02/07/30 Minister... Sir Humphrey...
02/07/26 Thoughts
02/07/24 An earthquake and other events
02/07/21 Insert bad pun here
02/07/17 Life after...
02/07/07 3 Opinion sites
02/07/03 5 Links about interactive fiction
02/07/01 4 Links about comics
I'm not sure whether, in the ever-popular Yes Minister series, the Minister ever tried to fire his indispensible but oh so irritating Secretary-General. Anyone wondering at what would happen if he did, should take a closer look at the Bomhoff / Van Lieshout situation.
Eduard Bomhoff is Minister of Health and vice Prime Minister for the LPF. Since he had been a member of Labour for nearly 40 years his appointment came rather as a surprise to all concerned.
Peter van Lieshout was Director-General of the Health department. From the start, Bomhoff had expressed a lack of confidence in Van Lieshout. The reasons were never made clear - Van Lieshout's Labour affiliations would have influenced his work (coming from Bomhoff, that sounded quite odd)... Van Lieshout had been reading the newspaper during a meeting with members of an organisation for the disabled (and so what - as far as I know Van Lieshout's behaviour wasn't Bomhoff's concern at the time)...
Firing Van Lieshout would have required the co-operation of Minister of the Interior and vice Prime Minister Remkes, a VVD conservative. Remkes didn't co-operate. A major thrash in the Second Chamber ensued, with proposed changes of law prohibiting firing civil servants for political reasons. I saw some of this on TV on Friday and Prime Minister Balkenende's apparent attempts at a cover-up (firing was never an issue, personnel matters are not discussed in the cabinet) didn't seem to make things better. Eventually the thrash died down, though his coalition partners from the christian democrat CDA and the conservative VVD made it clear to Bomhoff that something like this had better not happen again.
NRC Handelsblad: OR verontrust door ontslag topambtenaar
A poll by Interview/NSS for the Nova television program indicates that, were general elections to be held today, the LPF would get 15 seats in the Second Chamber in stead of the 26 it has now. The christian democrats would gain 5 seats and get 48, and the conservative VVD would get 25 seats (they currently have 24). Labour would gain 3 seats and get 26, making them the second largest fraction. The socialist SP would gain 1 seat and end up with 10, the christian fundamentalist SGP would gain 1 seat and end up with 3 seats in the Chamber. Unfortunately, perhaps, the polls held prior to the general elections in May turned out to be off by a pretty large margin and whether the latest polls are any more reliable is unclear.
De Volkskrant: LPF bijna gehalveerd in peiling
More Dutch politics and current events:
Dutch politics in 2002
Today's serendipitous finds:
For some reason Google considers this page "similar" to my article about Microsoft's smart tags. I fail to see the similarity, but it's a good site about an interesting artist I had never heard of before so thank you, Google.
Jan Svankmajer, alchemist of the surreal
Band pictures. Embarrassment by proxy.
Metafilter discussion
Great site about street photography.
Pink headed bug
The medium is the message.
Transdiffusion
All about screenwriting
Wordplay
Maybe it all began in the sixties. I guess something did. In the Netherlands, life in the fifties had been fairly rule-based. There were good and proper ways to do things, and that was that. The sixties changed that, with emotion taking the place of tradition as a guiding principle.
Maybe the popularity of the New Age that started some time in the mid-eighties, early nineties had something to do with it as well. At its best, a breath of fresh air compared to intitutionalised religion. At its worst, a hodge-podge of incompatible beliefs based on whatever feels right.
Reality shows. Emotion TV. Millions watching Diana's funeral. And demonstrating their newly learned behaviour after Fortuyn died.
Part of what happened after Pim Fortuyn died was the cult of feeling. Feeling shocked and betrayed because of the murder. Feeling threathened by immigration and crime. For a while these feelings were accepted without question, because to feel was to be part of the new order.
On the other hand, the aftermath of Fortuyn's murder and the LPF's rise to power did have a thing or two in common with other modern-day revolutions. The anti-intellectualism and the glorification of the ordinary people had some uneasy parallels with the Gesundes Volksempfinden of the nazi era, and with what happened under the various communist regimes. The rejection of "old politics" (with the recent death threaths against Mat Herben because his party's opposition against Ad Melkert's appointment with the World Bank hadn't been strong enough for some supporters' tastes as a recent example) also sounds familiar.
In a way this is quite comforting. Revolutions rarely last in the Netherlands, and consensus tends to prevail.
More Dutch politics and current events:
Dutch politics in 2002
Today's links:
Illegal immigration across the US - Mexican border.
Metafilter discussion
Referrer script. Neat.
Stephen's web referrals
(via High context)
We've got a government. And we had a very small earthquake on Monday morning. I've got a couple of days off, I was sleeping late and at about 7:45 the earthquake woke me up. Initially I thought the bed was going to collapse under me (that happened to me once) and the thought of an earthquake didn't cross my mind until I read that evening's newspaper.
Well, anyway, about the government. This week's Vrij Nederland magazine called it a "rariteitenkabinet", a "cabinet of odds and ends" or Wunderkammer. Several of the LPF's ministers and junior ministers are members of other parties than the LPF, one of the more striking examples being vice prime minister Eduard Bomhoff who had been a member of the Labour party for almost forty years.
