Bicycle madness

If cycling were a poker game, my style would be loose-aggressive. It might be plain compensation for the fact I don't own a car, but when I ride my bicycle I consider myself to be the king of the road. Which translates itself into a pretty offensive way of getting from point A to B (feel free to replace this euphemism by a sentence involving 'my life' and 'an old school strategic board game which - under the pretext of spending an evening with friends - has the sole purpose of driving a wedge between people') and getting rid of that universal amount of traffic-related frustration while pedaling the streets. I mean, it wouldn't be the first time a relative or friend of mine gets my middle finger shoved into the face because he or she honks the horn. Despite the fact that this is (more than) often meant as a simple 'Hello there!', my brain seems to interpret traffic horns as insults, and therefore reacts by extending the longest member of the digit family.

Anyway, this post is not meant as an excuse to sum up bicycle frustrations (although I just have to mention the biggest of them all: shattered glass on my path, often neatly shoveled onto the bicycle lane by the nitwit who wasn't able to steer clear of a car accident in the first place), but rather as an excuse to share my ideas on something that has been puzzling me for a while now: the fact that some people enjoy the act of smoking while riding their bike. There are definitely non-trivial actions which can be performed on a bike, while actually riding it. I haven't tried it myself, but professional cyclist seem to be able to pee while riding their bike. I do have experience with the following activities though: skipping tracks on the iPod, tying my shoes, making notes, sending text messages (often: "Will be there in 10 minutes, I am on my way!"), getting stuff from my backpack or preparing lectures.

Smoking while riding a bike, however, doesn't make any sense. At all. You don't see people eating hamburgers while jogging, do you? Although it would actually be a good idea to have top floor burger restaurants in tall buildings without elevators only: the Mac Stamina, your stairway to junk heaven! The thing is, I am more than willing to understand that you can enjoy a cigarette after dinner, or while going out(side), but how can you possibly do that on a bike? Unless traffic stresses you to an extent which goes beyond my understanding, or you just want to make perfectly clear why you are excessively panting and easily out of breath, holding the culprit in your hand. Because in that case, erhm...

Nah... It still doesn't make sense.

Stop, Look and Listen

My friend N was once told me: ‘People should really pay more attention to the lyrics of songs’ and she was right. I guess for most, the rhythm and melody are enough, but who knows the words? And I’m not talking about a few lines from the chorus. I’m talking about the meaning of a whole song.

A good example of this phenomenon is the painfully inappropriate songs some people select for the opening dance at their wedding. Every Breath You Take by The Police, for instance, sounds nice enough, but it’s actually about a stalker. Yes, that’s what I'll be watching you means! However, it’s not that obvious, so maybe there’s an excuse for this one.

The next one is worse, though. My Heart Will Go On, the song that was made famous by the movie Titanic, is another favourite at weddings. Still, people should realise if they saw the movie (and let’s face it, everyone did) that Céline Dion is singing about a dead boyfriend! She says as much in the one but last chorus: Love was when I loved you / One true time I hold you / In my life we'll always go on.

But I will Always Love You by Dolly Parton / Whitney Houston has to be the worst. Of course, people tend to remember only the line that gave the song its title and I guess that’s a pretty romantic statement. But what about the first chorus: Bittersweet memories / that is all I'm taking with me. / So, goodbye. Please, don't cry. / We both know I'm not what you, you need. That’s not too romantic now, is it? Indeed, the song is about a breakup.

Anyway, after this conversation with N, it became something of an obsession for me to really listen to lyrics. Sometimes it's fun. (Elbow, for instance, has some of the best out there). But I must say, it has its downsides too. Some songs are pretty awful when you stop and consider them as lyrical poetry, and worse, some lyrics don’t even make any sense.

This morning as I was munching my cornflakes, for instance, I heard these two:

Should I stay or should I go?
If I go there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double.
So you’ve got to let me know:
Should I stay or should I go?

Hmm. Going means trouble. Okay, gotcha. And staying means double trouble. Right. So, there’s not much of a decision here, is there? I’ll take trouble over double trouble any day.

You’re so vain,
You probably think this song is about you.
You’re so vain,
I guess you think this song is about you,
Don’t you, don’t you?

Hmm. Sing all you want, cookie, but the song is about him. Think about it. It doesn’t make any sense to sing a whole song to someone and then claim it’s not about that person!

Anyway, yet another way to ruin a perfectly enjoyable thing by thinking about it. That’s Fred and Fred for you folks!

Pink Metal

A few weeks ago, I went to a concert in Antwerp with my brother and two friends. The name of the place was the Trix, the name of the band Dimmu Borgir (which means 'dark castles' in Old Norse, a North Germanic language spoken during the Viking Age), a five-headed black metal band from Norway.

For those of you who are not familiar with black metal, this is the kind of music played by the sons of Satan themselves, which usually come in the following varieties:

(1) A lead singer doing all kinds of crazy shit with his voice - from screaming and yelling, over growling to grunting and barking - except actually singing, of course. Even when this guy (or girl, for real) addresses the audience, he sounds like a sleep deprived zombie who did nothing but smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol in the last 7000 years. I bet even blind girls pee their pants when a black metal lead singer approaches them in a pub, just to whisper "You look beautiful, fancy a drink?" into their ears.

(2) A drummer beating and kicking at speeds which are so incredibly fast that it actually makes sense to assume that the roaring waves he produces are simply a consequence of him breaking through the wall of sound. This guy deserves utter respect though, since black metal drumming for more than fifteen minutes in a row beats single-handedly hauling a piano up a tree on the scale of things-that-make-you-feel-tired.

