Cogs can think.

Weirdest coincidence EVAR. During the party last Saturday, I was telling Anne about my apparent obsession with girls with one or more ‘a’s in their name. I listed my love interests, and all of them carry the letter ‘a’ in their name. As I was walking down the list, I reached Anne - not the Anne I was talking to (whose full name is Annemarie, actually), but an Anne I knew in high school. It’s not you, I joked, Another Anne, an Anne you don’t know.

Seven hours later, as everyone else was preparing to get into bed, Anne, Nadia, and I were sitting on the couch, with the girls sifting through my shoe box full of old photographs and memorial books that I carry from my early childhood all the way up until my first few years studying psychology. We reached my high school class photos. Annemarie looked at one of them, and got all excited.

That’s Anne! she said. I know Anne!

You have to realise that Annemarie and I have only known each other for a little over three years now. Wonderful years, but the odds of Annemarie knowing the Anne from my past are really, really slim. Annemarie is from Weesp and Amsterdam, high-school-Anne is from Alkmaar.

That was not only weird, but also a tad bit cool. Anne was probably my first major crush, and also the one who dashed my hopes in a way that I will forever remember as the coolest rejection method I’ve ever experienced.

Majors props for writing “No Thom, no.” in large, black letters on my school etui. Beat that, future love interests.

And another entry in my series on good comedy. We all know Frasier, by almost every measure imaginable the best comedy show in history. 37 Emmy Awards, and voted Ultimate Sitcom by the British Channel 4, and the BBC more or less agrees.

What makes Frasier so good is not just the intelligent jokes, not just the fact that Frasier transcends the usual penis-vagina-poo level of most other sitcoms (I’m looking at you, Friends), but the fact that the actors in Frasier actually know how to act. Each one of them, every single character, is portrayed so well that if Frasier were a film, it’d sweep the Oscars.

Move the slider to 4m45s in. Peri Gilpin (as Roz) at full hurricane force. Breathtaking.

The difference between a good comedy show, and an outstanding one is not the humour, it’s not the funny situations - it’s how well the writers and cast deal with the situations that are not funny. And when it comes to that, I don’t think there is anything in the world that beats Frasier.

Last Saturday I threw a party for some of my closer friends at my place. The original idea was to hold the party during election night, but since everyone was being all responsible and slaves to capitalism, whining about work and school and whatever, we held the party the following Saturday.

The whole thing was awesome, but it did remind me of something Marco said somewhere last week or the week before that: we’re pretty much stuck with each other for the rest of our lives. The people that were here Saturday night, those are the people whose weddings we’ll visit, whose baby showers we’ll enjoy, whose funerals we’ll attend. I’ll turn 24 in three weeks, only six years and my life will be over, so I better get my social circle in order or else no one will cry during my funeral. Not because of me - but because they’ll be forced to listen to Fiona all throughout the god damn ceremony. THAT ONE’S FOR MAKING FUN OF FIONA AND ME.

But then again, I have this fear that even when we’re dead and buried, I’m still stuck with those people. I pretty much got front row seats in hell due to that one time I tried to score a chick on a graveyard in Belgium, and so do most of the other people in my circle of friends. But that’s not my biggest fear. Oh no.

My biggest fear is that when we arrive in hell, and Satan unleashes thousands of his minions upon us to commence the eternal cycle of torment and pain, I’m gonna be like, psssh. Amateurs.

I’ll be all like, uhm, fire? Brimstone? Dude, I already been to Texas, this stuff isn’t working. You guys have a similar administration to the one on the other side, right? You folk know all I’ve done and such, right? All my thoughts? Use that to your advantage, damnit! You guys have this whole untapped resource of subtle torture ideas, and you’re not even using it.

Take me for example. Sir Satan, you don’t have to waste all those precious mana points on casting thousands of little demons of fire - you can use your mana points much more efficiently by simply casting a kitchen where all the cups face the wrong way, where the cutlery is unsorted, but where no matter what you do, no matter how you sort and turn everything, the moment you blink, everything’s back to its unsorted state.

That’s subtle torture for you right there, sir, and you’ve saved on mana points, and you don’t have to deal with all those annoying demons of fire anymore (litterboxes for fire demons aren’t cheap, you know). Implement mana points saving rules all across hell, and in no time, you can conjure yourself a nice Alfa 8C with wheels of fire.

That’s my biggest fear. Not hell, but the fact I’ll probably make hell a lot more efficient.

This morning, it took me 2 hours to drive from Warmenhuizen to my university in Amsterdam - a 60km drive which normally takes me about 45 minutes. The reason? Let me explain by showing how our traffic announcements on the radio start:

And now for the traffic, here’s all traffic jams longer than 8 kilometres and at unusual locations…

Yes. Due to time constraints, they just don’t bother anymore with the “short” traffic jams of 8km and less. This means that between 7 and 9 and 17 and 19, my average driving speed is 30km. On a highway with a 120km speed limit. And that you hit massive traffic jams at 3 in the morning. On Sundays.

The Netherlands. Wonderfully liberal and civilised country, where everybody is (technically) equal. We allow homosexuals to get married, even though they’ll be late to their own wedding, probably BECAUSE THEY’RE STUCK IN TRAFFIC.

I felt like I was part of something special last night. Involuntarily, I was counting his stress points in each sentence. I forgot my friends around me. For some mysterious reason, I spoke along with the Lincoln quote, a quote that I happen to know by heart. You know what?

I felt American.

We were all witnesses to something remarkable last night. In 20 years, my kids are going to ask me where I was.

The part of the speech that touched me most was the following. It’s as if he was talking directly to my friends and I, huddled up around a huge flatscreen TV, on the other side of the Atlantic, our bodies kept going by what the rattling coffee machine provided us with.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world - our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand. To those who would tear this world down - we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security - we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

Beautiful. Just beautiful. I’m not used to getting slightly emotional because of someone’s speech, but this one certainly did it. You know what? I’m gonna do it.

YES. WE. CAN.

I couldn’t have said this better myself. Amazingly simple and effective.

As long as people like this can be found in the US, you guys will turn out just fine. If you live in California, please, vote ‘no’ on Proposition 8.

Ah, so that’s what battery acid tastes like.

A defeat has never tasted so sour. During the last 20 seconds ze German Timo Glock gave in. I was already raising my hands in the air, shouting it out in favour of Ferrari and Massa, when I - and Olav Mol, the Dutch iconic F1 commentator, realised that The Red had not won. I had a txt message reading “FORZA FERRARI!!!!” ready to be sent to Marco, but alas, I had to delete it from /concepts unsent.

You only get excitement like this once in your life. Thrilling.