He keeps coming to my attention by a kind of serial serendipity. Jaap de Berg wrote in the language column of Trouw basically what I wrote in 2008, prompted by a news item in another paper about President Obama: “as if he were a modern-day Hansje Brinker, able to do heroic work with one finger kilometers under water”. Here is a link; may not persist, may disappear behind a paywall after some finite amount of time, may be behind a paywall even now. If you can’t see the article and you want to read it (in Dutch, of course), please communicate.

This made me look up the Wikipedia article, which turns out to be surprisingly good and complete. And of course, there’s a non-zero chance that the boy with his finger in the dike —if, which I doubt, he existed at all— was also called Hans, or rather Hannes.

(Also, a student wants to quote my names deconstruction; recognition at last!)

Probably because I was cringing at the disrespectful treatment of the flag, of course. There are worse earworms to have.

I grabbed the text and translation (though I will comment on the latter) from the Wikipedia entry, which also has the original sixteenth-century spelling and two different English translations, one to fit the meter and one to fit the meaning. Corrected one obvious typo and some punctuation.

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The bottom sheet currently on our bed is so worn that there’s actually a tear in it, about where my shoulders are— but it’s also been on the bed the other way around, so it may have been worn through mostly by my other half’s feet. The tear was tiny last night and I let it be, but today I’ll have to change it because my tossing and turning (other half is away for a week and whatever science says I sleep worse when I’m sleeping alone) made it large enough to poke a hand through.

It reminded me of a folk song: (note that the lyrics I know are those of the folk group Perelaar and may not completely match scientifically recorded lyrics)

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The part of my brain that usually handles earworms has branched out and presented me with a name running persistently through my mind, the name of a person I don’t remember ever having come across in the flesh or in writing:

Betty Taminiau.

I googled it, of course, and found nothing that rang a bell. I did find Jan Taminiau the fashion designer, Bert or Bart Taminiau the field-hockey player, Renske Taminiau the singer, Aart Taminiau the artist, and several others (not to mention the 63 million occurrences of Betty). Until then, I hadn’t even been sure that the name actually existed.

In all its rarity it’s such a normal name that I can’t believe I haven’t read it somewhere and the earworms department has just found it in a cubby-hole and dished it up for me to look at. She sounds like someone who compiles cookery books, or someone from the Dutch WWII resistance, or even both: “the culinary writer Betty Taminiau, who saved twenty-three Jewish girls by hiding them in her cookery school.” I can see her now, still pert and lively at ninety-four; I can’t decide whether she has a tribe of great-grandchildren or only a morose black-and-white tomcat.

I do sometimes “get” characters like this, but they usually fit into something I’m already writing. Not this one. But if I don’t find a pre-existing Betty Taminiau, I’ll have to write something to make her exist; her name is much too splendid to let it go to waste.

My current signature is “Time flies like an arrow. What do time butterflies like?”

It’s probably a rhetorical question, but one answer I’d consider is “Greased lightning.”

I don’t know (well, in fact I do know; post about that later) how I got this earworm about 3 months late or 8 months early; it’s a St Nicholas song. But the lyrics are deliciously complex and I’ll dissect them for fun.

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Yesterday on BBC News I read the story of a man who was abandoned and adopted as a baby and is now trying to find out what exactly happened. (One of the strangest things is that when the police arrived at the block of flats where he’d been found, several people were standing around him on the cold concrete floor and nobody had picked him up.)

A sentence struck my eye: “The social morays at the time looked down on unmarried mothers.” …morays? Aren’t those the eels with all the teeth?

When you swim in the sea
and an eel bites your knee,
that’s a moray.

But then these are social morays, so probably apt to be more judgmental.

They’ve changed it now, of course, rather a pity. But how could it have happened? I don’t suspect the spell checker (check: mine knows both ‘mores’ and ‘morays’). Either someone didn’t know how to spell ‘mores’ or, more likely and more hilarious, someone used dictation software, pronounced it correctly, and the program picked the wrong homophone.

There’s a statue of the boy with his finger in the dyke in Spaarndam. According to this rather good article about Hans Brinker, it was placed there “in order to please the American tourists”, who all wanted to see exactly where the boy had put his finger in the dyke. Also, I recommend reading past the pictures of the statue in the first link.

(Here is my earlier post about Hans Brinker)

From sciamanna; she mentioned it on IRC. I don’t have any one “my novel” at the moment —one fatally stalled, three in submisson-anxiety coma— but I’ll answer for A Voice from the North, colloquially known as “the Frozen North thing”.

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landaulet

It floated into my mind when I was half-awake at 5:45 or so, trying to ignore a headache and to visualise subtle shades of midnight blue because green made me queasy and red hurt too much. A parting shot of the dream engine, I suppose, at the tail-end of a jumble of stuff inspired by the Prisoner of Zenda movie we watched last night. A splendid movie: with effective deliberate over-the-topness and very true to the book.

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