Net nei it Hearrenfean hjoed

The planned trip to see the skating in Heerenveen has been cancelled. The KNMI has issued a weather warning, and although it should be no problem to get to Thialf, it's not entirely likely there'll be trains back. According to the latest weather predictions, the ice storms won't hit the North before midnight so technically I should be okay, but JH has to go back down South which is likely to be impossible from about 9pm onwards. JH had already left but came back just before I was supposed to leave. And I would only be leaving because I'd told him I'd meet him at Thialf at 3. And he doesn't have a mobile, of course...

So we're going to do the same thing as we did the past couple of days: watch it on tv and discuss it on MSN. It's actually more comfortable and much easier to follow what's going on, but you miss the experience of standing in a crowded stadium and freezing to death. Better luck next year, maybe...

Holiday

Boxing day was spent at my aunt's in The Hague. She had organized an afternoon programme, I think mainly because my uncle (her brother) likes the after-dinner party drinks and will then drive back without any problems. Anyway, the food was good: an old-fashioned Dutch Sunday meal of rollade, Brussels sprouts, green beans, potatoes and gravy. Ice for dessert; my mom had brought back a Christmas pudding from Edinburgh when she went to my graduation, but I think that was outvoted in favour of ice, so the pudding will have to wait until some other time. They appear to have use-by dates in the very distant future anyway, so dessert for Christmas 2015 is all settled.

Between the main course and dessert we went on a little walk through the dunes to the beach boulevard of Kijkduin. They had some sort of artsy exposition there, with large milky-glass balls with paintings on, that were illuminated from the inside. They were supposed to be gorgeous. They were okay, but not exactly a life-changing experience. The sea was much nicer.

The train ride back the next day was problematic. Between Gouda and Woerden we had to go really slowly because the tracks were slippery from the snow. Then just after Amersfoort there was another slow stretch because someone was spotted walking along the tracks. After a while we sped up again and they said the person had not been found. A couple of stations on, the same thing. This time we did see the guy being picked up by the police. I wonder what the idea was behind building all these mental hospitals in the woods right next to the railroad tracks...

Today I had to go to the bank. They called yesterday, because apparently I don't qualify for a student account anymore, because they spotted that I no longer receive money from the government. The Bank may need to wake up, cause I haven't received that money since 2001! I now seem to be a young professional, cause that's the package they offered me now. They did say you needed at least €900 a month 'feeding' into your account. Too bad, but I did change the contract to 800 before I signed it. Banks are evil corporations that you really need to keep an eye on. After my mom's problems with her credit card while she was in Edinburgh, they are seriously considering moving all their money away from this bank -- then see how nice they suddenly are...

Radio 2 is currently doing their mammoth Top 2000 broadcast. The best 2000 songs ever as voted by their listeners. It's the seventh year in a row that they do this, it all started in 1999 as a run-up to the new millennium. A chart that runs from midnight into Boxing Day until midnight New Year's Eve, with really a lot of good records! (Currently a very bad hour actually, numbers 965 to 952, the next hour will be better.) After six years with Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at #1, it's now Boudewijn de Groot's Avond which has rightly clinched the top spot. Either way, it's a lot better than turning on the tv to any of the music channels. We have three -- TMF, MTV Nederland, and The Box -- and at any given time, at least one of them plays a Robbie Williams song.

A good thing on tv these days is the Dutch qualifying tournament for the Olympics in speedskating. Two days down, two days to go. It's very exciting, they're going really really fast and the results so far are just perfect: enough nice surprises and unexpected results but it's all safe bets that qualify for the Olympics. I'll be going to Heerenveen on Friday with JH and EvL to watch it in person (1000 m ladies, 1500 m men [that's going to be murder!] and 5000 m ladies). Should be good.

Oh yeah, the Christmas present books: three Bommel books by Marten Toonder (De toornviolen, De loodhervormer and De kwade inblazingen), Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club (in Dutch; set in Edinburgh), and a book with short stories by Eastern European authors with names with hacheks on the S and dashes through the L.

Sunset

Yuletide posting

An amazing amount of melted cheese in my stomach, the idea that it's not necessary to eat ever again, and really no good movies on tv for the rest of the night. Time to catch up then on the events of the past couple of days.

The Museum of Falsified Arts is quite nice. Really it's like a stand-up comedy show. We were entertained first by a guy who told us his whole personal history and how he and his wife -- whom he had met in the photocopier room of the high school they both worked at -- started collecting art, how they were conned into buying several pieces of falsified art, and how they decided to start a museum with these. The art was maybe not the most inspiring thing of the museum, it was more the stories surrounding it; how they knew the painting wasn't made by the original artist. They also had some non-falsified paintings, among them a drawing by Queen Wilhelmina and an oil painting by 'B. van B.', which everyone knows is Beatrix.

