Magere Hein

Yesterday Dutch Communist MP Frits Dragstra died, aged 87. He was a very vocal opponent of closing of Dutch coal mines in the 70s. Those mines were closed anyway; they couldn't compete with cheap imports and the newly discovered natural gas. I remember him best for the fact that I voted for him in the first general election in which I had the vote.

The best meaning I can glean from this, is that the chance that white American males live in their 90s has increased dramatically after WWII, when they have access to the best health care money can buy. This probably reflects the improvements made in said health care.

Funeral arrangements to be announced soon, stand well back if it's a cremation, eh? Well marinated, in any case.

So it seems the death penalty was commuted to life.

Hot hands indeed.

Yup... Woohoo!

Well I'll be damned: Wim Ruska obit in The Times of April 3 2015. Does that count?

A minor singer, but the cause of his death was very Dutch: the tricycle he rode was run over by a cyclist on 27 May. The injuries he sustained proved fatal.

I'm a barbarian, so I didn't expect much. I suppose 36,300 is as good as it gets.

Whodathunkit, the man does the Right Thing for once.

Classy guy. Urgh. I met Short once at a tournament in Rotterdam in the 1990s. His behaviour at and around the board was impeccable, but during drinks and chat after he turned out to be not entirely gentlemanly. This was a few years after his 1993 match against Kasparov, in which Short got thrashed. Kasparov happened to be present at the tournament and after he left the building Short made his opinion clear in words I won't repeat, libel laws being what they are.

Er.... fun? cripes, GAG. do you like, re-enact your fave car park scenes from 70s movies? ......to think people tell me I need to get out more =/ My guess is that watching people at a car park can be funny, in the same way that it can be funny to watch crews of yachts in a lock. I once spent a quite amusing afternoon in a beer garden next to the lock of Muiden. In Dutch, moving a ship through a lock is called schutten, but what most crews did was schutteren, which means act clumsily. The clasic mistake is this:

Today in 2005 Natalee Holloway, an 18 year old American high school student, disappeared while on holiday on Aruba, a Caribbean island and country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. She was never seen again, her remains were never found and in 2012 she was declared legally dead. Her disappearance led to a long investigation, in which the prime suspect was Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, but no charges were brought against him. Today in 2010 Stephany Flores, a 21 year old business student from Peru, was killed in a hotel room in Lima, Peru. The hotel room was registered to Joran van der Sloot, and in 2012 he was convicted for her murder to 28 years in prison. Apparently American authorities want a word with him after his eventual release.

In a similiar vein: "Now less than £100", which of course means: £99.99. It's just advertisement speak. Just as politicians, the people who write such things ought to be flogged for being professional liars. In a sense the politicians are worse, since they invent new meaningless drivel to hide their horrible intentions every day.

Interesting subject matter for that activity. I'm a great fan of reading on the loo, my loo is never without a book or two. Comes in handy when the toilet paper runs out as well. That reminds me, I once bought toilet paper made from crudely shredded Bibles, on which the original text was well readable. When a visitor protested, I added a Quran to the reading stack, with a few pages torn out.

Indeed. While I suppose two people can be half-siblings and stepsiblings at the same time, the words express two quite different concepts. While we're on the subject: Dutch has no word for sibling. The concept is expressed as "broer of zus". Similarly, Dutch isn't particularly good at expressing family relations beyond first cousin ("neef" or "nicht", Dutch has different words for male and female cousins). Fine gradations like third cousin twice removed cannot be expressed in Dutch, such relations are folded in the words "achterneef" or "achternicht". To complicate matters, the words "neef" and "nicht" are also used for nephew and niece. Finally a question: my grandmother was born from her father's second marriage, who remarried after becoming a widower. From the first marriage she had a few half-siblings. Her father died when she was 10 or so, and her mother remarried and had children with her second husband as well, also half-siblings of my granny. The children of her father's first marriage and of her mother's second weren't half-siblings. Dutch has no word to express such a relation. Does English?

Lol I love you too :-) Hey if we post any old date then we'd post the same names every single year. SC I take great care to post death anniversaries of people who haven't been posted about earlier. I assure you there is no lack of those, also ones with a picture on Wikipedia Commons. What is slightly more difficult is that I also want them to be meaningful for me. In the case of Pepys, it's because I read an annotated edition of his diary.

Actually, I am just the dark part of your personality. This whole forum is all you (or me). Yes, that possibility did cross my mind. I do have a sockpuppet here, for test purposes, but I don't think all the rest of the forum members are me, so they must be you. Close, but no cigar.

This one used to be that, but it got merged with other Brit SciFi topics.

Well, belated happy birthday then! is there any chance anyone on this site might have the same birthday Well, as long as there is more than one person, there's always a chance. We cannot, however, discard the possibility that only two people (you and me) fill this site. In that case, the chance of us sharing the same birthday are slim, 1 in 183 (allowing for being born on February 29).

Just to annoy SC: today in 1703 (so 312, a multiple of 13, years ago) English naval administrator, MP and diarist Samuel Pepys died, aged 70.

If Tanith Lee is indeed dead: about time. What an endless load of drivel did she write.

Billy Graham, again, if I got my maths right this time.

Hmm, that'll be ruining his skills at bridge.

Damn, there's a Soviet dissident whose existence I completely forgot. I remember his deportation from the USSR, but after that he didn't make Dutch news much, if at all. Perhaps the reason for that is that he, unlike several other dissidents, didn't cuddle up with loud right-wing types in the west.