Orthodox Christians should write and paint and sing and dance. We should make
movies and television shows. We should make clothes and produce textiles as art
as well (the fullness of culture is itself too large to describe in a sentence,
a paragraph or even a book). And in all these activities, they will be
expressive of the fullness of our humanity without having to stick an icon on
everything to prove its Orthodoxy.
-- Father Stephen in Glory to God for All Things
This is a picture of Lionel, my Useless Blob.
He's really here, jumping up and down. To adopt your own Useless Blob, click on him.
![[christian fandom]](http://www.valdyas.org/~irina/blog/graphics/page/cf125x125.gif)
2008-03-31
You are Dutch, and if you’re not COME LIVE HERE! WE ARE YOUR SOULMATES!!! You have a great sense of humour and tolerance is pretty good too! A big plus for culture!
| Link: The how Dutch are you? Test written by Sandertje on OkCupid [advertising deleted] |
(spelling and punctuation corrected — apart from being a kaaskop, I can be pretty pedantic too)
2008-03-30
We celebrated spring by giving ourselves a bit of pocket money and hitting the second-hand bookshops. Though we’re now living amid a surfeit of second-hand bookshops we hadn’t done that for, well, years. It took some getting used to— in the first few I still felt I had to buy useful books. I was cured of that by finding lots of things like “History of [thing I’m interested in]” —take it from the shelf— “in [country and/or period I’m not interested in at all]”.
2008-03-29
There were only nine people in the Liturgy of the Presanctified: the priest, his wife (choirmistress), their son (acolyte), my three daughters and I, and a couple we didn’t know, apparently a Greek or Serbian woman and her Dutch husband or fiancé. Even though it was a Friday, usually better attended than Wednesdays. Two people we had expected explictly hadn’t come after all, and none of the other regulars either; perhaps everybody thought they’d been to church enough already this week at the Vigil and Liturgy of the Annunciation on Monday and Tuesday.
2008-03-28
I don’t know whether there’s more Roggen or Weizen in this loaf, so I’ll call it a plain Mischbrot; German-style sourdough nevertheless. I figured out how to get the spectacular white crust: slicked it down with a wet hand, sifted ordinary white wheat flour over it (with a mesh tea ball, couldn’t find the little sieve, perhaps I threw it away because it was too worn) and pressed that well into the surface.
2008-03-27
I pass this bit of park several times a week and I’m used to geese sitting or walking in the road, but this time they walked faster, and one of them went “ka-PLECK ka-PLECK” in a weird way. Coming closer, I saw that it was not a goose at all, but a swan with a limp, presumably chasing the geese away from where its mate sat on eggs.
I took three pictures, but with getting the camera from my bag (while the swan got the geese well out of the threat zone) and a car trying to park off-camera on the left only the first was any good.
Location: Noordenbergsingel, Deventer. In the background is the railway bridge over the River IJssel.
This object, which has been outside our window since mid-October, was taken down last Tuesday. I could just catch it on Monday (western Easter Monday!) when there was an inch of snow on it. Two inches on the roof terrace, by the way.
All winter there have been dozens of these spread all through the town centre. The town authorities say they’re crowns, the local paper calls them jellyfish, we think they’re upside-down pumpkins. They’re extremely noisy when there’s any amount of wind; this one, about two meters below our bedroom window, has kept us awake in a storm. A few weeks ago, one fell down in one of the busiest shopping streets; fortunately it was Sunday and there were only a few pedestrians, none of whom got it on their head.
2008-03-26
I’ve overhauled my categories. All the old posts are still there apart from two outdated announcements. With the right date, too, because I discovered cp -p. It may cause flooding of your RSS feed (though I hope preserving the dates will prevent that), for which I’m heartily sorry, but my blogging habits have changed and the old categories didn’t work for me any more.
