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2007-07-19 14:07

Don't call it a comeback, I've been here for years

Well, not in Deventer as such and not you know literally years.

So maybe let's call it a comeback when we go back to the Deventer book fair, older if not wiser, more married and - crucially - rather better equipped to actually read Dutch books.

More to the point, we won't be tempted to try the krokketten (breadcrumbed and fried cylinders of gooey "meat" stew, and not as appetising as that sounds) again.

The Dutch boek market being rather on the small side, they go out of print quickly and out of circulation often quicker than that. The Deventer boek market, on the other hand, is the largest in Yoorp and it isn't just us saying that it's the Deventer tourist board, so it must be true.

2007-07-19 13:19

Moin moin!

We read an article recently on Limburg nationalism. There is a Limburg in the Netherlands and another Limburg in Belgium, and some of the Limburgers in the Netherlands argue that - given that they are Catholic, like Belgians, and make bier you can actually drink, like Belgians, and live in a bit of the Netherlands that sticks out at the south and would clearly make more sense as part of Belgium - they really ought to join up with their Belgian Limburgers and be part of Belgium. Or independent, or part of Chermany; anything but the Netherlands.

Of course, even normalised for the Countries of Lowness, Limburg Nationalism has a coefficient of geopolitical consequence that would struggle to be compare favorably with epsilon for very small values of epsilon, but we don't discriminate on grounds of relevance at this bladet and it all got us thinking.

So. Since we, for one, do not wish to be a part of a political territory that is not capable of producing a drinkable bier - sorry, non-Limburgish Dutchpersons, but we do mean you - we have decided to form an entirely imaginary political union of our own.

And since dialectologists all agree that the local dialect of Gronings is a flavour of Low Cherman, in no interesting way different from the flavours of Low Cherman to be found in Oost Friesland (where despite the name they do, or rather increasingly used to, indeed speak Low Cherman rather than Frisian), we are declaring that we really actually essentially live in Even Lower Saxony (AKA Submarine Saxony), and that therefore Beck's adequate pilsener has a better claim to be our Glorious National Bier than Heineken ever could so there.

(Of course, in this increasingly global world Becks, like Stella Artois, Bass, Staropramen and Franziskaner Weissbier, is actually perpetrated by the faceless corporate droids at InBev. But after all nationalism itself is increasingly an exercise in branding, and none the worse for that.)

2007-07-19 12:46

Monday review of stuff

We had a trial subscription to the weekly news magazine Elsevier from the eponymous publisher.

We didn't like it at all: as an immigrant and an instinctively cosmopolitan EU-enthusiast, we are never pleased to hear that the country's many alleged woes are largely the fault of

  • immigrants (notwithstanding that it is hinted without much delicacy that it is the browner sort you especially have to watch out for)
  • cosmopolitan ideologues, who are undermining the very glorious nation-state by coddling immigrants and their dispicable so-called cultures when they're not handing all the sovereignty they can get their hands on to Brussels hand over fist.
  • the EU

It's not as wretched or as cretinous as, say, the Daily Mail or the Murdoch Times but it's dispiriting stuff and we can (and intend to) do without it.

2007-07-19 07:33

Luxembourg!

Media coverage of flag-flavoured developments in Luxembourg has been dispiritingly hard to come by, as our Varied Reader is surely aware, but your soaraway 'bladet is willing to dig deeper than other bladets, and we've turned up a press release from the government itself.

Our Varied Reader will recall that when Luxembourg split from the Netherlands, it replaced the former's red, white and blue tricolore with a red, white and marginally different shade of blue tricolore to forestall any possible confusion.

Bizarrely, this cunning plan was not a complete success, and some Luxemburgers have been lobbying for its replacement by the flag currently used as the country's ensign. This would prevent any possible confusion, except perhaps with the identical flag used in and by the Luxembourgish-speaking part of Belgium, which is known, to prevent confusion with neighbouring Luxembourg, as Luxembourg.

Anyway:

Le Conseil est revenu � ses discussions du 27 avril concernant la proposition de loi N�5617 du d�put� Michel Wolter (CSV) portant modification de la loi du 23 juin 1972 sur les embl�mes nationaux, telle qu�elle a �t� modifi�e, pour confirmer la d�cision prise � cette occasion, � savoir qu�il estime que le drapeau tricolore doit garder son statut de drapeau national, mais que sur le territoire du Grand-Duch� de Luxembourg l�embl�me au Lion Rouge pourra �tre utilis� au m�me titre que le drapeau tricolore.

The council returned to its discussions on the law 5617 of the MP Michel Wolter (CSV) concerning the law of 23 June 1972 on national symbols, in so far as it has been nmodified, in order to confirm the decision taken on that occasion, that the tricolore flag should keep its status as the national flag, but that on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg the emblem of the Red Lion may be used in the same titre as the tricolure flag.

We, for one, are glad that's all sorted out!

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