website. I started by figuring out that Blogger.com had a setting that allowed you to publish an RSS feed for your blog.

Then I got stuck.

I have a news ticker Java application on my website, and I emailed the developers asking if there was a way to fit the RSS feed right into the news ticker. I got the typical developer answer: "Yes. But no."

Meaning, "yes, of course it is technically possible, IF you are a web programmer familiar with certain technologies like PHP and if you were you wouldn't be asking me so for YOU the answer is 'no'."

Well I decided to show that guy what was what. I started reading up on PHP. Now I don't know shit about web development languages. I barely understand HTML. But PHP sounded like it could do some pretty cool stuff... if you were a web programmer. Which I wasn't.

So I foundered for a few weeks. Then I got my courage back up, got back on the Internet, and started scrounging for answers. I found a great utility that some great people had written and put up on the internet for free (don't you just love the world we live in) that did exactly what I needed: it took an RSS feed and turned it into PHP.

Great. But I still didn't know what to do with the PHP.

A few hours more digging, some reading on some 'tutorial'-type pages, and I thought I had it. I started copying and pasting other people's code (hey, that's how the Internet works man, don't look at me like that...).

To make a long story short, I got it to work.

And there was much rejoicing.

But then I decided that I didn't like the way the dates were displaying. I mean, who wants to read "2005-05-08T13:45:32Z" right?

And then I got stuck. Apparently that's the format for date the Blogger.com uses. So to change it I would need to know how to manipulate the data in PHP arrays.

And cue exploding head.

So I found a developer's forum, signed up for their discussion board, and posted a message. Within an hour I got two replies. One guy pointed me to an article about how to ask questions on discussion forums and made a cryptic remark about "check out the date() function". Fucking know-it-all developers.

But the second guy, Alan Levine, wrote me a very succinct email telling me what the general theory was, and then (thank God) giving me a suggested piece of code to copy and paste into my existing code.

And therefore, Alan Levine is now my new hero. Thank you Mr. Levine, you are a savior on the order of the Messiah and Maxim magazine.

And now I want everyone to go to Mochasteak.com and ooh and aah over the fact that yours truly figured out how to get the headlines from his Blog to appear in BOTH the main page AND the Javascript news applet on the right.

BOOYA! I AM THE PHP MASTER!!!

Tom's Tourney 2005 - Part 2

2005-05-08T13:53:00.000+02:00

Tom's Tourney 2005 - Part 2

So we left off with me at the Brugge train station trying to get to the fields. It’s 10:15am. The tournament started at 9:30. I hopped a cab and the driver luckily knew the sportpark. I get to the fields and they are just swamped with ultimate teams. There are at least seven fields, with fourteen teams playing, and at least that many waiting on the sidelines. I start wandering around, looking for my team of giant-sized Dutch men, and can’t find them. This is slightly worrying. They should be easy to spot, they are all eight feet tall! But after ten minutes of lugging my duffel bag around, I have checked out every field and there is no sign of them.

Strange.

I mean, this HAS to be the place right? There’s no way that they’re at the OTHER huge Ultimate tournament in Brugge this weekend right…?

I finally head to the registration tent and find an arial map of the sportpark. There are three more fields which are hidden completely out of sight, and wouldn’t you know it, my team just finished playing their first game on one of them.

Eventually I meet up with my UFO teammates to find out that they stomped all over the first team they played by a score of 12-1. With only 35 minute games scoring twelve points is quite a lot. I lace up my cleats and get ready for the next game.

There are 32 open teams (meaning they can be all-male or they can be co-ed) at the tournament. They are in pools of 4. You play everyone in your pool, and then the top two teams advance to a higher bracket and the lower two teams go to a lower bracket.

There are also eight women’s teams playing a round robin against each other. One of these is the national women’s team from the Netherlands, which has a few Utrecht players on it.

So, we have two more pool games to play. The second game is against the “D” team from the Brugge area called the Wanna Beezz. They have an average age of thirteen and are about half as tall as us.

We stomp them too, but in the last few minutes of the game one of my teammates throws a pass to me and I slow down just a little and the twelve year old kid who is guarding me runs in and knocks down the pass. They then get two very good passes off and score their only point of the game. My teammates make fun of me for being beaten by a twelve-year-old, but the Wanna Beezz played their hearts out, knowing the whole time they were hopelessly outgunned, and they deserved at least one point. Final score: 12-1.

Our last pool game is against a team of old British guys called “Violently Happy.” They are there really to have a weekend of fun away from their wives eating Belgian fries and drinking beer. They are a fun group and have some experienced players, but we crush them 10-3.

So we advance to the upper bracket. We are now in another pool of four, this time with teams which are a lot better. Our first game is against a team from Paris called “Les Invalides”. They are better than anyone we have played so far, but they are still not at our level. Plus they are French, which annoys me. Final: 11-5

Our final game of the day is against the best team in the pool, also from France, called “Ultimate Vibration.” It starts off as a very good game. We actually score first. But these guys are all fast, athletic, and very experienced. They pull away toward the end of the game and we just can’t match them. We play our best game of ultimate that day, but lose 9-5.

Saturday night there’s a barbecue, and I learn that the team is actually NOT staying in a hostel as I thought I read in the emails, but they are sleeping in a gym. On the floor. For which everyone else has brought foam mats and sleeping bags. Of which I have neither.

Okaaaay.

I briefly consider trying to get a hotel room, but it’s just too late and the logistics are too annoying. I borrow the keys to someone’s car and spend a fitful night trying to arrange myself comfortably in a tiny European two-door with no blanket. I get about three hours of sleep if you string all the fifteen-minute pieces together.

I really need to pay more attention to the emails.

Sunday comes and we have three games to play. The first is the final game of our second pool, against a British team called “Blue Arse Flies.” They are a co-ed team and they usually play three women on the field at a time. They are fairly good, but you just can’t put 5’6” women up against 6’2” men and expect to win. They really turn up the play on their last two points, hoping to score at least one point, but being the nice Dutch team that we are, we stomp them 12-0. The funniest thing about this game is the huddle with both teams at the end, where both teams make a little speech about the game. Our captain told them that they would be a good co-ed team.

They ARE a co-ed team.

So, the good news is that we finish second in our pool. That means we get to play two more games, and we will be playing for 5th to 8th place.

The bad news is, we have finally run into the very good teams.

We play a great game against a team from London called “Fire of London”, we are leading almost the whole way, but they pull it out in the end, winning four straight points to go from 3-5 to 7-5. We are just morons and can neither get our offense to work nor stop them, so they deserved to win, but it was frustrating.

Our final game was against our sister team from the Netherlands, a team called IcyDykes. They have a lot of players who are on our UFO team, along with some of the best players from Amsterdam. Their problem is that they came light to the tournament, and then suffered two injuries, and have been playing with only two subs all day.

I have to say, although the level of play remains high, this turns out to be the worst-spirited game we play the entire tournament. There are more fouls called than in all our other games combined, some of them really bad calls. We are down 5-2 in this game until we take a time out, cool off mentally, then come back in and start concentrating on playing our best.

They are tired and after we score the next two points in a row we start to feel the momentum. We win the ‘second half’ 5-1 for a final score of 7-6, taking 7th place.

It was an awesome weekend of Ultimate and we got to play some very good teams. The weather was beautiful, sunny and cool, the food was great, they had Belgian waffles for sale in the tent, and we finished 7th out of 32 mens teams. Not bad I would say.

I burned the back of my neck and the top of my head (damn bald spot), but it was well worth it. I can’t wait for our next tournament.

I hope I can get a ride next time though…

More on TV

2005-05-07T08:26:00.000+02:00

It's uncanny. The courts must have read my blog.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050507/ap_on_hi_te/digital_tv_piracy

Deadwood - The Best Show Ever

2005-05-06T03:19:00.000+02:00

Oh, and before I lay my head down on the keys and go to sleep, I have to share with the world what a freaking AWESOME show "Deadwood" is.

It's on HBO (and also available illegally through the wonders of BitTorrent) and it is quite simply the best TV show ever made.

There. I got that off my chest.

G'Night.

Blind Date

2005-05-06T03:18:00.000+02:00

All this talk about TV, and the hour being so late, reminded me of the fact that it's been months since I've seen an episode of "Blind Date", my late night, eyes half-closed, staple.

:(

Thougths on Downloading TV

2005-05-06T02:35:00.000+02:00

I miss American TV. I miss the shows. I miss the networks and cable. I even miss the commercials. It's hard to explain the "minor league" feel to the TV ads that you see in Europe. I guess small TV markets are a disincentive for people to spend a lot on TV ads, especially when it's tough to reuse the same content in different markets because of the language barriers.

So what I generally do is steal my TV.

Actually, I don't even know if it's stealing anyway, at least not for the stuff that you get off of the broadcast networks. See, since I downloaded the awesomest BitTorrent client in the world (Azureus) and since I found my torrent treasure trove (isohunt.com), I have been able to download TV episodes and movies at will. Okay, it can take hours for a full TV episode (which usually runs about 350 megs) or even days for a movie to download, but I still get it.

And is it wrong?

For movies, CD tracks, and shows from cable TV channels, yes. It is wrong. You are supposed to pay for that product. For broadcast TV shows though (like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives"), I'm not so sure.

The fee you pay to watch network TV shows is that you have to watch them when the networks want you to, and you have to sit through the commercials. But other than that, the content is freely distributed through the air (although I doubt most people use antenna anymore).

THe point is, if you are willing to "time shift", and watch shows at times other than their scheduled "air" date, then what's wrong with that? The shows were publicly distributed, how can re-distribution via the Internet be wrong?

For shows on cable, the argument is different. You're supposed to pay a subscription rate to get access to the content, and if you download the shows you deprive the cable companies from the revenue, who then deprive the cable channels, who then can't pay the producers of the show, who then can't make the show in the first place. And I think we can all agree that's bad.

Does the same argument apply to watching the commercials on a broadcast TV show? Am I obligated to watch the commercials? Are they part of the show? If I videotape the show and watch it later and fast forward the commercials, am I breaking the law?

I was one of the early adopters of Tivo, and I can tell you that besides the value of pausing live TV, of automatically recording and cataloging shows I like to watch at my leisure, one of the big value adds was the ability to skip through the commercials. You start watching a show fifteen minutes after its start time, you hit the "fast forward" button through the commercials, and by the end, you catch up to 'real time' and you finish watching the show with everyone else, but without watching the commercials.

It's technology baby.

Content providers need to understand that consumers don't want what content providers want, they want the content. And in today's world, they want it on their temrs: the want it on their schedule and without having to sit through ads. And today's technology allows them to do that.

If the networks and cable operators were really smart they'd initiate Video On Demand immediately and figure out the licensing deals with the content owners as they do it.

The real value of ABC, CBS, or NBC is the fact that they are the gateway to the consumers. They are a distribution channel. In the past, their distribution was linear and meant that only one product could be served to many customers at any one time. Technology now makes it possible for them to provide a HUGE value for their customers: any product they want to watch, when THEY want to watch it.

All they have to do is figure out how to charge for it.

People already buy an entire season of a show they like on DVD, but they have to wait months after the initial air date. Why? Just let them watch it online!

Besides the obvious business benefit of being able to make money repeatedly from the same piece of content (as opposed to a single airing of a TV series episode for which they only make money on it the one time that it airs), there is also the ability to differentiate and sell product at different price points.

Here's a potential model: It's free to watch it the moment it comes out (but in exchange you have to watch ads). But you could also watch it online, any time after the original 'air' time, for say ten bucks an episode (which is roughly the price of a movie ticket plus a premium for the convenience of not having to leave your home), or you could wait three months after the ENTIRE SEASON is done and buy all the episodes for sixty bucks, which works out to about $4 an episode for a fifteen episode show, less for a 22 episode show... but you have to wait a LONG time from the initial air date.

It's so simple! What are they all morons!?

Obviously, it's not so simple. But the fact you can't ignore is that the technology is there, and it will be used, and you can either be a part of it (think iTunes) or you can fight it (think RIAA suing college kids).

Sure, it will cost to develop and implement, but like all new services, there will be someone with the know-how and infrastructure to serve content via the Internet who will provide the infrastructure in exchange for a piece of the action, and everyone wins because specialization is the key to economic growth (as I'm learning in my economics class).

But the networks then need to rethink their role in the world. Watching NBC starts to mean less, and recognizing that NBC.com is the place you go to get your filmed entertainment, any time you want it, starts to become more important. The networks still have a role to play in terms of marketing product to viewers, but now they don't have to be restricted to marketing what they can show in the 24 hours of a day. Now they can market as many shows as they can effectively find consumers for, because they aren't restricted to 24 one-hour time slots. THey could sell a thousand shows, and they should. Because for every episode that ever aired, there is someone in the world right now who wants to see it, right now, and would be willing to pay for the privilege.

Think what you could do if you had enough capital that you could buy the syndication rights for all of the best TV shows and sell them, Pay per View, exlcusively from your website. Or if you could make exclusive licensing deals with all the studios so taht none of your competitors could offer the same product.

Of course you can't, it's too much up-front capital. But for sure certain 'networks' will specialize in certain kinds of content. (WB will buy all the cheesy teen shows like Dawson's creek and One Tree Hill and UPN will buy every African American TV series ever made, probably at a discount...).

It's a brave new world once the distribution method for TV switches to the Internet.

Or at least, it WILL be a brave new world.

But who will take the first step?

Hollywood tried it (somewhat) with Movielink.com. Fox did something novel when they cancelled one of their 'reality' game shows halfway through, but put the last five episodes on their website (Pay per View of course).

We'll see what happens, but my bet is that it will take some newcomer who starts with cheap, old, syndicated shows and starts to prove the concept before the big boys will move.

I wonder if I could do it. Just so I could then sell myself as a consultant to all these big evil corporations to help them with the transition...

;-)

Tom's Tourney 2005 - Part 1

2005-05-03T21:36:00.000+02:00

I should be studying for my MBA class. Or sleeping. Or learning a new song on the guitar. Or sleeping. But in an attempt to make myself fall asleep at the keys, I will instead tell you the story of my tournament this weekend in Brugge, Belgium.

So I’m on this Frisbee team, UFO 2 (as I’ve said before). But, and this may come as a surprise to you, the Netherlands is not a big country. Therefore the ultimate culture is pretty incestuous. The best team in the Netherlands is a fairly new creation called Icy Dykes. The team is comprised of top level talent from mainly the Amsterdam and Utrecht areas, and a few ringers. In last year’s outdoor season the Amsterdam team (Red Lights) finished first, followed closely by UFO 1, the A team from Utrecht.

Well, for some scheduling reason, Icy Dykes had two bids to a tournament last weekend in Brugge, Belgium. See, this is why I love ultimate in Europe. All these teams get together in these exotic places like Copenhagen, Brugge, Paganello (Italy). It’s so awesome when you play another team and while marking you (Ultimate term: look it up) they count in French, or German, or Spanish.

So, for a month now I’ve known about this tournament. Of course, I didn’t tell Ann until like a week ago, just to maximize her poutiness (I’m gifted that way), and just to make it worse, I was away for the entire week in Heidelberg for work.

But anyway, Friday night rolls around, and I still haven’t connected with anyone from the team to get a ride to Brugge, which is about two hours away by car. I’m starting to get a little worried. I sent numerous emails to the email list with increasing levels of pleading (“Um, PLEASE can someone pick me up in Dordrecht…?”). No response.

I call all the numbers I can find on the website, searching for someone who will have an empty space in their car. Well, to make a long story short, no one has space.

Fine. I’ll take the train.

Only there’s one little problem: Koninginnensdag. Queen’s Day.

This weekend happens to be the 25th jubileum for the reign of Queen Beatrix over the kingdom of the Netherlands. I know, I’m thinking the same thing, big whoopee. Well, apparently it IS big whoopee. The entire fucking country is going nuts with orange.

Someone has to explain this to me one day, the flag of the Netherlands is three red, white, and blue stripes horizontally layered. Take the French flag, turn it ninety degrees, and that’s the Dutch flag. There isn’t any orange anywhere on it. But that’s the color they wear when they want to be all patriotic. I think a long time ago the king was called the prince of Orange, which is stupid as all get out because if there’s one fruit that you could NOT grow in this country it’s oranges.

But anyway, the point is, everyone in the entire country went out Friday night and partied until their heads exploded.

And then they all decided to take the train home. All still drunk.

I get to the train station at 7am on Saturday and I’m greeted by two Dutch guys who look like they are eighteen years old, have been up all night, and are still drunk. In fact, that’s exactly what they were.

These two idiots are yelling unintelligibly at everything they see, which apparently is really amusing to them. Then they get the bright idea of taking all the Metros (the free newspaper that’s distributed on the public transportation) out of the box they are laying in and start giving them out to everyone in sight. Unfortunately, besides me and the chick behind the glass window who is opening up the croissant shop, there aren’t many customers.

There’s a tall skinny one and a shorter one. The smaller, thicker one come up shoving a paper at me and saying something in some language, maybe Dutch, I can’t really tell. This is where I go into my “stupid American” act (which is a stretch) and say things like, “oh, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Dutch. Thanks anyway. Really, you’re too kind.”

But in the Netherlands, everyone speaks English anyway. So he just switches into his best drunken English and says, “Oh, you don’t speak Dutch? Well that’s no problem, here, I read the news to you.”

Great.

The guy wraps his arm around me while his partner bangs on the glass door of the croissant trying to get the attention of the girl fiddling with the croissant-making apparatus, who is trying very hard to ignore the idiot pounding on the glass and making lewd gestures.

“Uh…. lemme see… okay, this guy, he did something bad….” the short guy says to me. “And this weekend is Koninginnensdag, you know Koninginnensdag?”

No. Never heard of it. Stop touching me.

“Yeah, the party for the queen right—“

At this point the guy banging on the window has worked through the likely scenarios and decided the woman behind the glass is not going to engage in sexual acts with him at that time, so he gives the window a final bang and then let’s out a long, loud, “Pussyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.”

It was actually quite funny. It wasn’t a mean or angry shout, just enthusiastic, the kind you would shout after a huddle in a football game.

I’m trying to understand the motivation behind that (Accusation? Statement? Request?) when his partner realizes he’s (barely) reading the headlines to some foreign guy when he should be off doing more important things. He takes him arm off me and then says, “I love fucking bitches man.”

Not knowing how to respond (“Me too”? “Nah, I prefer ho’s”?), I just smile and nod and say, “Well good luck with that.”

Then I’m on the platform waiting for my train. The train before my train comes in. And doesn’t open its doors. It just sits there, with the door closed. And occupying the track that my train is supposed to come in on. It’s surreal. I can see the passengers on the inside of the train, all standing there, all acting like they want to get off the train, but nothing’s happening. I begin to think that it could all just be a very elaborate joke, but that would be stupid. Or would it...?

Fifteen minutes go by. The status marker on my train switches to “15 minutes delay”. Then two cops finally walk up to the platform and the doors open. They pull out this Morrocan or Turkish looking gentleman and start talking to him. He can’t make up his mind between being really snide and condescending (you can do that to the cops in Yurup and not get the shit beat out of you, it’s weird), or being nice and cooperative, while the other passengers disembark around them throwing nasty looks.

Apparently, the guy wouldn’t pay his train ticket. In the Netherlands, if you’re on the train and you don’t have any money you have to show your ID, and then they write down your address and send you a bill in the mail. And if you don’t pay it within a few weeks they start adding fines. I know, I’ve gotten them. But I digress.

This guy apparently didn’t want to pay and didn’t want to give any address. I guess he simply didn’t recognize the authority of the Netherlands Train Service to collect revenues from his person in general. Well, that fucker fucked up the entire train service headed south from Dordrecht. The cops finally had enough of his lip and cuffed him and escorted him off to experience the legendary horrors of the Dutch prison system.

I hope they give him the chair and fry his ass. But they don’t have the death penalty here. Big softies. He’ll probably be sipping tea with Milosevic in the Hague in a day.

My train does finally come, twenty minutes late, but I guess the Lord heard the generous praise I gave to all the chanting that was done when that dude Joey Ratz (aka the new Pope) was inaugurated, because somehow I make my connection in Antwerp and get to Brugge only 15 minutes later than expected.

My next test is finding my way to the fields.

But I will leave that, and the story of the actual tournament, for Part II as I am now concentrating on hitting the right keys and keeping my eyes open.

To be continued.

The Road to Heidelberg

2005-05-02T19:53:00.000+02:00

Last week my company had its Global Marketing Meeting. About 100 employees from at least five different offices in four different countries were gathered in Heidelberg, Germany.

The Dordrecht marketing staff rented cars and drove. The meeting where the travel arrangements were planned was held in English for about five minutes until I mentioned that I neither have a valid license to operate a motor vehicle in Europe, nor know how to drive a stick shift. After that the meeting carried on in some unintelligible language (Dutch) and I sat patiently waiting for someone to give me the recap. At the end I was told when and where to be on the day we left and that was enough for me.

My brain usually drops out much of the detailed data it finds uninteresting (like when taxes are due, how long it’s been between oil changes, how to cook food, what my Social Security Number is, and what medications I am allergic to), so whenever possible I like to reduce my action items to just showing up. Like someone (probably in the Army) said, life is decided by those who show up... and advance preparation is highly overrated.

So Monday morning I fulfill my obligation, lugging my suit bag the one kilometer (half a mile) to the office on foot, where I find out two things: 1) my brain did its job again by forgetting that the dress code was ‘business casual’ and I only packed suits, 2) I am going to spend the next six hours packed into a European rental car with four Dutch women.

Now, in case the severity of the situation escapes you, let me remind you that the height of the average Dutch woman is 5’8”, and at least two of the women in our car were 5’10”. The average European car on the other hand is only three feet wide. Okay, maybe three and a half.

