Cogs can think.

It’s a big mess in Italy right now - well, a bigger mess than usual. During fights between football hooligans, a policeman shot a supporter hooligan, killing the guy instantly. As a result, Italy went up in fire, riots everywhere, police stations attacked, that sort of thing.

Well, that’s what you get. When you play with fire, you’re bound to get burned. Football hooliganism is a major problem in Europe, and as far as I’m concerned, the State should use all means necessary to ban this violence; violence that costs us tax payers millions and millions of Euros each year. I even advocate a complete ban on professional football matches for as long as it takes the clubs to sort out this mess - I do not wish that my tax money is used to fight this nonsense. If the safety of Dutch citizens, as well as the property rights of shop and home owners nearby stadiums cannot be guaranteed, the cause of that should be banned. As simple as that.

Football is dead anyway.

It’s sold. The Cube is no longer in my possession. I really didn’t like parting with it, but as a parting gift (besides the 300 EUR, that is), consider the following conversation with the buyer.

“I have to say though, the Cube is an American Cube, so it has an American power plug. I’m giving you an adapter with it, though, and of course, you can replace the American power cord with a Dutch one.”

“No problem. It’s replacing an American Cube as well. My NeXTcube browser was starting to annoy me, old and all.”

The guy was using a NeXTcube as his main computer. I can assure you, my Cube is in good hands.

I’m excited. All hell is going to break loose here this afternoon and tonight, with a traditional south western storm coming our way, force 9 on the Beaufort scale (wind speeds of 75-88km/h), combined with spring tide, making way for 12 metre waves on the North Sea.

I might have to drive up to the coast today.

I would just like to congratulate Heather and Jon with their daughter Leta. I’ve never met any of them, and they probably haven’t a clue who the hell I am (I sent a few mails their way, but they probably get a whole lot more than just mine), but I still want to congratulate them in public. No, it’s not the little girl’s birthday, it’s not her first day of school, and no, it’s not her first ever Linux installation.

As it turns out, their daughter hates insects, and probably spiders too. That is a good thing. Insects and spiders are the seed of the devil, they are evil, wrong, scary, and must be eradicated from the face of the earth. They. Must. Die.

I am terribly afraid of insects, and I have a fairly moderate case of arachnophobia. As in, if they get larger than, I don’t know, a centimetre, I’ll be screaming like a schoolgirl.

My house actually has a small shed located way off my property (in a whole block of sheds), but I haven’t been there in, well, I don’t know, 10 months or so. It’s a spider-infested hell hole, and as a civilised human being, I simply refuse to bless that hell hole with my glowing appearance. Let the spiders have their victory over there.

When I see a spider, it consequently means it will have to die. This poses me with a serious problem, as the mere sight of one puts me in a serious instinctive flight or fight response. Twiek can care of large spiders easily, but he has this nasty habit of playing with them; I still haven’t been able to train Twiek to be a mindless spider killing drone.

But we’ll get there.

The final part of the Thule trilogy is divided up into three parts. The first part deals with Elvira, and so does the third part. The second part, however, deals with Shasita, Reni, and Hajo, the three daughters of the new Baden supreme governour of the colonies. They embark on a voyage out of the colonies to reach the new Thule capitol, Holtak (the original capitol, Gothab, has been conquered by Baden), in order to establish contact with the “enemy”, to try and establish trade between Thule and Baden.

The three girls’ voyage takes weeks, and just when they think all is lost, they reach the city of Holtak, where they are also brought to Thura. Obviously, later on, their paths cross with that of Elvira. At the inn where they stay, Shasita has a short chat with the son of the owner of the inn; remember that Thule is basically a communist society done right, so the inns are all free of charge, provided to the community, by the community. Shasita asks the son:

“Are there many such inns in Thule?”
“Oh, hundreds, maybe a thousand.”
“And any traveller can come and stay here?”
“Any traveller,” the boy nods.
“Do Thulinians travel often?”
“Only when they need to go from one place to another.”
“That’s what you call Thulinian logic,” laughed Reni.

It truly is. The logic employed by the Thule people is always strikingly simple, but effective. And by the way, my 2nd daughter will be named Shasita.

I’m currently reading the final part of the Thule trilogy I told you about earlier. It’s the first I actually ever read, a gift from my parents, a long time ago.

The reason the two societies in the trilogy don’t get along very well is mostly based on the fact that while Baden is governed “traditionally”, that is, by men; Thule is governed by women, and that has resulted in a society completely different from what we are used to.

