Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger wild boar wild boar

The information accumulated long ago has finally paid off (and on enormous scale at that)! The vast reserve of untapped badger knowledge I accumulated during primary school has been exchanged for a tangible, financially valuable reward!

 

Yes, it is true! Because I could identify, without a single second of hesitation, the tail of a badger as belonging to that loveable creature, I won… A CAP!

 

Huzzah!

 

Champagne flowed freely and parades were held in my honour.

 

This is the news that I was at a nature expedition while camping on the Veluwe with friends from Maastricht (who had to spend hours in the train to get there while I just had to sit in the taxi van for twenty minutes, because as you all should know Arnhem, where I spend much of my sleeping life, is the capital of the Veluwe). The Veluwe is at the same time a major tourist attraction and a nature reserve. There are ferocious animals there, such as badgers and wild boar. Also deer. These can all potentially kill people and are living proof that we Dutch are a hardy people accustomed to all the hardships nature can thrust our way.

Did I mention there are squirrels, too?

 

During the trip, which was conducted on the Dutchman’s iron horse or bicycle, we saw plenty of wildlife, including a minimum of thirty (possibly as many as forty) wild boar, which are much larger than I imagined. Also, they can make quite a pace and run like mad. Their legs are much thicker than I thought and could be mistaken for tree trunks if found separate from the rest of the boar (an unfortunate contingency), although not very big trees to be at all honest. Our guide also turned out to be quite the fox whisperer; on our way we encountered a young animal that was a little confused, and the guide managed to make it stay by whistling. Apparently the whistling – sounds a bit like the fake farting noises made in high school – is very similar to the sound made by parent foxes, and so the little one didn’t really know what to do. It didn’t dare come closer, because we – a group of I believe twenty-two people, so quite a large amount – did not at all resemble its parents, but the sound was unmistakeable. And so it waited in the tree line, at no more than two bikes distance from us (well, from me, anyway), even going so far as to sit down. After a while it got up and left, slightly reluctantly. Then some horses came and chased it away for no particular reason (presumably little Reinaert had been haggling about the price of young horses).

 

While the enchanted fox was magical to watch, it was somehow less impressive than the massive boar running across the road at full speed a short way ahead of us. I have no longer any difficulty imagining how a single one can wreck a car.

 

(Unfortunately, no badgers were sighted.)

Hundred Strikes a Minute

Well, not really, but certainly close. A few nights ago, on the night of Monday on Tuesday, the area was visited by an uncommon bout of lightning. The entire day had been dry yet humid, with a touch of thunder constantly in the air, but it took until the evening before it started going.

The buildup was slow: a few lightning strikes, peculiarly high in the sky (seemingly not hitting the ground) and with no thunder accompanying it. Then, between ten and eleven thirty, it started accelerating, until it reached its height at about midnight. By this time I was lying in bed, and could see the strikes through the window. I started counting them as a means to falling asleep – a bit like electrically charged sheep – and at the most it took five seconds between consecutive strikes. In many cases it was less, in many cases the strikes were double or even triple strikes. So, basically, loads of flashing going on, but no actual action.

Speaking of strikes, the bus drivers have been on strike for what seems like an eternity now. I sympathise with their plight but it has more than doubled my travel time between uni and home and is more than a little inconvenient. Apparently the bus companies have started a legal procedure against the drivers. Strikes are fair, they say, but not for this duration. I agree with that, even if I do not agree with their position towards drivers wages.

The oath of the tennis court where they did not play tennis

Sometimes, historical events or situations are given grossly anachronistic or downright misleading names. The example that has been bugging me and many of my fellow students is obviously the Oath of the Tennis Court (where the Third Estate, supported by some refugees from the First and Second Estate, proclaimed themselves the National Assembly and thus invalidated the French Estates, gnawing away at royal power), which has a different misleading and anachronistic name in Dutch, namely the Eed op de Kaatsbaan (kaatsen, aka Frisian handball, is a sport quite unlike tennis, which involves throwing a ball around. With yer hands). This gave us all an immense fright – what should we do if there was a question asking us to describe what kind of sport was being practised in the hall? We had no answer to this.

But now, thanks to my belated research on wikipedia (we already had the exam two weeks ago), I can provide an answer. Apparently, the game played in the, er, sporting hall was a kind of predecessor of tennis, a kind of handball where you threw the thing around, initially with your hands and later with a glove or racket. This is known as real tennis or court tennis. Frisian handball is related to it, except they didn’t introduce the racket and kept using their hands.

Perhaps, therefore, we should call the event the Oath of the Court Tennis Court. That will avoid all future confusion.

Non-Muslim dogs told they are children during mosque visit

THE HAGUE, 10/04/08 – A dog training centre in Amsterdam wished to provide its pupils with an understanding for other cultures. But during a visit to a mosque, the dogs were told they were children.

With a view to developing understanding and respect for other cultures among dogs, who may otherwise bark at people dressed in strange clothes or attack non-native postmen, dog training centre De Hondebrok regularly organises outings to various religious organisations. The chairman of a mosque told the dogs (aged between one and two) and their chaperones however that non-Muslim dogs are children.