The other museum I visited with my family was the Hunebed Museum in Borger. Hunebeds are neolithic rock graves. The museum was re-done last year and I hadn't been to the new version yet. The old museum was kind of old and boring, really an old-fashioned museum that didn't "talk" to the visitors anymore. The new one is much more of an "experience", and personally I was impressed by their graphic art (although they should have made sure the notes actually stuck to the exposition cases...). WW took a lot of notes because she found a lot of good ideas for three visitor centres she has to set up in Egypt. One is about the Abapta, a nomadic people; the other ones I think are in Berenike and the Fayum, but I may be wrong.

I've also been marking EL1 assignments. Seventeen down, thirteen to go. Overall, they seem to have been made slightly worse than the first exam, but that one I may still have overmarked slightly and in this one I may be a bit too strict.

I have also been watching a couple of movies, or rather, I've made some halfhearted attempts at watching movies. There is definitely a load of bad Christmas movies out there. Harry Potter II in German is quite a different experience (Harry, hol schon mal den Wagen!) and why is there no channel among the 31 I have on cable that is broadcasting The Sound of Music over Christmas?

Home Sweet Home

And we're back in the house I grew up in. The travels on Tuesday were fairly painless. It did involve getting up at 5.30 am, getting out of the house at 6.30, taking an airport bus at 7, arriving at the airport at 7.30, then waiting for my flight at 9.30. The flight seemed to be slightly late, but we arrived in Amsterdam on time so I guess there must have been favourable winds. There were no queues to speak of at passport control, and the luggage arrived with whizzing speeds. I hardly had time to get a train ticket from the machine before I could pick up my suitcase and leave. Of course, even with the trip going so smoothly, you arrive in the terminal about 3 minutes after the train has left, so that means another 57 minutes to kill at the airport.

Reading materials for the trip were the latest issue of Time (the English edition, the one with the best news pictures of 2005), the latest BBC History magazine, and the Christmas issue of HP De Tijd.

So far it's a weird mix of work and holiday. I do have a big load of EL1 tests to mark (13 down, 17 to go - and then to compare marks for consistency and give final marks), and AMcM seems to expect a first chapter of some sort somewhere in the first weeks of term. But other than that, I also have enough time to watch television. I have a television, and 31 channels!

Next term I am planning to take two Honours courses just because they are interesting. One is Historical Linguistics, the other one is Language Classification (or something along those lines). I found out one of my class mates for the Historical Linguistics one is going to be SN. That could be interesting...

Today we're going to the Museum of Falsified Arts. It'll be me, my parents and my mom's best friend (partly as a translator, cause the guides there seem only to be able to speak dialect, which is totally unintelligible to those from outside the area). And there we will meet my aunt, my cousin and his wife. They (HB and WW) live in Los Angeles and are over for Christmas and New Year's. They'll be staying with us for the next couple of days, so that should be good.

Thought of the day: It's okay that there should be a prize for the best television commercial, but I don't exactly see the need for a two-hour live televized gala. Also interesting that I knew exactly none of the nominated commercials. Living abroad without a telly may have something to do with that...

(My computer is still on British time though:)

Omissions

I also meant to say... well, I think I should explain what ticked me off on the whole ‘British Christmas culture is weird’ thing. It’s giving Christmas cards to people you see every day. Or every other day. Or at least very frequently. On my desk I have 11 Christmas cards. All of them were given to me in person – or in one case thrown vaguely in my direction (thanks CA!). And they all say something along the lines of ‘Dear Remco’, pre-printed Christmas greetings, ‘Love, X’.

They become even more personal if you realize that e.g. JW was writing names on already sealed envelopes during the New Scotland Christmas party. RW was a bit more personal, but she went into the hallway every time a new person arrived to write them a Christmas card.

So what’s the point of giving Christmas cards if you can just wish people a merry Christmas in person? Four of them were for charity, maybe that’s the point? (All of this doesn’t go for MM, who has gone through the bother of embroidering something and writing a personal message that goes beyond ‘Dear Remco’.)

Christmas party
The other thing I should have said was about the Christmas party. There was also a highlight while we were still there. This involved HC having rung for a taxi, and when the taxi man arrived, NM (who was already very drunk) answered the buzzer with ‘N’s Sex Services’. I wonder what the taxi driver would have thought of HC.