(3) Guitar and bass players torturing their strings, hereby combining speed, precision and the kind of devotion I prefer to reserve for sentences in which the word 'bloodlust' is combined with 'a slightly right-winged, frustrated, grumpy old man getting hold of the young mole that has been ruining his garden, his afternoon and - by lack of decent substitutes - his life'. Excellent musicians, that is, but not the kind you would like to meet in real life.

(4) The occasional keyboard player, trying to add an outlandish layer of ominous vibes to the blasphemous wall of sound created by his horned peers. Despite his good intentions, as in 'evil ones', this leads to a bizarre mixture of heavy metal and nightclub trance lines, inducing people stretching their arms. No need to blame Regi here, apparently it's a natural reflex.

Even if your ears can take black metal, there's still plenty of reasons to have objections from the visual point of view.

First if all, black metal artists have a bizarre tendency to travel around with a wardrobe containing more iron, latex and leather than a cargo ship carrying mechanical rodeo bulls and crash test dummies. Dressed in black, donning clothing accessories which look like a crossing between a piece of knight's armour and a fakir's bed. The most positive adjective I can come up with is kinky, but that's just because ridiculous and freaky are still fighting over a dog's bone that is no longer there. In the real sense of the word, it doesn't even look dangerous, because even people in a wheelchair could easily get away from an attacker wearing erhm... stuff attached to his arms and legs adorned with 5 inch spikes.

Secondly, there's the corpse paint: black metal artists paint their faces completely white - which could be useful for African artists, so that you can at least see where their costume ends and actual face begins, but I am not sure whether Nordic people, coming from a country where the sun doesn't even appear above the horizon for a few months, need an extra layer of white - and then accentuate their eyes and lips with black lipstick and mascara (iLiner for the hipsters amongst you). It's not that I question the very concept of make-up for artists, but in this particular situation I do have my objections. For when Dimmu Borgir came on stage, I couldn't help but think of five men sitting in front of a long mirror - lined with the kind of plastic tube they grow in Christmas trees, containing cosy lights - sharing make-up, brushes and sex stories. And, let's be honest, this is not really what you envision Satan's sons to do backstage, right? If they would have come on stage with fresh goat blood dripping from the corners of their mouths and nipples, wearing snakes as scarves, walking on smouldering coals, burping fiery fumes of rotting smoke, I would at least given them credit for what they claim to be (a bunch of crazy motherfuckers). The way they entered, however, I felt like being at a training session for the annual gay fetish wagon.

I even started wondering why five friends would actually decide to start a black metal band in the first place. Although my belief in musician's common love for music - in the broadest sense of the spectrum - stands as firm as a pudding in the freezer, I do believe that its any artist's dream to occasionally consume this love with the groupies flashing their bulgy bonuses from the first row, after a few free drinks backstage. As a black metal artist however, you are staring at long-haired men flashing their ever-growing beer bellies from underneath an ever-shrinking t-shirt, in which some illegible writing refers to - what I think - a name of a metal band, although it could be a kind of medicine as well (I am not a pharmacist, sorry).

In the end, I realized that what brought these people together can only be one thing: sheer love. For music. Their music: metal...

Holy shit

Yesterday I was not a happy camper. And although the reason for my foul mood wasn’t primarily that (surprise surprise) I was once again going through a commute from hell, it sure didn’t help either. By the time I was on my fourth train that morning and still hadn’t reached my destination to start the working day, I was pretty depressed. Now the train in question was packed with people trying to do the same as I was, but there was also a fairly large number of American students on it, all girls. And of course they did the classic American girl thing: they talked. Quite loudly, I might add.

But rather than the sheer volume of their quacking, it was their language that angered me. It really was my very own United States of Whatever on that train (click here if you don’t know what I’m talking about). In essence, this boils down to endless conversations consisting of nothing but ‘Yeah, whatever…’, ‘And then she was all like…’, ‘But I ain’t sayin’ nuthin’, knowwhamean?’ and similar capital offenses against the Queen’s Tongue. And of course that had me going for the rest of the day…

Indeed, it suddenly dawned on me that throughout any given day I’m at least several times annoyed by bad language. I already mentioned people using the noun ‘paranoia’ for the adjective ‘paranoid’ the day before yesterday. Now some of you might say, ‘Well, is it really that bad that the language is evolving into using ‘paranoia’ both as a noun and an adjective? A philologist like you should realise that language changes constantly and that there’s not really any objective reason to label something good or bad if it’s used by a community of speakers’. Well touché, I guess someone woke up with a linguistic mind this morning! But you see, I’m not really trying to decide what’s right and what’s wrong here. What I’m saying is that when we use poor language (in the literal sense of a language being less rich than before the change), we might end up using poor thinking.

For instance, most English speakers don’t know the difference between disinterested and uninterested. Now uninterested means you are not interested in something, as in ‘She gave him an uninterested look’, while disinterested means you take no interest in something, as in ‘To be a good referee you have to be disinterested’. Most people would use both to express the same, and many have already forgotten disinterested or consider it a posh alternative. But think about it: when we confuse both words or ultimately end up with only one, doesn’t that also mean that we’re losing a way to distinguish between two very different things? And doesn’t it fit wonderfully well with modern society that we are forgetting the notion of being disinterested (and objective) and favouring the notion of being uninterested (and - often - selfish)?

Anyway, to illustrate how bad language can ultimately turn into very bad thinking, or perhaps vice versa (I’m not too sure in this case), consider this picture of a sign posted in the bathroom of my working place. It’s been annoying me for months on end now, mainly because I cannot for the life of me decide what it actually means. I suppose the person who drafted it wasn’t too careful with the way he expressed himself and there you have the logical consequence: utter nonsense.


(for those who don’t speak Dutch: ‘Please put the toilet brush back clean and dry in its holder. Thank you kindly in advance!’)

