Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates. Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak [...]
Languages are a hot item of discussion at our house, because – well, there’s a big language gap here. Susan’s family is a mix of Norwegian, Danish and variations on British Isles, and there’s a little bit of the ‘Fargo’ Scandinavian-American accent there. Not much, mostly in word choice and the occasional ‘ya, sure‘ delivered [...]
Miep Gies, the last of the group who hid Anne Frank from the Nazis, turns 100 today (hat tip to aisb23). Weekend news anchors at a local TV station have a ritual they do during a commercial break – get up and DANCE! (h/t andrewducker) Jabba and other beach huts on the Lincolnshire (UK) coast [...]
Another bit of Rittenhousia, about the beginnings of paper-making in America, circa 1688 – this is from the Historical Magazine, 1857. Again, for the record.
I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so. Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow. So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff. Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and [...]
Longtime readers will recall that I’m a great fan of the Dutch-American author Hendrik Willem Van Loon, a taste that I got from my mom and her brother, my uncle. There’s an online exhibit at the Ohio State University site of Van Loon’s illustrations (crude, but charming) for his best-known work, The Story of Mankind. [...]
At various times, I get into research projects; some simmer on for decades in various forms, and some break off and pick up speed because I happen to run into something that really fuels the fire, so to speak. My library here is largely one that I use for reference. I have a huge amount [...]
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The U.S. dollar’s value is dropping so fast against the euro that small currency outlets in Amsterdam are turning away tourists seeking to sell their dollars for local money while on vacation in the Netherlands. “Our dollar is worth maybe zero over here,” said Mary Kelly, an American tourist from Indianapolis, Indiana, [...]
First off, there’s a link here to a translation of the latest SPOORLOOS and a link to the actual show on-line. As noted previously, my Dutch is nonexistent, and I (and others) had asked her to help out on a translation of the show about the reunion of a Chinese adoptee in the Netherlands with [...]
I got this comment on the LJ branch of the site yesterday: I just ran across this blog entry and I was wondering (although it’s none of my business, of course) whether you guys have given any thought to searching for Meredith’s birth family, or if you’re going to let the girls decide when they’re [...]
I wonder what they would have had for my family when they came here in 1688 from the Netherlands….