But honestly, the Dutch in general are very outgoing and forward people, so you can have some pretty interesting conversations when you’re stuck in a car with them for six hours. I got the low down on the biggest domestic problems facing the Netherlands today: the aging population, environmental pollution, and Suzanne (who I know think is crazy) said that we weren’t treating the disabled with the right amount of special care they need – now THAT’S Dutch for you.

We had a group discussion sparked by an article in my Businessweek magazine about the use of blogs as community-building devices for our scientific journals. I will probably put it all down in a memo to my boss and claim complete credit for all the good ideas.

I also had a very interesting discussion with Dianna about the cyclical nature of economic improvement vis a vis the rise of China’s economy and its inevitable fall to the same outsourcing pressures now affecting America and Europe.

On the way there we stopped at a gas station to pick up some porn. I mean gas. To pick up some gas.

Just so you know, filling up a gas tank in Europe will generally cost you on the order of 50 Euros. That’s about $65. Think about that next time you fill up your Taurus or Camry at your local Exxon or Mobil station for $2 a gallon.

Overall it was a very nice trip. Other than the fact that they made me listen to Annie Lennox and Suzanne (the crazy one) said she doesn’t like U2 (further proof that she’s nuts).

I have to say thank you to Christel who drove the whole way. I took a plane back, but that was only because I was staying an extra day. I wouldn’t have missed being sandwiched in between all those Dutch women for any other reason.

;-)

Update on Little Differences 4

2005-04-29T15:15:00.000+02:00

In a previous post I talked about the porn at the gas station. We recently drove from Dordrecht to Heidelberg for our Global Marketing Meeting and this time when we stopped off to get gas I got some proof. Notice the ingenius co-marketing of the "Betty Boop" video right below the "Penthouse" DVD. Genius.

What Is With All This Chanting?

2005-04-24T11:51:00.000+02:00

I just realized that for the past three hours my apartment could have been mistaken for the residence of some chant-crazed Gregorian monks. This is a bit strange, as both Ann and I are devout atheists.

The culprit is CNN, which we generally have on in the background at all times so we can keep track of all the death and destruction on planet Earth. Their non-stop coverage of the inaugural mass of the new Pope means that someone in the Vatican CD store is getting very rich right now.

I'll Pencil You In

2005-04-24T11:44:00.000+02:00

The Dutch are big on advance planning. Your typical Dutch man or woman is indoctrinated into the tradition of “the agenda” at a very early age. Six or seven I think. They usually plan everything weeks in advance.

I have a few people at work who I’ve tried to get together with for a movie or drinks or the occasional game of poker, and the typical response you get when you ask someone if they are free is, “Hold on one minute [sound of riffling pages], let me see… I’m booked this weekend, next weekend too, how about three weeks from now?”

How about three weeks from now?

Come on people! How about you break free from the shackles that bind you and just freaking DO IT! It’s a MOVIE! Or an evening of drinks. It’s SUPPOSED to be spontaneous, it’s a casual gathering of friends.

To my way of thinking, being friends with someone means that I don’t HAVE to schedule face-time. Being friends means that you can call someone up and say, “Hey, feel like shooting some pool? Yeah? Okay, meet you at the bar in an hour.”

I schedule my work appointments. I schedule vendors. And colleagues. And meetings. I don’t schedule my friends to the point that when they indicate that they want to spend some time with me, I tell them that they should take a number and wait for a good few weeks.

I haven’t mustered the courage to sneak a peek, but I wonder if they plan out their sex lives too

Little Differences 4

2005-04-19T16:13:00.000+02:00

So I'm in a car on my way to play frisbee in Groningen, which is in the north easternmost corner of the country. We stop after an hour at a gas station to fill up and get some snacks from the convenience store.

Now we all can be thankful for the progress that has been made in turning regular old fuel distribution points into mini-supermarkets where you can get all manner of road snacks, magazines, drinks, ice cream, all manner of health and hygiene supplies, and other sundries.

Well, in the Netherlands, that list also includes porn.

Right next to the magazine rack was a wall mounted collection of porn VHS tapes for sale with graphic aides and blurbs on the front and back to help customers understand the unique selling points of each product ("With 'Naught Girls Orgy' 12!", "the MOST cumshots!", etc.)

I perused a few, just to get a feel for the kind of porn that appeals to the average Dutch person at the gas station. I didn't notice any anthropological uniqueness to their selection. Comforting to think that people are people the world over.

Sophia Maranhao Guzik

2005-04-18T11:40:00.000+02:00

Big news! Sofia Maranhao Guzik entered the world on April 18th, weighing in at 6lbs 15 ozs and 19.5 inches long. And with a head of black hair.

Congratulations to proud parents Pete and Allie Guzik.

Best wishes for the future.

Love,

Brian and Ann

My New Addiction

2005-04-14T16:54:00.000+02:00

I am addicted.

There is somthing in these damn "Oven Roasted Chicken and Thyme" potato chips that is more potent than crack cocaine (not that I would really know, but I can imagine).

I can't stop eating them. They are so TASTY. They're like an entire meal condensed into a single potato chip. Delicious.

See for yourself.

Little Differences 3

2005-04-13T15:23:00.000+02:00

Here’s an annoying difference between Europe and the States: dry cleaning costs a fortune here.

Which is strange, because you’d think that since the average business dress code is more formal here than in the US, that more people would have dry cleaning to do and therefore the prices would be at least as low as in the US.

Instead, I’m paying 6 Euros for a pair of pants, 7.50 for a suit jacket, and 4 for a shirt. That’s 17.50 (Euro!) for ONE business outfit!

And this in a country where you can get a sack of fresh oranges for 3 Euros and a book-sized hunk of Gouda cheese for two Euros. Just to give you an example, when Ann and I buy groceries for a week, we spend a little over twenty Euros.

It’s almost as expensive to dry clean a suit as it is to buy food for a week. Strange.

This leads me to the conclusion that most of the people you see walking around wearing professional clothes either: 1.) Invest in their own dry cleaning equipment to keep at home because it apparently pays off pretty quickly, or 2.) never clean their clothes.

Those are the only two possible options. I mean, I know they’re not rich, because the economy is set up to greatly limit the amount of personal wealth an individual can attain… so it has to be one of those two.

I think this would be a good discussion question for my Economics class.

Frisbee UFO-Style

2005-04-07T19:11:00.000+02:00

So I'm on UFO 2. The second of four frisbee teams that Utrecht fields. We actually play under the name UFO 3 due to a naming mishap at the Nederland Frisbee Bond, the bureaucratic organization that organizes frisbee in the Netherlands (you simply cannot escape the bureaucracy in this country).

Last weekend was our first outdoor competition day (pictures). We played two games and lost them both, but I have to say, for being out of shape and not having thrown a disc in two months, I think I did alright.

As you can see from the picture, the competition in Frisbee is tough because the average height of the dutch male is 6'2", no joke.

Now, in this picture it may LOOK like I have the vertical leaping ability of a potted plant, but the truth is, this was a good pass to the other guy, it was in the endzone, still early in the game (when it was fairly close), and believe it or not, I blocked this.

BOOYA YOU TALL DUTCH BASTARDS!!!

We still lost 17-5, so it doesn't really matter that they didn't get this particular goal. But I still felt like the man. Until the tall dude warned me about being more careful with my arms as we were walking back (ultimate is a no contact sport). I couldn't believe this tall guy was serious, but "no contact" in the Netherlands is different from "no contact" in the states.

Hey, I'm from Jersey right?

Much love to my homeys back at Mercer County Ultimate.

Heidelberg & A Note On National Identity

2005-04-07T10:19:00.000+02:00

My company has a large office in Heidelberg, Germany, which I have been to probably six or seven times.

Heidelberg is one of those quaint little European towns with cobblestone streets in the old part of town, nice gothic cathedrals, and a castle which overlooks the town from up on a hill. If you are ever doing a tour of the south of Germany I highly recommend making a stop there. Friendly people, good (heavy) food, and a little bit of history.

---- WARNING: RAMBLING PHILOSOPHICAL DIGRESSION ----

Every time I see these parts of cities that are centuries old, where the buildings are sometimes older than my country, I think about what a difference in perspective there is between countries with real and obvious historical tradition, and America. I've always thought that history is a bit of a double edged sword. It can give you a perspective on the world that is perhaps a bit more far-sighted, if your country can claim that it was a nation (or becoming one) a thousand years ago. Or THREE thousand years ago in the case of the Greeks. It can give you a sense of belonging to a tradition, but in many ways that cuts both ways.

By NOT having an extremely long history, America is free to make it up as it goes along, and everyone who is there at the time can feel like they are equally a part of it. You lose the long term perspective, and perhaps your identity has to be grounded in something other than the history of your country, but we substitute other traditions (like our family history, or ethnic history) and the good news is that everyone gets to identify themselves in two ways: as an American, and as whatever it is they want to identify their history as.

Italian-American. African-American. Asian-American. Etc.

Yeah, we become a country of hyphenated people, but that's symbolic of the advantages and disadvantages of our national character. We let everyone be a part of it, and at the same time we let everyone distinguish themselves. The national identity is not something that is allowed to be tied to a particular ethnicity, a particular religion, a particular skin color, etc. (Not to say that our history ISN'T written from a particular perspective of a particular group of white, European-descended, Christians.) The word "American" doesn't imply a specific set of characteristics, but gets to represent more abstract concepts: individual freedom, equality of opportunity, aggressive use of force against other countries, the schizophrenia of gun-totin' crazies and tree-hugging liberals living together...

Try doing that with the cultural identity "French". Being "French" implies a particular set of historical experiences, largely associated with a particular race and religion (or two). Same with the Dutch, Germans, British, Irish, Spanish, Italian.... and on and on and on.

Alright, enough for one post. But I invite anyone to comment on whether they agree or disagree with this analysis.

Spectacle of Death

2005-04-02T00:10:00.000+02:00

What is it about a slow, televised death that is so fascinating?

I come home from MBA class, turn on the TV, and find out that what everyone has been speculating for two days is now official: Pope John Paul II is near death from advanced Parkinsons.

Now, as the leader of one of the world’s largest religions, it’s understandable that his imminent death is news. What’s less easily accepted is the spectacle. The endless talking heads givingthe grueling details of advanced Parkinson’s disease, giving the world a vicarious death that they can internalize and therefore become one with this powerful symbol as he undertakes the final voyage into the infinite.

That’s what it’s all about right. The discussions about feeding tubes through the nose, the precise impact of kidney failure. The news commentators can’t repeat enough how wrenching it must have been for this great communicator to be unable to discharge the duties of his office in his final days.

It’s all about giving the people a window into the death of someone famous. I guess we should thank the news media for helping us with our method acting, helping us get into role. They could probably make a killing if they partnered with QVC to sell props as well.

I can’t decide if it’s a normal human reaction, and should be praised as empathy, or if it’s just plain sick pandering, and should be denounced.

Is it part of being human to want to identify with these famous people, who have transcended being human and have become symbols of something we believe is greater than ourselves? Isn’t the ability to empathize, and the desire to place oneself in another’s position (at least from the safety of our living rooms) a good quality?

I don’t know. On one level, it’s just selfish.

We want to empathize with them because they represent something that we want to take part in. Knowing what dying of Parkinson’s is like helps us pretend that we are closer to the Pope as he lies in his apartments, waiting to die. It makes us just like those protestors who just wouldn’t leave in front of Terri Schiavo’s hospice while she died from dehydration. It wasn’t for Terry that they stood there day after day: it was for themselves. They needed to be there to satisfy their own beliefs and values.

I took a course one time that examined many aspects of human interactions, one example used was an audience, and what is happening when an audience gives applause. As much as they may think differently, the audience isn’t giving applause for the performer. The audience is giving applause because they have a need to express their own satisfaction/gratitude/compliance with the group’s norms/whatever. It’s not about the target of the applause… it’s about the needs of the people doing the clapping. If they *didn't* clap they would be unfulfilled.

I think the same is true with this mass media spectacle of grief. It’s not about the Pope. It’s not about Terri Schiavo. It’s not about Yasser Arafat. It’s about satisfying the need of the anonymous spectators at home to make themselves a part of the action.

[Editor’s note: It pains me to mention the Pope and Yasser Arafat in the same sentence. I am neither a Catholic nor a Palestinian, but I have an infinite amount of respect for the Pope and only absolute loathing for Yasser Arafat, who was never anything but a petty thug with distinctive headwear. I use him only because his death was so recent, he was such a good example of a symbol, and he rated the same mass spectacle.]

I guess it’s natural that we make people into symbols. We like symbols. Symbols are very powerful. They are also very easy to understand and file away. We like leaders. We like having one person represent the needs of a population. After all, it makes things simpler, and it absolves us of the responsibility. In a representational democracy we pick someone, someone who wanted the job (which should be a red flag in itself), and then we pay our taxes and say, “Hey, I did my part.” We take responsibility when they act the way we want or things go right, or we put the blame squarely on their shoulders if they don’t or it doesn’t. I just learned tonight in my Organizational behavior class that there's a name for it: the fundamental attribution error. Look it up if you want.

We do so much emotional effort to avoid responsibility by assigning it to a symbol, and then try to get it back after the fact by empathizing with them from a safe distance.

In the past few months there have been quite a few high profile, protracted deaths. Arafat. Terri Schiavo. The Pope. The press even has their next one lined up, Prince Rainier of Monaco. Although he will probably be eclipsed if he should happen to kick the bucket within the next week or so. His PR people have the worst timing.

I suppose we won’t ever escape the spectacle of a highly publicized death process. I suppose the throngs of people gathering in St Peter’s Square is a normal and natural reaction and should be praised as at least an attempt to participate. It’s better than apathy for sure.

I just wish it wasn’t so much of a production. I wish I *didn’t* have access to Terri Schiavo’s autopsy records. I wish I didn’t have updates every fifteen minutes on the progression of someone’s death. Anyone’s death. People deserve better than that. How would YOU like it?

I personally think that everyone who goes online to look at Terry Schiavo’s autopsy report should first have to sign a waiver saying that they will have their own bodies autopsied, and the details about the state of their flesh at the time of their death made public.

I’m overdoing it of course. We’re all capable of acts that are both repulsive and heroic. That’s the human condition. I just don’t like having the worst aspects of our nature publicized to sell TV ads.

Call me crazy.

Proof

2005-03-31T14:20:00.000+02:00

If you read my last post about moving, I talked about how beautiful the day was when I came back from dropping Ann off at the airport. Here's some proof.

Dordrecht's Scheffer's plein (1.8MB .asf file)

A Philosophical Post on Moving

2005-03-29T00:41:00.000+02:00

Ann left two days ago. Guess how long it’s been since I left the apartment. You guessed it. Two days.

Actually, today I went to Utrecht with my bike to go to a pickup game of ultimate. Utrecht is an hour away by train, and I hadn’t been to the new sports park where the team started having its practices, but what the hell. I had a general idea of where it was and no shame about asking multiple pedestrians where the “Kanalstraat” and the “Marco van Basten sportpark” was. I found my way, but there were only eight people there to play ultimate. At least I was around people again.

Now, I’m not a stranger to international living experiences. My family moved to Paris, Seoul, and Hong Kong when I was growing up, and I know how it goes. But the truth is, it’s different each time. The places and the cultures are different each time. Where you are in your life is different each time. That said, there are some general trends that you can count on.

The beginning is always tough. And it’s even tougher when you don’t have an immediate support network you can latch on to (like an expatriate club, which, surprisingly, does not have a Dordrecht chapter), or where the culture is extremely different from your own (like Asia), or where there is a language barrier.

In terms of difficulty, this move has been about a 6. The culture is different in some ways, but shares many of the same fundamental traits that American culture shares. That, plus the fact that Ann at least speaks the language (so we can read all the forms), and that the majority of people you run into will speak English, have helped. On the other hand, we knew no one here, and that is the main reason that I have not showered in two days.

In general, you move someplace, and you spend the first few months just getting oriented. Doing your paperwork to get legal. Dealing with the various bureaucracies. Setting up your utility bills. Buying appliances.

You spend the first year really completing your settling in process. Learning the ins and outs of where you live. Where to shop. What the fastest way from here to there is. How much things cost. The names of the streets. The good places to eat.

Then after about a year you have made the place your own somehow. Now you don’t think twice about calling it home. The boxes are all unpacked. All your stuff is around you. You feel more confident about being there. And you start to look for your people.

Everywhere you go, you look for your people. Or as close to them as you can get. You look for people who share the same world view, who are into the same sports. Who have the same general background and the same general goals. The people who laugh at your jokes. The people whose numbers you memorize. (Well, at least you used to, in the days before cell phones.)

In the five times that I moved with my family before I was fifteen, I found that wherever I was, it usually took between one and two years to really find your friends. That usually gave me about one year of easy living before the movers showed up again with their supply of brown cardboard boxes.

Right now, I haven’t found my people yet. And I think it gets tougher as you get older. People have other commitments. People have priorities. The Dutch especially are fond of planning everything ahead in their little agenda books, which makes it tough to just call someone up and say, “Hey, want to go shoot some pool?” The likely Dutch response is, “Sure, let me see, [sound of small pages being riffled] how about next Thursday.”

So while I have no people, and no real time to dedicate to finding some (in between my six hours a week of Dutch classes and my MBA program), I have to face facts. When Ann goes away my options become very limited.

Here’s what I have done over the past two days.

Played on my friend Ian’s Xbox that he thoughtfully left at my place.

Finished the new Crichton book (State of Fear, not bad)

Watched mindless TV programs

Unloaded the dishwasher

Slept

Read my Economics textbook (in ten page chunks because it is THAT boring and dense)

Prepared sustenance for myself (usually in the form of sandwiches of bread, meat, and cheese)

Contributing to this general malaise is the fact that it’s Easter, there’s no one I can call to do anything with, and the weather is crappy, grey and cold all the time. It would be easy to sit on my slightly stiff Ikea couches and pontificate on how lonely and pathetic I am.

But even though I am still wandering around looking for my people, and have to endure the occasional house confinement, the truth is, I know what the deal is. I’ve been here before. I know what the process is, how long it takes, and how much effort it requires. So it’s hard to really sulk, I knew it was all coming. And I can do better things with my time than wallow.

So let me tell you about something that happened to me on the day my wife left me (for her trip to the States, just for ten days). I was coming back from the airport where I had said my goodbyes. I got to Dordrecht and it was just a beautiful day. The sun was shining, it was in the high sixties, the people were all out and about because it was the last day before everything closed for the Easter holiday. It was hard to not take a deep breath and just be happy to be alive.

I went to the grocery store because just before she left Ann admonished me to get some food in the house since there would be nothing open for two days. I shopped, alone, but surrounded by Dutch people who had no idea about the American in their midst. Well, at least until I got to the cash register and spoke Dutch in my American accent.

I walked out onto the street and my first thought was, “This is exactly what I hoped for when I said I wanted to live in a quaint European town.”

Here I am, walking down the market street with throngs of Dutch people just going about their business. And I’m one of them. I’ve got my ridiculously thin plastic bags from the grocery store. I’m on my way to my apartment. The sun is shining. The weather is warm. Spring is coming. Life is good.

How many people get to do this? How many Americans are walking down the street on this sunny Saturday with their little plastic bags full of groceries from the local tiny market? And here I am.

I can understand now about a fifth of what I hear (thanks to my ever-patient Dutch teacher Corrie). I can get by at the grocery store and on the train. I have my bike. I am in that phase. I’m starting to make it my own.

And I know I’ll find my people. Might take a little longer than usual since I have so many constraints on my time. But they are here. They are everywhere you go. And knowing that takes away a lot of the fear and anxiety that is always close by when you completely change your environment.

I miss my life in the states. But I know that my life now is just as rewarding, just in different ways.

I checked on Weather.com to see when this succession of grey, cold, rainy days will end, but the five week forecast shows nothing but the same.

But I know the sun is coming.

Our 5th Anniversary

2005-03-25T10:22:00.000+01:00

Thank you for everything honey baby.

Know when to hold 'em...

2005-03-23T12:59:00.000+01:00

There’s good news about poker night, and there’s bad news.

The good news is that we have finally migrated to “no limit”, and we have moved into that phase of gambling degeneracy. We have moved into the phase where the adrenaline shoots into your veins as you calmly look across the table at your opponents and say, “I’m all in.”

Previous poker nights were all low-limit affairs where people would come, buy in for five Euros, perhaps buy in for another five if everything disappeared too quickly, and your entire exposure for any given hand of poker was a whopping two Euros.

But lately we have brought in the X-factors, Constantine and Dominic, our two German interns, into the game. The good thing about interns who are only there for three months is: they don’t give a damn. They’re willing to give anything a try. And, like the degenerate pusher that I am, I brought out the hard stuff: no-limit.

No-limit poker simply means that at any point in the game, you can decide to wager your entire stack of chips. Anyone who has enough chips to cover the bet can match you, and usually in those situations, after all the cards are out, one person doubles their money and one person is then out for the rest of the hand. It’s like the playoffs: win or go home.

In no-limit poker you play until one person has all the chips. The chips themselves don’t have any intrinsic value, they’re just indicators of who’s got the advantage (and the biggest cojones). At the beginning of the round everyone “buys in” for a pre-determined amount, and the person who wins all the chips walks away with the money. If you have a large enough group it’s usual to split the money between first and second place, or even first, second and third place, but you need at least six or seven players to make that worthwhile.