But Holy Mackerel, what does that mean ‘put the toilet brush back clean and dry’? Clean and dry? You do know I’m using this brush to clean off my shit from inside a wet toilet, don’t you? That’s what it’s for! How on earth am I going to keep it from getting dirty and wet? Or, alternatively, do you expect me to get it clean and dry after I have used it? But what do you want me to do? I can’t very well rinse it out in the sink and then use the blow dryer to dry it, can I?

For God’s sake, people. Let’s try to express ourselves articulately, shall we?

Thank you in advance.

Super-market-man!

One of my favourite places on this earth? Market places. I just love wandering around markets. Not the second-hand flea markets and art bazaars - although browsing through crates of records can make this Fred happy too, but genuine markets. Be it at home or abroad, nothing beats watching people, sampling food and buying fresh ingredients for a more than decent price. I even enjoy the hours of politely queueing at the vegetable stall - balancing on that fine line between being a gentleman and lacking a healthy form of assertiveness - when I am constantly cut in front by pink-haired older ladies holding a crossing between a rat and a dog wearing a plastic jacket underneath their arm...

Personally, visiting a market place gives me a sense of reality - which comes in quite handy after a tiresome week of exploring the back of my mind, searching for answers to problems which are further from reality than umbrellas made from sponge. It makes me feel relaxed, despite the fact that market places are buzzing with activity. I would even say that it makes me feel connected with real life, as it gives me a chance to blend in with everybody else. Not just real life as it is today, but as it always was and will always be: I find it comforting to know that man has always met at market places.

Speaking about meeting people, last weekend I was at the super version of a market. Which doesn't beat the real market, let that be clear, but wandering around super markets also qualifies as something I like to do. When it's not too crowded, that is. I was scanning my stuff, at one of these little computers that looks a bit like a copier, when the cute supervising shop assistant in charge of the self-scanning devices tapped my shoulder. "Excuse me," she said, "is this yours?". An elegant arm holding canned television sausages was stretched in my direction. "Erhm, not really!", I blurted out - somewhat taken aback by the fact that this lovely woman was addressing me. As a single, being addressed by strangers is good for the confidence - especially when they are of the opposite sex and rather pretty, but not when they are offering you a can of processed meat. Still, my manly mind was racing, and so I added: "Too bad it weren't roses, that would have been nice!". I was cursing myself ("Roses? You dork, that's the biggest cliché ever!" "Yeah, but still, it's your favourite dEUS track, remember?") but she smiled at me and asked "What would it mean, you'd say, if someone left a can of sausages on my desk?".

Classical example of a plan back-firing.

A few milliseconds seemingly turned themselves into silent minutes.

"Hm. You could announce it through the speakers," I suggested, "asking the person who left his sausages at the self-scanning counter to see the cashier." A perfect long-distance pass went over the attacker's heads. We both smiled. Hers was teasingly pinkish, mine stiffly greenish. On the way home, I was thinking about canned sausages and why anyone would leave them behind, having deliberately picked them up from the shelf in the first place. Above all, I was wondering whether or not to go back inside.

They do sell roses in the super market, you know...

Panopticon

When Fred wrote a piece about Isis’ album Panopticon yesterday, I thought for sure he was going to explain what exactly a panopticon is. He does know, I’m sure of it, because we talked about it some time ago. Anyway, I guess his prediction that it wouldn’t be the last time for the word to be used in a blog, will come true even more quickly than he thought!

The Panopticon (from the Greek πᾶν ὀπτικόν, ‘all visible’) was originally a type of building designed by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). Think of it like this. Imagine you need to make a prison for a thousand people but can’t afford more than one prison guard. How can you control that many people with that small amount of man power?

Bentham came up with the following solution to create an incredibly a cheap prison system. Build a prison with a circular structure and an ‘inspection house’ in the middle from which the one prison guard is able to watch the inmates who live in cells around the perimeter of the building. Like this:



Now make sure that the guard can watch the prisoners at all times and that the prisoners do not know when they are watched. You could do this, for instance, with one way glass - you know, the mirror/glass in the interrogation room in movies (Bentham’s nineteenth-century method was slightly different, but never mind). Now, in this way no prisoner of the Panopticon would ever try to escape, because they would never be sure whether the guard was watching them or not. In this way, one man could guard a thousand prisoners, and more. Moreover, he wouldn’t even have to work all the time. There would be no way for the prisoners to tell if he was on duty or not. In fact, if you think about it, you wouldn’t even need a guard at all. No prisoner would ever be the wiser. Indeed, the Panopticon leaves the watching to the watched, so to say, and thus operates by ‘power of mind over mind’, as Bentham put it, rather than by physically guarding people.

Over time (and largely thanks to the analysis of this concept by Michel Foucault) the panopticon came to stand metaphorically for the hierarchical social structure of modern society and its increasing tendency to observe and control people. Indeed, nowadays ‘they’ can see you in the street with CCTV, they can locate you with satellite imaging, they can listen to your cell phone conversations, they can see the websites you’ve visited, what you bought with your credit card and so forth. So I guess you could say we effectively live in a panopticon today.

However, I’m always slightly annoyed when people then turn paranoid (and even more when they use paranoia as an adjective talking about it) and start shouting Big Brother is watching you! There is, in my mind, one important difference in our case. The panopticon aims to keep prisoners from escaping, or generally stated to keep people from doing what’s illegal. So if you are not trying to do anything illegal, what does it matter if you might be watched? You don’t even know for sure if you’re ever really watched or who does the watching for that matter.

Think of it like this. Suppose there is a chance – but it’s not a certainty – that at some point someone – but you won’t know who – could see you in the shower – but you won’t know when it happens, provided it does. Would you then be afraid to take a shower? I don’t believe I would, actually.

