An original piece by @Shinigamigirl

Drawn on the paper chopstick holder from tonight's all you can eat sushi buffet (courtesy of our guests!), Shinigamigirl drew this species-challenged chap. She calls him Alex F. Cow...

Breakfast with @erilo_crown: chocolate croissants! Mmm!

Or, as he for some reason wound up calling them: gronuts. Or maybe bronuts. Slownuts?

Arm's reach: protect the children from white tentacle monsters

via juliasmexicocity.typepad.com

Apparently it's perfectly okay to let kids aged 7 and up wander brazenly into a Cthulhoid abyss, but under 7 you have to put up a fight before you let the Great Old Ones take them.

HC3 teaser: Praetor PMC (logo design by Chris Goodwin)

via baddogbooks.com

If you'll pardon me tooting my own horn, here's another teaser for Heathen City 3 to whet the ol' apetite. Logo design by the inestimable Chris Goodwin!

On the menu tonight: bagna cauda

I'm a healthy young man with a strongish heart, so I can get away with this.

Bagna cauda is an Italian fondue dish. You melt butter, mashed garlic (loads of it) and anchovies fillets in olive oil.

Then you eat it with chopped raw vegetables, bread and, to be a bit ghetto, potato crisps.

Its absolutely delicious!

All 37 ingredients in a Twinkie. In Petri dishes.

via eschlimanphoto.com

I'm reminded of the fantastic BBC parody of '80s-era school television "Look Around You": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2k9JwGpm1w

Thank you for ot smoking. Now piss-off.

via oddlyspecific.com

The #languagenerd in me bristles at the hyphen, but it has the Seal of the City of London. I've been told the Seal is quite impressive, jumping through hooks and diving for fish!

Cookies and Cream Jello Cake

via flickr.com

Although, to me, it looks a bit more like jellyfish and molluscs with sea cucumber glazing...

My grandfather, Nagasaki, and nukes.

via laphamsquarterly.org

My paternal grandfather has been dead some twenty-two years now, so much of what I know of his life is second- and third-hand, and thoroughly anecdotal. I know this: he died of cancer, and he was a POW in Japan. And he saw the flash of the Hiroshima bomb.

He was around 18, a native of Indonesia (then under Dutch rule) when he was mobilized into the Dutch colonial army to defend the country against the Japanese invading forces. The colonial army, called KNIL, had at that point already capitulated, but due to the crippled communication infrastructure the draft hadn't yet been cancelled. Having never held a rifle, having just been inducted into basic training, my grandfather was put on a boat and shipped to a Japanese labour camp. 

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We don't know much about where he went or what he did there. He seldom spoke of it, and I was only knee-high at the time he was still healthy enough to talk much at all. He would later, on his deathbed, admit that if he were to recover, the one place in the world he'd like to see again was Japan. He said it seemd a beautiful place through the bars of his barracks, and he'd have liked to see it as a free man.

Toward the end of his imprisonment he was stationed in the Nagasaki shipyards labour camp, up until the end of July, 1945. Two weeks later, Fat Man would be dropped.

That's all I know. How he was repatriated, what his circumstances were when he saw the flash of the Hiroshima bomb... if I've heard anything on these topics at all it's such a mess of contradictory stories from different relatives it doesn't bear repeating. However, about a decade ago, I came across a book that at least painted some pictures for me.

The sister city of Nagasaki is  in the Netherlands, a wealthy and large municipality that's been bucking to be named a 'city' for decades, and not too far from my secondary school. Through outlandish circumstances I (in no way affiliated with Amstelveen) was asked to be a member of the youth representation of Amstelveen when a large contingent of Nagasaki dignitaries, journalists, scholars and a set of school kids would pay a visit to Amstelveen. The reason I was asked is because I'm of Indonesian descent, and the triangle between Holland, Indonesia and Japan, focused on the second world war, was a significant topic planned for the visit.

You know that stereotype of Japanese people with cameras? It's true. Every single one of the Japanese attendees -- professors, politicians, everyone -- had a disposable yellow Kodak cardboard clickybox. When the Japanese kids laid a wreath on the Indonesian colonial monument, the Mayor of Nagasaki actually stood shoulder to shoulder with the press photographers so that his photos would look as good as the professionals'... I digress a bit.

