Amat victoria curam!

Jan Smit, Hollands favorite torch song singer started his own underwear line with C&A. He's on posters all over town. Dear Jan: please leave that sort of stuff to the professionals, like Troy (hmm...)

I already migrated my blog to the new beta blogger website and today I added a brand new template...

On December 4th the yearly Teddy Bear Auction will be held at Christies, London. Some of these guys have an estimated price of more then 20.000 pounds...

Beginning 2007 the tax regime for stuff you bring with you after a trip to the USA is much better. You can take for $570 of goods with you. That's more then twice the amount of what it is now. I guess a lot of iPods and Playstations will be bought...

Trough the photo service of good old Albert Heijn I am trying to arrange cards to wish our friends and family a happy New Year. I am using this picture of Eddie and Me at Disney World, Magical Kingdom. I am anxious to see what they can make out of it....

After a very funny and wicked "Running with Scissors"and a moving but still attractive "Dry" I am running into trouble with the new books of Augusten Burroughs: "Magical Thinking" and especially: "Possible Side effects". We know by now what kind of youth Augusten has had, so why bother and exploit it again and again? I think I will stop with Augusten for a while and try something else instead.

Went to the new James Bond this morning with Eddie and Ingo. It is one of the best Bonds ever!
Judy Dench is a perfect M and about Daniel...He is my 007... :-)

Our old neighbors were visiting us and during dinner it was just like the old days and if we still live next door.

After Rupert III lost his clothes in an unfortunately string of events he had to go through life "Au Natural". Luckily in New Orleans they have specialty stores fro Bears like Rupert III and so I was happy to buy him two sets of new cloths. One more informal one more for the more exciting part of times.

If this is what you can win in Casino Royale, I am in!

Today Funda Records released its new CD in the fundamentally series: Meeting Friends. It was agreat party at the house of tomorrow with "our" DJ Maestro.

At Bubb Kuyper book auctioneers this photo of Thom Hoffman as Frits van Egters in the movie of De Avonden, after the famous dutch novel of Gerard Reve. The photo is made by Erwin Olaf but was never published. Unfortunately it is not really a good quality print.

Still a bit jet lagged, after 3 opera's on a row (DNO: Mozart Cosi , DonGiovani and Figaro) and having a cold (as usual after a long flight) I felt like a dog this afternoon. I had to go to the ministry of housing this morning for an important meeting with the general director, but after that I went home and straight to bed. It helped because I feel much better now. :-)

A week ago I lost contact with the (300 Gig) Maxtor One Touch hard disk. Filled with my favorite movies and all of y -back up- pictures it was vital to recover communication.
After browsing on the Internet I found that especially Maxtor has this problem and the error: lost I/O contact, drive not formatted is a very common one. Solution on the Maxtor website: tough luck, buy a new one and pray it won't happen again...
After a hour high level google search I found the solution: simple as chkdsk /F...
All the bad index sectors were quickly repaired and all of the 300 Gig data is recovered :-))
Hopefully it will continue to be stable.

In the Volkskrant of today an interview with Jasper Rosier (26) from Rotterdam. His wish list for Santa Claus this year is rather forward: he needs sox and new underwear... He hopes his danish lover Ander will get the message... :-)

For months I have been wondering how to vote for the upcoming general elections. Should I go old school and vote VVD (conservative liberal) or try something new? Today I decided that it would be best to follow my principles and heart and go for the party with the best program. (and is not actually maybe the best party...) So I will vote for D'66 (liberal) not for number one, but their number two: Boris van der Ham. On all mayor issues I fully agree with their standpoint, let's hope they will get enough votes for two seats in parliament...

This is the time of the year where Christies and Sothebys have their sculpture auctions. I am interested in The Boucher (Au But!), Pompon (Ours) and the Meunier (The docker).
The auctions are next week. Also next week a new book auction at Bubb Kuyper.

Due to a power failure in our office most of our tropical fish died of cold. We have now only 4 left... We are planning to set up an emergency text message system to avoid such a disaster to happen ever again.

