Blog 06-19-22 Sunday Amsterdam I was resolved to get eight hours of sleep last night after several days of insufficient snoozing. My six-bed hostel room was empty except for me when I retired a bit after midnight. At about 2am the door opened, the overhead light came on, and I heard what sounded like two or three guys came in speaking a guttural language that I didn’t recognize, Serbian? Ukrainian? They fussed about for a few minutes then, blissfully, extinguished the light and went to bed. The disturbance to my rest was minimal. Fifteen minutes later the snoring began. One of the guys sawed wood loudly and forcefully. It bothered me a bit but I remembered that I’d slept under the catapult of the USS John F Kennedy (CVA 67) for nearly a year. I knew how to handle noise that would disrupt the repose of lesser beings. The problem was that his companion was less forgiving. “Wake up, you’re snoring!” That’s what I translated from the sounds emanating from the guy’s distre...
Blog 06-26-22 Sunday There aren’t many ‘man defeats nature’ memes around these days. Mostly nature seems to be crushing human ambitions and dreams. If you go to Holland, however, they have built a tourist site to refute the pessimists. It’s called Kinderdijk (the dyke of the children) in the land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea, and called, of course, Zeeland. It’s a delta of three rivers that once produced a vast marsh of peat bogs and human-less territory. It took the dutch over 500 years (1200 - 1740) to build a system that drained most of the land, spilling the excess water back into the more narrow environs of the rivers. Further west the North Sea was walled out, preventing the drainage work from being undone. The dry land was then converted to agriculture. Nature vanquished. The main mechanism, built in the 18th century, was a series of windmills that pump the lowland water up into higher drainage canals that then spill into the rivers. They are still there, the icons of dutch cu...
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