Rambling

Today was the Brussels 20km (half) marathon. I didn't participate because I was busy doing battle with an Emsen, wielding only a Fixa (bloody Swedes), but a mate of mine did run today.

John: my congratulations on the achievement! I feel sufficiently like a fat-bastard now, possibly even enough to encourage me to get fit for next year's run on May 25^th 2008. Maybe even the ING Brussels Marathon, since it's basically a choice between a 5km, 20km or 40km run back to my apartment. Hmm…

Meet Louis: Ordinarily he works for Bruxelles-Propreté, the garbos here in Brussels. Louis is an incredibly busy man since he started his second job with Nintendo as the half-brother of Mario. Unfortunately, this has left Louis little time to properly communicate with plebeians with regard to how garbage should be handled.

Lately, Louis and his team of public relations boffins have decided to attempt rectification of their past communications that disappeared silently — They have attempted to convey to the great-unwashed how glass should be recycled. In order to tailor the message to the masses, they've decided it's a good idea to treat everyone like children.

Belgian politics is amusing for outsiders, which probably helps explain why most Belgians are not particularly open about their political views.

Floating around lately is this, the NEE party («nee» is “no” in Dutch). NEE aims to provide voters in the up-coming general election a the choice to not vote for any of the candidates, as opposed to a blank vote which still essentially gives votes to all parties.

As a concept this really isn't too bad, since a vote for NEE would steal votes from parties you didn't really want to vote for but had no choice — overcoming the lesser evil principle. NEE's principal, Tania Deveaux, is offering 40,000 blow-jobs as a publicity stunt which has lately pushed the group into the international spot-light.

Oh dear, it's Eurovision time again. Having said that, though, the quality of the Eurovision Song Contest has risen greatly over the past few years given the state of the competition, with some countries quietly employing professionals to help write songs.

After last year's win to Finland, it's been hosted at Helsinki's Hartwall Areena, somewhere I've been hoping to visit for years for the Assembly demo competition.

I managed to watch the show using the excellent Octoshape P2P streaming plug-in which provided stable video of excellent quality. Finland's YLE with the EBU gave us some awful cut-sequences, Krisse the terrible tart (a not-so-funny Finnish comedian), and even Santa — without which the show wouldn't be tasteless enough to be Eurovision!

I recently watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which offers an interesting perspective on what happened to GM's EV1 — possibly the first practical electric car to appear. By its final generation, the car boasted the lowest drag co-efficient of any production car in history, clocked a top speed of nearly 130km/h (but was in reality limited because of gear design), and had a maximum range of 120–250km per full-charge.

The EV1 was amazing technology for its time, and not a bad looking car either, but for various reasons GM destroyed the cars and moved on to much more important things like the producing gas guzzling pile of junk known as the Hummer, and joining the Global Climate Coalition to help sway negative Kyoto Protocol sentiment. They had to do something special since they destroyed several tram-ways last century.

So, what happened to the electric car anyway?

I never knew there was a Disneyland in China until recently. Oh, wait, no, that's not Disneyland, it's Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park (北京石景山游乐园).

It turns out the aptly abbreviated BS Amusement Park have nicely epitomised Chinese attitudes to western copyright law, and once again made their own cheap knock-off version of something successful.