KLM advertised today in all mayor dutch newspaper with an announcement about their cabin services upgrade program for the coming years... Conclusion: NO flat lie beds on board intercontinental flight- Thanks for the warning guys, we continue to fly BA or Lufthansa instead.

Today Marijn and I helped to rebuild the botanical garden of New Orleans. This garden which is part of the huge city park was under water for more then 90%. Lots of vegetation was lost because of the (salt) water and everything has to be rebuild. This park is solely dependent of gifts and the staff was reduced from 360 to 17 people. So they can use all the help there is . We helped out with the planning of the big Xmas celebration which hopefully will raise enough cash to continue.
It still amazes me that the USA can easily destroy two countries in a couple of months, but seems not to be able to rebuild one of their own cities. Let´s face it: New Orleans is still one big mess. After one and a half years, not a lot has been done or accomplished to get this city back on its feet again.

The NAR Expo is one big madness of thousands of booths offering everything from computer software, leads to massages and jewelry...
We did not see anything that was of any interest for us, but enjoyed playing games and entering the drawings. Unfortunately we were to late for the money drop, where a couple of thousand dollars was dropped on a eager audience. :-)

Ghost Town - The Specials

This town, is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs have been closed down
This place, is coming like a ghost town
Bands won't play no more
too much fighting on the dance floor

Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?
We danced and sang, and the music played in a de boomtown

This town, is coming like a ghost town
Why must the youth fight against themselves?
Government leaving the youth on the shelf
This place, is coming like a ghost town
No job to be found in this country
Can't go on no more
The people getting angry

This town, is coming like a ghost town
This town, is coming like a ghost town
This town, is coming like a ghost town
This town, is coming like a ghost town

This is the song that keeps on hunting me while I am walking around in downtown New Orleans...

We had dinner with the Irish board in Herbesaint, one of the best restaurants of New Orleans (or is it the ONLY restaurant in New Orleans were you can get decent food...?) We were later joined by the guys from ziprealty, were my buddy Richard is now CEO. He is having a hard time getting used to the role of being the head of a big public company. In the US that means a lot of regulations to e followed to the letter (and beyond).

In ice cold hotels meeting rooms we have lots of meetings with people we hope who can gave us more insight of the trends here in the US real estate business.
We speak with the representatives of Texas, California and the NAR. Because of the recent congress elections we notice that the NAR and its associations are the biggest contributors in political sponsoring. Nationwide most of the money is split 50/50 between the parties, but in Texas they even produced a voting guide to endorse the Republican candidates...
The common vision is that ALL information will be available on the internet sooner then we think and that it is important as realtors to try to keep control over this information (in the sense that you try to interpret the information for the consumers).
We also have meetings with the NVM and ICREA.

In the whole of New Orleans you can still see and feel the results of The Storm. Abandoned stores (e.g. Abercrombie) houses being renovated and rebuild. In this drawing of Valencia you can see that even the children are still drawing houses surrounded by water.

Marijn and I flew to New Orleans today. Because there are no direct flights out of Schiphol we flew via Frankfurt and Washington. The service of Lufthansa was excellent. Unfortunately the transfer time in Washington was to tight for our Suitcases to make it in time to New Orleans. We are now still walking around in our tracksuit.

Ingo gave us this picture last week of our house in the 1960's. As you can see when the famous Dutch Painter Otto de Kat still lived here, it was not much of a decent house yet.

Just as this lunatic Haggard is exposed I was visiting the Dutch Resistance Museum where they have a very interesting exhibition about the persecution of gays in the second world war. In some countries it seems, not a lot has changed since the last SIXTY years...

"There is part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." (Ted Haggard)
What could that be Ted? Your wife? :-)

After we bought a bread machine last week I have quiet got the hang of it and so I was baking bread yesterday. Unfortunately this was rye bread and it was extra crispy. So when it fell from the cupboard on my head, I got (yet an other) cut in my head...

Yesterday Dennis and Therissa got married in Bloemendaal (The Tides) It was a nice ceremony and we saw a lot of (almost) forgotten old friends.

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