Travel preparations

Closing up for Christmas is a very complicated process. It seems to take several days and comes with a variety of food and drink substances, and above all a large amount of ritual. For someone who hasn’t grown up with the British Christmas traditions — even with a tradition where Christmas is definitely subordinate to the much more important feast of St Nicholas, the original Santa Claus — it takes a bit of getting used to, I guess.

Thursday morning was a meeting of the prospective organizers of the LEL Postgraduate Conference, which is to take place in April. It used to be TAAL (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) but after the merger and the creation of the One Big Happy Family of Linguistics and English Language, it’s now LEL. I think we’re quite nicely divided among the subject areas. Anyway, I seem to be the only one comfortable enough with computers, so I got myself involved in doing website stuff and making the abstracts look nice on paper. KM and I were surprised at the absence of VP, very unlike him.

Thursday evening was the final night of dancing for the year. Extended social, with a lot of the year’s favourites. I had some difficulty calling Hooper’s Jig from the Green Book — which ones are the squares again? — but I did Midnight Oil perfectly so that made up for it. ZB’s English dance was manic, even at half speed, but can we please do that again? RK was slightly stressed throughout the night, for a variety of reasons: [a] she had exams the next day, [b] her reason for living chose the Big Monkey Movie over her, and [c] CI had buggered off to Romania without notice. Quite interesting to keep my cool and calm and pretending to be saving the day...

Friday morning was another chapter in Benedict Anderson’s Forestillede fællesskaber, after which lunch and some general tidying in the office. Friday afternoon from 3 was the departmental Christmas party. Organized by MB, the tech support guy, who really put his heart and soul into it. This involved a treasure hunt connected to pass-the-parcel, and an attempt at the world record shortest Strip the Willow. I think a bar and a half of music and not even getting beyond the spinning bit qualifies as ‘world record shortest’, but maybe not as ‘Strip the Willow’?

Friday evening was departmental Christmas dinner, organized by the postgrads themselves. Well, by LC and AP really; quite impressive as they had prepared this after the undergrad lunch on Wednesday, which for the two of them involved drinking from half noon to 2.30am. We went to Buffet King for dinner, all you can eat Chinese for £13 — but they charge for tap water?!

Saturday was the New Scotland Christmas party at TtT’s. The themes were Y and H, which bonus points for combining the two. It was impressive how inventive people were at combining Y and H as an excuse not to dress up. The reactions to the salmiak were interesting, especially YK’s face, but in the end it was about 50/50 positive and negative reactions. The After Eight Game — work an After Eight from your forehead into your mouth using only your facial muscles — was amusing. Congratulations to JW for getting at least three or four of them into her mouth without any problem!

MG seems to have caught a stomach bug from one of the little ‘snot monsters’ at Cameron Toll. They should be glad to see Santa, not infect his elves with nasty little viruses! Food came out of pretty much all holes, not pretty; and we narrowly avoided CM vomiting by-proxy.

The most memorable event seems to have occurred after we left, when JH (in clearly intoxicated state) swapped costumes with NM (also not quite sober, we can assume). There is photographic evidence which was obtained from LF via AF, but for obvious reasons it seems wiser not to publish that here.

Yesterday consisted mainly of playing nurse to MG, who could hardly keep in water. Buying the rehydration drink thing was difficult, as pharmacies aren’t normally open on Sundays. Later in the afternoon I got a visitor, so I spent some time with LG before she went to church. And finally today is a matter of cleaning up, tying up the loose ends, packing etc. I brought out a load of paper for recycling, done most of the ironing (except for the bits that aren’t quite dry yet), and with this also the item ‘update blog’ can be stricken from the To Do list.

Tomorrow morning is the cheap Easyjet flight home. Get up at 5.30am to be home by 4pm. Then it can start snowing.

Food update

Decent platter of meat (kruwa je luba), chocolate cake for dessert. Not bad. Not bad at all.

We were too late for the fish-eye milkshake. Can’t say I’m too bothered.

Celebrate!

Today was the Date of Dates for MG, the date that’s been hanging over her head like a Damoclean sword for the past months. In other words, thesis due date. But with the deadline met earlier today, stress is over and peace and tranquility can once again take over this household.

It’s really not been that bad. The period from fourteen to seven days ago (ish) seems to have been the one with most stress for MG, and I was afraid that as doomsday neared, the stress would only get worse. Instead, she seems to have gone through a period of intense worry and suddenly, about a week ago, all the pieces of the puzzle shoved into place and it was really just a matter of finishing the product.

