As I blogged previously, Watson started to lose strength in his back legs in April. By mid-May he was finding it difficult to stay upright.
His quality of life reduced to the point where we decided that he had reached his final destination and called the vet. She came and with gentle care put him to sleep. He was almost 15, which for a Labrador is a good age.
We said that we wouldn’t think about getting another dog for at least 6 months. However, it turns out that both Martin and I were scanning the web secretly, and Martin came across Ollie, an 8-year-old rescue dog. We decided to adopt him, and he has been settling into his new home for the past two months. Here he is…
The events in Amsterdam last week have led to a stormy debate in the Dutch parliament and an apparently equally stormy cabinet meeting. As a result, the deputy finance minister, Nora Achahbar, handed in her resignation yesterday. She wrote in her resignation letter that:
The polarising interactions of the past weeks made such an impact on me that I am no longer able to effectively carry out my duties as deputy minister.
There was speculation that other members of her party in the coalition cabinet might follow suit. It resulted in a five-hour crisis meeting of Dick Schoof, the premier, and his coalition partners. The outcome was that his Cabinet will continue, but I note that he said that the junior minister’s resignation:
“came unexpectedly and impacted me and other cabinet members”
Adding:
“there has never been any racism in my government or in the coalition parties”.
Pull the other one – it’s got bells on. You’ve got people such as Faber, Klever and Keijzer in your government who spout the same rhetoric as Wilders…
There’s an opinion piece in today’s Volkskrant where the writer says that they are unlucky to have a PM who gives the impression of bowing to Wilders before getting his marching orders for the day… More than a grain of truth in that, methinks.
Addendum 19 November 2024:
And now, two more party members of the NSC (one of the four parties in the coalition government) have resigned. Rosanne Hertzberger and Femke Zeedijk have had enough. Hertzberger said:
“Completely inappropriate statements are being made, both in front of and behind the scenes of this government. Basic standards of decency, civility, manners – how you speak about colleagues, how you speak about the Dutch – are being violated.”
The coarsening of politics gathers apace, and it seems to be worldwide, with pied piper-in-chief Trump leading the pack. Wilders is not far behind and now it seems as though Yesilgöz and van der Plas are following the piper as well.
The recent riots in Amsterdam are being treated by the media and the Dutch Government as antisemitic. Wilders, in particular is doubling down on this. Frankly, what I saw was football hooliganism turned up to 11 by external events. This was not a “pogrom”, this was a riot – on both sides. And for the mainstream media (and Wilders) to cast it in purely antisemitic terms is both damaging and immoral.
The news that Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sower of hate, is to become the next US President is beyond depressing to me. As far as I can see, it means nothing but bad news on many fronts for the next four years. Only the Musks of this world will benefit, the rest of us are likely to be heading to Hell in a handbasket.
Many years ago, I had a T-shirt made for myself that bore the text: “Never underestimate the power of large groups of stupid people”. I should have kept it.
The US vice-presidential candidate, J. D. Vance, recently accepted shootings in US schools as “a fact of life“.
Along these lines, the sociologist Kieran Healy made some observations on the rituals of childhood back in 2019. I found his observations quite prescient and chilling, and they immediately put me in mind of Shirley Jackson’s short story: “The Lottery“, except his observations are not a work of fiction.
“I’m fairly confident that our institutions will hold and we will show once again that we have a resilient democracy in 2024” – well, I’m not confident at all, at all. If he loses, Trump will declare the results invalid. It’s as certain as death and taxes.
Sigh, once again Microsoft ruins a product – it is no longer possible to search tags in photos stored in OneDrive.
When it was first launched in 2007 (under the name Windows Live SkyDrive), it was not possible to search for tags stored in photos’ metadata. This was finally made possible in 2015.
The OneDrive Search function still claims that it is possible to search tags in photos:
However, when I attempted to search for any of my tags in my photos, this function no longer works. Microsoft appear to have silently downgraded OneDrive, presumably to match their abysmal Photos app, which has never had the ability to support photo metadata tags since it was introduced.
Once again Microsoft snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Addendum: Here’s an example… My Pictures folder is backed up to OneDrive. Using Windows File Explorer to search for the tag “Watson” gives 1,895 photos as the result:
OneDrive knows about the tags for each photo; for example:
But searching for “Watson” in OneDrive only finds photos with “Watson” in the filename; all the tags are being ignored…
Addendum 17 February 2025: I tried once again to contact Microsoft Support to report this (all my previous attempts disappeared into the ether). This time I actually got a link to a Community Post describing the same issue. The post was dated October 5th 2024. The issue was acknowledged to exist, but a few replies further on was this:
FYI, in the past week I’ve been told by Microsoft this issue had been fixed, then that it would be fixed by the end of December, and finally I was told that the feature is being removed from One Drive altogether. Yes, you read that correctly: Microsoft is removing the search feature for photo tags.