The record for the most short-lived government membership now belongs to the former junior minister for emancipation and family affairs, Philomena Bijlhout. Her membership of Surinam's people's militia, a paramilitary organisation that people participated in on their spare time, was not much of a problem in itself. Initially the Bouterse regime was quite popular, also in the Netherlands. The December murders in 1982, when 15 of Bouterse's political adverseries were killed, changed all that. Bijlhout claimed that she resigned from the people's militia before the December murders, and that photos of her wearing a uniform would not be found. She turned out to be wrong on both counts.
Dutch minister resigns within hours
More Dutch politics and current events:
Dutch politics in 2002
Today's net flotsam:
Yikes.
ABC News: Virus dials 911 (warning: here be pop-under ads)
Thoughts like these cross my mind, sometimes.
Kuro5hin: OK, so NOW where...
Blogger recording the latest about 9/11. Interesting use of the medium.
Metafilter discussion
New dark culture. Whatever that means.
Opi8
I must confess I was one of the about 900,000 people who watched the removal of Pim Fortuyn's coffin from its temporary burial site in Driehuis-Westerveld on TV late Friday afternoon.
And a rather unusual event it was. Once the coffin was raised from the vault a Surinam lady, in some kind of traditional burial ceremony, spread a cloth over the coffin and proceeded to sing a kind of improvised goodbye hymn to the melody of Amazing Grace. In the TV broadcast she was called a friend of the family, though in an interview in Saturday's NRC Handelsblad the wife of Fortuyn's eldest brother described her as a self-proclaimed expert on Surinam burial ritual who had offered her services to the family after Fortuyn's death.
After the ceremony the coffin was transported to Rotterdam, escortedby about 100 bikers ("Pim was a kind of rebel and so are we").
Oddly enough, the initiative to broadcast the whole thing live on television was taken by Fortuyn's family. The reasons that were given were:
Fortuyn was a man of the people. People want to witness anything that has to do with him and have a right to do so;
There were rumors that Fortuyn wasn't actually buried at Driehuis-Westerveld. The family wanted to dispel these rumors by allowing the reburial to be broadcasted live. Of course the real hard-core conspiracy fans won't be convinced, since we got to see the coffin but (thankfully) not the body.
One bit of good news is that public turn-out at Driehuis-Westerveld and the Rotterdam airport from where the coffin was flown to Italy was far less than expected. In stead of the thousands that were anticipated (and mentioned in the BBC article linked below), only 500 to 600 people actually came to the airport. We may be regaining our senses here.
The Guardian: Fortuyn exhumation to be shown on TV
BBC: Fortuyn's body is flown to Italy
NRC Handelsblad: Betrokkenheid bij Fortuyn lijkt voorbij
De Volkskrant: Fortuyn begraven - de show is over
Trouw: Pastoor Rigolo draagt heel gewone mis op
More Dutch politics and current events:
Dutch politics in 2002
Today's found footage:
Pictures of all turf labyrinths in Great-Britain. I just happen to like labyrinths, OK?
British turf labyrinths - an update
Who said left-wing radicals had no sense of humor? At least, I hope they're joking.
The radical history of football
The fairy feller's masterstroke: unusual art by a Victorian gentleman and convicted murderer.
Metafilter discussion
True porn clerk stories. You ought to read them for the writing. Honestly.
Metafilter discussion
Very funny, even (or especially) if you don't like the Lord of the Rings.
Secret diaries
Let's say that you've had this tremendous fight with your spouse. You had all this anger and hurt and frustration building up in you, and you just let it rip.
And then, there you are. Your adrenalin level is going down really fast, there are broken plates all over the place, and the one thing you can think of is: where do I go now? How do I get back to normal?
Right now, living in the Netherlands is a bit like that.
More Dutch politics and current events:
Dutch politics in 2002
Today's random linkage:
Providing accessible information on science, technology and society.
Access Research Network
Computers as persuasive technologies. Many practical hints and tips.
Captology
Psychology resource with large number of articles and papers available on-line.
Psyche matters
Alternative news and underground culture.
Disinformation
Rant, parody and pop culture.
Hissyfit
Loud and occasionally off-key.
Daily howler
Five technical discussion and software exchange sites: Arstechnica, Betanews, Freshmeat, Infoanarchy and Slashdot.
5 Sites (4)
I've expanded my review of Lileks.com a bit. I realize that most of these "Five Sites" reviews that I've written are announcements rather than reviews, and will go back and revise them.
The Bleat
I've always loved text adventures, and I never got into that 3D first-person shooter stuff. I can remember how, years and years ago, I was in a room full of people and we were all playing a text adventure on a computer connected to a TV screen, one person typing in the commands and the whole room shouting at them what to do. Shows how old I am, I guess.
Old-style text adventures available via telnet.
Infocom games playable online
Designing interactive fiction.
Inform
Good collection of links about interactive fiction.
Interactive fiction links
Discussion on The Noodle Incident. At one point they're talking about writing interactive fiction, though I'm not sure why I bookmarked it. Interesting read, though.
Stay awake - more new words
The magazine for interactive fiction enthusiasts.
XYZZY news
This site was linked all over the place last year. Now it's linked here. I'm so unhip.
Scot McCloud
Flash 5 required, fairly bandwidth-extensive.
Broken saints
Comics and free speech.
Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
The weird stuff
Red meat
Reviews of another five interesting sites: Cryptome, Politechbot, Red rock eater digest, Risks digest and Securityfocus.
5 Sites (3)
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