In a letter to the dog’s owners, the school expresses its regret at the incident: “We are shocked that during the guided tour, the mosque’s chairman told the dogs and chaperoning owners that non believing dogs were children. We consider this statement as unacceptable since we allow our dogs to partake in this project to develop respect for freedom of religious choice”.

In the meantime, the school’s management has addressed the mosque on the undesirable behaviour of the chairman. Both parties will say nothing further on the matter. “We will resolve the matter amongst ourselves and I have no inclination whatsoever to discuss the matter with the media”, as newspaper De Telegraaf quoted the school’s spokesperson Margriet van Dwergen. “We have been to the mosque before and it always went well”.

Angry owners had sent the letter on to De Telegraaf but were reportedly rapped on the knuckles by the school’s management. “The school wishes to play this down. That is precisely the problem”, as one owner commented.

“My Benji was depressed for a week.” she added, “He was deeply offended by being called a child. He dislikes the implication that he ever wore nappies or that we had to make him eat his food by pretending it was a aeroplane of some kind. When he returned from the mosque I could immediately see something was wrong. He seemed depressed and didn’t want to play at all. All he would do was sit beside the toys of our children and growl whenever they approached. It was only the following day that we discovered he had eaten all the lego pieces.”

Some owners are considering pressing charges for the emotional damage suffered by their pets. No dogs were found willing to respond.

 

Protection

“It’s a protected species, and it will stay protected. We’re just going to exterminate it, that’s all.”
Those are not the words of the Welsh rural affairs minister, but they might have been.

This is, of course, the news that Wales is going to implement a limited cull of badgers to try and deal with bovine tb.
Certainly, bovine tb is a very serious problem in Wales, where 7905 cattle were slaughtered last year alone. However, the exact causes of the disease are shrouded in uncertainty, and the move to cull badgers appears to be little more than an attempt to curry favour with farmers. Further more, culling badgers may have further negative consequences: the only real study of note, which looked at evidence from culls between 1998-2006, “show that intensive culling of badgers resulted in roughly one extra fox per square kilometre.” Foxes are also a problem to farmers, as anyone who has heard children stories or more ancient tales like the telling of Reynaerd will know.

Dr Woodroffe, who is a member of the ISG, said: “What we concluded was that the only way you could have even a modest benefit for control of cattle TB was by culling badgers on an extremely large geographic scale, over long periods of time in a highly co-ordinated way.”
She added: “If you don’t do it in that way, you actually make it worse. Badgers are social and highly territorial. This limits the spread of disease because infected badgers are mainly going to interact with their own group.
“When you cull the badgers, you break down that territoriality, so the badgers are ranging more widely and meeting more herds of cattle. But they are also more likely to be interacting with what used to be neighbouring social groups.”
Nonetheless, Professor Sir David King, then the government’s chief scientist, advised ministers to push ahead with a cull.
In November, Sir David told BBC News: “If we don’t do this, we are actually leaving a disease to spread through the animals in the UK at increasing cost to the taxpayer and at a devastating cost to the farming community.”
Foxes are also of concern because they would be principal vectors in the event of a rabies outbreak and a source of the parasitic worm Trichenella.

So, basically, you need to almost wipe out badgers to actually cause bovine tb to diminish – because if you do not, the disease will actually spread more.

So yes, I suppose I am being shamelessly pro-wildlife here, but it’s not like carrying out extensive culls is a cheap matter; and while badgers may very well spread bovine tb, it is doubtful whether they are the only animal spreading it; also, the intensive transportation of cattle in the UK is hardly going to limit the spread.

Also, everyone seems to be ignoring this research now (although it is still not wrapped up, it might be a viable alternative).

Land of many lords

Yesterday, while on a trip to Val-Dieu with my father, we drove through a rather peculiar little town on the way from Visé. As I saw more and more of the hilltop structures reports became increasingly excited (‘Ooh, there is a castle on top of the hill!’ ‘Oh, and a church. Or is it a castle, too?’ ‘And hey, there is a house over there built on the remains of a turret!’ ‘There’s the ruins of a keep over there!’) and we decided to stop and have a look.

The town of Dalhem turned out to be a city and the hilltop was actually a citadel. Apart from that, the men who had once lived in the now ruined keep had held the office of count (if only because, until the thirteenth century, no one could force them to give up that grand design), their lands stretching from Cadier, in the north, to Olne, in the south (but not exclusively: stretches in between were owned by other lords, abbots, etc). This map shows the territories of the duchy of Limburg and the territories of Dalhem, Valkenburg and ’s Hertogenrade. The first thing that leaps to mind here is that the duchy of Limburg is tiny and barely deserving of the name, but that’s medieval imperial politics for you: support an emperor, receive a ducal hat.

Pictures of the county (hover over them for captions)

Note: the doorway on the second picture from the left isn’t the gate entrance; that role is reserved for the open space directly underneath the structure: it wouldn’t be able to fit a horse or a cart!