To prepare for the event, I'd interviewed my paternal grandmother and, through the mists of her mild dementia, I gleaned stories from which I could fashion what ultimately became quite a moving speech, which would later be quoted in some Nagasaki newspaper -- I was once sent a copy which I since lost, but it was all squiggly gobbledygook anyway.

After the speechifying, a woman from the Dutch Indies Comittee came and spoke to me because the story I'd told about my grandfather so closely resembled the accounts of her husband, who'd also been a POW in Japan. He'd later recorded his experiences in a series of articles published in a national newspaper, later still collected and published as a book, and wouldI like a copy? I would indeed. She sent it a week later, and I read it in a day.

Now, it's equally possible that my grandfather and this woman's husband knew each other, saw each other, or never met. I'll never know. But the story in the book was nothing short of harrowing.

This gentleman was still working at the Nagasaki docks when the bomb was dropped on the city. He and his mates were walking back to their barracks, along a road lined with cherry blossom trees, overlooking the city. He remembered blinking and seeing red, and when he opened his eyes, the ragged, paper-thin clothes on the prisoner in front of him were on fire. He remembered having no response at all until the sound hit like a massive thunderclap a second or two later. What had most likely happened was that he was just passing the trunk of a tree at the exact moment the plutonium core detonated, and he was protected from the initial light and heat blast simply by the luck of being in the tree's shadow.

The prisoners were quickly herded back into the barracks and effectively locked up there while the guards and soldiers went into the ruined city to help the evacutation and relief efforts. With very limited access to food and certainly no medical supplies, the conditions described in the book were horrifying. One of the burned prisoners complained of lions roaring in his ear, and when they inspected it, they found maggots crawling in his ear canal, grinding against his eardrum. They had no tools to remove them.

He described being unable to hate the guards for abandoning them even when the worse-off prisoners started dying. Some 40 000 of their countrymen had just been killed, some of them simply vaporized. The soldiers were concerned for their families, their friends, and their duty to their country. With 25 000 wounded, infrastructure shattered, there was no food to spare for prisoners, and certainly none of the precious antibiotics, disinfectants and painkillers that the Japanese victims so desperately needed.

The most formidable weapon of mass destruction ever created by mankind has only been used twice in its history, by the United States against Japan.

I once learned that the original targets for the nuclear strikes had been Tokyo and Kyoto, the capital city and the seat of the Emperor respectively, but that these were rejected because their destruction would be so devastating to the Japanese spirit that peaceful relations between the US and Japan would be unimaginable in future.

It reminded me of some morbid wisdom which I believe my grandfather gave to me when I was too young to understand, or to recall clearly now:

You can beat a man to within an inch of his life, steal his money and burn his house, and you could still one day be friends. Kill his child, and you have an enemy for life.

I won't deny that nukes are awesome, as Stephen Colbert demonstrates.

But stories like these are food for thought.

US support of same-sex marriage since '88 looks like a funny wing-wong - but what happened in '04?

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

After ignoring the fact that the throughlines in this chart look like a misshapen John Thomas, what's with the weird anti-gay bump around 2004? Lawrence v. Texas was a year earlier, so why were public polls suddenly so opposed?

I wish I were two puppy-dogs...

Sitting at the window-sill,
observing stormy weather,
I wish I were two puppy-dogs,
so I could play together.

 

Freely translated from the original Dutch, attributed to either Godfried Bomans or Michel van der Plas:

 

Ik zit mij voor het vensterglas
onnoemelijk te vervelen.
Ik wou dat ik twee hondjes was,
dan kon ik samen spelen.

 

Which in turn was derived from tge Austrian Friedrich Torberg:

 

Ich Möchte alles, was ich fühl, nicht fühlen
und ganz allein sein. Nein, nicht ganz allein.
Ich Möchte gern zwei Hunde sein
und miteinander spielen.

 

Ivo de Wijs took the original Dutch and made it dirty:

 

Ik zit wat voor het vensterglas
Te klooien in de keuken.
Ik wou dat ik twee hondjes was,
.........

 

Which could translate as:

 

Sitting by the window-sill,

With nothing left to do,

If I could two naughty dogs,

I'd have a nice hard...

Vintage Tokyo subway manner posters

via pinktentacle.com

Just as the West inappropriately co-opts imagery from other heritages, the Tokyo subway authority freely snatched Superman, Hitler and Japan's own Tokusatsu film tradition to inspire screaming terror good manners.

Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes

 

I like... *click click* Birds.

via community.livejournal.com

Title comes from this here little ditty by the Eels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSi3_izdRZE

Old comics were so implicitly DIRTY in their wholesomeness.

via comicallyvintage.tumblr.com

You know what she's talking about. Come on, you KNOW. And the himbo got no class, neither.

Genealogy of Eurasian languages, Chaucer and Eddie Izzard. #languagenerd

via intersolinc.com

I once saw an episode of the BBC program 'All Things British' (wherein former Action Transvestite Eddie Izzard traces the foreign roots of various aspects of British culture) that dealt with the English language and its origins on the mainland. I'll get back to that in a bit.

The remaining influence of the Roman invasion of the island then known as Albion, and later the Norman and Saxon occupations left a hodgepodge of a language that, really, has far too many words. For example: royal (related to French 'roi'), kingly (related to German 'König') and regal (related to Latin 'rex') all mean the same thing!

Dutch is the closest living relative to English. I grew up Dutch-English bilingual, and we learn German and French in high school here, so when I first read the Canterbury tales it felt as if I were Harry Potter and realized I could enderstand snakes. If I turned my head like this, closed oned eye, squinted the other and bit my tongue just right, I could easily parse eighty percent of any passage. The biggest help was that the rhyming scheme could inform me how a word was expected to be pronounced, which allowed me to pick the language it most probably sourced.

Here's the first lines: <!--more-->

Wan, that April, with his shores sooth,
The droghte of March, hat perched to the rote,

(note that these are not the officially correct lines; this is how they appeared in the version I read)

Soothing shores don't make much sense for April, but March reveals himself more clearly. A dry month, parched to the root... and if that's how they pronounced rote, then maybe sooth sounded more like soot. If you then guess that this is cognate to Dutch zoet, meaning sweet, then shores makes sense as showers. Sweet April showers? That's imagery that survives to this day. And droghte is so clearly related to Dutch droogte that it didn't occur to me until later that it might have been pronounced drought.

There was a lot of guesswork and likely a lot of false friendship, but it was a fascinating experience that greatly informed how I perceive the cultures of the world as intertwining threads of a single fabric. Most curious of course are the nonsensical frays and knots, like Finnish and Hungarian (the Finno-Ugric isolates) which don't connect to anything.

Anyway, Eddie Izzard. In this episode of All Thing British he went down to Oxbridge of Camford or some such to take a crash course in Middle English (despite what the above tree would have you believe, Middle Dutch and Middle English still had quite a few linguistic dalliances) to learn conversational and mercantile phrases. On a plane he hopped and arrived at Schiphol airport, the zenith of my daily commute, after which he traveled north, to that strange province of Friesland.

In Friesland they speak Frys, a language ostensibly related to Dutch but so alien that we can't understand each other, under most circumstances. The Frysian populace actually campaigned for quite a few decades to have Frys reclassified as a language on its own right rather than merely a Dutch dialect.

So our Eddie goes up to a Frysian farmer and uses his Middle English to try and purchase a cow... and amazingly, succeeds. Quick-witted, he observed the patient farmer's responses and figured out how the patterns of his phrases connected to the patterns of Frys -- for instance, the Middle English for cow is pronounced more like kew whereas the Frys actually sounds completely like the modern English cow.

And so he spent the rest of the episode followed by an inquisitive calf on a rope.

Waterfall and rope bridge on the open road

 

 via feedproxy.google.com

Splendid work. I've always loved sincere efforts to enliven the public space with good, daring art.

21 years late, Wil Wheaton sends out a touching letter to a formerly 8-year-old fan

via lettersofnote.com

This is simply adorable.

Wil Wheaton, who played the reviled part of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, came upon the story of Teresa Juniso, aged 29, who never received her membership package for the now-defunct WilPower fanclub.

8 years old, she'd saved up the $12 membership fee, and didn't receive her welcome package... until 21 years later. Wheaton, a renowned Friend of Fanboys/girls, wrote this heartwarming apology to 8-year-old Teresa on behalf of his 15-year-old self.

Wll, we've long gotten over our displaced revulsion of Wesley Crusher. Secretly many of us envied you the opportunity to play with the blinkenlights on the Enterprise-D, and admire your ability to stomach some of the ghastly lines they fed you when you were too young to put up a fight. Really, you don't need to keep being this awesome to impress us.

