The Poles are coming!

Each month, a thousand Polish workers take temporary positions in Belgium thanks to the recent simplification of European Union rules for recruiting workers from the new Central and Eastern member states. I'm obviously out of touch with the population working in agriculture, as all the Poles I know I've either encountered at Yale, Amersfoort, or Poland.

My visit to Poland has left me not only with a five-word Polish vocabulary, but also the ability to tell Poles apart from other Europeans--probably akin to being able to tell the Chinese and Japanese apart. And I can kind of distinguish their language from other Slavic tongues...with a 51% success rate.

fear of the dark

After the theft of my front wheel and vandalism of my brake cables, my view of Belgium changed slightly... it was no longer the unbelievably safe place it seemed and that some claim it to be. It became darker, less relaxed. But Ben took the cake when he confided in me on our way to KBC's Boerentoren that the young woman working at a Brussels cafe he used to frequent had been taken into the woods and clubbed to death by a "friend"/married man a week or two ago. Incidentally, what news should arise but that murder has increased by 35% over the past five years, symbolized recently by the senseless mp3 killing in Brussel Centraal. I doubt that any of the explanations presented in the article--vigilantism, materialism, lack of social cohesion--can really explain this dude going stark raving mad, but it's not difficult to imagine some prevailing force at work.

spirograph

For the past few years, I've returned to wanting more advanced Spirographs than the one I had as a child. There was one model based partially on randomness, with a pen perched over a moving tray.

Now artificially-grown mouse neurons can create artwork that looks eerily similar to the results of said Spirograph. I'm creeped out.

an LA thing

Where can you find an information wanted sign posted by the homocide department of the police bearing 54 photos of aspiring models? Most certainly in Los Angeles. And it's working.

jailbreak

So Will finally writes back. And he's been up to the best kind of no good! A bit reminiscent of the red paper clip.

A potential antidote to iTunes comes, of all possibilities, from National Geographic World Music.

icky

No wonder an American girl conducted a study showing that toilet seats generally host fewer bacteria than ice cream. Even the soft ice in Belgium is dirty.

lies, all lies!

People can't tell the truth about lying. Surprise, surprise.

tolerance?

The Flemish Interest is avidly opposing anti-racism concerts, taking the events as a personal insult. No further comment necessary.

Since when was Mechelen a noisy place at night? Take me to your party!

earth-shaking

"The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year, 100,000 of which can be felt and 100 of which cause damage." You'd think Californians would be working hardest on preparing for the big one, but it's a Buffalo-based company in upstate New York that's developed a "silicon-fluid-filled damper...about 20 inches long and as thick as a pop can, [that] can dissipate 15,000 pounds of force, the equivalent of 20 car shock absorbers." It's already used in the Bay Bridge and Triborough Bridge. It's amazing that such a small thing can absorb so much force.

The earth is always threatening to turn on us. Remember all those forest fires that plague California and the four corners? They're already increasing in frequency rapidly because of global warming. When I'm finally done with my education, will I have a Cali to come back to?!

scofflaw diplomats in new york

Parking in Manhattan can easily cost $20 per hour. So being a diplomat must be sweet: "Between November 1997 and the end of 2002, diplomats accumulated more than 150,000 unpaid parking tickets in New York, racking up $18 million in unpaid fines.

Based on statistics supplied by the city, the report said the worst offenders during that period were Kuwait, which averaged 246.2 unpaid tickets per diplomat per year, followed by Egypt, with 139.6; Chad, with 124.3; and Sudan, with 119.1.

Twenty-two countries averaged zero unpaid tickets per year, according to the study, including Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates."

much ado about nothing

Anyone who thinks that America can operate in its current state without its illegal immigrants is an utter fool. So why not let the status quo continue and save the nation some money to educate immigrant children, etc.? Oh, yes, because people want to be re-elected by a nation of fools.

We could also save some money for the people who nearly died for us in wars not all of us supported. A good half to three-quarters of the homeless in San Francisco are veterans of the Vietnam War, if I recall the figures I was told at a shelter correctly. And now the young people who served as recently as in the Iraq war have no place to go. How can we send them off to a war of questionable motivation and then drop them back in the US with nothing but nightmares of the horrors they went through?

Also of interest: "In the United States, a full 42 percent identify themselves first as Christians and second as Americans." From an article about how Muslims are actually doing better than before in Europe.

hearing loss

By the time you've reached your twenties, you've lost your ability to hear very high frequencies, and nobody thought to take advantage of that until now. The possibilities! But it's disturbing to me as a musician that my hearing is already going, particularly since I expose my unprotected ears regularly to the loudest acoustic instrument in the world. How will I detect that the ninth overtone of that bell over yonder is five cents too low?

failure to launch

I watched Failure To Launch on the way to the US, and a gorgeous girl with a Cyrillic passport sitting next to me bore a startling resemblance to Kit (Zooey Deschanel), right down to her outfit. The movie made sense in the US. But I wonder if it would fly in Belgium or just leave people offended.

a nation of workaholics

I had no idea Americans were second only to Singapore in the number of hours worked weekly. And what's the deal with Singapore anyway?

We can't be too clinical about the effects of vacations though. In a recent study described in the article, "nearly three quarters [of respondents] thought that doctors should be able to write prescriptions for vacations." How reasonable could the rest of their answers have been?

city life at its best

Barcelona isn't even in the top 10 most livable cities according to a survey by Mercer. And that's one of the top three places in the world I'd be happiest living in so far.

There's a lot more traveling for me to do. And I really have been meaning to visit Zurich.

London lags quite a bit behind San Fran? Clearly I'm more spoiled than I think. Either that, or living in crime-ridden communities has desensitized me to the effect of that factor on city living.

camel cavalry

From a history of Confederate president Jefferson Davis' camel cavalry:

In 1863, a camel-express service was tried between New San Pedro and Tucson, Arizona, but with only limited success. Around that same time a group of Mexicans loaded up some camels on wagons with the intention of making beasts of burden out of them, but abused them so severely that most of the animals died.

There are so many nonsensical things about that. Not to mention that anything concerning dromedaries or Jefferson Davis may be considered comical.

another reason SUVs are evil

Even the police can't drive them without running over people's heads.

Damn motorists. You gotta do Critical Mass naked just to get their attention, and not just in Mexico City.

blue and gold, blue and...

When the University of California was deciding its colors in the 1860s-70s, it was decided that gold would represent the state's principal natural resource and blue would honor Yale, the alma mater of most of the new university's founders.
Source: calbears.ocsn.com.
Joe McMillan, 19 November 2003

Sweet! Even the California Governor's (Arnold's) flag is on a Yale Blue field. But was Yale blue chosen after Oxford blue? Cuz whether I'm in Oxford or Cali, I feel right at home with the university colors.

what happened to rights?

Ok, so nobody would actually wear a burka in the US because the reaction would be so bad... but at the same time, there's no way in hell anyone would even think to try to make it illegal.

doh

When you've installed so many programs of questionable attainment that you've forgotten some of the most powerful software on your machine, you know you're an addict. All this time I've been trying to run beat-up old Adobe Pagemaker 7 on my Virtual PC for Mac (running Windows XP Pro) when I had Adobe InDesign CS installed on OS X the whole damn time!

I still haven't paid Adobe a cent in my life, but I feel as if I owe the company my first-born child. Has a single week gone by in my college and post-collegiate life that I haven't used their software?