So I’m not too crazy about all the shouting in the media that our privacy is being invaded. Come to think of it, I’m glad someone’s watching my streets, my credit card or the internet our children visit. So watch me all you want, Mr Big Brother, thou lonely guard of the Panopticon, I couldn’t care less.

But apparently the sludge metal band Isis did mind and that’s why they called their third album Panopticon, because it deals with ‘the proliferation of surveillance technologies throughout modern society and the government’s role in that spread’.

Such cry babies those metal heads...

Pod-heads (4)

This isn't the first time the word 'Panopticon' is used in a blogpost. And I doubt it will be the last time. Because this is the name of my all-time favourite CD, released by the American band Isis in 2004. There once was a time in which I could safely write "I cannot tell you how many times I listened to this album", but iTunes kept track of that: 'So did we', the opening track, was played at least 114 times from my laptop. Add all the times I have been listening to Panopticon on the train, staring through the windows, or walking through the city, dreaming about other cities...

In case you pressed 'play', chances are that you pressed 'pause' as well - after roughly 15 seconds I presume? And yet: despite the brutal opening featuring Aaron Turner's harsh vocals, this track sums everything up there is to know and appreciate about Isis. Filed under the post-metal flag, they create long, epic tracks (mostly instrumental), combining melodic lead passages with heavily distorted outbursts, fusing eery guitar riffs with repetitive bass lines, blending intense emotions and musical craftsmanship into a massive landscape in which you - the listener - cannot do anything else but wander around and get lost. This description may sound quite abstract and maybe even somewhat grand or sumptuous - after all, I am writing about a CD - but I guess this is what Isis evokes in me. Even at this very moment, as I am listening to what iTunes officially recorded as the 115th time, I get overwhelmed by a strange feeling...

Just in case you're interested in more post-metal bands (good things are there to be shared, a philosophy which applies to more than cheese and beer), try one of the following: Pelican, Russian Circles, Red Sparowes, Neurosis, Amenra and so on.

Have a safe journey back!

Mrs. Robinson

Research is a fascinating thing. Only today I read on The New Scientist that after additional observations our beloved neutrinos seem to continue their quarky behaviour and might after all be able to travel faster than the speed of light (story here). If it were true (and I still think we need to be careful), it would be a jaw-dropping finding.

Just think about it. We’re able to send people to the moon, soon even to Mars. We can operate on people’s brain while they are awake. We are about to replace solar panels with a kind of ink that contains silicium nano solar cells, which means that we can print energy cells on paper! And still we do not fully understand one of the most basic things in the world: how fast stuff can move. Just imagine what we’ll be able to do once we do understand it!

And this, dear reader, is why it’s such a privilege to be part of the group of people that can contribute to our understanding of things - even if, in Fred and Fred’s case, that involves questions about stuff which might seem much more trivial than the behaviour of neutrinos. Moreover, it is also the reason why scientists and scholars should take their job as serious as they possible can. But regrettably they do not always do so. A year or two ago, I was shocked to hear that a philosophy professor, whom at one point I was very close to working with for a year, had been fired for plagiarizing on a massive scale. And lately, there seem to be more and more cases of the same deontological tomfoolery. Only recently there was the case of a sociology professor who made up his own research data (story here, on Wikipedia no less!) and yesterday I read about a cardiology professor doing something similar (story here). And it baffles me. If you truly believe in your sacred - and yes, that's the word for me - mission as a researcher, namely to discover new information about ourselves and the world we live in, how can you then knowingly spread false information? It's beyond me.

Anyway, I'm on this high horse because today I was confronted with some bad research myself. No cases of plagiarism or anything as bad as that, but still. The last week I have been working my way through pages and pages of Latin correspondence between Erasmus and one of his Frisian acquaintances, since I have been invited to speak about the topic at the end of the month. Now when doing research I like to form my own opinion about a subject before reading papers by others that involve the same or a similar topic. Just to be objective, you know. So this morning I finally started looking at some of the articles I had gathered. One of them, by a certain Mrs. Robinson, was published in 2004 in a journal that has an IT-B ranking (with IT-A being the highest possible, think Nature or Science) and discusses some of the aforementioned correspondence while tackling a different issue. Now just imagine my jaw dropping when I discovered that not one of Mrs. Robinson's statements, not one, about these documents is correct. Apparently she misunderstood them, all of them. And so the world is left with just a little bit more false information. Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson!

On her online cv (where she also proudly posted an online version of the paper horribilis) I read that Mrs. Robinson (a PhD in classics by the way) is also an artist. God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson - but stick to art in the future, will you? At least that doesn't have anything to do with the truth.

Koo-koo-ka-fucking-choo, Mrs. Robinson.

Youth of Today

Today is International Student's Day, in commemoration of what happened in Prague in 1939. On October 28, a demonstration was held in Prague to commemorate the anniversary of the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic. During this manifestation, suppressed by Nazi forces, an unfortunate Czech student (Jan Opletal) was shot in the stomach. He died in the hospital on November 11. A few days later, his body was transported from Prague to his home town in Moravia, and the funeral procession (attended by thousands of students) turned into an anti-Nazi demonstration. The Nazi's responded with drastic measures: all Czech higher education institutions were closed down, more than 1,200 students were arrested and sent to concentration camps, and on the 17th of November nine students and professors were executed without trial.

Personally, I can relate to this story because of two reasons. First of all, I have spent one whole year at the Charles University in the beloved city of Prague. Not only is the Czech Republic's ancient capital a captivating and truly fantastic place to live (or wander around as a tourist), I can also say that my year in Prague has given shape to the life I am living now. People that stuck with me, experiences that were etched in my mind, and opportunities that changed the course of my career.

