Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2007

  • Amsterdam Canal Parade 2007

    As promised, here’s my impressions of the 12th annual Canal Parade, held last Saturday in Amsterdam. For the first time I can recall, the weather was perfect. Most years that I’ve been present, we’ve had occasional showers, but this year there was not a cloud in the sky. That may have helped with the record-breaking turnout as well, there were 400,000 spectators lining the canals, according to police estimates. And there were 70 boats in the parade, the highest number ever.

    A number of the boats had a serious message. There appears to be an increasing number of anti-gay incidents occurring in Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands. Last weekend, for example, a 34-year old Irishman had his jaw and nose broken, an American gay couple were sprayed with pepper-spray or teargas and then beaten, and another couple were spat upon by a pair on motor scooters. So the unofficial motto of the Canal Parade could be said to be that emblazoned on the side of the Mr. B boat: "So you’re intolerant? – Piss off!!"

    20070804-1435-54 

    The figurehead of the boat also rather impressively underscored the message:

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    The rise in anti-gay violence was the theme of the Trut dance club boat, which was decorated with newspaper reports on the rise:

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    Then there was the "Pink Police" boat, with its motto: "to serve and protect Gay Amsterdam":

    20070804-1519-53 

    There was even a Hetero Boat, entered in the Parade to show solidarity, with the motto: "Samen anders, samen één" (different together, one together):

    20070804-1623-49 

    There were a couple of notable firsts in this year’s Parade. There was "Danny’s Boat" – a boat of LGBT children and their parents. This was the initiative of 14-year old Danny Hoekzema. When he first mooted the idea, the Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, rejected it, expressing doubts about involving "that vulnerable group" in the procession. He later relented, and gave his permission. In the event, you have to wonder what all the fuss was about. It was great to see the boat:

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    The other first was a boat sponsored by the care organisation Cordaan. It carried gay people who happened to also be mentally handicapped:

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    As I wrote last week, Shell didn’t have a boat in the parade this year, but there were a number of other multinationals represented, among them TNT, ING Bank and the ABN-AMRO bank:

    20070804-1459-13 

    This guy in the centre of the ING picture was giving it all that he had. Clearly a thwarted thespian who seized the chance to belt out a song and dance routine:

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    20070804-1559-55 

    And of course, being a gay parade, we had the usual assortment of drag queens and muscle marys. Gawd bless ’em all:

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    The other 617(!) photos that I took that day can be seen in the complete photoset up on Flickr.

  • While You’re Waiting…

    While you’re waiting for my report and photos on the Amsterdam Canal Parade, may I just refer you to this report on the event, which seems to touch quite well on the influences and pressure points that I feel also. 

  • English As She Is Spoke

    There’s something about the often tortured language of academia that makes me want to scream. I begin to suspect that the reason that the phrasing is so labyrinthine is that because the emperor (or the empress) ain’t wearing no clothes. 
     
    Here’s a typical example. Salam Al-Mahadin writing in the Guardian and claiming that "Bookshops are using Muslim women’s autobiographies to peddle a bogus canon of Islamic oppression". Well, that’s what the sub-editor has put as the summary of her piece. For myself, I found it difficult to comprehend when wading through such motions as:
    "In individualising their experiences via lengthy narratives, these women contributed to the annihilation of that individuality.
     
    These accounts emerged in a discursive space already fraught with the polemics of generalisations. The veracity of the individual narratives may not be in dispute but the problematic of their deployment and the danger inherent in their exclusionary mechanisms is.  
     
    Thus "truths" about Islam, like any other truths, are produced by a paradigm of inclusion and exclusion, constraints and circulation. This is quite unique to these biographies.  
     
    The brown/black woman of the erstwhile colonial discourse may have spoken. But the din of the few voices that have been heard produce a totalising, essentialist mythology about Islam. They are heard as a symphony rather than solo concertos."  
    Er, hello? Is there any sense in there?

