Amsterdam: Part IV

March 29, 2019 • 9:30 am

Two days ago was the obligatory visit to the Rijksmuseum, the epicenter of Rembrandt paintings, drawings, and etchings. The building dates from 1885 and includes, besides the Greatest Painter of All Time (my opinion), works by Hals, Vermeer, and even the stray Van Gogh.

I was lucky to be there for the “All the Rembrandts” exhibit, celebrating the 350th anniversary of the Master’s death. The name means that every Rembrandt work possessed by the Museum was on display, not every Rembrandt in the world (I wish).

In the garden before the entrance was a beautiful Eurasian magpie (Pica pica), a corvid and a bird of high intelligence.

You can see ALL the Rembrandts online, so I won’t reproduce pictures of them (I took only a few anyway). What struck me was how different going to art museums is now that people have cellphone cameras. You can take photographs in the Rijksmuseum without using a flash, and what happens is what you see below with The Night Watch. Many people photograph the painting but don’t spend any time looking at it. Many even take selfies with a painting, apparently just to show that they were there. It’s a strange way to appreciate art.

Ditto with The Milkmaid, by Johannes Vermeer. I also consider him one of the ten best painters of all time.

A lovely Rembrandt etching:

Otherwise I took pictures of waterfowl and cats in the big collection of paintings. Here’s a duck that, sadly, has joined the Choir Invisible, destined for dinner.

One of the nicest paintings in the Rijksmuseum, “The Threatened Swan” by Jan Asselijn, painted in 1650. An aggressive swan protects its nest and eggs from an approaching dog. It brims with life and is a tour de force for that age. Here I’m admiring it.

A happy mallard helping a bunch of other birds attack a raven for stealing their feathers. This is part of Melchior d’ Hoendecoeter’s painting “The Raven Robbed of the Feathers He Wore to Adorn Himself” (1671).

A section of “A Pelican and Other Birds Near a Pool” (ca. 1680), also by Melchior d’Hondecoeter. There’s a passel of ducks, including a muscovy, a mallard, and, at top right with the brownish-red eye ring, an Egyptian duck (see below for a live one):

More ducks; I don’t know the painting.

Jan Steen’s “The Dancing Lesson” (also known as “Children Teaching a Cat to Dance”), painted between 1660 and 1679. Cats didn’t like it any better back then, and the old dude at the top is telling the kids to knock it off.

“The Drunken Couple” by Jan Steen, painted between 1655 and 1665. Note the cat looking up incredulously at its besotted staff.

The boy at lower left has a kitten, but I can’t remember the painting and can’t be arsed to look it up. Maybe we have an art-history genus reading this who can name the painting:

A nice Art Deco building near the Rijksmuseum.

Yesterday was another obligatory (and another wonderful) visit—this time to the Van Gogh Museum, a five-minute walk from the Rijksmuseum. (Note; i recommend not seeing them both on way day because of the possibility of ocular exhaustion.) Here’s a picture of Van Gogh’s palette, which is on display. van Gogh is in my top five of World’s Best Painters, so I was lucky enough to see three of them in just two days.

Almond Blossoms (1890), painted the year van Gogh died.

“Still Life with Mussels and Shrimp” (1886):

Cypresses and Two Women (1890). This was the year van Gogh died after having shot himself in the chest. In my view, these late paintings are his best.

“Winter Garden” (1884), pencil, pen and ink.

A post-Museum waffle. They come in all grades from plain to chocolate-iced to this one, including chocolate icing, drizzle, and a Twix bar embedded in the top. They get even fancier than this, including strawberries or raspberries. Dutch waffles are GOOD!

A herring stall near my hotel. I haven’t yet worked up the courage to try raw herring Dutch style, but I am going to try.

A sign in the herring stall. Translation, please?

A box of cat cards in a store. What are these? From knowing German I can make out “advice cards” from “the world’s most famous cat”.

Curiously, although I’ve seen a few coots and swans in the canals, I haven’t seen a single mallard. I got excited when I saw ducklike shapes swimming in the canal near the Central Station, but upon closer inspection they turned out to be a new species for me: the Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca). It’s the only species in the genus Alopochen, and Wikipedia says it’s most closely related to shelducks, which are ducks and not geese.

Do you see it in the painting above? It’s clearly been in Holland since the 17th century, Why is it here? Wikipedia says, “[The species] spread to Great Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy where there are self-sustaining populations which are mostly derived from escaped ornamental birds.”