But please do!

Her father finally cured her. Now Jessica is a woman.

via comicallyvintage.tumblr.com

...cured her of what?

Bette Nesmith Graham: Mother of Tipp-Ex and Monkee who filmed glowing cars

via thereifixedit.com

Usually thereifixedit.com is a stream of innocuously droll photos of Very Bad Ideas, but every now and then there's a little gem. Here we have Bette Nesmith Graham, a shoddy typist whose innovation became a staple of offices until the end of her millennium -- and whose son was in the Monkees, and produced Repo Man!

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x78o8_the-monkees-intro-tv-theme-song_music

The Setup: nerdy interviews with folks like Guy Kawasaki, Tim Bray, Stephen Wolfram, American McGee...

Guy Kawasaki

Venture capitalist, entrepreneur

via usesthis.com

Wonderful selection of figures interviewed in clear, succinct style about what they do and what computer equipment they use. Great reads. Sort of like the "what do you drive?" interview segment on Top Gear, except for, you know, nerds.

Dalton Ghetti's unbelievable micro pencil sculptures

via blog.makezine.com

Distribution of time spent in present, flashback, future or other weird stuff in TV shows.

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

I'll let the Doctor himself explain why his show's chart looks so wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey...

http://www.youtube.com/v/vY_Ry8J_jdw&hl=en&fs=1

German designer Peter Dahmen's AWESOME pop-up sculptures.

http://www.youtube.com/v/YuQsxFhBGzw&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1peterdahmen.de

 

So close, and yet so far

via leilockheart.net

 

My feller is a bridge-climbing stud. (warning: summery shirtlessness and puerile stupidity)

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0006.mov (9938 KB)

Spent the afternoon on a little rented boat with the boyfriend and an old friend of his, riding the canals through our city.

Made it to our buddy Kensaro's backyard, but he wasn't home. Still: much fun!

My dude is a showoff, but I think he's entitled to it :)

Happy 50th Birthday to Echo 1, Grandpappy of Satellite Communications

via gizmodo.com

I'd never heard of this thing. Not once. Even though it's fantastic:

Essentially a wafer-thin reflective membrane filled with nitrogen and sent into orbit as a massive balloon, which allowed radio signals to be reflected off its shiny bulbous skin.

How cool is that?

I scream like a man, and I'm proud of it (also, glass-bottomed hot air balloon? sign me the fuck up.)

via dailymail.co.uk

When I saw this, I knew I'd immediately want a ride on it: a glass-bottomed hot air balloon designed to coast the Alps. Test flights conducted with guests showed that it's not for the wobbly of heart; many passengers experienced an uncommon degree of terror.

I can understand that! In a basket, at least you have a safe zone. When you see the world beneath your feet (and can't even detect what you're standing on because you don't cast a shadow) your rational mind must constantly battle your shrieking survival instincts.

Story time. A few years ago, some friends and I went to a theme park where there was an attraction whose name we have forgotten, but still fondly remember as the Tower of Terror. A tall pylon, with four sets of seats attached in a square so that you're sitting abreast of two or three others on your side, all with your back to the pylon.

You wait in line. Take your seat. The padded safety harness comes down. Accompanied by loud noises, the seats begin to lift, ratcheting up the pylon.

The sounds of the other partying visitors die down as your altitude increases, becoming ghostly, and then still. Figures below become unidentifiable and meaningless. The wind intensifies, and it gets cold. You become aware of your body and its fragility. <!--more-->

Then you reach the top and come to a halt. Even with the wind, there's near-silence: everyone knows what's coming and doesn't want to speak for fear of accidentally biting off the tip of their tongue. At this height, you can feel the swaying of the pylon and it creaks subtly but menacingly.

At this point, I fantasized that a German voice could have crackled over the intercom announcing that, if everyone would please swipe their credit card through the slot under their armrest to transfer two hundred euros to the park management and agreed never to disclosse what happened, we would be lowered gently to the ground and escorted out. If that had happened I'll bet you everyone would have complied -- and if some refused, the others would have happily paid their share.

It didn't happen. We just...

 

D
     r
         o
            p
               p
                 e
                  d
                   .

Now, I've enjoyed my share of rollercoasters. My boyfriend likes to screech the tires when he can get away with it. I'm no stranger to being jostled. But this? I can't explain it! Maybe it was the harnes, or the unfeeling attitude of the ride attendants, or the creeping doubts about the integrity of the ride. It was all of it, but none of them were on my mind.

