Day 1: 5 am in Amsterdam

And this is how I know ...

The great Michelle Shocked song from her first [boosted] record ... well, the church bells toll at 5:30 am here in Amsterdam. Not 5 ... sorry, Michelle.

I was expecting it to be colder, but it's warm enough. Overcast. So many bicycles, all of them big, sturdy, plain and slightly rusty. Thousands and thousands of bikes. Mothers on bikes, with two children in wooden baskets. No baby seats, just wooden seats. No one wears helmets. Young pretty girls who, if they lived in America would never walk or bike after the age of 15, bike around without any consciousness of how unusual this would be half a world away.

Sure, there are a lot of cars, but there are a lot more bikes. And lots of mass transit.

It's also nice not being the palest person in the room for a change. Being partly Dutch [my mom was a DeWaal], I feel something of a connection to these people. They seem serious. I get that.

Someone said that the Dutch were a tall people. I don't find that to be unusually true. I'm 5' 11" and seem to be no more or less tall than the average here.

Lots and lots of graffiti here, everything is tagged or defaced. That surprised me. I felt like I was in the other Holland, Brooklyn, for a while.

And the canals, and the marshy ground. Everything is underwater. How do you keep buildings from rotting? It seems an impossible task. I would expect the cars to be all rusty, but generally they are not.

Very few dogs here. It's like San Francisco, there is no place here for dogs or babies.

And the red light district and the coffee shops? More on that later.

T for Texas

In Fort Worth tonight. Windy, not too cold. Indiana [this morning] was cold, unmelted hail still on the ground. And Charlotte [this afternoon] was warmer, but windy. This is my road show. 6 flights in 3 days. Tomorrow, DFW to PHX, PHX to LAX.

A couple of good things about work travel. One, you're not in the office listening to non-stop inanity. And believe me, 90% of my reality is inanity. Second, you discover weird cool things - TCBY has a new spin-off chain called Yovana, which purports to be healthy & natural. It is fresh [and fresh-tasting.] They make it fresh each day at the franchise, the process by which I do not wish to know. But I can tell you this, it is delicious. By far the best tasting frozen yogurt I have ever had. Creamy and thick, with great mouth-feel [Insert joke here.] They have one at the Charlotte, NC airport, where I have been twice in the last two days, courtesy of US Air.

I'm not shy, but I am reticent to talk with people I don't know well. It's hard for me, especially as I have a few good friends that I speak a kind of shorthand with [and have done so for over 30 years.] We can drop references to Gatsby, Fernwood 2Nite, Spy magazine, Wilhelm Reich, Robert Evans, the Wobblies, and the talking flute on HR Pufnstuf in the same conversation. And the conversation will make perfect sense. Try that sometime.

Baseball season is just around the corner. And can we just do something about the Twins disposing of all their talent each year? This has been going on for as long as I can remember. Hell, thank you for giving us Doug Corbett, Lyman Bostock, Rod Carew and Rob Wilfong. We owe you.

One more thing I never want to hear about again in my lifetime: the Sean Young/Catwoman audition incident. For the love of pete, why is this woman maligned for showing up to an audition for the Catwoman movie in a Catwoman costume? You are supposed to wear the outfit of the job you're seeking, that is behavior that we encourage! She was showing commitment, initiative, and what I would call "old fashioned moxie." Is she bat-shit crazy? Oh yeah. But is this incident further proof of that behavior? Quite the opposite.

I have an ungodly wake up time tomorrow, so off to bed. Damn the time difference.

Ten Years Gone

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the passing of one of my very best friends, Dennis Hayden Turner. Here's a photo of the Big Swede.

Travel Notes, the Desert Edition

Just got back from sun & fun in Phoenix, which is habitable about 1/2 of the year. Somehow, in three days, I packed in 2 airplane rides [on underserviced Southwest planes, no less], 1 trip the Phoenix zoo [dug the giraffes], 3 baseball games [Angels won 2, woo hoo! Go Torii!], 1 hockey game where I got to sit behind the goal, a movie [the delightful and oddly emotionally resonant Semi-Pro], a trip the mall, breakfast at a wonderful small restaurant, and saw two old friends - one who I have not seen for over 20 years. So it was a great trip, very relaxing and went off without a hitch.

Only downside was that we did not go see the dogs run, nor did we go slick cart racing. Maybe next year.

In the airport, on Monday night, two notable conversations were overheard. A couple of young women, kind of typical 30-ish women, neither model-thin nor chubby were heard talking about Hillary Clinton, "Yeah, she's one of us. She's got a butt on her." So now, we're tracking the "Girls with Butts vote" ...

Other conversation was between this guy, about 40 who was talking with a rather nice unassuming housewife-looking woman, in her mid-50s. This guy was blabbing on about how he worked as a trainer for marines, he was in charge of this and that, he was Mr. Bigshot marine trainer dude ... finally, after boring this woman with what he expected was a pretty impressive resume, he asked her what she did. She matter-of-factly said, sounding very much like Mary Tyler Moore, "Oh, I was a flight surgeon in the Army, after I got out of medical school in the early 70s." Blabby jarhead boy wasn't so talkative after that.