This difference is best illustrated in the final book, when Elvira, a young Baden girl living in one of the Baden colonies in Thule, moves into enemy territory to find her father, only to found out he died because of supposedly friendly fire (killed by bullets - Thule doesn’t have bullets). This sets in motion a whole chain of events, which lead to her being seen as a negotiator (by the Thule women) between Baden and Thule. When one of the prime leaders of Thule, Thura, explains Elvira’s role to her, Elvira says:

The Supreme Governour will roll over the floor laughing. He’ll say: “Woman, don’t be ridiculous, get married, have six kids, that’s how you serve your country.”

My first daughter will be named Elvira, by the way, whenever I have kids (600 years from now).

Can anybody tell me what the hell is wrong with Firefox lately? It crashes a few times a day, at completely random websites. In addition, my scrollbars are all black.

I’m running 2.0.0.9, but the problems started on previous versions. Is Firefox’ quality control lacking or something?

When I look out the window today, I see a sunny autumn day. Leaves and branches gently waving, colder than you expect, with the early signs of rain coming later today. In other words, a typical Dutch autumn day.

English weather guy Piers Corbijn has made a prediction that The Netherlands will be hit by what we call a superstorm during the second halve of November this year; wind speeds of up to 175-200kph, and even tornadoes are not out of the question.

In other words, a storm rivalling those of 1987 and, of course, 1953, the biggest natural disaster in The Netherlands in recent history. A storm as described by Corbijn would be the 10 000 year storm; the Dutch norm for dikes and other flood protection systems is that they may only be tested to their full capacity once every 10 000 years. This norm was mandated after the great flood of 1953, which killed 2000 Dutchmen and women, caused 70 000 to flee, and flooded 1365 km² of land (3.3% of the country).

The forecast is, rightly so, met with scepticism, and I think it’s fairly safe to say that predictions made that far ahead will most likely turn out to be, well, nonsense. We can barely predict what the weather is like tomorrow, let alone three weeks from now. That is not to say such a storm will not occur; as I have said before, we Dutch have become complacent with the completion of the Delta Works, and I’m fairly sure Mother Nature will punish us for that complacency one of these years, but it’s impossible to say how or when.

Assuming that this guy is in fact right (you know, justifying this blog post and all), my family, friends, and I could be in a whole world of shit water. I live a few metres below sea level, about 15km out of the North Sea coast. Event though at my latitude I’m protected by the coastal dunes, you only have to move north a few km to stumble upon a weak link in our North Sea defences: the Hondsbosse Zeewering, marked by our government as one of the eight weak links in the coastal defense system; the dike is too low, and the trench in the sea in front of it is too deep, causing higher waves.

De Hondsbosse Zeewering itself is still an impressive piece of engineering. It it simply fcuking huge, but it is also showing its age. As you can see on the below picture, erosion of the coastal areas on either end of the dike has caused the dike itself to stick out into the sea. The current dike was originally built in 1880, ending a centuries long struggle to maintain the coastal dunes in this area after the St. Elizabeth’s Flood of 1421.

If a superstorm would occur in the coming years, we could be in serious trouble. Especially seeing I can’t swim.

There was planning. There was drinking. There was lots of laughing. There was talking. There was pepper sniffing (I was not involved in the sniffing. I was involved in the peer pressure, though). There was people I didn’t know. There was people I heard a lot about. There was people I do know. There was lots of people I love.

Levi celebrated his birthday in Amsterdam yesterday.

A federal jury in Baltimore, Maryland, Wednesday awarded $10.9 million to a father of a Marine whose funeral was picketed by members of a fundamentalist church carrying signs blaming soldiers’ deaths on America’s tolerance of homosexuals.

This is sad on so many levels.

First and foremost, these idiots are disturbing funerals. Funerals of people who most likely died way too young. I don’t agree one bit with war (on any level), but these soldiers are just normal boys and girls, taken from their home country to go fight against an enemy they can barely see in the scorching heat in a desert on the other side of the world. These people deserve a respectful and peaceful burial, just like everybody else.

Secondly, they say this is a punishment by god for America’s tolerance towards homosexuality. Right-o. I would say that if there is a god involved in all this, don’t you think he’s punishing the US for being unable to properly feed and take care of its citizens? You see, America may call itself god’s nation, but if there is one country on this planet that is anything but Christian, it’s the US. The people in charge in the US have little to no understanding of what Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam for that matter) is all about: tolerance, respect, and love. Those three words are the pillars of Christianity (and yes, of Judaism and Islam too, these three faiths are mostly the same anyway) in my eyes - and let’s face, many people in the US, including these religious idiots, have lost all touch with these core values.

As far as I’m concerned, the police arrests all of these morons whenever they try to ruin another funeral. Stuff like this should be harshly punished. Even the biggest of criminals deserve a peaceful funeral. That’s what separates us civilised people from barbarians.