The software that was included on the CD Rom with the image data was a very crappy Windows application and I didn’t do much with it. But today I found an open source Mac viewer and it produced these stunning revealing images.

Have a peek into my body:

We arrived late in Winnipeg so our scheduled 4 hour stop was cut short to one hour. I didn’t care too much since I’ve visited Winnipeg before ( Read here and the next posts about that trip).

We went on a short stroll through the Forks, where we saw the worlds longest skating rink, a cool bridge with ice on it so you could skate over it, and had a chat with a guy that ran a sound recording studio right in the middle of a shopping mall.

When I told people we were going on this trip everybody warned me that the part of the trip through Manitoba and Saskatchewan would be very boring because the landscape was all flat. So I feared the worst, especially because I hate the flat Dutch landscape.

So when we left Winnipeg I prepared myself for some boring hours and even thought of doing some work on my current programming project. But the landscape was actually quite pleasant. We travelled between rolling hills, covered with snow (although in Montreal there was more snow that in Winnipeg) all the way towards Saskatchewan when it got too dark to distinguish much outside our always moving picture window.

So don’t believe people when they say Canada’s prairie provinces are all flat. It’s a big flat lie.

5 years later.

It’s my birthday today but I’m totally not in the mood for a party. Alison is in Toronto, and I’m invited by friends to celebrate my birthday with them. Even though i didn’t feel like it I reluctantly went. It costs a lot of energy to appear human.

The supper was great, the cake was lovely, the company pleasant, but nevertheless I wasn’t able to really enjoy it.

This depressive episode lasts a couple of weeks now and I’m want it to be over. I can only see the negative side of things, the house that needs lot of maintenance, the tenants that refuse the rent increase, my lack of friends, clients that didn’t pay my invoices etc. I even shout to the dogs.

Via illicit channels I stumbled upon a yet unreleased movie about the thesis subject of a fellow web-logger. I downloaded it, burned it onto a CD-ROM and gave it to her. And since I had it on my hard drive I decided to watch it.

“Noise” is about a man (Tim Robbins) who can’t stand the noise in New York, especially the blaring car alarms, and he decides to do something about it. I won’t give away the whole plot here, but it involves breaking car windows and cutting battery cables.

Now is this a subject that lies close to my heart. During my last years in the Netherlands I was kind of obsessed with cars. I didn’t mind their noise that much, but I couldn’t stand them driving through red lights, not giving priority to pedestrians and bicycles on crosswalks and generally breaking traffic rules. So I actually had more of a gripe with their drivers than with the cars themselves. But since they were hiding in the sacred cows it was easier to hate cars, period. This all originated to a few incidents I had where I told (or gestured) some cars that they shouldn’t drive over my toes and was subsequently assaulted and beaten up by the driver. And this, instead of making me more timid and restrained, made me even more vocal and focussed on car’s errors. I once threw my bike in front of a car to stop it from entering the one-way street I lived in from the wrong direction (this happened a lot because it was a huge shortcut between two main streets). And I could get totally worked up when I saw cars jumping red lights, even when they were far away from me. I was a totally self-righteous asshole, stopping for every red pedrestian stop light, even in the middle of the night when there was no traffic at all. If I followed the rules I could critique everybody else who didn’t.

This happened only when I was riding my bike or was a pedestrian. When I drove a car myself I could stand traffic violations much better. So for a while I drove to my studio, even though that actually took more time and was a hassle with parking.

During the worst period I couldn’t even watch out of my window, in fear of getting totally worked up over cars running in the wrong direction. There were days I couldn’t leave the house. I suffered from a special case of agoraphobia. During the nights I was plotting evil plans involving setting cars ablaze that were parked illegally and acquiring a rocket launcher to, as in Doom, blow cars into pieces. Just the thought that I couldn’t afford being apprehended because it would affect my immigration process, withheld me from actually doing these things in reality.

When I was visiting Montréal I had none of these symptoms, probably because I didn’t have to “defend” my territory, because I was a visitor. But even now, when I’m not a visitor anymore, I only rarely have the urge to fight cars. I even jaywalk sometimes!

Anyway, the movie wasn’t a masterpiece but watching it brought back a lot of not so nice memories. Not so much that I started to hyperventilate, but enough to cause a slightly elevated heartbeat. But I was also relieved that this period was over, that I was “normal” again.

When we paused the movie we heard the neighbours dogs barking very loudly and we started to laugh about the coincidence.

It became even more hilarious when two of our tenants came down and rang our doorbell complaining about our dogs. I pointed them to the neighbours house and had to close the door fast because I couldn’t hold in my laughter.

The tagging virus is doing the rounds again and Frank tried to infect me. Since I’ve not much else to write here I happily tag along.

According to the rule-book:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself.
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs.
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website.