It is a handsome DUCK (not a goose; I cannot be enamored of geese). Looking up divergence times in TimeTree, I find that the common ancestor of the Egyptian “goose” and the mallard lived about 20 million years ago, while the common ancestor of the Egyptian “goose” and the Canada goose lived about 28 million years ago. One always finds this species most closely related to other ducks than to other geese. Since I don’t think ducks and geese are paraphyletic, this is not a goose. It is apparently called a goose because it’s larger than most ducks, and is very chunky.

Here’s the natural range map of the Egyptian goose:

 

Friday: Hili dialogue

March 29, 2019 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, welcome to Friday!

 

In history today:

  • 845 – Paris is sacked by Viking raiders, probably under Ragnar Lodbrok, who collects a huge ransom in exchange for leaving.
  • 1549 – The city of Salvador da Bahia, the first capital of Brazil, is founded.
  • 1632 – Treaty of Saint-Germain is signed returning Quebec to French control after the English had seized it in 1629.
  • 1867 – Queen Victoria gives Royal Assent to the British North America Act which establishes the Dominion of Canada on July 1.
  • 1927 – Sunbeam 1000hp breaks the land speed record at Daytona Beach, Florida.
  •  1936 – In Germany, Adolf Hitler receives 99% of the votes in a referendum to ratify Germany’s illegal remilitarization and reoccupation of the Rhineland, receiving 44.5 million votes out of 45.5 million registered voters.
  • 1974 – NASA’s Mariner 10 becomes the first space probe to fly by Mercury.
  • 1999 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above the 10,000 mark (10,006.78) for the first time, during the height of the dot-com bubble.
  • 2014 – The first same-sex marriages in England and Wales are performed.

Notable birthdays:

  • 1900 – Bill Aston, English race car driver (d. 1974)
  • 1927 – John Vane, English pharmacologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004)
  • 1929 – Dick Lewontin, Jerry’s Ph.D. boss, turns 90 today and is still kicking. Born March 29, 1929.
  • 1929 – Utpal Dutt, Indian Bengali actor, director and playwright(d. 1993)
  • 1936 – Judith Guest, American author and screenwriter
  • 1940 – Astrud Gilberto, Brazilian singer-songwriter
  • 1943 – John Major, English banker and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (28 November 1990 – 2 May 1997)
  • 1955 – Marina Sirtis, British-American actress, best known for Star Trek: The Next Generation

Today iHili is issuing orders that may or may not have an ulterior motive.

Hili: You’ve drunk your coffee.
A: Oh, so I have.
Hili: Make yourself another one with cream – but not all the cream.

In Polish:

Hili: Wypiłeś kawę.
Ja: O, rzeczywiście.
HilI: Zrób sobie następną, ze śmietanką (ale nie całą).

From Twitter today

There are worse things in life than being you.

From Wednesday, an interesting note.

An angle I had not considered

One thing you didn’t know ducklings like to do

A new and better ending to Frankenstein

An interesting story, no it’s nothing to do with chimeras.

Overly-dramatic man makes three new friends

Same

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1111143087231778816

Finally, panorama photos of dogs are a new form of art.

 

The ducks have become friendly; Anna concludes that the hen is Honey

March 28, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Anna is back co-parenting the mallards with me, and sent three short videos and some pictures. She is now pretty sure that the female is Honey, as she’s friendly, eats from the hand, and comes to Anna’s whistle.  Voilà (Anna’s notes are indented):

They’re doing well. Must be Honey. Also she does have the dots on her beak. Now that she’s so friendly I can see them.

She bites a little! Frank was way less bitey.

Corn-ucopia:

And some photos:

Such a beauty. So glad she’s back!

Selfie with Honey.

Clearly Honey has a new gentleman friend; that isn’t James Pond. Would readers like to suggest a name for the drake?

Brunei to become barbaric on April 3, allowing stoning to death for adultery and homosexual acts

March 28, 2019 • 11:20 am

Only one religion on Earth—and I’ll give you this paragraph to guess—would, in this day and age, suddenly sanction stoning to death for “crimes” like homosexual behavior and adultery. The punishment statue starts on April 3 in Brunei and is described in several places, including the New York Times (click on screenshot below).

Six years ago Brunei announced that it was going to impose a harsh form of sharia law, for the country’s official religion is Sunni Islam. In the past few years it banned alcohol and celebrations of Christmas (even by non-Muslims). Now the vise is being squeezed even harder. As the NYT reports:

Brunei has had the death penalty on the books since it was a British protectorate, but in practice executions are not typically carried out.

