So the general concensus is that Conrad Black got off very lightly. He did indeed.

Poor Toronto Life writer Douglas Bell did far worse - he has to eat his own blog!

Though Mr. Black's prison sentence is a mere 6½ years, our beloved Conrad has been handed a life sentence excluding him from everything he holds dear.

As fellow convicted felon Martha Stewart might say, this is a good thing.

Today they sentence Conrad Black, an event that I have waited for like a kid waits for Santa.

Mr. Black has maintained all along that the remaining convictions against him are rubbish and even offered his opinion that this is a fine example of how US justice functions as a wealth redistribution system.

I would call him Conrad here, except I don't know him, nor do I think he would consider me his buddy. I don't think he is a member of the British House of Lords anymore, so it has to be Mr. Black. Anything else would be disrepectful.

Here we have a guy named Conrad Black, from Canada, being sentenced for BIG TIME fraud and obstruction of justice by the US legal system. Many people in Canada are thinking, well it's about time! He got away with far too much shit here for way too long. Where were our watchdogs and enforcers?

Hollywood screenwriters are on strike as I write this. A name like Conrad Black might be too hokey for an grade 'A' Hollywood movie script. It's like having a lawyer named Lipschitz as a hired mouthpiece.

The Reluctant Traveler (TRT) and his sidekick, MLW, visited the city Antwerp in Belgium on this weekend.

For those of you who are wondering why TRT goes by that name, it should be explained that it's the act of traveling that he fears and loathes. Once at the destination, things are all right, even pleasant at times.

TRT looks forward to the day when we can just ethereally transport from place to place at the speed of light, avoiding things like airports and queues and the like. Until that time, TRT will soldier on, reporting to all the joys of "travel".

The train trip to Belgium offered a perfect backdrop for your intrepid reporter.

Welcome to the our new Home page, a quick way of reviewing all the different kinds of rubbish to be found on this site.

Press the <space bar> to step through the menu selection on offer. This is the same as clicking the Next button, except faster.

Click on any of the links on a menu page to view a story page.

So we have a new BLOG format now, called the JAB page. It has a scrollable calendar. The coloured days are the JAB days. Full moons are shown, along with some special occasion days.

This will be our online journal of our life and travels in the Netherlands. Move the mouse pointer over a JAB day to see the title or topic. Click on the day to view the JAB for that day.

Most of the content on this website will be found on the JAB page, including some of the real stale content that was on the home page.

I went to the mailbox around noon today and picked up the latest edition of The Economist for some lunchtime reading.

For readers here in the Netherlands, or in London, where I lived a few years ago, this would be the beginning of a real boring blog. But in my hometown of Calgary, Canada, that opening paragraph would be pure fiction, even fantasy.

Mail is NOT delivered on Saturday in Canada (though it once was), and certain pieces, like magazines, crawl through the system at a snails pace.

I can speak with some authority on this. We have made use of all three national postal systems in the last four years. I subscribe to one magazine, the Economist, and we have moved back and forth between these countries in recent years.

We went to Maastricht, a city located in a teardrop shaped piece land surrounded by Belgium and Germany, but belonging to the Netherlands. It is in the province of Limburg and is the deep south of the Netherlands. They speak dutch there, but it sounds kind of funny. Maastricht sits very near the Belgium border.

It is one of the oldest occupied areas in the Netherlands, having been occupied by the Dutch, the Romans, the Dutch, assorted kings, conquerers and churches, the Dutch, Napoleon, the Dutch, Germans, and of course, the Dutch. It may be worse. Like the repair bill for an old car or most of history, this is just a rough estimate.

October 11, 2007

Wow! Almost a full month since our last update. Time does fly.

The jukebox page has been a challenge. We ran out of disk drive space for songs. Attempts at repartioning the existing hard drive proved fruitless. The end solution was to simply just buy a new hard drive.

Only $90 for 250 gigabytes! It's amazing.

So we have been busy working a a new app to enhance your visit.

Today we are proud to announce our jukebox is now in operation, at least until the authorities shut us down.

End user experience may vary.

I started on this widget when I began learning PHP and mySQL stuff several years ago. To make it interesting, I needed a database that was both useful and fun.

I have a collection of mp3 files. It keeps getting larger. So this database was born from that time and need.

Enjoy!

The Parking in Den Haag page has been enhanced for Google Earth users. It now has a link to a .kmz file that will download and open with Google Earth (if you have it installed).

The car parked on the wall is quite visible on the satellite shot. An anonymous cyclist is also captured.

The satellite shots of Den Haag are amazing. There are no clouds, a clear sky. This is very suspicious.