That’s not the only bad-time aspect to these, by Dutch standard, normal political proceedings though. The new elections are sheduled for may, there are local council elections in march. I think it’ll make the two bodies of government too much alike, even though local parties are mostly incarnations of the national ones in name and logo only. A few rather more interesting topics will have to be dealt with much, much later such as the whole retirement at 67 thing and plenty of other things. Everyone is now happily assuming that a new cabinet can be in place in august or september. That’s not bloody likely though. Last time the formation of the coalition took about seven months. This time around I suspect the vote will be split even more. The formation should take even longer. That’s one way to get out of taking hard decisions half the people of the country won’t like of course.

Here’s article. It’s in Dutch so I’ll briefly recap the main points of it.

At some point the gov.nl said local councils have to have an archaeological survey done of their soil. I don’t know the reason but I’d guess it is to roughly chart what is and what is not particularly interesting to try to preserve. Staphort is one of the more God fearing towns you can find in this country. And the Staphorst council figures that since they have to pay for this survey, they also want the biblical view of the age of things in the archaeological survey. Now here we run into a bit of a mathematical problem. For those of you who need enlightenment on this part. Science claims just over 4.5 billion years of Earth, calculations based on the bible generally say 6 000 years, though the article states that their estimates range from 6 000 to 12 000 years old. That’s a time difference not even Einstein can fix for us.

Now I don’t feel like joking around about this because it’s just too damn easy. Oh ok. The Staphorst council is so dense that their time runs significantly slower than the time the rest of us perceive.

Instead, I think I’m going to feel very sorry for them as well as any soil surveyor they approach. I doubt any real scientist will even do this. Which means, like with other Christian science (documentaries aired by the EO for example) it’ll get tweaked to suit their needs. One thing is for sure while their tweaking will be blunt, the tool they have used will probably not be a flint hand axe!

Now I’m going to agree with them for a bit. Not the age thing, of course not. But their logic makes some sort of sense. They pay for the survey, they want it done they way they want it done. Here is where the gov.nl should’ve paid for it in stead or at least making the higher power (*sigh* gov.nl over local council, not sky-ghosts!) add a set of standards the survey has to meet. You know, to prevent random assholes with dowsing rods from making a bid for such a job.

First off you might be thinking WTF is SIRE. And if you’re not Dutch you would be thinking that. SIRE is basically a non-profit organisation aimed at changing society for the better through advertising. Their most well known advertising campaign runs around december/january about not being an idiot when it comes to fireworks. In short they tell you what you should already know.

And they’ve now taken it upon themselves to teach us how to deal with nice people. Clearly I’m an extraordinary person for not thinking that people should be nicer. According to sire.nl 78% of Dutch think people should be nicer. What they mean of course is act nicer, not be nicer. You can act nice and not actually be nice, hence the word act. Anyway, to me this is up to the individual and that is where it should remain. You can be nice if you want but surely it isn’t a bloody crime to be in a bad mood for a change or to just ignore someone. If you don’t want to deal with people you let them know. Not engaging in their niceness seems the right thing to do. SIRE also claims people find niceness suspicious, and I honestly don’t blame them. When you want a favour, you are nice. This again makes perfect sense but apparently being a little suspicious about niceness doesn’t.

Well thank you SIRE but I’d like to decline with a nod and a nice little smile. I’ll decide when and when not to be nice thank you very much.

In short: people complain and people love it.

First off I’d like to say it’s up to the owners of KLM to deal with these issues and up to the passengers to cope with them. The final say most definitely is with the KLM. And it’s the passenger’s job to fight these kinds of things in court.

Having said that…
how does that work out? Last time I was in a plane the size of the seats wasn’t all that great. I’m tall enough to have my knees embedded into the tray table thing and fat enough to be just about uncomfortable between those two standard-sized arm rests made of armour plated plastic or whatever. Fine, it fits. Sort of. Let’s go ahead and put someone bigger in that seat, bigger in all possible dimensions. How would it be safer for that person in two seats? The arm rest doesn’t move. Surely it can’t be two seats next to each other. That leaves that you’re paying for your second seat ahead of you. That’d work for people who need the leg room provied they are willing to REMOVE the seat, but not if you’re a particularly wide specimen of the human species.
Ok, so I can’t work out for you why they want you to buy two seats. I also don’t know how this would improve safety.

Since you’re buying two seats, do you get two meals, two blankets, twice the amount of luggage on board? If the plane crashes and you die a horrible death, is your charred corpose with the chair number attached to it noted as yours on the passenger list? Well whatever. What the KLM is getting from this is an excuse to sell two chairs for one person if they are big, less weight on the same amount of seats (read: less fuel etc) and on the whole less uncomfortable passengers.

Here’s what I think they should do. Stop using people as a unit. Have people, just like luggage, factored in as weight. That’s all they are anyway to an airline company. At least be honest about it. That way everyone pays the same amount for the trip, since it’s based on their total weight. Add people on the luggage weigh in.

Did anyone else notice that the date when this starts is april 1st. This seems like a very well planned april fools joke to me.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing here, judges throwing out files or people going through other people’s “household rubbish”. I think the first might be an honest but very big mistake and the second is very disturbing indeed.

The postman doesn’t go through your mail, the garbageman damn well shouldn’t go through your garbage…

Read it, though not as quickly as I would have liked and well. The only impression it left with me is “this is a radio script”. Now in HHG terms that is not necessarily a bad thing as any HHG fan might know, this is how it started after all. But for a novel, it’s diet-HHG at best. The basic story is pretty entertaining, I’m a fan of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged so that was a decent enough choice. It was also stitched onto the story as it ended in Mostly Harmless. Zaphod has two heads, sort of, as opposed to that horrible pop-up head thing being used in the movie (yeah I know, DNA’s idea. Doesn’t make it a good idea). So all in all, yeah, it’s HHG.

So why do I consider it HHG light rather than fullblown HHG. Why did I call it a radio script rather than a novel? Well. It lacks details. I wasn’t hearing the surroundings in my head. Less descriptions of the look and feel of the tech I suppose. And more importantly it lacks endless diversions and sidetracking into the infinite depths of some random culture on a random planetoid in a random nebula of a random galaxy with a very random history indeed. In short it lacks striking guide narrative. It is there, but they’re pretty short injections of tiny factoids rather than side-stories in a nutshell. Oh and there isn’t a single “dingo’s kidneys” in there. In stead we get “buffa biscuit” which just plain reminded me too much of the Star Wars “Bantha poodoo” remark (at the very least present in SWKOTOR1).

All in all not a bad read though. It’ll make a more entertaining radio play should it ever be produced than it does a novel though, if you’ve read DNA’s books religiously.

Mr. Nieuwenhuijs, thank you.

And just as a sidenote, there are many more examples of Fox doing this kind of idiotic false reporting such as this one. Does freedom of the press mean they can just plain pull shit out of their arses? And how do they manage to squeeze it all past that large rough-finished oak crucifix up there… I may need some time to get that image out of my head.