Homosexuality is already illegal in Brunei, with a punishment of up to 10 years in prison, but the new laws allow for penalties including whipping and stoning. The new laws also introduce amputation of hands or feet as a punishment for robbery.

. . . Under the laws about to come into effect, a person can be convicted of adultery or having gay sex only if there are multiple Muslim witnesses. The law will apply to Muslims and non-Muslims alike, although some offenses, such as apostasy, apply specifically to Muslims, who make up about two-thirds of Brunei’s population.

The “multiple Muslim witnesses” mitigates the punishment a bit, but not much. Stoning and amputation are signs of barbarism, and should not be on the books anywhere.

Although not mentioned in the Qur’an, stoning is repeatedly mentioned in the hadith and has been adopted as punishment by several branches of Islam, though this is a first for Muslim countries in Southeast Asia. And the requisites for stoning, according to the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, are that the stones used in the punishment should be about hand-size, so as not to cause death too quickly but big enough to do cumulative fatal damage.

Stoning is a horrible punishment which often takes a long time to cause death. The preliminaries—wrapping the victim in cloth and buying him/her up to their chest in the ground—are cruel and terror-inducing. No civilized people could mandate or participate in such a crime. If the U.S. had any guts, we’d break off relations with oil-rich Brunei immediately.

Amsterdam: Part III

March 28, 2019 • 10:30 am

I forgot to mention the ubiquity of bicycles in Amsterdam, but of course it is the first thing one notices on the streets. Bikes are everywhere and most everyone rides one: not ten-speeds or fancy bikes, but solid, sturdy ones designed for horizontal transportation. (You don’t need gears in such a flat country.) Below is the daily sight outside the Central Station in Amsterdam, and this is only a small fraction of bikes parked there, presumably for the day.

It’s a lot easier to get hit by a bike than a car, as Americans aren’t used to looking for bikes, but bike lanes are on every street (sometimes resembling sidewalks) and the cycles come whizzing by. I’ve had a few close shaves.

Below is the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, standing in Dam Square and completed as a town hall in 1655. The exterior is yellow sandstone (now stained with age), and the interior is largely marble. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte forced the Dutch to accept his brother, Louis Bonaparte, as King Louis I. At that time Louis turned the town hall into a royal palace, and it’s been sporadically occupied by Holland’s monarchs ever since.

The present royalty, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Máxima, come here for at most a few weeks of year (I think they live in the Hague most of the time), but are always in residence during state visits from leaders of other countries.

The great Central Hall, richly adorned with painting, sculpture, and marble.

On the floor are two inlaid maps of the world, also in marble. Though they were installed in the mid-18th century, but they are highly inaccurate for that time. (This may be due to their being replacements of earlier maps from about 1650.) At any rate, here you see Australia connected to New Guinea:

Marble walls with a chandelier:

What the small state dinners look like. The silverware is gold-plated silver and the plates painted by hand:

Earlier cutlery and china for the royalty:

Louis I’s bedroom. Apparently he and his wife didn’t get along at all and had separate bedrooms as far apart as possible in the large palace.

This is the room where declarations of bankruptcy were judged; a painting on the wall is supposed to urge the officials to be merciful. It was in this room that Rembrandt van Rijn stood in 1656 to make his bankruptcy official. He sold off most of his paintings and drawings to regain solvency.

This is the guest bedroom where heads of state stay during their official visits. Winston Churchill slept here, and it’s nice to think of the cigar fumes wafting about the palace.

The Begijnhof, a famous and quiet corner of Amsterdam that housed a beguinage, a place where religious women, though not nuns, would retire from the world. They were Catholic, but had to give up their churches because Catholicism was banned in the Netherlands in the 16th century. The last “beguine” died in 1871, and I gather (but am not sure) that the houses have been converted to private residences:

The English Reformed Church is one of two churches in the walled compound, and several panels on its pulpit were designed by Piet Mondrian when he was young and not geometric. Here’s one of them along with his signature.

Here’s a famous house within the compound, supposedly the oldest wooden house still standing in Amsterdam. It dates from 1528 (the plaque on it gives another date), but the nice woman in charge of the church told us that they’d recently discovered another wooden house in the city that was 50 years older.

Lunch after a long walk. This restaurant, Haesje Claes, is renowned for its home-style Dutch cooking:

It has a cozy interior. I have noticed that the proportion of tourists in restaurants, even those places recommended by the Dutch, is quite high—a contrast to France at this time of year.

