Here’s an update on the case of the teacher who confiscated Linux CDs, which I wrote about yesterday. It seems that she and her critic have come to an understanding.

Congratulations on being the first to cold-call my fledgling firm to propose a business solution. Unfortunately, I had to say “sorry, not interested”, and if you knew that the firm in question is at the moment €71,42 in the red you’d likely be “not interested” either. It’s true that I’ll be in the black again when the people I’ve just sent an invoice pay up, but I don’t expect to be more than a few hundred in the black any time soon.

Quite apart from that, I’ve been with Other Bank for thirty-mumble years and I see no reason to change. They’ve done some stupid things (does it really need a dozen notices to change the address of a family of five? do they really expect someone recently turned twelve, and addressed henceforth by you as Ms Initials Surname, to be interested in this great offer for a learn-to-play-with-money gadget aimed at seven-year-olds?) but they’ve never done anything bad to me on the banking front. If I do suddenly start earning great sums of money I may reconsider, and I may even end up with you (you seem to be an okay bank as such, and I understand all banks are a bit desperate at the moment), but your cold call did bump you to the bottom of the list.

I must concede, though, that you employ a higher class of call-center people than the run-of-the-mill ones who try to sell me double glazing or mortgages at 6:30 pm when I’m having dinner, even though I’m privately on the don’t-call list (note to self: find out if there is a business don’t-call list). That’s why I didn’t tell her “no, I’m unlikely to ever become interested in something that’s pushed over the phone”: she was far too nice and polite for that.

If this is true (and I’m afraid it is) it’s outrageous. Executive summary: teacher confiscates Linux CDs from student (US middle school, I think early teens) who was demonstrating and distributing to friends, and threatens with the law because “no software is free”. (Here’s a really sensible comment from a good teacher, by the way)

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All the supermarkets are playing St.Nicholas songs instead of their usual muzak.

All the supermarkets appear to have the same tape sung by a very off-key children’s choir— no, they’re not very off-key, they’re subtly, annoyingly off-key, which is worse.

They’ve set all the songs to straight 4/4 time arrangements, even the ones that aren’t. That is even more annoying than the off-keyness: instead of this
[ETA: sheet music]

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So how would you feel if for years you’d been in the habit of doing something you thought was a good thing, absolutely saw the sense of, took pains to do right, taught your children to do, put up with discomfort in order to do…

… and then suddenly you’re told that you don’t have to do it any more, and not only that (so you could at least feel virtuous for keeping it up regardless) but it’s made impossible?

No, I’m not talking about the outdated practice of covering one’s head in church. I’m talking about the outdated practice of separating household waste into organic and miscellaneous. Which was the spiffy new thing, let’s see, a few decades ago.

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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.

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Is it hopelessly naive of me to think of the square root of x as “the number that x is the square of” and that, consequently, 2(sqrt 3) * (sqrt 3) is 2*3, that is, 6? Why does my daughters’ math book want them to calculate it as 2(sqrt 9) first? Granted, that also comes out 6, but why the extra step?

Also, don’t they teach them that the square of a+b (can’t do proper math notation) is (a squared) + 2ab + (b squared)? When I drew the square-with-rectangles that I was taught decades ago to visualise it, the girl who was struggling with the problem didn’t understand the visualisation any better than she understood the problem itself, and insisted that it was only (a squared) + (b squared).

Filia Prima says it’s the math book, and our friend who is tutoring her (because she got interested in how a math book can make mathematics so much more complicated) tends to agree.

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.

Trying to find a train to Haarlem for tomorrow on the Dutch Railways planner, I noticed that they wanted to send me via Utrecht. Usually, that’s a detour —Deventer, Amsterdam and Haarlem lie more or less in a straight line east-west, with Utrecht well out of the way to the south— so I tried to go explicitly via Amsterdam. They sent me via Utrecht and Amsterdam. Lots of warnings about works on the line [*] but nothing between Deventer and Amsterdam, so I got curious.

[*] It was very heartening in Greece to see road works announced with “LITOURGIA”, making me realise that “liturgy” means “the work that has to be done to make everything run smoothly”, in a mundane context no less than in a spiritual one. Less heartening, though, to see “PROSFORA” in every other shop, meaning merely “special offer”.

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Ridiculously early by Orthodox standards (April 8; earliest it can be is April 4), and still quite early by Western standards. So the supermarket I still call my favourite, though that may change once they’ve finished refurbishing my usual instance of it with, among other abominations, a “cook-and-choose island” right where you come in, where you can buy what is basically a meal kit for two adults and two children; useless, not only because I prefer to make my own choices, but also because I have too many children to fit their marketing concept. And anyway, they’re teenagers, so they Grow. And Eat. Ah well.

