Today was Open Monumentendag in the Netherlands, which means that many monuments, otherwise closed to the public, are open for free exploration. We had a walk around our town Leiden today and came across some really nice 1940’s Escher intarsia (a form of wood inlaying) works at the city’s Town Hall. More »

We were in Madrid last weekend and saw the Puerta de Europa (‘Gateway to Europe’) towers, the world’s first leaning high-rise buildings. They were built in 1996 and designed by the American architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee. Each building is 115 m tall, or 26 stories, with an inclination of 15º, or more than twice that of the ‘leaning’ (pfft) tower of Pisa. More »

The average supermarket in the Netherlands is the smallest in Europe, and the selection of food and drink here at grocery stores is also very limited compared to stores in Germany, France, UK, USA and even Belgium. Here is a list of several food products that I like to bring back when shopping abroad — stuff that they really should sell here in Holland. More »

What do Madrid, Turin, Leiden and New York have in common? All four cities have a complete Egyptian temple! Back in 1960 when the Great Dam of Aswan threatened to cover Lower Nubia and all its ancient Egyptian temples under Lake Nasser, UNESCO made an international call to save the many historical sites, among which the massive rock temples of Abu Simbel, that were between 1964 and 1968 moved 200 meters away from the river. As a thank you present, the Egyptian state gave away four of the Nubian temples. More »

These last weeks I have been working on my site Disney Comics Worldwide (which I’ve had since 1995). DCW is a popular website with information on Disney comics and magazines from around the world. I’ve completely updated the design and user interface and added new functionality here and there. I’ve optimised the source code by moving from a table-based design to CSS-based DIV boxes that are positioned relatively on the page. More »

We’re having another extreme weather record-breaking month here in the Netherlands. After the extreme heat of July, we are now having one of the wettest Augusts ever. As of last Friday, we have had thirteen ‘heavy rain’ days this month. Over 50mm of precipitation in one day is considered a ‘heavy rain.’ More »

Earlier this month we decided to try changing our two-square-meals-a-day (plus snacks) cats into free-range eaters. Alex had a small setback last week when she gorged herself and then barfed everything up. Other than that incident things are going smoothly and Arby and Alex seem to understand that they can eat whenever they want to. More »

Our cats, Arby and Alex, have been driving us completely crazy the last few months with their obsession with food. They have been meowing hours before dinner time and begging for food all throughout the day. Trying to sleep in on the weekends has been disastrous; one or the other cat starts jumping around our bed at 5am or earlier, pestering us to get up and feed them. Finally this week we decided we’ve had it and started an experiment to get them to be ‘free eaters.’ More »

The Dutch national weather agency (KNMI) has already announced that July 2006 will go down in the record books as the hottest month ever. It has been so hot that the announcement was made more than a week before the end of the month. More »

Nine days … seven astronauts … ONE space station. For ten days millions across the globe have followed the adventures of Stephanie, Mike, Steve, Piers, Mark, Thomas and Lisa … as NASA TV brought us 24/7 live images from cameras inside and outside the International Space Station. More »