Secondly, I have a job (a.o. because of my stay in Prague) which brings me in contact with students on a daily basis. And 'they' can say what they want, but my impression is that the youth of today still embodies a lot of fire and passion. Of course, it's different from what my father told me, and I guess that even the comparison with my own student years wouldn't make any sense at all - despite my relatively young age, but still: deep down, students will never change. And this is not about the unconditional love for beer, cheap food and fellow students of the opposite (well, you know what I mean) sex, this is about their desire to connect, change and contribute.

For the students!

Keep raising your voices, preferably not during my classes ;)

Get it on!

I guess, nay hope, that you’re probably not too surprised to hear that Fred and Fred are pretty big fans of comedy. I mean, we do try to be funny (we hope you’ve at least noticed the intention), but of course we are very aware of the fact that we are nowhere near our examples. And who might they be? Well, I believe Fred is quite fond of standup comedians like Eddie Izzard, Steven Wright, Jimmy Carr and of all-round talent Ricky Gervais, whereas I’m more of a BBC comedy man, enjoying Green Wing, Little Britain, The Fast Show, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Shooting Stars, and shows like that. Still, I’m no stranger to standup either and especially like Scottish comedians Frankie Boyle and Kevin Bridges. Now, if you want to know more about all this funny stuff, do leave this blog and Google or YouTube any of the aforementioned names. You’re in for a very, very good laugh. But if you want to get to know something else, I suggest you read on for a while…

Indeed, I have left out one comedian in the list – a man whose nasaly drone (his words) I listen to almost every day. And that man is Adam Carolla. He’s come up a few times on this blog already as the source of one witticism or another, but I’m pretty sure nobody knows who the guy is.

Adam Carolla, born in LA in 1964, used to be a carpet cleaner, a traffic school instructor, a carpenter, a boxing instructor, and a general contracter before getting into the comedy business. He then did radio shows, got several succesful shows on MTV, made a movie and finally got his own morning radio program The Adam Carolla Show. However, in 2009 the very popular radioshow was inexplicably cancelled, and Carolla was out of a job.

And that’s when a stroke of genious hit. Carolla started a daily podcast, also called The Adam Carolla Show, which is available for free on iTunes.


It includes a news cast, a guy with a brain tumor doing funny sound effects (for real!), and games like Blahblah-blog where the guy guess which celebrity wrote a certain pompous quote on his or her blog. The show also features interviews with guests like Christoph Walz (the German colonel from Inglourious Basterds), Morgan Spurlock (the guy from Supersize Me) or Michael Moore. In May 2011 the show became the Guinness World Records holder for the most downloaded podcast after being downloaded a whopping 59,574,843 times from March 2009 to 16 March, 2011!

So now, every morning after getting out of the shower, I put my iPod in the speakerbox and listen to this podcast. And I listen to it during my commute, while doing the dishes, when shopping; pretty much whenever I have the time, really. And I absolutely love it.

Why?

Well, Carolla’s prime talent is … complaining – something I’m quite fond of myself actually (if you hadn’t noticed yet). Indeed, one of the many bits that come along in the podcast is called What Can’t Adam Complain About?, a part where listeners can call in and challenge Carolla to complain about something that they think is impossible to complain about. I’ve heard him complain with dolphins, Ferraris, even oxygen, and it’s always super funny. But during the show too, Carollo will complain about just about anything. About flavoured iced tea, for example, saying “Iced tea has a flavour! It’s tea flavour. We need to call peach or passion fruit iced tea something else so I don’t end up with a cold drink tasting like potpourri and shit when I order iced-tea!”

But complaining isn’t Carolla’s only talent. He’s quick as a fox and his tongue is razor sharp, which allows for hilarious quotes. I’ve often had people on the train looking at me in a funny way because I was ‘laughing like a hyena’ (again, Carolla’s words) at one of his quotes. Here’s a couple for you to enjoy:

• "Having sex without a condom is like riding a roller coaster with diarrhea. You can't just throw your hands up and enjoy it."
• "I give women two types of orgasms. Fake and none."
• "When black men get fat they become bouncers. When I put on 30lbs I start looking like Truman Capote."
• "He doesn't sound like a guy who's done a onesome, let alone a threesome."
• "Chicks named Tammy have a greater chance of actually driving a Mercedes than a chick named Mercedes."
• "You think you're Napoleon? You're nuts. You talk to Jesus? You're nuts."
• "You might be an eighth Cherokee, but you're still seven eighths asshole."
• "My philosophy is: figure out what you want to do in life then take a nap."

(source: @carollaquotes twitter-account)

So, get it on with Carolla (his catchphrase, repeated at the start of every podcast) and check out the show at http://www.adamcarolla.com. It’s free and funny as hell!

Thank you and mahalo (his Hawaian-style sign-off).

Centenary

This really is our one hundredth blogpost. What started as (and, as you will soon see, with) a joke has now officially become a collection of 100 reflections, rants and rhetorical ramblings. Apart from the embedded pictures and youtube video's, this amounts to more or less 200 kilobytes of information.

And yet, we have chosen to wait with the fuzz until we reach number 111. The question is of course: why? First of all, despite the fact that people celebrating anniversaries seem to have a natural liking towards multiples of five, any number is interesting. This can even be proved mathematically. For when do we call a number interesting?

Or just skip the number, and let's talk people instead: when do we say someone is interesting? When they have this one particular property that sets them apart from the others, right? Some sort of characterization that renders them unique. Well, the same thing applies to numbers. Two for example, is an interesting number, as this is the only even prime number. Which - pun alert - makes it the oddest one amongst the prime numbers...

