A Lethe

6:30. Consciousness. The baby is wide awake and chattering.

8:00 Showering with my 2-year old. He busted the coffee pot with a single well-placed blow with a ceramic dessert dish last night. So today we go cold turkey.

9:00. Crap! I'm late to learn of a big story: Corporate Express has agreed to be bought by Staples. EUR9.25 per share but what's the full price? 182 million shares outstanding according to Euronext * EUR9.25 per share = EUR1.68 billion. Make it "Around EUR1.7 billion." Why, after numerous attempts, am I not on the Corporate Express email list? On the bright side, it will never matter again after today.

10:00 CORRECTION! Staples' press release says the purchase price was EUR3.1 billion. They outta know, it's their money. That's cost plus debt. No breakdown, but that appears to be an awful lot of debt CE is carrying.

11:00. To office, to office, jiggety jig.
Amsterdam is beautiful.


12:00 Bureaucracy. What's the price on Corporate Express? Company says 185 million shares outstanding * EUR9.25 per share = EUR1.71 billion. And EUR1.09 billion in debt. But that's still just EUR2.8 billion. EUR300 million has gone missing.

13:00 London and New York like the idea of a story on how coffee shops will be affected by a smoking ban. It's scheduled for next week, no backing out now. Also, no word on what happened to that Koolhaas feature I turned in 2 weeks back.

14:00 A co-worker gets bad personal news. No time to talk, I have to leave Amsterdam *right now* and head for The Hague. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's right hand man Motjtaba Hashemi Samareh is doing Q&A with reporters. Ride with the photographer, he's got a motorcycle, it's quicker. I'm getting too fat and old for riding on the back of motorcycles.



15:00-17:30. The Iranian Embassy is a very civilized place for a talk about Iran's confrontation with the West over nuclear power.

I have trouble pronouncing the name Ahmadinejad. I laugh privately to myself about the idea of asking Samareh whether Iran has considered trying to get the Olympic Games to Tehran, to improve its image.

(Samareh .. he had something of Ed Norton in his grin)

I don't know as much about the situation as I would like, let alone as much as I should.

The press conference drags on and on. I "reject" five phone calls while Samareh speaks. He carefully avoids direct answers to direct questions, and invokes national pride and a feeling of justice when explaining why Iran is so determined to enrich uranium even if it harms the country's economy and international standing.

He says:
"I have a question for YOU: is having access to nuclear energy good or not? If it's good why shouldn't others have it? If it's wrong, why do you have it?"

(An anecdote ... in short, even the school children in Iran are singing songs about the importance of nuclear power. It's a matter of national pride, so he says. The sound quality is terrible. Once again, I realize I need a better video camera).

17:30 Start walking through diplomatic neighborhood to tram to train to bike to home. Trouble with computer on train. Woman asks me not to play recording of Samareh out loud. Work with earphones on. Paris has taken over the Iran story, send Samareh quotes through to them. My dad calls. An editor still wants to know about Corporate Express's purchase price. Leave messages with Corporate Express and Staples.

1830: Amsterdam is beautiful as always.


1900: My dad wants to talk details about our upcoming family vacation. Two children are crying when I walk in the door.

1930: Corporate Express and Staples call back. Neither can explain the purchase price in a way that makes sense. But Staples says there are 200 million shares outstanding * EUR9.25 per share = EUR1.85 billion. And the real number including debt is EUR3.06 billion: they rounded up to EUR3.1 billion in the press release. We're closing the gap!
Corporate Express says perhaps the debt figure is higher for Staples to buy than it is on CE books _ hmmm.
Staples denies that. Certainty may elude us on this today.
I think we're best off just sticking with the EUR3.1 billion figure we had in the first place.

2000: "Quality time" with the kids. My daughter has learned to grab her feet. My coworker calls to further explain bad personal news. Sympathize, briefly. A contradiction in terms? I dine on chips and candy bars I swiped randomly from a "party bowl" left out at our office yesterday.

20:30: A lawyer I left a message with days ago, Liesbeth Zegveld, calls out of the blue to talk about the Srebrenica hearings next week. What Srebrenica hearings? Civil suit against the Dutch government seeking compensation for failing to protect Bosnian Muslims during the fall of Srebrenica in 1995. The lawyer explains there are two totally different cases, Monday and Wednesday. Local hire employees on Monday, class action suit for 'civilans' on Wednesday. The U.N. and the Dutch government are accused in both. Dutch gov't is protesting jurisdiction. Why not go after the Bosnian Serbs, they were the ones who did the killing, I ask the lawyer. (Answer: deep pockets. And Dutch voluntarily subject themselves to the rule of law). She claims juridical shennanigans by Dutch Justice. I can't vet those kind of claims well from where I sit. We talk for nearly 45 minutes. I'm glad she called. Next week is going to be hell.