All I could hear was screaming. Not excited shrieking, as on a rollercoaster where you voluntarily give over to your impulse and enjoy the liberating thrill of it. This was screaming. To the left of me, to the right, and behind.

Loudest of them all was my own, and that was when I discovered who I am, at my deepest core. For while all the other screams were girls' screams, high-pitched falsetto sirens, mine was the deep, throaty roar of a man, baby.

It means nothing, of course. This instinctual exclamation bellows from the deepest recesses of the reptile brain and says nothing about your personality, disposition or gender identity. You can't control it, but that's rather the point. That noise started fivehundred million years ago, echoed through aeons of evolution, thrummed through cold and warm blood, through sea, steppe and city, finally to erupt from your ashen, terrified rictus.

But still. When I wobbled off there, all of us scrambling together the tattered shreds of our collective machismo, I felt a quiet sense of victory -- quiet, only, because my voice was raw and it took an hour before I could comfortably speak again. I felt like I'd won a game I didn't know I was playing.

Which, I suppose, was just the last electrochemical spasm of my primate brain and its commonly-repressed drive for alpha status. Can't really blame it for wanting to stretch its wings after it was awoken, briefly, by a nice fat shot of adrenaline. Fair's fair.

So there's no shame in screaming like a girl.

But me?

I'm proud that I scream like a man.

This sounds like a hungry fox's paradise.

via oddlyspecific.com

Radioactive Wild Boars Plague Germany - I wish I were making this up.

via news.discovery.com

How handsomely you're glowing today, Herr Oinkfarb!

Facebook: Like/dislike/fuck off.

Vintage ads for Youtube, Facebook, Skype.

via adsoftheworld.com

Brazilian advertising firm Moma produced these '60s-style ads for modern internet sensations to highlight how vaporous today's obsessions will seem fifty years from now. And, one assumes, to advertise their creative chops.

Dog's rule, cats drool.

via gunshowcomic.com

Been sayin' it all along, bitches.

Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense

via s3.amazonaws.com

Wow! I'll never be bored again. Even if I devote only one month to each of these obsessions, why, by the time I'm fifty I'll still be a fucking nutjob.

If only this weren't a photoshop job. Such awesome typography!

via leilockheart.net

Meaning no offense to my faithful brothers and sisters...

via i.imgur.com

Long-dead Internet meme, meet 2000-year-old scripture.

FIGHT

To my Muslim brothers and sisters: Ramadan Mubarak!

Take care! Even though I haven't the fortitude to share your fast, I'll charitable volunteer my services in clearing out the treats table when Eid comes around. I'm noble like that. (if you have any lokum going spare I volunteer for that too, kthxplz :)

Constructive dialog

via digbysblog.blogspot.com

On gay marriage

via blogs.ajc.com

Best of luck to our brothers and sisters in California, and, you know, pretty much everywhere that isn't cool yet.

Take My Lego, Take My Land

via epicwinftw.com

Serenity, from the brilliant sci-fi show Firefly, for those not in the know. I miss it so.

http://www.youtube.com/v/LrAS20mNZUE&hl=en&fs=1

Sheep take over the old Lord of the Rings set

via io9.com

It's the Ba-a-a-a-alrog!

No such thing as Triceratops. The hell you say?!

via gizmodo.com

Apparently Triceratops wasn't a distinct dino, just a juvenile version of the torosaurus pictured above (note the weird bone bridge between the crest and the horn just above the eye. Apparently there's enough evidence to suggest that baby Toro starts out looking like our familiar Trike, and that later his bones gain those weird gaps till he becomes this guy.

At least he's improved with age. Here's what he looked like in 1905:

Blackstar Warrior: Lando is the MAN! (this one's for @fuzzwolf2000 and @zapnuttshakur)

http://www.youtube.com/v/NATeU-r0GDU&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22

via io9.com

I wish this were real!

Since it's unlikely, we can always settle for Black Dynamite. Here's a trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/v/6-wqmnJrOFM&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1

And my favorite clip:

http://www.youtube.com/v/6-wqmnJrOFM&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1

Super(market) Mario. Awesome.

via neatorama.com

Turning typography into mustaches.

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

I'm a typography nut. Even so, I'm ashamed at how much I love this :)

Mr. T is a damn hero.

