Zwarte Piet

Zoos are my biggest guilty pleasure.

What could be more exciting than seeing up-close, examples of the world’s most exotic fauna arranged in carefully recreated simulations of their natural surroundings?

Where else could you span continents and climates all within a few dozen acres?
Where else could you learn Latin, the taxonomic classification of species and several new country names – and still have fun?

Where else could you go and see monkeys fuck?

On a good day, a zoo is like paradise – it’s either a joyous display of all of God’s creatures or a brilliantly reasoned argument for the science of evolution, depending on your viewpoint. It’s a slickly managed bit of educational entertainment, inspiring minds with the wonders on nature.

But on a bad day, zoos are more like one of those horrible experiments you remember reading about in psychology textbooks.

So what we’ve done is: we’ve gone to all four-corners of the earth to drug and kidnap animals. We’ve then put them into elaborate prisons, carefully constructing poor imitations of their natural surroundings.

We’ve inflicted psychological torture on these animals. By completely controlling every aspect of their lives, artificially constraining their movement, their diet, the lighting and temperature, it’s no wonder so many of them have gone completely loopy.

It’s no wonder that the lions and tigers pace endlessly in their enclosure, that the apes look so sullen, and that the bears have started eating their own shit.

It’s like One flew over the cuckoo’s nest, or that half-way house on the end of your street, where the strange people who talk to themselves and blink a lot live.

It really is the most curiously sadistic activity if approached from a species-neutral perspective. It’s like we’re on the top step of the podium for the evolutionary race, pissing down on our competitors.

The worst thing for the animals is that they haven’t evolved a complex language to offer their views. They can scream, bark and growl, but that might mean “yes I want another banana”, as easily as “I’m frightened”, or “I believe in freedom as an unalienable right of the individual”.

Madrid

madrid_0022, originally uploaded by Joe Russ.

Castle Combe

Best magazine coverline ever

No beating around the bush here – this is how Dutch magazine Revu is reporting the latest Winehouse breakdown.

TV Highlights

I’m not sure whether it’s something to do with Dutch tastes or the fact that everyone smokes a lot of pot, but Dutch TV shows some really shockingly bad movies.

Turn on the TV any night of the week and you’re almost guaranteed to find a Steven Seagal on one of the channels. Not that weird – but most of the time they’re not even the ‘good’ Seagal films, like Under Siege or Marked for Death,  from when he had some popularity as an action lead.

Instead, you’re more likely to see his more recent straight-to-DVD movies, like Attack Force – a film so bad that Seagal couldn’t be bothered to record all his own dialogue and is actually dubbed by another actor in some scenes.

But the best films on Dutch TV are those made for TV movies which imitate contemporary blockbusters. Last night I caught an absolute gem, Destination Infestation – an action thriller about killers ants aboard a passenger airliner.

Yeah, that’s right – Ants on a Plane.

Burial and Four tet collaboration

I’ve been really slack with buying music recently – partly because I haven’t really been looking, but also because I haven’t heard anything that’s really grabbed me… until now.

I think I’m in geek music heaven with the news of this Burial and Four tet collaboration 12-inch. Though the tracks are credited to the respective artists, you can definitely tell the influence they’ve had on each other.

Cycling: UK vs Netherlands

There’s a great article on the Guardian site today about the relative safety of cycling in various places in the UK and mainland Europe.

The most interesting fact from my perspective was about the level of cycle usage in Netherlands compared to the UK.

In the UK only 2% of all journeys involve a bike.

In the Netherlands the equivalent figure is 27%.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/may/07/cycling-safety-york-calderdale

Queen’s Day in Amsterdam

My first Queen’s Day in Amsterdam was quite an experience. I’ve uploaded a few pics here http://www.flickr.com/photos/snapperjr/sets/72157617454995063/

Hmm, P2? This could be a good replacemen…

Hmm, P2? This could be a good replacement for Twitter. At least my tweets (or P2s) will actually be archived properly.