This is the first time in about four years (okay, three and a half) that I’ve actually had internet in my room for good. After a whole week of this, it is time to evaluate!

Generally, it’s been positive only. Despite being brand new, my pc had an occasional software-induced glitch. Without internet, it would’ve been impossible for me to locate and eradicate the problem, and I may have returned the pc to the shop to give it a proper look through. Luckily, that wasn’t necessary. Though I was half fearing the problem was caused by faulty hardware, a quick search of Microsoft’s online help features revealed it was actually a Vista bug loads of people suffer from (WMI error 10) which was essentially not a problem, except poor programming causes inexplicable freeze-ups leaving a hard reboot the only option open to the user. What this error – solved by running a simple script – is still doing in retail versions of Vista approximately two years after release can only be a complete and utter mystery to me, but I’m glad that problem is over. Weirdly enough, the freezes only happened when I tried to open notepad. Not a terribly demanding task considering all the other things I’m forcing it to do. But such is Vista!

It also didn’t really interfer with my study work. I managed to plough through the approx 80 pages due for paleography in an hour or two, three, without much pc distraction. We read up to and including the Carolingian minuscule last week, which was quite interesting. The early national alphabets were awkward in the extreme, including a’s that looked like u’s or double c’s (cc), and weirdest of all, the Visigothic t that looked a bit like ct. Ah yes, the wonders of the alphabet. Also, I found out that one Latin student apparently didn’t know enough Latin to understand the transcriptions. So what are they doing over there?!

University has picked up again and the long Summer of doing nothing is over. I’ve got loads and loads of pages to read each day, and after doing that I actually have to formulate a structured and viable argument regarding issues raised in said pages. I have not yet been evicted, despite some of my products already having been scrutinised. So that’s good.

Another bonus is the fact I also passed my only resit, with a 7.5, meaning I have my first year – the propedeuse or P, as it is known in Dutch – in the bag, so I don’t have to worry about taking first year classes anymore.

My new classes seem okay at present. Dutch history is probably the most interesting, followed closely by the history of the European idea, where we (that is, those specialising in cultural history) will be studying the Enlightenment, both in its actual context and its use and abuse at the present time. I’ve already read more about ‘the concept of Europe’ in the past few days than I had in many years before.

My bookshelves have also been filled with excellent editions of the two Reynaert stories and a medieval novel (the ‘Historie vanden Vier Heemskinderen’, known to some perhaps as a wild Middle Dutch variant of the Middle French poem Renaud de Montauban, which describes the troublesome adventures of some noblemen who have fallen out with Charlemagne).

Anyway, because of this, and other literary pursuits of mine, book reviews are forthcoming!

With the holidays starting and life generally dulling down, my dreams reflect a similar tendency of being completely uninteresting. Obviously this is an excellent excuse to talk about them.

In fact, these dreams are worse than normal dull dreams. They are actually so dull that, as they happen, my brain is frantically trying to delay me and prevent me from doing anything while it thinks up a new storyline, and it’s really bad at it. Last night’s dream is an excellent example. I don’t remember exactly how it started, but, basically, it was a family meeting of some kind and there was a shortage of something or other so I had to go down to the shop to buy more of the something or other (not that this has ever happened in my life).

So I took my bicycle and went down to the shop, purchased the necessary product and made my way back. Except I couldn’t find the proper house and accidentally cycled in through the backdoor of the supermarket (yes it is becoming less plausible at a frightening rate). Then I had to make my way through the supermarket. This is where my brain lost its way and couldn’t really think of anything original. Rather than either getting me out of the supermarket or conjuring up some fantastical twist in the story, I had to wait because someone had spilled drink on the path and the employees had to mop it up first. And then I had to wait in line and suddenly my bicycle had been replaced with stuff I had to buy. So I actually spent half the dream doing nothing. Thankfully, I woke up then, before even less interesting things started happening.

If Freud were alive, he’d probably be bored to death by now.