Suppose now there exist numbers which are not interesting. Or downright boring, to make it worse. Wouldn't it then be quite interesting for a number to be called the first boring number? Agreed, it doesn't sound as nice as being a perfect number (like 6, because it is the sum of its own proper divisors, since 6 = 1 + 2 + 3), but it would still be a pretty interesting property. However, this very argument undermines the concept of being a boring number. Which therefore means that any number is interesting.

There are even websites and books listing numbers, and the reason why they are interesting. Here's a nice example. And it explains why we choose the number 111, as this is the smallest possible magic constant of a (3x3)-magic square containing distinct primes. And if that doesn't ring a bell, nevermind: only eleven to go...

The Power of the Remix

Last Saturday I went to see Tom Lanoye’s Sprakeloos (‘Speechless’) – adapted from the novel for theatre – in which he tells the tale of his mother’s stroke, subsequent aphasia and slow demise. And although I’m not that big a fan of the cliché, I’m willing to make this one exception: I was speechless. I’m not going to go into ornate descriptions of his baroque style with its grandiose verbiage and courageous syntax; Lanoye does the real thing much better than I can describe it. Still speechless, so it seems.

However, Lanoye’s monologue also reminded me that at times when we are at a loss for words, we can turn to music to express what lies between the unsaid and the unsayable. Somewhere towards then end of the show Lanoye had some photographs of his mother projected on stage and the theatre room basked in the unspeakable melancholy of music. Afterwards I found out through my friend M (thanks for the invite by the way!) that the song in question was a remix of Dinah Washington’s This bitter earth by Max Richter who fused it with his On the nature of daylight for the movie Shutter Island:

You can listen to the original song by 50s blues singer Dinah Washington (1924-1963) here and read all about it here, but I must confess: I like the remix better. Perhaps because the strings are more bitter or more likely because Richter’s version will always remind me of Lanoye’s words. But still.

And that got me thinking: there are actually quite a few songs where I like a remix or cover version better than the original. I purposely didn’t Google this as I’m writing it, but here’s a couple that I can think of immediately:

Ryan Adams - Wonderwall (original by Oasis)

The Baseballs - Umbrella (original by Rihanna)

James Blake - Limit to your love (original by Feist) (sorry N, I know you won’t agree!)

But above all, I’m curious, my dear Freddies: what’s your favourite remix or cover song? Do tell!

November Nine

Most people think of November as a month devoted to remembering and honouring the dead (historical people who upgraded to Holy-dot-com, deceased family members or World War soldiers), and within a few years we might think of November as the extra summer month which used to be the heart of autumn.

In Fred-land however, we like to think of November as the month in which the November Nine battle themselves through the final table at the WSOP in Las Vegas. The World Series of Poker, that is. Because Fred and Fred have more in common than an unusual appetite for canned white beans in tomato sauce and moderately peated single malts: we also love poker. Playing poker, watching poker (you have no idea how many websites there are, devoted to this card game) or talking about poker: whenever we meet, at least one of these aspects is covered. Without getting too sentimental, it was our common interest in poker that more or less brought us together, two years ago.

The WSOP is the biggest live tournament, held in the Rio (a famous casino in Nevada). You can think of it as the Olympics of Poker, since all kinds of poker games are played (No Limit Texas Hold'em - which is probably the kind of poker you know from Bond movies - Pot Limit Omaha, 7-card Stud Hi/Lo, Razz, HORSE, A to 5 triple draw and so on) and each winner earns himself a golden bracelet plus a fair share of money.

If there's one event you want to play and - preferably - win, it's the Main Event. This is a No Limit Texas Hold'em event, and this year the winner takes a whopping 8.5 million dollar. Only slightly better then 7 other players, who are also guaranteed at least 1 million dollars. While 'our government' is talking about budget cuts, trying to find a few billion euros (what on earth do they mean by that?), a bunch of poker players are flying back home with enough money to convert a random African country into a well-oiled machine. Not that it comes for free though, as each contestant needs to pay 10.000 dollar entrance fee. More than one paycheck, that is, for a seat at the felt.

This year's event is almost over. The final nine players - the November Nine - are raising, bluffing and shoving themselves towards life-changing amounts of cash. Hoping to get dealt better cards than A8 (and ace and an eight), which is known as the Dead Man's Hand: legend has it that this was the hand held by Wild Bill Hickok at the time of his murder. Yups, poker players honour the dead...

The mystery explained: #111!

Ahoy, me hearties! We be supposin' all ye lads an' lassies be well currrious about what this scurvy EPC might be that be poppin' up rrregularrrly on this here website? Well, shiver me timbers if we won't soon be tellin' all ye lily-livered landlubbers and squiffy scallywags!

Okay, there might still be 315 days to go until the next Talk like a pirate day (19 September) but you'll see soon enough that we have good reason to address you in pirate fashion just now. Indeed, as I just mentioned, you are perhaps a bit curious about the enigmatic EPC and EPC (2) posts that surfaced a while ago and which both featured a reference to pirates? Obviously they were meant to be 'teasers' (we even added a label saying just that - yes that was very subtle), but what were they supposed to be teasing?

Well, today's post aims to clarify a couple of things.

First of all, EPC stands for episode 100 or C in Roman numerals. Indeed, even we were surprised to see that Fred and Fred's 100th blogpost is quickly approaching! Obviously, this needs to be celebrated and we will, but we wouldn't be Fred and Fred if we did it in the 100th blogpost itself. Nay, for starters, the number 100 is much too boring...

However, keep your eyes peeled for blogpost #111 or number eleventy-one! Indeed, blogpost #111 - at the current rate, to be posted somewhere at the end of November - will be something quite special. We will celebrate our eleventy-first blog in good style (yes there will be champagne) and we will tell you all about how Fred and Fred started. And that tale, dear friends, involves a story about pirates! However, we won't just yet reveal exactly how we plan to tell that story. You'll just have to come and see!