… what was I saying? Oh yes, the supermarket has chocolate Easter eggs on the shelves. In January. One of the teenagers tells me that another shop already had some last week. Not that I object to chocolate Easter eggs; on the contrary, I’d probably buy and eat some now if it wasn’t for the fact that I, you know, celebrate Easter.

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Years ago, we discovered Bolletje Eindeloos cinnamon biscuits. Thin hard biscuits sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, nice enough to be more-ish, plain enough for fast days, handy to take to work or school because they come in three separate compartments of five biscuits each to a pack.

We all liked them a lot. I didn’t buy many, or often— I could get some whenever I liked, anyway.

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The UPS van stopping in front of our house made me gleefully abandon my ironing this morning. More like the UPS lorry, really: it was on the huge side of substantial and, like all UPS vans, gothically black with gold lettering. I hope the neighbours were watching. It brought not one but two Dells, which Boudewijn has already blogged about extensively (also in other articles in that vicinity; just keep reading).

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And Whit Monday, of course, and Boxing Day.

Well, maybe not. They’re traditional, after all, and some people do want an extra day off to do furniture fun-shopping, and I especially don’t want to get mixed up in the debate about all Dutch national holidays being Christian holidays, “and can’t we accommodate other faiths, or abolish all feast days because nobody believes any more anyway?”

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Translating and commenting on parts of an article in yesterday’s Trouw:

The Commission Against Female Genital Mutilation has presented Minister Hoogervorst of Public Health with a package of measures to ‘eradicate’ circumcision of girls.

Well, that sounds reasonable enough. It goes on to say that it happens about fifty times a year to girls living in the Netherlands, mostly in their home countries (in the Sahara area).

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A free concert of Ambon Country Rock, ballads, krontjong and other Indonesian music, in the local shopping mall on a Wednesday afternoon: that sounded delectable. It was Nightbreakers from Zoetermeer giving the concert, something I’d never heard of, but then I’m not well-versed in the genre.

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After the Theophany, the Christmas tree has to go. We planted one in the garden a few years ago; it came to the then eight-year-old’s shoulder, and it’s now inches taller than the same kid at almost eleven. We don’t have a garden large enough to cope with two, let alone a whole stand of, former Christmas trees.

The municipal garbage-collecting people collect them every year, so that’s no problem, but I spotted discarded trees in the town centre before the Theophany and that worried me a bit. So I looked up the official city website; nothing about Christmas-tree collection. What’s the garbage-collecting outfit called again? Circulus. It figures, it rings a whole peal of bells of recycling, but it’s yet another of those fashionable names for institutions that don’t tell you what it is. “Thuiszorg” (“home care”) is now Carinova — and I had to look that up because it’s not something you remember.

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The girls brought home a Thing.

One Thing each, to be exact, packed in a gaudy orange carrier bag, together with a magnetic weekly planner and a Letter to the Parents. The Thing turns out to be a “gruitbox”, designed especially to bring your Fruit-and-Vegetables to school. There’s been a campaign going on for a year and a half, the letter says, to make kids eat more fruit and vegetables. To that effect the Fruit and Vegetables Board or whatever has been supplying fruit and vegetables to primary schools under the name of schoolgruiten. Gruiten is a portmanteau, a very ugly one in my opinion, of groenten (vegetables) and fruit. (Warning: the site requires Flash, Konqueror couldn’t cope with it but Firefox could)

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I find myself putting off going to the library. So much so that I keep my books too long almost every time and I’m charged overdue fees. I thought it was simple sloth, or my innate talent for procrastination, but today I realised that it’s the System.

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My little brush with the Tax Office got an unexpected sequel. Today, a blue envelope dropped on the mat, giving me a sinking feeling (“oh, no, another tax thing”) but it was an apology for their mistaken demand. And it turned out that the uneasy feeling I had then was right all along: I don’t need to do anything, it will sort itself out.

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We let Naomi quit swimming class. She can swim — she has been able to swim expertly for months — but she can’t succeed in doing one thing that’s necessary to get a swimming certificate, namely, to swim nine meters underwater and go through a hole in a plastic sheet without surfacing in between.

Unlike things like breaststroke which you can be weak, good enough or excellent at, this is binary: you get two tries and if you don’t make it you’re screwed, even if you do everything else perfectly.

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