Un-f*cking-believable…
However, a few posts further on, someone discovered a workaround, which is to post a query of the form:
Well, great that I can search for a single tag, but I used to be able to search on multiple tags in an AND operation, e.g. show me photos that have both our dogs in them (search for the tags Watson AND Lexie). Microsoft has simply removed this functionality and neutered OneDrive.
Addendum 26 February 2025: I think I’ve discovered what Microsoft has done. They have indeed removed the ability to search our photo tags. Instead, OneDrive relies on their bloody AI engine to assign tags, and then group them on a new “Explore” page. It appears that your own tags are totally ignored when building these categories and Search now only searches photo filenames.
Well, that’s a pile of Dingos’ kidneys – it renders OneDrive totally useless to me as an online resource to manage and search my photo library, and the AI is not much good either. There are many errors, and I simply haven’t the will to keep correcting its mistakes.
Microsoft – you’ve ruined OneDrive for me.
Addendum 28 February 2025: Just when I thought this couldn’t get any worse, Microsoft has managed it in spades. I turned off the Tag option in OneDrive, because Microsoft’s AI tags were poor and not what I wanted; I just wanted to have my own curated tags present. I checked that my tags were still present in the photos up on OneDrive (even though the Search function no longer works) and they were, and could be searched using the workaround I showed earlier.
However, Microsoft has pulled a fast one on me – when the option was on, as OneDrive was assigning AI tags to photos, it appears to have downloaded versions of those photos with no tags at all to my PC. This is a complete turnabout to the old OneDrive, which preserved tags in downloaded copies.
I discovered that I now have 32,000+ photos in my library that have had all my tags stripped out.
Fortunately, I have my photos replicated in a shadow set of folders safely out of the reach of OneDrive, but now I have a lot of work to do to replace the castrated photos in my Pictures folder with curated ones.
There was a time when the Microsoft software developers working on photo applications lived by the mantra that “the truth lives in the file” – i.e. accurate metadata and its preservation were paramount considerations. Those days are no more.
Addendum 30 July 2025: Well, it appears as though the ability to search our tags has been restored to OneDrive. Pity that Microsoft didn’t bother to tell us…
Barbecook is a Belgian manufacturer of barbecues. About ten years ago we bought a barbecue from them: the Puuur model. One of the reasons we chose it was because it has a ceramic bowl that holds the charcoal.
It’s given us good service, but this season I noticed that the bowl had developed a large crack, and another crack is developing. It will only be a matter of time before the bowl starts falling apart.
I went to the Barbecook website to look for a replacement bowl. While the Puuur model is apparently no longer available, there were still spare parts for it listed, including the bowl, so I ordered it, at a cost of €146.88.
A few days later a large box was delivered, which rattled alarmingly. I opened it, and sure enough, the bowl had been smashed in transit
Very comprehensively:
Naturally, I emailed Barbecook’s Customer Support, and got a reply back apologising and saying “I will send you a new ceramic bowl and ask our warehouse staff to pack it extra securely”.
Great, thought I, good customer service. At least I did until the second bowl arrived:
Sigh – broken in transit again; just in two halves this time. So much for the “extra secure packing” – which was exactly the same as for the first time. The issue is that the packing material they use (air bags) gets punctured in transit and the heavy bowl then rattles around in the large box and suffers damage.
I emailed Customer Support with this observation and photos on the 7th August. It’s now two weeks later and I’ve not had any reply. It looks as though I’m €146.88 out of pocket on this particular learning experience. I’m not best pleased, and if I do need to replace our barbecue, you can sure it will not be with a model from Barbecook’s range.
Addendum 24 August 2024: Perhaps it is pure coincidence, but a day after I posted this, I got an email from Barbecook Customer Service apologising for the delay in replying to my last email and offering to either attempt sending a third replacement or to refund my money. I’ve replied that I don’t want to run the risk of a third disappointment, so I would accept the refund…
I have just been watching a program on Dutch TV that introduced all the members of the new Dutch cabinet to us with interviews of each of them by TV political journalists.
Marjolein Faber and Reinette Klever (in particular) came across as rather nasty pieces of work. Klever seemingly refusing to accept that “population replacement” (quoted by both her and Faber in the past) was a conspiracy theory…
I get the distinct impression that this cabinet do not love each other and Dick Schoof as the new premier will have his work cut out to keep them united… We live in interesting times.
When the policy document of the new coalition government in the Netherlands was published a month ago, I predicted that we would be in for a bumpy ride.
Now that names are being put to the Cabinet posts, my prediction is becoming a dead certainty.