Okay, now we’ve got that out of the way, here we go, in no particular order:

1. I generally don’t eat meat, but I’ll sometimes make exceptions for lamb or venison. I did however eat dog once. I was in a market in rural Vietnam and taking pictures of two tied-up dogs. Someone came to me and gestured to come with him, intermittently pointing to the dogs. We ended up at a stall on the market with a big boiling pot of soup with chucks of meat in it. He took a big spoon, fished out some meat and held it in front of my face. How could I refuse somebody who offered me a part of his feast meal? It was quite tasty and tasted like wild pig. I do eat fish but will spare you a gruesome story.
2. I hate the fact that men’s clothes are almost all in subdued, dark colours. I like to wear bright colours, the world is already grey enough. (There was a period in my life that I only had grey clothes, but that was when I was in art school…)
3. I almost always sleep with something in my mouth. A plastic mouth guard, because I grind and clench my teeth during my sleep; and a Dutch “dropje” (liquorice) in order to keep my saliva going and thus preventing a dry mouth and a resulting sore throat; and sometimes also my right index finger to be able to breathe because my nose often clogs up completely. However, and maybe the result of the above, I do not snore.
4. I am not circumcised, but I did have a vasectomy. I had some complications after doing that procedure so I’m not sure if I can recommend it. Even though it’s good for bringing down the growth of the human population, so maybe we can have another generation before the resource wars will start.
5. I learn very fast but I’m also easily bored. So I never become a real expert in something because when the learning curve flattens at the top, and improving things costs too much time, I tend to move my attention to something else. As a result I’m good in doing many things, but don’t excel in anything particular.
6. I’ve never knowingly slept with a Mac user.

O, and now for the hard part. Find six blogs that haven’t been tagged. Of course that is impossible, like with every pyramid scheme. The number of bloggers that already have been tagged goes up quite a bit with every iteration.

Six, forty-two, 258 (more people than I know that have a blog), 1554, 9330, 55986, 335922, 2015538 (more people than there are living on the island of Montréal), 12093234 (more people than in Québec), 72559410 (more people than living in the Netherlands and Canada combined), 435356466, 2612138802 (almost half of the earth’s human population), 15672832818 (we really have to teach animals to blog now)…

This whole tagging thing is totally unsustainable. All I can do is break the rules. Either by tagging less than six people or by tagging people that have already been tagged, but haven’t written a “6 random things about me”-post.

I just tag one person, and I’ll force her to write something so the chain isn’t broken because we all know that means bad luck. Without further ado I hereby tag Alison, who writes much better than I do on her Transparency blog.

(I’m so going to regret this.)

In 2004, the Naked Bike Ride in Montréal wasn’t exactly a success, even though a naked picture of me made it into the Mirror.

Today was the second try for Montréal. So while in one part of the city one of the worlds’ most polluting events took place, the Formula One races, we protested against cars and pollution by riding our bikes in the buff. It’s also Clean Air Day, even though there is a smog warning in effect.

and it was much better. About 150 to 200 people showed up, and most of them bared it all and rode through the Plateau neighbourhood naked. Of course there were about 500 onlookers at the start and many more along the roads. The police escorted us and closed roads and intersections for us. All happened without any incidents.

Halfway my bike’s front tire was punctured so I spent the last 2 kilometres running with my bike in hand. I was surprised of my endurance, since I normally never run, and certainly not on my Teva sandals. I’m sure seeing me run must have been a spectacular sight.

If you want to see me naked on a bike watch the news tonight or read a newspaper tomorrow. I’ve seen so many cameras along the route that I’m sure they snapped me as well.

Click for video [1 MB QT]

Today we made a shocking discovery. Inspired by a web-page were they told that the latest version of Apple’s video editing program iMovie had a time lapse function, I decided to make a movie of the dogs while we’re gone, and they are locked up in the kitchen. The results were quite scary. It seems that while we’re gone the dogs aren’t resting or sleeping, which is almost all they do when we’re around, but that they are nervously watching if we’re not coming back. If you click on above image you can see part of the video. One second of video correspondents to one minute in real time. You see Poupoune hiding somewhere out of the camera image (Why did I make that dog bed?) and Pepe looking up and watching around nervously and only getting naps of a couple of minutes. This goes on for the full 12 hours we were gone today. Longer than normal, but we went to the movies.
(We went to see Miami Vice, a very bad movie, BTW. To be avoided.)

We don’t really know what to do, maybe we’re going to lock them in the bathroom, where they have less distraction. I’m going to monitor with my dog cam, of course and see if it is an improvement. O, and in case you wonder why we have to lock them up, we have to because they are badly trained when they were young and tend to pee and poop inside during our absence and we prefer them to not do that on the hardwood floors or on the couches. The kichen and bathroom floors are much easier to clean.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

De mislukte fietsdemonstratie heeft wel de pers gehaald. De “Mirror” (een gratis wekelijkse krant) publiceerde een foto. Met mij erop. Een vriendin van Alison herkende me zelfs.

Hier is de foto op de Mirror website.

[I’m too lazy to translate this. Try

for a computer translation.]

En nog een fietstocht! Dit is de Montréalse poging om mee te doen met de wereldwijde ‘Naked Bike Ride’, een protestfietstocht tegen olie en voor zelfexpressie.
Helaas was de organisator van de Montréalse tocht halverwege opgehouden met organiseren en kwamen er maar een stuk of twintig mensen opdagen. En een heleboel politie. Die agenten zeiden eerst dat het OK was als we maar binnen het park bleven waar de start was gepland. Toen we ons uitkleden begonnen ze echter aanstalten te maken om ons een voor een te arresteren. En dat hadden we er nu ook niet voor over, dus we kleden ons maar weer aan. Maar daarna zijn we met 8 mensen samengekomen op een nabij terras en hebben gezamelijk besloten dat we het volgend jaar beter gaan aanpakken. Met betere publiciteit en hopelijk meer deelnemers. Dus wellicht tot volgend jaar.

Ik sta rechts op deze foto.