Internal links will work again when I’ve overhauled those too; that may take a while. [ETA: now done, it was less work than I’d thought because I could at least semi-automate the searching]
If you’ve lost the link to a post and can’t find it even by searching, please pipe up and I’ll tell you where it is.
This is part 2 of the Hans Brinker review, with the names deconstruction.
If you’re actually using this page as a resource —I decided to split the blog post in two when I suddenly realised that some people might want to do that— please comment or mail to tell me if you’d prefer the names to be ordered thematically or alphabetically instead.
I don’t know what prompted it [ETA: a daughter trying to keep a beer bottle from squirting by plugging it with her finger], but I read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. And couldn’t stop reading it once I was underway, though it’s very dated (that figures; it was published in 1865) and it kept me wishing I had a time machine so I could go and be Mary Mapes Dodge’s copy editor, because she badly needed one. It’s surprisingly gripping.
Note that Hans Brinker is not the name of the boy with his finger in the dike. It’s a story-in-the-story in this book. That story is not, and never has been, something that every Dutch child knows; it’s only known in the Netherlands from translations and retellings of Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates. I shudder to think that whole generations of children in the United States had most of their knowledge of the Netherlands from this book alone. No wonder so many tourists arrive with serious misconceptions.
2008-03-20
On Tuesday night, when I was away playing the recorder (still have an earworm of Scarlatti), the art class people called to ask whether I could sit on Thursday morning. I called their voicemail on Wednesday morning to say yes, and this morning I sat.
This time, the teacher herself joined in: in between giving advice to students, she made dozens of small one-minute sketches and let me choose one (thanks, Danielle!)
If you’re at all in the neighbourhood of Deventer (Netherlands; there also seems to be one in the US) and want art classes, I can definitely recommend the Kunstlokaal. And if you’re not in the neighbourhood, perhaps you might like to buy some of the work of Petrus Franciscus or Danielle van Strien. The site is in Dutch; if you’re having trouble with it, don’t hesitate to ask me.
2008-03-18
Don’t send from hotmail if you can help it. I don’t know why my spam filter thought the header was forged (for all I know it was perfectly genuine) but I suspect (some of?) the hotmail gateways assign random IP addresses, without having an actual host with that address.
Also have an address without numbers if at all possible. The “likely spammer email” mentioned below was of the type “name2006”. This only got 0.4 points, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
If you can’t help sending from hotmail (for instance, as in this case, because your message is the change-of-address from hotmail to something else…) try to make it send plain text. My antispam software is very suspicious of HTML. I’ve already deleted my own filters that throw away all HTML to get rid of some of the false positives, but SpamAssassin is diligent.
I don’t know the reason for the 40% to 60% Bayesian spam probability. Perhaps because there was very little text, only “Hi, my old address is X, my new address is Y, thanks”. But that didn’t give any points, so never mind.
Content analysis details: (5.4 points, 5.0 required)
pts rule name description
---- ---------------------- ------------
3.0 FORGED_HOTMAIL_RCVD Forged hotmail.com 'Received:' header found
0.4 MAILTO_TO_SPAM_ADDR URI: Includes a link to a likely spammer email
2.0 HTML_MESSAGE BODY: HTML included in message
0.0 BAYES_50 BODY: Bayesian spam probability is 40 to 60%
[score: 0.5070]
I did catch this one, but I can’t guarantee that I always will. I have SpamAssassin and the filters to avoid having to see every single message that comes in.
2008-03-15
Thanks, Gilles!
I intended to go to the market and buy a blue skirt with my modelling fee, but this was thwarted by the fact that one of the students (Gilles Lescure; when he makes a name for himself, remember where you first read about him) made something that was so beautiful that I said “I wouldn’t mind framing that and hanging it on the bedroom wall.” “All right,” he said, “I’ll spray it with fixative for you.” And so he did, and so I did, spending about half the money on a frame and passe-partout. (Or rather, I framed it and my other half hung it.)