No-limit is intoxicating. It brings a whole other dimension to the game. You aren’t bound by the normal rules of strategy, and the swings can be immense. You can go from being almost out to the chip leader (the guy with the most chips) in two or three consecutive hands (as I did last night). It’s like walking the edge of a skyscraper when you declare “all in”. And you will either crash and burn and have to watch your friends play the rest of the time without you, or you will be catapulted to an even higher level of chips, which you will also eventually have to put on the line again in order to knock the next players out. You can’t win at no-limit by just waiting it out, gaining a little on this hand, a little on that hand. In order to win… you have to risk it all.

Last night we had five players, one of whom was my wife. She didn’t take to no-limit. The traits that make her successful at regular Hold ‘Em, patience and risk-aversion, are liabilities in no-limit. The new guy, Marco, who hadn’t played even regular Hold ‘Em before, actually was a very fast learner and did very well. The German interns were the German interns. Unpredictable, staying in on hands they clearly had no chance and, and every now and then pulling out something that would just make you shake your head in disbelief.

We played four rounds of no-limit. I won them all. I have to admit, I got really lucky on one of them. In the last round there were 3 players left, and I was down to about fifteen chips. My opponents had about 80 and 120. I do the only thing I can in that situation, where just covering the big blind would take out a quarter of my stack, and I go all in before the flop. Thankfully, Constantine goes with me. I guess he figures it’s less than ten percent of his stack for the opportunity to knock me out. But I win that one. Go all in on the next hand, win that one too, and all of a sudden the chips are evenly distributed again.

Now, while it IS true that I was pulling stuff out of my ass all night (getting two pairs on hands like Queen, 10, and getting full houses and the like), the truth is: I’m just nasty. I am a NASTY no-limit player! I’M THE GREATE—I better quiet down before Ken and Guze decide to fly over one night just to remind me what’s what.

It saddens me that this was the last poker night for the German interns. They will be going back to the Fatherland at the end of the weekend, and I will have to go back to five Euro buy-ins and playing hands for forty cents and losing to hands like 3,9 unsuited. Sigh.

Well, it was great while it lasted, and I’d like to thank Constantine and Dominic for contributing to the “Brian’s Next Trip to the Casino In Amsterdam” fund.

Take care guys.

Bearded Brian

2005-03-16T23:43:00.000+01:00

So while I was on the 2nd Annual Guys Snowboarding Trip I decided to see what it would look like if I grew a beard. While my swarthy half-Turkish genes were certainly up to the task, there's just so much facial hair you can grow in 9 days.

I came back and was greeted by my wife with three reactions:

1. "Ow. It prickles. Get off."
2. "You look like Mark. I feel like I'm kissing your brother. Ew."
3. "It makes your lip look funny. Go shave."

How about a little reaction on the "Comments" on this one, eh folks? What do you think of the manly facial hair. Sure it may look like a George-Michael-before-he-admitted-he-was-a-queer wanna-be right now, but try and see past that and recognize the sheer exotic sensuality of a Brian covered in facial hair.

Come on. You know you love it. SAY IT. SAY YOU LOVE IT!

2nd Annual Guys Snowboarding Trip

2005-03-14T18:30:00.000+01:00

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For the tenth time in two months I’m on a plane. I’m somewhere above America, flying from Salt Lake City to Newark on my way back to the Netherlands. It’s going to take me two days to make the complete trip because for some crazy reason the airline companies didn’t consider that someone might want to wake up in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, fly twelve hours and across eight time zones so they could go to sleep in Dordrecht. The best I could manage was getting to Newark airport at 11:00pm on Saturday, and then taking a Sunday night flight back to the Netherlands, which arrives at 8am of the following day.

I am going to write a strongly worded letter to Continental, KLM, and Delta about this serious lack of sensitivity to their customer’s needs.

Why am I doing this you may ask? Because I love pain. I love strapping myself into a four foot high piece of composite materials with wax on the bottom and throwing myself down the steep side of a snow covered mountain, and then repeating the process until all body parts are sore and/or bruised.

You may know this phenomenon by its more common name: snowboarding.

I’m on my annual Guys Snowboarding Trip. This is the second installment in what I hope will be a yearly tradition from now until I am too old and arthritic to tighten my boot straps. The “Guys” in this case are my friends Ken and Jimmy and my brother Mark. This year we decided to spend a week snowboarding in that perennial snow paradise, “the West”.

When you grow up skiing in such places as the Adirondacks, the Poconos, Vermont and New Hampshire, you say “the West” with the appropriate amount of reverence. In the East we get small mountains with short runs which are more suited to ice skates than skis. But you take what you can get and you love it. Well, you love it until you go someplace that nature truly intended humans to ski or snowboard. These places include Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Vancouver, and Lake Tahoe (which is where the first annual Guys Snowboarding Trip was held).

It is only when you see the sheer size of the mountains in the West, when you carve a tight turn on a bed of soft snow with the sun shining on your face while you’re wearing only a sweater, that you truly understand what a cruel joke Northeastern skiing is.

That said, the locals told us that we picked one of the worst seasons in memory to go to Jackson Hole Mountain Resort. This year they only got half of their usual amount of snowfall due to strange weather systems with Hispanic names which pushed most of the snowstorms either north or south of the Tetons.

It’s still freaking fantastic. The first day was a little tough because the sky was overcast, so the snow stayed hard all day. I got a rude awakening to the fact that Jackson Hole is not a mountain for beginners as I repeatedly fell on my ass and got pushed around by the moguls. The second day was cloudless and sunny, and the temperature reached into the high forties, the snow softened into a heavy, slushy consistency which allowed us to push IT around… and there was much rejoicing.

We ate our lunches outside almost every day with the sun on our faces and our coats off. We took various pictures of ourselves in front of vast panoramas of mountains. We played poker at night with the four of us. We made fun of Mark to the appropriate level as he is our token whipping boy, a role which he excels at.

Mark is on the Guys Snowboarding Trip thanks to the generosity of his investors, Mom and Dad, who believe that having something to look forward to is a good incentive for Mark’s performance at the Florida State University in Talahassee. If Mark keeps the grades up he can probably milk the Rents for at least one more free ski trip.

Sadly I had to take a whole day off to finish a final for my Managerial Accounting class, but beyond that it was a fantastic trip. Here are some of the highlights:

Reviving the liberal use of the word “punani”
Mark slashing Ken’s chin open with the edge of his snowboard on the very first day so that he needed sixteen stitches. Ken is no punani though. He got stitched up, then got back to the mountain for a few more hours of boarding. In the words of Ali G, “respec!”
Mark coining the phrase of the trip: spicy. He first used it in the story he told about the barber who trimmed his moustache so that it was pencil thin, which he then complimented the barber on by saying, “yeah, that’s spicy!” Little did Mark know the versatility of this accolade. For example: “Did you like that run? Yeah, it was spicy!” and “Nice shot on the 8 ball Ken, spicy.” “The stock market has been really spicy lately.” Give it a try. (By the way, Mark, pencil thin staches only work for John Waters and certain sexually ambiguous boy bands. And maybe Buscemi. Maybe.)
Losing my entire stack within the first five minutes in two consecutive no-limit Hold ‘Em tournaments. What can I say, I know how to pick ‘em.
Beating Ken on our last night in two consecutive heads-up Hold Em tourneys. Spicy.
The guy at the Board Room, a local snowboard store where apparently the staff are not allowed to show up to work unless they are stoned or just naturally slow.
Finding a beer called “Bitch Creek”
The “Nut Sack.” A bag of snowboard screws, nuts, and washers sold in one of those little plastic netted sacks that they sell Hanakkuh candy in. The packaging sports a picture of a squirrel with a huge nut sack hanging between his legs. Spicy.
Finding a replacement for the “Awful Awful” from Reno on our last trip: Billy’s Burgers. Cheap, greasy fare that tastes great as long as you don’t watch how it’s made. Still, you either eat it or you’re a punani.
Finding the one table at the Rancher pool hall with felt so bad that it ended up correcting for my inherent suckiness at pool long enough for me to beat Ken (who owns a pool table and is a truly spicy pool player) once. I also counted at least seven cowboy hats there.
Buying a new snowboard. (Ann if you’re reading this, they were practically giving them away. 230 including tax. That’s really not even fair to the board shop. Plus, I’ve had my old one for seven seasons now. Ann, it was just too spicy NOT to buy. Honey? Don’t hurt me. I’m a punani.)
Ken, Jimmy, and Mark snowboarding after drinking two pitchers at lunch one day.
Listening to Mark make these cute squaling sounds every time he took his boots off because of the coaster-sized blister he developed after the first day. Talk about being a punani.

Well, I’m just past Cleveland now. The captain said the tailwinds are spicy and we should be in a half hour earlier than anticipated. I’ll have a few hours on Sunday to meet with Princeton friends and then it’s another cramped economy seat across the ocean.

Catch you all later.
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Blizzard!

2005-03-04T14:47:00.000+01:00

I take back what I said about it never snowing in the Netherlands.

I take it back because I am sitting on a train instead of a plane. My flight from Frankfurt back to Amsterdam was cancelled because of a snowstorm that was working its way across “the Continent”.

I luckily got onto an ICE (InterCity Express for those of you unfamiliar with European train services) from Frankfurt to Amsterdam. That’s three and a half hours, and then I have to get from Amsterdam home, because I have to go to my Dutch class since I missed it on Monday and I’m missing the next three classes due to my ski trip to Jackson Hole.

* * *

I missed my class though. The train got in at around 8:40 and thanks to Murphy's law, there were no taxis. I trudged through the snow, dragging my suitcase, looking around at the (mostly) deserted snow-covered streets and trying to keep my balance in my treadless work shoes.

Dordrecht is fairly pretty when covered under a blanket of snow. I just wish I had remembered to wear two pairs of socks.

Nieves

2005-03-03T10:00:00.000+01:00

The last time I saw Nieves was almost four years ago. She came for the US wedding of our friends Ken and Sole, which was in the summer of 2001.

Nieves was one of the au pair crop that Ken and I, and various other Princeton locals hit on. I ended up with Ann, and Ken ended up with Sole, so there were no suitable suitors left in all of Princeton and sadly Nieves left at the end of her au pair term in 1999.

Nieves moved to Germany to live with her boyfriend at the time, Manuel, without knowing a lick of German (well, strictly speaking that’s not true…). I remember thinking what a huge leap of faith that was for her. Nieves is as Spanish as you can get, close with her large sized family, talks at a mile a minute when she gets excited, often gets excited. Loves life and art. She was part of our band (Smelly Pig), has a great singing voice, and a few other great physical assets. I’m speaking about her eyes of course. Big and green. ;-)

So Nieves moved to Germany, got a job in Stuttgart working for Mercedes, and is now speaking fluent German and climbing the corporate ladder, leading a busy and fulfilling life. I caught up with her over Italian in Stuttgart while I was in Heidelberg on business. I was immediately reminded what a warm and caring person she is, and how sad it was that after she left I didn’t keep in touch. I’m lazy that way, and the cost was evident to me while I listened to the brief version of the last four years.

I got to see her apartment and her DVD of her performances on various German TV shows (she’s an actress too, and plays a very convincing Venezuelan mother). I even got to see her naked. Well, sort of. Apparently Nieves and a few other women were somehow convinced to get naked, cover themselves with white and black body paint, and then pose in artistic positions against a white screen while a projector shone images onto their bodies.

I know, it sounds very weird, but the effect it created was really cool. First of all, not all of their bodies are painted white, so the images projected on them only come through partially. In many of the pictures you could kind of make out body parts and outlines of female forms, but their bodies blend into the screen, and the images being projected on them act as their clothing. The different angles and positions give the eye so much to look at that it’s often very hard to really focus on the people, and you get this very interesting effect of seeing pieces of human shape embedded in these very colorful pictures of other things. I was very impressed, there are some very cool shots. In fact, I am thinking about becoming an ‘artistic’ photographer myself. All I need is a camera, a projector, a few gallons of body paint, and I’m in business.

Sabine and Rik Visit

2005-02-27T11:32:00.000+01:00

Ann's mom Sabine and her boyfriend Rik are visiting for the first time! We are very glad to host them, but we have to keep Sabine out of the kitchen because she has a nasty habit of breaking all our stuff.

;-)

Third Trip Home

2005-02-25T09:48:00.000+01:00

My second whirlwind trip home.

Only this time I didn’t get to spend as much time in Princeton as last time. And I didn’t get to eat ANY Indian food!

I came into Newark on Monday, arriving one day after the snow, just like last time. We haven’t hardly seen any snow at all in the Netherlands, it only got cold enough to flurry twice, and both times it was gone in an hour. This time the news didn't call it a 'blizzard', but in Northeastern terminology, I would call it "a good sized dump". Which sounds worse than I intended...

I had the obligatory contradictory emotions of “god I miss this” and “god I’m so happy I don’t have to do this any more” as I got reacquainted with New Jersey Transit and Metrocard. It’s home, and it’s not at the same time.

Monday night I met my Aunt Bernadette for dinner up near her (upper East side). My Aunt, although she is retired, knows only one pace: busy. Right now she is busy organizing our family reunion, which happens only once every five years. She gave me the low down about the various operations, births, divorces, and other important details of my extended family, most of whom I have met only once in my life, at the first family reunion. Still, I give her much respect for the effort involved in dealing with all that family.

Tuesday night I found heaven. It’s what others know as “Brazilian style steak house” or “chiascurria”. You pay a fixed price, you get access to the appetizer bar, and then you get down to business. The waiters start bringing around skewers and skewers of meat. Just meat, of many different varieties. Five kinds of sirloin, two kinds of lamb, three other kinds of beef, spare ribs, two kinds of pork, and then exotic things like chicken hearts (which I will never forgive myself for actually trying a bite of… poor little chickens, so wrong to eat their hearts). And it keeps coming and coming as long as you have your signal coaster green side up. When you want to take a break, you flip it over so the red side is up, and then flip it back when you are ready for more. I absolutely love this concept. Thank you Brazil, for making plastic surgery a commodity, for your contribution to women’s grooming, and for Churrascaria.

Wednesday night was Princeton night. Met Mark and Katrin and their baby Kira and Guze and Allie (who are also expecting a baby in about six weeks) for Chinese food at Sunny Garden. Hands down the best Chinese food and sushi in Princeton. Good food. Good company. A baby making cute baby noises. Great time.

Thursday was the going away party for my friend Jim Kingsepp. Jim was a delayed victim of the merger of Springer and Kluwer. He was good at his job, a good manager, and could have done a better job of handling our electronic publishing needs than anyone else, so naturally he was let go. Jim and I both started at Kluwer at the same time, back in 2001 when Kluwer decided to make an “Electronic Publishing Services” group and hire handsome (me) and talented (Jim) people to help make the world safe for electronic publishing. It was sad to see him go, one more reminder that given enough time, everything changes.

The highlights of the evening were:

Losing at Hold ‘Em to a bunch of amateurs (I lost ten bucks). That’s not a highlight, but I’ll throw it in anyway. Whatever, they’re still amateurs.
Beating the pants off of Jim at Galaga to earn pronunciation rights (it’s a long ‘Gala’ as in Galaxy, and a short ‘ga’ at the end. And a high score of 75,000 by yours truly has the final say, BEOTCH!)
Seeing old Kluwer peeps like the immensely tall and wookie-like Rob Wheeler, the charming and lovely ladies: Karen Knapstein, Jen Stevens, and Diane Schubach. Even Mike Malone, who was the head of the company that managed our online platform before we decided to switch to a different vendor who charged us twice as much and was half as responsive (naturally) came to say goodbye to Jim.

It’s true that you can never go home, but you can go back to the place that WAS home and see your old friends and feel like there was a place that you once belonged. And I guess that’s good enough.

Going back has made me think a lot about where I want to be, where I want to spend the years of my life, and how important good friends are to your happiness. My parents proved, with their gallivanting all over the globe, that you can make good friends everywhere, and that’s definitely true. But you meet a finite number of truly special people in your time on Earth, and I think it shows the appropriate honor to recognize them for how special they are.

So consider yourself recognized. You know who you are.

Sony Shout-out

2005-02-20T20:52:00.000+01:00

I would just like to send a shout-out to Sony, the makers of the Micro Vault USB memory stick. Thank god that they designed that thing to go through a washing machine cycle and still operate. Without corrupting any of the files or damaging the memory stick in any way. Truly, amazing foresight on their part.

Much love to the homeys from Japan.

The Diamond Games

2005-02-20T19:40:00.000+01:00

This weekend Ann and I decided to go on a spontaneous trip to Antwerp to go see the women’s finals of the Diamond Games featuring Venus Williams and some French chick I had never heard of (Amelie Mauresmo).

We arrived Saturday night, tired and hungry, and walked to the hotel, which did nothing but inflame our appetites even more (and make Brian even more tired and grumpy because walking in the cold is not on my list of favorite activities). Alright, so I was being a bit of a baby. I admit it. But when Ann suggested we eat at this all too trendy restaurant (this place had barren white walls with large photos of children in poverty on the wall) I balked. “Forget it, we’re leaving.” Call me crazy, but staring at pictures of half naked poor kids doesn’t create a warm dining experience for me.

The problem is, it was now 8pm on a Saturday night in Antwerp. There were no tables available anywhere. After walking around for another ten minutes I just picked the first place with seating that said “Steakhouse.” Let this be a warning to you. If the place is a third full on Saturday in Antwerp… there’s a reason. Bad service. Bad fries (which in Belgium is a capital crime). Bad béarnaise sauce (according to Ann). Note to all you travelers: stay away from the “Argentinian Steakhouse” right by the Cathedral in Antwerp.

The hotel we stayed in (Hotel Theatre), was right next to a very old and famous theater in Antwerp called the Bourla Schouwburg. The place is decorated like a roman amphitheater with statues of famous old dead guys and their names in gold letters surrounding the circular entrance. Believe it or not, Ann had performed on the stage of the Bourla for a performance of “Bacchanten”. I asked her if she played a nymph, but she said her job was to lead out her friend who was playing the blind sage. Apparently, there were no nymphs involved in the production.

Sunday morning was a little better. We slept in. Went to the stadium to buy tickets. We had lunch in this café facing the Town Hall that had great smoked salmon. Then it was time to go to the game. The tournament is known for the prize that can be won if the same person wins the tournament three times in five years: a solid gold, life-sized tennis racquet with a handle encrusted in diamonds and a tennis ball made of diamonds set into the diamond “strings”. A million euros. And Venus Williams was playing for her third win of the tournament.

So, Venus Williams and Amelie Mauresmo start playing, and right from the start it’s a close match. Venus wins the very first game by breaking Mauresmo’s serve. But Mauresmo comes right back and does the same. Venus finally wins the first set 6-4. Both of these women hit the ball with such amazing strength. The TV doesn’t convey the effort that these players are putting into every shot, and simply how amazing it is that they can set up and execute a hit on the ball when it’s moving so fast.

Both women seemed to be ‘power’ players, trying to beat their opponent by ramming the ball down their throat. Mauresmo had a little more finesse and agility than Williams, who had more power and a slightly better serve. Right from the first set though I could see (tennis pro that I am) that Venus was making many more errors than Mauresmo, who was slowly figuring out exactly how to play her. Whenever Venus was on the ropes, she usually ended up losing the point, whereas you could never count out Mauresmo from any point or from any set regardless how many points or games she was down.

The worm turned in the second set. Venus was up 4-2, Mauresmo came back with three straight to make it 5-4. They tied at 5, and Mauresmo won it after two more. In the third set Venus jumped out to take the lead, but when she had a chance to put away Mauresmo and win the game to go up 5-2, she hit too easy of a shot and Mauresmo capitalized, winning the point, then the game (to make it 4-3), then winning the next two games. The last game was the best of the entire match. The longest volleys. The longest game (something like eight or nine deuce points) but finally Mauresmo got the opportunity, with Venus having missed her first serve, she just played the point out until Venus hit it into the net, and the crowd, which was composed of many French-speaking Belgians and French nationals, erupted.

For forty Euros a head, it was some damn good entertainment.

Making the day complete, we were on the first tram back to the Central Station, we caught a train back in fifteen minutes, and so far it hasn’t rained.

I’d like to say a big thank you to my honey baby for putting up with my grumpiness and suggesting this very fun excursion.

See you all next time at Roland Garros (which is the French Open for all you tennis ignoramuses out there).

Ken, Brian, and a Night at Holland Casino

2005-02-14T10:34:00.000+01:00

It wasn’t easy at first.

Ken and I got to the Holland Casino at about 8:15. We rushed through the bag check and bounded up the stairs to get on the list for a Hold ‘Em table (correction: THE Hold ‘Em table) only to find the single 10-20 table in all of Amsterdam, full.

In Amsterdam, poker is heavily regulated, and they only allow about twenty people in the entire city to play poker, only after a successfully negotiating the Office of Poker Licesnsing and waiting 6-9 months for their “Degenerate Gambler” permit, and only during very specific hours. Poker started at 8pm and finished at 3am when the casino closes. If you want to play at times other than those designated by the Office of Poker Licensing, then you are just shit out of luck.

Seriously though, Amsterdam is a pretty big city (over 730,000 inhabitants), and for some reason they can’t find more than fifteen people who want to play poker in this entire burg. I don’t get it.

In honor of my friend Ken’s visit from the States, and the fact that he was winding down his whirlwind European tour, we decided a final trip to Amsterdam was in order. With so many vices to spend our time on (coffee shops, the Red Light District, sniffing tulips) it was a tough choice, but we settled on Texas Hold’ Em.

Alright, it wasn’t a tough choice at all.

So there we were, second and third on the list, watching the only table of Texas Hold ‘Em, looking at all the happy people receiving their two cards and paying their blinds, looking a lot like hungry dogs at the kitchen table. There were seven people standing around waiting to play poker, which generally is enough to get a second table going (assuming the authorities from the Office of Poker Licensing wouldn’t intervene), but the problem was that four of these guys were about 20 and they had all pooled their money to give to one Indian kid so that he could represent them at the table.