I got to be a font nazi yesterday and helped MG decide on the layout for her thesis. Although I did proofread the thing and as far as I can judge human ecology, it all seems to make sense and is presented in a logical way, never mind the contents – at least it looks good. Body text in a 10-point Minion (kudos to Robert Slimbach!), headings in something else that MG had herself and that actually looks quite classy in combination with Minion. That came out very positive, and once MG was done with it, also very purple.

So tonight MG, TT and I are going to celebrate. Dinner in The Apartment. It didn’t get very good reviews in the media, but TT had food there recently and was quite positive so we’re going to give it a go. On the way there, MG is going to pop into Meadowood to get one of her Chinese fish-eye milkshakes. Shudder.

Thought of the day: «Zelena kruwa kupa w ćopłej wodźe.»

Salmiak

MG and AF object to Dutch candy.

Salmiak (NH4Cl) is ammonium chloride. There are several ways of producing salmiak. One of them is that it is what is left over after making fertilizer.

Prompting MG and AF to state, “It’s not even good enough to be crap. It’s a by-product of crap. It’s a by-product of substitute crap!”

Such disrespect for non-Anglo-Saxon culinary cultures!

Beaver

There were two beavers in the Biesbosch National Park in the Netherlands. Now there is one. The other one managed to get itself killed by gnawing down a tree and then having the tree fall on top of him.

Splat.

Geography

I needed a German dictionary at the NLS, so I went to the dictionary section. That one is fairly systematically set up. English dictionaries first, then Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian), then Germanic languages (German, Dutch, everything Scandinavian, possibly including Finnish, on one big heap). The next category is interesting: ‘Eastern Europe’.

Linguistically I would oppose to having Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian under ‘Eastern Europe’ but I can see where they’re coming from. Same thing for Georgian and Armenian. I would do it differently, but fair enough. It’s all in Europe and it’s all in the East.

But where was the Basque Country again?

And that institute is supposed to support higher learning? Tsk...

Edinburgh today

A minor challenge for Dick van Dyke?

Polonaise

Polonaise (2002) is one of the better Dutch tv movies of recent years. (IMDB link) It is set in the near future, when traffic jams are so standard that there’s this entire economy built around it. There’s traffic jam radio, a traffic jam dating service, traffic jam hairdressers, etcetera. Hold that thought.

This morning it started to snow and by 10 AM there was quite a nice layer of crispy white snow. It’s even worse back home, I just read about there being 60 traffic jams with a total length of 800 km. (Side-note: the French call 800 km of traffic jams in France ‘black Thursday’, but do consider the relative size of France and the Netherlands and decide who should not complain...)

So I switched on the Dutch radio, and they had sent several reporters to drive into the traffic jams and report on their progress.

That made me think of the movie. And laugh.

How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways...

Edinburgh is ‘blessed’ with the National Library of Scotland. Words likely fail to express my feelings towards this particular institution, but I shall try anyway.

I have previously described the NLS’s attitude towards their readers along the lines of “Okay, so yes we are a library and as such we should let you touch the books, but if it’s all the same to you, we’d really rather not”. Add to this their ridiculously high prices for photocopying (10p per sheet) and their strict rules for the same – not so much copyright-related but more a matter of not allowing you to bend the spine of the book and then installing photocopiers where the glass plate starts about two inches from the edge so that it is technically impossible to photocopy anything without bending the spine – and there you have my main problems with these Lovely Helpful People.

So today I went in there to read the Geschichte der Sorben (Bautzen: Domowina, 1974–1979). I only ordered volume 1 as I really don’t care how the Sorbians fared under Erich Honecker. Of course they gave me the whole lot, all four heavy volumes of it. Why? No idea.

So I dutifully started reading, and in the back I found some maps. They were on loose sheets and they looked rather helpful: a map of the Sorbian language area around 1500 and one of the same around 1789. (Around, yes.) Time to photocopy!

Of course the bloody photocopier had to jam, as did the one next to it – because an institution like the NLS can’t afford decent equipment, I guess – so the office woman had to come and help. ‘Did you ask permission to photocopy these? No!’ (Said in a very kindergarten-teacher-telling-off-a-four-year-old tone.) The fact that it was only maps that were on loose sheets, that the books may be thirty years old but that surely not more than twenty people will have even THOUGHT of reading them in the past thirty years so that there absolutely is no danger of damaging them, and most of all, the fact that when I walked past that desk there was no one there to ask permission from, didn’t matter.