  • Department of the Bleeding Obvious

    I take it that this is a review of a new SF series currently underway on American TV. It contains the classic line:
    In what may be a political statement, the US is ready to take an unpopular course of action without support from the rest of the world, but the manner in which this decision is made does not come across as particularly plausible.
    No shit, Sherlock? Colour me as completely unsurprised…  

  • Photos Coming…

    The photos from last Saturday’s Amsterdam Canal Parade will be along shortly. I took nearly 700 photos, and most of them are currently being loaded in Flickr here. I’ll post a selection on the blog soon. 

  • The Enemies of Reason

    This TV series sounds really good. Hopefully it will make its way to YouTube for those of us who don’t have Channel 4… 

  • Amsterdam Pride

    This year’s Amsterdam Pride festivities started yesterday, and will carry on until Sunday. The highlight for many people, myself included, will be the annual boat parade. The weather forecast is good, so I’ll travel to Amsterdam tomorrow to take lots of photos of it.
     
    Unfortunately, this year Shell won’t have a boat in the parade. As a Shell pensioner, I feel rather sad about this, particularly following all the effort the Shell GLBT group (Pink Pearl) made to get their first ground-breaking boat into the parade in 2005. That led to other multinationals sponsoring their own boats in 2006 alongside the Shell boat.
     
    I understand from a Pink Pearl member that the reason that Shell is not participating this year in the parade is because the Shell Nederland Country Chairman gave Pink Pearl the steer to focus their limited resources (both manpower to organise these events, and yearly budget) on solving an internal Shell GLBT issue – which is Mobility across borders. At the moment gay employees are not free to move from one expatriate assignment to another with their partners (because it is illegal to be gay in many countries where Shell operates- sometimes leading to the death penalty if found with another same sex partner). The result of this is that gay people do not have equal chances to succeed in their careers if they are limited as to which countries they can work in with their partners, or they have to make choices to work in a country without their partners which does not make for a stable home life. At the moment, Pink Pearl is working on raising the awareness of this issue in Shell, especially within the Human Resources community and leadership teams.
     
    So, alas, no boat this year, but Pink Pearl members will definitely be present to cheer on the parade. Me too.  

  • Pricking Pomposity

    I see that PZ Myers, over at Pharyngula, is also exasperated by Alister McGrath. He’s been reading a recent interview with McGrath that has appeared in the National Catholic Register. While I tend to find that McGrath’s arguments just make me want to howl in frustration with their stupidity, PZ takes the scalpel of reason to dissect them and lay them out in all their threadbare tawdriness for all to see. Nice job. 

  • Living With Climate Change

    A rather worrying video from EUtube. It also contains another version of the graphic showing the impact of sea-level rises on The Netherlands. Sigh.
     
     

  • A Comprehensive FAQ

    Having had to do it a few times in a past life, then I know that compiling the list of questions and answers that go to make up a FAQ can become more of an art than a science at times.
     
    Still, I take my hat off to the compiler of this FAQ from Sainsburys, which accompanies their announcement of the fact that they will no longer be accepting cheques in their stores. It contains the following beauty:
    I have a latex allergy. What are the buttons on your chip and PIN terminals made of?  
    It’s given me an insight into some people’s lives that I never even realised existed… Although what you must do if you’re into rubber, and you have a latex allergy, I really cannot imagine. Perhaps that’s one definition of masochist? And before you jump to conclusions, I have neither of the two conditions.
     
    (hat tip to Diamond Geezer for the link)

  • Boy-Wives and Female Husbands

    Gawd, I love the internet! It leads me down such fascinating paths. There I was, idly browsing through Improbable Research, and I come across a reference to this week’s Improbable Research column in the Guardian. It’s devoted to the topic of when someone’s speech "sounds gay", what makes it sound that way (and is the speaker in fact gay?). There have been three studies into this.
     
    I noticed that one study had been done by Rudolf P. Gaudio at Standford University in 1994 (and on an associated note, his picture set off my gaydar – although I have to say that my gaydar is notoriously unreliable). I then googled to see what other research he might have been involved in. I see that he contributed a wonderfully-titled paper entitled "Not Talking Straight In Hansa" to the book Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender and Sexuality, edited by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. I’m almost persuaded to get a copy, since many of the other papers have equally intriguing titles such as: "The Color of His Eyes; Polari and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence", "Pots an Pans; Identification of Queer Japanese in Terms of Discrimination" and "‘Go Suck Your Husband’s Sugarcane’; Hijras and the Use of Sexual Insult".
     