What the hell, “Can we start a table with four?” I asked the manager.

He verified my “Degenerate Gambler” permit, and then said, “if you want to play with four, I’ll open up a table.”

It was 8:45 when Ken, myself, this beefcake Italian guy, and the head of the Student Government’s Degenerate Gamble Chapter sat down and started playing poker. At first, it sucked. Playing with four people is extremely difficult because two of them (the “blinds”) are already half in every hand (because of their forced bet), and with 4 people you have to realize that nobody has shit, so you have to adjust your normal thinking about what is an acceptable hand to play. It wasn’t rare for a single pair, or a high face card to win a pot with no other help. Plus, Beefcake was playing with a stack of black chips (which were 500 Euros) and would stay in on basically everything and take you all the way to the river (the last card) if he had any chance of pairing EITHER of his two cards.

Here’s how it went. I traded money back and forth with Ken and Beefcake for about half an hour until some new blood showed up and we devoured him. It was kind of sad really, here was the first guy to sit down and we took his initial 200 Euros in about fifteen minutes, he bought in again for 200, and that was gone 15 minutes later. Ken took this guy all in (meaning he had put all the money he had available into a hand) and beat him both times.

Somehow I managed to go down almost 200 Euros, mainly to Ken and Beefcake, in the first forty-five minutes. I never gave any real money to Student Government because he was so obvious about what he had. Ken likewise (didn't contribute to the educational fund). SG made his money completely from Beefcake, who was happy to throw it away chasing flushes (one of which he made, against me, for about 100 Euros, sadly) and straights.

As the night wore on into the tenth hour, we finally got to seven people, and we finally started having some real poker hands. And that is when God came down from Heaven and said, “Brian, I will now make up for cursing you with male pattern baldness.” The cloudy skies parted, and the hands began to fall into my lap like manna from Heaven.

Three of a kind. Which turned into a full house. Flush. Flush. Then four of a kind (three tens on the board and I had one in my hand and realized, “Hey, I don’t think anyone else can have a ten…”). Another full house (sevens full of fours, which beat the nice old Chinese guy next to me, who had sevens full of threes. Sorry pops.) Then another flush caught on the river as I was standing up to leave.

I was a tsunami of unbelievable hands for about fifteen minutes. And then, thanks be to the Father Almighty, it just so happened to be time to leave. I walked out of Holland Casino with almost 600 Euros in profit. Converted into frightfully devalued US dollars, that’s the best poker night I’ve ever had in my life.

So far.

(And the Devil and the man at the Office of Poker Licesning both smile.)

Ken, who was up a little over 300 at his peak, walked away with 100 profit (50% gain in two and a half hours, hey, better than investing in my 401k).

And the two of us rode the train back to Dordrecht happy men. I even found it in my heart to tip the cab driver a whole Euro (karma and all).

When I got home I put all the profit, all in crisp 100 Euro bills, into the money jar that we use to collect our change. Ann honey, that Delvaux handbag is almost in reach.

Happy Valentines Day.

pre-Superbowl Jitters

2005-02-06T20:41:00.000+01:00

So I’m trying to occupy the time until Superbowl XXXIX. Four hours to go. It will be 12:30am here when I start watching, but I started conditioning myself to watch the whole thing by staying up last night until 3am watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. As much as I appreciate brilliant filmmaking, that movie is pretty damn dull. And weird. Actually, I think most Stanley Kubrick movies are like that. Dull, weird, masterpieces.

I am so psyched that my Eagles are finally in the Big Game. Twenty four years baby. I really shouldn’t front though, I’ve only been an Eagles fan since I moved there in 1999. In a strange twist of fate, my father, who lives in a town about an hour south of Jacksonville, has a ticket to see the game. I guess by the time you are 71 you should have a broad enough network that there is SOMEONE who can get you into the Superbowl, but I still view it as a pretty major accomplishment. I know he does too. Keep an eye out for him: section 104. I told him the best way for me to see him will be for him to jump the barrier and streak across the field. Keep your eyes peeled.

The Superbowl also marks the final opportunity for me to tie up my fantasy football duel with Guze. He’s up by one win. Drafting a fantasy football team when you only have two teams to pick players from shouldn’t be so hard, but I found a way to screw it up by letting him have BOTH starting runningbacks because he had the first pick (Corey Dillon) and I wanted to make sure I got Brady (which was a mistake, the difference between the QBs shouldn’t be THAT great), which meant that Guze took Westbrook for his second pick and now I can’t get a single rushing yard. Extremely poor draft strategy, but whatever.

The Superbowl will be broadcast on SBS6, the cable sports channel in the Netherlands. I will have to watch it in Dutch, with Dutch commentators. I am thinking about turning on my internet radio on really loud (it’s downstairs in the computer room), but that might interfere with my wife’s sleeping.

I don’t know what she’s thinking. My weeping if the Eagles lose (which they are predicted to by 6.5 points I think) will achieve the same effect.

Being out of the country for the entire NFL season sucked. I “watched” the play by play on NFL.com and listened to the Eagles radio show via the internet, but it still sucked. They have an NFL expansion league here, but it has only 6 teams I think. Probably will fold in a year or two, especially with all the anti-Americanism in the air these days.

Speaking of which, I had a bizarre argument with a Russian woman who is in my MBA class at lunch yesterday. Unsurprisingly, she was no fan of American foreign policy, but she got really worked up (which always just makes me get worked up) and we had a bit of an argument about whether more people were killed by Saddam or the US and which was the lesser of two evils. Hard to argue with a woman who thinks that Putin is God and who freely admits that she supported Milosevic. I remember thinking that she probably was really disappointed the poison didn’t work on Yeschenko in the Ukraine. But then I started to get a little freaked out, because I had this amazingly vivid image of HER being the one slipping the poison into his food, which made me subtly slide my plate a little further out of her reach.

Hey, the girl is nuts.

I’ll write a little more about the MBA program later, right now I am going to switch time-wasting tactics and play computer games for a little bit.

The Little Differences 2

2005-02-04T20:20:00.000+01:00

The popcorn in the movie theaters here is coated with sugar instead of salt and butter. I have to say, I really like it. It’s a really light coating, just enough to give you the idea and to make you want more. Come to think of it, they may mix heroin in there too…

Also, at the little three screen theater in Dordrecht here they stop the movies halfway through and have “intermission” for fifteen minutes. To be extra cruel, they play this little clip of a beer commercial the whole time, which accomplishes two things: 1) makes the audience want beer (which is available at the concession stand) and 2) makes sure that only the deaf patrons will actually stay in the theater during the intermission.

Brilliant marketing.

PS: Blade Trinity was pretty bad. And for me to give a comic book superhero special effects vampire Wesley Snipes movie a bad review is saying a lot.

After Exams Dinner

2005-02-04T16:48:00.000+01:00

I know, I know, this is only my second contribution to our blog…After someone called me a slacker (you know who you are), I decided that it was time to start cranking out another contribution. So I will tell you how the future America specialists celebrated the end of their first exam session.

Our last exam was US History on January 31st. I was not only looking forward to handing in my exam papers, but also to our little “After Exams Dinner” that was to take place that evening. I was looking forward to an opportunity to finally sit down with my fellow (but oh so much younger) students in an environment where I wouldn’t have to feel nervous about Professor Chew calling my name.

Canan, a Belgian student from a Turkish family, invited us all to her mom’s restaurant L’Heure Locale in Koekelberg. We were about 25 people (or was I seeing double?). We had a delicious buffet of Turkish vegetarian dishes (the stuff that makes Brian go green), followed by a main dish of real Turkish French Fries and chicken and meat. It was all very yummy, and I stuffed myself silly, which is not out of the ordinary when I am in a relaxed mood and talking everyone’s ears off.

So what were my highlights of the evening?

- George imitating a cat (I mean really well!!)
- Frederic being a master in making girl’s breasts look bigger when operating a camera
- The girls’ gossiping about good looking men
- Catherine trying to figure out who Ruben was, and then Thomas
- Being the cause of Floris’ hearing problem
- Finding out that the Walloon dictionary has 17 volumes
- Utku being really disappointed about his one meatball (no further comments)
- Tim and Niel contemplating when it was better to dump the girlfriend
- Kasper calling me ZOT (a nut case) for the second time this semester (??)
- Trying to figure out where exactly Clara lived, apparently she wasn’t quite sure herself
- Making my way back to the Central Station with 3 personal bodyguards

Anyway, I would say that we need to organize another social event. This was way too much fun. I am looking forward to the next semester, one without incorporation (if I hear that word one more time…), checks and balances, cash crops, Addison’s disease, the tyranny of the majority, enumerated powers, blablabla…

I rest my case.
--Ann

Welcoming arms of NJ Transit

2005-01-24T18:44:00.000+01:00

I am so goddamned happy I don’t have to take New Jersey transit any more.

I will never do it again in my life. Ever.

After a hectic entry into New York, brief stop by the office, then the hotel to check in and drop off my bag, I took a cab to Penn Station to catch a train to Princeton for dinner with my friends Ryan and Guze.

That’s when the trouble started.

See, yesterday New York, and the whole Northeast, was hit by a large snow storm. It wasn’t really a ‘blizzard’ in New York, but newspapers cannot be sold and TV stations will lose viewers if any amount of snowfall is NOT termed a ‘blizzard’, so I guess I am sitting in the middle of “the blizzard of ’05.” Keep in mind an entire 18 inches of snow fell.

First problem: the express train is cancelled. Sigh. Fine. It is a blizzard I guess.

Second problem: the people who run the trains are (still) idiots.

It takes half an hour to go about seven miles, which normally takes less than ten minutes. Then these idiots get on the intercom and start yelling at each other, “let’s go crew, close the end doors. Check your end doors, let’s lock ‘em up!”

Let me give the management of the NJ Transit some free advice: if you can’t do simple operational activities such as CLOSING THE DOORS, you are in deep shit.

Luckily for management however, the customers have no alternative. So, I, and about three hundred other packed-in, weary commutes sit in brown vinyl chairs and listen to conductors bicker and watch the scenery crawl by while contemplating how hard it would be to bomb the headquarters of New Jersey Transit.

Third problem: I am starving. I skipped the complimentary in-flight food service because I couldn’t tell the difference between the microwaved plastic wrapping and the (presumably) organic material contained within it. Now I am starting to regret that decision.

I’m sure dinner will be great (mmm, Masala Grill in Princeton, best Indian around) and it will be great to see my friends again, but it’s impossible to fully enjoy yourself when you know that, at some point, you are going to have to get back on the New Jersey Transit.

Like I said. Never again.

My Hometown

2005-01-23T23:35:00.000+01:00

Talk about surreal.

I’m riding my bike home from the train station in Dordrecht at 5:30pm on a Sunday night. As it is a Sunday, all the residents of Dordrecht are required by martial law to shut themselves in their homes and remove all traces of life from the town.

It’s dark, and I’m gliding through the empty wet streets (winter isn’t snowy here, it’s just wet) when I swear I hear the chorus of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown”.

My frist thought is, “oh my god, I made one too many joke about the voices in my head, and now they are really there…” But as I pass onto the ghost-town-ish main shopping street, I slow down and take a second look around.

There under the awning of one of the stores is the Minstrel. The Minstrel is a Dutch man of African descent who can be found every day in a three block radius of the town square, standing in his green rubber galoshes, strumming a very worn-in looking acoustic guitar, and belting out classic tunes from the Beatles, Dylan, Tom Petty, Neill Young, and various unknown Dutch folk singers. He’s not a bad singer. He’s not great either, but he can carry a tune. He’s also probably fifty and always looks like he just got out of bed.

I give him a wave as I pass by and think to myself how weird it is to be a foreigner in this town, expecting to be a stranger in a strange land, and to hear a song that makes you think of college, your best friends, Americana, and New Jersey’s favored son.

“My hometown. My. Home. Town. My hometown. Myyyyy… home… town….”

Just one of those weird things. He was playing Bruce in the middle of a deserted street in Dordrecht at the exact moment that a foreigner from New Jersey was riding by on his bike. There was no reason for him to be out. It was cold. It was wet. It was Sunday. There was no reason for him to be playing Bruce. I had never heard him play a Bruce song before.

But he was there. And he did play it. And I rode by just then. And thought of home.

A Quick Update

2005-01-23T22:43:00.000+01:00

The blog posts have gotten a little infrequent since I started my MBA, and I’d like to take this chance to explain why:

From the 10th to the 15th of January I was basically in school or going to school from 7:00am until 6:00pm.
The next week I was catching up on work (really)
Then I went to my second Dutch lesson, came back, wrote a beautiful piece about the problem in the Netherlands of integrating Muslim immigrants from Turkey, and then when I tried to post it the system crashed and I lost the whole damn thing.
Then I was so infuriated for having written such a great piece and losing it that I simply couldn’t sit down in front of a keyboard without getting insanely angry.

But I’m much better now. All the doctors say so.

So let me fill you all in on some Brian current events.

Dutch classes are proceeding. I continue to sit mystified in front of the computer for the first hour, listening to Dutch people converse in their unintelligible language, and then punching buttons until I get enough right answers on the quizzes (thank god for multiple choice).

I had my first regular weekend of MBA class. I am in a group of six people and we meet before the class each Friday and Saturday and stare at each other and say, “did YOU do the homework” a lot. The small group structure is really necessary for working stiffs because it allows us to break up the work and use each other as resources. I have a head of a sales department, a product manager, two consultants, and a banker in my group. They have me. Personally, I think they are getting the better deal.

I had a Frisbee tournament today. I actually thought I had this Frisbee tournament NEXT Sunday, but I got a phone call from the captain at 9:45am asking me where I was. “I’m in Dordrecht…” duh. Where do you think I am. “Oh, well are you coming to the tournament?”

Shit.

Jumped into some clothes, bike like crazy to the station, two trains, one cab, and about two hours later I walk into the Sporthal Vlinder in Wageningen just as their second game starts. We had a good time. The standings don’t show it, but we had fun. We lost three and tied one game (they play timed games here, so it is possible to tie, wacky). Yeah, the score says we sucked balls, but two of the games we lost by one point and remember, we tied one…

Now I am listening to the audio of 94WYSP over the internet so I can hear Merrill Reese and Mike Quick call the Conference Championship, where McNabb and the Eagles are handing Atlanta their ass 14-3 so far in the first half.

Tomorrow I am off to NY for a short business trip, then back to Amsterdam, where I travel by train to Heidelberg for a one day meeting on Friday, and then on Saturday I hope to meet up with Nieves, a friend of ours from “the good old au pair days” (as I like to call them) who I haven’t seen in about four years.

All I have to do is make sure I wake up on time.

Keep your fingers crossed sports fans.

MBA Start Week

2005-01-16T01:30:00.000+01:00

I just finished my MBA “Start Week”. I’m pretty sure the model for start week is Boot Camp. Just a quick recap: a little over a year ago I decided that an MBA would not only be a useful career tool, but would actually teach me a lot of things about business. In the parlance of that great orator Donald Rumsfeld, the known unknowns. And with that, an end to the military metaphors.

I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Executive MBA program at the Rotterdam School of Management. I have a great story to tell about the two GMAT tests I took so I could get in, but we’ll save that for later.

The RSM alternates within Europe as the fifth or sixth best business school, depending on the year and who’s doing the rankings. And while I am very happy that the school is very prestigious, that was really secondary for me. It was within commuting distance of Dordrecht, and it was in the Netherlands (so I could get a chance to learn Dutch). Oh, and it was the only school I applied to. I later found out there is a term for that actually: suicide school. Scary.

Anyway, things worked out (kind of, I still am not having anything contributed into my 401k plan) and on Monday January 10 I started school again after a sabbatical of seven years. I expected the Executive class to be small (which it was), mainly male (something like 85%), largely Dutch (also true, 56%) and full of smart people who probably were in high-powered careers and jobs to begin with. When starting an MBA, it is at least good to know that you are smart enough to know that you really have no place being there. Thank god no one told admissions.

The average age of the class is 32.9, so our birthday is coming up soon (in case any of you want to send gifts…). There is a predominance of engineers and people who work in some financial capacity, a few IT-oriented people, and maybe four or five Marketing-based people… including me. There is no one in publishing or any media field that I am aware of, and I am one of about four Americans.

Immediately, after all the introductions and speeches from people like the Dean and the head of the program and such (who you see exactly twice at any school ever: your first day and your last), we immediately got down to business. First thing’s first, we were split into two groups. These groups stay static for an entire year. Then we were split up into groups of six. This is the group we will stay in for the first semester. Mine has four Dutch people and me. We were supposed to have a sixth, but he’s Brazilian and his visa didn’t get cleared until the third day of class.

My three classes this semester are Managerial Accounting, Management Science, and Management Information Systems. As you can see, there is a heavy focus on management.

And now I must digress for a second.

One of the first things I realized from our first workshops and classes, was that I had not been thinking about management the right way. The first description of a manager that really stuck with me was given to me by a guy named Ryan Lafferty, the CFO of the start-up I worked in right out of college. Ryan was a consultant at Andersen or some such, and he knew his shit. He once told me that “a manager’s job is to remove obstacles.” At the time I was in a very operational unit (Production) and most of the issues I dealt with were simply small problems that needed a decision on, or fairly non-intensive personnel issues.

I slowly learned that a manager was also distinguished by a degree of responsibility. Being a manager means you’re responsible for things. You need to meet certain targets and you need other people to do all the work needed to realize those targets. Took me a long time, since I generally preferred to just do things myself, but I slowly developed the “a manager is a coach” philosophy, where the performance of the team was the critical success factor.

Now I am at the point where I believe that a true manager, the one that you would trust with a really big and important job, has a few other important dimensions that I had always associated as good traits, but now have a more concrete definition for. A manager requires judgment, because a manager is someone who is paid to make tough decisions, often under uncertainty, and often with heavy potential impacts. A good manager is also a leader, inspiring people and communicating a vision that people can feel comfortable following. And finally, I now also add to the list a strong sense of ethics. It is impossible to be a leader, to inspire people and gain their confidence, without being able to consistently demonstrate ethical behavior.

I’m sure I will continue to learn, and redefine these concepts, but the first few days when you start something, before you get sucked into the details, are like the impressionable first years of life. There is a brief window where a space is created for something new to be internalized, or for something to be altered or redefined in you.

Now, I certainly hope to also get a lot of exposure, experience, skills, and education also for my 38,000 Euros, but right now I am fairly happy to start here.

As this is my first night free for six days. The first night that I have not stayed up until 1am just trying to get through all the reading, never mind the homework, I am going to take my leave and sleep for about fifty-four hours.

My First Dutch Lesson

2005-01-11T23:54:00.000+01:00

I had my first state-sponsored Dutch lesson last night. Right after my first day of MBA school. I was pretty tired, but I managed to show up at the right place at the right time. I was directed to my classroom, met my teacher (very nice lady with an unfortunate overbite), who told me that I had to join the class that was already half a year in. However, while they all did the homework from lessons 18 and beyond, I could do the homework from lesson 1.

So, if I get this right, then I sit in a class and listen to a lesson I’m not prepared for, then go back and do the homework for another lesson which I haven’t taken. Okaaaaay.

But I digress. The first part of the lesson I was sent upstairs to the library for a CD-ROM lesson. I was given a CD, pointed at a computer, and told to go through as far as possible. I started this thing up and, unsurprisingly, it was all in Dutch. I mean from Disc 1 Lesson 1, they just show a picture of two people, run an audio track with a conversation, and then start asking you to do exercises and answer questions.

The problem with this approach is… it’s ALL IN DUTCH. Not only can I not understand the recorded conversation, I can’t understand the questions they are asking, and I have no idea what the hell I am supposed to be doing. The first couple of times I asked the teacher to help me by explaining what I was supposed to be doing, but I soon tired of being the problem child and eventually just tried to figure out what I was supposed to be doing in each exercise. But I got tired of THAT pretty quick, and then just started punching buttons.

Most of the questions only had two or three answers, and the program let you go back whenever you wanted. So, I’d hit a button, if the green light when on, I continued, if the red light went on, I continued. When I got to the end with a score of 50% and the program forced me to take that section over again, I just kept hitting buttons until I got all the right answers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I’d like to take a moment to make an appeal, just in case the designers of the “Listen and Learn Dutch” software are reading this blog. I would like to ask you: who the hell designed your fucking icons!? I compliment you on hitting upon the amazing insight that many of your users would not be able to navigate a piece of software with text prompts, and that you should use icons, but in the name of all “Listen and Learn Dutch” users, I have to ask you if you are fucking crazy. Are you?

Why in the world would I interpret the visual clue of a single footstep, in what looks to be a field of snow, as meaning “next”. How about just a simple arrow, eh pals? Arrows cut across cultural boundaries don’t they?

And on your main exercise screen, when I click on “intro”, and your extremely helpful software just reads back to me the lesson number, I can only assume that you ran out of billable development hours and needed something to meet your revenue target.

And finally, if you were sitting down to a learning package, and you saw an icon of a tree and a hand holding a shovel, would you really interpret that to mean “begin the exercise”? Would you really? Be honest. Acceptance is the first step on the path to recovery.

After the wonderfully useful computer lesson, I had two hours of actual in class learning. There were about fourteen people in the class, which was actually two groups who had to be taught by the same teacher in the same classroom. So we had our class first for an hour while the other half did their homework, then we switched formats.

Now, you may be interested about the characters who take the beginning year of state-mandated Dutch lessons. In my group there were two Turkish men, a Yugoslavian woman, a Phillipino-Dutch woman who had lived in the Nehterlands for seven years but never learned the language, and a surly Polish guy who shaved his head and wore an immaculate tracksuit. The surly Pole, Peter, spoke English and wanted to talk my ear off about how sucky the classes were. Which, unbelievably, did not improve the class experience.