2008-03-13
There was too much wind for skating, otherwise this would have been the last writeup of the season written in the Skating Cafe (as most of the rest have been since October). I’ll miss my weekly hour of ambient noise that’s practically guaranteed to be nothing to do with me, so I can shut it out and be more focused than even in silence.
2008-03-12
Great Compline, in the first week of Lent, gets me in the mood immediately. After initial annoyance at the Great Canon —I already know I’m a sinner, I don’t want it rubbed in!— it starts to soak in instead. And about a hundred prostrations are good for the body as well as for the soul, at least my muscles say so. (Note to self: wear a skirt without sequins; the sequins are as black as the skirt so I didn’t realise they were there until I actually knelt on them, ouch)
This made me go back to Athal’s story for a correction: Raisse got a lion cub, of course, possibly offspring of the previous occupant of the lion skin. And Raisse is asking all the questions explicitly that Athal only asks in his mind, or when they come up in a conversation. It’s increasingly clear that he did really marry the right woman.
2008-03-10
(thanks, you-know-who-you-are, for the title)
Starting today, it’s Great Lent. Here’s Father Stephen explaining why we fast much more clearly than I can.
The week before Lent is Cheesefare Week, maslenica, Butter Week as it’s called in Dutch (well, the English translation of what we call it in Dutch; shut up, Little Voice), when we eat up all our cheese and butter and eggs and fish. It’s become a tradition in our parish to have a community meal of bliny, little Russian-style buckwheat pancakes, with fish and butter and cream. Though this seems to be Russian folklore, it’s actually a fusion thing: most of the local Russians, and of the people who have been to Russia, haven’t encountered it in that form.
2008-03-07
I was very late in acquiring a mobile phone. First, we got one free with our bank account, which we shared (the person on the train had the phone to call home when the train was late). Then, my father-in-law gave me his old one, which broke down after a few months. I’d gotten used to it, so I bought just about the cheapest I could get.
A few years later all my daughters were buying phones, and the screen of mine was getting a bit dim and the battery tired, so I got this Nokia 2600 because I loved the way it looked and I could get it with a prepaid SIM card from a decent provider.
There are much more spiffy phones on the market now, and I’m not sure whether I want to stay with Nokia now they’ve sold their soul to the devil, but I still think this is the perfect shape for a phone.
2008-03-06
(this post alone, I predict, will get all of my blog banned by various net nannies)
Every now and again I earn some pocket money by sitting still in the nude for two hours, in various positions. Modelling for a life-drawing class, that is, in case your dirty mind had switched on already. I have “my” art classes, run by a couple who are both artists, and people can join at different times during the year so there are always some old hands and some beginners. One of the things I like best is the evaluation at the end where I can see what all those people made of the body on the couch.
2008-03-05
Except that I don’t understand half of it, but the percentages make sense. And I’m in good company, at least the ones I’ve heard of.
I’ve taken the liberty to correct a few typos (mostly misspelled names) and take the ad out of the credits link.
(long exposition, with pictures, after the cut)
2008-03-04
I’m writing this to combat other frustration with bureaucracy that I don’t want to write about yet. Disclaimer: all of these cases are based on things that happened to people I know, but the facts have been melted down and recast. If you think you recognise yourself or your own, please don’t mail me saying “but it didn’t happen exactly like that!” because, well, that’s the point.
2008-03-02
Bless curse bless you, Kiya, for pointing
me to Hitherby Dragons.
Right up there with Fredric Brown and R.A. Lafferty.
Reading too much of it in one go makes me think that the world really is like that.
2008-03-01
Yesterday I woke up at 4:15 from a nightmare. I don’t remember what it was about —perhaps fortunately— but I couldn’t get back to sleep, and after tossing and turning for another hour I admitted that I wouldn’t ever get comfortable and got up. Amazing that being comfortable in bed is a whole-body experience, but being uncomfortable in bed is a detailed experience: every little bit has its separate discomfort.
