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.
Easterday: the shops are closed, but the musea open, so we made the best of it and visited Orsay, Musee Decorative and the Louvre - where we met...Ruby & Niek!
We visited the De Vlaminck exhibition in Jardin du Luxembourg which was small but nice (especially his panting of the Theems of 1909). Then briefly to the old Atelier of DelaCroix. Later that day it was time for shopping and...uh... shopping (mostly at Le Bon Marche).
For dinner I had made reservations at "Ze Kitichen" which was great fun and great taste.
Time to spend some days in Paris and to visit our friends Ruby and Niek. Whatever time of the year of whatever weather Paris is always nice to wander arround, shop, enjoy and EAT!. We stay at our favorite quartier: St. Germain des Pres in the loverly Bel Ami Hotel.
Randy Pausch is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon and he was
asked to give his last lecture,
his last since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The
lecture he gave--"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"--wasn't about
dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling
the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you
have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It
was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about
living. And it is great: see it for your self or order the upcoming book.
