The front door of the house opens, in a very Dutch way, right onto a staircase. So the only path is up the stairs, into a small hallway and kitchen. The kitchen is where the mail is stored for extended periods of time. Mail addressed to tenants gets picked up quick, but mail to former tenants may be there for months, until they come to get it or the landlord picks it up. But before it lands on the kitchen table, it takes a human to bring it up the stairs. It arrives everyday through the medieval crack, of course.

I get very little mail. Mail is pretty antiquated now. It's all online communications (or cell phone if you must). So I'm getting less mail now than I did a few years ago. Mail isn't exciting either, and it has to do with the content of it. Most of the mail is ads that noone cares about, that goes right in the trash. Sometimes we get ads in a proper envelope, addressed to "the inhabitants of this house", also right in the trash. Very high noise to signal ratio, it's like email really.

So that's the reality of the mail. Mail on the kitchen table has no appeal, I go through it dutifully but there's almost never anything. But when the mail arrives through the crack in the door, it's downstairs so I don't see exactly what it is. In between the ads, sometimes there are envelopes. There is a strange sense of suspense there. Since I don't know I'm almost thinking "hey maybe there's something down there for me". Sometimes I go down the stairs to bring it up, sometimes I don't. It's always a call to make. If it's just ads, I never bother.

Yeap. Platini was elected on the back of his proposals to even the scores in European football, and the movement gained enough momentum to win the bid for Euro2012. Pretty amazing. :star:

With a strong Ukraine lobby, and enough support for a Euro in Central/Eastern Europe, they pulled it off. Italy was the big favorite, but lost big time with all the bad press in the last year, their World Cup notwithstanding.

The host cities are:

• Chorzów Silesian Stadium (60,000)
• Gdańsk Baltic Arena (40,000)
• Kraków Wisła Stadium (30,000)
• Poznań Municipal Stadium (46,500)
• Warsaw National Stadium (70,000)
• Wrocław Olimpic Stadium (40,000)

And our neighors:

• Dnipropetrovsk Dnipro Stadium (31,003)
• Donetsk Shakhtar Stadium (50,000)
• Kyiv Olimpiysky (83,450)
• Lviv Ukraina Stadium (29,004)

So no Łódź. :lazy: But it should be a terrific boost for tourism, and just about as good enough pretext to fix the broken infrastructure. I hear a Warsaw-Łódź motorway is actually on the way, who would have thought after all these years they would do the most obvious thing in the world.

Obviously, new stadia will be built, and the plans are no less than impressive. Have a look at the prospects.

As a kid I was a master at wasting time. My two main activities were computer games and sports. And tv. And although I don't do it as much anymore, some skills are just so innate that you can stop practicing something for years, and then it comes right back to you when you need it.

So for those not fully expert yet, let me recommend three handy online, available-from-anywhere time wasting spots.

Wikipedia

A marvellous site. When you look up something you can find yourself clicking around to more and more pages, more and more content, it never stops. Wikipedia isn't at a point yet where you'll find everything there, but it's working hard to close the gap. Give it a couple more years and chances are you won't even need the rest of the internet, googling will be a mere memory.

Youtube

Who knew that Youtube would be such an amazing success? The reason I introduced Wikipedia first is that there's a parallel to make here. Youtube is the Wikipedia of video. Whatever it is you're looking for, chances are you'll find it. For instance, say you heard about something happening on the news, or a talk show, or you want to track down a scene from a famous movie, or you want to see last night's buzzer beater, all you need is Youtube. In fact, Youtube is so vast that the "similar searches" option will ensure that for any search that finds a match, you have about 20 videos to watch. And for each of those you have another... well you get the point.

Reddit

Reddit is an amazing kind of site, because every time you load it, it has lots of items you want to see. It's hard to account for how this happens, but the content has such a diversity of topics, and such a depth of content in many cases, that scanning the top25 seems terribly compelling. And because it changes constantly, you can come back in 12h and it will be completely refreshed.

In the absence of the concentration to finish a decent blog idea, I was browsing the stats of the site and that's always a bit surprising. For instance, when looking at how people found the site through a search engine..

eva mendes 537
fast cars 29
fast and furious 14
eva mendez 9

It's a bit strange that so many looking for Eva Mendes landed here, considering the name has only been mentioned twice, both times in passing. One would think this blog is pretty irrelevant to Eva Mendes, also considering both occurences (to which this will be a third :P ) are from 2005, so not exactly recent. Me thinks there's some sucky search engine out there that keeps sending hopefuls here, only to let them down. What's weird is that this search term has ranked as most popular on this site for months now. It's a shame my stats only go back a year, so I can't see what you were searching for before I ever mentioned Eva Mendes.

Other more relevant search terms were tell me something about your ielts (which I actually blogged about), kruidvat paracetamol (which seems terribly concrete), unethical funds (trying to get rich or doing research for a school paper?), cm97 stadium capacity (someone knowing exactly what they want), i love oslo (yeah, me too), cyclist smoothie (you found it), and utrecht red light district location map -amsterdam (I know where it is, perhaps I should have a suggestion box for people looking for stuff in the area).

I don't usually get excited about these things, but I was browsing Planet Larry when I saw this tag that looked fun.

1. Grab the book, nearest to you, open page 18 and quote line four.
   Since I had to walk over to the bookshelf for this one anyway, I decided to pick "Donald Duck Pocket 125". :P
   Wat? Denkt hij echt dat de magiër van het moeras sterker is dan Zwarte Magica?
2. Reach out with your left arm as far as possible. What do you have in your left hand?
   My hand is on the glass of the window.
3. What did you see on TV last?
   Don't recall, might have been the news on BBC World.
4. Except the computer, what can you hear right now?
   Traffic outside the window.
5. When was the last time you were outside?
   Got home from school an hour ago.
6. What did you do right before answering these questions?
   Sent an email, had coffee.
7. What are you wearing right now?
   Cotton pants, sweatshirt, headphones, sandals (they double as slippers).
8. When was the last time you laughed?
   Christ, who keeps track of that? I laugh lots of times everyday, last one that comes to mind was today in class.
9. What is on the walls of the room you’re currently located in?
   A map of Europe, a map of Łódź, and a superb canvas I bought in the Brussels subway.
10. Did you see anything strange recently?
    Yes, and if you read my blog, you're up to date on the strangest things I encounter. ;)
11. What do you think about this survey?
    Random enough to be fun, I cut a bunch of stupid questions, though.
12. What was the last movie you saw?
    Don't remember, but I watched the NBA Allstar game last weekend.
13. What would you buy if suddenly you were a multi billionaire?
    A bunch of plane tickets to places far away that are too expensive to visit. Also the Sun Ultra 45 workstation, maxed out specs. :D
14. Tell me something I didn’t know about you!
    I'm short for this country, a mere 175cm.
15. Would you consider emigrating?
    Yes. In fact, I sometimes wonder if I can stand to live in the same country for the rest of my life, or if I'm bound to move around ever so often.
16. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be?
    For the Miss America pageant, try next door.