Clash of civilisations?

People need to belong to a race, religion, country, club or whatever to fight for against “the others” to justify their identity. The problem are not the good willing but the nationalistic and/or religious hooligans. From those we have to be aware of that they can drag us into their elementary medieval thoughts and tribe fights.

I will criticize all jingoistic fools disregarded their religion. It is not about condemning Muslims, Jews or Christians but about condemning zealots. The maniacs amidst us who will never accept criticism and while we cannot blame fools to act within their limited potential we still have to try to bring our narrow-minded brothers to a more civilized era; a task not easy as they think they are justified in their behaviour.

A good contraceptive (01)

To experience my kids at their worst.

The healing power of precious stones

I met a stone polisher who strongly believes in the healing power of precious stones. On my scepticism he told me that his sister in law suffered strongly from asthma and that he had cut a malachite for her to wear on her chest. When I asked him how she is doing now, he said that three weeks after she got the stone she passed away.

He couldn’t laugh on my remark that the stone had definitely proofed its power as she clearly doesn’t suffer from asthma anymore.

My Purim disguise:

The Invisible Man

Indignant Muslim reaction to Geert Wilders' movie

"Declare that we are peaceful and civilized or we will kill you!"

Stoolpigeon!

In my youth whenever I misbehaved out of sight of my parents, they still always seemed to know what I did. Around the age of 5, whether it was walking through the park with all that tempting water, stealing all the go-karts, tricycles and children's wheelbarrows in the neighborhood and hiding them on top of some nearby garages, playing waterfall at the stairs from the top floor in the flat with milk from the bottles that the milkman had left on his daily routine, playing soccer in the sandbox with a big piece of meat the butcher had left on top of the postboxes in the flat and after playing around with it wrapping it back up and laying it back, sneaking in at a local construction work and playing with burning liquid hot tar (that I eventually got in my eyes), selling from door to door the little pieces of fabric that my father had asked me to give to the handicraft teacher or with X-mas, trying to sell the neighbors branches of holly that I had cut from their own tree a bit before, my parents always knew it.

When I asked them how they knew it, they told me that Mrs. Van Hupschoten had told them. Boy, did I hate that woman, snitching on me like that! My parents never wanted to tell me where she lived, or vaguely described the area. When I was 7 years old we moved from Amsterdam to another city. Much to my surprise when I came home one day from jumping ice floes over a canal (something my parents had rather strongly forbidden), I found out that Mrs. Van Hupschoten had moved to the same city too; still snitching on all the things I did.

Now, a parent myself, I too am calling-up on the services of Mrs. Van Hupschoten, much to the despair of my kids, and although they suspect Mrs. Van Hupschoten is imaginary they are not really 100% sure.