The highlight of the evening was when the teacher made us listen to a CD with a three way conversation and then we broke into groups of three and played out all the roles. There was the role of the tourist asking for directions, the eldery confused lady, and the sultry woman who shows the way with the map. I don’t know who was funnier as the sultry map-wielding CD voice, Ismail the Turk, or Peter the surly Pole. I really got into the old lady voice. I briefly considered telling Ismail that he did a great sultry map voice, but then decided against it. I have a general policy about not antagonizing men with moustaches who come from Muslim countries.

More after my next class.

Higher Education

2005-01-11T23:50:00.000+01:00

I have had two days of MBA classes at the Erasmus Universiteit, the biggest university in Rotterdam.

Among the differences between American and European educational systems: they sell cans of Heineken and little bottles of wine in the school cafeteria.

Degenerates

2005-01-08T22:31:00.000+01:00

Starting bankroll:
Guze: $22152
Brian: $1116
End: Brian +13 ($1129)

New Year's 2005

2005-01-01T15:00:00.000+01:00

New Year’s Eve – 2004

It’s 2:30pm on the first of January, 2005, and I am just starting to feel awake. Last night Ann and I accompanied Anja and Geert to the fabulous “Sporthal Pollepel” (The Ladle), a gymnasium about three basketball courts wide and deep, where 350 of Duffel’s finest citizens came to ring in the new year.

For a mere 75 Euros a person could gain entrance to the biggest party in town, which included hot and cold buffet, open bar, a stage with flashing lights, fog machine, DJ, and enough interesting characters to keep you entertained all night. And since the festivities commenced at 7:30, that was a tall order indeed.

At first, there was the usual posed pictures, the furtive glances around for sources of alcohol, and clumps of people all examining each other over the rims of their first drink. Most people were in a state of semi-dressiness, with the usual teenager or two who just couldn’t break away from their blue jeans, or the odd table of white trash for whom a black pair of jeans and knockoff Italian-designer shirt WAS “dressed up”.

Every now and then Ann and Anja would mutually gasp in horror and embarrassment as some poor fashion victim walked by in a blue leopard print jacket, or a belly-revealing get-up that accentuated the amount of tummy overbite. It was during these episodes that I was especially happy to be 1.) male and 2.) completely oblivious. Ann says she saved me from my own fashion faux pas by not allowing me to wear the red tie that I had selected for the evening. I believe her exact words were: “You look like a clown.”

Our table was strategically located between a corner of the dance floor, and the entrance of the food area. When they started calling tables to begin the buffet, ours was the fourth (of fifty) called, and we were among the first to raid the various tables. It truly was an enormous buffet. There were round folding-tables that could normally seat eight or ten, completely covered with all manner of consumables. There was the fish table, the lobster table, the meatballs and cherry sauce table, the cold cuts table, the tomatoes filled with mini-shrimp table, bread baskets, venison stew, fried fish table, it went on and on, over half the length of the gym. I was once again convinced that the Belgians eat better than any of their neighbors.

After dinner the real entertainment began. The DJ turned on the flashing stage lights, cranked up the fog machine, and deftly maneuvered his hands over the controls of the CD player. By this time it was almost 10:00pm and people were well into their fifth and sixth drinks of the evening. The dance floor quickly filled up and Geert and I rearranged our chairs so we would have a good view of the entertainment portion of the evening’s events.

Now, before we go into details about the dancing, let me give you a good understanding of the demographic. Duffel is home to 15,000 Belgian souls. It is what you would call, a small town. While it is only fifteen minutes from larger cities like Mechelen and Antwerp, it has a distinctly provincial feel to it and an abundance of green fields with roaming sheep and goats. Duffel is one of those places where a significant portion of the population may never live outside of the town limits.

Not surprisingly, many of this type of Duffelite could be found at the Pollepel on New Year’s Eve, instead of at some trendy club in Antwerp. The average age of the participants was between 30 and 50, and there were only a few “kids tables” where even the kids were teenagers, looking self-consciously bored as teenagers are wont to do.

About 15-20% of the people there were around Ann’s age, and I expected a lot more of the “running into people you hadn’t seen since high school and never really liked even then but feel obligated to give the recap of your life story to,” but Ann and Anja both only ran into one old acquaintance.

The dancing started, and the DJ demonstrated an understanding of his audience by sprinkling in a few trance and hip-hop songs among a majority of classic 70s dance hits, pop radio fare, and (strangely enough) remixed kids songs, each of which came with their own choreographed dance that is normally only seen performed by children just out of diapers.

However, since fully half of the audience had children (or grandchildren) of this age, the adults relished this opportunity to show off their choreographed dancing abilities without the usual distraction of the kids around, and it was truly a sight to see. An entire dance floor full of adults all waving their arms in the air and then getting down on their haunches as the singer instructs them “Now, walk like a goose!”

There were no less than seven of these choreographed songs played throughout the night and it led me to ponder the underlying psychology of coordinated group behavior. Anywhere but a dimly lit and fake-fog filled gymnasium, and these people would never dream of getting up in front of a crowd and hobbling around like a goose. These are the same people who don’t even sing the national anthem before sports events because it’s too corny.

But get a few drinks in them, give them one non-repeating yearly event, subtract their children and all self-consciousness, and the result is a dance floor full of middle-aged people all enjoying the fact that they are part of that special group: those who know the dance. And they love it. You can tell by the way that people stream to the dance floor whenever one of these begins, and the confident bearing of their heads after they have figured out the “turn turn, step, turn, kick,” routine.

Over the course of the evening we had ample time to gaze over the audience and pick out the most entertaining people to watch. These included:

-----Stick woman-----
This was the poor soul who wore the black dress with the unevenly cut bottom covered by a blue leopard print jacket. She looked like she was going to an extremely posh event: in Bedrock. With Barney Rubble. She was also, as you might have guessed, skinnier than a stick, and every time she moved a limb she gave off the optical illusion that she was dividing her mass in half. Especially entertaining while dancing.

-----Belly mama-----
A woman in her mid forties who obviously spent a lot of time at the gym and the tanning salon and wanted everyone to know it. She wore black pants, and a turquoise top that stopped an inch short of where her pants began. The amount of exposed belly when her arms were down was minimal, but she rarely danced with her arms down, as that would have defeated the purpose of displaying those orange-tinged ab muscles. She was a bit like Frankenstein, with the belly of a twenty year old, and the crow’s feet of a fifty year old.

-----“Pay My Bills”-----
This girl was a riot. She had a grey plaid skirt that she liked to grab fistfuls of and swing around and she danced around, like a can can dancer without a lot to work with though. Geert and I both came to the conclusion that she rode the little bus to school because she was more hyperactive than a Ritalin kid, had only one expression (a huge smile), and she loved to come up to all the sitting men at her table and run into them and pester them to try and get them to dance. She had a sleeveless t-shirt on that said “Pay My Bills” in very large letters, and she was built like a tank. When dancing in her proximity you had to keep her in your peripheral vision or you might end up knocked flat on your ass. Ann says she fell down on the dance floor right in front of her, but I missed this. I am sure however, that the smile never faltered.

-----Moustache Man-----
Anja loved this guy. He wore black jeans, and a black long-sleeve t-shirt with random bits of white on it that made him look like someone had very carefully spilled white paint on him. He was tall and skinny, had perfectly coiffed short hair, and a thin little mustache. But what made this guy so interesting was that he took the entire dancing affair very very seriously. The entire time he was out there shaking his tailfeather he kept this look of intense concentration. You get the impression that if he had let even one smile out it would have completely destroyed his careful rhythm.

-----Mullet Man-----
If the NFL were to recruit from Duffel, this guy would be their number one draft pick. He was at least six foot three or four, and built like a linebacker. You could see this clearly once he took his sport jacket off and was just dancing in his black sleeveless tee. What really gave this guy character though, besides the fact that he really came alive during the Nirvana and U2 songs, was his mullet. A gorgeous specimen of mullet beauty that extended past his shoulder muscles (which is saying a lot). He also resembled Meatloaf facially, which kind of made him scary when he really got into mouthing the words to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

-----Jerky girl-----
Some people just love to dance their own way. Jerky Girl was one of these. A thin girl of about 25 with hair just down to her chin, Jerky Girl loved to get on the dance floor and jerk spasmodically around a particular area of it. She had on pants and a tight, aqua colored, halter-ish top. Her pale arms made it easy to pick her out in the crowd.

-----Butt Woman-----
I save the best for last. Butt Woman. She started out as just an interesting anatomical study, a woman with solid arms and torso which connected to an incredibly round butt. She had on an embroidered top that had no straps, and she started off with a tight silver skirt that gave her posterior a look of brushed steel, but as this was too restrictive, she later emerged wearing tight white pants. Once she got out in her new duds she quickly out-danced every single person on the dance floor. She was such a good dancer that invariably wherever she went people would accord her generous amounts of space just to see what she would do. She had extreme balance and grace (considering her butt must have been affecting her center of gravity), and she could dance in a variety of different styles, the best of which was the entire complicated dance routine from a Detiny’s Child song that she performed with a friend. Ann refused to believe that the sole reason I was riveted was the fact that she moved such a stout frame around so gracefully, but I swear that was the truly incredible thing, and therefore Butt Woman wins my award for MVP of the Sporthal Pollepel 2005 New Year Bash.

Around 3:00am the ladies eventually ran out of power and it was time to go home. As usual for this time of year in Belgium, it was cold and drizzly, but we were so satisfied both gastronomically and spiritually from having had such a full New Year’s Eve, that we hardly noticed.

The Weather

2004-12-29T14:39:00.000+01:00

The book I read that said that there are, on average, 23 cloudless days in the netherlands in a YEAR was not joking. Winter is pretty grey, cold, and miserable. Yesterday it snowed for the first time, only an inch of slushy stuff that was gone by noon, but still enough for me to wipe out on my bike on the way to work. (Hey, I'm a true Dutchman now, I ride to work even in the snow.)

Here's an example of the weather forecast for the next few days (temperatures in Farenheit. Hey, I've made that mistake before...)

Gift from the Royal Dutch Post

2004-12-29T14:28:00.000+01:00

Ann, as usual, prepared this years Christmas cards. She is always very good about keeping track of everyone's address and sending them each a hand-written Christmas card.

However, since this is a very industrial process involving a long assembly line of card writing, postage stamping, envelope licking and trying to get her husband to just sign his damn name, it's understandable that the odd exception might get through.

The day after we mailed the entire load Ann calls me up and says, "Brian, did you notice if the card to Dan and Chizuko in Japan had postage on it."

"I don't even remember what color they were Ann."

So, Ann, master of detail that she is, followed up with Dan and Chizuko with an email informing them that they may not be receiving a card this year, but that did not mean that we were in any way displeased with their work as our friends.

Dan and Chizuko, coming back from a vacation in Phuket (where they missed the tsunamis by one week!), saw the email, and sent us this.

Looks like both the Dutch and Japanese mail systems decided to give us a Christmas gift this year. Not only did the card get there with no postage... it only took about 7 days.

Christmas 2004

2004-12-26T14:21:00.000+01:00

Merry Christmas to all!

Our first Christmas in the Netherlands, our second in Europe (we were in London for Christmas 2000), and only my second Christmas overall away from my family (which, when I say it out loud, makes me feel equal parts mamma's boy and nostalgic).

Neither Ann nor I are religious, but for me Christmas has always been one of the most important holidays of the year. I always love to buy presents for all of my friends because I view it as the one time a year that you get to show someone that they are special to you by getting them something thoughtful. So, sadly, I had to write this year off completely because, besides Ann, and a few small gifts for my family, I did not get a single thing for anyone. I chalked it up to the logistical difficulties of being overseas, but in the end there's no way to escape feeling like a non-participant.

The one tradition that was solidly upheld was Christmas dinners. We had two of them. And a Christmas lunch. We ate so much and so well that it's amazing we didn't gain 10 kilos each. On Friday night we had "gourmet" with Anja and Geert. It was new to me, but apparently "gourmet" in Europe is a specific kind of meal, like fondue, and it's not just a general term you slap on products so you can charge a little more for them.

A true "gourmet" meal consists of a heated plate that has a grill and a cooking stone on the top, places for individual dish-like scoops underneath, and a variety of different uncooked meats, vegetables, cheeses, potatos, toppings, etc. You then decide what section of the device you want to cook each portion of your meal and everyone cooks and eats at their own pace.

It was really a new experience for me, to be so interactive with my food. Food preparation for me either consists of paying for the groceries, or in some way involves a microwave. I was a little worried my complete absence of culinary skills would show through, but when you get down to it, you're just slapping a tiny piece of meat onto a grill and flipping it over when it is obviously done. By the fourth piece I had it down.

Saturday night we had dinner with Ann's father and that side of the family. I have to admit, that being the non-family member at a family gathering can really be a lot of fun. It's kind of like watching those Fox documentaries about highway crashes. You get to see the whole thing unfolding from the safety of your armchair while mass destruction inevitably unfolds frame by frame in front of you.

To understand why this is so entertaining you have to understand the people involved. Ann's grandparents on her father's side, called Bon and Bonpa, are in their 80s. Her grandmother is a little hard of hearing and as a consequence shouts everything. This wouldn't be a problem normally, except for the fact that she generally bides her time while conversation is going, waits until she hears something worth remarking on, and then bursts out with a:

"YES YES, ANNEKE IS RIGHT, YOU CAN'T BUY BREAD ON SUNDAYS."

Everyone has at least one person in the world who has the mystifying ability to irritate them beyond reasonable measure, and for Ann this is her Bonpa (Grandfather). For some reason, every word that comes out of Bonpa's old mouth has an accumulating and exponentially increasing ability to annoy Ann. At the same time, Ann is powerless to extricate herself emotionally from this cycle of destruction and inevitably ends up arguing loudly with her grandfather, attempting to get him to understand that he shouldn't be looking up "megabyte" or "gigabyte" in the dictionary from 1970 because the term didn't even exist then.

"But look here, 'gigantic' is in there, so it should be in there too."

And cue Ann's exploding head.

Ann's father Andre has a girlfriend named Mieke who although is sweet and well-meaning, isn't the brightest bulb, and she inevitably ends up interjecting with a comment from the conversation of half an hour ago (in this case it was "yeah but 'gigabyte', doesn't that mean really big?").

This year the family drama revolved around Mieke's new puppy: Prutske (which sounds like a bad word but isn't). The puppy is a cute little black terrier, but it is six weeks old. Mieke was the impetus behind adding the dog to their already very cramped apartment, and she wanted to bring little Prutske to dinner so that he wouldn't have to be alone for hours. The grandmother, Bon, is terrified of dogs, even little ones, and would not have it. Plus, you have to be a little sensitive, these people are OLD!

Mieke's mature response to the situation was to then refuse to come.

In the end, Mieke came and the dog stayed. I did my part by not mentioning the dog after Ann warned me it would be a sore subject, but Mieke showed me the photos and couldn't resist adding, rather loudly in English, "I want to bring him, but SHE not allow," aimed at poor Bon. I did my best not to giggle.

Anyway, in a meal that extended over three hours we had champagne (again), a wonderful fish soup, and then we had these very soft and light filets of sole in a fantastic cream sauce (Bouilliabaise? Ann? Help.), and an ice cream cake dessert.

Our final meal was a simple and elegant affair prepared by Ann's mother. First there were the best custs of venison steak that were hand delivered by Ann's cousin Kato, whose father's hobby is being a butcher (I know, very strange). This was served in your choice of mushroom sauce or gravy. There were cooked apples filled with hot cranberry sauce, and potato croquettes. For dessert we had special hand-made pastries from the family bakery. Absolutely fantastic.

When I told Sabine that we always had the best food in Belgium she answered: "Natuurlijk." Which translates loosely as: "You offend my honor by assuming there could be a country with better cuisine you ignorant American."

Besides the fact that the Internet had the wrong times for the trains and it took us three and a half hours to get home, we had a very good weekend that Ann will require a week to fully decompress from.

That's okay though, because we are going back next weekend for New Year's.

;-)

CNN's Top 10 Stories of 2004

2004-12-21T14:54:00.000+01:00

CNN has just published its list of the top 10 events of 2004. Here’s my brief opinion on them:

1. Election 2004 – I still feel like someone ripped out my heart and beat me over the head with it. At the same time I want to say “I’m not surprised” (since I did predict this) and “How the hell could this happen?”
2. War in Iraq – Yep. Still as pissed off about this as before.
3. Terrorism – Same here. Terrorists are scum.
4. (tie) 9/11 Commission – Have to admit: didn’t read it. But glad they wrote it. Bush is a dick.
4. (tie) Hurricane season – My parents had to go through two of these. Hurricanes are dicks.
6. Yasser Arafat dies – The world is a better place for it. Arafat was a dick.
7. Morality split – This is an abysmal failure of the Democrats to counter the marketing of the Republicans (who are dicks)
8. Ronald Reagan dies – I’m sure the Soviets thought he was a dick, but a charismatic one.
9. Sudanese crisis – Can’t decide between anger or sadness over this. Where are the liberations armies on this one Bush, you lying snake. Where’s the intervention of the morally superior UN huh? The UN makes me mad.
10. Red Sox win World Series – The Red Sox are dicks. Still can’t believe the Yankees couldn’t win ONE out of four games to put them in their place. The Yankees let down America and ended a fantastic baseball tradition.

So, to sum things up:

The world if full of dicks.
Many things make Brian angry.

That’s pretty much it for 2004. I fall back on the fool’s hopeful mantra: “Maybe next year will be better.”

Dutch Fashion Update #1

2004-12-21T14:07:00.000+01:00

For those who missed our first post about this topic, here are some more examples that we found at the Kerstmarkt. Now those are some serious boots.

Kerstmarkt

2004-12-20T01:08:00.000+01:00

Today was one of the 5 cloudless days in the Netherlands, and Ann and I took a stroll through the Kerstmarkt (Christmas Market) which had been set up on the main shopping street in the middle of town.

Every year, for three days they fill up the already congested Main St. with all sorts of stalls, keep most of the shops open all weekend, entertain the masses with live bands at night and roaming bands all dressed up like Santa playing holiday music. It’s a lot of fun actually. AND, it’s some great eating.

To get into the spirit, and do my part to stimulate the Dutch economy, I gladly purchased (and quickly consumed):

some chicken satay with a fantastic peanut sauce
a sandwich of thinly sliced grilled ham off the bone
a plate of poffertjes

For those of you ignorant in the culinary traditions of the Netherlands, you aren’t missing out on much. Poffertjes however, are the exception to the rule. Poffertjes are tiny pancakes that are cooked just enough to be soft and stick together, and are covered with butter and powdered sugar. They are about an inch and a half across and delicious. At a fancy poffertje restaurant (of which we have been to two already in the center of town) you can get them with various toppings like warm cherries, vanilla, rum, etc. You get about twelve to fifteen on a regular portion and a cute little three pronged plastic fork to spear them with (which bears a striking resemblance to the plastic implement used by the Dutch to eat their packages of French Fries, which they do not condescend to eat with their fingers). The poffertje chef has a large pan with poffertje dimples into which he pours batter, and after only a minute or two, while the tops of the little pancakes are still liquid, he quickly goes down the columns sticking a small metal knife into each half-cooked reservoir, and flips them over with a tiny flick of his wrist. Truly, a dough artiste.

Ann and I bought our poffertjes from a stand run by the guy who works in our mail room (and apparently moonlights as a poffertje-iste. I said hi to him in Dutch, but threw Ann in front of me like a human translator shield when he started speaking back. He offered to give us a free topping of rum, and Ann had to enter into a tedious explanation that her husband didn’t drink alcohol, which involved far too many hand gestures and I’m sure entertained the other fifteen people in line.

One final note about poffertjes, I have decided to make them the theme for my weekly themed lunch outing. Every week I like to make sure I get out of the office (and away from the cheap but limited work-subsidized cafeteria) and have a nice sit-down lunch. In the states this was called Indian Thursday. Not surprisingly, we had Indian. In the Netherlands, in keeping with the tradition of selecting an ethnic cuisine, I have instituted the new tradition of Poffertjes Thursday.

Sadly, there are simply no Indian restaurants in Dordrecht. Anywhere.

But that is a topic for a different rant.

Early Retirement

2004-12-17T10:12:00.000+01:00

I had to go to Rotterdam yesterday to my MBA school to take care of some financial matters. It seems that Sallie Mae, after telling both me AND the school that it would be a cold day in hell before they made out educational checks to a student, sent $30,000 in checks to the Rotterdam School of Management, made payable to the order of Brian Bishop.

At first I thought I could just sign them over. But no. Of couse, that would be too easy.

I now have to deposit them into my own bank, and then wire transfer them over to the school.

Or...

I could take all the money. Hop on the train to Amsterdam. Go to the Holland Casino. And put all the money on black.

Robbed Twice

2004-12-16T19:04:00.000+01:00

New back wheel, chain, plus labor involved to put them both on shoddily (so I had to take it back to the shop after riding on it for two seconds): 96 Euros.

New lock because now apparently I need to lock BOTH the front and back tires: 12 Euros.

New clip on lights (because someone stole mine while it was chained outside the bike shop waiting repair: 15 Euros.

Total bill: 122 Euros.

I bought the whole bike originally for 200.

>:(

Goddamn Immigrants

2004-12-12T22:17:00.000+01:00

Some asshole stole the back wheel off my bike yesterday.

