Branko's Weblog

I moved this blog between systems at the end of 2005, and in the process commenting was switched off for old posts. Being unfamiliar with Wordpress at the time I decided to switch comments back on by hand, something that proved to be rather a cumbersome task. The task subsequently ended up on the back-burner, what with not being very important in the first place.

Well, we’re five full years on and guess what? I went back to the posts from those heady days of 2005 when I still had a job of sorts, when I lived in a different apartment, when a cat still roamed the halls of said apartment, when I had yet to discover the delights of Zoetermeer, and so on and so on, and switched commenting back on for them.

In the grand scheme of things this is not very important. In fact it is so unimportant that none of you cared to mention it to me. But this feels tidy.

Yesterday Queen’s Day. Grunt.

Comics:

• Tangy & Laverdure, De verdwenen DC-8
• De Blauwbloezen, De roos van Bantry

Books for the scanner:

• Herman en Dorothea, Wolfgang von Goethe
• De doorluchte vatenspoelster, Cervantes
• Over toneel, Frans Mijnssen

Books for the Branko:

• Momo, Michael Ende
• Prodwitt’s Guide to Writing
• Fotografie, Frans Naeff
• Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
• Paddeltje, de scheepsjongen van Michiel de Ruyter, Joh. H. Been
• Carpe Jugulum, Terry Pratchett
• Meneer Foppe in zijn blootje, Wim de Bie
• Een tafel vol vlinders, Tim Krabbé
• A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
• Kramer Versus Kramer, Avery Corman
• Maigret en het lijk aan de kerkdeur, Georges Simenon
• Twee verhalen van Yury Kazakov

Yesterday I took a long train ride to the South to visit relatives.

On my way back I walked through the village of Baarlo. One of its four (!) castles is Castle d’Erp which was for sale in 1972 for 1 guilder. I know this because at the time, my parents were considering buying it. While the (obviously symbolic) price was low, the snag was that necessary roof repairs were estimated to cost over a million guilders (somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 US dollar at the time, I guess). Since my parents did not have that kind of cash lying around, they tried to move other families to buy it with them, a scheme that ultimately failed. The castle was then bought by the municipality.

Today I went for a short hike along a small bit of the Defence Line of Amsterdam. As Wikipedia notes, this line, built between 1880 and 1920, became obsolete as soon as it was finished thanks to the inventions of the plane and the tank.

I got off at Abcoude station and walked 5 kilometres along the river Gein towards the Fort at Nigtevecht, and the same distance back.

Willow has suffered:

A fortification just outside the main fort:

Amsterdam-Rijnkanaal:

Ah, welcome to the virtual home of a lunatic.

Today there is a common cold on the menu, like yesterday, and similar time-units before. Rather fuzzy in the head, I am.

So now I am condemned to the hell of daytime television.

Have you ever noticed how some interviewees respond to their interviewers as if they are explaining things to literal retards? I always assumed there is just this type of interviewee, you know, who explains anything to anyone this way, slowly, deliberate, and not to afraid to pronounce and then answer every hidden assumption.

But with retards doing the interviews, it is hard to say what is going on these days.

Today I felt a little fitter than yesterday. This renewed vigour, I felt, was proven by the fact that yesterday I preheated the oven, but had forgotten to put the buns in. Whereas today… and then doubt started to creep in. I checked the kitchen. Suffice it to say that unlike yesterday, today I had not only preheated the oven, but had also taken the buns out of the fridge, and then … I just walked away.

I am going to try and come up with a couple of achievable, yet challenging New Year’s resolutions. In fact, that will be the first one.

In the meantime I wish you a good 2010.

A law should be passed that prohibits people from entering Dutch cities through their main railway stations, because more often than not your first impression will be of a barren wasteland where horrid things go to die. (Which, by the way, really fantastic! if you are into that sort of thing.)

This, for instance, is Zoetermeer, a name that translates to Sweeter Lake.

(”Kantoor te huur” means “office for rent.”)

A 20 kilometre hike today from Naarden, a town known better for the way it looks from the air than from the ground, to Muiden, where count Floris V had a castle built, only to see it used as a prison for himself by his enemies. The finish line was in Weesp, an unassuming town known to historians for the quality of its drinking water, and to me for having a railway station.

In case you are wondering, I did take photos of the fortifications of Naarden but, as I said, from the ground… And I also took pictures of Floris V’s castle, but those just did not make the cut. Here are the ones that did:

What you see in the last picture is the entrance to the harbour of Muiden.

Belastingdienst, the Dutch tax service, sent a form for me to fill out in which I needed to indicate projected future earnings. They do this almost each year—well, regularly—so that they can let you pay your taxes for 2020 in 2019 instead of the more reasonable 2021. And every year I postpone filling out this form (deadline August 1) as long as possible, so that I can always include my latest earnings in the estimate.

That’s the pre-amble. When I checked the form yesterday, I noticed the tax service wanted me to fill out my projected earnings for last year, 2008. I received this form at the end of May, two full months after I had reported them my income for 2008 (the cut-off date for which is April 1 in the Netherlands). More than a year after they had charged me income taxes over 2008 based on their own estimates. And two full days after they had corrected my income tax over 2008, presumably based on my April report.

In other words, have I just gone mad or is the tax service not quite right in the head? What am I missing here?

(I returned the form with the box checked that says they already know my income over 2008, which should be sufficient.)

When I was still in bed in the morning and not quite ready to get up, I was listening to Eddie Izzard’s Definite Article on my audio player, and apparently I had dozed off, because at one point I was sitting in a living room on a fairly high rug or carpet, wedged between a couch and a flat screen TV with the BBC on. And I was laughing about the show on my headset, which must have been not at all compatible with what was going on on the TV. And I was feeling slightly guilty about that, because it seemed a little a-social, to be watching a program with somebody and then actually be listening to something else.

But she must not have minded very much, because she did not say anything about it. Instead, her foot moved slowly closer and closer to my face, until it brushed me, as if accidentally, which gave me the impression that she wasn’t very much interested in the television either, but wanted to play.

Except that in that half-wake, half-dream state you do somewhat realize what is real and what is not, so I decided to keep listening to Eddie Izzard, which sort of chilled things between me and my dream date.

Before that I had actually woken up around six, which was a bit early for my taste, so I decided to stay in bed and had all kinds of intermittent dreams. One was the famous naked-in-public dream, though I was saved by two things. One, I got to keep my underwear on (thank you subconscious!), and two, the guy next to me started stripping and jumped in the water, which signaled to me that it apparently was OK to sit there barely clad. Even if it was at the tram stop.