Zoobreak!

(this photo is copyrighted by Bert Bohlmeijer and AT5. Guys: I think I know someone who'd like to buy it, if you get in touch quickly...)

From the AP:

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.

Police spokesman Arnout Aben says the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighborhood for several hours after their 5:30 a.m. breakout.

The animals were back at the circus later Monday after being rounded up by police and circus workers with the assistance of dogs. Aben says neighbors fed some of the animals — which he said was a bad idea — but they were tame and nobody was hurt.

Says Aben: "You have to imagine somebody rubbing his eyes first thing in the morning and saying, 'Am I seeing things or is that 15 camels walking past?'"

Speaking of Swine, the big cull in the Hoge Veluwe is supposed to start tomorrow. I wonder if the Party for the Animals (political party) is going to go ballistic...

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Monkeys: Misanthropic or Misunderstood?

(photo:thomas lu)

"We can deal with mad bulls but monkeys are more difficult"

-New Delhi deputy police commissioner Jaspal Singh, as quoted by AFP.

I feel it is my duty to remark upon the spate of yellow journalism that has been denigrating the noble race of monkeys in recent days.

It began with an Agence France Presse article titled "Monkeys rampage in Indian capital", which quickly scaled Yahoo's "Most Viewed" charts, prompting the other agencies to respond.

"In land of the Monkey God, a primate menaces," Reuters blared.

To the AP's credit, it has a slightly more factual story, "Monkey Injures Several People in India," avoiding the dubious claim repeated by other agencies that a single monkey had hurt more than 2 dozen people.

Today the New York Times got into the act, two days late and with 1,000 words _ the words not worth the picture. At that length, the NYT is more a magazine than a newspaper...

All the stories are basically anthropocentric, species-ist and humanist in their outlook: people are good, and monkeys bad. People are valuable, monkeys are a nuisance.

And, aiming at the lowest common denominator, all make sure to mention prominently the death of New Delhi's vice mayor last month.

Trouble boiled over in late October when the city's deputy mayor, Sawinder Singh Bajwa, 52, fell to his death driving away monkeys from his home.

He was on his balcony reading a newspaper when four monkeys appeared, his family said. As he waved a stick to scare them away, he tumbled over the edge and died in hospital from head injuries.

-AFP

Tragic, surely. I pray that I don't die in some humiliating manner.
But no one dares to point out the obvious: if this guy weren't going after the monkeys with a stick, he'd be alive today.

In fact, none of the stories makes more than a passing effort to think about things from the monkeys' point of view.

(peter garnhum)



(mr. huevo)

Estimates for the city's monkey population in all four stories range from 5,000 to 25,000.

Well, I estimate New Delhi's human population at 14 million, and growing at the rate of 1/2 million per year. Who is overbreeding here?

A telling detail is included in the final sentence of the AFP story:

"Kartick Satyanarayanan, head of India's Wildlife SOS, said the invasion of natural habitats by mushrooming populations was at the root of the problem.
"Humans are taking all their space."

It's only natural for monkeys to strike back. In fact, rumor has it, the latest altercations are part of the monkey's "Take Back New Delhi" campaign, in which all the humans will ultimately be put in cages and be moved to neighboring Mumbai.

The monkeys are a nuisance, but please, don't insult my intelligence by suggesting that they can compete with say, pollution, on the list of troubles that New Delhi faces.

The other thing these stories do is mock Hinduism, the world's oldest surviving religion, in which monkeys are considered holy.

The AFP says that "along with sacred cows and buffaloes, marauding monkeys have been longstanding pests."

Efforts to drive out the animals is complicated by the fact that devout Hindus view them as an incarnation of Hanuman, the monkey god who symbolizes strength.

Devout Hindus? As opposed to lax Hindus, who cook and eat the monkeys? New Delhi is more than 80 percent Hindu.

There's a reason Hindus worship monkeys!

Monkeys are pure comedy gold. Always have been, always will be.

Praise Hanuman!

And please, keep me up to date about any important monkey news or comedy you come across...

(stephen butler)
(stephen butler)
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Van Gogh - Letter Sketch - Loving Couple - Langlois Bridge

(vincent van gogh - the plan)
(vincent van gogh - what remains of the canvas, which he destroyed)
(vincent van gogh - a later, calmer painting from near the same spot)
(vincent van gogh - the concept once again)

The AP has a story about a nice display at the Van Gogh museum.

