the decider

One thing about The Administration: now I think Bill Maher is hilarious. Before, not so much.

Had Enough of the Scary Christians?

Best to not click on this link, then.

SPOILER ALERT

No, it's not about Harry Potter 7, don't worry.

Today, at the Albert Cuyp market, I came across 8 inch tall, Delft-painted china salt shakers. Only here's the thing: they were shaped like penises.

So now you know what I'm bringing everyone from Amsterdam.

a work in progress, part 1

The real city of Amsterdam lies down two narrow streets with four different names across three canals filled with flower-laden houseboats. It will have a local bar, with a cat named Joep. There will be a crowd of regulars, and their golden retrievers. People will be smiling and nodding, because they have managed to be sitting outside for the two hours the sun has been shining this week. You’ll see it just as you turn the corner, a flash of sun illuminating a whole picture. Amsterdam is a city that winks at you.

The Dutch are rather like tulips themselves, long and thin, clean, spare, heads bright against the hanging grey sky. I’m all in love with half of them, or half in love with all of them. I try not to stare.

I decide to take care of the flowers myself. I step out my big blue door into a July day in Holland. My sweater isn’t thick enough, and I briefly debate returning upstairs for my umbrella. Deciding that it will probably stop raining, and, also, remembering that umbrellas are no use against rain blown sideways, I pull the door shut behind me.

Walking down Beethovenstraat, I pretend I never have to leave this city, its tall straight-backed people on old Gazelles, the fragrant corner flower stalls. Everything here is expensive except flowers. I buy fifty white tulips for five euros.

This particular block of Beethovenstraat is such a typical slice of Amsterdam: a Gall & Gall, a tobacco store, a newsstand, an albert hijn, four cafes, an etos, a slagerij, a vishandel, a kaswinkel. It is no wonder that people get lost easily and constantly here. All this block needs is a Heineken sign and some bewildered tourists, and it would be absolutely indistinguishable from 2000 other blocks in Amsterdam.

I’ve reached a certain stage of familiarity with the city. Namely, I know where I’m going just about when I get there. I take circuitous routes because I have to piece the city together from sensory memory each time—this is the block with the chocolaterie, and I know that one block this way is the place with the best apple pie, which means that I’m four blocks from the store that I actually set out to go to in the first place.

It’s true that the Dutch in Amsterdam speak English easily and well, with a certain endearing enthusiasm. There is none of the smoldering we-refuse-to-be-good-at-this ressentiment of the French. (Yesterday, I heard the stock boy at the Albert Heijn showing a British person the “ethnic food” section: “And I’m afraid that this is all we have, for the moment…”) Because of this, foreigners, especially Americans, feel at home in Amsterdam. What is hard to see, unless you look for it, is that Dutch is the language of the real city, of the hidden, gezellig rooms behind the open, stern modernity. Dutch is a behind doors and just-between-us language. Outsiders are thus kept at a proper, Calvinistic distance. You are welcome to come and stay; we are happy to speak English with you; you don’t actually know us at all. Imagine a city in which everyone seems to be smiling at each other behind your back (or, in my case, over my head) and that’s something like the feeling of being a stranger in Amsterdam. It’s not malicious, and not mean-spirited. You just don’t speak the language of life here.

There seems a surprising number of tanning parlors, until I think about the number of days that the sky is that particularly Dutch shade of grey. Perhaps because Amsterdam is still an enigma to me, I hardly notice the weather. Even rainy days are wonderful because they are so typically Amsterdam. It’s exactly as it is with a new love, when their habit of dropping socks on the floor and leaving the toilet seat up seem but charming aberrations in an otherwise perfect person.

Yesterday, biking home after a late movie—about 1 a.m.—we swerved around a taxi that had precipitously pulled up onto the bike lane (something only done under severe duress). Leaning out the window was a young man—possibly Dutch, in that the taxi driver was imploring him to “buiten steppen”—vomiting milky, bile-y vomit out the open taxi window. Still—will it be believed?—this only added to the atomosphere of the night, the charm of the lights on the canals and the exhilarating feeling of biking home, late at night in a city full of flowers.

Dutch Television, Pt. 3 in an Ongoing Series

One of the rules of Dutch television--as far as I have been able to tell--is that one will come in on any given one at the least explicable point. Even with my 70% Dutch comprehension, I still have no idea what was going on in this scenario: an echt Nederlandse jongen, tall, stretched-thin, blue eyed, clutching a large wooden dildo. A shaman of some kind (this is Indonesia, I gather) is performing some kind of ritual that is causing the guy to keep saying, "God, this is crazy. I am so insane to be doing this." After the ritual, the doctor tells the guy not to get himself wet or have sex for the next three days.