I came back from my first indoor frisbee tournament, and when I got to my bike I saw that it was curiously low to the ground in the back. It took me a few seconds, but I eventually realized that the back wheel was gone. I kicked the space where the tire SHOULD have been a few times, just to make sure that it was really gone. It was. I absently kicked it once or twice more, but it didn't magically reappear.

I had locked the front wheel to the body of the bike, and both of these to the bike rack, so I guess that's why I'm only missing one wheel instead of the whole bike. But somehow it's even MORE insulting to have this disfigured, cripple of a bike. It's like instead of someone kidnapping your baby, they just amputated a leg and put him back in the stroller.

Okay, well maybe not like that. But close.

Who would do such a thing? I asked a Dutch colleague of mine, "Who would go through the effort of detaching JUST the back wheel from the gears so that they could have ONE bike wheel?"

"Goddamned immigrants."

Computer "Exercises"

2004-12-09T14:42:00.000+01:00

So, I was speaking with my friend Esther the other day when all of a sudden she was locked out of her computer. This program hijacked her computer, put up pictures of people doing strange things, and wouldn’t let her close it or do anything else.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s my little thingee that tells me it’s time to take a break.”

Interesting. It wasn’t actually malicious spyware… it was a state-mandated plot to further decrease the efficiency of Dutch workers, carefully disguised as a service for poor, overworked office employees. Every few hours or so, this computer program (called WorkPace) pops up and tells you to take a break, stop slaving away for the Man, and instead instructs you to do strange isometric exercises at your desk to avoid becoming fat, near-sighted slobs like the Americans. To ensure compliance, the program actually doesn’t let you do anything else during the time that it runs.

Now, you may have heard stories about the tolerant nature of the Dutch, and their progressive attitudes toward sex and drug use. Well, here is the proof. Here we have some screenshots of the WorkPace program. In the United States, this is the kind of subversive, pornographic sabotage that can get you thrown in jail. Combine that with the sexually explicit nature of the “exercises”, and what you have in “WorkPace” is a de facto Government-sponsored campaign to destroy the very "moral fabric" of "civilization."

Take this for example:

This woman is being instructed, during work hours, not only to masturbate, but exactly how to tilt her head in ecstasy for greatest ergonomic effect.

And this example:

The shoulders of this innocent-looking "office worker" are limbering up in anticipation of an unholy act of self-violation. The instructions, translated from the Dutch, read: "Once you are fully stretched (to reduce risk from Repetitive Stress Injury), commence beating off like a crazed monkey in heat."

And this:

Just what do you think this exercise is to prepare for….?

Sick pervs.

(Oh, by the way, there is a free trial download of WorkPace available from their website, but unfortunately you can't set it to "interrupt" you more than once an hour.)

Humidity in the Workplace

2004-12-08T10:14:00.000+01:00

Just to illustrate the different attitudes between the Netherlands and the US as concerns employee welfare, below is an excerpt from an actual memo sent from the Facilities Manager here in Dordrecht:

"2. Temperature and Humidity in our building
John Q. Dutchman (trainee Facility Management) is measuring the temperature and humidity on a few floors at a regular interval during a period of 4 weeks. Most of you will have seen him on your floor with a small black machine.

"Until now, the outcome of the analysis is that the climate in the building is within the normal standards. However, the feel of temperature and humidity varies from person to person.

"Please let us know if you feel uncomfortable at your workspace, so that we can try to find an individual solution for you."

An individual solution to the temperature discomfort of each and every individual. I'd like to see OSHA try and mandate THAT kind of care in the United States.

Contrast this to our office in New York, where the thermostat for our floor was actually kept in Siberia, and where we often had to keep windows open in the winter to cool the rooms off, the air was drier than many trans-oceanic flights, and a memo from the "facilities manager" might have gone a little something like this:

"Deal with it."

Maastricht

2004-12-07T14:54:00.000+01:00

Saturday – December 4, 2004

Ann booked us a weekend getaway in Maastricht and I am writing this from the bed of the Crown Plaza hotel, which Ann acquired for us at a discount that warms her little Belgian heart.

Maastricht is one of the oldest towns in the Netherlands and has a long history as a strategically important location. Maastricht is on this strange peninsula of the Netherlands which juts out from its bottom right corner into what should be, by all rights, Belgium. This peninsula is surrounded on the south and the west by Belgium, and by Germany on the east. There’s a distinct difference in the way Dutch is spoken here, much softer and without much of the throat-scraping and spittle-inducing consonants. In other words, much more Belgian.

The town has a more Belgian feel to it as well. It’s an old town with small cobblestone streets and quaintly off-kilter house fronts. It also has a preponderance of stores, which might have had something to do with Ann’s desire to come here. Today is the day before Sinterklaas comes to all the good little Dutch (and Belgian) boys and girls, and the costumed Sinterklaas men and their army of Zwarte Pete’s are making the most of it roaming around, giving the children last minute admonishments to be good.

In the Netherlands and Belgium on December 5th, all the good boys and girls are rewarded by the Sint (Dutch for ‘Saint’) with prodigious amounts of gifts which are, for some reason, left in their shoes. There is an entire history to Sinterklaas; he comes from Spain every winter on a steamboat, in a procession which is broadcast on national TV, riding on his white horse, with his army of black slaves in attendance.

Sinterklaas is helped by a number of black servants who all share the same name (Black Pete), and apparently are there to provide the stick (literally) to the Sint’s carrot of shoefuls of gifts. The Black Petes all carry around burlap sacks and wooden switches, which are to beat unruly children and convey them back to Spain respectively. Seriously, the premise of Zwarte Pete’s existence is that he has a mandate from Sinterklaas to kidnap unruly kids and bring them back to Spain, presumably to live out the rest of their existence getting traded for cigarettes in whatever barracks the Zwarte Pete’s live in. It is not an uncommon sight for an especially young child to scream in terror when Zwarte Pete reaches out to them.

Strange country.

Ann and I walked around the city center for a while stopping in and out of stores. Ann forced me to pass up fried dough and candy stores, but eventually I got her to cave in and got a chocolate waffle which I must say had the tastiest, richest chocolate sauce I have ever had.

We then walked around the Maastricht Winterland, a kind of holiday themed fair which is just an excuse to sell all kinds of foods, toys, and expensive rides to kids. Naturally, I loved it. I convinced Ann to ride the ferris wheel, after a glass of gluhewine (warm German wine) to get her courage up. Ann is afraid of heights and I have to give her credit for sticking it out.

On our way back to the hotel we mistakenly wandered into the section of town where you need to be a millionaire to enter any of the shops. Ann checked out the price of a coat, dropped it like it was on fire, and walked out of the store. “520 Euros for that coat. I don’t think so.” It was on this same street that we found this cute little antique map store and decided to stroll through it, which must have been just what the elderly gent in the fine suit wanted… two tourists in jeans trolling through his antique books and maps.

I have to say, the place was amazing. Ann spoke with the owner for a bit and learned that the store didn’t even deal with anything that was made after 1750. There were original maps of Dutch towns like Amsterdam and Maastricht that showed the original city walls and fortifications, the gates and canals, all painstakingly drawn by hand. There were even framed original Mercatur maps on display (only 8,500 Euros! A steal!). Now, I didn’t even know who Mercatur was, but my extremely well educated wife did and made sure that at least one of us looked impressed by something other than the price tags.

It’s just so European, walking into a store that sells things that are four hundred years old. I really felt like I was touching history. It was a nice feeling… until the alarms went off.

Ann picked a very cozy ‘eetcafe’ for dinner which confirmed for us, yet again, that the average quality of meals you get in Europe is far and away much better than in the States. Smoked salmon, venison steak with cranberry demi-glace, and chocolate mousse. Yum.

Sunday – December 5, 2004

Our main goal on getting out of bed on Sunday was to get to the breakfast buffet so we could stuff ourselves. Which we accomplished.

Then we met our friend Blanca and two of her friends from Spain who had come for the day. Unfortunately, all the sunshine and shopping had been used up on Saturday and all that was left on Sunday was closed shops and grey clouds. It really just goes to show you how boring Europe is on Sundays. The only thing open were the churches. (see related picture).

We hit the Winterland one more time to use our coupon for free ice skating. Ann and I spent half an hour trying to avoid collisions with the maniacal Dutch children who were playing tag. Ice skating is fun. But wearing rental skates with pieces of metal sticking into your ankles isn’t. I don’t think we used the whole half hour.

We decided to take a one-hour boat tour to get out of the cold. Let me give you a brief description: The boat leaves. The boat goes down the river about ten minutes. Look, there! A cement factory. And above it: some ruins! On your right: a lock that leads to some canal that goes to some place. The boat turns around. Look! The ruins on top of the cement factory…again. Amazing. Ten more minutes. And we’re back.

A word to the wise: stay away from the one-hour boat tour.

The last memorable thing we did in Maastricht is buy cheese. Not just any cheese. Stinky cheese. And not just ANY stink cheese, but the stinkiest of the stinky, ripest possible, tear inducing, more potent than a public toilet… stinky cheese. The stink was so pungent that even though the cheese was wrapped in paper, and then hermetically sealed in a plastic bag, you could smell it from across the room.

And then, we got on the train home.

Two and a half hours of basking in the stink of our cheese, which, since it was OUR cheese, we were naturally quite proud of. Kind of like smelling your own fart continuously for two and a half hours.

It was revenge really. You give me crappy one-hour boat tour… I give you two and a half hours of unbearable stink.

That’ll teach ‘em.

I’m thinking about exporting some back to the NJ Transit headquarters actually. It’s pretty cheap. I could buy one stinky slice for each floor. Every week.

Nah, it’d probably never make it through customs. Shame really.

Poker Night Reborn!

2004-12-02T15:01:00.000+01:00

A grand and noble tradition has now been introduced to the gambling-impoverished masses of Dordrecht: poker night.

First I had to wait two months to get an apartment. Then I had to wait another month to fill it with IKEA furniture and new appliances. Then I had to go through the process of finding likely candidates to participate in this solemn and important event. Of course, in the end I took whoever the hell I could get, but I like to think they represent the best and the brightest that the Netherlands has to offer for this introductory class of 2004 Poker Series.

On Wednesday, December 1st, seven intrepid souls, all employees of the venerable Springer publishing company, were rounded up, herded to our apartment, given plastic chips in exchange for 10 Euro bills, and were promptly initiated into the Brotherhood of Degenerate Gamblers In the Making.

It was my original intent to play a variety of different kinds of poker games, but the newbies (and they were ALL newbies) quickly nixed that idea saying it was tough enough just trying to figure out Texas Hold ‘Em. So we stuck to 20/40 Hold ‘Em… that’s 20 and 40 CENT Texas Hold ‘Em…. mind you.

After covering the basics of the game (the first two cards, the flop, the changing of the betting limits) we got into many of the finer points of the game:

“Why do I have to be the Big Blind?”

“Whose turn is it to bet?”

“Why can’t I just check after he bets? I don’t want to put any more money in.”

Friends, it was a difficult night for your humble narrator. But everyone starts at the beginning, and by the end of the night the group had the basics down pretty well. We even covered some higher level casino-game situations such as:

“Why You Have to Post Both Blinds If You Get Up to Smoke a Cigarette and Miss the Blinds You Smelly Nicotine Addicts”
“Why You Sometimes Have to Chop the Pot”
“Why It Sends Brian Into A Homicidal Rage When You String Bet”

Even my wife, who participated (and will never let me live down the fact that she won 13 Euros while I *lost* 13 Euros) was able to take the training wheels off and stop referring to the print out of the poker hierarchy.

Some memorable points of the evening were:

Pete Binfield getting four of a kind: a pair of 3’s in his hand and two on the flop. Nice one Pete.
Itsco van der Linden teaching Brian to sit his ass DOWN after beating his well concealed trips with an even BETTER concealed full house. (I believe his exact words were: “BOOYA beotch!”)
Pete Binfield winning a huge hand with four 3’s again. This time THREE of them on the board (seriously Pete, cut it out)
Esther coming to drop off something from IKEA for us and getting sucked in to buying in for 3 euros. And then 5 more. And then another 5.
Ian coaching Esther how to bet all the way through a hand with just the two of them, which she then demolished him on.
Ian making up for getting beat by a girl by eating all of the pizza we were saving for Michel.
Wouter, who most of the time needed his cheat sheet and had a penchant for staying in on 3,8 unsuited, cleaning up the HOUSE
Ann refusing to loan her husband money until she had counted it all first so she could know EXACTLY how much she had won.
Listening to Pete Binfield referring to everyone as ‘bitch’.
Esther’s shocked/innocent act when she said: “You guys! Why didn’t you tell me my shirt had come unbuttoned.”

We had pizza from Dominos and there was a fair quantity of beer drunk, so in many ways it was just like poker night back home. I’m pretty sure that everyone had a good time, and that poker night will continue. Eventually the youngsters here may even graduate to playing no limit and we can do some 10 Euro tournaments.

My real goal is to find a way to introduce Kings and Little Ones. I will not be satisfied until I start seeing some IOUs on the table.

Baby steps though, baby steps…

Our First Trip Home - Part II

2004-11-25T15:59:00.000+01:00

It was a little weird being ‘home’. First of all, it’s hard to call a place home when you don’t live there, even if all your friends are there and you’ve spent a significant chunk of your life there. When you’re driving around in a rental car, and you have to sleep in someone else’s bed, calling it ‘home’ just doesn’t feel right. But it was good to be back regardless.

I want to say a big thank you to all our friends who made time to see us during the five days that we were back. Even Katie proved how strong her secret love for me is by flying all the way from Germany just so she could see me again. Mark and Katrin hosted us for a bit while we cooed over Kira. Guze and Allie came and saw us at least three times, and Guze and I did our first Fantasy Football draft in person while our wives attempted to hide their “there they go again with that silly game” looks.

The other major accomplishment of our first trip home was that we spent a lot of money. Between buying DVDs to take back with us, clothes, and eating out, we spent over a grand. And while it was unabashedly decadent, it felt (and tasted) fantastic. I was in Best Buy going through the downward spiral of a compulsive consumer. First I would take one or two $20 movies off the ‘new releases’ shelf and say, “I really need these.” Then I would see one or two $15 movies and say, “Oh, these were really great movies too, and they’re discounted,” and then I found the $5.99 rack and I just disintegrated into a mindless buying machine. A second copy of “Rounders”? Sure, why not. A widescreen version of “the 13th Warrior”? How could I say no?

Even Ann, who I depend on to be the responsible one, went a little crazy. I was in Banana Republic, fretting over an $80 pair of pants, and this long sleeve shirt that went well with them. I showed the combo to Ann. She said: “That’s nice. Why don’t you get it in brown too?”

That’s right. Why don’t I?

With the Euro gaining 30% in the good ole USofA it’s like everything is at a 25% discount to start with. Ann and I already transferred a lot of money from our savings account here in Europe simply because we can instantly make 30% on it without having to pay taxes. I wouldn’t mind eating ramen noodles for a few months and saving every penny I can to transfer over.

Well. Maybe ramen noodles and chicken fingers.

The Little Differences

2004-11-22T17:15:00.000+01:00

Let’s say you get a new debit card in the mail and have to activate it, how would you normally expect that to be done? You call the number on the back, punch in your card number, maybe punch in some personal info, and voila, done right?

See, this is where those “little differences” that Travolta talked about in Pulp Fiction come in. Here in Yurup they don’t trust such important things as activating your credit card to the phone system. They make you come into the branch, during bank hours (which are, incredibly, even shorter than regular work hours), and bring an acceptable form of ID to do it in person.

So I’m at the bank, during lunch. Everything is going fine until I say, “oh, the card had my wife’s name on it, I hope that won’t be a problem.”

Duh!!! Give any person a chance to say no and chances are good they’ll take you up on it. Give a Dutch person that chance, and fuhgeddaboutit. You’re history.

“Oh, actually, that WILL be a problem. If it has her name on it then only she can activate it.”

“But it’s my card, it was sent to me. See here, the letter from your bank, addressed to me.”

“Sorry, if it says her name, then she has to activate it. You can order another one, it will take 4-5 business days.”

Funny. THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT I JUST DID!

I swipe the card back and hop onto my ever-present bike and take my card and my passport to another bank branch to see if I just keep my mouth shut if they will activate the dam card so I can finally have a means of getting money that doesn’t involve begging my wife for my allowance.

I get to the second bank branch, wait in line, and present my credentials for authentication. I even show her two bills I have to pay with my name on them, to try and distract her. Turns out she doesn’t need any help from me. She wanders over to a drawer. Wanders back with a binder. Leisurely flips through it. It’s a binder full of examples of passports from all different countries. She’s checking my passport for authenticity. Can you freaking believe this!

So this ditzy bitch is flipping through the entire book looking for examples of passports from the United States. She goes over “Ukraine” like seven times, riffling the pages with her fingers to make sure she hasn’t missed any. She tries “America”, then “United States”, then “Verenig Staten” (‘United States’ in Dutch), and she can’t find anything.

Give me a fucking break! We have to be the largest issuer of passports in the world and she can’t figure out where in the stupid book the U.S. is?!

Finally, she shows the book to her manager, who spends a few minutes staring at it dumbfounded, WITHOUT looking through it, and then she comes back to the counter.

“Did you know this card has your wife’s name on it? She has to be the one to activate it.”

Cue exploding head.

Our First Trip Home - Part I

2004-11-16T15:26:00.000+01:00

I’m sitting in Hartsfield airport in Atlanta. I’m halfway through my trip home. It’s my first official trip home as an expat. At first this was just going to be an extended business trip, I needed to go through Newark to get to New Orleans for a business meeting. I did the rational thing and scheduled it so I would have a weekend in Princeton and could do some important things such as attending Friday poker night, getting a round of Frisbee golf in, seeing Mark and Katrin’s beautiful baby girl, and eating some good Indian food. You know, the basics.

Then Ann found out that her school schedule had a gap during exactly the same week, so she booked a ticket and the two of us got to have the enjoyment of watching “Dodgeball” three times on the interminable flight over.

So, the brief recap so far is: won $40 at poker, ate pancakes at PJs, saw “The Incredibles” (two thumbs way up), crashed Murray’s housewarming party, won Frisbee golf by one stroke, won a lot at poker in New Orleans, got cocky and gave most of it back, walked away today (Tuesday) with a small profit and still can’t decide if I’m happy to be up overall, or pissed off that I lost so much of my profit chasing straights and flushes.

I absolutely love poker. I would go so far to say that if poker were a woman, I would practice polygamy and marry her. She and Ann and I would create a non-traditional family unit of blissful possibilities, and at night—

Sorry. Jet lag.

But seriously, I love poker. I played from 9:30pm until 2:00am the first night, played four hours on Monday night, and played for two hours today before rushing out to make my shuttle to the airport. So, with this in mind, you may be able to appreciate the cruelty of what happened to me at my so-called ‘friendly’ poker game on Friday night.

Allow me to set the scene: Imagine you love poker. Imagine that between getting to and from airports, flying to the states, waiting in line in fucking customs, and driving, you have spent eleven and a half hours traveling and your body is telling you that it is 3:00am as you sit down to BEGIN playing poker. Now, imagine further that you sit down with eight of your close friends to enjoy some quality time with your second love, and the first hand you get is a pocket pair of queens (a very good hand, for all you poker ignoramuses).

Imagine your pleasure at the obvious sign of a divine mandate to win. Imagine your further pleasure as the flop includes is king of spades, queen of spades, and queen of hearts. Imagine your glee as you realize you have four of a kind, a hand you might see once in a thousand hours of playing poker. Imagine keeping it all inside as you wisely check, allowing other players to bet up the pot, and waiting for your chance to strike some poor sucker with an “I’m all in.”

Now imagine your satisfaction as that poor sucker turns out to be Hoagie (aka Paul), who has a history of staying in on hands he shouldn’t, and whose presence as your sole competition is likely to immediately double your bankroll.

Imagine that, as you had hoped, Hoagie calls your “all in”. Putting all his chips, and all your chips into the pot, so that both of you are fully committed to this one hand. Win or go home. And you have four of a kind.

Now, dear friends, comes the truly terrible part.

Imagine that you flip up your pocket queens, proudly showing four of a kind already, with the hand not even finished yet. And imagine that Hoagie flips over the jack and ten of spades. Imagine the terrible thought that surfaces, as much as your fatigue and poker haze try to suppress it, that there is a possibility that this inferior hand might just beat you. That’s right sports fans, the only hand that could possibly beat four of a kind… a straight flush. Something that you might play ten thousand hours of poker and not see. And it’s possible that this grinning fool next to you, who has bet all his money without even a pair, might just beat you if the ace of spades is the last card to come out.

“Hoagie. If you beat me… I’m going to have to kill you.”

Hoagie just watches the board with his hand over his mouth.

The final card is dealt.

The table erupts.

Ace of spades.

“Holy Shit!”

“Oh snap!”

“He did not just pull a straight flush!”

For a few seconds I do nothing, make no reaction, just clench my jaw and attempt to furiously find a way to be okay with the fact that I just lost with four of a kind. And then I notice it. The laughter. There’s just a little too much of it. Then Ken lets me in on a little secret.

“We rigged the deck. Welcome back.”

Assholes.

I went on to lose sixty bucks over the next hour, borrow $40 from Ken, win one tournament and finish second in another, to end the night at 3:00am (9:00am Brian’s body time) up by about $40.

But nothing that happened that night will really stay with me other than that hand.

IKEA Overload

2004-11-07T13:30:00.000+01:00

For those of you who ever wondered, the maximum amount of times that one can safely shop at IKEA without experiencing IKEA Overload, is twice a month.

Yesterday Ann and I took our fourth trip in as many weeks to freaking IKEA. We rented a car from Avis in Dordrecht and drove there. To say that Ann was nervous about driving a stick shift (it had been six years) in Europe again is the understatement of the year. I have to commend her though, we only stalled three times the entire day and not once on the highway.