And some good Dutch food: a starter of smoked mackerel salad:

I had snert, the classic Dutch split pea soup. Just the ticket on a cold day, accompanied by good local bread and butter.

The main course was a classic homecooked dish, Stamppot, consisting of potatoes mashed with cabbage and some kind of meat or meats (I had a honking huge meatball). Pickles, capers, and pickled onions are on the side. It was good and filling, though perhaps not up to the gustatory standards of, say, a French blanquette de veau or coq au vin.

Dessert: lemon pie with ice cream.

Fun fact: The Dutch have the tallest men in the world (the average height is a shade over 6 feet), and it’s painfully obvious to a shrimp like me. Science Daily says this:

  • Dutch men are the tallest on the planet, with an average height of 182.5cm. [Wikipedia says 183.8 cm.] Latvian women are the tallest on the planet, with an average height of 170cm.

 

  • The top four tallest countries for men are the Netherlands, Belgium, Estonia and Latvia. The top four tallest countries for women are Latvia, the Netherlands, Estonia and the Czech Republic.

Here’s a chart of change in male height over time: note that in 1850 Dutch men were among the shortest in Europe, but have shot up since then. It’s not an evolutionary change, as it’s too quick, but I suspect it’s attributable to either improved diet or an interaction between improved diet and “tall” genes. However, in northern climes one expects animals à la Allen’s Rule, to be shorter and squatter to prevent heat loss.

 

 

Brexit Twitter

March 28, 2019 • 9:00 am

by Grania

In case you are sick of it already, you can safely skip this collection of Brexit-related tweets. I think everyone in Europe is sick of it, but we can’t ignore it for it affects us all in one way or another even if we live outside the UK.

It is not fair to say that being EU-skeptical or taking a Leave position is equivalent to being xenophobic. There are valid criticisms of the EU. However, the Leave side has not yet produced a workable answer to the problem that it would have with the Irish border (the border between Northern Ireland which is part of the UK and the Republic of Ireland which is a separate country) which is still governed by the Good Friday Agreement, the terms of which prohibit a hard border between the two countries. However, a lack of a hard border between the two renders null and void the Leave side’s need to control Free Movement in and out of the UK. This is one (but not the only) of the major stumbling blocks that has prevented any agreement being reached in parliament about how Brexit should actually go and why “No-deal Brexit” is a concept being considered. Hence the shambles in Parliament right now.

MPs get to vote again and again, yet deny the people a chance to do  the same.

A flowchart to explain the process

Wasn’t this a song?

I think this is not a smart statement from any politician, but particularly not this one (Reese-Mogg).

High-level trolling from the Brexit Coordinator for European parliament. Nigel Farage is currently serving as Leader of the Brexit Party since 2019. More detail here.

But more seriously, this is what is going on:

Explainer here.

From Ex-British Humanist president and comedian Shappi Khorsandi.

Potential consequence if Brexit goes ahead.

 

Finally, an interesting interview between radio talk-show host James O’Brien and Oliver Norgrove, who worked for Vote Leave during the Brexit referendum campaign, but says he would now vote Remain.

 

 

Hat-tip: Matthew

Thursday: Hili dialogue

March 28, 2019 • 6:30 am

by Grania

Good morning, welcome to Thursday!

In history today:

Notable birthdays:

Today in Poland there are deep reflections on the passage of Time. Or food. Probably both.

Hili: Do you remember when we had our breakfast?
Cyrus: I have a feeling that it was a long time ago.
Hili: How the time flies.
(Photo: Zuzanna Frydrych)

In Polish:

Hili: Czy pamiętasz kiedy jedliśmy śniadanie?
Cyrus: Mam wrażenie, że dawno temu.
Hili: Jak ten czas leci.
(Foto: Zuzanna Frydrych)

From Twitter:

Brexit isn’t the only thing giving politicians a chance to display their grip on the issue of the day.

https://twitter.com/PhillyD/status/1110988585757335552

We present one of the leading minds of the 11th century

Trolling, or living dangerously.

Cute animals

https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1111012847008374784

Unintentionally awesome

https://twitter.com/_youhadonejob1/status/1110973971233734657

An amazing view of the ISS

Something to soothe your nerves

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1110682340613939200

Click through on the tweet for the answer

Contender for #NotTheSmartestDog

Especially for Diana McP, Heather thought you would appreciate this one.

A kind crow

https://twitter.com/AMAZlNGNATURE/status/1110995460854968320

And finally, a sweet cat

https://twitter.com/EmrgencyKittens/status/1110930769034260480

 

 

Hat-tip: Matthew, Heather