The county lost it’s independence in 1239, when Henri II, duke of Brabant, laid siege to Dalhem. After seven weeks, count Dirk van Hochstaden threw the towel in the ring and negotiated peace. In 1244 the county passed into the hands of the duke of Brabant (who was never there but in stead had a voogd or drossaard reign in his place, a common occurrence in the many castles of the region), and Dalhem itself was united in union with the lands of Outre-Meuse or Overmaas, first Brabançon possessions, later, after the Eighty Years War, Dutch territories.

In 1785 the majority of the county of Dalhem passed to Austria after the treaty of Fontainebleau, signed in the same year. The treaty brought an end to the Cauldron War (named thus because the only victim was an unfortunate cauldron) in which the Austrians tried to force the Dutch blockade of Antwerp. This blockade had been in place since the Eighty Years War (1568-1648) and the Austrians thought that, the year being 1785, it might be time to end the ancient tradition. Three warships were sent up the Schelde river, but a single shot (which hit the legendary cauldron) from the Dutch warship De Dolfijn was enough to force the leading Austrian vessel, the Le Louis, to surrender. While preparations for war were made following the incident, it never came to that, and the treaty confirmed the blockade. The Dutch paid the Austrians an indemnity of perhaps 8,5 million guilders and some territories switched hands, including parts of Dalhem. In return, apart from maintaining the blockade (and thus preserving part of the Dutch naval economy), a few other villages were handed over to the Republic.

What heroics!

After that, we visited Val-Dieu, the 13th century abbey still known for its beers (and its ‘fromagerie‘). The place was destroyed multiple times (by fire, protestants, and French revolutionaries) but rebuilt each time. However, the church appears to have suffered the greatest damage: many of the outer buildings, including the wonderful palace of the abbot, are still quite old (the palace dates from 1739, or so the inscription above its entrance claims).

Pictures of the abbey

And that was what I did on my holidays!

Err, hello

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.

Ghent Independent!

I just discovered the New Ghent Alliance (NGA), a party aiming at the complete independence of Ghent from all other states. Some point from their political programme:

11b. Every mention of ‘politie’ on uniforms or vehicles should be replaced with ‘flieken’.
15. Until the pope recites, on Easter, with Ghentish accent, the following: “Merci veur de bloeme, ja santé maan ratse!”, all relations with Vatican city will be broken.
31. On Friday morning West-Flemish serfs can be bought at the Beestenmarkt for 1 ganda.
33. The long tradition of the state Ghent regarding unclear, decaying or completely missing road markings is viewed as Cultural Heritage and will receive monumental protection. After Anschluss of Zerzate and Terneuzen the tradition will be introduced there, also.
37. Agriculture: NGA is opposed to agriculture.
38. All websites should end with .GE
39. Anyone living in Ghent for ten years or more and not from West Flanders can publicly criticise his roots to become a true Ghenter.

And Ghent too small? Obviously not. The NGA lists 23 UN states with a smaller population than Ghent, including Barbados, Micronesia, Tonga and Tuvalu! Time for independence!

The Elephant Shrew

The elephant shrew is the latest discovered mammal. Living in Tanzania and with the size of a cat, this curious creature is related to elephants, sea cows, aardvarks and hyraxes, but not actually to shrews. Apparently it was first caught on camera in 2005 but only officially researched in 2006. Its discovery, however, was only published recently.

It uses its long, flexible nose and tongue to flick up insects, such as termites, and it is most active either at dawn, dusk, or during the day.

Dr Rathbun added: “They are behaviourally fairly simple – they are not like a dog or cat you can interact with – but they are so bizarre-looking and a lot of their behavioural ecology is so unique and interesting, you kind of get wrapped up with them.”

Read all about it here.

And if you’re at the BBC anyway, take a look at the wonderful hopping long-eared jerboa – a kind of desert mouse with massive ears, first caught on camera last year in China and Mongolia. You can see footage of him happily hopping about like a kangaroo. Brilliant!
Link

The art of divorce

“Honey, let’s go to the divorce convention!” is not a phrase that will be heard in many households, if any. And nor will it be, until the organisers of the convention manage to put together more convincing posters than the depressing example currently watching over train stations throughout the country.

Not only does the poster depict a divorce as a hard, serious, and midlife crisis inducing phenomenon, it also doesn’t actually list any reasons to go to the convention itself, which is an even more serious mistake when it comes to advertising. In fact, it almost makes divorcing look like something that simply isn’t fun!

So, to offer these poor organisers some assistance, here is Kor’s list of things that should be organised on a divorce convention:

• Marksmanship classes: learn the basics of the divorce struggle: throwing plates and potplants for women, kicking rubbish bins and elementary belt action for men
• Children’s hour: children are often innocent bystanders in the divorce wars. This is a waste of space. Learn how to use the potential of these fierce little blighters and turn them into fanatical fighters. Note: bring your own children.
• Litigation wars: how to effectively sue your spouse and leave him or her with nothing more than their legs to stand on. Essential for any successful divorce!
• Free drinks!

That should attract more people. I suggest bolding, colouring, and underlining the last line.