hit me.

On my way through Westerpark to see Filmhuis Cavia's showing of an actual 16mm celluloid copy of Blue Velvet at the Buurtboerderij, complete with speed and focus problems. An unexpected bonus was the ambient stereo environment provided by a herd of live goats several meters away and a house music festival off in the distance. All this sonic goodness was followed by a gig I didn't say yes to, which is still a hard thing to do (not saying yes), but during the movie gentle waves of gratefulness kept lapping at my feet while I focused on nothing else but the story in front of me.

c'mon.

Of course I'm talking to the weathermen on this side of the world. Rainy all weekend long was the prediction as recently as yesterday.

If you're one of the people who may have invited me out of the house this weekend and I said no I wasn't going anywhere, the fact that I am outside has nothing to do with you, it just happened ("it meant nothing!").

I was up early after an amazing night of sleep, and so I started cleaning, which is my goal for the day. I needed to drop off 4000 dead batteries at the Dirk and take a bag of old clothes (mine, honey, mine) to the, uh, "clothes donation point", can't remember the Dutch, which is a big enclosed dumpster looking thing, so I went outside...

And then I just kept going. It was beautifully sunny, and, since it was supposed to rain all day, I thought I'd sneak in a little bike ride while it wasn't. And so I started off through the Westerpark.

It didn't get any less nice, so I kept going. And kept going, all the way to Sloterdijk.

I really like Sloterdijk on Sundays, it reminds me of my adolescence in suburban Atlanta. Whereas previous generations of kids used to sneak off into the woods to drink, smoke, and fool around, we didn't have any woods. So we used to sneak off into deserted office parks.

This was before workplace shootings, cheap webcams, and cellphones, so security was an entirely different ballgame back then, just some old fat dude in a car with a walkie-talkie and no gun. As long as you avoided him you were OK.

And then I rode home.

And now I'm going to clean.

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down in the south.

It's been under consideration for some time now, but I think I'm finally ready to begin trying to learn something about Ethiopian/Eritrean cooking. The spur in my haunch is probably Andy's approaching birthday, which will sport a marked Ethiopian focus due to visiting Ethiopians doing the cooking and providing the live tuneage. Also our friend Big Ron is going to Addis for a month this summer, etc. Like that.

So here are some resources:

• Saveur article (cut/pasteable recipes here, though I have no idea why anyone would want to do that)
• This looks an awful lot like the Chris Schlesinger recipe I've been thinking about doing, plus the sambussa looked interesting.
• I get a creepy vibe from this website, but there are step-by-step videos and shit. In case I've forgotten how to stir or something.

First steps: berberé drumsticks and nit'r qibe runner beans.

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hey, you know what this needs?

A big road. Just running right through the middle of it.

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you're ruining everything.

Haven't had time to read any more about this, but if it's true it would be really really disappointing. Prepare to mobilize.

For non-Dutch readers, it's about the proposed carving up of our fantastic and beloved Westerpark into something that allows for "more pedestrian and automobile traffic". This glorious vision of a more car-friendly future is some years off (2040), but no less mind-boggling for that.



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westerpark west.

I have an unenviably roomy capacity for forgetting how peace-inducing a walk in the park can be. A good park, I mean, somewhere big enough to where mopeds and streetsweepers and randomly screaming general sonic urbanity is all unhearable.






















Well, in the Westerpark you can still hear trains quite often, very close by, but that's a sound I don't mind at all. In fact it may be one of my favorite things about Westerpark.

I also like the diversity of the place, there's a lot of different, whatchacallit, ecosystems? going on in this large (120 acres) but efficiently and appealingly arranged urban wilderness. Not to mention that it's an internationally-recognized example of reclaiming unusable industrial areas of the city center and transforming them into something radically more interesting and useful.













Back to peace-induction. For me to forget about it, the forgotten nature walk also has to be a good walk. Not just bringing a book and a bottle of wine and flopping down in the nearest available spot. That I remember to do all the time.













It doesn't always work out for everyone like this. This person did not find his or her time in the woods to be nearly as relaxing as I found mine:












Nature also does a good job of quietly reminding you that it doesn't care about your daily life stressors, and maybe you shouldn't either. At least not all the time. Any idea what this unfortunate half-body is? It's quite large, and this is only half of it. My initial quesses were: raccoon, possum (which I'm not even sure we have here), were-rabbit, cave cat, and rat-heron.

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lone catfish.

I unexpectedly "saw" Radiohead live last night in the Westerpark. Yeah, I saw them from behind the stage, coming out of their dressing room or whatever and going on stage, then I didn't see them again until they came offstage. But we could hear them, and this arrangement meant that I didn't have to give the evil bastards at Mojo any of my money (tickets were 60 euro).

It was unexpected because the plan had been to listen to them from our roof, thereby avoiding the 18,000 people in Westerpark, but yeah then it turns out that we knew a few of these people, they were having a picnic/party, the weather was perfect, etc. Here's a video of what life was like for the ticketless.

Hopefully some actual pictures of the Dog Hill Party will surface after the people who had the cameras put themselves back together, at which point I'll replace the above photo stolen from Flickr. Unfortunately there's no picture of an unusually intoxicated HPoes kicking an empty beer can down the middle of the street.

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It probably says something important, sociologically speaking, that this is the first time I've ever heard anyone say this in my entire life. Hooray for us, the childless.

I recommend NOT reading the "Comments" section after the article if you want to retain any moderately non-negative feelings you might have gotten from reading the article. The Fresh Prince was right.

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Something I make all the time for myself is gingered catfish. But I never do it the same way twice, and for this reason I almost never serve it to anyone. So I'm going to try and put a recipe for it together now, in hopes that said recipe might become a reliably reproducible part of my repertoire.

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