The frequency of occurrence and lasting appeal of cooking books as well as their ancient pedigree make it more than surprising that no previous study has ever attempted to discover the deeper meanings hidden inside. While other authors have achieved great results examining, for example, ancient myths, the same has not been done with cooking books. This study will attempt to right that wrong and discover what the actual point of cooking books, what message they seek to convey. To do this we will look at the three main ingredients that appear within any random cooking book:

1. Potatoes

The potato is a small creature from the Antipodes. It dwells primarily in caves, where it nourishes itself by licking dust off rocks. It is a rare and nocturnal animal. When the Europeans inherited the Antipodes from a wealthy uncle, the potato was one of their main interests, for it was rumoured to be capable of turning base metals into gold. Unfortunately this turned out to be false, and the European torture of the creature resulted into the death of the creature, which was boiled alive. Afterwards it was found that the potato was very tasty indeed, and more were hunted down and brought to the Old World. Because they were typically uncreative, Europeans did not seek to develop new ways of preparing potatoes, and to this day there are three main ways of preparing the animal: cooking, roasting and frying.

2. Rice

Rice is harvested from the depths of Asia. We are unfortunately not properly informed on the way it is created. We can only presume alchemy has something to do with it. Rice is a strange food and we are as yet unsure whether or not vegetarians should avoid it. In any case, it is preferably eaten after putting it in boiling water for a bit.

3. Bears

Everyone’s favourite dish, bears are best served raw. In Russia they prefer to eat the bear by picking it up by its tail, holding it above their heads and then letting it slide into the mouth in one go. Sometimes the bear is killed before this is attempted, but real Russians claim only degenerate Ukrainians etc do this.

We have seen the main ingredients. Two of them are definitely, without any doubt, animals. The other, rice, possibly is. Because it is completely illogical for two main ingredients to be animals but not the third, we will therefore assume rice, too is a creature. We will now examine the way in which these ingredients interact.

There is one very popular dish, especially in Northern Europe, which uniquely combines all the ingredients in one. It reads as follows:

Get some live potatoes and put them in front of a cave. A bear will come out. Once the bear chases the potatoes, throw rice into his eyes so that he is blinded. Order the potatoes to walk over it until it is dead. Shoot the potatoes. Put them all on the fire. Eat.

Clearly the rice takes on only an auxiliary function in this recipe, while the potatoes and the bear are the main course. Note how cleverly the potatoes are exploited to remove the obstacle of defeating the bear. We can therefore presume the following:

fig. 1
Bear > potatoes > rice

However this is only one look at the issue. Another structure would read like this:

fig. 2
Rice > bear > potatoes

It is clear that everything is sacrificed to kill the bear. If potatoes die in the process, this matters little. One can say, as in fig. 1, that the potatoes are more important than the rice, which matters little and is only used to make sure the potatoes survive. On the other hand, as in fig. 2, one can say that the rice is used in tiny measure because it is more valuable. Perhaps the serf hoards the rice more carefully and eats it only on Sundays, whereas the bear with potatoes would be his every day of the week staple diet. Certainly this is something future scientists will need to examine more closely, for example by examining loads of data about serfs.

The final coursework done, the final lecture attended, the final group meeting over and done with. The academic year is drawing to a close. Two exams to make and a 4000-word essay to write; all that is left, the final hurdles of my first year at the Radboud.

So, conclusions?

• Middle Ages FTW
• Raedts is awesome
• Nijmegen is still not the oldest city of the Netherlands
• Time passes very quickly

I presume that as a blogger I am partly drawn to writing to increase visitor numbers. However, due to a very serious problem I have become incredibly lax. What is the case?

I am getting too many visitors! Yes, when I opened a page for Age of Chivalry on this weblog I could not fathom what vast masses it would attract. The page went up in late December, and already it has drawn more visitors than any other page on my blog (save the frontpage, obviously) with a staggering total of 1146 visits. The second best page is the “Hunting for Rooms” (popular because it has images of Maastricht and Nijmegen and thus attracts a lot of image searches) with 195; the third place is, with 96 visits, the About page.