    Gaudio’s work on the Hansa society and language then led me on to another intriguingly-titled book: Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, by Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe. It’s a study of homosexualities (the modes and expressions of homosexuality) in African societies. Despite what Archbishop Akinola may wish to believe, homosexualities have been around in African societies for a very long time, and have not been recently introduced by the decadent West. The book gets a good review here. Damn, another one for the pile.

  • Murata Boy

    Murata Boy is a bicycle-riding robot. It actually rides a bike better than most humans – I can’t come to a dead stop and still remain upright, for one thing. Still, Murata Boy cheats – I think it doesn’t actually power the bicycle with its feet – there’s what looks suspiciously like an electric motor attached to the rear wheel. Same for the handlebars – I think they are turned by a servo motor in the top of the frame. Despite this, Murata Boy is pretty impressive. It was created to showcase the technologies of the firm that built it.  

  • Be Prepared

    Here’s a handy-dandy guide to propaganda and debating tricks. Train yourself to spot when they’re being deployed (by politicians, practically all the time these days, it would seem). Very useful. 
     
    (hat tip to Larry Moran of Sandwalk for the link)

  • Bootstrapping The Brain

    Carl Zimmer refers to an article that appears in Nature, which describes the case of a man being roused from a minimally conscious state by electrical stimulation of his brain. Unfortunately, the article is available to subscribers only, so I haven’t been able to read it. But Zimmer does have a link to an article that he wrote on the background. And here’s a BBC news story on the current development (pun not intended). 

  • Clashing Carpets

    Martin and I have a weak spot for watching Escape to the Country – a TV programme in which home-seekers are shown a selection of country properties in their budget that purport to measure up to their requirements. Part of the fascination is the chance to look at other people’s taste (and I use the word advisedly) in interior furnishings. The highpoints come when a particularly violent scheme elicits whimpers of horror from us. Such schemes usually centre around a carpet whose design burns into the retina.
     
    Now Dan, over at fulminate//Architectures of Control, draws our attention to carpets that are deliberately designed to be unsettling. Fascinating stuff.

  • The Wilder Shores

    Come with me on a trip to the wilder shores of medical research. Ben Goldacre, over at Bad Science, raised his eyebrows at some research that has been published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. The "central thrust of their argument is that people with Down’s Syndrome have a lot in common with people from oriental countries". Oo-er, missus.
     
    Vaughan, a contributor to Mind Hacks, has now referenced Goldacre’s article, and given some additional background to this esteemed journal, and its somewhat controversial founder. There’s clearly no shortage of hare-brained hypotheses in every field of human endeavour. Don’t miss the link to the hypothesis (also published in Medical Hypotheses) that asks: Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia?  

  • What’s Your AQ?

    That’s Asperger Quotient. Here’s a test, originally devised by psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, that purports to give an indication of whether you exhibit the common signs of Asperger’s syndrome. I turn out to be boringly average with a score of 18.

  • Out of the Tunnel

    That’s the title of the book by Rachel North that describes her experiences in the terrifying places of her life. First when she was raped and secondly when she was very nearly blown up in the bombings in London on the 7th July 2005.
     
    I mentioned here that I thought that the book would be worth reading. Now that I have done that, I can confirm that my feeling was right. It is a wonderful book. Her voice is human, true, solid, and deserves to be heard.
     
    The end of the book – when the light returns – reminds me somewhat of the glorious closure of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America:
    This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.
    Bye now.
    You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
    And I bless you: More Life.
    The Great Work Begins. 
    Thank you, Rachel for the book.

  • A Horse Named Courage

    Liz (of Granny Gets A Vibrator fame) tells us that we should live each day to the full. Quite right, too. 

  • The Joys of Parenting

    Jon Ronson on bringing up his boy. I hail from a time when one didn’t have conversations like that with one’s parents, but I still ended up knowing the words somehow.