Basically, from the above pictures you can see the way that Van Gogh planned his compositions carefully, even though as a (post) Impressionist, he painted somewhat spontaneously at the spot. It all went wrong when he had to take the canvas back to his studio to finish, and he ended up cutting out the couple and throwing away the rest.

"With the sketch blown up to scale, the "Loving Couple" would fit perfectly onto it, matching notations of the colors van Gogh intended to use, down to the word "jaune" — French for "yellow" — on the man's hat. The canal water is emerald green, as van Gogh planned, and the woman is draped in an orange shawl. Although the path is mostly brown, rather than pink, as the artist indicated, he began with pink and then later colored on top of it."-AP

Google has the best layout on this that I've seen.

The one problem is, the story doesn't really lay the images in question side by side, or at full resolution. So I've taken the liberty.

I wonder only slightly about the copyright issues here. After all, Van Gogh's paintings and letters are surely in the public domain (?!).


By the way, tonight is Museumnacht, or "Museum Night" in Amsterdam, when all the musuems are open until 2 a.m., and I'm planning to go out and take some photos, weather permitting.

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Magic Mushrooms Banned in Netherlands

(growroom)
Friday the Dutch government unveiled a ban on hallinogenic mushrooms.

I want to recycle some good photos I have lying around from earlier stories I did on this.

(smartshop)

Secondarily, I wanted to remark on the following: here is a list of the top stories in the Netherlands Friday (just after midnight Dutch time).



For those of you who don't read Dutch, they are:
1) Record oil price
2) 300 French Arrested for Child Pornography
3) Dead gangster's girlfriend remains in jail
4) Free Internet for soldiers
5) More traffic jam information on highway signboards
6) Bulgarians stymie "euro" spelling
7) Student wounds two in Rotterdam
8) Schiphol Airport won't be privatized
9) Al Gore wins Nobel Prize.

While the mushroom ban got a fair amount of attention internationally, it wasn't considered significant enough to make the list of top stories in the Netherlands.

Not quite sure why that is.


The city of Amsterdam is protesting, but the Oracle predicts they will find it difficult to resist a well-reasoned decision taken at the national level.

(sorry for the blur but this was taken with a cell phone!)

The Cabinet also plans to introduce a ban on smoking next year; marijuana smokers will be forced to sit in a ventilated compartment separated from the rest of the coffee shop.

I've very curious to see how that will work in practice.

The main mushroom growing company, Procare, says they plan to throw a party with the last mushrooms they grow legally.

If I can swing an invite I'll go and take pictures.
(ready for packaging) MORE

Soldier of Orange / Soldaat van Oranje

This photo (from Wikipedia) is a screenshot of Rutger Hauer in the film, Soldier of Orange/Soldaat van Oranje. The real Soldier of Orange died this week.

Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema was a man who lived a romantic, somewhat reckless, and somewhat peripatetic life, and was indeed fortunate to survive into old age.

Movies always make things seem more glamorous than they are, but c'mon: smuggling radio equipment into the Netherlands by boat, shuttling resistance leaders back and forth across the English Channel; flying bombing missions with the RAF; earning the highest military honor for bravery in battle; becoming close friends with the royal house; it's an amazing story.

Like the hero of "Europa, Europa" in some ways.

As an appendix, I highly recommend Soldaat van Oranje, which is debatably the best Dutch film there is (though debatably there's not a lot of competition). But Paul Verhoeven is, in my opinion, an underrated director, and this is his best work. Yes, better than "Turkish Fruit," not to mention "Starship Troopers" and "Robocop."

The photo above shows the war hero face to face with the collaborator; but the film itself is subtle. People make difficult choices, and live and die by them.

The ending of the movie is one of the ultimate expressions of the Dutch national character: Rutger Hauer drinks a glass of wine with an old school buddy who basically just sat out the war without doing anything. He says something to Hauer (Roelfzema) like "gosh, did all those things really happen to you?"

A multifaceted question.

I find that Verhoeven would end on that note so typically Dutch. Critical, self-critical, realistic in appraisal of his countrymen. Most of us are not heroes nor villains; and most Dutch who 'just followed orders' in shipping off Jews to the camps weren't either. They just watched as history went by.


Secondarily, I notice that Google has this story hosted on its own site. Is this Armageddon for AP's newspaper customers/owners?

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