Since we had the car, we decided to go shopping at the Aldi, a cheap supermarket that is a bit of a hike on foot. It's hard to describe this supermarket. The business model is that all costs are stipped out of the operation to offer the cheapest product possible. To do this they simply drop pallets of produce and such in somewhat aligned rows, they sell only no-name brands, and they have one register open on Saturday... the only day that most of the Netherlands has to shop. But, since you can get two liters of attractively boxed wine for about three Euros, naturally, the frugal Dutch love the place.

The Dutch don't pinch pennies. They flatten them into wafer-thin discs to stretch their buying power.

Anyway, the funny thing is, as Ann was pulling into the parking spot, she didn't get all the way in, and had to back out to re-adjust. Unfortunately, the car didn't seem to want to go into reverse. The little picture on the knob clearly showed that there indeed was a gear called 'R', but for some reason the stick didn't want to go there. So there we were, blocking up the lane, Ann getting increasingly frustrated/infuriated, and me trying to calm her by letting her know "you can do this". Note to self: that shit just does not work.

Finally I asked a guy who was standing around for help. He was a little bewildered. He probably thought it was an elaborate scheme to get him behind the wheel so we could blame him for something wrong with the car. He didn't want to get in the driver's seat. He wanted to push the car back into the lane a little bit to get us some more room. I cannot tell you how idiotic two men pushing a little European car that refuses to budge looks. For some reason we simply could not coordinate with Ann to be pushing at the same time that she put the car in neutral. Every time she put it in neutral, and we weren't ready, the car inched forward again, closer and closer to the car that we were trying to AVOID hitting, so she'd put the brakes on, and that would be the moment that this random Dutch guy and I were throwing our backs out trying to move the car back.

Very frustrating.

Finally this couple who were coming back to the car next to us offered to get in and drive it. Unbeknownst to us, since Ann had left the Continent, there had been amazing advances in stick-shift technology to improve the safety of cars. In order to go into reverse, you first had to pull UP on the stick, THEN change gears.

The woman backed out, then pulled into the parking spot, in two seconds.

Ann and I stood there silently and attempted to keep our heads from exploding.

After the pressure in our heads reduced, we drove to IKEA to pick up what we hoped were the final pieces of furniture we would ever need in our lives.

We zoomed through the showroom, skipped the traditional Swedish meatballs and ligonberry sauce, argued over the bookcase (Ann won, of course), got into the warehouse, and found out that the closet we were getting weighed 86lbs., in the box. The other closet weighed in at a measly 71lbs., and the book case was a feather-light 55lbs. When we got home Ann drank her super-woman potion and the two of us manhandled the beastly boxes up into our apartment.

That is the last time we plan to go to IKEA until 2005. Maybe 2006.

Geriatric Ward

2004-11-06T13:27:00.000+01:00

Ann and I have met five neighbors so far. All of them had to be over 65. A few of them were in the 70s I think. I think Ann and I brought the average age of that apartment block down about 20 years when we stepped in.

At least they won't make a lot of noise. And presumably, they won't be able to tell if WE are making a lot of noise.

;-)

Election

2004-11-03T13:42:00.000+01:00

Our new TV has CNN International. Stayed up until 6:00am watching election coverage, hoping to see a trend in Ohio that would allow me to go to sleep with the knowledge that we would have a new president.

Instead went to bed angry and frustrated and woke up to find out that four million more people thought it was a good idea to re-elect George Bush.

Like I said before... anger and sadness.

God I hope this feeling ends soon. I don't want to feel like I've been punched in the gut for four straight years.

Moving Into Merwekade

2004-11-02T13:33:00.000+01:00

This weekend we moved into our new apartment. Here are some of the highlights:

Four appliances came Friday morning. I succeeded in getting them out of the packaging, but after that I reached the limits of my usefulness.
Ann’s dad and Mieke came about around 11:00am to help us out. Since Ann’s dad actually knows all the appropriate names for the tools and their uses this was a decidedly large help.
Four pallets of IKEA furniture came Satruday too. The delivery guys climbed six steps to get into the building, five steps to get to our door, came in, and then refused to carry the stuff the remaining seven steps to the living room (our apartment is split level). They said I only paid for ground floor delivery. I was equal parts incredulous and disgusted. I carried the damn sofas, carpet, entertainment center, dinner table and end tables up the seven steps myself. Counting loudly as I did so.
Andre drove us to IKEA to purchase even more stuff. We spent an hour in the lighting department alone. I won on the halogen lights for the kitchen but had to concede the hallway, office, and guest bedroom lamps. Since the kitchen has the most electoral college votes though I am declaring victory.
The Swedish meatballs and ligonberry sauce were yummy for a third time in ten days.
We lost Mieke in the parking lot of IKEA. We found her though. Still not sure if Andre was serious when he said, “Don’t worry, she’ll find her way back.” (IKEA is 20 minutes away by car.)
While forcing apart the pieces of a pre-IKEA cheapo closet left in our apartment that was just too ugly to bear, the sides fell apart and three heavy shelves fell almost directly on top of Andre’s head. Thankfully only one of them grazed his hand. That event signaled our move into the dinner portion of the event.
Monday the 1st our shipment from the states came. Ann was sick all day and as a result I let the delivery guys off the hook. They were supposed to unpack all the boxes, but I didn’t want to disturb Ann, who was sleeping, so I told them we would do it later.
You’d be amazed how much time it takes to unwrap boxes and boxes of plate ware and kitchen stuff.
We found our rice cooker and coffee machine. Neither of which work on 220 voltage. Apparently, “Don’t pack anything electrical” was too hard to understand.
Even the TV was uncooperative. It auto-detected about eight channels. Only half of them with sound. All of them different from the channels that we had in the company apartment. After reprogramming it eventually got all 30 channels it was supposed to.

So now we are more or less installed in the new place. We slept for the first time in our own bed last night (which is amazingly large and soft, just as we remembered it). We, of course, need more stuff from IKEA (you’d think that place sold heroin instead of furniture).

But things are moving along and Ann and I are looking forward to having a place to call ‘home’ for a little while that has such a great view and is in the old part of town. The bathroom and the kitchen look great after the renovations, and the place will look even better after we dig out from under all the cardboard boxes and packing paper.

IKEA & karma

2004-10-28T15:11:00.000+02:00

So we went to IKEA last night and dropped 1,100 Euros on furniture for our new pad. Couches. Dining room table. End table. Rug. Bed. Mattress. Bathroom rack. Entertainment center. Our place is goign to be an IKEA model home.

The thing is, we were supposed to eat at the restaurant, then go shopping and take our restaurant receipts with us, and they would deduct it from the bill. Cool right? Free Swedish meatballs and ligonberry sauce, hooray.

Except that half the Netherlands was also there waiting in line for their free meal. So we decided to shop first and try and get the discount second. Ehhhhh. Thanks for playing. Buh-bye.

It took two and a half hours to get everything, and then enter in each of our four pallets worth of stuff item by item into the system to schedule the delivery. The place closed at 9:00 and we finished at about 8:50.

Plus, we missed the last bus back to the train station and we didn't have any way of calling a taxi. So, Ann put on her best 'lost child' face and asked at customer service if there was any way to find a taxi service, and the woman standing in line next to her offers to drive us to a train station!

Deciding to keep the good karma going I took my receipts from dinner and handed them to some appropriately tall Dutch guy telling him that they would take 12 Euros off his bill if he gave them to the cashier.

The good karma keeps on rolling.

So, I'd just like to say a warm thank you to Fred and Marysa, who dropped us off at the Zuidplein subway stop. Even though Marysa told us that the place was always in the news because of the murders, we got to the Central Station unmolested and got home much quicker than if we had been waiting in Barendrecht for a local train.

Let it never be said that the Dutch are unfriendly or insensitive to those in need.

The Death of America

2004-10-27T23:29:00.000+02:00

The election is coming.

It is less than a week away. It dominates every newspaper headline, it is on every newscast of every Dutch, German, and Belgian TV channel that we get. There are more articles about who's leading in the polls than any other topic. Even an ocean away the election for the next President of the United States is the biggest story going. The story is so strong, the passions are so inflamed, that people on both sides of the ocean, believing that their very lives are at stake, have engaged in disgraceful acts that in almost any other era those same people would probably not even be able to contemplate without revulsion.

In the UK a newspaper bought a mailing list of US voter names in a swing state and urged their readers to write them letters and urge them to vote. Ostensibly it was just an effort to promote turnout in the US, but since the overwhelming opinion of Europeans is anti-Bush the "we're just promoting the exercising of democracy" defense doesn't hold spit. That kind of international tampering is reprehensible, and the fact that a media outlet has compromised it's integrity by engaging in such a partisan activity fills me with sadness.

Unlike the right wing media in my own country, which distorts the truth on a daily basis to tens of millions of viewers. That just makes me mad. It enrages me that a propaganda machine like Fox News is allowed to exist in a country who sacrificed 400,000 of its citizens to defeat facist countries whose leaders employed those very same tactics to justify the very same ends.

For some reason, instead of earning the outright contempt of the American public for lying to them, and so blatantly trying to manipulate them, the average middle American is likely to call you un-patriotic, or imply that you don't support the troops, if you disparage Bill O'Rielly or Brit Hume. Unbelievable. Somewhere in Washington a Republican is lighting the incense sticks on his shrine to the right wing media and cackling with glee that they can still somehow seem to portray the media as 'liberal' whenever it suits their needs.

Anger. That's what the outlets for my country's political discourse inspire in me.

And it's not just the media that has this effect on me.

I'm angry that spin is more important than substance. I'm angry that anyone can get in front of a podium and portray the situation in Iraq as "improving" and not have their head explode. I'm angry that over a thousand US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi people, human beings with lives just as valuable as any American's, have been killed in what has to be the biggest fraud that has ever been perpetrated on the American people.

I'm angry that the marketers of the right wing are so adept, and the average intelligence of my countrymen so low, that they aren't demanding that the President be impeached for causing the needless deaths of tens of thousands of people and then getting on TV during a debate and saying he was fighting "the enemy".

0 of 19 hijackers were from Iraq.

There were 0 operational anti-US terrorist camps in Iraq before we went in there and turned the entire country into one.

We are the Muslim extremists wet dream. We created a terrorist training facility the size of California, where even your average run-of-the-mill jihadist, who before the war would likely have never even SEEN an American citizen, now has the opportunity to blow one up wiht an Improvised Explosive Device. We achieved the miracle of uniting the Shiites and the Sunnis: in hatred against us.

I'm angry that I was lied to about weapons of mass destruction, a very real and credible threat that will now never be taken seriously ever again. Here's how I envision the next intelligence briefing on WMD:

Intelligence Chief: "Mr. President, we have satellite photos of Country X putting the nuke on the warhead and programming in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave!"
President: "Oh really. Like in Iraq?"

The sad part is that due to the proliferation of these weapons I'm sure there will come a time when we ARE attacked with some form of WMD, and it will be from some place that we never bothered to shine a light on because there was no chance that there would be a pool of oil there to shine back on us.

I'm angry that I believed Colin Powell's fabulous PowerPoint presentation to the UN. Thank you Colin Powell, for removing the illusion from me that my elected government would never lie to me about something as serious as a threat to our national security.

I believed. Up until the moment I realized that CNN and Fox and all the others were so desperate to capture the footage of the first discovered stockpile of WMDs that they were interrupting regular programming EVERY TIME A SENSOR WENT OFF, only to have to fill the dead air time after time when all that was ever found were some gas masks and one artillery shell with some mustard gas residue. It took until about the second or third false alarm before it really hit me.

There never were any weapons.

It was all a lie.

A lie Saddam told to instill fear, or to impress a girl. Who knows. I don't know why he lied. But Saddam Hussein didn't lie to me. Saddam Hussein didn't take over 100 billion of my country's tax money and spend it on creating the largest terrorist camp the world has ever seen, while smiling and telling me he was making me safer. Saddam Hussein didn't give the order for 135,000 US troops to walk into an Arab country and beg them to hate us.

George W. Bush did that.

And that's why I'm angry. Because the Great Liar (as I have come to call him) has lied so well, and so effectively, that he is now up by 5 points in the latest polls of likely voters.

I am sad. And angry. At America.

Because we believe the emporer when he tells us he has clothes on, even when our eyes are staring at the ugly truth every night on the evening news.

It's like reverse David Copperfied. He pulls the curtain off the Statue of Liberty and it's still there... and we all pretend not to see it. Because for some reason we'd rather believe that terrorists took it away. We'd rather trade what it means to be America for the right to go and blow the shit out of some other country to feel better about getting sucker-punched in the face by Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden: Mastermind behind the deaths of almost 3,000 Americans who were killed on their own soil. We sent 5,000 troops after him and Mullah Omar. Both are still at large.

Saddam Hussein: Never responsible for the death of any American on American soil. We sent 135,000 troops after him and pulled him out of a hole after six months.

Hello, priorities!? Where's the anger! Where's the outrage?

I never had Watergate. I never had Vietnam. I never had those experiences that shake the very trust that is the foundation of any democracy's legitimacy. Until now.

I have Iraq.

I have something now that helps me understand what it does to your soul to find out that your country doesn't mean what you thought it meant. That your President lied to you. And that people, a lot of them, died as a result. Most of them innocent.

I am angry that more people aren't angry. They cannot, or worse, they do not want to see, that their country's very meaning has been corrupted. What used to be the land of freedom and the place where hard working people could achieve success, has revealed itself to be nothing more than one, gigantic, superpower of a con artist.

I have never been one to say that a country should act according to what the rest of the world thinks of it. I am not that "multilateral". But I also do not believe that any country, even the world's only superpower, cannot afford to pretend that it lives in a vacuum where the opinion of the rest of the world has no bearing on our own security.

It's called *International* terrorism for a reason.The terrorists who attacked our country on September 11 operated out of Europe and the Middle east while they were planning their heinous crimes. And now the lesson we have shown the world is that we will not listen to them at all. So why should they?

I'm angry that the real threat, terrorism, has been hijacked. I'm angry that so many Americans link Iraq and September 11th even though the two had nothing to do with each other.

I'm angry that we want to believe the lie. And that we will look at the iceberg in our path and instead tell ourselves that what we are looking at is the promised land of a safe and secure America. Oh, and that must be Lady Liberty there behind it, we've been missing her!

Jesus. Seven more days of this incessant coverage of people saying nothing.

And then, sadly, barring a minor miracle at the polls, four more years of watching the meaning of the word America slowly die until it is a synonym for 'lie'.

It used to be that the American Dream was something to aspire to. Now it means the capability of seeing the bodies of 48 unarmed Iraqi National Guard troops who were executed while they were lying on the ground, and telling the world that the situation is improving.

I guess I am most angry at the fact that America does not mean what I thought it did. Not anymore.

Dutch Fashion

2004-10-24T01:28:00.000+02:00

Ever since moving here Ann and I have noticed a certain distinct and pervasive sense of Dutch 'style'. Simply put: the Dutch wear things that in almost all other cultures would surpass acceptable fashion limits.

When put into the larger context of their country's historically inclusive and tolerant culture it may be easier to understand this seeming meltdown of conventional fashion norms. The Dutch have always been a little... different, from the other European countries.

When you walk down the shopping streets in the Netherlands you will be confronted with a series of stores bearing names that rival their American counterparts in trendiness. Stores such as Cool Cat, Miss Sixty, The Sting, and Etam would blend in quite well with American establishments such as Wet Seal, Hot Topic, and Torrid.

The clothes come from such famous labels as G-Star Raw, Diesel, Von Dutch (natually), Cool Cat (they have their own clothes), and Indian Rose. These designers of men and women's fashions have tailored their offerings to appeal to the unique Dutch sense of style. Bold, mismatched colors are only the tip of the iceberg. Many Dutch fashionistas also have a penchant for contrasting styles of clothing even within one ensemble. There is the popular "poofy colorful skirt over black spandex leggings tucked into white boots" flavor of contrast. There is also the "long colorful wool scarf over brown suede coat and black pants" look. I personally enjoyed the girl with the orange camo hat and the puffy green North Face jacket over a black skirt and boots, sporting the straw handbag with fashionable skull and crossed bones (see montage below). There are also the traditional style staples like Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo, Scapa, Zara... but no one cool is wearing THOSE.

And for some unfathomable reason it has become very popular to wear high suede boots into which jeans are tucked. Several examples of this are included in the montage above. These are REAL people wearing this stuff. I took those pictures myself as we were touring around. And before you dismiss this as perhaps the style of only one particular city, I should mention that the shots above were taken in Amsterdam, Dordrecht, Den Haag, and Rotterdam.

Ann's general reaction to the sight of these brave pioneers of contra-fashion is a look of disbelief (you know, the look that says, "Am I really seeing this?") followed by either a "I feel really old," or a, "Can we move to Belgium?" My general reaction is to wonder how much effort must have gone in to finding the exact combination of colors and styles that would NOT match. It must take them a fair amount of time, but as you can see for yourself, the results are obviously well worth the effort.

Can't wait to see what will be in by summertime. All two weeks of it.

click for larger images

Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa... and Brian

2004-10-22T17:00:00.000+02:00

Our friend Mark Lorenc will love this.

Ann called up the IND, the bureau responsible for processing our application for a residence permit, to check up on the status.

The woman said it was still processing, but that she didn't think it would be a problem since her husband was Polish and therefore an EU citizen.

Come again?

Yes, apparently "USA" and "Poland" are very easy to mix up in Dutch. One is abbreviated "VS" (for Verenig Staten) and one is "PL" (for Polen).

Please, no "ejector seats in helicopters" jokes.

A Taste of Bureaucracy

2004-10-20T11:35:00.000+02:00

Just to give you a typical example:

I called up the local school a few weeks ago to see what it would cost to take Dutch lessons. Immediately the receptionist said: "Do you have an inbeurgeringskontract?" To which I replied: "God bless you."

Apparently, if you have this unpronounceable piece of paper from the government, then THEY pay for your Dutch lessons. This is a service to help newcomers learn how to speak Dutch so they can integrate into Dutch society better. Okay... get paper... free school. Got it.

This morning I met with a representative of the WIN, the Dutch agency responsible for handling the 'intake' of foreigners. To get this meeting I had to call them, explain what I wanted, answer a few questions correctly, and then wait for them to send me a letter with an appointment time. The letter did come in timely fashion (three days after my call), and the appointment was only a week after my call. So far so good.

I show up at the meeting. The woman is very polite. She immediately tells me that she looked into my 'file' at the town hall, and (of course), I do not yet have the necessary paperwork completed: I don't have my official residence permit.

The residence permit is, of course, handled by another department, so there really is nothing she can do. When I mentioned to her that the residence permit may take six months to get, she immediately knew the answer to that one: "Yes, but usually before the actual permit comes they send you a letter saying that the permit is coming."

Rube Goldberg would be proud.

It's good to know that so long as the Dutch bureaucracies remain standing the Dutch Post Office will remain solvent.

Ah, but we are not yet done. It IS possible for me to get started learning Dutch. If my wife, who is an EU citizen and legal resident, writes a 'garandstelling' (Bless you again) letter stating that she will pay the costs for the school if for some reason the residence permit is denied, then they will go ahead and send the inbeurgeringskontract (You really should get that checked out) to the school which will result in...

...another interview!

See, you can't just start taking classes, silly! You have to have an interview to determine what kind of classes are best, what your schedule is, yadda yadda yadda. I seriously contemplated showing up at this interview and putting on my best retard act. ("Hahv you theen my weiner?")

But let's get back to this 'garandstelling' letter where my spouse promises to pay if for some reason I should be denied residency (keep in mind that it's only ME that needs the fucking permit):

Brian: "So what do you need in the letter?"
Bureaucrat: "Her name and address, that she will pay, and your name and address."
Brian: "Do you need her SOFI [Social security] number?"
Bureaucrat:"No."
Brian:"Do you need a bank account or credit card number?"
Bureaucrat:"No."
Brian:"Should she include a copy of her passport?'
Bureaucrat:"No."

If the Dutch Government denies my residency I wish them the best of luck collecting from Catherine Zeta Jones-Bishop, 123 Flurneygurney St., Dordrecht.

Also, by signing up for the inbrughrugrufkontract I automatically enroll with YET ANOTHER government agency, the VIZO, whose purpose is to provide support to people moving to the Netherlands. They will be contacting me to make sure I am fully supported, that I am getting by fine in the Netherlands, and that I am not roaming around the streets with pneumatic bolt cutters stealing bikes. I envision this as kind of like my Dutch parole officer.

Naturally, the VIZO will send me a letter.
To set up an appointment.
To have an interview.
Where the first thing they will tell me is, of course:

"You don't have the right paperwork."

An Update on My Dinner

2004-10-18T23:34:00.000+02:00

Dinner tonight: rice cakes, smoked gouda cheese, a Coke.

Just so no one got the impression that the Netherlands has changed me.

Blanca's Visit

2004-10-17T17:28:00.000+02:00

For those of you who don't know, Blanca is one of the founding members of Smelly Pig, the world-famous two guitar, four singer, one plastic tambourine band whose appeareances at the Bucks County Coffee House are legendary.

Blanca is originally from San Esteban de Gormaz, a small village in Soria, an hour and a half north of Madrid. We met originally in Princeton when she was working as an au pair. Nowadays Blanca is living in Brussels while she completes a five month internship at the European Parliament.

Blanca made the mistake of letting us know that she was close by, so we invited her to come and visit us at her earliest convenience. Of course, we marketed all the positive points of the Netherlands in an attempt to secure her visit: legalized marijuana, legalized prostitution, little towns with cute canals, tulips, cheese, etc. What we left out was the fact that it would probably be cold, grey, and rainy the entire time she was here.