The first bump in the road was happily experienced by Wilders himself. He had proposed his PVV party member Gidi Markuszower for the post of Minister of Asylum and Migration, but the Dutch Security Service has said that Markuszower has failed his security check, and so Wilders has had to withdraw his nomination and has proposed an alternative candidate.
Markuszower, by his past public pronouncements, comes across as a particularly nasty piece of work who views those seeking asylum as merely “fortune seekers” and has held forth tirades against them in parliament e.g. the “ordinary Dutch man and woman” is being “replaced” by asylum seekers and that the current policy on asylum is “a crime against the people” and those responsible for it must face a parliamentary tribunal. He is on record as saying:
‘Het is walgelijk dat Nederlanders door de eigen overheid worden vertrapt, maar dat gelukszoekers uit Afrika en achterlijke Midden-Oosterse zandbaklanden door diezelfde overheid worden vertroeteld.’
‘De jungle van Afrika komt massaal hiernaartoe.’
‘We hebben te maken met roedels van zogenaamde ‘bontkraagjes’, groepen van jongeren die hier eigenlijk niet thuishoren.’
‘Ze trappen op het hoofd en beuken en rossen door. Hun slachtoffers kiezen ze zorgvuldig uit, vaak Nederlandse kinderen dus, die hier wél thuishoren. Nederland is van ons, maar de straat is inmiddels van hen. Dit is gewelddadig racisme, waarbij autochtone jongeren in elkaar worden gemept door allochtoon tuig.’
In translation:
“It is disgusting that Dutch people are trampled on by their own government, but that fortune seekers from Africa and backward Middle Eastern sandbox countries are pampered by the same government.”
“The jungles of Africa are coming here en masse.”
“We are dealing with packs of so-called ‘fur collars’ [a derogatory term for male youngsters of supposed Moroccan background], groups of young people who do not actually belong here.”
‘They kick on the head and keep pounding and pounding. They carefully choose their victims, often Dutch children, who do belong here. The Netherlands is ours, but the street is now theirs. This is violent racism, where native young people are beaten up by immigrant scum.’
Wilders has now proposed Marjolein Faber for the post, and she’s not much of an improvement in my eyes: in the First Chamber (the Senate) she has accused the current cabinet of treason because of their policies on mass immigration.
Then we have gems such as Reinette Klever who is to be the Minister for Foreign Trade and Foreign Aid. Presumably she’s been chosen because she wants to scrap all Foreign Aid. She’s written that asylum seekers bring “TB, hepatitus, polio, cholera, typhoid and other exotic diseases with them”. She left politics in 2017 to work in her husband’s business, but then since 2022 has popped up as a TV-commentator in the broadcaster Ongehoord Nederland (Unheard Netherlands) – the Dutch equivalent of Fox News or GB News – so you can imagine what that’s like…
Wilders claims that:
‘Nederland moet een land worden waar u zich weer thuis voelt, een land waar u een goede boterham verdient zonder te veel belasting te betalen, een land waar u ’s avonds veilig over straat kunt zonder beroofd te worden, een land waar de ouderen en de gehandicapten het goed hebben.’
‘The Netherlands must become a country where you feel at home again, a country where you earn a good living without paying too much tax, a country where you can walk safely on the streets at night without being robbed, a country where the elderly and the disabled are doing well.’
Laudable aims, Mr. Wilders, but the end does not justify your means to achieve it.
The real giveaway is that phrase “where you feel at home again” – in other words, white, Christian, and not from any other ethnic or religious background or country. As I said last month: this is not in my name, Mr. Wilders.
I was in despair back in November last year when the right-wing party of Geert Wilders gained the most seats in the Dutch general election. It has taken since then until now for the formation of a four-party coalition government to be agreed (Wilders thought it would take a week).
And as expected, the end result does not look good. A hard line on asylum-seekers and migrants, soft-pedalling on the farmers and a reduction of measures to combat the effects of climate change and the protection of Nature.
If this government wants to put the money where their mouth is, they are going to have to do battle with Brussels. This, of course, is exactly what Wilders wants so that he can claim that the EU is hindering the execution of his plans. Right-wing populism is not what I signed up for when I became a Dutch citizen in 2006. Wilders may claim that he is doing what is right for all Dutch citizens, but it’s not in my name.
Just under a month ago, I blogged that The End Is Nigh – and today it arrived.
It has been very clear over the last week that Watson was on the downward slope – he was finding it difficult to stay upright, and preferred to spend the day resting and sleeping. He would no longer come into our bedroom every morning to wake Martin and steal a sock from the clothes basket, or ask to be chased around the dining table every evening.
On his daily walks, he could only manage a little way outside the house before he would collapse and need to rest and recover his strength. I needed to help him get back upright on all fours before he was able to carry on.