So here’s the plan:

• The building that is currently being built on Crichton Street car park for Informatics will get a new purpose: an extension of the University Library. They will be connected through an underground corridor (which will also connect all the other buildings on George Square, something that is long overdue).
• All the books from the NLS will be transferred to the University Library, where we have sensible staff and sensible people handling books sensibly. (As opposed to crazy staff being paranoid that sensible people, who are handling books sensibly, will handle books craziliy.)
• We dump the computer geeks in the now-empty NLS building on George IV Bridge.
• Former NLS staff can work at Special Collections with all the old and decaying books that do demand some kind of extra care. Books from 1975 that have never been read before do not belong in this category!

So yeah, tomorrow it’s back to that oh-so researchers-friendly library to see how my Sorbian friends were doing after the German Farmers’ Revolts.

Porridge oats

‘Allergy advice: contains oats.’

Really?

Lazy day

Okay, so I did do two loads of laundry, and the dishes, and I vacuumed my room and the hallway, but other than that: I did nothing. The plan to go out and walk up the Crags or take the lift up to the roof terrace of the museum was cancelled, as the weather wasn’t as nice as the past couple of days. Much cloudier, so less vision. Too bad.

The vacuum cleaner tore my headset to pieces, so I’m skypeless for the moment. At least we know our vacuum cleaner is effective.

I’ve started so I’ll finish

The Scottish Society for Northern Studies had their annual conference in David Hume Tower today. The theme of the day was Hermann Pálsson, the late Icelandic academic. There was an obituary by Magnús Magnússon of Mastermind fame, who disappointed me by not using his signature phrase “I’ve started so I’ll finish”. Instead he quoted from Hávamál:

Deyr fé, deyja frændur
Deyr sjálfur ið sama
En orðstír deyr aldregi
Hveim er sér góðan getur

Then a lecture by someone whose name I can’t spell on vicious women in Laxdæla saga who invoke a fight between their two lovers and make sure the fight will last until Ragnarok. After lunch a nice lecture on place names with ‘eið’ in the North Atlantic, by Doreen Waugh. I promised her a copy of my map of the Faroes to get some data from there. Then the boring AGM, for which I had to stay, because...

They had an essay contest which I entered... and won! So I got an envelope with a nice cash prize, plus the essay will be published in the next issue of Northern Studies, to appear early 2006.

In the words of L.G.: BOUNCE!

Summarizing...

Okay, so I left it that late that I wasn’t even logged on automatically anymore. Here’s a summary of the past couple of weeks; it doesn’t have much depth but I may elaborate on some things later on. Or I may not.

New Scotland-related stuff
Dance was nice. Seems like ages ago. I learned proper calling and put it to the test last Thursday. The big test is in two weeks when I’m not calling a shite-easy Montgomeries’ Rant but the bugger Midnight Oil. Pleasance booking took seven hours and everyone present agreed that the system does not make sense. C.I. forgot to go to Treasurer’s Training. This is dumb, but not a real disaster. We have a hall for the Annual, but no date or band. Yet.

University-related stuff
I am too nice. Or so L.v.B. said. In other words, I had to re-mark the EL1 Class Test. Not happy, but hey, what can you do. Tutorials otherwise are going fine, although first-year students continue to be painfully apathic. Research is good as well, I came across some really good books on language, ethnic identity and state formation. And stuff. And all the people are in Scotland!

Other stuff
F.M. had a birthday party. She had a chocolate fountain. Wow. I will be getting a book for my graduation (was within budget, mom said). I still think they should translate more good books to English, like this one. Had a conversation with M.M. yesterday about the hows and whys of the xenophobic British book market. J.B.’s birthday party tonight. T.T. is going to Z.S.’s followers’ gathering, M.G. is wondering whether to go or not.

Geez, my life is monotonous.

Useless info

The top most played songs from iTunes on my desktop as of this moment:
1. Fokofpolisiekar, Tevrede
2. Fokofpolisiekar, Hemel op die platteland
3. Krauka, Sigurd
4. Michel Fugain, Une belle histoire
5. Ramses Shaffy, Shaffycantate
6. Fokofpolisiekar, Fokofpolisiekar
7. Fomins & Kleins, Dziesma par laimi
8. NOX, Forogj világ
9. Boudewijn de Groot, De reiziger
10. Enekk, Rakiya

And on my laptop:
1. Luca Dirisio, Calma e sangue freddo
2. Sinsemilia, Tout le bonheur du monde
3. Laïs, Klaas
4. Lùnapop, Zapping
Multi-way tie for 5, so it ends here :)