And it was.

Friday I picked her up at the train station and we walked back to the apartment with me pointing out the important sights of Dordrecht: "that's the apartment we thought we had, but we didn't get. Oh, that's the apartment that we told them we would sign the papers for, but we didn't. Above this restaurant is an apartment we looked at, but we didn't like. Oh, that's the town square with a statue of some guy."

Saturday, we went to Den Haag. This is where many of the government offices are, and is a historically important town because many international events and treaties took place in Den Haag. The International Court of Justice is located there now, as well as the Queen's 'working palace', and a lot of expensive stores who cater to the indiginous population of lawyers and bureaucrats.

It's cute town. The center of the city has this large rectangular pond around which the houses of parliament are located. There are many museums and we visited the Mauritshuis museum, which was the first public museum in the Netherlands, a gift of Prince William the 5th of Orange, who amassed quite a few Rembrandts, Vermeers, and other works from Dutch and Continental Masterpieces. Ann and I finally got to see the famous painting "Girl with a Pearl Earring" (which was the subject of a great movie, Scarlett Johanssen is in it). It is truly striking with its black background, subtle use of light and contrast, and the fantastic way the girl's expression is captured. It's definitely worth seeing.

While we were there we also took a tram ride to the beach. That area is called Scheveningen (don't even try to pronouce it correctly), and during the one week in summer when it is sunny and warm, all Dutch people are required to put on their speedos and lay on the beach. We hope not to miss it next summer (as the liberal-minded Dutch women are usually also well-endowed). Okay, well *I* am looking forward to it.

Sunday we got up bright and early (11:30am), and after another painful "Well I don't know, where do YOU want to go?" we settled on Rotterdam. The sky was (unsurprisingly) threatening rain, but we lucked out, and it just remained overcast for all our trip. We got out at the Rotterdam Blaak station, which is right were a famous Rotterdam landmark is located: the Kubis apartments. This is a post-post-modern apartment complex made up of what look to be large yellow cubes suspended on concrete stalks and set at an angle. Really trippy. But that's what you get when you mix architecture and legalized recreational drug use.

We walked (forever) to the harbor front, passed up the Maritime Museum, and settled on the World Museum. This was an interesting collection of largely religious artifacts from all continents. There was a very tasteful exhibition on the legacy of slavery, but there was also an exaggeratedly tasteless egotistical exhibit from a Dutch artist who simply loved being shocking. Ugh. Art. Gotta take the bad with the good.

We hope that this account won't discourage any of our other friends from making the trip. I promise, it's much better in the spring and summer. Eventually the weather will be good enough that Blanca will come back and we will make the trip to Amsterdam (which is an hour and twenty minutes away) and we will take her to all the smoke shops, hookers, and casinos that she could every want. And I will extend that same generosity to any of our other friends who want to come.

Bicycle Story

2004-10-15T14:12:00.000+02:00

So let me tell you about bicycles.

The bicycle is the main mode of transportation in the Netherlands. Bikes are so prevalent that most city streets have separate lanes just for bikes (adding to the confusion from the already numerous painted lines on the road). The Dutch bike in all weather conditions, at all times of the year. I asked a friend of mine who biked to work: “What do you do when it rains?’ He replied: “Wear your rain coat.”

As the entire country is one flat expanse (it’s topographical map looks like a blank sheet of paper), the Netherlands is well suited to this mode of transportation. And, over the course of Dutch evolution, they have developed a plethora of related bike technologies adapted particularly to their needs. There is, of course, the usual bike bags to go on the back and carry your groceries, the multiple configurations of child seats for your bike, flashing lights, bells, speedometers, pant cuff clips for the business professional who doesn’t want to risk getting his pants caught in the gears, rods that connect two bikes together, etc.

Unfortunately, bicycle theft is rampant in the Netherlands. And we’re not just talking about your run of the mill “stayed-out-too-late-in-the-red-light-district-and-was-too-drunk-to-recognize-my-own-bike-so-took-the-first-one-available” theft here. We are talking about gangs of street thieves who come prepared with pneumatic bolt cutters, pull up in front of a train station, liberate an entire row of bikes from their chains, throw them in the back of a truck, and speed off. Leaving the owners with the sad prospect of filling out their bicycle insurance claim forms. The very fact that every bike shop sells bike insurance should tell you something.

In order to combat this abuse the Dutch have come up with a very clever defense mechanism: enforced decrepitude. This is the process by which all bicycles are developed in the Netherlands to look like they were put into circulation just after World War II. This way, no single bike stands out. Everyone’s bike is equally ugly and provides only the bare necessity of functionality (i.e., two wheels). Even new bikes are carefully engineered so that when they leave the factory they blend in to the herd of old, rusty, ass-breaking, iron behemoths that constitute the average Dutch bike. Those who flaunt this collective defense do so at their own risk.

When I got to the Netherlands, and realized I would be spending at least two months in the company apartment, I immediately set upon finding a bike. As luck would have it a colleague in the Dordrecht office was just about to move to the New York office, and offered me his bike. I asked him how much he wanted for it and, in very un-Dutch style, he said, “Nothing.”

I soon found out why. This bike is actually the prototype that all bikes in the Netherlands are based on. It has no gears. It is at least thirty years old. You have to push back on the pedals to brake. The entire thing is rusty. It is made of lead or some other ridiculously dense metal used only in the manufacture of tanks. And it has a seat whose main goal in life is to prepare you for the horrors of prison life.

At first I took this as a challenge to my integration into Dutch culture. If I was going to make it here in the Netherlands I was going to need to get used to the customs of the Dutch people, and that meant taming this beast.

Well, after two weeks I was done. She would not be tamed, that Fongers bicycle of mine. Perhaps it was the height of the seat (which could not be adjusted) which required a running jump to mount, or the difficulty in keeping the bike on course while it shook like a rocket ship on re-entry at speeds greater than five miles an hour. Perhaps it was the fact that my sensitive areas were being abused worse than inmates at Abu Ghraib, I don’t know. But I needed a new bike. One with gears. And brakes.

Enter Eynseberg’s bike shop. A fairly large establishment. When I found a mountain bike that I liked there the owner was more than pleased to sell it to me, but would not take my credit card. I went after work one day to purchase the bike. It was 5:15 on Friday. His shop closed at 5:30. The owner said that his registers were closed and that he was having a beer. If I wanted the bike I could run to the ATM and come back with cash, but it had to be within the next 15 minutes. Of course. How rude of me to try and cut into his weekend time BY TRYING TO BUY A FUCKING BICYCLE.

Anyway, I got the bike, and it was like heaven. This bike was a Lexus compared to the Chevette I had been riding. This bike had gears. And brakes. And no rust! Immediately the bike made an improvement in the quality of my life. Okay, so it was purple, and I would not normally purchase a purple bike… but YOU try sitting on that ass-destroying Fongers and then tell me how picky you are about color!

So now, every day, rain or shine, I get on my new Montana bike by KH (race proven in the USA), settle my behind onto the gel seat (with its own shock absorber), zoom down the historic streets of Dordrecht, changing gears at will and giving off a maniacal scream of joy each time, and make the 1.25km trip to work in about 6 minutes.

Six minutes baby.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to my peeps on the platform at Princeton Junction, waiting for the wretched New Jersey Transit and their wretched staff. Especially to my homeys waiting on the end doors between the third and fourth cars...

Peace out.

Suckers.

Mark and Katrin's Baby -- Kira!

2004-10-14T16:49:00.000+02:00

I can't believe I forgot to put a post up about the beautiful baby girl that our friends Mark and Katrin brought into the world.

full name: Kira Alexis Lorenc
DOB: Sept. 29, 2004; 11:53pm
weight: 8 lbs. 1 oz.
length: 21 inches
pictures: http://www.undertone.org/gallery/kirabirth

Katrin told us some horror story about a three day delivery, but I'm sure she was just exaggerating to get sympathy (and to freak Ann out so that she never has a kid!)

Our New Apartment

2004-10-12T13:16:00.000+02:00

We have found a place to live.

After four weeks of looking, and two previous unsuccessful attempts, Brian and Ann have now signed the papers and put down the deposit to rent an apartment in Dordrecht. After having done this once already, only to have the rental company call up and tell us they rented us an apartment that they actually, legally could not rent us, I am not going to feel safe until I am sitting on my bed in the new place.

At first our difficulty was in finding a place that was both in the center of Dordrecht, and also nice enough to live in for three years. Neither of us was keen on the idea of moving again, so we wanted to choose a place once that we could stay in for a while.

We looked at quite a few quaint apratments right on the main shopping street of Dordrecht (the Voorstraat), but everything we looked at there was extremely old, and looked it. Then we saw a newer apartment that had four floors worth of space (palatial in terms of European apartment size), but it just had no character at all. Finally, we found a nice split level apartment right on the water, within walking distance to work and the train station (which is very important, as we don't have a car).

Our new place has two bedrooms and an office, plus the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. It's a split level place, so it feels large on the inside. The place is right on the water and has a great view of the Maas river. The kitchen and bathroom are being renovated as we speak, so that will be nice. The only drawback (besides the price) is that it comes 'unfurnished'. Let me explain to you what the Dutch mean by 'unfurnished': if it has the remotest potential for having value, and it can be removed... it is. We're talking everything. Blinds, light fixtures, appliances, everything. There are wires hanging from the ceiling instead of lights. the real estate agent had to bring a flashlight with her to show us the bathroom because it doesn't have a window. THAT is how cheap these people are.

But that's alrgiht. New bathroom and kitchen. New furniture. New appliances. It will be like a brand new place. Ann is the one who favors the rustic look. Me, I want my apartment to look like a page out of an IKEA catalog. I want gleaming appliances that whir and beep and have flashing lights and look like they came from a spaceship. I want smooth floors and white walls and the house equivalent of 'new car smell'.

Plus, the place has a garage. Which is half the battle toward getting a car. Especially in downtown Dordrecht, where the waiting list to get a parking permit is measures in years.

I hope that we will be able to entertain some of our friends from the states in our new digs. All you freeloaders, you now have a place to crash. You just get here, we'll give you a place to stay.

Move in day is Nov. 1. We expect you all to be there. And I'm buying an extra-heavy couch so that this time when I drop it on Jimmy's legs it does the job right.

;-)

American Studies in Brussels

2004-10-12T10:55:00.000+02:00

After a long absence, I find myself contributing my two (euro)cents to the Belgian educational system once again. It was almost literally two cents, because the entire program cost only about 500 euros, which is "peanuts" compared to the heaps of cash I had to dig out for my American undergrad degree.

The students at the Center for American Studies in Brussels are an interesting bunch. There are about 50 of us, half of them are fellow Flemish, half are students from all around the world. Although most of us have very concrete plans for our Masters degree in American Studies, others just feel like they needed to learn more about their "enemy". Some just didn't really know what else to do with their precious young lives...I am sure that this global mix of people will produce interesting perspectives on everything Americana.

Although the first semester courses seem manageable, my little backpack is always bulging with books and other student paraphernalia. I am always very grateful when Brian comes to pick me up at the Dordrecht train station and graciously releases me from this heavy burden (the backpack just looks so much better on him, I always look like I'm on a back-breaking backpacking tour through Europe).

But so far so good. I have been very studious and have kept up with my reading. I even started thinking about a thesis topic and have done some research for a presentation on women voters that is due at the end of October. All this prep work would be a little easier if students could actually check out books from the library, but instead we find ourselves married to the copy machine that spits out free copies of every bit of useful information that we can put our hands on. Hopefully, the center has a nice supply of toner.

The only thing that is not going so smoothly is the train that takes me from Dordrecht to Brussels and back. In one week time there were 2 accidents which delayed me for hours and took a toll on my tolerance for stress. The first time two trains collided with each other, the second time around a van was caught under a train. This all happened in the same town, Essen, which I now consider a health risk.
Last Thursday it took me 3,5 hours to get to Brussels...I am trying to ban this event from my memory...

That's all for now. Stay tuned for more.
--Ann

Last Call for the Airbreakers

2004-10-11T11:38:00.000+02:00

First of all, we had to drive two hours to Venlo to play two games.

For those of you keeping track at home, this is the last outdoor tournament of the 2004 season, and I had to play it with the Airbreakers (click here to find out why).

Final results:

Game 1: Airbreakers 9 : 7 Rest of Holland
Game 2: WAF 15 : 4 Airbreakers

We just came apart from the very beginning of game two. Can't really explain it. Other than that a cosmic wormhole of suckiness opened up right above our team before we started the second game and we were bombarded with sucky rays.

I now know why they made such a stink and forced me to play with them. They only had 7 without me.

--Brian

Quiz Night in Duffel

2004-10-10T02:08:00.000+02:00

Ann promised me, "This is Belgium at its most provincial Brian." And she was right.

Quiz night at the local bar/second home for Duffel's finest. Ann had signed us up with Katja and Roeland to participate in the monthly quiz night. 30 teams of 4 people congregated in the back meeting hall of "de Kroon" (the Crown) to drink beer, heatedly argue over correct answers to trivia questions, and smoke many many many cigarettes.

My god. It was like the entire room was smoking. There was absolutely no ventilation and apparently Belgians like to smoke extra-smoky cigarettes. I am using that as the excuse as to why I did not contribute too much to the answers. The real reason I didn't contribute is because most of the time the questions were local (who are these people you see on TV? What are these famous commercials for?). That, and the fact that, astonishingly enough, the event was conducted in Dutch (with a heavy Duffel dialect [or so I am told]). I did know the first year that the modern olympics started though (1896) and a few other pop-culture answers, but most of the time I just sat there looking pretty and trying not to think about how bad my eyes were stinging and how much I would stink the next day (damn I should have brought a change of clothes).

We finished 6th out of 30. Not bad considering they really only had two and a half players (Katja, Roeland, and Ann, who could at least understand the questions but who was also as out of the loop as I was).

They sold raffle tickets and Katja won a 'gourmet' thingee dingee for two that includes a little grill with two little pots to cook stuff in. I'm sure Ann could tell you what it's for, but as it relates to food preparation I am completely in the dark.

Everyone who attended got to pick prized from a room full of them (most of them gift certificates to local businesses for ten Euros), and we picked two certificates for fries and a restaurant in another town. Katja and Roeland decided they wanted the 72 bounds of chocolate milk and juice-boxes and other assorted sundries that their baby, Lander, would appreciate. (see attached picture).

We are signed up for another quiz in 3 weeks. I have two assignments until then: 1) learn Dutch, 2) study everything.

Being the competitive guy that I am, I did get into the spirit of things, so I hope to make more of a contribution to "the Golden Four" (our team name) next time. We were originally going to be called "Flippy Dippy", but apparently the name was to ridiculous to be accepted.

We'll let you know. Next time we might even break into the top 5.

;-)

--Brian

Breaking Up with the Airbreakers

2004-10-07T14:36:00.000+02:00

The Airbreakers. Sounds like a club for the flatulent-prone. In fact it is the name of the ultimate frisbee team from Rotterdam. Months before I actually stepped foot in the Netherlands I had checked out the ultimate scene to make sure that I was going to be living in a civilized country. What I found was the Nederlands Frisbee Bond (or Netherlands Frisbee Association).

This year ultimate was organized a little differently. Five divisions were made, each with five teams in them. Over the course of six "competition days" you play everyone in your division a few times. At the end of the period (which I think is about 6 months) the divisions are ranked and the top team in the division gets promoted to the next division up, and the bottom team gets demoted to the next level down. This is similar to how soccer clubs are organized and is designed to make sure that teams are playing teams that are around their level.

The Airbreakers are in Division 4. The team is about 50% beginners, and 50% crotchety old men who are keepers of the oral histories about the glory days of the Airbreakers when they were one of the Netherlands top teams. I emailed them before I moved, and they invited me to join them for their fifth "competition day". So, I showed up at the Rotterdam Centraal station, having no idea who I was looking for, wondering what I would find, and there sitting on the corner, smoking a cigarette and looking none too happy about being awake at 9:00am on Sunday, was undoubtedly an ultimate player. I introduced myself and got right to work trying to get an understanding of what kind of club they were.
"So, do you guys have practices?"
"Well, we all work. It's hard to get everyone together."
"Do you guys have a standard offense you like to run?"
"Uh, not with as many new players as we have."
"Do you play any zone defense?"
"Well, sometimes our opponents play zone against US..."

But for all of their lack of experience or organization, the Airbreakers loved to play ultimate. They wear black shirts, and they don't bring a light-colored shirt as a backup. They wear black. Period. They are passionate about ultimate. So passionate in fact that at both of the tournaments I went to with them there was a confrontation that resulted in ending the day with fewer players than we started with.

The first time, one guy started yelling at another guy (I wasn't aware of their names or relationship) and then before I knew it, the yelling guy walked off the field, got in his car, and drove home. Then, in the next game, the exact same thing happened. They just got upset, and went home. Interesting.

At the second tournament we had two guys who just didn't want to get up and play for our first game the second day. At this tournament we had a total of eleven players. Two of those were not in the best physical shape and so they generally traded being on and off. Seven people have to be on the field. Then, one of our players got injured. So, if you're keeping track at home, that means that we had one sub. The entire game. The two guys eventually got up, failed to apologize, asked if anyone wanted to play a pickup game of basketball during our second-round bye, and were then promptly asked to leave and not come back. We played out last game with only seven functioning players. Savage seven, in ultimate terminology.

Now, I love to play ultimate. And I love to play it with people that I can have a good time with. As fun and entertaining as the Airbreakers are, they are just not that committed to playing ultimate. It's a hobby for them. It's soemthing they get together and do every now and then when the competition days are scheduled. And I was looking for more than that.

So, after the second tournament, I started looking around. The problem is that there is jut not a lot of choice. There are only about 25 teams total in the country, and many of those are located in one place (for instance Amsterdam has 5 teams). But one of the opponents we played, UFO (pronounce 'ooh-foh' in Dutch) from Utrecht, seemed like a good candidate. They were only about an hour away by train and they had enough players to field 3 full teams at the tournament, so that seemed like a good sign. I asked them if they would let me come to a few practices, and that's when they made their first mistake.

A month later I had been to six practices, three of those in the freezing rain, and they had agreed to let me play on their Division 1 team for the final competition day. Needless to say, I was psyched.

Then I told the Airbreakers. Three days later I got the news.

According to the rules of the NFB, if you play as a guest player on a team, then you cannot play for any other team during that competition period. Even if that team is three divisions higher. Even if you are a stupid American and did not know this, and your team never told you that you were marrying them by stepping on the field. Even if you spent hours getting to and from practice in fucking Utrecht so you could play on a team at your level.

Stupid rules.

Actually, the rule is for a good reason. The goal is to have teams that are consistent, and consistently play other teams at their level. The purpose of not allowing players to move around is to keep that consistency. Makes sense. Wish I had known that from the beginning though, I might have been less excited about risking pneumonia and sitting in my soaking ultimate clothes on the train for an hour on the way home.

This weekend is the final competition day for this period though, and my choices are to play with the Airbreakers, or not play at all. The Airbreakers are good guys, and they were very generous to me as a newcomer to Netherlands frisbee. I hope we will have a good time and possibly do well enough to get the team into the next level. They are tied for third place in the pool right now, so I don't know if it's realistic, but we'll soon see.

I'll write back when it's over.

Until then sportsfans, the moral of the story is: ask for full discolsure from your new frisbee team before you lace up your cleats.

--Brian

Gouda

2004-10-03T17:43:00.000+02:00

Okay. So Gouda is actually pronounced with a soft 'g', like "how-da". Bet you didn't know that (unless you are Dutch. Or Belgian. Or unless you DID know it). Ann and I just got back from a (brief) day-trip to this city famous for it's cheese and it's stained-glass windows.

We did buy some cheese (after multiple samples of everything on display), but the church was closed (unsurprisingly, since it is Sunday, and almost everything in the Netherlands is closed on Sunday, I mean... why, of all things, would the CHURCH be open on SUNDAY right?). Even the bakeries are closed. Which is unbelievable to Ann, who hails from a long line of bakers in Belgium, where the standard of service is apparently much higher, and the most bread is sold on Sunday morning.

Neither of us can understand the business practices of these strange people: the Dutch. All businesses are open Monday through Friday from 9:00 until 6:00 (many of them actually CLOSE for an hour during lunch), and only restaurants are open later. Many of the stores are closed Monday mornings as well. Everything follows this rule. Everything.

Imagine looking for an apartment. You have to do it between 5pm and 6pm.

Think about going grocery shopping. Better get it done before 6.

Oh, and if you are out of food on Sunday. Tough luck pal. You can eat at a restaurant when they open.

Want to rent a video? Better decide what and get it from the store before 6 buddy.

Need some condoms? Well my friend, you shoulda planned ahead. Now your options are abstinence or pull 'n pray. All because the culture here apparently convulses at the thought of keeping shops open during times when people might actually be able to BUY SOMETHING!

(Editor's Note: we bought batteries in a convenience store today. The "Family Planning" section, with the flavored condoms and the spermicide, was--naturally--right next to the candy section.)

Well. Enough bitching and moaning for one day. We returned from Gouda with two pounds of cheese, a baguette, a can of coke (because we ran out and, you guessed it, the grocery stores were closed), and some chocolates. So it was a fairly successful trip from a purely American consumer point of view.

More later. It's time to watch "Robinson Expedition 2004: Netherlands vs. Belgium". This is like "Survivor" except the teams are from competing nations. It's a little worrisome how much Ann delights in seeing the Belgian team win all the challenges, but this is what you do on Sunday nights in the Netherlands.

Signing off.