In any case, the result is that I get visitors in large quantities without actually doing anything; from 189 views in November the amount of visitors skyrocketed to 557 in January and 641 in February. The figures are subsiding only now, with 379 views in this month thus far, which means I must resort to new methods to keep you all drawn to this page. I must inform you that I am still practising my song-and-dance routine. Sorry about that.

Yes I am! One of my birthday presents was the wonderful Art et organisation militaires dans la principauté de Liège et dans le comté de Looz au Moyen Age (I love writing it out in full) and I’m reading it! It is a very good book indeed, but to get to the bottom of it and actually understand half of what’s being said (understand, rather than grasp the essentials and the context) I purchased a cheap French-Dutch dictionary at De Slegte today. It was a slightly older one (2001) hence it was only €3,50, but seeing as Art et cetera was written in 1968 and deals with the Middle Ages, I don’t think I’m missing out any essential words. Also it’s somewhat geared to dealing with Belgian French, which is just as well because the writer is a Walloon and you never know what kind of strange mutilations of the language he might apply! (Though it has to be said that he’s a very good writer and applies a broad vocabulary, meaning my dictionary has already proved itself useful on more than a few occasions.)

We also had, yesterday, two lectures, the first dealing with the third century emperors of Rome (some forty to fifty in a sort free-for-all brawl causing the total breakdown of state cohesion and even a shortlived split of the empire into four parts). It was very good.
The second lecture, however, dealt with the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, a subject that had already been treated in half a lecture by professor Rietbergen; the material was therefore not only very familiar, Rietbergen’s presentation was also hard to top. It indeed turned out to be rather dull and far less clear than Rietbergen had been.
Out of boredom, I tried my hand at art! When De Kleijn mentioned the Ibis as creature related to the worship of Isis, and Suzanne next to me was unaware of what an Ibis was, I drew one to make it clear. And then I drew a Dodo because that is easily one of the most enjoyable birds to draw, ever.

The Dodo is wondering, in case you’re curious, how a small sect could become so numerous. He obviously has more than a passing interest in the expansion of a tiny group! The question was not satisfactorily answered by De Kleijn, by the by. The Dodo should have attended Rietbergen’s lecture to find out.
The two birds below are meant to be Ibises. The second is sleeping because the lecture was dull. The first looks a bit like Gonzo, due to its sort of over-enthusiastic beak.

+1 year today!
+1 article in the article section (Hussite Wars)!
+1 post here!
+1 book (last week)¹!
+1 book (yesterday)²!
+1 CD³!

¹ Contamine, Philippe, War in the Middle Ages
² Gaier, Claude, Art et organisation militaires dans la principauté de Liège et dans le comté de Looz au Moyen Age
³ Radiohead, InRainbows for free huzzah!

Today I saw, together with my dad, a hamerkop, a peculiar bird from sub-Saharan Africa which was somehow scouring a nearby pool for frogs. It was presumably kept in captivity and had escaped, as it was rather a long from home and didn’t look like it could have survived the entire trip. Here’s some photographs my dad took:

It’s called Hammerkop in English, a Dutch or probably Afrikaans name that has been anglified a little. The bird is apparently fairly common in Africa and is named after the hammer shape of its head. It’s related, somewhat distantly, to storks, herons, etc. Or to pelicans, gannets, cormorants and the like. The jury’s still out.

But it’s mostly a very peculiar creature.

The heron is standing in the middle of the pavement, its claws stretched flat on the stones. There is a little fence right in front of it and a small pool behind it, but it’s standing on the wrong side and looking somewhat puzzled as he tries to figure out how to reach the pond with its hidden treasures. I walk past and he suddenly notices me; his awkward eye in the side of his slender head is turned towards me, and the bird realises it has to react. And it knows only one way to react, given the circumstances.
It straightens itself. Like the canes behind the fence, it becomes a thin vertical line, its long letter-opener beak pointing to the sky. I pretend not to notice it and walk past.
Proudly the heron stands still and observes me going past, certain that its deception has worked. This is even better than eating fish, it thinks, and stays around on the pavement for a good long while.