Next channel, next hour: three average looking, middle-aged Dutch men. Sitting in a large, heart-shaped jacuzzi bathtub. With bubbles. And, I hasten to add, bathing trunks. They are discussing bicycles. How did they end up in the bathtub? What larger point is being made? Why discuss bicycles in the bathtub? It's all a mystery to me.

a new snarky person to love

I followed a link from wonkette to IMAO, a new place for me to spend time rather than reading my student's papers on Seneca. Frank points out that, well, hey, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, especially when it comes to approval ratings. And he has some suggestions--good, valuable, almost terrifyingly plausible suggestions.

There's Nothing as Dangerous as a Man with Nothing to Lose

There's some indication that President Bush may be gearing up to attack Iran since he doesn't think any of his successors will handle it. It could just be a wild rumor, but I think it's a cool idea. It's time President Bush focuses on the one thing he has going for him: His approval ratings are so low he can essentially ignore the public's opinion. That's true freedom, and he might as well run with it.

FRANK IDEAS FOR PRESIDENT BUSH NOW THAT HE NO LONGER HAS TO WORRY ABOUT PUBLIC OPINION

* Next time Congress doesn't pass a bill he wants, burn down the Capitol.

* Doesn't like a country's attitude? Beat up their ambassador and ship him back to his country in a nailed shut wooden crate.

* Plan and execute an elaborate casino heist.

* Scalp John Edwards.

* Like Disney World, every day at the White House ends with fireworks.

* Announce that, after careful consideration, you've ordered air strikes on Latveria. Sit back and watch the confusion.

* By executive order, all restaurants, convenience stores, and school cafeterias must serve nachos.

* Move Department of Defense resources to building a real-life transformer. Demand it makes "that sound" when it transforms.

* Randomly announce a day to be the holiday "Bush Day." Demand that for the day all TV stations must play Red Dawn in a continuous loop.

* Invite journalists to check out the conditions at Gitmo and then lock them inside as prisoners.

* Give the national anthem a techno beat.

* Start a new war. When the press demands comments, have Tony Snow tell them that you're "too busy eating pie."

Yaaaay! FIREWORKS!!!!!!!!

since feeling is first

So, now we know that our 'rational' thoughts are merely those compelling narratives that we lay over emotional and physical reactions that have already occurred. Which makes me think of e.e. cummings, who was--in this case at least--about forty years ahead of neuroscience:

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

get your fucking war on

I love David Rees, and I'm always happy when I forget to go to his website for a while and then get to to work my way backward through weeks of strips that make me look like a people-loving Pollyanna.

Y'know, You Leave Your Country for a Few Days

And all kinds of stuff happens. So the Surgeon General--now that his term is over--has decided to tell the world that the Bush Administration puts ideology over science. Which, you know, some of us already knew, but it's always fine to hear again. I just want to say, though, that it would have been nice if maybe some of these people--Colin Powell, I'm talking to you--had maybe, I don't know, done this five years ago. I'm just sayin.' Disgruntled ex-employees of the EPA, now is the time to tell us how Bush and Laura eat endangered species for lunch, with a helping of baby seal on the side.

The Senate Democrats, emboldened by The Administration's low ratings, and the fact that this is a way to get at Cheney without pissing off their corporate sponors, are trying to cut the funding for Cheney's office. I agree with this tactic. I think, at the very least, we should make Halliburton pay Cheney's office expenses directly. Cut out the middleman, efficiency, fiscal responsibility, etc. etc.

Finally, though, I laughed out loud while watching Michael Moore take Wolf Blitzer to the woodshed the other day. The "report" that CNN did on Moore's movie is so laughably bad, so clearly written by C students from Yale, that I couldn't even watch it. But the second half, where Moore opens fire and demands an apology from CNN and calls them corporate lackeys? I could watch that several more times. It's right there with Jon Stewart's (long may he prosper) appearance on Crossfire.

stroopwafels and canals and tall people, oh my

After a hard day's shopping, and thanks to my parents, I can now leave the country with some sperry top siders, lacoste shoes, and a new digital camera. I am all set. With god as my witness, someday I will totally be self-supporting and buy my own shoes. Seriously.

More news from the other side of the Atlantic.

Uit

My passport arrived today, which means I can officially leave the country on Friday. I'm so happy to go back to Amsterdam, to eat stroopwafels and get lost along the canals and buy lots of flowers. And after the news about Our Dear Leader commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby, I don't know if I'll come back.