So there you have it! Pirates equal 111 equals a big suprise on Fred and Fred. And rest assured, you won't be disappointed. However, if you need any more incentive, what about this? The first person to add a comment to blogpost #111 will receive a very special Fred and Fred gift!

So look out for #111! We sure can't wait!

Jennie from the block

A recent online news article reported the story of Jessie, an Australian cat who disappeared from Berry Springs (just outside the far northern end of Darwin), shortly after her owners moved in from their old house somewhere in South Australia's Eyre Peninsula. Both places are separated by nearly 2000 miles and a vast, inhospitable desert, but one year after her disappearance the new residents of Mrs. Gale's old house found a strange cat hanging around. They took a picture and sent it to Berry Springs. It turned out to be Gale's cat... Despite the odds, Mrs. Gale believes that her cat walked all the way back, "because she hates getting into cars". This is definitely an amazing story, but what bothers me about it is that nobody ever considered interviewing Jennie.

Which is exactly why I rang her up last night.

(F) Hi Jennie, how are you doing?

(J) Hi Fred, long time no speak! Thanks for asking. I do feel better now, back home, although I wish the new tenants would stop staring at me like I come from another planet.

(snorts)

Well, I do, but let's all just stick to our jobs, okay? Dogs do the leg-humping, you get uncomfortable when we follow you into the bathroom and we do the staring. Right?

(F) Jennie, rumour has it that you walked all the way back from Darwin. Is that true?

(J) Are they all out of their fucking minds? Of course not! Seriously, whoever said that needs to have a look at a real cat. There's a reason why we basically live on people's couches, you see? That's because we prefer to sleep, stare and snack. Repeatedly. That, and follow you to the bathroom. The most active thing I ever did was to chase my own tail, you know?

(F) But how did you get back South then?

(J) I just hid myself in a truck, moving couches from a factory in Darwin to retail sellers in the South.

(F) Isn't that dangerous? I mean, how did you prepare yourself for that?

(J) Of course it's dangerous Fred! As long as nobody opened the truck I was both dead and alive. And believe me, that's not a very nice feeling. But I have years of experience: ever since I was a little kitten, I made a habit of crawling into unattended boxes. So I knew how to survive a collapse of the wave-function.

(F) Just one more question Jennie. Why did you decide to go back?

(J) The curtains, Fred, the curtains. Nothings beats dangling from the vintage draperies at home.

Lost

When I was about 12, I picked up a book in my father’s library and read its blurb (you know, the text on the back). It simply said: ‘There are only two kinds of people in this world: those that have read this book and those who are meaning to read it’. That book was The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. As my father only had an English copy of it and I was still too young to understand Tolkien’s stately English, he summarised the story for me and gave me the old I guess you’ll just have to wait until you grow up… However, being a rather curious little fellow (both in the sense of curiosity and curiousness), little Fred didn’t wait to grow up. The year after I managed to put my hands on The Hobbit - that rather dull prequel to The Lord of the Rings, but originally meant as a children’s story, so a little easier - and when I turned 15 I bravely started the 1,000 odd pages of TLOR. And I absolutely loved it.

For me it was the beginning of a true obsession with English fantasy literature. I'm talking about those fist thick books with shiny covers with relief lettering about magicians, dragons, ancient tales and heroic quests, that sort of thing. You've seen them. Besides Tolkien’s other work (his philosophical The Silmarillion and his collection of Unfinished Tales), I also devoured the American author Raymond Feist, who wrote (and is still writing) complete sagas, such as The Rift War Saga, including books with ringing names like Silverthorn or A Darkness at Sethanon. I must have read over 5,000 pages of fantasy literature I realise just now, but then, probably somewhere around 2000, just like that, I gave up on it. Until last Saturday that is…

Last Saturday I woke up and realised it wasn’t going to be my day. It had been a somewhat shitty week and it promised to be a similarly shitty weekend. So I had to come up with a plan to make things better. So I went into town, just to get out more that anything else, and sure enough, pretty quickly I ended up at a big bookstore. As I walked through the aisles stacked with the mental offspring of TV chefs, books with athletes’ stories and guides to rearranging your chakras, my attention was suddenly drawn towards the fantasy corner. Indeed, the week before I had happened to talk about fantasy literature with someone who was absolutely in love with the books by Dave and Leigh Eggers, and sure enough, there it was: The Redemption of Althalus. Shiny cover, drawing of a guy carrying an ornate bronze dagger, and close to a thousand pages of that new book smell. I couldn’t resist the temptation.

What happened next was nothing more than a frightful fantasy binge. Since 4 p.m. on Saturday I have already read close to 800 pages of The Redemption of Althalus. It spins a crazed tale of a thief meeting a talking cat who teaches him to read and use a magical book written by Deiwos the God of Creation. Utterly stupid, of course, with its clichéd archaism and pseudo-philosophical narrative, but ah the guilty pleasure of turning page after page after page, and the endless escapism! If you’ve never tried fantasy, I strongly recommend you do at least once. If it works on you, it’s sheer bliss.

Because, you see, fantasy is like the inverse of other literature. Unlike much reading, fantasy literature is not about making sense of the world and your place in it, it’s about losing yourself and the world.

And tell me, don’t you want to get rid of you once in a while?

Bogey-Wogey

I'd say 'bogeys' is a misnomer. I don't know about you, but to me it sounds like candy. Red candy, to be more precise, shaped like a rabbit and slightly sour-tasting. The kind of candy that makes the muscles between your mouth and ears contract spontaneously when you have more than one.

As it stands, bogeys are pieces of dried nasal mucus. Dry snot, if that sounds more familiar to you. And if you still don't know what I'm talking about here, then visit the nearest primary school and turn over a random chair: the chunky pieces attached to the bottom of the seat might ring a bell. Unless they are pink of course, that used to be bubblegum.