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

For many men my age, Mr T had a special place in their childhood. He was at once a jester and a knight; while undeniably goofy and laughable (saved only from accusations of racial mockery by dint of Murdock being even loopier) he also set high standards for nobility, loyalty and bravery to aim for.

Before the A-Team, Laurence Turaud was a wrestler, and known for wearing $300 000 worth of gold jewelry to signify his slave heritage and a mohawk haircut (the inspiration for which came from National Geographic) in deference to his African origin. He starred opposite Sly Stallone in Rocky III, where his catchphrase "I pity the fool" originated.

As B. A. Baracus he became a hero to many kids, resulting in the easily-mocked but adorably upbeat confidence-building video he produced, a choice excerpt of which can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/v/eG5DeiZBDgM&hl=en&fs=1

You can laugh! I certainly did. But at the same time I'm in awe of the man's honest, upright optimism. Through the wobbly lines of '80s VHS the passion and sincerity of his values shines through in every golden glint and every blistering glare.

In '95 he was diagnosed with a form of cancer called T-Cell Lymphoma, which really begs for all manner of tasteless Internat gaggery with heavy use of the Impact font, and he beat that down like he would any damn fool. This interview with him is almost unbearably saccharine and soft-focus daytime television, but the man's presence clearly hasn't faded one bit.

He still believes in doing right, and not taking no crap from no damn fools. He still preaches hope, confidence, honesty and respect. He ay be a bit of a clown, but if more clowns were as awesome as this guy, maybe I wouldn't be so goddamn terrified of them.

Although seeing him playing Santa for Nancy Reagan in '83 does creep me out just a smidge.

Cats, graphed against... more cats.

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

There are never enough cats on the internet.

Robotic arm thrashes a dude about like a British nanny with a baby

http://www.youtube.com/v/Zs0MTWUkBaQ&hl=en&fs=1

via youtube.com

So many moments where the chap is a mere inch away from having his egg cracked, or where he wisely pulls in his legs to keep his knees bending the right way.

Rest assured, though, the robot is a friendly and caring monster and does its passenger no harm at all, only delivering a thrilling ride.

It does look like crazy fun. Would you hold my glasses? And phone. And wallet. Could you give the ponchos to the audience? I had shrimp for lunch.

A fitting response to @kensaro's question regarding same-sex marriage vs first-cousin marriagei n the US

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

"What will the children look like?"

Gay Pride 2010: The Movie (starring yours truly!)

http://www.youtube.com/v/ZpZbWgg2ZMM&hl=en&fs=1&hd=1

All right, that got a little bit wetter than expected. The day started out dreary, a shameful break from the lovely weather we've had for the last few weeks, but nothing that could upset the people of Amsterdam. Music played everywhere, the trains were packed. 

As always it was quite the chore to find a decent spot from which to actually see the parade boats, but even when they were blocked from view by houseboats along the canals and vast throngs of people with umbrellas, there was still plenty to see and hear to get into the spirit of things.<!--more-->

Sadly the rain only intensified and we decided to head home. Some chores needed doing at home before the boyfriend's dad comes to visit tomorrow, and we're not really partygoers either, so we skipped on the myriad street parties that popped up left and right like mushrooms. Some of them discretely served mushrooms, come to think of it.

Still, the craic was good and the spirits high, and seeing that diversity made me proud of my city. In the stretch of two minutes' walk after leaving the station I overheard conversations in Korean, Greek, Swedish, French, Hebrew and Arabic, and those were only the ones I stood a half-decent chance of identifying by sound. Old folks wrapped their grandkids in ponchos before hoisting them onto their shoulders to wave at transvestites on stilts, who gave them flowers and candy in return. 

The parade boats were ingenious and colorful and filled with people of all ages and inclinations who didn't seem to notice the chilly rain nearly as much as us oglers on the sides of the canals. The police (pink in blue!) and army (pink in green!) were represented, most of them in uniform. The mayor of Amsterdam endured substantial fussing by drag queens, and there were plenty of pretty dull boats with just ordinary people enjoying some music, 

Wet though it might have been, I'm thoroughly pleased we went out. Time for a shower :)

 

A D&D Alignment chart for Star Trek characters. Discuss!

via ilovecharts.tumblr.com

There's a few figure on here whose relative positions I don't fully agree with... what do you think?