A short and pleasant flight brought us to Tel Aviv and after a very efficient border control we drove to Jerusalem. Because we arrived at 3 AM we went to bed as soon as we arrived in our (great) hotel: The American Colony. Later that day we visited the Israel Museum and saw the dead sea books, found in the 1940's in the special purpose build part of the museum. We were just in time for the friday prayers at the West Wall and we thought it would be a good idea to join in - only we were a little suspicious for not wearing black as the other guys - but orange ;-)
The city state's government-owned broadcaster was fined £5,500 for airing a lifestyle programme featuring a gay couple with their adopted baby. The state regulator said the episode "normalises and promotes a gay lifestyle".
Nice graph from The New York Times of Today: amount of prisoners per 100000 per country. Lowest? Iceland (32 - total 133 prisoners), Highest USA - (751 - 2.3 million -that's a quarter of all prisoners in the whole world - OOPS!). Holland a modest 117 - still quite high though in Europe.
Made with my new iShowU software... ;-)
Kraak & Smaak, the team of Mark Kneppers, Oscar De Jong and Wim Plug does it again! After their great "Boogie Angst" album, they released Plastic People which is even better funky dance music. Not bad for a couple of guys from Leiden. I really like the song "Ready for Life" - I guess this wil be a huge hit in a couple of..uh..days? listen at www.kraaksmaak.nl
Traditional tattoos, or ta moko, were once a source of discrimination
against New Zealand’s half a million Maori population, but the art has
been revived amid renewed ethnic pride.
Lots of Maori now are getting tattoos again - but not so much on their faces anymore; shame actually ;-)
Panny's Lumix DMC-TZ50 isn't brand new or anything -- after all, we first caught wind of this WiFi-equipped point-and-shoot late last month
in Japan. Nevertheless, Panasonic is now announcing that said camera
will be heading Stateside with 802.11b/g capabilities, access to
T-Mobile HotSpot service and the ability to upload photos directly to
Google's Picasa Web Albums. Yours for about $450.
What was the #1 most popular song on the day you were born? Has this question been keeping you up at night? Then today’s your lucky day. On this site,
you can specify your birth month and date. The site will show you which
song was at the top of the Billboard charts on the day your life began.
PS: Mine is Duke of Earl by Gene Chandler...Hmmm ;-)
The art fair in Den Bosch is always fun because of the quality of the artifacts and the affordability. We went (as usual) with No & Go and they surprised us with a present in the form of a really great print of Alma Tadema which we immediately liked the moment we saw it. I am glad to say that I now hangs pretty in our home :-))
An other picture that struck me at once was Fuel station by the Dutch artist Jan Ros. It looks like a photograph, but actually is a painting. We bought that one as well.
There were some other nice things to see - like glasses from the 18th century at Lameris, but at that time we thought we bought enough and called it a day.
The managment of museum d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux removed pictures of Christian Delecluse of fathers and sons, claiming that they could be interpretated as pedophilic porn...A discussion in the Liberation followed. If you see the pics, you ask yourself: what is all the fuss about?
A great story in the latest edition of "Vrij Nederland" features my buddy Peter Paul as the new elite fishing men.
As I am preparing my upcoming trip to Israel I found this picture which made me want to go right away... :-)
We had an excellent Gourmet Dinner at No & Go. No spend hours and hours preparing and it was worth every minute of it :-)
With the help of the Cooking books of Dieter Muller (the famous German 3 star chef) she prepared a dinner that could compete with the food Dieter himself makes.
By now, the little sectioned circle has become so familiar, it feels as if it had no genesis, that it just emerged out of a collective folk culture, like the Star of David or a nursery rhyme. But in fact it can be traced to a single inventor, Gerald Holtom who arrived at the image by combining the semaphore signals for the letters N, for nuclear, and D, for disarmament. The first is a figure with arms held downward and out from both sides; the second, a figure holding one arm above its head while the other points to the ground It debuted on April 4 in London's Trafalgar Square at Britain's first major demonstration against nuclear weapons and it is still going strong (and neccessary I am afraid)
Mehdi Kazemi, 19, came to London to study English in 2004 but later
discovered that his boyfriend had been arrested by the Iranian police,
charged with sodomy and hanged.He fled to Holland because the Britisch Government wanted to sent him back to Iran. Now he has the chance to be sent back to Britain by European Law. Today a vital discussion in Dutch Parlement will decide over his faith.
Verstuurd met BlackBerry van KPN
Now that the Terminal 5 disaster is almost over we can focus on real progress: electronic checking in without having to print out your boarding pas with an acient barcode. Continental Airlines’ electronic boarding pass pilot program lets a security worker scan the image of a bar code on a BlackBerry.
The technology being tested by Continental uses a two-dimensional encrypted bar code, which is much tougher to copy than the one-dimensional bar code used by many airlines for boarding passes printed online
Mobile devices can so become a crucial part of traveling, that means battery chargers and reliable wireless signals will be even more critical for a stress-free trip though... ;-)
Just saw "Zomerhitte" (Summer Heat) from Monique van der Ven after the short story by Jan Wolkers. I am happy that Jan died before he could see this picture, because otherwise this would have killed him instantly.
The dialogues are ridiculous, continuity not existing and production very bad. I stopped counting all the mistakes in this movie after a half hour or so - it was just to much. Luckily the Dutch audience can see right trhough this rubbish and no wonder that this is a huge FLOP.
(If we aren't even allowed to see Waldemar naked - what's the point of having him in the film anyway...? :-) )
A nice 1953 statue of Spirou of the Spirou et Fantasio comic range by Franquin. For sale at the comic auction of Artcurial in Paris this Weekend. Value: € 2000...
Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, fails to interest or provide insight,
making one wonder why it aroused so much attention in the first place
I just watched Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, The Movie.
He had promised it would be too shocking, too frightening, too
disturbing - and much of the world was holding its breath in a morbid,
anxious wait for its release. The media feared rabid violence by those Muslims.
My initial reaction is a yawn. I blame production. The soundtrack is
Tchaikovsky's mellow classical piece called "Arab Dance". Anyone who has seen terrorist propaganda films is familiar with most
of the scenes and most of the disgusting conflations of the Quran with
acts of violence, murder, kidnapping and antisemitism. The scene of the hanging of the gay boys Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni in Iran still gives me shivers...
Such behaviour
has been condemned resoundingly among Muslims. The same could also be done with clippings of the Bible.
The film is a mixture of conflating the most painful and
heart-wrenching images from terror-strikes with extremist imams, in an
effort to turn the entirety of Islam into a demonic edifice. This is
neither new, nor interesting.
What the film really shows is that Wilders doesn't know the
difference between Islam and Islamism - and when it comes to the latter
he is completely lost.
PS: The transformation
of "Fitna" into "Fin" at the end was pretty cool ;-)
A nice sweet tv series on BBC1: The no 1 ladies detective agency. Based on the bestselling (9) books by the Rhodesian-born author Alexander McCall Smith. It really gives a different perpective of Africa (Botswana).
I absolutely love Anika Noni Rose in her role of Grace Makutsi (secretary 97%), very funny!
Almost had an accident today with this new David Posters filling all the billboards in Amsterdam :-)
Eckart died suddenly last friday in his home in France. He was only 68 years old. He was a great inspiration for me about how to organise companies and to act responsible as an entrepeneur. Luckily he was able to write a great book about his ideas so his philosophy can live on.