You might be wondering where this is heading to, as the subject of today is not exactly the most tasteful one (we all tried it, no need to be judgemental here) and bordering a line which you don't necessarily want to see crossed - right? The thing is, this Fred is having one of those days in which my head seems to be filled to the brim with snot. I have no sense of smell at all today, and a voice which is so nasal that you could easily mistake me for Fran Drescher (The Nanny, anyone?).

But a Fred wouldn't be a real Fred if he didn't try to look at the slimy gooey stuff from the scientific point of view. And this is why I spent the fifteen-minute walk from my office to the lecture hall thinking about mucus.

And it led me to a baffling realization: we can't tell whether our own snot stinks!

Karma Chameleon

I am a child of the eighties, which according to the Urban Dictionary means ‘a person born roughly between 1972 and 1984’. For boys, it meant growing up watching cartoons like He-Man or Transformers, playing with GI Joe dolls or Nintendo’s Double Dragon, watching movies like Beverly Hills Cop or Back to the Future, and of course listening to some of the shittiest music ever. Whether it was Genesis, Duran Duran or Bon Jovi that tickled people's fancy, I’m pretty sure they all look back now and think ‘What were we thinking?’.

Still, my parents have often told the story of how as a toddler I went absolutely ballistic every time Culture Club’s Karma Chameleon was on. If you need to be reminded, do press play:

It’s funny that especially this Karma Chameleon should have been my favourite. Indeed, as I grew up and even today, people have told me that in some ways I am indeed like a chameleon. Which, I guess, is sort of true. But then again, aren’t we all? I mean, us modern folk live such varied lives that we are in many like chameleons, shifting shapes as we go. Or is it just me?

I’ll let you decide by the different skins I have put on this week. So far I have been…

(Sunday) …the Italian grandma: making pizza from scratch with fresh dough, home made passata, mozzarella di buffala and 24-month-old Parmigiano Reggiano, wearing a dirty apron, sweating profusely and cursing like an old sailor when chipping my fingernail while chopping the fresh basil.

(Monday) …the Italian twenty-five year old: getting up at 10 o’clock in the morning and wearing pyjamas until 12. Then off to the gym for an easy workout, followed by a long shower. In the afternoon espressos with a friend and complaining about how hard work has been lately. And in the evening frozen margaritas with the boys and going to a groovy funk gig (Ben Westbeech rules!).

(Tuesday/1) …the Englishman in tweed jacket: discussing the interdisciplinary possibilities of rhetorical theory and mathematics with two of my colleagues from academia, sipping sweet Manzanilla sherry, munching cheddar cheese and saying things like: Yes, I do believe persuasive strategies of both individual speech and communal discourse could be formalised in a mathematical decision model, but obviously specific values will have to be substituted by general proportions.

(Tuesday/2) …the fat American guy: sitting at the poker table with my head between my elbows at one o’clock at night, trying to decide whether a flop bet of four 20¢ chips instead of three chips (one 50¢, one 20¢ and one 10¢) is a sign of strength or weakness after having too many beers, all the while trying to pick one of those damn Duyvis-nuts from between my teeth.

Which of course, begs the question. What will Wednesday bring?

Tormented writer guy? (trying to finish that short story that’s in my drawer) Marathon man? (going for a long run later today) DIY handy man? (finally replacing my name tag on the doorbell) TV dude? (catching up on stuff I taped)

Or all of the above?

Karma karma karma karma karma chameleon,
you come and go, you come and go.

Dictionary for aliens (3)

vintage: (adjective) Despite decades of intense research by an intergalactic team of comparative linguists, social engineers, cosmologists, quantum designers and behaviourists, the meaning of this word is still not completely clear. Although it can be employed in a variety of contexts, from clothing and furniture over wine to guitars and cars, neither usage seems to make sense.

Take clothing for example. Skirts and dresses which look like they could have hung in front of windows in the early to mid-twentieth century, are likely to be called vintage. Based on the examples that have been investigated at the University of Theoretical Fashion Studies, it seems that no restrictions are put on the visual appearance of the clothes under consideration: they may be flashy and flowery (usually the kind which cats will try to tear to shreds, one of the many facts pointing in the direction of feline superiority over the human race), or gleaming with geometrical patterns (the kind of drapery earthlings are not allowed to watch through the washing machine's little window, since they lack the inverse hypnotization skills required to bring their victims back to life), it may still be vintage.

Strangely enough, it seems that the aesthetic qualities of the human being actually wearing the clothes determine whether or not it is vintage. The very same dress can be worn by a young American blonde and an old Russian woman, but the measured amount of vintage may be radically different. More surprisingly, also the following things can have an impact on the final result:

• the number of times (s)he has been on the television,
• the car (s)he is driving - or, even better, in which (s)he is driven around (especially if the car itself is vintage),
• the place where (s)he is wearing them (such as bars with vintage chairs where vintage wines are consumed).

These discoveries have led to two new branches in Fashion Physics, called Quantum Fashion Theory and Trend Relativity. The former is based on the principle that a physical quantity - in casu the amount of vintage - can be influenced by both the measurement itself and the carrier of the thing to be measured. The latter starts from the idea that trendiness is a universal constant, but the measured amount may depend on the frame of reference (the theory of Calvin Kleinstein).

Some cosmologists believe that the earthlings' universe was created with a universal amount of vintage, which after the first few nanoseconds split into five fundamental forms (clothing, the most obvious form of appearance, furniture, cars, liquors and guitars, the hardest one to grasp). Theoretical fashion scientists are now trying to recreate these circumstances in changing rooms under extreme temperatures, hoping to shed more light on the so-called VUT (Vintage Unification Theories).