The Mighty Quynh

For those of you playing at home, here’s a little Sinterklaas spirit from everyone’s favorite (racist, by American standards) Dutch character, Zwarte Piet.

“I am a Black Pete, but I have a white L.”

As my Belgian buddy, who sent me that video, explained, “lul (L) means dick (D). So he’s Black P but he has a white D. ”

Or it could be a perfectly innocent song about traditional Sinterklaas chocolate letters, you know!

Since I don’t ever plan on having a big apartment, Flux chairs are looking like a pretty spiffy option for my future abodes.

One of the billions of things I found cool about Amsterdam is the amount of art (graffiti) and bright colors I saw on a number of buildings. What I didn’t realize at the time was that those buildings were probably in the hands of squatters. You can see an example of such a building in this article.

Courtesy Radio Netherlands Worldwide

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Now that squatting has been banned, I wonder how much the city will lose part of its colorful character. Hopefully I’m still in time to snap pictures of those buildings, which I neglected to do the first time around because I assumed they would be around forever.

Meanwhile, people still think I only like NL for the drugs.

So the Dutch right-wing coalition government wants to halve all “non-western” immigrants. If the PVV had its way, it would expunge all Muslims entirely. We knew that coming in. Now it seems they don’t want too many tourists, either, as they target marijuana policy in a push for coffee shops to be “members only” clubs. Good luck with that. Why not build a fence around the country while you’re at it?

He’s not even playing anything from David Guetta!

This is the kind of video I put on three times in a row and still can’t get enough of it.

Check out what’s between the “Home” and “About Quynh” links. A shiny new Archives page! The default side navigation Archives was beginning to take up way too much space and I’d been wanting a separate page for them for a while. I found this excellent page explaining how to do it for all you WordPress folks.

I also installed a plugin to make my URLs prettier (I was actually looking for an archive plugin when I installed it, but it worked out) and changed my title fonts from Georgia to Helvetica to womp you in the face some more. Let’s see if it sticks.

The closest game at the time we’ll be there would’ve been FC Feyenoord v ADO Den Haag. (By the way, Feyenoord’s stadium is called “De Kuip” which means “The Tub”… CUTE.) I poked around a bit and found out I needed a club card to buy tickets to a game. This in turn requires mailing in an application, which will take around 3 weeks to process. And you can’t have multiple teams’ club cards, you can only have one. Sheesh, what’s with the stringent rules just to buy a bloody ticket?

Turns out it’s all thanks to good ol’ European soccer hooliganism. If I thought ticket-buying was stringent, I was in for a rude awakening when I read this article about why club cards are here to stay.

And I thought Philadelphia fans were bad. Ripping up seats, setting off fireworks that blow back up in someone’s face, racist remarks… You can read it all yourself.

No thanks. Even if ADO are boycotting this match (they are), I’m thinking I’m not as ready as I thought I was for the European football experience. I will stick to relatively tame Red Bull games Stateside. You don’t need a club card for that!

I hope the day before I am to leave Amsterdam, Eyjafjallajökull blasts the fuck out of Earth’s bowels and shits into the atmosphere again.

“Hi Mr. Man, I’m afraid I won’t be able to make it into work tomorrow. The Earth sharted and I’m stuck in Europe.”

So this is pretty cool: the NY Public Library has a ton of vintage street photos of New York from the 1930s which you can browse from their digital gallery (which has loads of things besides the vintage NYC pics I mentioned) and buy as a print, framed or unframed. Plus you can get 20% off with the code ny20 (it’s for being a subscriber to the newsletter, but I’m guessing anyone can use that code).

I want to get a picture of Rich’s building to hang in his apartment. It would be nice for it to be a surprise, but I already told him exactly everything I just wrote here, so I suck.

I think it’s great you can enjoy all these old photos freely and easily on the Internet, but I also think they make awesome gifts. Plus buying a print supports the library, so it’s win-win-win!