21:30: My wife announces she's going to bed. That prompts a marital debriefing.

22:00 My wife goes to bed. "My" time begins.

22:30 Idea for blog post germinates and is rapidly brought to fruition. In theory this day shall not be forgot. Yet all shall be forgot...

23:30 Check Facebook, answer emails, then bed. Hope I can sleep.

MORE

Busy

Busy, busy busy MORE

Sison, Dati and a pretty hectic day

Today was the kind of day where it's so busy things start falling through the cracks.

First there was another protest in front of the courthouse where Philippine communist leader/academic Jose Maria Sison is being held.

(Si-son Vrij! means Free Sison! The man with the megaphone is Luis Jalandoni, and the woman in white is Sison's wife Julie. She has bruises on her wrists where she says the Dutch police grabbed her during the raids; she's not being allowed to see her husband).

Then the French Justice Minister Rachida Dati popped over to check out a Dutch asylum for the criminally insane _ because maybe they want to adopt the Dutch system for recidivist sex criminals. This is a big story in France that no one else cares much about. She spoke French likety-splitly at this press conference.

(sorry for the red eyes, Ms. Dati. I'm still not much of a photographer).

Then there was a ruling in the Sison case, that he can be held for another two weeks.

I'm very, very curious to see the evidence against Sison, and now I have to wonder why the judge is keeping him in solitary confinement. The public prosecutors aren't saying anything about their evidence. That's normal, but the track record of the government isn't great in proving criminal organizations, much less "chain of command" cases.

But basically, we will know nothing for the next two weeks at least.

The news coming from the lawyer is very one sided: he says there was "no evidence" against Sison, but it says something that the judges thought it was enough to hold him anyway.

Having met the man, I will be very surprised if he said anything out loud that could get him into trouble. Various members of the NDF here told stories of how the Dutch police burst into their houses, breaking down the doors. One guy said his kids were like "sheesh, all they had to do was knock."


(I thought it would be cute to see the demonstration from the eyes of the people holding the banners).

Meanwhile, Ms. Dati came through to check out the Dutch system of holding criminals who commit crimes like rape or pedophilia in mental hospitals until they are considered cured _ even if the cure lasts longer then their prison sentence.

It's ironic that the French would consider adopting this system, since it's been one of the number one most criticized policies in the Netherlands in the past five years: prisoners keep escaping supervision while on furlough and committing crimes (rape, murder, you name it).

But that's politics.
MORE

I want to ride my bicycle

Obviously, I need a little work on my camera skills.

Rainy days and Mondays always get me down, especially when both come at once.

However, this is the kind of story that's extremely easy to write.



This is also one of the things that I love about Dutch culture, without reservation, and about my job: my commute is 10 minutes by bike through scenic Amsterdam.

"Bakfietsen have been around for decades, used mostly by left-wing Amsterdam residents and squatters. Since the turn of the century however, they have become mainstream.
In the wealthier neighborhoods, having a high-quality model has become something of a status symbol among young urban professionals, who deck them out with chrome finishes and various accessories. Rain covers are a must.
``I see more of them all the time,'' said florist Samira Sindaba, a bakfiets owner who runs the ``Happy Flower,'' a stand on a busy corner in the east of Amsterdam. ``My daughter - she's 6 - she thinks it's fantastic.''
Her bakfiets, a top model, cost $2,700 new, and it's insured like a car. "
-Associated Press

Guardian story
MORE

>Red Herring

"The newspaper Algemeen Dagblad said Wednesday it has received anonymous threats
against several of its journalists, threatening to kill them if the paper
publishes its 26th annual herring stand review."

-Associated Press


So the first question about this story, is this threat for real, or could it possibly have been fabricated to sell papers.
Secondarily, I'm a little disappointed that this story doesn't prominently moot the theory that a disgruntled fish seller might have been behind the threat. Who else would have motive?

Nonetheless not a bad yarn, as my quality colleague M--- put it.
MORE

Amsterdam's 'Mother Teresa' Dies

Expatica Version

I met her once; she was joking around the whole time. It was a little hard for me to understand her Dutch, but her smile was hard to resist.

I couldn't help thinking while writing this story that she got so much recognition in her later life _ which is great _ but there are so many lonely old people who are pining for attention. It's overwhelming to think about all that pain. Majoor Bosshardt was very deserving of respect, but then, who isn't? She would have been the first to agree...

"World, world, oh world! But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee, life would not yield to age." MORE