Found Objects

There are lots of street magazines in the Netherlands, sold (and often produced) by homeless people, like The Big Issue in the United Kingdom and elsewhere: Z Magazine in Amsterdam, De Zelfkrant in Den Bosch, Haags Straatnieuws in The Hague, De Riepe (which is Groninger dialect for “The Sidewalk”) in the North, Straatjournaal in Haarlem (no website, but a big presence in the local news), Straatmagazine Leiden in Leiden, Straatmagazine in Rotterdam and Straatnieuws, the oldest street magazine of the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Amersfoort and Hilversum. In Arnhem, Nijmegen, Doetinchem and Apeldoorn there used to be Impuls, but it folded in July 2007 for lack of vendors; probably a good thing, because it means that fewer people are homeless.

Whenever I find myself in one of those towns I buy a copy. In Utrecht, if possible, from the same vendor every time, a friendly stick-thin man who stands at one of the exits of the station area. I don’t give money to beggars on principle, but if someone is making a real effort —whether playing music, drawing chalk sidewalk pictures or selling street magazines— I usually contribute.

Our town doesn’t have a street magazine, worse luck. Probably because nobody can set it up, or there are no starting funds, rather than for lack of people who could sell it, judging by the number of likely suspects I see in the streets. (This may be skewed by the fact that we live very close to the local homeless facility, but I think there are a few dozen at least.).

Instead, we have Het Daklozenwoord. It may look like a street magazine on first sight, but it doesn’t quite quack like one: it’s run by Eastern European gangs, it may be sold by people who are technically homeless, but as far as I (or at least my sources) can find out they don’t get to keep any of the proceeds. And the vendors I’ve met —a whole family of them, taking turns at the door of my usual supermarket— weren’t very friendly, but saying “Daaklozenkraant! Asseblief! Dankoewel!” in a whiny voice, ever more insistently, even to the same person who has said “no” three times in a row in the last five minutes. I wish those people would stick to making music; they do that too, and not at all badly.

And any guilt-induced impulse to give them the benefit of the doubt was quashed forever when I saw the only female member of that family —a girl of around twenty— carefully set her face to “pitiful” before taking up her pile of papers.

When life hands one lemons— or, more to the point, a generous helping of the Family Cold, one does not only make lemonade but also try to see things in a larger perspective. There’s a big universe out there. And I’ve just found out that the Astronomy Picture of the Day doesn’t break my RSS reader any more with overly wide pictures (they have thumbnails in the feed now), so I’ve subscribed again.

Reading random things while ironing, I also found someone who says at least some of what I was going to say (continuing what I’ve already said) when the cold caught up with me.

And here is an article explaining how not only actual practice, but also going over it in your imagination and sleeping on it helps to learn music faster.

Here endeth the linkspam in lieu of a post.

If I were an atheist, I’d want to call my blog “Athier than Thou”. And searching for that actually turns up some hits. (And it made me find Twenty Sided, which I like a lot.) No blog with that title, at least not one that’s easy to find, but it’s moot anyway because I’m so not an atheist.

After choir practice last night, some of us washed up the coffee cups and stood in the cold kitchen for twenty minutes afterwards arguing fine points of Trinitarian theology. It came from a discussion that started earlier when we were arguing fine points of text placement: these are the people who happen to be most passionate about, and most experienced at, fitting words to music. Some people think we’re a self-appointed “inner circle” but it’s more like a sloppy polygon located in no particular place that usually expresses itself as a triangle but can acquire extra sides whenever convenient.

Some people likely to read this (you know who you are) will now think I’m going to talk about choir politics, but they can rest assured that I’m not. I only want to say explicitly that this is one of the things I like most about my particular corner of the Orthodox Church: that it’s not only possible but normal to argue theology while washing up. It doesn’t need a context that’s specially set apart for it. We’re not only Christians on Sundays, not only in church, not in carefully set-aside “quiet time”, but always. There is no division, no fence between Christian stuff and just stuff. There is no Christian reservation.

