Suriname

... is in SOUTH AMERICA!!!! and has an "e" on the end of it.

About 5 minutes ago I had one of those lightbulb moments when your perception of the world completely changes. It's a really cool thing. The world is no where near as known as we thought.

I thought Suriname was in Asia, somewhere near Indonesia. The reason I know a lot about it is that there is a large Surinamese community in Amsterdam, and I thought I always knew where it was - boy how wrong!

I almost called these moments Standard Bank moments, because when I was young I always thought the Standard Bank logo was just a squiggle in a badge. One day I saw it was a flag, and from then I could never see the squiggle again. Life changing moments.

mud, and then some photos!

So Giona and Elaine took some photos of us, just so you can get an idea:

The start of the race and everybody looking quite casual, clearly not aware of what's coming...

That's Tom, me and Eoin after clearing the last ditch (clearly we weren't too worried about getting to the finish line in time!). More like watching the other sorry souls dragging them from the nearest ditch (gloating Tom?).

The end of the race and while Eoin and Tom are looking quite relaxed I'm still dealing with mud in the teeth. Nice.











To end it all of a bit of bumper cars after a hosing by the fire brigade and plus minus three bottles of shampoo and at least 2 showers each!

Dutch Mud

Yesterday was the Land over Zand 4km fun run through the best the Dutch country side has to offer. When I say through, I mean it literally!

Tom, someone I work with on the Toxics campaign, lives in Broek in Waterland, a small town to the North of Amsterdam. Every year the town has something of a feestje, with stalls, drinking, carnival type rides and a fun run. It was for the fun run that about 350 people and I where there. Tom had invited a few of us from work to take part and while 10 of us arrived, only 5 of us ran, Tom, Andrew, Eoin, Alexandra and Myself.

After a short ferry trip and a 45 minute cycle ride (back on my fixie -woohoo!) interrupted only by a stop for a glass of fresh organic milk fresh from the farm I arrived in Broek in Waterland. I was a bit nervous and tried to gain as much information from those who had run last year (Andrew, Eion and Tom). I eventually decided to run without a shirt or shoes (as apparently the shirt can only ever be used for the same event, and having a once a year shirt ain't my thing; and if you start with shoes on, you aren't guaranteed to finish with them on!) and with tissue shoved in my ears. Why all the prep? While the run is only 4kms, it includes jumping over when you can, but more often than not, into the ditches between the fields. These are filled with a mixture of black dutch soil, cow excrement and various other flotsam and jetsam. After the first one everyone was filthy (I was rather proud of my graceful jump, only getting covered in "mud" up to my chest on the front of me, until a fellow runner jumped in behind me and caused a wave of "mud" to cascade all over me). By the end of the race we were unrecognisable. After the 10th ditch, now covered in "mud" from head to toe I had the feeling I was in a horror movie with my breathing heavy in my own ears from the mixture of tissue paper and mud, and my vision impaired by the mud dripping out of my eyebrows.

Some of the less agreeable things:

• The smell of ditch 7 and 12 (okay they were all pretty terrible, but these two were horrific)
• The hard pebbly bits in ditches 14 and 16 (I would like to believe this was bits of wood and flotting rocks, but I would imagine it was more from the lack of roughage in some of the cows diets... in any case, I now know what my teeth feel like when I brush with the toothpaste with the beads in - ditch 14 and 16, now with active.....)
• getting a couple of cuts in my feet and trying but not really succeeding to convince myself that my immune system would be strong enough to ward of the 101 things in the water that could probably cause infection that would make gangrene look like a scratch.
• The fact that if you arrived at a ditch with no one in it it was bubbling.
  

Besides these however, the whole run (well, walk in our case) was great, with a dousing by the local fire dept. and their high pressure hoses afterwards - which got the worst off, however I think I will be surprised by what goes down the drain when I take a shower tonight, even though it is my 4th in 2 days!

Beers and a bit of bumper cars sorted most of the bad memories, and was an end to an excellent visit to Broek in Waterland, and some of the best laughs of the week.

I finished off the day at "Pluk de Nacht", an outdoor film festival. The main show (Flight of the Choncords) was definitely upstaged by the short movie that was shown before hand. Guess what? I found it on you tube! I'm nominating it for official movie of my blog, as I think it fits in well with the title. Enjoy:



Today I spent the day sorting out the recycling (which isn't foreplay, but is also very important) and doing washing. Also got a webcam connected to my computer (no worries, I didn't buy it - found in my flat).

Enviro tip: You can find the drivers for most hardware on the internet, normally from the producer, so don't throw away stuff just because it's not talking to your computer.

More info? skype me and I'll show you :-)

To GE or not to GE

A good question: if GE had no corporate contral, no bad environmental impacts and real benefits, more than exisiting and conventional methods, would it be a bad thing?

This sounds like a really loaded question but I ask it in all sincerity, should we persue a technology that is currently not performing at all in the hopes that at some time it may deliver un-thought of benefits.

I think it is in this last sentance lies the rub - GE is a solution looking for a problem, and at the moment it's doing a terrible job of it.