Today we decided that he had reached his final destination and called the vet.
She came, with a vet in training, and with gentle care put him to sleep.
The 1961 film Victim was very probably influential in leading to a change in British law in 1967. Same-sex relations were not decriminalised in the Isle of Man until 1992.
Matt Baume gives an excellent exposition on how courageous and influential the makers and actors of that film were.
Martin bought a 2-piece grater for the kitchen today – a Duo, designed by the Joseph Joseph company. The two graters are designed to clip together for storage.
However, I realised that when clipped together, one set of blades is always exposed.
Why on earth were they not designed so that the blades were safely inside during storage? With the current design, there will always be one set of blades exposed ready to snag on anything – including fingers.
Yet another example of defeat being snatched from the jaws of victory.
Our dog Watson is well into old age – he’s more than 14 years old, which is old for a Labrador. A few weeks ago his back legs suddenly gave way and he collapsed in a heap on the floor. He looked very confused at this, but picked himself up and carried on. It occurred again a week later and now it’s become really noticeable that he’s losing control of his back legs. Last weekend out on his walk I had to stop a few times after he collapsed to let him gather himself together and struggle on.
I took him to the vets’ yesterday and had a good discussion with the vet. We agreed that Watson still has a good quality of life considering his age, but that we’re definitely on the downward slope now. She thinks that it’s a matter of months before we reach a point where we need to think seriously about having him put to sleep, but she did warn that things could change quickly, so to be prepared.
At the moment, the fact that he still wants to play, and getting exercise by wandering about the garden and our field doing his own thing several times a day is demonstrating that he’s coping with his arthritis (for which he’s already getting painkillers and food supplements). So he may just reach his 15th birthday at the end of July – which for a Lab is exceptional – but it’s highly unlikely that he will see Christmas. We will just make the best of the time that we have left.
Way back in 1975 I had read Frank Herbert’s Dune and been mightily impressed by the story. The paperback had a sticker on the front “Soon to be a major film” – but that proved to be rather optimistic, it was 1984 before the first film adaptation of Dune reached the screen. There was an earlier attempt to film the book – the Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky had purchased the film rights in 1974 – but in the end it all came to naught, no film studio was prepared to fund Jodorowsky’s vision, which reportedly would have resulted in a film lasting 14 hours.
Then in 1984, the David Lynch version reached the cinemas. It was not a commercial success, and was mostly disliked by the critics, but I liked it – it certainly had visual style. Lynch himself was not happy with the result – the studio cut his three-hour film back to two hours.
Following that, there were two TV series adaptations of Dune that were relatively successful, but I still did not think that justice had been done to the source material.
Then, in 2021, Denis Villeneuve brought his version of Dune to the silver screen. For the first time, I thought that this was the version of Dune that I had been waiting for. It turned out that this was Dune Part One – Villeneuve intended that a book as complex as Dune required two parts to tell the story.
I never got to see Dune Part One in the cinema, I’ve only viewed it at home on our TV (with surround sound). Still, it is very impressive. A spectacle, but also very well played by excellent actors.
Dune Part Two was released in March this year. This time I was determined to see it in a cinema on an IMAX screen, as Villeneuve intended it should be experienced.
I went to a morning screening (there were just 20 of us in the IMAX theatre) at the Pathé cinema in Arnhem. This was my first ever experience of IMAX, and it did not disappoint. Dune Part Two is superbly well-realised – in my opinion, a successful adaptation of the book in every way. There are sequences in it that are simply breathtaking in their spectacle, while the characters are never drowned out, their stories play out in front of us with real emotional weight.
The film does say “based on the book” and while it does follow the plot in the main and often quotes the text, there are some significant deviations (no Count Fenring at all and no Alia in the final scenes, for example). I wondered about the dropping of Count Fenring – although a minor character in much of the book, he turns out to be significant at the climax. The closure of the film is also very different from the book, but points the way forward for part 3 (based on the “Dune Messiah” book) – which will probably arrive in 5 years’ time – I think Villeneuve wants to take a break and do something else next. I hope that I will live to see it…
We live in the region of the Netherlands known as the Achterhoek. The name literally means the rear corner – because of its geographical position. It has its own flag – that was developed in 2018, and has since become very popular – you see it flying everywhere.
Since 2006, when we came to live here, we’ve been flying the Rainbow flag in the garden, but a couple of years ago, I learned that Thessa Banning from Zieuwent had developed an Achterhoekse version. Now, at last, courtesy of Marion from the local LGBTQ group we have one raised on the flagpole in the garden…
Terrible news that Alexei Navalny has died in the Artic Penal Colony where he was being held “after a fall”. Defenestration comes in many forms it would seem, but it too often befalls those whom Putin views as his enemies.
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