It’s said that “all things are holy” and I can agree, but that doesn’t mean that everything is prim, prissy, prudish and possibly other things starting with ‘p’. It does mean that my whole life belongs to God, not just that part of it that happens to take place in church. It doesn’t mean, either, that I am necessarily good all the time: there is such a thing as sin. Allen Ginsberg’s expression of this thought is not mine, but he did get it right.

We went to bed at 2:45. Couldn’t stop when Raisse’s player was supposed to go and catch the last train, because it was in the middle of a storm; couldn’t stop when it was a reasonable bedtime (just past midnight) because it was in the middle of a battle. Finished about 1:50 but badly needed to wind down. Fortunately Raisse’s player had brought a bottle of whisky retrieved from a shipwreck (the story is in Dutch but starts with a blurb in English).

And I woke up at 6:37 from a dream in which we’d escaped the Khas only to end up in the hands of the Taleban.

(it’s really long, over 4500 words; I wish I could do that with ‘real’ writing, but then the events happen as I write them and with game writeups events have already happened and I feel like I’m hurrying to catch up)

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Picked it up somewhere; found it in different places.

Four films I could watch over and over:

The Three Musketeers (with Douglas Fairbanks)
Labyrinth
The Princess Bride
The Court Jester

Four favorite TV shows: (note: I haven’t watched TV at any length for over ten years)

Original Star Trek
Catweazle
Kunt u mij de weg naar Hamelen vertellen, meneer
Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Four favorite foods:

Cheese
Anything in aspic, especially ham rolls with horseradish
Guinea-fowl
Chocolate

Four websites I visit every day:

Glory to God for All Things
Slashfood
nu.nl
Boing Boing

Four places I would love to be:

London
The flat bit of Canada (failing that, eastern Groningen, preferably on a bus)
Anywhere at the seaside
Beverwijk, strangely enough, because that’s where I used to go whenever I needed a brain reboot when I was living in Haarlem

Four favorite colors:

#FFEBCD blanchedalmond (was my website background colour for years)
#8B0000 darkred
also, though all greens and most blues are off for my vision on a computer screen:
#53868B cadetblue4
#228B22 forestgreen

Four names I love but wouldn’t/couldn’t use for a kid:

(these are names we didn’t actually use for kids, though they were considered)

Sara(h) - felt too much like an old woman’s name
Rachel - it wouldn’t have done to call twins something with the same initial. But every year on the eve of the Sunday of the Fathers of the Old Testament, singing the sticheron in the sixth tone about Sarah, Rebecca and Rachel, I vaguely wish I’d known beforehand that I’d have three daughters (though Prima and Tertia are glad I didn’t, they like the names they’ve got).
Daniel - name for my first that didn’t make it. Also, for Younger Boy Twin, but they were both girls.
Jonathan - name for Primus but she turned out Prima; also name for Elder-or-Only Boy Twin, see above.

Four people to tag:

<points> You. And you. And you too. Oh, and you. If you feel called, don’t hesitate.

Ever seen a “please close the door” sign on a sliding door so you could only read the sign when the door was closed? This is the same thing, only with treacle.

Treacle comes in one-pound waxed cardboard cups. Under the lid there’s an inner cover, also of waxed cardboard, explaining how to hold the cup to prevent spilling treacle all over self and kitchen (“hold the cup like this, and not by the lid”). But you can only read it when you’ve already removed the lid, as seen in the bottom picture. Granted, the first time you remove the lid the inner cover is still on it, but if you hold it by the lid, and not as seen in the top picture, you’re bound to spill treacle on the floor.

It’s also got a grammatical oddity. “Deksel” can be grammatically epicene (de deksel) or neuter (het deksel); the legend along the edge says “Environment-friendly paper lid” in the epicene form, while the main text has “het deksel” in the neuter form.

But I do like the treacle jumping out of the cup in the how-not-to picture.