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Flat land

Music, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, video
Published on 1 Comment on Flat land

Sometimes you have to look at a familiar landscape through foreign eyes to appreciate it:

But there’s no bridge from anyplace I’ve lived to the Dutch polder. This is nothing like anything I have ever known. If my love of California came through the front door and my love of Scotland through the side, this sudden, inarticulate love of the Netherlands is the unexpected guest who appears one day in the living room, ringing no bell and answering no invitation. And yet, here it is, and it draws me out of the house and away from the cities every bright day. I go out for half-hour rides and come back three hours later, windblown and bright-eyed.

And the Noord-Hollands polder through which I’ve been riding is the real deal, the unfiltered, unadulterated Dutch landscape, served neat. It’s undiluted by tulips and uncut by the tourist trail. It stretches out northward from the urbanized shore of the IJ to the Afsluitdijk, making up the land between the North Sea and the IJsselmeer. The fields are punctuated by towns and villages: Purmerend, Volendam, Alkmaar, Heerhugowaard, Den Helder, Edam, Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Schagen, Heiloo. Straight, elevated canals and swift roads cross them, taking the people and the freight to and fro. But the land between is filled only with a kind of vastness: long, straight lines of pasture under the endless, endless sky.

Abi Sutherland declares her love for the flat, Dutch landscape. I’ve always found Noord-Holland, that stretched out farmland north of Amsterdam, to be dull and depressing, the worst part of the Netherlands but Abi shows it can be beautiful too.

So did Jacques Brel decades ago, talking about Vlaanderen, but it could be Holland as well:



We Can Stop It

Feminism, Policing, video
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What I like about Scottish anti-rape campaign is that it approaches it in the way a drunk driving campaign would. So whereas with traditional campaigns the mephasis is always on rape prevention by the victim, this campaign is talking directly to potential perpetrators, using the same sort of techniques that helped make drink driving from something you bragged about to something you do furtively, if at all.

Not that rape is anywhere near as accepted as drunk driving once was of course, but rather that the way most of us, especially blokes, think about rape is about the stereotypical man in a dark alley physically overpowering a random woman. What this campaign instead is saying that actually, there are quite a few situations in which no physical force is used that are still rape or sexual assault, that consent is always required with sex and that decent, normal men know when it can and cannot be given.

What it does in short is to denormalise all these situations in which you can fool yourself that you’re not actually doing wrong in forcing somebody to have sex with you, by explicitely stating that no, having sex with a woman too drunk to stand up of her own accord is wrong. And it does it largely without putting the hackles up of its target audience, young men, who can get very defensive when talking about rape, for obvious reasons.

Sarah Brightman wants to sing in space

funny, geekdom, video
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Sarah Brightman wants to be the first professional singer in space:

British singer Sarah Brightman is to travel as a space tourist to the International Space Station.

The classical recording artist, once married to Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, will be part of a three-person crew flying to the ISS.

After completing a tour in 2013, Ms Brightman will embark on six months of preparation at the Star City cosmonaut training centre in Moscow.

She will be the seventh space tourist to visit the ISS.

Once there, she says she intends to become the first professional musician to sing from space.

I say we let her do what she wants, as long as she sings this song: